Ep. 182: "House Trotter"
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
This is weird.
This is weird.
Tell them what we're doing.
So as some of you, as regular listeners to this podcast know, I am driving across the West in my GMC RV.
And the trip has taken me to San Francisco, California, where one Merlin man lives and works.
And we are doing our first ever podcast where we're in the same room looking at each other.
There wasn't a Vicky Live event for a fake comedy thing.
Oh, yeah, we've done live things, but even then we're not looking at each other.
We're both looking at the audience.
I'm riding the faders over here, and you're eating my nuts.
Yeah, I'm eating Merlin's special nut blend, which you gave me the whole recipe for.
I won't reveal it to the audience.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fancy, fancy nuts.
Yeah, I put these together on my own with a variety of different Walgreens premium nuts.
You know, we don't usually eat on the program, but since we're here in beautiful San Francisco, why not share the sound of nuts?
John, this is where they invented free love.
Everything's okay here.
That's right.
So we're having a great time.
A lot of nuts.
We're here together.
I am in your office for the first time in all the years I've never been in this space.
I don't have an office, John.
Oh.
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do, but it's an undisclosed location.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
I mean, what I meant was your repurposed Nazi submarine out there.
Over here by the Chrysler building.
Yeah.
Oh, I just heard a strange sound, a rumbling.
It's almost like I somehow managed to get an office right next to where a fucking streetcar goes by.
Ding, ding, ding.
Hi, Charlie.
Hey, you're in the room for it, huh?
Rice-a-roni.
So, yeah.
This is great.
I'm here in the room.
I see...
All of the X-Men paraphernalia that I thought was just part of a bit, but is actually real.
I've got more for you.
Keep describing.
Let's see.
There's microphones.
There's boxes.
Oh, hello.
It's a character.
Called, like, Pupilless Girl.
And here's her friend, Robot Arms.
Right.
And Pupilless Girl and Robot Arms are in an adventure that's called These Legs Are Impossibly Long.
Yeah.
And they're running and they look like kind of like gold-plated skeletons.
You can tell they've been through some stuff.
But they have...
Like wedge clogs.
Yeah.
They have, like, wedgie clog shoes.
What you got there is, John, you got Phoenix and you got Dark Phoenix.
Oh, Phoenix and Dark Phoenix.
Yeah, yeah.
They're good 14 inches tall.
Yeah, they're huge and, like, disproportionate.
Like, even worse than Barbies.
Physiologically, they could not stand on their own.
They're very powerful women.
But I think the thing that sticks out to me is that if you were going to be superheroing,
I don't think you need high heels for that.
That's right.
Wrong kind of boots.
Right?
You could not climb a fence or fight crime or whatever.
So Phoenix is a crime fighter?
Is she a detective or something?
She's a detective.
Does she have the power of smell?
Is she a good smeller?
Probably the most powerful superhero in the universe.
Not that it matters.
Phoenix.
Phoenix is.
Dark Phoenix, yeah.
Oh, what about Light Phoenix?
Light Phoenix is nice.
What about Green Phoenix?
Green Phoenix has had some issues over time.
She's had some times.
What does that mean?
She used to just be Marvel Girl, but then something happened, and she got stuck in a cocoon under a lake for a whole bunch of years and arose as Phoenix, only it wasn't really her.
It was actually this avatar of this thing called the Phoenix Force.
And then she came back, she was Phoenix, then she became Dark Phoenix, and she basically ate a planet.
Did she ever fight a Balrog?
No.
So how's your trip going?
I finally got to see and be inside the GMC RV.
You did.
You had your whole family there, but you really adopted it.
You went for it right away.
You were like, I could live in this.
I want to live in this right now.
What is wrong with my life that I don't have one of these and I'm not living in this?
I wonder if it's...
Not exclusively, but I wonder if it's partly just like the dream of a boy from the 1970s.
It's such a 70s dream to have a house.
You're really enjoying that Dark Phoenix, aren't you?
You're manipulating her.
The other thing I'm finding about this Dark Phoenix is that she would be really impossible to play with.
Like, if you want to put her in a seated position.
She's a collectible, John.
If you want to just sit her in a chair, her legs immediately spread into... Could you please be more gentle with her joints?
You know what I mean?
Like, the only reason a person would ever sit like this is that they were having a gynecological exam.
This is not a natural way for a person or doll to sit.
How do you know that's not a special offer from like a Comic-Con where it's a special gynecology edition of Phoenix?
Oh, she rose from the ashes to have a speculum.
And maybe she needs a pap smear.
A super pap smear.
And what's the deal with her hair?
She doesn't need all this hair.
Sure she does.
She's the most powerful superhero in the universe.
You don't need any hair.
Well, it also means you can have as much hair as you want.
You know, it's like a movable force, a movable object.
So this is the big question.
If you had all the power in the universe, would you have A, all the hair in the world, or would you have B, no hair?
Well, there's a part of me that thinks that for a long time I would just use all the power in the universe to make people not care about what my hair looked like.
But I think eventually I would get incredibly fucking elaborate hair.
because i could so let's say this girl dark phoenix yeah comes up against naked blue giant man from the other comic book the naked penis man dr manhattan from the comic book with the guy with the the the like bag over his face scarecrow um so who's more powerful oh dark phoenix or a penis man
um you know uh i'm i'm gonna have to uh let me go uh let's see if i can go find that is there a wiki is there a wiki about this let me check on my oh there we uh they say hang on in the universe i feel like dark phoenix can't even fucking sit down so i'm gonna give this one to penis man
Maybe she doesn't need to sit down, John.
I don't know.
Even the most powerful creature in the universe, if the most powerful creature still has articulated joints and isn't just like a- It's a model of that person.
Pulsating orb.
Oh, my God.
It's brutal.
Yeah.
I feel like these things are, these would only be collected by-
Did you want to open your mail or anything while you're here?
Angry people.
Did you bring an email with you?
I didn't.
Oh, here's the great story.
Here's the great story.
So I get an email from the woman who has the office next to mine in my office building.
Right.
And she said, hey.
I don't know if you haven't been around in a couple of days, but there is a giant stack of boxes leaning against your office door.
What?
And I was like, how many boxes?
And she was like, more than a dozen boxes.
What?
And they are basically starting to block the hallway.
And I said, oh, right.
Not very long ago, I gave out the physical address of my office and told people to send me the things that they make.
And then I left town in an RV with no clear return date.
And so I called the building manager and I said, hey, would you check to see if there are a bunch of boxes outside my office door?
And he went up and he was like, oh dear.
I said, you have a key to my office.
Would you put those things in my office?
And he said, yes.
And then it happened again.
And he put those in my office.
So when I get back to the office,
There's going to be a lot of mail to open.
And you're going to get a talking to, I think, from the building manager.
Well, you know.
He's not your mom, John.
The thing is, it's an art space, and I'm the one guy that doesn't routinely spray Freon into the halls.
Okay.
All right.
Pluses and minuses.
Yeah, right.
You walk down the hall and it's like, oh, somebody has pushed out into the hall like several mannequins that have been made into like very awful art.
And they're just going to sit there for seven months.
So you've made another woman of pork chops.
Right.
So I have a bunch of boxes in the hall and it's credit to my space that nobody or presumably nobody stole any.
Right.
I mean, maybe somebody walked by and was like, I'm going to take one of those.
He has 12 boxes.
I'm going to take one.
But I don't think so.
I don't think they did.
Do you regret giving out the address?
Well, I haven't really opened any of these boxes, so I have no idea.
If I open these boxes and I have 12 new poorly made wallets, I'm going to be like, that was a weird experiment.
But if I open the box and there's salt and pepper shakers carved out of precious rocks, and there's somebody made me a bunch of custom underwear that says, look who's talking to...
or whatever it is that people are making.
Seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams.
Yep, if somebody made one of those out of real dreams.
Popsicle stick Lincoln Logs, maybe.
Eiffel Tower made out of toothpicks.
Yep, yep.
I'm going to be psyched, because I'll just be like, my office now looks cool.
It doesn't just have a bunch of vote roderick paraphernalia that's sad, that's wet and sad.
Now it has a seven-sided lighthouse made of dreams.
People can come over here and feel like...
This is great.
And if there are a couple of wallets, I'll put them in rotation.
Office 332, Washington Avenue, Anytown, USA, 12345.
Send all the cards and letters.
Cards and letters.
Nothing dead.
Cards and letters.
Right?
We had a crazy lunch.
I'm way off my game today for a number of reasons.
I've had a lot of coffee, but also we had an incredibly weird lunch.
Do you want to talk about it, or should I?
I think you should talk about it.
Knowing that you're not as much of a fan of Secret Salt as I am.
Right.
Well, years and years ago, when I first started coming to this beautiful part of San Francisco, back when I would stay at your house, sometimes for many, many, many nights...
before your daughter was born.
Never more than two or three weeks.
Yeah, right.
That would be unusual.
For a lot of people, to have a house guest show up and stay for two weeks, sort of like, hey.
But we had fun, right?
We had times, man.
You get a man like John Roderick in the house, you can't throw him out.
Yeah, what are you going to do?
Throw him out?
Good luck.
What are you going to do, get a forklift?
So even all the way back then, there was a little dim sum place that you've referred to in many, many, many of your other programs.
And it's a dirty little, tiny little dim sum place where the man counts the money and then handles the dim sum.
He never has more than $5 in money in the cash drawer.
If he has to make change for anything, he literally reaches under a filthy counter, grabs filthy money, and then with his filthy hands does filthy things.
The thing that distinguishes this place, it was somewhat well-known in our neighborhood because they had a cat and some pigeons in the kitchen.
Oh.
and they didn't mind it.
So it's clear, just to be clear here, it's not that they welcomed the cats and the pigeons into the kitchen, and it's not that they were mad about it.
They merely didn't mind.
Somewhere in between.
Yeah, it was just a situation that they just dealt with.
Sort of irrelevant to them.
I remember going in there and ordering dim sum at one point, and he reached into his pockets and put some dim sum out and put it in the container for us.
But we had many great dim sums, and this is something maybe I've never revealed.
Yeah.
But that place was the first dim sum I ever had.
It became a ritual.
