Ep. 77: "The Derivation of Donk"
The invasion of the continent was at hand.
Hello.
Hey, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
It's like an old glove.
You sound like you're on a wireless set.
Oh, do I?
Yeah, or like a faraway small phone.
Oh, is it like quiet?
You know, it might be that I turned my volumes down.
Turn your volumes up and I will hopefully be here.
Oh, that's much better.
You sound much closer now that my volumes are up.
It's probably because I'm speaking like this.
That's a weird thing.
There's a ship that is rigged and ready in the harbor.
Closeness and loudness.
Did you ever get into Roger Whitaker when you were a kid?
Not when I was a kid because my mom hated country music.
He and Slim Whitman were both the side door entries in my house.
side door entry well yeah you know you get slim whitman a lot of people don't realize they know him from the tv ads like roger whitaker right he was in he was an accomplished yodeler yodelesque and uh and you know yodelesque is that that french painter i'm thinking of yeah yeah that's uh yeah yodelisk jacques yodelisk oh he's the guy that did the uh rectangles right let me start over um
Yeah, you know, the one Roger Whitaker song always got, the Germans call it an earworm scheisse.
Right, earworm scheisse, yeah.
At my house, the sign said, hippies use the side door, and then the side door was boarded up.
I didn't get into country music.
My mom hated John Denver.
She hated country music so thoroughly that she hated John Denver all through the 70s, which made me...
Kind of a pariah with the with the girl, the proto Fleet Foxes fans of 1975, 76.
And your mom disliked him for probably unconventional reasons, because, I mean, in an ideal world, your mom would potentially be in the top three to five tiers of the John Denver target audience.
Well, except that this is the this is the curious thing.
My mom is from northwestern Ohio.
And in my extensive investigations of America, I have come to realize that the South, what we refer to as the South, the Southern states, the Confederacy, really technically, the Confederacy reaches its northern point already.
in central ohio oh brother don't i know it and you know ohio went with the union but in every other respect southern ohio is part of the american south it was probably it was probably for tax reasons as you know i'm from cincinnati and it is it's it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like which is exactly between indiana and kentucky cincinnatus cincinnatus the great uh the great roman yodeler
Yeah, Cincinnati's scheisse.
So you think that was her rejecting her rural past or the border stops?
Well, not her rural past.
I think that particularly if you read the book, the great book, the great American history book, Albion Seed, which talks about the four great migrations of people from England, England, or rather...
The United Kingdom.
Because you told me before, John, that this was a problem of Scots persons versus English persons.
That's the war between the states, right?
Scots persons versus English persons, but also Puritans and Quakers being mistaken for one another.
And my mother's people, we have determined, my mom and I have spent many hours discussing this.
We have determined that they were, in fact, Quaker people who moved west in a very, because as you know, if the south is all the way up through central Ohio in every way, spiritually, culturally, in every meaningful, practical way, the south ends in Lima, Ohio.
Yeah.
That means that the north, the northern states at that point are squeezed into a very narrow band between northern Ohio and the lake, right?
I mean, there is no state above Ohio.
You're saying there's a small civic aperture in which that can fit in.
Exactly.
And then, you know, of course, the north then expands out in the west, right?
And, you know, you could you could argue that Washington and Oregon are union.
Oh, absolutely.
Like a great delta, a north flowing delta.
Exactly.
But so.
So I think right up close to the lake in Ohio.
those were puritans you know the the the rather the the um the progeny of puritans and then there was this little narrow band of of quakers that moved through central northern ohio and then it was all scots irish it's scots scots irish all the way down
Until you hit the French all the way down.
God, I wish they'd hit the French.
In the sewers of America.
But in any case, my mother's prejudice against country music comes from a very old Ohio prejudice against southern hillbillies, which they regarded, you know, Appalachian people, which they regarded even within the state of Ohio as being a subclass...
i get it of whites it's almost like uh casts in india right there's always somebody or indie rock or star trek you can always look down on somebody precisely precisely so when people started in the in the 40s and 50s when you when yodeling music became popular on the radio in the in the in the personage of uh hank williams senior
My mom instantly rejected it because it seemed to her to be... It was white trash music, basically.
If anything, she wanted to distance herself from that.
That's interesting.
And that prejudice against honky-tonk-sounding, fiddle-playing music, which she knew from her young childhood as being the music of itinerant...
uh you know white farm laborers and people who live down around around cincinnati let alone guilty further south down there around that kentucky border where all goes to hell it must also be like the soundtrack for want in her mind like it's got to be you know what i mean you don't want to listen to the to the yodel and break because it reminds you of being out of corn that's exactly right it's like
He says, I got all pig iron.
I got all pig iron.
I fooled you.
I fooled you.
So anybody gets food but you.
My mom was putting thumbs down on it.
I get it.
All the way through the 70s.
And it was not until she was forced to enjoy indie rock.
Because her son was a purveyor.
Because she was your business manager.
That even until 2003, if she saw a Telecaster, she immediately was like, you know, a needle scratching across the record.
And only in 2003, when The Long Winters started, you know, when The Long Winters had Peter Buck play Mandolin on Cinnamon...
Did my mom concede that maybe she could give a listen to Wilco and it wasn't going to kill her?
So, country music.
Long and the short of it, no Roger Whitaker in my life until Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter.
Jesse Sykes would have me over to her apartment sometimes and play Roger Whitaker records for me.
That was the excuse?
Because they were a big influence on her.
that was her and then she would you know she would come out she would come out of the back bedroom with holding roger whitaker record and nothing else and uh and i would say oh let's put it on see what that sounds like and that's when i learned like dressed dressed as sexy buck owens
All swayed.
Come plow by Bakersfield.
I don't know if you remember this from short story class.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just heard a scream outside.
Here or there?
It was outside of my house.
Did you just hear a scream outside?
No, but I have to imagine that if you hear a scream in your neighborhood, I'm just guessing you figure somebody had it coming.
Will you play a little hold music for just a second?
I'm going to run and look out the window.
Hang on just a second.
Hey, hey, hey, good looking.
What you got cooking?
How's it about cooking?
Something up with me?
It seems all right.
It seems like the street is clear.
Oh, good.
No gunfire to follow up.
There's nobody screaming still, so I feel like the neighborhood has resolved this.
Okay, here's the thing.
You may remember this from a short story class.
Alice Walker, short story, Everyday Use.
And it was a story about a like basically, you know, Afro-wearing, forward-thinking, Afro-American young woman who comes home from college and wants her grandmother's quilt as basically a Afro, as we say then, as basically, you know, an African-American artifact of
And they're like, no, we still use this.
And the thrust of the story in the title is it's too good for everyday use.
Right, right.
I have one of those here at my house, a quilt that my great-grandmother made.
Almost everything in your house is too good for everyday use, isn't it?
Yeah, that's true.
I just, on my way home, speaking of afros, I saw a young man in his mid-20s wearing a full-on kid-and-play hair tower.
Is it called a fade?
But tall fade, like high, high, high fade.
He's in his mid-20s, so he's doing this as a retro gesture, and he was driving a convertible red Jaguar.
And I felt like pulling over, getting out of my car and applauding.
As he drove by, because I just felt like, yes, thank you.
Thank you.
You know, you should be allowed to give out citations to people, not in the bad way.
You should be able to give people citations for winning the day.
You should be able to go to him and give him a handsome certificate and say, sir, you just won the day.
Well, and this is why I feel, Merlin, that technology has not, despite all of our handheld gizmos, technology has not caught up to what we imagined it would be.
Because routinely, and I'm talking about 10 times a day, I'm driving and I would like to send a message.
To the driver in front of me, the driver beside me or the driver behind me.
And it's a, it's a, I would just like to send them a personal message that would show up on their dashboard for, for, for a minute, you know, like for, for just, just for 30 seconds, I would like to be able to, and I think every driver should have this ability to be able to send a message to the driver in front of them, next to them or behind them.
And sometimes I, sometimes that message is a citation, but
in the form of, you are doing an excellent job driving, and I am having a very good time following you.
Because you are navigating through traffic in a way that I admire.
And I am keeping pace with you just so that I can admire your drive.
It's an honor to not need to tailgate you.
Exactly.
Yes.
I would just like to commend you.
And I know that at a certain point, you are going to take an exit or you're going to go in a different direction.
And I would just like to leave you with a gold star.
And I feel like I should have the ability to type your license plate into my device and
And say, send message to X license plate.
Nicely done, gold star.
Now, would you only send kind messages, John?
No, absolutely not.
I would also say, I would send messages like, lower your brights.
And if it is not a case where your brights are on, but that you have halogen lights in your car...
And they are and they are inaccurately aimed.
You need to go to a service station and have the man aim them properly.
Yes.
And if it is the technology is there, John, if it is not a case of improperly aimed halogens, but just that you have made a modification to your car and put illegally bright lights in your car, I would like you to take the car to a crusher.
I would like you to remain in the car while the car is crushed.
But for the system to work, yes, A, there has to be a way for you to send this to someone, approximate driver.
I think B, there has to be some way for them to have to read it.
Like maybe the car will only run – maybe you get only so many of these a day.
Maybe there's some kind of economics to it.
You get like two a day, right?
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
So everybody gets two a day.
You don't become a nuisance.
Right.
You have to reserve them.
You can't just be driving down the road and saying, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
But if you have not responded appropriately within 15 seconds, the car literally blows up.
Yeah, right.
Or all four wheels go flat.
Yeah, the tires blow out.
But all the time you want to say, like, stop looking at your phone.
It is impairing your driving.
Stop driving 50 miles an hour in the fast lane.
You are causing a traffic jam.
You want to be able to send these simple messages.
It could be like a Terminator screen where it's just like, fuck you, asshole.
You get to call it a heads-up display.
Yeah, that's right.
And it should just appear on there.
I think there's two or three a day, and advanced drivers should maybe get four or five.
Okay.
I would like to come back to the idea of what I'm going to call skipping a generation if we have time later.
I want to circle back to that.
But here's what I'm going to tell you about that.
I think it's fucking sickening that you can go out and just because the dim sum place that's been open for a week accidentally had one bad night and you and your friends from San Francisco State University collapse on that place on Yelp and you can put it out of business literally within three business days.
I think it's fucking sickening to me that you can do that, but you can't take a truly dangerous 80-year-old woman driving 50 miles an hour off the road.
Yes.
Don't you think – I mean, doesn't it seem bizarre that you could have some kind of wuffy on Yelp, but you don't have a way to have like forced larger letters on the heads-up display for the person in front of you?
Well, or here's what we're talking about.
If you could Yelp somebody's driver's license plate and those Yelp reviews would go and be reviewed at the Department of Motor Vehicles periodically.
No, no, I think from a public tribunal.
DMV's got plenty on their plate.
You should be part of a public tribunal that is trying people based on their automotive Yelp reviews.
Now, here's the thing.
You know what I don't need?
I don't need to send things.
Google Maps will now let you send things to a car.
I don't need that.
And that's that's like the opposite of what I need.
That's right.
What I need is this.
And, you know, they got all the I don't get started on the NSA thing.
Right.
It's been a while since we chatted a lot.
A lot has happened.
I've seen a lot of World War Two movies.
That's true.
But we don't have to catch up on.
You know, a lot of concerned citizens have been contacting me offline.
How's that?
A man, a concerned citizen today, took me aside in real life and pulled up on his phone the last half a dozen episodes of Roderick on the Line podcast.
And he said, would you like to see the dates of the last six Roderick on the Line podcasts?
And I said, no, not really.
And he said, well, let me show them to you anyway.
And then he proceeded to publicly shame me.
It's a timeliness issue.
Well, he's saying, he actually said, do you want to see the last six episodes of the Marc Maron podcast?
I would say no.
I said, I have no interest at all in seeing that.
Absolutely not.
And he said, well, let me just, in shorthand, clear this up for you, that in the last two months, he has made a lot more podcasts than you and Merlin have.
And I was like, oh, my goodness.
Message received.
Oh, my goodness.
Community college.
My gosh.
Where do you where do you begin?
Wow.
Well, thank you.
But but but I think I feel like we have gotten into it right away here.
Yeah.
I'm glad we got that out of the way, John.
I mean, I feel like I need an app just to keep track of my interventions at this point.
So I'm just glad I don't have to deal with that right now.
But we already have established in this podcast already, and it's just a few minutes in, that we need some kind of system, like maybe from that Swedish movie where the punk rock girl was tracking some kind of serial killer.
Oh, the girl with the regret in her face.
Yeah, the girl who stomped on the hornet's face.
The girl with the scheissen in the shoes and sitter.
There's different versions of that.
But anyway, what she did at one point was she tied up her attacker and she tattooed a rapist on his somewhere on him.
Is that a pictogram somewhere?
No, I think it was the actual words.
But it was in Swedish.
So he could just move to a different country.
And then he'd be like, oh, yeah, that's my hometown.
Stay away from the six people who speak Swedish in Europe.
Yeah.
He moved to Spain and they'd be like, hey, nice tattoo.
And he'd be like, yeah, well, I've got a little bit of a radical.
OK.
outsider artist.
But in any case, if we had the ability, based on Yelp reviews of license plates, to have public tribunals where the result was that we tattooed some form of bad driver, bad person...
That person, really.
John, I don't want to get us derailed here, but at this point we need an intern because you're on to like four or five different thematic things that are becoming extremely important to me.
And they keep coming up again and again, which makes me think they're important.
So yes, first of all, there should be a way that your will can be opposed upon strangers.
Let's just get that out of the way.
We've established that.
Okay.
That's been stipulated from pretty early on, right?
There should be a way to force people to hear what you have to say and then respond appropriately and in a timely manner, in a timely manner.
Right.
You can't just let the heads up thing sit there for a week because then you'll steam, right?
Sure.
I like the idea of the tribunal.
No question about it.
Sometimes I think you've been a gentleman about it and I know you're busy.
You got a lot on your plate.
You might not have time to lead that many tribunals.
Maybe you could manage other tribunal managers.
Right.
It seems like if we get a baseline of rules, people are then operating according to what constitutes a system.
If there are questions, it's like any court system.
You do your best.
You become like an existential referee.
If there are questions, you bump it up to a higher court.
I like it.
You know what?
You could just be available.
You could be up there in your bathrobe, in your scimitar, up in your garret.
And occasionally people would just... You know, I get a lot of emails and tweets already of people asking me questions.
To adjudicate matters?
Yeah, if it was a system where it was... I mean, you remember the two kids that came up to me in Portland and wanted me to figure out their relationship situation.
And, you know, I spelled that out for them.
Sounds kind of like a Judge John Hodgman kind of thing.
In about three minutes.
It does kind of sound like that.
I don't want to tread on his term.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing that John Hodgman will not do is tattoo people against their will.
And I believe this came up at least once before.
I don't listen to our program that often.
But I believe this came up in a discussion of going through the line at the airport.
Yeah.
Where you should have to prove, oh, you go through the clear lane.
I don't know if that even exists anymore.
But there should definitely be a way, I think, based on – I'm trying to remember where we left it.
I think one place we left, your idea, I believe, was to either, I think, slay them or give them a tattoo.
And I wanted a way for them to be able to bring their grade up.
I wanted them to have a way of saying basically a Yelp.
First of all, can I just say I fucking hate Yelp.
I really hate Yelp.
Yeah, I do too.
I do too.
You've already said it a bunch of times.
It's really frustrating.
The NSA is already like –
marking this down in their Yelp discussion.
Well, I want to come back to that too, because I'm not contrarian necessarily, but I will say that when we get access to what's actually in that data, oh boy, we're going to do stuff with that the government has no idea that they could even do.
You know what I'm saying?
Do you understand what you and I could do with Excel and that information?
You know how many things we could fix?
I'm compiling a list of keywords right now in my mind.
It would take like an afternoon to just get rid of so many problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, here's the problem with forced tattooing.
It has a bad history in the 20th century.
Okay.
Well, maybe it could be a tribal scarring.
Okay.
All right.
Ritual scarring.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe there's all kinds of ways to fuck somebody up, John.
I used to go to parties and there was a, it was during, I used to go to parties, but, but also I used to go to parties in the nineties where it was popular to stick a fork and
In the electric burner of the stove at the party house and everybody would, you know, in a certain group of people would give themselves like fork burns as a way of like being modern primitives.
One trade paperback of Research Magazine and so many lives ruined.
That's exactly right.
You know, that's all it takes.
You go down to the independent bookstore, you pick that up, and pretty soon you look like a holder for kitchen gadgets.
Yeah, pretty soon you've got – all you can do anymore is look at vivisection photographs because you've become desensitized to – You can't masturbate to anything normal, and you can't really even masturbate.
Yeah, you just want to go to a slaughterhouse.
You got a Prince Philip of Spain in there.
You got your penis Velcroed to your lip.
Jesus fuck, John.
I think tattooing is a wonderful way.
I mean, already people very thoughtfully are putting big tattoos of like Mexican prayer candle images of the Virgin Mary right on the side of their neck.
So that you don't, you no longer really have to ask yourself in a group of people like, who are the ding-a-lings in this group of people?
The ding-a-lings are self-branding.
And they're saying, I'm a ding-a-ling.
I have a big Madonna on my neck.
Let's put it this way.