You would come to town, and no matter what, we would always go there and get probably 15 pounds of dim sum.
Right.
An amount of dim sum that seemed impossible for us to actually manage to eat through, and yet we did it every time.
Yeah.
Even if you did the math and you said 5, 10, 15, 25, 40 per person, we still managed to do it.
And it rarely costs more than like $10, no matter how much we got.
Right.
Because they're 30 cents a piece.
Yeah.
And so, like, it's the place that I first had dim sum.
I mean, I know the place that I first had sushi.
Wow, that's momentous.
The place that I first had Thai food.
I mean, I know these places.
I remember the occasion and I remember that.
And you introduced me to dim sum.
And we went there today to have our beautiful John and Merlin dim sum lunch.
And what happened?
It's gutted.
Gutted.
Somebody is in there.
I was there as recently as I want to say a week and a half ago.
I went in there, grabbed six pork chamois out the door.
Good to go.
How's your daughter?
She's in school.
Have a nice day.
Go.
Bob's your uncle.
Bob's your uncle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we went in there.
They were gutting it.
Gutting it.
They had all the lights on.
It wasn't dark and weird like it used to be.
And for the first of about four occasions this particular afternoon, I said something to someone and they stared at me like I was from another planet.
Yeah, you said, is this place gone for good or are you just remodeling it?
And the guy turned, he was on a ladder.
He literally stared at me.
Turned and looked at you and said nothing.
He didn't even make a handshake, yeah, I don't speak English.
He looked at me as though I had an umbrella for a head.
Yeah, right.
And then you finally found somebody who would answer you.
Yeah.
And he said, yeah, it's going to be a coffee shop.
Coffee shop.
Because, you know, if you had to say, John, is there one thing that we need more of around here?
Right.
It's a coffee shop.
Coffee shop.
We could use some more bubble tea, some more Irish bars, and probably a little more coffee.
Oh, and another Walgreens.
If they put another Walgreens in on this block.
But then, so we went up the street.
We were looking for a good lunch.
And we went into a place that kind of smelled like propane.
Yeah.
And it seemed like, hmm, not so much.
And then we went into a place that was, A, really big.
By comparison to the other restaurants on the block.
It's palatial.
Three tables out of 30 in this place occupied.
Also almost completely empty.
We sat down.
The first thing that happened was a table of six white people stood up and left without having ordered.
And as they walked by, each person made sustained and uncomfortable eye contact with us with a weird Manson family smile.
Yeah, it had a real Tex Watson kind of feeling to it.
And they were all different ages.
There was like a hippie mom.
There was a young guy.
There was an old man.
I think the last guy was kind of a father figure in the family.
And he had a real, real enduring look at us.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like the sort of Bogwan look.
And so we were like, huh, what do we do?
Merlin looked at the menu, chose some items.
Chose some other items.
There was a bullfrog on the dish, on the menu.
They do?
I was just trying to find the menu real quick, because there were some of them.
There was one that was, I think it was venting chicken.
Venting chicken, right, which would be good for some of our listeners.
There was garlic strings.
Garlic strings.
There was the one that started with, it was like acid reflux.
Oh, yeah, there was one that had acid drops.
Pork buns?
I think acid drops was the name of it.
Acid drops.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, so we ended up ordering... Acid droplets, beans, pork.
Acid droplets, beans, pork?
Acid droplets.
Oh, droplets.
Beans, pork.
Acid droplets, beans, pork.
Acid droplets, beans, pork.
Yeah.
Great guy to buy voices.
Two, three, four.
And so we ordered this food.
The waiter kind of made some suggestions.
We ordered it.
It came...
uh it was delicious but it was so flavored with msg and cumin and inexplicably cumin which is not normally a chinese ass ass tons of cumin but the distinguishing characteristic is everybody we uh encountered was staring at us but also everyone in this restaurant the diners and the waitstaff alike not only in this case the waitstaff seemed not only as though they had not been waiters for more than an hour or so it seems like maybe they just never been to a restaurant they didn't know how to restaurant
Well, right, the waiters didn't.
They also walked by and sustained eye contact with us with no, not attempting to fill our water glasses or ask us any questions, just pacing the restaurant.
What am I, Cheryl Teagues?
Right, like staring.
Yeah.
And then thinking back to the original customers that left as soon as we walked in, they seemed like people who were approximating what they thought being a human being was.
Yeah, like if you had like a really above average person,
An alien doing a really above-average impersonation of a human.
Yeah, if you put on a human suit, not for the first time, but this was the first time.
You'd tried out the human suit a few times.
You'd worn it on the train.
You'd put on a human suit.
You're not ready to join a submarine corps.
You could pass among the other greys.
Right, right.
Just walking around, not trying to interact with anybody.
You'd be like, is that Phil?
No, that guy's totally a human.
Totally a human being.
He's not so comfortable in the human suit that he's going to get a job in an office.
Yeah.
But this was like, all right, you know what?
Let's take five of us out to a restaurant and see how it plays.
Sunday afternoon would be a great place to test that out.
And then you and I walk in and they're like, I don't think we're ready to like be in a restaurant with these two guys.
Right.
You know, they're like, oh, my God, I don't have no idea how deep this goes.
Right.
If they were they were in there, they were trying it out.
The waiters are also Gray's.
And so they were just like, let's see how this plays.
The whole restaurant is just like, let's test this out.
It's beyond a front.
It's more like one of those little towns you go to when you act like you're attacking the Russians.
You go somewhere or a little safety town where you bring your bike.
It's an entire simulacrum town.
Safety town.
Safety town where you come in and you interact with other people.
So you all know it's a drill.
You all know it's an exercise.
That's right.
You can dance if you want to.
Yeah.
I'm sure you could leave yourself behind, but you want to be able to fit in.
You want to pass.
You don't want to get clocked.
Exactly.
And so we walk in, and they were not expecting us.
They knew we were headed to dim sum.
But somehow the whole thing, like they didn't coordinate the gutting of the dim sum place with you and me being on the street.
Oh, my God.
They should have seen this coming.
And we walk in, and they're like, holy shit.
This is not part of the plan.
What we were going to do is sit in here, and people were going to walk by and look in at us.
feel uncomfortable about this restaurant and not come in, and that was going to be what we did today.
Like if somebody had left off the sheet the fact that if this was an actual restaurant, there might be people who would come in and want to eat there.
Right.
They should have warned them.
Say, prepare yourselves for this.
They're called diners.
The last thing they thought was it would be you and me, right?
If it was just a couple of snorks, just like some normals, who came in and were like, oh, we're going to eat some food and look at our phones.
I did not – there was not a single thing –
I said to anyone in that place that they would not have heard 40 times a day if they were waiters.
But they looked like they had never heard it.
Like, for example, they'd never actually heard what I would describe as the human voice.
Well, and you said, do you have tea?
I said, we'd like some tea.
Do you have jasmine tea?
I think his response was, tea?
Yeah, right, right.
Like a young Chinese guy had never heard of tea.
They got this guy over here.
So then we ordered this food, and it had all the wrong flavors for Chinese food.
Like the waiter comes back, and he's like, holy shit, they want food.
They want food.
Oh, my God, oh, my God.
What is Chinese food?
What is Chinese food?
Book, book, book, book, book, book.
Telephone, telephone.
and so he opens the book and he's like uh cumin capers fish and uh like a milk he threw it all in a pot and then it came out and i feel now like i have like i've been sucking on 2d batteries
All afternoon.
There's so much MSG in my body that my tongue is just swollen and full of, I don't know, corpuscles?
I'm too high to tell you what it is.
Like you got an extra retina.
I started re-experiencing meals from my childhood.
I started tasting things that I hadn't tasted in years.
It suddenly reawakened this kind of 9-volt energy on my tongue.
You were like Otter Pops.
Oh.
Wow.
And cumin.
Otterpops and cumin.
Who puts cumin on food like that?
Never heard of it.
Well, so anyway, I do feel like that warrants some more investigation.
I kind of want to go back, but you know, in my experience, you go to a place, especially like a lot of Asian restaurants, but especially like a Chinese restaurant...
It pays to go in, and if you've got a group of people, try a bunch of different things.
Sure.
At least one thing will be good.
This is not a Chinese thing, but it's the kind of food that's usually very conducive to sharing, family-style.
I was ready to order six things for the two of us.
That's right.
Finally, the guy...
He gets real proactive.
To his credit.
Yeah, to his credit.
He says, I think that's enough.
Yeah.
We ordered some things.
He was like, that's plenty.
And he was right.
The fish arrived in what I can only describe as, I want to say a terrine, but it was actually more of a punch bowl.
It was sort of a punch bowl.
It was the type of thing that if you went into a fancy house, it would be sitting on the table in the entryway filled with dried flowers or whatever.
Right.
Or 7,000 Starlight mints.
Or colored marbles.
Imagine you have pretty good-sized hands, and you were given a job, you're on a game show, and it was your job on that game show to, as quickly as possible, stick your hands into this food and take out everything that was a large filet of fish.
A man with large hands, it would take two minutes for them to do this.
This was what was astonishing to me.
It was like four fish.
Yeah, you get a big bowl of this, and the first time I dug into it, I was like, oh, there's some kind of bean sprouts in the bottom, but...
But they're not real bean sprouts.
They're some other kind of sprout.
And I was like, oh, this is a thing where there's like four pieces of fish on top of a giant underlayer.
That's how they get you.
Right.
An underlayer of sprouts.
Yeah.
But then we kept digging into this thing and there were like the flesh of 15 fish in this thing.
15 good sized fish were in this terrine.
You can put away some groceries.
And I think, did you finish all of it?
So at the end, I blacked out toward the end.
At the end, I was like, I'm not going to leave.
I'll leave some sprouts in this bowl, but I'm not going to leave any fish.
Right.
You take that challenge.
And then I went for it and my plate was piled high with with the cumin fish for the sixth time.
And I just was like, I don't think there's a bottom to this.
Namas.
I can't get all the fish out of this.
And then we're starting to finally kind of wind down.
We've got some stuff to do.
We've got to go ride in the RV.
We need to get going.
Stuff to do.
If I remember correctly, I think I did two things that are usually fairly well understood when it's the end of the meal.