If you have a notional room with a million people in it and you have to quickly decide which .01 percent just have bad judgment without having any time to talk to anybody, ask people to remove everything from the top of their head to the bottom of their neck.
And in about two minutes, you're going to be good to go.
You're going to have way more than 0.01%.
Sure, you're going to be able to call the ding-a-lings right away.
That's right.
And give them a special task.
Yeah, you there with the St.
Jude.
Let's move on.
Talk about hopeless.
Jesus.
Would you guys take some of this Zyklon B and go put it in that bathtub for me?
Okay.
So...
I saw the longest day.
Wait a minute.
Did you just hit a bell accidentally or was that like a muted?
I've never hit the bell more deliberately and I've never muted it more quickly.
call it carolana scheisse so uh the point being anyway a little shot of chew spit you mean like a like a like a blazing saddle sort of into the spittoon
Okay.
We've got skipping a generation.
We've got Yelp.
We've got a lot to cover, John.
But you know what?
Can I just say one thing?
I don't want to get too nostalgic about this program we used to do.
But it really does warm my heart how often, first of all, it's not annoying to be reminded that I haven't done the show.
Because let me just tell you, I'm aware how long it's been since we've been.
We're not doing it to provoke you, maybe.
Oh, you're talking to the listeners now?
I'm sorry.
I know it's unseemly to speak to our audience.
I get the impression that they periodically like it.
I think they've missed it.
You know what it is?
It's like your parents or your mate.
You miss them so much until you see them again.
Or your kids.
Let's be honest.
And you think, boy, I really missed you pretty recently, didn't I?
That's really weird.
Now we're back.
We're figuring out how to kill you with poison and tattoo you.
You've made 15 subtle Holocaust references and you've insulted probably me or my family.
Am I speaking to listeners?
There's so many ways in which I would like to see your will imposed on people.
I think people have missed that.
I'm feeling better.
I'm feeling more willful lately.
You sound good.
You sound like you're on top of your game.
Are you having more chili?
What's going on?
Well, no.
In fact...
I'm seriously contemplating now that I have not taken any steps toward this.
In fact, so anyway, I'm seriously contemplating doing some kind of low carbohydrate diet.
And as I've been thinking about it, I've been eating more and more pasta just to get it out of my cupboards.
Just as when I decided I was going to quit drinking, I started drinking rye for a month and a half.
I wish I could have been there to help you.
To really spirited along.
Spirited away.
But so I'm contemplating this low-carbohydrate diet.
I'm still battling ants in my apartment.
Oh, John.
And so they're really getting me down.
I was gone for two weeks.
Getting rid of the sugar would help.
I have no idea what these ants are eating.
There is nothing in my house.
I emptied it of food, and I was gone for two weeks.
I hermetically sealed it, and I came back, and they were just having a party, just doing the things that they do.
Do you have Grant's ant steaks?
Have you tried those?
They're very rewarding.
Do you have those?
Grant's ants?
You can remember because it rhymes.
What is it?
Grant's ants.
You get these little things, and you get this little thing.
It's like a little silver thing with a hole in it.
It's on a little plastic spiky thing.
So you can either stick it into the ground outside, or you can just lay it down inside, and it does a job.
It does a number, as they say, on ants.
It's pretty good.
You put it wherever they're likely to walk.
It's really gratifying.
It's like we get mice in our garage occasionally, and I put down way more traps than I need to just because I love finding dead mice.
Ha, ha.
And I've gotten so good at it, and there's so little, and I've gotten really, really good at it.
And I like to think I like to leave them there for a couple, three days.
I don't know if it actually helps.
Just as a warning to the other guys?
Yeah, it's a Mussolini in the square type situation.
Sort of a Vlad the Impaler.
It's a lots ghetto thing.
It sends a message.
But no, okay, so I want to talk about the carbs too, and I want to talk about Alice Walker and Yelp.
I mean, you know how uninteresting talking about carbohydrates is.
I'm going to say one thing about that, John.
It makes a huge difference.
Do you remember that?
You first met me when I was eating nothing but bacon.
That wasn't long after we met.
I remember.
I remember.
And I'm looking forward to something making a huge difference in my life.
Oh, God, me too.
I've been really craving that.
I've been really tired lately.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's exactly right.
Tired, old, ineffectual.
Ants.
Unlovable.
Yeah.
Marginalized.
You know, I bought some pink pants.
I'm wearing purple sneakers.
Yeah, and I'm hoping that pink pants are a thing that are going to give me a new lease on life.
Pink pants and then the halitosis that comes from ketosis.
And that's going to be the thing that makes me more people.
As I walk through the town, people are going to be like, that guy with the bad breath in the pink pants has a youthful glow.
First of all, are the pants comfortable?
Do they fit you appropriately?
Well, so this is the thing about pink pants.
Do they draw stringed?
No, I'm not drawstringed.
What do you think is happening to me?
I'm not an astronaut.
I'm not going all the way there.
They have tubes.
No, no.
As far as I can tell, the choice of pink pants, the valid choice of pink pants, leaving aside anything with drawstrings...
You can either get tight, skinny fit Uniqlo pink pants.
Right.
Like Project Runway pants.
Yeah, that you require that you wear white sunglasses and have a faux hawk.
Excuse me.
Which are not going to look good on me.
I'm going to look like a lollipop.
I'm going to look like an Oxford cloth lollipop.
Or you get some proper pink pants that an old man on Cape Cod would wear.
Oh, like from your preppy days, like when you could wear normal pants.
Yeah, that are pants that might have anchors on them.
Right.
But unpleated, right?
You're not going to have pleats.
Unpleated, flat front.
I'm looking forward to option three.
Cotton pants in a light pink color, which is what I got.
And they are very comfortable.
And not only are they comfortable to wear, but I am very comfortable with what they say about me.
You're comfortable with pink.
You always have been.
Yeah, yeah.
I think pink is a hell of a good color for men.
And option three.
You could choose to get comically oversized, balloon-y, room-y.
Because once you get a little heavier than you'd like, it's really rewarding to buy pants an extra size big so they don't feel like your fat pants.
No, I can't do that anymore because I'm already at the limit.
I'm at the limit that I set for myself.
Excuse me.
Are these a size eight?
No, sir.
Please turn it a quarter turn.
That's an infinity sign.
I think the third option is you buy a pair of white Levi's and you dye them pink.
But I'm not going to do that.
I don't know if you remember this.
And if you do remember, please tell it because you'll tell it better than I do.
But I was into the Atkins stuff.
As you know, I used to weigh 30 pounds more.
Now imagine me turning to my side and pulling my pants out so you can see how large they used to be.
You were a bigger man.
I was a bigger man.
I had orange hair.
But I remember it was – it wasn't when we very first met.
But like I think it was around the time we met, not long after that.
It really was like catching fire.
I've been doing it for like, I don't know, a pretty good while.
But it really caught on.
Everybody was doing Atkins.
And you, if I remember, were just – you were kind of just sick of hearing people talk about Atkins.
And then he died?
Yes.
He slipped on a pat of butter.
Do you remember?
Do you remember?
Do you remember what you said to people who would talk to you about Atkins after that?
I'm not sure.
You were talking to a woman who was going on and on about Atkins.
Yeah.
I'm telling your story.
I hope you don't mind.
It's okay.
And she said, oh, yeah, Atkins is so much healthier.
And you say, well, look what happened to him.
Yeah.
And I go, what?
He go, well, he died.
And he fell – he slipped on ice and fell down.
And he go, well, see.
So?
I just – but obviously you're telling him it was better.
But that's – you know, it does make you feel better.
You get more energy.
But you get – to get into that, they call it the induction phase, which is their made-up name for getting the ketosis started.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And whenever you go to, you know what's fun?
You know what's fun to do is go to an actual physician that went to an American medical school and tell them about things you read about.
They love that.
Sure.
Oh, you talk to them about chiropractic.
You go in and talk to somebody who's actually had a chemistry class and use words like ketosis.
Yeah.
Well, as far as I can... It's like somebody at the gas station saying to you, you did that one song that had like a what?
Talking about a 64 flat on it?
What was that?
You did that one with the string note.
What was that?
The thing about playing guitar is that the barrier to entry is a lot lower.
So the guy at the gas station probably knows more about it than I do.
He's in rehab for people with severe head trauma.
It's that easy to pick up.
What I'm discovering about myself is that I do not have...
I do not have such a sophisticated palate that, frankly, that I give a shit what I eat.
You know, like food is not a form of entertainment for me.
Temperature doesn't seem to come into it.
It could be in a can.
It could be on a counter.
Yeah.
It could be covered with ants.
Listen, if the Chef Boyardee has been anywhere close to it, I know I'm going to enjoy it.
But I'm not against, like, fancy food.