One of the things I did was I held my hand up in the air like I had a make-believe pen, and I made a signature.
What am I doing here, John?
I'm doing kind of a squishing, oscillating, signing motion.
I would like to sign the check now.
I would like the check, please.
But just to put a belt on those suspenders, I also turned to the man and I said, could we have the check, please?
That's right.
And what response did you get?
I got a blank-eyed, you know what I got?
I got man mambo dog face to the banana patch.
I got a dead-eyed shark look.
Like I had just said things that weren't even, like he'd been talking to like a baleen, like a whale.
Woo!
Yeah, right.
Or like you were Beetlejuice and all of a sudden your hat turned into a merry-go-round and you're like ding, ding, ding.
I can't explain it except that, I mean, this neighborhood is gentrifying fast.
Yes.
Faster than I expected.
But this is no gentrification I ever saw.
I want to circle back to that.
If I allow myself to adopt that thought technology, a whole lot of shit in this neighborhood suddenly starts making a lot more sense.
Yeah.
John, can I tell you about one of our sponsors this week?
Whoa.
We're going to do like, oh, right, we're sitting in the room together.
Yeah.
You're going to do a live read of the sponsor.
And you are encouraged to join in and to flesh it out.
Before you do, I'd like everyone to hear that I'm drinking one of Merlin Mann's.
famous seltzer waters in a can, the Refreshy Seltzer Water.
I'd like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Safeway Seltzer Water.
How are you enjoying it?
I haven't tasted it yet.
I just opened it.
Here we go.
Ready?
Oh, God.
It's good.
It tastes good.
It does not taste like it was filtered through a dead raccoon.
Or no taste of cumin?
No taste of cumin.
It's rinsing it out.
But it goes great with Merlin's special blend of nuts.
I got your chaser right here.
Oh, look at that.
Some hydrogen peroxide.
One quart of hydrogen peroxide.
I got another one I haven't even opened yet.
It's a cure-all.
Yeah, so for me, I just keep it right here.
I just do this.
Mm, yeah, and swish, swish, swish, and then into the spit bucket.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, there it goes.
Oh, ha, ha.
It's literally a spit bucket.
It's a five-gallon can of, like, spackle.
Once you start with the hydrogen peroxide, you'll never look back.
That's right.
You'll feel dirty.
You'll feel dirty in the mouth if you don't have a little bit of hydrogen peroxide.
I use it for everything.
I use it for everything.
You told me about it, and I use it for everything.
I use it as contact lens solution.
It's not... Is that right?
That's not safe.
Ladies and gentlemen, today I want to tell you about one of the sponsors of our show, which is Casper.
John, are you familiar with Casper?
Mm-hmm.
So now I have not one but two Casper mattresses in my house, and they are phenomenal.
Okay, put a pin in that because Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses.
Like John, now I only have one Casper mattress.
I don't know how you got away with two, but they're an online retailer of premium mattresses.
You can get delivered to your door for a fraction of the price that you pay in stores.
And I'm telling you, you do not want – have you ever actually tried to go and buy a mattress in a store?
I have.
You know, I used to go routinely to department stores and just lay on the mattresses because it just was a thing to do in the afternoon.
Oh, this is just during that period where you would want a place to lay down.
The thing is, they won't kick you off a mattress because they think you might be testing it.
And you can lay there for 12 minutes before someone comes along and masks.
As long as you don't leave a spot or something, right?
And then they're like, hey, can I help you with something?
And you're like, just testing the mattresses.
You think you're better than me?
But then those mattresses are like $3,500.
They're super expensive and they're super gross because the thing is, you think you're the first person to go lay on that disgusting mattress in the store?
Sorry, Johnny.
You are the latest one is what that is.
That's right.
Master's mattress is a one-of-a-kind kind of mattress.
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Say what?
I didn't even know that.
It's a new kind of hybrid mattress, John.
It combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
It's a hybrid?
It's a new kind of hybrid mattress that combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
I see.
Does it have a battery pack?
I didn't look inside it.
No, it's a new kind of hybrid mattress that combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
Latex foam and memory foam.
And memory foam.
That means it's got just the right sink and just the right bounce.
It does.
A lot of times you'll get the bounce but not the sink.
Or the worst is the sink without the bounce.
Can I just literally beg you not to get me started on that?
The thing is, this is starting to sound a little bit like a real doll in the shape of a mattress.
That's the two technologies coming together for better nights and brighter days.
I have now had mine.
I checked.
It's been over, I believe, 14 months now.
Wow!
14 months.
Let me ask you a question, John.
So I piled onto that mattress.
So it shows up in a box.
It's literally a box.
It's a box on the front porch.
It's a little bigger than a two-drawer file cabinet.
Yeah, right.
I showed up and I was like, no, there's no way that there's a king-size mattress in that box.
There's one thought that everyone has, no way is that a bed.
No way.
No way is that a bed.
And they said, oh, the mattress is on its way.
And then two days later, there it is on the front porch.
You think, shame on me.
Shame on me for falling for these hucksters at Casper.
Yeah.
And so I schlepped the thing inside and I let it sit there in the entryway for a couple of days because I'm not sure what to do with it.
As you do.
A couple of days turns to a couple of weeks and people are like, what's the big box?
And I'm like, it's a king-sized mattress.
And they're like, no way.
No way.
So I finally... John, are there other things in this room that are king-size mattresses or just this tiny box?
So I unpack it and the mattress goes... It's like one of those mushrooms in the forest that comes up out of the ground and all of a sudden it's like this enormous mushroom.
Like a mushroom.
Like a giant mushroom.
Like a magic mushroom.
I flip it out and I'm like, I've stayed on... Listen, I've been a touring musician for 15 years.
I've slept on a lot of mattresses.
John Roderick for Casper Mattresses.
Around the country and around the world.
And I looked at this thing and I was like, all right, when is this mattress going to rise up and bite me on the ass, right?
And I get on this thing and I'm like, ah.
It's not heavy.
It's not thick.
There's no baloney.
I'm just like, oh, I'm on this mattress.
And then I'm just like having some mattress time.
Yes.
And then here's the crazy thing.
Yeah.
I was putting this mattress in the guest room.
Yeah.
But then I started sleeping in the guest room.
Turns out.
And since the Casper mattress arrived in the guest room, I have not slept in my actual bed.
Oh, my goodness.
I've been sleeping on the Casper in the guest room.
I wake up every morning like, where am I?
I sleep in mine every night.
I think I know why it's so comfortable.
It's because it's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
Combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
Well, I support it.
And it supports me.
So the box shows up.
You open this thing.
It inhales.
And you have this beautiful, beautiful mattress.
You know, the thing is, it's not too hard.
It's not too soft.
It's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
I like a firm mattress.
I don't like a saggy mattress.
You know, this is the thing.
I think from watching cartoons and seeing 30s movies, we think, you know, at Hobo time, you think you want a soft bed.
You want a soft pillow.
That's the last thing in the world that you want.
No, you don't want a soft bed.
Particularly when you are a big man, you want a firm mattress.
You want a big mattress.
Big boy bed.
And, you know, I'm like, I'm often, I have guests.
Right.
Right?
I mean, you want a mattress that can- Why don't you shoot people out of bed?
Aren't you a shooer?
I don't like people to stick around in bed.
I want them to go sleep in their own bed.
It's a new kind of hybrid mattress that combines- But this mattress can accommodate three people.
Let's just say that.
What size is that?
So I have the King one.
So here's the crazy thing.
Yeah.
Right?
They're going to find out what happened.
They're going to be knocking on your door, buddy.
So then I got a second one.
through you know by hook or by crook let's say let's say it's not a scam i wasn't trying to scam anybody i was just like hey here i am here i am i'm doing these podcasts plural yeah and uh two podcasts two mattresses that's the that's the old exchange rate and so the the next one from the talmud the next one i was like
It's really more of a Sephardic than an Ashkenazi.
Better not Sephardic in here.
Is it right for a man to have two mattresses in exchange for two podcasts?
So here's what I did.
On the second mattress, I was like, you know what I want?
I want a California King.
I've never even had one before.
And I'm a big man.
I want it.
It's like a Yeti.
I don't think I've ever even seen one.
If I had a California King, I might not even shoot people out of my bed.
I might welcome them into my bed.
They get their own little zip code.
Yeah, that's right.
You go over to that side of the mattress.
I'll see you in the morning.
So this California King arrives on the front porch.
It's still like an impossibly small box for what it portends to be.
But I've seen this in action.
So I know it's possible.
And I move the California King into the living room.
But the problem is, in order to install this California King in my house, I have to actually get rid of my actual bed.
Oh, now you've got a word problem, right?
Now you've got some kind of thing where there's not going to be an easy single answer for this.
It's a tile game.
It's a kind of existential tile game.
I've got a queen-size sleigh bed.
And the sleigh bed creaks when you move vigorously.
Yes.
And that can be funny, depending on who your house guest is.
Your majesty.
But it can also be kind of a pain in the ass.
Sure, sure.
Because it's very much distracting, right?
You're just like, what is, come on, this can't be real.
This is like something.
It adds an element of competition.
Yeah.
It's like the movie Delicatessen, right?
There's somebody cutting up some pork downstairs.
The French movie with the guy in the garbage can.
That's right.
The guy in the garbage can.
The one with the tape recorder that says, oh, who have you been sleeping with?
That's a good movie.
The guy looks like a frog in it.
I feel like I'm mixing up a couple of things.
This is still the ad, just so you know.
But that's a queen-size bed, and here's the thing.
In the sleigh bed,
There is a mattress that I have had since basically three weeks after I quit drinking, which was 21 years ago.
I think the International Mattress Authority would tell you, you should be changing that little fella a little more.
You should have changed that mattress a long time ago.
But here's what happened.
I got sober, and I was like, I need to get an apartment.
I haven't had an apartment for a while.
Can I get a key?
I should buy a toothbrush one of these days.
Yeah.
And I need a mattress.
So I went out to one of those places.
It was like cheap mattresses on the side of the road.
And there was a there was a shipping container and you could go in the shipping container and walk down the dark like no lights in it and pick your mattress out of there.
And they'd sell it for $199.
Did they shoot somebody off of it?
No, so they were all stacked up, like mattresses stacked up end on end.