But it's just that food is a kind of... Like, my relationship to food is both, like, full of boredom and also full of, like, emotional neediness.
You know what I mean?
Like, I go downstairs and I make a four-pound bowl of...
I don't even care what comes next.
A four pound bowl of sugar covered with fat.
And I sit, you know, and I just, I let it like drip down my chin and I'm just eating it.
Just, you know, kind of softly crying and just trying to fill the hole in me with spackle.
And I need to break that cycle and get into a place where food is dead animals, which is what it should be.
Dead animals with a minimum of bologna.
Or rather, if you want to wrap it in bologna, that's fine too.
But dead animals with salt and butter.
It's and then I'll just then I feel like a lot of my troubles will go away and I'll stop.
I'll stop crying while I eat.
I will stop listening to people talk about food completely instead of like 98 percent.
Isn't that a huge turn off?
It's all I can do not to tell you like not to tell you not to share with you half a dozen different very strong feelings I have about this because of the impact that it's had on me.
But it's just it's so fucking boring to hear people talk about food.
I'm going to get rid of all books out of my life, too.
Oh, my God.
They're so annoying.
The books have got to go.
My house is going to be like one of those houses.
It sounds like once you finish dinner, you have quite a plan ready here.
I think I'm going to make my house look like a hotel.
You know what you need?
One of those Swedish ice hotels.
Yeah.
Levels.
It's like a ski lodge.
You know what?
Great.
Seinfeld jokes.
You know what you should do?
You know, the last thing in the world you should do with your actual house, as far as I'm concerned, is turn it into an actual bed and breakfast.
But wouldn't it be kind of nice if you made it look like a bed and breakfast and you just live there?
Wouldn't that be nice?
Like a bed and breakfast.
Yes.
The thing is, you have guests a lot and you're a wonderful host.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, seriously.
I mean, it's wonderful to be there.
But it could be the world's most secure bed and breakfast.
Other places you go, there are holes in the perimeter everywhere.
They're thinking way more about muffins than about somebody getting a clear shot from 300 yards away.
Right, right, right.
You know what you can do with a scope?
You get one of those browning things.
I watched a documentary about snipers the other day.
I mean, a lot of people don't realize how unprotected their bed and breakfast is.
You put down some Yahtzee and a fucking family circle from 1982 and you call it a hotel?
Fuck that.
The thing about a sniper, though, is he's out there and you have to pretty much trust that the sniper is not going to start feeling estranged.
He's watching your perimeter, but he's watching it through a scope.
So he's only getting half of the context.
And he sees you go out to the mailbox every day.
He sees you talking to people.
Guy in a dark sedan drives up.
You lean into the window.
You talk for a few minutes.
He drives away.
Pretty soon the sniper starts to feel, it's just in their nature to feel a creeping paranoia.
It's like that other people's lives movie, right?
Or you start listening in long enough and pretty soon you're part of their lives.
Maybe he looks in, he sees some overstuffed pillows or some Braille Playboys and he starts feeling maybe he wants to go spend a couple nights there, maybe a Liberty weekend.
Yeah, he starts to say to himself, why am I stationed up in this tree covered in netting while people are coming, sleeping comfortably in this house and my nominal employer, the owner of the bed and breakfast,
Keeps talking to men in dark sedans.
What if you had the world's first bed and breakfast exclusively for snipers?
They could come in.
Maybe they could come in and help you.
I mean obviously you know most of what you need to know.
But if you had exclusively paramilitary, black ops kinds of people that could stay there, they know it's a comfortable place.
It's in a secured location.
I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
The thing is it's all about vertical markets, John.
If you want to score high on Yelp, you're going to have to go beyond like, oh, we got prints and shit to something like, oh, you get a boiled egg and we talk too much.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Well, no, I'm seeing what you're saying because astronauts, maybe astronauts.
Well, if you if you just if you just focus on snipers, you got marine snipers, you got Air Force snipers, you got Army snipers, you got then you've got all the like you've got the CIA snipers, but you've also got these weird like State Department snipers that nobody ever hears.
John, there's going to be guys checking in.
They're going to have one of those black Amex cards, African-American Amex cards.
They're going to hand it over.
You're not going to know what kind of sniper they are.
And let's be honest, they may not even know what kind of sniper they were.
They don't know who they work for.
It's a huge untapped market.
We don't even know how many snipers are out there.
Retired snipers.
Currently active snipers.
I'm guessing there are snipers that don't even know they're snipers.
Oh, 100 percent.
Sleep or sell.
How do you get the word out to those guys?
You would need the right marketing materials, probably a Facebook page.
Just collect some likes.
Well, OK.
So there's a lot of ways you could go with this.
I'm just going to say, first of all, there's nothing in this world more deadly than a Marine and his rifle.
Did you know that?
Were you aware of that?
Yeah.
Remember the guy up in the tower in Austin?
That's right.
Where did he learn his trade?
Marines, sir.
That's right.
The Marines.
I'm going to call you private.
Doesn't know he's a sniper.
Oh, you know what?
In order to check in here, you have to prove that you were born again hard.
Can you do that?
Can you stand here and disassemble your rifle?
You go into the latrine?
You got watched that night?
No, there's a lot of things that you could do.
I mean, obviously, I guess there's two ways you could go.
I think at first, again, as you know, I am not a bed and breakfast consultant.
Yeah.
But I think you might want to start with people who know they're snipers and just need a break.
This is a problem with me and my relationship to snipers and my relationship to all kinds of people that I think I want to be friends with.
The number one problem with me being friends with former special ops people is that I am not a member of that fraternity, technically.
Right.
Or they say, you know, where did you serve?
Or whatever it is that they say to each other.
When they say, sick semper tyrannis.
Or... I think you're thinking of the John Wilkes Booth Company.
When they say, when they say, dolce farniente.
Or whatever it is they're trained to say.
I served in la dolce vita division.
And I say, you know, and I say, you know...
I mean, whatever my reply is.
That means that's like a skull and bones thing.
You just responded with the right whoop whoop to the sniper.
Exactly.
I show them my Masonic pinky ring, but they know it's wrong.
The points of the star are facing away from my heart or whatever.
I am already not a member of the fraternity enough that I can bridge that gap and make the common cause with them that I feel like.
that I've in my imagination exists, but the, but the other problem, and this is one that is, that's growing in concern to me is that there's been a lot of, a lot more exposure to,
of special operations people in the last 10 years.
During the Reagan era.
Like awareness of what they do or outing as?
Both.
I mean, just because of the way our culture goes, the whole business in 1985, if you worked in any fashion in a secret agency, you made no reference to it whatsoever.
Your spouse didn't know.
Yeah, you wouldn't show up in Scarsdale and go, oh, you know that thing down in Nicaragua?
That was me.
Yeah, right.
You weren't certainly writing a book about it or appearing on television about it.
But now, I don't know if you saw, but there was this movie that came out a couple of years ago that was all...
Currently active SEAL team members starring in this movie.
And it was it was predictably awful.
The acting was the adventure.
Well, it was a fictive world.
I mean, it was they were acting in this movie.
It wasn't a documentary.
Yeah, it was a SEAL team.
It was a SEAL team movie where they were out.
chasing terrorists and jumping out of airplanes and and they had they had like boats outfitted with gatling guns that could strip the bark off a tree and and all this crazy shit and they were flying around the world and chasing terrorists but it was all the actors were all active SEAL team members and so the dialogue was it was it was like watching the bark of a tree try and and do line readings and
It seems like that would defeat the purpose of two different industries.
On the one hand, you have the desire to theoretically entertain people.
And then on the other hand, you try to keep the country safe by not saying who's a SEAL.
Well, so – but my experience of absorbing and consuming all this special forces material, it began –
Of course, with the movie where the girl from St.
Elmo's Fire went through the SEAL training and shaved her head.
I'm talking about Mrs. Bruce Willis.
Yes, the lady who was in A Few Good Men.
Ashton Kuchner's... G.I.
Jane?
G.I.
Jane, was that it?
Because that movie was on cable a lot, and because I will always watch...
uh dramatized seer training uh i i watched that movie a dozen times and uh and back then you couldn't trust what you were seeing because it was just hollywood and it was some dumb it was some dumb movie but now you you get to meet these seal people on tv or on the internet there you get to see them in real life and my perception of them which was completely formed in my imagination with no basis in reality
my perception of them being Jason Bourne-like at the minimum.
But honestly, my perception, my dream of them was that they were all like Roddy McDowell.
And they live.
No, not Roddy Piper, I mean Roddy McDowell.
Sorry, Cornelius.
Yeah, Cornelius, exactly.
He plays an American in The Longest Day.
That's right.
Well, he's a great actor.
Watched it three times.
But I always imagined special forces people were likable British.
Oh, my goodness.
Yes.
I mean, I mean, I know you're not a comic person, but I mean, it's like people in shield.
You imagine it's going to be people who are super smart, super fit, you know, super with it.
I felt this way about Scientologists.
And then I watched a couple of documentaries and they were real doughy.
I thought they'd be a lot tougher.
And that's the thing about these SEAL guys.
The more of them I see, I realize— They look like vice principals.
Well, and every single one of them is a goddamn hillbilly asshole.
And the more I think about it, it's like, well, duh, of course.
Who is going to go through all that bullshit?
They're not going to make it out of the Swiss embassy like a Bourne.
These guys are just guys that are attracted to the SEALs because, A, they are hyper-patriotic.
B, they want to meet every challenge and never fail.
And C, they want to run big machines.
It's basically the same dudes that are building drag strip cars.
Oh, this is like people who are like – I mean I don't have cable, but it sounds like from what I've seen of cable, this is like people who should have a cable TV show.
It's like heavy guys with mustaches and like colorful accents.
Maybe they make motorcycles or in this case, they invade Banana Republics.
Yeah, exactly.
They helicopter in and they sneak into people's houses and they shoot them.
And why I thought that they were going to be like David Niven instead of like Larry the Cable Guy, I don't know.
But they're basically all Larry the Cable Guy in better shape.
You're totally right.
And they sit there and they got the big meat beard.
And they're wearing a shirt that's a little too tight.
You're totally you're totally right.
And they believe that they are on a Christian mission to like destroy the infidels.
Isn't that depressing?
And then so so.
But for me, though, I want somebody like, gosh, there's so much I want to talk to you about.
I watched Band of Brothers again.
And I want to be like like Easy Company like that.
I want to be guys like that.
Sure, there's a guy from Brooklyn.
There's a guy from Kansas.
There's the other guy from Brooklyn.
But you know who it is for me?
David Niven, Roddy McDowell, who is not Rowdy Roddy Piper.
For me, it's Max von Sydow in Three Days of the Condor.
Right.
I just – he is so cool.
He is so stone cold in that movie.
I didn't realize – I always think of him as being in Seventh Seal, but he's in lots of like really normal movies too.
I mean he's in The Exorcist.
I always forget about that.
Pretty normal.
Or the actor that was in The Day of the Jackal.
who was also in force 10 from Navarone, uh, not Robert Shaw.
No, not Robert Shaw.
Although he was in force 10.
Is he more, uh, is he more, uh, Jackal?
He's the in force 10 from Navarone.
He's the British guy with the briefcase full of explosives.
And in day of the Jackal, he's the Jackal.
And so what we've got here is what I will refer to as the Larry continuum.
You know, you've got like, you've got, you got, you got your Larry's at anyway.
I, I,
I have so many things I want to ask you about.
I'm sorry.
I have a lot of notes right here.
And so the problem is if you're going to open this bed and breakfast, you're going to need self-awareness.
You need self-awareness about do you really want to have Larry the Cable Guy staying at your house, for example.
That's the problem.
I'm going to have to stock the refrigerator with Jimmy Dean's sausage.
This could be good for your diet.
My stereo is just going to be all, uh, whatever that, uh, like Garth Brooks is heavy metal alternative persona.
Uh, what's his name?
Yeah.
But you know what I mean?
Like these are guys, these are guys that are listening to, uh, that are listening to like Creed on their, or Kid Rock on their, while they're in the helicopter on their way to make the, uh, make the world a better place.
And I'm not sure I want them in my house.
I'm not sure that I'm going to have anything in common with them.
See, but this is where I think you can work outside of the Yelp model.
I mean, what if you – what if, for example, I mean, again, you don't have enough insider knowledge.
I mean, you know, like when we were kids and certainly for years before we were kids, you knew there was the FBI.
You knew there were like secret agents.
That's right.
You didn't know.
You go to Wikipedia now.
You can read like seven levels deep about the black, black, blacker ops and all that kind of stuff.
And obviously it's a little late in life for you to just be getting started with that, right?
Yes.
Yes.
But you could have a covert bed and breakfast, and maybe that becomes a word of mouth thing where you wouldn't let anybody in.
Maybe you would make them think it's a normal bed and breakfast, which none of these snipers would want to stay at.
Certainly not in your neighborhood.
What, are you going to go out to John's neighborhood to stay at a bed and breakfast?
What if I start a bed and breakfast and I don't let anybody come stay here?
I think it's a terrific start.
Well, I'm halfway there.
Well, no, think about it.
You could do some tests, some test flights.
I don't know.
I'm just saying you travel a lot.
It's the kind of thing where once it gets running, maybe it could be like a TV show.
Maybe some of the snipers could come and work there.
I feel like I very much want to be part of this world where people are –
house swapping.
They trade their cool house for somebody's apartment in Paris.
It's like video games.
I've completely missed this entire phenomenon.
I knew it was out there, but people talk about it like it's a normal thing.
It's completely passed me over.
Yeah, it's happening, and I think it's brilliant precisely because what you do is you trade the mundane reality of your life
With somebody else's mundane reality.
And they think they think where you live in San Francisco is amazing.
And you think whatever like outlying suburb of Paris they live in is amazing.
It's like swapping underwear.
It's always intriguing.
This underwear is incredible.
It's just my underwear.
Yeah, but it's awesome.
The problem with it is that my house is situated just far enough outside of the ring.
And by the ring, I mean the ring of whites, the ring of Anglo-Saxon scared people.
The ring of whites sounds like some kind of community group in your mom's hometown.
The ring of whites in downtown Seattle who are terrified of ever having any conflict.
That is what other people think is what's magical about Seattle.
And so somebody from Paris is going to come here and they're going to be like,
What is this car on the giant wheels?
And I'm going to say, oh, that's a donk.
And they're going to say, I'm headed home.
That's not a word.
They don't want to trade houses with me.
I mean, no.
No, donk is a real word.
Okay.
I think that means butt, doesn't it?
Is that the Donk-a-Donk?
The derivation of Donk, this is based on the Dirty South culture.
Oh, my God.
Around the sort of Florida-Atlanta axis.
And the original cars that they used to put on those giant rims were Impalas.
and the little jumping impala logo on the back of an impala the little the little impala uh like elk uh deer whatever that thing whatever the little like leaping gazelle uh logo the gazelle on the back of an impala uh the the um
The purveyors of these giant hopped up custom cars felt like that animal looked like a donkey.
And so they started calling the cars donkeys and then shortened to donks.
And now it's a phenomenon.
It's a worldwide phenomenon.
Put your car up on the tall wheels.
Donk.
But they're called donks.
Hmm.
And you see a lot of people that are from inside the white ring might not know the donks as much, especially the Parisians.
Inside the ring of whites, the donks are only passing through.
But down here, the donks are the main form of motorized transit.
And somebody from Paris might think that that's fascinating, but it's also a little bit outside of...
Like, oh, let's step outside of our mental health.
I think you undersell the continent.
But here's the thing.
The last thing I want to do tonight is accuse you of black and white thinking, John.
But I think whether it's your diet or your pants, I think it helps to start small, but not too small.
Not where they'll be uncomfortable or bind.
But I think you have to start with small, little, small steps.
And if you're going to have a covert bed and breakfast, let's start by just having maybe a bed and breakfast.
And it does not even have to be available to the public.
You should just see if you like having that kind of a setup.
I mean, I think they're real creepy.
Have you ever stayed at a bed and breakfast?
My experience of bed and breakfast is that they have a lot of Victoriana, right?
Like lamps with heavy brocade shades.
Basically, every cliche in a movie that you've ever seen about bed and breakfast is true.
Inclusive.
I mean we stayed at one once and it was – I mean of all the things that make me uncomfortable about hotels, at least national hotel chains understand the most important thing.
Well, they understand an important thing, which is to make it seem like nobody has ever been in your room before.
Right.
Right.
But in these places, that is not the primary assumption.
Instead, they want to look like thousands of people have been in your room over the last 200 years.
Everything is creaky.
Everything is woven.
They've papered the walls with corduroy to actually collect dander from guests.
Do you know how much dander you can collect in flocking just at a baseline level?
Just a background dander collects in a flock.
I think I have an ant in my ear.
I don't know how it would have gotten in there, but I'm sorry to interrupt.
Not at all.
Do you need a minute?
I could put Hank Williams again.
No, no, it's all right.
I'm going to survive it.
I have a little bit of that sympathetic ant in the ear problem where I just imagine it goes back to Star Trek Wrath of Khan.
Hmm.
I like that with – the way you are with raccoons, that's kind of how I am with ants.
I got a lot of respect for them.
If I got to take them out, I'm going to do it like a gentleman.
But I have a lot of respect.
We stayed at one one time and the price was competitive with other places and it was mainly because of the location.