Wow.
And so I walk through, and I'm looking at these things, and I'm pulling it out, and this is at a time, kind of like, remember when Gibson Les Pauls were judged by how heavy they were?
Oh, yeah.
Like, oh, the heavier the Les Paul, the more sustain.
And now, if you go to the Gibson Company, they sell you the lightest Les Paul.
That's the sign of quality, the light ones.
Because they can still get the performance characteristics without the weight.
If you're playing for a long time on stage, that becomes a bit controversial.
You want a lighter guitar, apparently.
Although I feel like a heavy guitar is still good.
Anyway, I'm walking through this thing.
It's still the ad.
That's the only comparison I have.
So I'm like, I want the heaviest mattress here.
Ah, smart.
And I'm pulling these light mattresses out.
No, no, no.
And then I come to a mattress that is A, purple paisley, and B, weighs as much as a Honda Civic.
You know, even with paisleys, that's a mattress that for a man like you at that time, that's the future, not the past.
Am I right?
That's exactly right.
I felt like I've got a toothbrush now.
I've been sober for three weeks.
I'm getting a purple paisley mattress.
Treat myself to a mattress out of a shipping container.
Right.
Four people can't lift this mattress.
And I brought it home.
It was firm like you were sleeping on a Honda Civic.
Mm-hmm.
But I've had it for 20 years.
Literally every good thing that's ever happened to me has happened on that mattress.
Every bad thing that's ever happened to me has happened on that mattress.
It is, that mattress now is, I would say, I would say it is the color of Oklahoma as seen from the air.
And it is so knackered, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It has, everyone I've ever known has left a part of themselves in one or the other side of this mattress.
Literally every person I've ever been close to.
And, you know, at some point in there, it's sort of right after I quit drinking, I got scabies.
Yeah.
Um, because I still was, I still was trafficking with people that I knew from the old days.
This is not a Casper mattress.
No, no, no, no.
This is this mattress I got out of a shipping container.
Anyway, I, I sterilized it somehow.
I think by, by like pouring, uh, hydrogen peroxide on it, which was the only multi-tool I had at the time.
Um, and, uh, yeah, literally, I mean, I can see it's like a Rorschach test of my entire life.
Hmm.
And so I'm very reluctant to get rid of it, except it is past its expiry date.
The problem is it still weighs 700 pounds.
I can't just schlep it down the stairs and move it outside.
That's a challenge.
So the whole thing's got to go.
My whole room has got to change.
I've got this California king waiting in its cocoon down in my entryway.
And I'm so excited about it, but there's an uphill climb before I can deploy this.
And the crazy part is, if you get your Casper mattress, and for some reason, which is not the Paisley mattress that John's had for 20 years, halfway through the read.
Listen, if anybody wants to come by and be the last one to sleep with me on that mattress, this could be a promotion with Casper.
Maybe Casper is, we'll have a contest.
Be the last one to leave your mark on John's Paisley.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's right.
You can take it with you when you go.
You should, please.
Can you imagine what, like, in the crime lab, what they would have to deal with in terms of, like, there's no control?
Come on.
Can you even imagine?
You could create, you know, basically you could repopulate a planet by just taking the DNA out of this mattress and saying, like, well, there's, I mean, we have 400 completely separate DNAs and probably 4,000 DNAs that have combined unnaturally.
Oh, my God, the island of Dr. Roderick.
But you get this Casper mattress.
It's a wonderful, super clean mattress.
It's incredibly clean.
It's a lot nicer.
It's living in a hermetically sealed bag right now.
Oh, my God.
And you get it in your house, and you sleep on it for 100 nights, and if you are not satisfied for some reason, you can send it back because that is their policy.
You get free delivery, painless returns.
It's made in America, and you get sleep, glorious sleep.
All of that is incredible.
And it's amazing the prices are bananas on these things.
You start out with $500 for a twin size, up to $950 for a king-size mattress.
That is like about half of what you pay, in my experience.
Dynamite.
Dynamite.
You know, the thing is now I'm thinking rather than take the Paisley mattress out, I feel like I should give it to a lab because there may be new strains of penicillin that they could pull out of it or potentially like...
Like painkillers.
Solve crimes.
Yeah, sure.
Well, I don't think there were any real crimes committed on that mattress.
And the incredible part is that if you're a listener of this show, you can go to Casper.com slash SuperTrain and use the very special offer code SuperTrain.
Wait a minute.
And?
You get $50 towards the purchase of any mattress not too happy.
That's fantastic!
Terms and conditions apply.
That's fantastic.
I'm so glad I brought you in on this.
All right, thanks to Casper for a great night's sleep and for supporting Roderick on the Line.
Thank you, Casper.
You have revolutionized my life.
And I feel like when I finally get rid of that old mattress...
It's the dawn of a new age.
I have to be honest with you.
I don't know.
It might be a gas leak.
I think something's happened to me in the last 15 minutes.
Are you feeling anything with the MSG and the cumin?
My tongue, the swelling has gone down.
I still feel like I have a battery in my mouth, but it's just a AAA battery.
I feel like I'm falling down very, very, very, very slowly.
You ever had that feeling?
You know, it's a feeling of falling down.
And there's that feeling of like, oh, no, I'm falling down.
I feel like I'm falling down, but it might take me a week and a half.
Now that you mention it, I feel like I have an extra stomach.
Yeah, well, you sound both very close and very far away right now.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it might be the extra stomach.
I've never felt like I had two stomachs before.
Man, this is weird.
This is strange.
I'm going to miss that dim sum, buddy.
I'll tell you what.
I miss it already.
So we had lunch.
And welcome back to Sunday afternoon with John and Merle.
We went to the Walgreens, got some half and half.
Went to the Walgreens.
We saw a very, very interesting thing at the Walgreens.
Yes.
And I don't mean to say...
I don't mean to say the weird line that couldn't figure out whether it was a line or not.
Everyone that joined the line was like, is this the line?
Oh, no.
No one's ever known where the line is there.
There are a bunch of people standing around and there are some cash registers there.
John, you've heard me talk about this Walgreens in the past.
If you just listen to the programs, you'd think I'm exaggerating a little bit.
Ah.
This is the Walgreens where we bought the cape.
Yes.
Then we went and had a night with John, a night with the cape.
Yes, yes, yes.
We took photos of you.
But would you not agree that there is something a little bit Grimm Brothers about this Walgreens?
This Walgreens, I've been to a lot of Walgreens, let's be honest.
Yeah.
First of all, it's an urban Walgreens, so it doesn't have the full, like, it doesn't stretch out like a normal Walgreens.
No.
It's very compact.
They probably don't have what you need, and if they do have something that's like what you need, they might have one of it or be out of it.
And no one knows where the line is.
Every time we come up, like, right, because there's some machines there that you can get your copies made?
Oh, yeah, you can get photos made.
There may be four cash registers open or just the pharmacy.
And then... No one's going to reach out.
Yeah, there's sort of a grouping of people and no one's in charge.
And then they've got end caps.
People are fighting to get to the end caps.
And because it's the holidays here in San Francisco, there's an end cap full of Sharper Image branded products.
That's right, which I couldn't... I mean, Sharper Image has really fallen from its early days as a thing that was supposed to be... It used to be like the James Bond company.
Yeah, or at least if you were a CEO and you wanted something on your desk that said, I'm an asshole.
Yeah.
Some little things where the balls were going.
Obsidian.
Yeah, right.
An obsidian thing.
I'm an asshole.
I'm an asshole.
Look at me.
Look at me.
And then they moved into massage chairs and air filters.
Well, there was a while.
Didn't they have a submarine?
It was like Hammock or Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
Schlemmer.
I think they might just... They're like Pierre Cardin.
I think you just buy their name to put on things.
Yeah, it's a brand, and you can just put it on with one of those price guns.
So you're thinking, I love Dad.
I want to make his day special.
I want to get him something nice from the sharper image end cap.
End cap at the Walgreens.
At the Walgreens.
And one would say, I love you, Daddy.
Yeah.
So we're looking at this.
I mean, you know, absently looking at it, because we're just two guys that can't find where the line is.
Because we think we're in line, but we're not sure.
And then I notice...
That there's a flask, a sharper image flask.
You mean like the kind of flask you put in your back pocket?
Yeah, like a back pocket flask that you might take to a football game.
A little pop-up lid on it?
Yeah, something that, you know, it's not like, I'm an alcoholic.
It's just like, I just want to carry some whiskey with me.
You're saying you're walking around, you want to have a little nip.
You want to have a little nip because it's cold day.
It's the size of a small paperback book.
You can put that in your pocket and enjoy a little bit of a drink.
Yeah, something if you're maybe out in a duck blind...
or you're sitting under a Pendleton blanket at the college game.
Reach into your vest pocket, you pull out a little flask.
A little flask.
You give the guy next to you a nip.
Put a little bit in your coffee, maybe.
Sure.
Right?
It doesn't mean you have a drinking problem.
It just means that you just want like eight ounces.
Merry Christmas.
But this flask...
is characterized by a unique... It has a unique quality that other flasks don't, which is that it is a 40-ounce flask.
It's a 40-ounce flask.
It's about the size of a professional Frisbee.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the size of a 175.
Yeah.
But it's shaped in every other way... Like a hip pocket flask.
Like a hip flask.
Yeah.
And so we stared at it.
We picked it up off the shelf and passed it back and forth between us.
Yes.
We tried to imagine how...
We tried to compute if you could put an entire liquor bottle into this, which you could.
Well, and also, as it happens, there is a standard alcohol unit that is 40 ounces.
That's right.
I think a lot of people think of malt liquor.
They think of a quart of malt liquor, right?
But we're talking about a 40.
Do you know how many ounces is 40 ounces?
Hmm.
Yeah, it's a lot of ounces.
It's a lot of ounces.
I can't do the math that fast.
And so if you were holding this flask, basically in scale, you would look like an alcoholic child.
That's right.
It's more than a liter.
It's like 1.2 liters or something.
And just imagining you would have to either have a friend help you carry it.
Yes.
Or you could put it in the back pocket of your Filson jacket.
Yeah.
But it wasn't co-branded with Filson.
No.
That's just a little thing I'm doing.
And honestly, I almost bought it.
And I still think maybe I want to buy it.
It looks so good on the passenger seat.
Yeah.
It goes with the RV, right?
It just goes.
It totally does.
And the thing is, I would fill it with acetone.
You could benzene.
Yeah.
Something that you need if you want to prime a fuel injection system.
Sir, do you mind if I search your 1.5 liter flask?
No.
No, by all means, officer, take a nip.
It's full of acetone.
We have plenty of time to look at it.
It's a fantastic thing, and the more I think about it, the more I like it.
We should get it.
We should get it.
I feel like I want it.
You know what?
After this, we're going to go there.
I'm going to buy it for you for Christmas.
Oh, that's sweet of you.
Yeah.
You're going to have to wrap it yourself.
Is that all right?
Yeah.
Fuck yeah.
I'm going to wrap it in my arms.
I don't know if I'm going to make it, John.
I think I had too much cumin.
Do you want some special nut blend?
I want a little bit of nut blend.
You know, I'm surprised, sitting here looking at you, that this feels like a normal podcast.
It feels like sitting around with you talking.
If I weren't hallucinating from the food, I would be feeling pretty good.
Somebody asked me the other day whether we look at each other when we podcast, and I was like, no.
No.
Yeah, sometimes you get questions that are hard to answer because they're so wrong they're not even right.
A lot of people ask me how long, I have been asked in the past, how long it takes to write an episode.
Actually, that's difficult to answer.
You know, somebody asked me the other day, like, how much preparation I do before Erotic on the Line.
Oh, gosh, you got rehearsals, you got schedulings, you got the fittings, you got to do the fittings.
I know.
Sometimes I put on a shirt.
But I remember the first time you called me on Skype, or maybe I called you or something like that, but it was like I pushed the video button because I didn't know what I was doing.
It's my nightmare.
And you started yelling at me,
No, no, no.
No video.
No video.
And since then, I've never used VideoSkype.
I don't even touch it.
That button just feels like some kind of flush button.
I don't want to trigger people, but I happen to know that I share an electronic fear with other people.
A lot of my friends have this.
Your biggest fear is your phone starts ringing.
It's a weird ringtone.
Oh, my God.
It's a FaceTime call.
It's a FaceTime call.
You pick it up.
Unknown caller requesting a video call.
Oh.
Has that happened to you?
That's triggering.
Yeah, somebody in Trinidad and Tobago kept calling me.
Alexa, turn the office lights off.
Okay.
Yeah.
Also, just so you know, anybody who has an Amazon Echo in their house, you just turned off their lights too.
Oh, I did?
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, that's great.
Alexa, open garage door.
Okay.
Sorry, I couldn't find a device or group named Garage Door in Merlin's profile.
Alexa, who's John Roderick?
John Roderick is an American musician, writer, podcaster, and politician.
I'm a podcaster and politician.
Thank you, Alexa.
Thank you.
Probably done some good work here today.
I feel... I feel winded.
I actually feel a little bit weird, like my eyelids are sweating.
Yeah, I'm starting to get the Rosicrucia of MSG.
Is that that group of friars that you could get to tear out of magazines?
They have a monastery in Portland.
The Rosicrucians.
The Rosicrucians.
And that's different from rosacea.
That's what English boys, fat English boys have that, right?
Oh, yeah.
Rosacea?
Rosacea?
Yeah, that's how you tell a German from a group of other white people.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Because they've got the capillaries.
Yeah, the capillaries start to burst at a young age.
The ubersturm capillaries.
Scheisse.
Well, it's dark in here now.
It is dark.
Alexa.
Alexa.
Turn on office lights.
Okay.
God.
Okay.
She has a pretty voice.
I feel like she should be more respectful.
Of course you do.
I think she should say, okay, or I think she should say, yes, sir, or yes, Mr. Roderick, or yes, Mr. Mann.
Like, okay, just feels like, who the fuck are you?
I used to get that with my GPS.
Okay.
Where I really felt like I knew in my head to a near certainty that there's no way the voice was actually getting frustrated with me.
But still, when it would go, recalculating.
I just felt like decades of disappointment in the voice.
It was like... Make a U-turn when possible.
Recalculating.
Make a U-turn.
Well, the thing I love about the new GPSs is that they have started to do like... Given normal traffic, you are on the fastest route...
Except for, one of them said to me the other day, except for some traffic.
And I was like, some?
How do you know about some traffic?
You don't know how much traffic is some traffic.
You're an algorithm.
You're an algorithm, yeah.
Don't start using mitigating words with me.
Like, maybe you'll get there.
And it's like, no.
For your drive home, it's going to be a little bit busy.
Yeah.
What the fuck does that mean?
I feel like what it is is it's casual Friday everywhere now.
And all the people that are making these robots for us, they're like, oh, what we want is a robot that's really cash.
I'll see what Siri does.
Who's John Roderick?
Oh, my God.
It says, who's your daughter?
Turn that off.
What?
Oh, my God.
Bob's your daughter?
That's not the answer.
This is really horrifying.
Uh-oh.
Who's John Roderick?
Oh, so then it just pulls up your card.
That's not super interesting.
I want to hear her voice.
Wikipedia, John Roderick.
Oh, look, there's a nice photo of you.
Look at that.
Is there a nice photo?
And that's a home haircut, huh?
Is there a nice photo?
You're 47.
Did you know you're 47?
Yeah, I did.
I just turned 47.
That was back in September.
47.
It turns out that people, this is something I didn't know, but that middle-aged white men are afforded certain privileges in our society.
I don't think that's accurate.
And right when I turned 47, all of a sudden I started getting treated differently.
I was already treated with a lot of respect.
uh just by general by the general population you have to carry your mom's groceries yeah yeah right exactly but now i just feel like uh i feel like the police are very respectful i got a pull i got a park uh not a parking a speeding ticket uh driving through pepperdine university the other day in my rv and the guy was like uh you know the this is a college campus and there is no part of it where you can drive an rv 60 miles an hour
Could you break that question into parts, please?
Yeah, I suppose I knew that.
I know a lot of things, officer.
I mean, do you mean no place?
That's very poorly worded.
He said, when you tried to stop it, you actually skidded to a stop.
And I was like, well, it was a big hill.
So I got a speeding ticket.
And so he handed me the ticket to sign.
And I was very frustrated with him.
Because I was like, I'm in an RV.
Like, I want some special dispensation here.
I just bought this thing.
I'm driving it to California.
I'm doing you a favor.
Oh, absolutely.
They should be excited for you.
I'm bringing commerce to you.
Yes.
And so he handed me the ticket to sign, and I was feeling very much like one of those guys that's like, I know my rights.
Oh, like one of the YouTube guys.
The YouTube guys that's like, I don't have to open my window more than one inch.
Just to be able to pass documents through.
That's right.
And so the cop hands me the thing to sign, and I drew an
x oh on my signature pepperdine and i handed it back to the guy and he was a california state highway patrolman a chip and he said sir is that your signature and i said they call me mr x i said no and he handed it back to me and i scrawled some like
That'll show it.
I was like, here.
Mildred, you're not going to believe what just happened.
A man just signed his ticket wrong.
I was like, come on, X. When was the last time somebody signed a ticket X?
It doesn't matter to you.
If you sign for a credit card, you could draw a tree on there.
I do it all the time.
Do you draw pictures?
I draw a penis.
I don't really.
That's not my style.
No, that's not you.
But I do not make any attempt to replicate my actual signature.
I think that's terrific.
I go, and a lot of times I make that sound, and I look at the cashier as I'm drawing it.
I don't look at what I'm doing.
I just go, and they always laugh and think I'm charming.
The people who deliver our groceries when I have to sign for something, they've stopped even asking me.
They just signed it themselves now.
And I say, did you want me to sign that?
And they go, that's all right.
I'll do it.
Well, and this is the crazy thing, is that people continue to send us PDFs on the internet and say, we need you to sign this and fax it back.
And I'm like, you bastards.
You bastards.
Fax it back.
I will not sign it.
And they're like, well, sorry, but we can't.
It's a disgusting state of affairs, John.
It reminds me of what I want to say a little bit about a sponsor this week.
Another sponsor?
This is Braintree.
Braintree!
Braintree is code for easy online payments.
You can learn more by going to BraintreePayments.com slash SuperTrain.
Have you used Braintree before?
Yes, you have.
You just didn't know it.
What happened?
You use it all the time.
Let me ask you.
John, have you ever used an Uber?
The answer is yes.
Yes, yes, I have.
Have you ever been to an Airbnb?
Yes, I just recently was.
You ever get on Living Social, whatever that is?
Living Social.
All the time.
Oh, yes, I do go there.
And we've gotten Munchery delivered.
Munchery, terrible name for company.
We've gotten Munchery.
Oh, yes.
Yes, we have.
Did you know that?
We should have done that today instead of eat those batteries.
They are the payment solution used by companies like that.
Did you know that?
Braintree.
Braintree.
Braintree is behind the scenes making all this commerce happen?
That's an excellent question, John.
I appreciate you asking me that.
What you do is you drop in some code and you get a full stack payment solution.
Code like computer codes?
Code for easy online payments.
So if you're a mobile app developer, you've got to check out Braintree.com.
Here's the deal.
They made the payment experiences in so many of the apps.
All the great apps, seamless and magical.
And now you can add a similar experience to your own app.
So Braintree is a thing that you would use if you were building an app to build in the functionality of online payments.
That's an excellent question.
Casper's mattress is a one-of-a-kind hybrid mattress.
I see.
Right.
And so Braintree, it's not a thing that a consumer...
would use yes it's absolutely a thing a consumer uses not a thing a consumer would buy because here's how it works you've made an app and now you need to figure out a way how to do what make money with it yeah yeah yeah and so what you want to do is you want to have a way to drop in just a tiny bit of code and with that one easy integration you can now have you can now have payments through uh what do you got you got paypal apple pay right
You just saw me use Apple Pay today.
First time you've ever seen it.
I did see you use Apple Pay at the Walgreens.
Bitcoin, Venmo, cards, credit cards, and more, all with that one single integration across all platforms, superior fraud protection, customer service, and fast pass.
John, my eyes are literally salivating right now.