We're staying near family in Rhode Island and it was really easy.
It seemed great.
We got there.
i'll be quick about this but you go in first of all if you're going to get there if you can get there after seven let us know because we'll have to like you know you gotta flip the light on and off seven times and come down and we'll have split pea soup for you it's like oh fuck so first of all when you check in um the main lobby if you like meaning their living room is not open so you have to go in through the antique store entrance because of course it has an antique store i like this place mainly focusing on figurines
i don't like this so a lady in a house coat comes down at eight o'clock i like this place she's not in a good way she comes down and i mean i didn't even head down to like the junk junk credit card thing and you go you check in you go into this room it's incredibly creepy sure you know you know like you stayed lots of yes everything's slanted i mean it's it's it's everything's like and everything's like deliberately human like everything's way too human but
You know, it's – because it's real wabi-sabi quality.
Like, oh, you know, that's Staines Vintage or whatever.
But OK.
So anyway, it's awful.
Creepy doll.
It smells like people have been there.
And the – oh, God.
You know, and you're supposed to come down and eat breakfast with everybody.
That's the gig.
But we had gotten real fancy.
She said, if you want, you know, I could bring breakfast.
Drop it off.
OK, sure.
Fine.
Whatever.
Whatever.
And so my lady and I are sleeping and we hear this like –
And it's this woman.
There's our room with a door that goes out to the hallway.
And then there's another door that we weren't really aware of.
And there's this room between two rooms where she goes in and puts this really like – not handmade in like a nice way.
But like it really looks like a lady made you breakfast.
And she puts it right outside like where you're sleeping.
And you can hear her.
Like you can hear things like –
In the anteroom.
It's kind of like an alcove.
And then you hear... She closes the other door.
So it's like this little DMZ between two rooms.
And then turns on a red light.
And you know it's safe to go in and get your hard-boiled egg.
Put on your hose pants.
But yeah, you go in there and... Do you know what I'm saying there, John?
Like, again...
To their credit, a hotel, you get a meal and it kind of looks like nobody's ever touched it, which they – whatever.
It probably got shot out of a machine, shot out like pump chili.
But in this case, seriously, like a hard-boiled egg on a stand, like really, really creepy.
And everything smells like needlework.
It's just gross.
I've never stayed in one of those in America because why the hell would you?
But I've stayed in a million of them in Europe.
where where you're staying in someone's home and and you realize all of a sudden that they have house rules that they expect you to like i got yelled at by an old woman one time for the way i was taking a shower like she came into the bathroom i was like you can't take a shower like this and she was yelling at me and yelling at me in german and i was like i don't know what you what were you doing wrong do you remember i have no idea
I was taking a shower.
That's the thing.
It's like you're saying.
In her imagination, shower time is between 7.45 and 8.15.
And I was showering at 8.36 or something, and she's like, what are you doing?
You're all the way into breakfast time now.
They love rules.
You can't be in the shower.
You are into breakfast, deep into breakfast.
Breakfast is important, and they serve a lot of bread there.
They do dark bread.
Cakes.
Dark bread and that blood sausage.
My thinking also, though, is – so first of all, fuck bed and breakfast.
That's bullshit.
I think a sniper who's out there, somebody – it's a very high-pressure situation.
You don't – let's be honest.
You don't get to sleep real well.
You might be in a blind or what would you call it?
Like you're up in like your little sniper hole.
What do you call that?
You might call that a blind.
I mean that's more what a hunter would make.
But yeah, let's say sniper blind.
Okay.
You've been in your sniper blind.
Maybe you've got a crack in your neck.
But anyway, all I'm saying is maybe they would want to come there.
I don't think they're going to want to come there and talk about guns.
I think guns and sniper nests and blinds and trees are probably the last thing they want to talk about.
They might want to talk about raccoons.
This is the thing.
This is what I'm afraid of.
I am afraid that special forces people are not as sophisticated as I hope.
And that, in fact, they do want to talk about guns because it's all that they want to talk about.
They want to talk about guns and freedom.
Or who knows?
Or they want to talk about sports.
Oh, you're saying it might be.
Oh, gosh.
I don't know if it's what you're saying, but all of a sudden I went down a real, real wormhole here.
It's a fucking bachelor party and it's like five of these mooks and they want to watch sports and
And have a hooker come over or something.
They want to watch sports, maybe have a hooker come over.
And every time a car backfires outside, they all are under the tea tray.
They're still in Saigon.
And all of a sudden, you got little laser pointer sights going all over the dark room.
And I feel like what my hope was, was that there would be a bunch of men of discernment sitting around talking about the Biafran War, talking about the old days in Rhodesia.
And we would be comparing geopolitical notes and killing techniques.
But in a really urbane way.
In a very urbane way.
No one ever says the word kill or death.
There's always a euphemism employed.
And there's an appreciation for the Walther PPK.
It's a small gun.
Easy to conceal.
There's a little tradecraft discussed, but always, again, in a way where everything is in code.
Here's another big difference.
If you went to, God forbid, a rock and roll bed and breakfast...
Like, you wouldn't want to go, like, grab an acoustic guitar and join seven people in singing The Weight.
Jesus, no.
No, but you might want to sit around and talk about people and gossip about people in bands that you don't like.
Like, that would be fun, right?
Absolutely, if that's the best.
So, I mean, still, I'm not sure you'd want to go stay with other musicians, but all I'm saying is Tradecraft might come into it, but it wouldn't be that on the nose.
I figured out something this past week.
I was staying with some friends, and one of them, her father was an expert on the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
He was a university professor.
He worked at the State Department.
He was an expert on the Soviets.
He traveled to the Soviet Union.
Is this Kathleen's father?
Many times.
No, no, no.
It's not Kathleen's father.
Her dad, I think, was a doctor.
God, he's a gentleman.
But in any case, I asked some probing questions right away of this man who's now an elderly gentleman because I was like, come on.
Who are you kidding?
You were working for the State Department?
You were working for the State Department in the Moscow office?
Like, give me a break.
Oh, he's trying to play it off like he's a lower-level ambassador kind of person?
No, he's playing it off like he's an academic.
Oh, he's there for research and education.
Come on, come on, let's talk Turkey.
Like, what's the real story?
And it didn't take long at all to establish that, no, in fact, he was...
an academic.
He was not in espionage.
And I believe it.
But that there were all kinds of people working in what I imagined were very exciting Cold War era lines of inquiry, working for the government or working in the Soviet studies or whatever.
People that I imagined would be fascinating to talk to because of all the special – you know, the special –
the information that they would have or the special knowledge, I guess, of the world, a world that was a great mystery to me at the time.
And in talking to him, it became clear that, well, 40 years ago, it was just the same as now.
And most people just did some thing, some kind of uninteresting thing, and their perceptions of the world were...
were more or less governed by their own prejudices.
It's just a job?
It's just a job.
And the Soviet Union, my retroactive perception of the Soviet Union as this gigantic, like Jeff Koons metal dog balloon.
LAUGHTER
Okay.
Is not a perception shared by people who were actively engaged with American-Soviet intercourse in the 60s and 70s.
And so I'm like, well, come on.
Wasn't the Soviet Union really just a big Jeff Koons sculpture of a metal dog balloon?
And I am greeted with incomprehension.
That's so odd.
And then the older man sort of pedantically explained to me that the Soviet Union was a legitimate threat, that they were a threat to democracy, and that Soviet communism and their military buildup were real and dangerous.
And I was like, come on.
But really?
Wasn't it just a...
Wasn't it just a taxidermied shark in an aquarium of piss?
And he says... I should really go.
He doesn't understand what I'm asking, and he says, no, they were the enemy, and they had a bad ideology, and they were backing it up with nuclear bombs.
And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Wasn't it just a giant nesting doll of babushkas?
in in some kind of uh art museum and at that point he broke down and told you the truth he i couldn't i could i couldn't get it out of him see that guy's good he's bed and breakfast material right there that's what i but but but but i was convinced ultimately i was convinced that he was he was not using tradecraft on me that in fact he had no idea what i was talking about oh that's so depressing
And he genuinely considers to this day that the Soviet Union was – that the Cold War was justified and the Soviet Union was genuinely – they were bad guys and communism was a real threat to our way of life and all these things that I guess I can't fault him for.
But these were things that I felt –
I felt pretty strongly in 1983, I guess.
But by 1993...
I really felt like we had looked behind the curtain, and there was the wizard.
Especially in East Germany, where you saw how broken the whole system was for so long.
It was so broken and so sad, and he certainly appreciates that, and I think anybody that worked in that time understands that it was broken and sad.
But the idea that it was also an unstoppable plague that was bringing broken sadness to us, if we didn't counter them
by literally throwing F-16s at them, or by rattling so many sabers.