I know.
I can see they're moving very fast.
I'm extremely uncomfortable with this.
But I have to continue because it's so important for you to know that you can learn more and get your first $50,000 American in transactions fee-free by going to BraintreePayments.com slash SuperTrain.
Did you know that?
I didn't know.
And it's like symptomatic of our age that $50,000 in payments to your app would be considered a loss leader.
for this company I'm not here to tell Braintree what their model is I know that they're a terrific company you get the simple integrations you can get ready to receive those payments quickly and here's the thing Braintree's continuous support that means fast payouts means you'll be prepared as your company grows from your first dollar in my case to your billionth dollar in John's case you can find out more about this right now please go out and have a look hey you know what I'll tell you the truth turns out off the record I've worked with these folks in the past I've been in a visit with them they're a fantastic group
You know, my favorite two words in the English language, I didn't realize it until you just said it.
Fast payouts.
Fast payouts.
I love fast payouts.
Oh, my gosh.
I can't even tell you what a difference it makes for fast payouts.
Back in the day when I was getting slow payouts.
I was literally this close.
I was like...
I was like, what the, what the what?
Yeah.
You know, you're sending, you're sending postcards to people.
You're calling them on the telephone.
You're saying, hey, you know, I'm a guy over here.
Yeah.
You're taking out ads on a blimp saying like, pay me.
Full page and variety.
Full page and variety.
Sure.
Pay your bills.
Pay me.
Pay me.
Fast payouts.
Pay me M fucker or whatever.
Fast payouts.
Yeah.
Right.
Fast payouts.
Fast payouts.
I love a fast payout.
Braintreepayments.com slash super train.
Fast.
Payouts.
You think we should start over?
With what?
I can't.
You mean this whole podcast?
I can't tell if.
Start doing rhetoric on the line.
Episode one.
I can't.
I can't tell if I either can't feel my eyelids or if I feel them too much.
Your pupils are literally the size of pies.
The thing is, I've never tasted cumin in Chinese food before.
You've never tasted human in Chinese food?
Sorry, let me walk that back.
I've never tasted cumin in Chinese food before.
There were all kinds of little berries.
Now that I'm thinking about it, there were little berries in that fish dish.
Like little strange little berries.
Not like lychee fruit, but like little nubbins.
There were bean nubbins, I think.
There might have been some bean.
I think there was a hot pepper nubbin.
There were a lot of those.
There was kind of a blooming flower, blooming onion feeling.
Like there was something roiling out of the broth.
Maybe it was royal jelly.
It was heavily in broth.
Is that made by the bees?
Is that what you get out of the Queens hive?
I feel like there might have been some bees.
You might have had that on your old mattress.
For sure I did.
That's why my tongue feels like I was licking a battery.
It's because there were bees in the food.
And it's actually like bee venom.
Is that right?
Now that I've said it, do you feel like you had some bee venom today?
You know what?
I couldn't promise you I hadn't.
No, I feel super weird.
I think something's happening.
I don't think I have food poisoning.
It's nothing like food poisoning.
I think I might have like a third eye.
I feel like I'm seeing stuff that I did not.
I'm feeling stuff that I did not feel before.
We had a lot of food.
We did.
You look just like the baby in Eraserhead.
Oh, my God.
So do you.
Thank you.
What is that?
Was that garlic on the beans when we had the green beans?
Not the nubbin beans, the canonical beans.
We had green beans with, like, was it a garlic on there?
But that's the thing.
It didn't taste like garlic.
It tasted like what?
Nine-volt batteries.
It tasted like what an UFO might think a garlic tasted like.
uh i don't i cannot account for it the thing is i'm pretty invulnerable to food poisoning yes um or e coli really oh wait you have a reason for this right and also you deer ticks you can't get deer ticks right well so i do test positive for the antibodies for lyme disease but i've never actually contracted lyme disease or maybe i have lyme disease all the time but it hasn't made me sick
You're still narrowing these things down.
Yeah, it's just made me impervious.
I'm sort of like Dark Phoenix, where I'm impervious to Lyme disease, but I can't bend my legs or sit.
But I have great hair, and I'm fighting crime in high-heeled sandals.
It's sort of like that.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, there are a lot of things.
I ate at Jack in the Box.
Uh, once many years ago, really right during the eco life thing that killed like a bunch of kids and I got very sick, but didn't kill me because I'm strong like bull.
It might've actually made you stronger.
I think it did.
I think it made me impervious to that type of thing.
People get food poisoning all around me and, um, I just, I just assimilated into my muscles.
I think it's because there's so, because I'm sleeping on a bed of penicillin.
Oh, John, I'm just going through the menu quickly here.
I'm just looking at some of the items.
See, this is what's amazing is that normally I sit in front of a computer and look at pictures of old cars.
I know.
But I'm seeing you scroll through Unix databases.
Are you on the dark web right now?
Couldn't say.
Is this a tour?
This is called working, John.
Here's a couple of these.
Can I give you a few?
This is not working.
I'm looking at a Chinese menu.
Have you seen how fairly randomly these choices have been?
You've seen me make a few choices from this menu and paste them, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm on an online menu, and I'm copying and pasting just the ones that I can see while I'm very carefully listening to what John is saying.
Here's some of the items that are available on the menu today.
You got your A13.
That's the boiled bullfrog.
Boiled bullfrog.
Stunning double pepper fish head.
stunning double pepper fish head sauerkraut tofu soup yeah this is one i remember you actively saying you didn't want to try house trotter i don't want the house trotter i know for sure i don't i've had it if this were urban dictionary i've had house trotter i don't want it now yeah i had i had house trotter i've had i've had a a hairy monk fish and i had a cleveland steamer and i don't want any of them
Acid drops, beans, pork.
Yeah, I was curious about that, acid drops, beans, pork.
Marinated fountain.
Marinated Fountain?
You ever had Marinated Fountain?
So I was just talking to somebody the other day who is a medical examiner in Arizona.
Oh, nice.
Actually, I was talking to someone who knows a medical examiner in Arizona.
Good enough for a podcast.
And the medical examiner said that one of the most common ways for people to die in Arizona...
is that they get drunk and they fall into their swimming pool.
It seems like people would know about that and take precautions.
I can think of at least two things that would help that from happening.
What are the two?
Don't get too drunk and stay away from your fucking pool.
That's right.
If you are too drunk, don't get near your pool.
Maybe get Siri to remind you, if I get super fucking drunk, don't go near the pool.
Billy, what could I do?
Don't go near the pool.
Maybe it's like eating, right?
Maybe wait half an hour before you go in.
So here they are.
They're living by themselves somewhere in Arizona.
They get too fucked up on little tiny bottles of Chivas Regal.
And then they walk out the back door.
They stumble and fall into their swimming pool and die.
And this is not just a thing that happens.
It's not an isolated occurrence.
It's not like spontaneous human combustion.
It's like a cleaning the gun, hurt yourself kind of thing.
Like it happens.
This happens all the time.
Wow.
And so according to this friend of mine who knows a medical examiner, the medical examiner said that what happens when these people fall into their swimming pool dead from drinking is that it's a very hot climate and that if they live alone and are not discovered very soon –
Their bodies undergo decomposition floating in the pool.
And when they are finally discovered by the medical examiner, they are a skeleton and then a very thick sludge across the entire top, like a two inch like sludge across the swimming pool.
How long does that take?
Well.
I don't know.
I'm not a medical examiner.
No.
But it decays and you're just- The flesh just like liquefies in the water and through the process of decomposition.
Oh my God.
And the skeleton just sort of- And this is the first question I had, of course, natural question.
I'm sure it's the first question you and all of our listeners are thinking.
Yes.
Does the skeleton sink to the bottom or does the skeleton float in the sludge?
And probably I was imagining it floating two feet below the surface.
Right, just a little bit, just skeleton, sort of mostly intact, still held together with the ligaments, and just sort of floating.
It's not just bones.
It's still got meat.
Not meat.
It's not even meat.
It's not muscles.
Yeah, it's just the gristle.
It's the gristle.
The gristle's probably holding it together.
Human gristle.
I mean, but this is the thing.
I don't know.
Maybe the heavy bones break and fall, like the head.
Drop a femur.
Yeah, right?
Right, right, right, right.
But your medical examiner comes and it's like, okay, there's like this sludge, this sort of oily top surface that we have to, what, skim?
Like a skin on soup?
Yeah, we have to skim it.
Well, you have to save it.
You have to bag it.
You bag it, you tag it, you take it back to HQ.
Right.
You bag it, you tag it.
Because some relative's going to want that to bury it with an American flag over the casket.
Yeah, thank you for your service.
Yeah, that's right.
And so I've been thinking about that all day.
Oh, jeez.
And feeling like that's kind of an interesting sort of phenomenon.
That doesn't actually sound like that bad of a way to go.
White oil sausage.
Philippine sweet intestine.
I prefer my sweet intestine to be made in the Cambodian style.
Large pan of chicken.
LAUGHTER
And then another one I remember you specifically nixing was F11, leavened meat section.
I didn't want leavened meat section either.
I don't like meat section from the Levant.
Is that near Alsace Lorraine?
The other pope, the second pope.
The second pope, the one at Avignon.
Anyway, I just want to say our thanks to Braintree for supporting Roderick on the line.
Thanks, Braintree.
Thanks for speedy payments.
Fast payouts.
I don't feel like myself, John.
Maybe it's just more nuts.
I don't feel right.
The thing is, you look great.
I took a picture of you earlier today that was like a sort of a comedy picture where you looked a little bit like... I finally figured out where you got that from.
What?
Oh, I totally got it!
What?
Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places.
Am I right?
That's exactly right.
You didn't... I never identified it before.
That's it.
He's in a Santa costume.
Yeah, he pulls the salmon out of the Santa costume.
He goes...
I've been using that for years.
I did not know that was a reference.
Oh, my God.
That movie is so good.
Thank you.
That's Merlin's special blend.
He's standing outside the restaurant looking in, and he pulls the locks.
He's got a fish in his beard, right?
He's got the whole fish.
He just eats it covered with synthetic hair.
Covered with Santa hair.
I watched it in a hotel room a couple weeks ago, and it was great.
Thank you.