Like playing thousands of high-stakes games of Battleship, maybe not even being sure where those planes are, but they're out there, trust me.
That whole game with the submarines chasing each other around the abysmal deep or whatever.
And you're just thinking, did we really live like that?
Did we really live like that for so long?
So much money.
So much money.
It's a thing that gives me great sympathy for...
Uh, Marxist feminism, like, like university style, uh, nineties feminism, their contention that the, that you talk about the real Dworkin tick.
Yeah.
That, that their contention that, that, that politics and the, and the world of men is just a, just this, just a bunch of little boys throwing marbles at each other.
And when you look at the Cold War with any distance, I can't escape that that is an accurate critique.
And that this has been overcoming me lately.
My love of military pomp and circumstance and secret operations is for the first time really, really up against this feeling that it is...
baron munchausen or or worse that little guy in blade runner with the napoleon hat and the pinocchio nose home again home again and that that is that all of this wonderful world of making war on one another
is just this pathetic child game.
The nuclear holocaust under which I and you both grew from zygote-hood to adulthood.
The threat of this was so palpable and so...
And felt so fraught.
And even though for two decades now, it's been like, eh.
You know, thank goodness that's not a thing anymore.
It's amazing how fast it just went away.
And over like basically two to three years.
Yeah, just evaporated like San Francisco fog on a hot afternoon.
Yeah, you had Red Dawn.
And then like within five years, you got, you know, KMFDM is a drug against war.
And we're all tearing down the wall with Pepsi and stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Five years later, you're trading your Levi's for a Trabant.
And everybody thinks it's hilarious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can I try to restore some of this?
I'm not saying this is – I'm not about to try and fight the dorkins of your mind.
But one thing I have to bring up – you remember this last time we talked about the Holocaust, how I was saying it had never really sung into me what a –
extraordinarily small amount of time uh the the the whole like a formal process of concentration camps being more than a place to concentrate people in a camp that it was really like three years i mean they were tearing them down i mean they went from like within one year they went from tell me if i'm wrong but i think within about a year they went from like ridiculous escalation and like railroads and all this stuff to like tearing it down quickly because here comes the the allies right yeah it was 43 43
Yeah, exactly.
Well, watching all these movies in our interregnum has shown me another thing.
I'll be quick about this.
But it's – when we're watching – you know what else I watched that I kind of give you?
The World at War, 26-part documentary from 1974 narrated by Laurence Olivier.
Yeah.
26 parts.
Each one, one to two hours.
I think I watched it on TV.
Of course you did.
You remember the logo, the big flaming logo?
Oh, so great.
Here's what I got from that.
I'm going to stand by what I always said as an armchair 70 years too late historian.
Holy shit.
And every single day, every single goddamn day, if we had gotten in one day earlier, what a difference one day would have made at so many points.
It's amazing how much of that war went on and happened and happened and happened over so many years.
But it's just so strange to me that you look at like – so when was the bombing of London?
It was like 42 years.
Well, you're talking about the Blitzkrieg?
Yeah, the Battle of London, right?
No, before, 39.
Well, I think that the bombing started – here's all I want to get at is like it seems to me that the amount of time – like once the U.S.
came in, it seems like I never realized this so much.
My feeling had always been that like I think of –
In my head, I always think of World War II, the American interest in that being about five years long.
When really, no, it was kind of really four years, but really three years.
We were not actually that engaged that much for that long.
And to be honest, in retrospect, in serious, serious retrospect, I mean this is very much armchair stuff, the tide turned.
on three different fronts, three different theaters, like not long after we got in.
It did not take that – it didn't take more than two years of us being in to like really change the tide.
I mean even by the time of – I mean those horrible few episodes of Band of Brothers around the project Market Day.
Market Garden.
Market Garden.
Oh my god.
And all the horrible stuff around Battle of the Bulge.
Well, Battle of the Bulge was like a last gasp.
Last gasp.
A horrible, horrible like series of just awful things.
But that was their last ditch effort.
You know what I mean?
It's incredible from like basically January of 1942 to June of 1944.
Think about that.
I mean that's – that's like what?
How long is that?
That's like two, two and a half years or something like that?
I have mayonnaise in my fridge that's older than that.
Isn't that unbelievable?
But the only reason I want to hear comments on that, but the only thing, the only reason I mentioned all of this is because we should talk more about Hitler, but also because I wonder if a, first of all, there's the fact that even after we were trouncing, uh, finally the fucking Americans jumped in and provided more than like, you know, a few tanks and planes.
Uh, we had, you know, we brought in this huge amount of, uh, sea power, you know, to add into the mix, change, change the game for everybody.
Yeah.
But it still took – it did still take those years.
And by 1944, it was some of the worst fighting in the war even though those are the scales that already tipped.
So I wonder if there's that part of it combined within the fact that – so when you think about the Soviet era intelligence people, I wonder if there's this part of them that was coming out of that World War II culture of going, oh, it may have seemed like we were winning.
But believe me, it was not a decisive victory.
Until we came in from the west and the Russians came in from the east and boy, a lot of bodies had to fall after we started quote-unquote winning.
Do you know what I mean?
I wonder part of it was that like until that entire system was broken down, until there was zero chance that there could be a plausible strike from the Soviet Union.
Do you know what I mean?
I bet that mentality stuck with people who were brought up in that period or who had fathers that died in that war.
Yeah.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it does.
And I think that's why we're still so fascinated by the secret weapons of Adolf Hitler.
There was that sense that there was the doomsday device or at least the jet airplane that was waiting under a tarp.
The V1 or whatever?
Well, I mean, no, I mean, the ME-262 was the sort of first operational jet.
And if they had, you know, if the war had lasted two more years or if they brought that jet out two years earlier, I mean, there's so many things that could have turned the tide, particularly if Hitler had, if we hadn't had that great special forces operation up into Norway to destroy their heavy water manufacturing plant.
And Hitler had made a bomb.
uh an atom bomb when was that i don't know about that when was that oh well this is there's there's there's some great movies about this raid i got my pencil but there uh you know there was a uh there was a a uh what would it be called a refinement sort of
plant dam there was a there was a dam involved and they were refining heavy water which is necessary in order to process uranium and they were collecting this heavy water up at this place in Norway and a special team of of winter time like special forces paratroops
were were dropped up in the snow lands and cross country skied their way down to this, this, uh,
heavy water plant and like blew it up in the middle of the night effectively ending the nazis sort of like uranium enrichment project and this was all part of the you know the the that growing awareness that like whatever that letter that einstein wrote to fdr was
Where it's like, this bomb could be real.
We could make this bomb.
And if the Nazis aren't working on it, then they're crazy.
I mean, the Nazis are definitely working on this.
We need to get this bomb first.
And if you're looking for their bomb project, here's what you should be looking for.
And, you know, they took it seriously and they went and stopped him or whatever.
But, you know, the secret weapons thing...
And it still gets people today.
I mean the whole idea of – I mean think about everything.
I just read this essay the security guy wrote about just those concentric circles that come out from the word terrorist and how we can excuse anything.
It just starts out with terrorism and then it just moves out and it really is a slippery slope.
I mean, you know, now that you've got all this NSA stuff, what comes next?
Do you use it to stop child pornographers?
Well, that seems like a good cause.
You know what I mean?
And then the next thing is like, yeah.
What about dog abusers?
Yes.
Pretty soon it's people who didn't respond to John's Yelp review fast enough.
What about people that haven't updated their Adobe software?
Yes.
But I think really the hardest thing for me to remember and the hardest thing for everybody to picture is that...
During the 20th century, the idea of a fascist society, along the lines of the one that we jokingly refer to on Roderick on the Line.
Hmm.
or not so jokingly referred to, but the idea that the best way for human culture to run in an industrial mechanized era, when we finally have the technology to run things according to clocks and run things as efficiently as possible, that the notion that democracy was an outdated mode of thinking
And a more primitive way of ordering human society and that ultimately having one strong altruistic person at the top of a system, like at the top of an efficient bureaucratic system was in fact the next evolution of
And that notion, which went in the direction of fascism and state communism, statism,
that those ideas were not... We look at them now and think of them as artifacts of sort of a 20th century wrongheadedness, but that in 1920, it was a convincing argument that I think a lot of people could legitimately...
Feel a sympathy toward like, yes, there should be a way that these bad drivers are kept off the roads.
Yes, there should be a way that we can that we can tattoo the people we we would like to ostracize.
And those ideas seemed like an appropriately new evolution of technology, and we were going to eliminate – I'm talking about we, the human race.
We're going to eliminate poverty.
We're going to eliminate –
ultimately eliminate suffering by employing technology in these ways.
And, and when I look at the cold war now, I have to remember that this ideological battle that seems hilarious to me now, that seems like, that seems like slim pickings, riding a bomb, right?
At the time, it was so real to people because these ideologies that the Soviets were the last vestige of this idea that top-down, bureaucratic, state-ordered government and culture was actually in competition with democracy itself.
In reasonable people's minds, there were all kinds of American intellectuals that felt like, no, what we really need is five-year agriculture plans and re-education camps for dummies.
Mm-hmm.
But that's not where it starts, I don't think.
I mean we've covered this – or I've covered this ground a lot, that whole idea of like – well, we've talked about Versailles and the wheelbarrows full of money and stuff like that.
But you know another way to look at it is if you go somewhere – and gosh, now I think it's almost like Les Mis or something.
But you go somewhere and you buy something that's supposed to be beef and it's actually like tainted ass or whatever.
There's no regulation, right?
Tainted ass.
Dunk, dunk, chicka, chicka, chicka.
But you know what I mean?
If you go somewhere – I mean think about the idea of like something like the FDA is all I'm saying.
Like having regulations about like what's OK with food and the fact that like what if all of a sudden somebody took a little bribe and decided that a bunch of this stuff would go past inspection that couldn't and because of that combination of incompetence and corruption, a bunch of kids die.
Like when that happens, boy, for sure.
I think most of us are going to be jumping out of our seats to say, oh my god, we need more of that –
Big brother or whatever you want to call it.
You want – you don't want that to never – could be stuff involving kids on every level.
It's something that gets our dander up, right, for really good reasons.
But that's – the thing is I don't think – I really don't think it starts with let's have the hook noses go get bricked into this area of town.
I think it really starts somewhere much more basic.
I think that you can stoke it with that.
But I mean I think it's that basic fear of things that we – in a large technological society, the things we can't know or understand or trust is we have to have somebody there who's standing between us and the bad guys.
I'm not trying to defend it but I think that's a lot of where it starts.
I mean don't – it could be a banking system.
It could be like where you can just take money from people just by –
Being a banker who decides to walk away with this money or whatever.
And then the public gets that and that's red meat.
So I don't know.
I mean I guess I just feel like it's – that impulse is in almost all of us.
It's like the people who – the hippie that gets his weed stolen and calls the cops.
Everybody wants a dad when it comes time to get to the thing that they really care about.
Sure, but I think what changed in our era in the 20th century was that we were finally able to account for every person.
Census-wise?
Yeah, and just like everybody has an ID at a certain point.
You have the technology to ultimately line everybody up and give them a number and start...
you know, start directing them according to systems, which even in, you know, even in the 19th century was just a, you know, just a distant dream.
I mean, they were still, they were still putting, they were still putting gas lamps up or whatever, but by 19, by 1930, uh,
you could do a pretty reliable count of everybody.
And that kind of order, what it allows the imagination to do is race ahead and think like, okay, we've got a number on everybody now.
We can also give them all a rating.
Like we can...
Why shouldn't that number also be a rating from one to five million according to some system of tests that we give or some system of criteria?
And you start moving people around.
I mean, one of the famous things that Soviet defectors, one of the first impressions when they came to America...
They would stand on an overpass or whatever and watch cars driving on a freeway and say, who is directing where all these people go?
How are these people able to just drive wherever they want?
What keeps them...
At their jobs or what keeps what keeps everybody from just doing whatever they want.
And, you know, their American handler would kind of chuckle and say, well, it's America.
It's freedom.
Their own self-interest keeps them.
And, you know, our our Occupy Wall Street friends would say that the American people were chained by their chained by all these invisible hands.
But the Soviet defectors were like, no, in the Soviet Union, you are not allowed to do this.
You are expected to present your card from when you leave here and when you arrive there.
And that seems...
Like you're saying, that is a way of controlling fear and a natural one to try, you know?
A natural one to try out like, well, why don't we give everybody an appointment every day if we can?
Why would we let everybody just run around now that we have the power to forbid it?
What if we made everybody do something?
What if we had one guy on the top?
What if Mao...
is the one that says, everybody make a home iron smelter.
You know this story, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you have basically the equivalent of a Weber grill.
Nobody's eaten in weeks, and then you're supposed to make industrial-grade steel on a Weber grill in your yard.
On a Weber grill.
Or Ceausescu, who was, you know, his car would drive through the farmlands in November, and he would say, why are there no apples on the trees?
Yeah.
And people would be put in front of a firing squad.
Why are there no apples on the trees?
Well, it's November.
Oh, my Lord.
But what I'm saying, we have learned through hard experience that you put one guy on the top of a human pile and it doesn't turn out that way.
But it doesn't turn out so well.
But before anybody had tried it with modern technology...
it probably seemed like the problem of kings had been solved.
The problem of despots had
could finally be solved because there would be like a paper trail.
There would be accountability by virtue of records and ledgers.
Did you read that article?
I sent you a few months ago when you were talking about, you know, everybody hates bureaucracy until they go to Romania and you drive into a sewer.
Right.
Or you go to the office of missing sewer caps and you say, hey, there's a missing sewer cap.
They throw you on the sewer.
Yeah.
The guy is just somebody's brother-in-law and he's like, ah.
But I sent you that article because it was – I haven't read the book, but there was a great review of this book about the history of bureaucracy and how bureaucracy as we know it today is a long –
Damn side off from where it started out as, which I guess is a French Revolution idea of saying, well, this paper trail is what's going to keep these people honest.
That was the whole idea of what we now call bureaucracy, not in terms of literally the bureau, not in terms of like having the pyramid-like structure of a large organization.
But the idea of a paper trail was meant to be extremely democratic.
It was the idea that if everybody has to sign all of these receipts, nobody is going to be able to get away with shit, right?
Right.
And ultimately, my feeling is that bureaucracy is incredibly democratic.
But this is the argument that we're having in America now.
The two sides of... And I think it's an argument that's happening in every democracy around the world.
It's just like there are people who want...
There are people who want the government to be activist over here and to be laissez-faire over here, and then their opponents feel the opposite way.
And everybody wants an activist government somewhere, and then they want the government to leave them alone in this other way.
And I think that's what feels healthy about democracy to me right now.
I guess if I watched cable news, I could put this to the test better.
But my gut is that – I don't know.
My gut is that there are people out there who – the people who feel most strongly about the government clamping down on somebody are also some of the people who are the most strident about wanting the government to stay the fuck out of this other piece of their life in a big way.
It seems to me like the most –
But don't touch my guns.
Boy, is that ever a broad stereotype.
But that's the feeling that I get is that there's like, why are you messing around with my personal freedom stuff when you should be taking away personal freedoms from all these people over here?
And that's exactly right.
I mean, libertarianism at its core, I don't see how a libertarian could be opposed to gay marriage in any way, shape or form.
the government should get out of the business of regulating it seems like a like a an almost comically easy idea of what libertarianism would be for right it's like literally harming no one but in fact you know the the self-identified libertarians are all you know the the venn diagram overlaps with the crowd that wants to that wants the government to really really restrict what
what people are able to do in their bedrooms or with their bodies.
So it's a funny business.
And, you know, it was only 50 years ago when most Republicans didn't care what you did in your apartments.
It's so depressing.
Isn't it depressing?
And it was the Democrats that were so worried about who you were sleeping with.
It's so depressing that the republicans of like 19 – I mean setting aside some of the nut jobs.
But by and large, the republicans of the mid-20th century were better democrats than the liberals of the early 21st century.
It's true.
Everybody is just such a nut job now.
I mean …
But he's such a nutjob.
Such a nutjob.
Can I tell you, first of all, I'm going to go find this World of War.
They're all such nutjobs.
We're the only ones that have any fucking thing sane to say.
I want to help them.
You and I are a couple of nutjobs.
A couple of nutjobs.
That's the problem.
We are fucking nutjobs.
You know what we are?
We're ranting on the internet.
Holy shit, John.
We're fucking nutjobs.
We're a couple of fucking nuts.
Holy shit.
I think we might be nutjobs.
Internet nutjobs.
You know what has never gotten the, at least to me, something I wish I had known about that I didn't know about?
One of my favorite episodes of that World of War is the Project Overlord, like the day of, like the setup and what happens.
So exciting.
I got into it.
Oh, my God.
I got into it after I watched – so I go through these jags.
I don't know why I've been into movies lately.
It's probably my diet.
But I watched The Longest Day two days in a row.
And then it's like four hours long.
No, it's only three hours, right?
Have you watched A Bridge Too Far?
Yes.
Uh-huh.
Yes, and I've seen Bridge on the Richard River Kwai.
I did a quick calculation based on IMDb, and if I kept at my current pace of two to three World War II movies a day, I had about another month and a half left of war movies.
Before you had watched more movies than the actual length of World War II?
Turns out!
Okay, that could be a stop, but...