Thank you for getting that.
My God.
My God.
Wow.
Oh, man.
You know, if we made people pay us for the show, I'd make this a bonus episode.
How so?
How would this be a bonus?
Oh, right.
People would have to pay extra.
Yeah.
It would be like you'd have to Patreon me.
Because this isn't a canonical episode.
This is like you and me sitting in a room.
Oh, you mean like this is like a special, like a giant-sized X-Men.
Like this is only going to happen once a year.
It's an annual.
Yeah, I don't get the X-Men reference.
She's in the X-Men.
Oh, who?
Marvel Girl, a.k.a.
Phoenix.
Cape Girl?
I got more of them in there.
Quag Girl?
So which one is in the X-Men?
Is it the dark one or the green one?
She's the same person.
Oh, the same person.
Oh, let's see the Spider-Womans.
She also can't sit down.
Oh my goodness, her butt cheeks are larger than life.
I support this character.
This is another version of Phoenix called the Black Queen.
How many versions does Phoenix have?
She has a lot of lives.
This looks like the... She looks very much like the Red Queen in Game of Thrones.
Except the Red Queen would not wear this terrible black diaper.
Oh, I like Marvel Girl.
This is Iron Fist.
And this is Iron Fist.
Okay, so Iron Fist is for dorks.
The only person that would play with Iron Fist is a total... Iron Fist is a badass, man.
Total fucking dork.
He stuck his hands into a dragon, man.
He looks like powder blue Batman, except instead of a bat symbol, it's exactly the bat symbol, except the bat has a long neck and it's a dragon.
So this guy is a total freaking dork.
Total badass.
Now, Marvel.
He's got a Netflix show coming.
What?
A ding-a-ling here?
Iron Fist.
Iron Fist.
Why don't they call him Dragon Boy?
What?
I'll write that down.
So Marvel Girl is great.
She looks like somebody that would be in the 60s Batman show.
Yeah.
And she has knee-high stockings.
I think those are boots.
Oh.
Well, I prefer to think of them as knee-high stockings.
All righty.
She's not wearing pantyhose.
She has a little skirt.
And underneath the skirt, you can see her panties.
She has green panties.
And she's just really got a nice body.
A very lovely girl.
That's her original costume.
Well, that's a little more demure, but she's still very pretty.
Red hair.
Some kind of stupid green Batman mask that you might wear to a Venetian New Year's Eve party.
But I think she's my favorite so far.
The Black Queen is not wearing her cape in that one.
This is after she's been brought into the Hellfire Club and they're controlling her mind.
I see.
She's wearing a bra.
Which is like, okay, put on a shirt.
And then she has some gloves that go all the way up to the top of her arm.
Hard to superhero in.
Pretty hot, though.
And then her pants are like diapers with black stockings coming out of them.
You know that somebody in Berlin, that's their special thing.
And then she's wearing her hair in a bun.
She looks like Mrs. Garrett.
As though it's like, oh, I'm going to do some superheroing.
I better put my hair up in a bun.
She's like hot Mrs. Garrett.
And then a dog collar.
So that is absolutely some fucked up thing that only a German would understand.
So not in favor of that.
Poor Stan Lee.
And then here is Batgirl.
No, it's, oh, for the love of Christ, it's Catwoman.
Oh, no, Catwoman.
Or no, Spiderwoman.
No, what did I say?
Spidergirl.
Did I say Catgirl?
No, she's Spidergirl.
I can't feel my eyelids.
Spider girl has, like, bat wings.
Spiders don't have wings.
Should they do?
They don't?
I think they fly.
Is this really spider girl?
Why does she have wings?
She's a spider woman.
There's no wings on a spider.
She's English.
Are there wings on English spiders?
The ones that fly have them.
Okay, so that explains that.
Yeah.
But more than any other of the superhero dolls that you've handed me, well, with the possible exception of Marvel Girl, she has a very anatomically correct and interesting...
They frequently draw her bosoms a little on the large side.
It's not my favorite thing they do about her, but sometimes they'll make her bosoms a little large.
The costume, the whole design of the costume does not evoke a spider as much as it evokes a bustier, and it's really pointing a lot of vectors at her boobs.
She's got a lot of powers.
She can put out pheromones.
You turn her around, and her...
ass is so absolutely crafted i mean there is somebody making 180 000 a year at marvel whose only job is to use a putty knife to make this craft a spider to make this ass so that it looks like something from a from like a 70s playboy and it's and it feels like if this was really your
superhero costume, you would spend half of your superheroing time just pulling it out of your butt cheeks.
I would find it hard to focus.
Yeah, you're like, I'm solving crimes.
She can shoot electricity.
She has many of the powers of Spider-Man.
I don't remember him having the power to shoot electricity.
Plus, she can do electricity.
She's got pheromones.
She's very persuasive with anybody, but especially men, because she has pheromones.
Spiders, I do not find, are very persuasive.
And I don't think that they can shoot electricity.
As far as you remember.
So why would they call her Spider Girl and not, like, Electricity Bat Girl?
Or, like, Persuasive Butterfly Girl, or whatever.
These aren't butterfly wings, either.
They are just full-on...
Bat wings.
There's no other way to describe them.
Yellow bat wings.
So she's electricity butt girl.
Oh, dear.
Butt bat girl.
Butt bat girl.
Butt bat girl.
Just a couple breaking announcements.
We've got a few more dishes from the place where we had lunch that made us hallucinate.
Oh, my goodness.
These are great.
Aren't they awful good?
That's my homemade blend.
They're cutting the MSG right out of me.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, there's a whole other doll here.
That's a different smaller Spider-Woman.
Oh, Spider-Woman.
She's a different scale, John.
I don't feel like these wings are functional.
You got item I2, which is chrysanthemum.
This is under Northeast Tasty Hot Spicy.
The section of the menu is called Northeast Tasty Hot Spicy.
Let me just reference the smaller background.
Everything about her is different.
The color of her costume is different.
The way the wings work, the color of the wings.
Everything is different except the shape of her ass, which is exactly the same.
Exquisite.
It's a smaller version and it's just the identical ass.
They want to make sure it's not out of period.
Northeast Tasty Hot Spicy, you got item I-8, parsley.
Parsley?
Yeah.
You got I-18, which is mutton.
I-16, you've got luncheon meat.
I don't remember mutton meat.
This is a section called Northeast Tasty Hot Spicy.
I don't know what these items are, except it just says parsley.
I'm guessing this is something from Northeast China that we don't normally encounter.
Yes.
And I'm trying to think of what is happening in Northeast China.
It's like, what's going on up there?
Raves?
Is that house music?
Is that where it is?
Northeast China.
That's Manchester I'm thinking of.
Yeah, you're right.
You got homemade meat droplets, vermicelli.
Corn segment.
You think you'd want to try corn segment?
I think that when I think of the word segment, I'm thinking of something from the Insecte genus.
Insecte.
Yeah.
House Trotter.
No.
I don't want that.
I don't want that at all.
I honestly can barely feel my eyes at all.
Which is a good opportunity for me to say, hey, you know, I want to let you know that this episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you in part by our friends at Squarespace.
Whoa!
We have a three-sponsor episode.
Yeah.
Three sponsors.
Let's talk about Squarespace.
Squarespace.
You can learn more about Squarespace by pointing your browser to squarespace.com.
John, did you know, John, John, what are you doing?
Are you on Instagram?
What are you doing?
No, I'm just... Don't take any photos that will identify my location.
Okay.
All right.
No, but go ahead.
It's fine.
I'll look handsome for it.
Do another one.
Go ahead.
You want another photograph?
Sure.
Right here of you in action.
This is a thing I've never done.
Sure.
Take a picture of you while you were podcasting.
Live podcasting holding hydrogen peroxide.
I'm sure people want... Here, hold up the hydrogen peroxide.
I'm sure people want to know what really happens here.
Behind the scenes.
Alexa, deploy hydrogen peroxide.
She just fucking turned herself off with no comment.
That was super.
Oh, my God.
What just happened?
I don't know.
Did you hear it, too?
Yeah, she came alive.
She thought about it.
And then she went.
I've been a huge fan and evangelist of Squarespace now for over five years.
John, I don't know if you're aware of this, but our site is hosted on Squarespace.
I did know that.
Yes.
I do quite a bit of corresponding with the people at Squarespace.
Oh, yeah.
You sign things.
I do.
I sign a few things.
I send them back.
Right.
I print them out.
So Squarespace is terrific.
And I've been using it for years.
And if you're listening to this podcast right now, which I have to assume you are because you are, you are listening to that because of Squarespace.
That is where we host this podcast.
It is where our show lives.
I got to tell you, it is the first place I recommend for anybody wanting to do what we do.
That means if you want to have a blog, if you want to have a portfolio, a gallery, heck, if you want to have an online store, you can do all of that.
They have an e-commerce package that is out of control.
Did you know this?
Were you aware of this?
No, no, no.
E-commerce is a thing that still intrigues me.
You can only sell E's.
As my daughter would say, it's not funny.
It's not even a joke.
It's not even a joke.
You know, you can't pull the wool over her eyes.
She's getting big, isn't she?
Yeah, she's big and she doesn't take a lot of monkey business.
She does not suffer fools, which is a problem for me.
Let me ask you a question.
Squarespace.
Let's say someone is listening to this podcast far, far, far in the future.
This is a thing we've considered before or a thing that I think about all the time.
You think about it a lot.
Let's say 700 years from now.
Someone is thinking about the 21st century and they're like scouring through all the data.
Maybe they have a super intelligence, this person.
All right.
And they are like listening to 25 podcasts at a time.
And you get to this ad read where you say, if you're listening to this podcast, which you are.
And they're going to think about that and consider that with their super intelligence and they're going to be like incontrovertible.
And then you say, you're listening to this on Squarespace.
My question to you is, will they still be listening to it on Squarespace then?
I'm going to say yes.
I'm going to say yes, because if Squarespace is really smart, and I have not read as much science fiction as you have, but I think there may come a day when Squarespace, I don't know, they're not proprietary.
Here's the thing.
You can put whatever you want on Squarespace.
It doesn't even have to be good.
Really?
It should be good just because you care a lot.
Oh, my God, John.
I'm sorry.
I spilled the seltzer.
Oh, my God.
No, no, no.
Is it on Spider Woman?
I was listening to the Squarespace thing so intently that I spilled the seltzer on the Spider Girl.
On the Spider Girl's butt, which is now.
She's got electric.
I'm thinking, why didn't I think of this before?
Pheromones.
So Squarespace, you're saying- 700 years from now?
You're saying Squarespace has become self-aware?
Right.
Yes.
Also, their sites are professionally designed masterpieces that look great right out of the box.
That's regardless of your skill level.
Zero coding, nerdery required.
It's so great to use.
They have easy, intuitive, easy-to-use tools that take all the pain out of getting your stuff up.
They also have state-of-the-art technology powering your site that ensures security and stability.
Even if you get a link from a major internet personality like John Roderick.
I wish that I had something that would take some of the pain out of getting my stuff up.
Do you throw a lot of lumber?
I do.
I chop a lot of wood.
You give a man a link, he takes a mile.
I'll tell you what.
Yeah.
How do you feel Squarespace is going to receive this ad read?
Bury the needle.
What time and what do I wear?
Crazy part is, Squarespace plans start at a very affordable $8.
$8 per month!
Are you kidding me?
$8 per month.
You can't even smoke cigarettes for $8 a month.
It's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
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You know, the thing is you meet people and they're like, I've got to get a thing for my... Oh, I hate people when they do that.
That voice.
Fucking stop it.
Hey, Horshack, why don't you knock it off?
John.
John.
Oh, Mr. Cotter, I don't know how to host my web page.
We need an auction page for our school site.
My church wants online.
Where do I get that?
Oh.
And you go, it used to be you go, ugh.
Right.
Give me the FTP password.
I'll go take care of everything.
Give me all your busted-ass Word files, and I'll get no more.
Oh, my God.
If I had a dollar for every time I've said that.
How many times have you agreed to take people's FTP password?
Just send me all your FTPs.
Oh, it's all your FTPs.
And your HTMLs.
All the great FTPs.
And I'll put them all together in 43 files.
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Spider-Woman is angry.
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You basically can't afford not to do it.
You literally cannot afford not to use Squarespace.
Not to use Squarespace.
Fresh mushrooms, luncheon meat, Yuba.
Something called Yuba.
Isn't that a city in Arizona?
I think it's Yuma or Zuma.
Zuma might be a Neil Young album.
I thought Zuma was that weird vodka drink that tasted like treacle.
What comes to time?
That's the country album.
I'm not sure.
Treacle's the one with Sting in it.
That's true.
I do know that northeast China is called Manchuria.
Manchuria.
So this is Manchurian food you're looking at.
Oh, how about this?
How about this?
Oh, my God, where do I begin, John?
This day is so goddamn weird.
Do you have anything like potstickers or dim sum?
Yeah, potstickers or dim sum.
And what was the noise that his face made?
The guy laughed.
He literally laughed.
He laughed uncomfortably, but it was a laugh.
It's as if I'd asked for a cock and a 7-Up.
He was like...
It's like potstickers.
Potstickers?
What an unusual thing to ask for.
What do you think we're trying to... What do you want?
What do you want?
Tea?
What?
Tea?
We don't have that in Manchuria.
Sorry.
A check?
A check for what?
Sorry.
You want to... You want to pay a Pepsi free?
You want a checkmark next to your name?
You want to be verified by us?
You want a Pepsi?
You got to pay me.
It's not free.
Pepsi free.
Homemade meat.
Do you like Kipling?
I don't know.
I've never Kipled.
I've never Kipled.
Homemade.
We should just do punchlines from our favorite jokes.
Wouldn't that be fun?
So anyway, thank you to Casper.
The soup and this guy over here.
We got the Jew over here.
Stand back, Eve.
I don't know how big this thing gets.
Stand back.
That's a good one.
That's one of the all-time greatest jokes.
Stand back, Eve.
I don't know how big this thing gets.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
Ever since I've been taking this bipolar medication.
Yeah.
So somebody tweeted me.
So we talked about it.
We did.
And then somebody tweeted me, and they were like, I'm on that same medication, but it makes me horny all the time.
Oh.
And I was like, I don't know.
This is Lasagnaville?
What's it called?
It's La Mancha.
La Mancha.
La Mancha Gill.
It's Lothlorian.
Yeah.
A train.
Peter Lawfordson.
It's called Lamictal, also known as Lamotrigine.
Lamotrigine.
Dancing for Lamotrigine.
And I said, I don't see a world in which being horny all the time is like a bad side effect.
Being horny all the time is a pretty good...
That's a thing that a lot of people would appreciate, right?
Sure.
I mean, there's a lot of folks.
I just don't want to find a point on it.
A lot of guys would take a whole different medicine just to get more of that.
That's right.
People are buying medicine online from Russia because it promises to make you horny.
My pants fit too well most of the time.
And this guy wrote me back and he said, well, I'm single.
It doesn't help me.
What an odd response.
Wow, that's really funny.
Let me recommend masturbating, which is amazing.
This is still part of the Squarespace ad read.
I'm not really sure where any of the ads have stopped at this point.
So I feel like it's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
House Trotter.
If you are horny all the time, you can solve that problem with a very pleasurable activity that you can do almost anywhere.
This is the one surprising tip for somebody who's horny.
You won't believe what happens next.
If you're horny, you don't have to fuck a Gatorade bottle.
Yeah.
You don't have to cut a hole in the drywall.
Is it wearing a funny outfit?
Is it wearing a sexy outfit, the Gatorade bottle?
Yeah, right.
The Gatorade bottle is made to look like human buttocks.
It's made to look like Spider Woman's buttocks.
And they could actually sell those.
No, you can turn off the lights even.
Have you seen where you can buy a foot that you can fuck?
Outside of Germany?
I'm pretty sure you can get it.
It's a Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
Fusscheiße.
You know what they say?
Start with the easiest to just look for a fuckable foot.
So it's a thing if you like to fuck feet, and it's like a, oh, my God.
So wait a minute.
You're not meant to put your penis between the toes of the foot.
Oh, no, there's a MacGuffin inside the MacGuffin.
You start out thinking, oh, it's a fuckable foot.
It's a thing you rub on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Did I ever tell you the story?
That would be a little too organic and healthy.
Did I ever tell you the story about the posies?
Yeah.
The Posey's on tour in Spain, and the drummer was asleep in his bed, and he woke up, and the bass player had his dick between his toes.
Oh, no.
And was just fucking his foot.
And the drummer's like, what the fuck are you doing?
And the bass player's just laughing, and he's like, ah, I'm fucking your foot.
He was just fucking his foot.
Are you kidding me?
While he was sleeping.
This is the posies.
This is why you shouldn't listen to the posies.
How long ago?
Oh, it was a while back.
Okay.
I mean, it's not the new posies.
Not the guy from Oranger?
No, no, no.
Pre him.
But this is different than that.
Yeah.
This is real super specialized.
Yeah.
This is a foot...
Which looks like a severed foot.
And you can see the name of what the item is called?
No, it's called... I can't tell if this is real.
Is this April Fool's?
It's got to be.
It's on Gizmodo, and they're renowned for their sense of humor.
Right, so you can't be wrong.
And so instead of... This is almost too grotesque to describe.
Oh, it's a thing.
It is.
It's called the Vajankle.
The Vajankle.
And what it is is it's... You're not... You're actually where the bone would be, where the leg bone...
is connected to the ankle bone.
I don't think you want to overcomplicate this.
If you cut off a foot just above the ankle and put a vagina on it, that's what it would be.
If you put an anatomically correct vagina inside the top of a severed foot, you would have this device.
It's got toenails and everything, John.
Yeah, yeah.
No, it's a very accurate foot and it does not look like a lady's foot.
No, it doesn't.
It looks like somebody's cousin's foot.
It looks like a hobbit foot, frankly.
It looks like a shaved hobbit foot.
And you would use this to pleasure yourself.
I don't think they've ever met a foot fetishist.
Because this isn't really for a foot fetishist.
It's for a disembodied ankle with a vagina in it fetishist.
Somebody who wants to have sex with every part of your body one at a time.
But to have this Dr. Moreau level of authenticity to a thing where there would normally be just the rest of a person.
Yeah, there's an absolute uncanny valley problem here.
And I can only imagine that most foot fetishists would want to put a sock and a shoe on it.
Sure, or you just get something that just looks like a regular foot without a vagina on it.
You know, it's a little bit of a chocolate and peanut butter situation, except one's a vagina.
Yeah, if you just want to worship a foot, you don't want a vagina on it.
Vaginas belong in a certain place.
That's true.
Which is to say, on the top of a Gatorade bar.
House trotter.
Tasty crawfish.
I can name every kind of Chinese food.
They got crawfish.
They got monkfish.
Candy bananas.
Hawthorne sugar-coated haws.
What the fuck does that mean?
G4.
Hawthorne sugar-coated haws?
What's a haw?
It's some kind of trotter.
Like a house trotter?
A haw.
It's different from a sand dab?
I think a haw it is very much.
Isn't a haw some kind of a pig's foot?
Snow cotton hummus?
But what is hawthorne?
Hawthorne's where the Beach Boys are from.
Right.
So what does that have to do with the sugar-coated hog?
It might be like a sand dab or a sugar dab.
Sugar dab?
Right.
You know what?
I would like everyone to call me sugar dab from now on.
Oh, God, I don't feel good.
Chicken gizzard string.
You look great.
Oh, yeah, now how do you make string out of a chicken gizzard?
See, I'm trying to figure out if they just did a find and replace and forgot to say string beans.
But can I give you some strings?
Okay, John, this is under Northeast Shenyang Tasty Barbecue.
So we're going to assume...
That this is Manchurian.
You're assuming that, yes.
I'm going to assume that this is Manchurian.
That's one candidate.
Northeast Shenyang Tasty Barbecue.
You got mutton kidney.
Here you go.
Let me eat some strings.
You got heart-shaped string, chicken skin string.
You got chicken gizzard string.
You got prawn string.
You got veggie string, garlic string.
H25, baked bread pieces.
I think that's bread.
Baked bread pieces.
But it's been pieced.
Yeah, but I mean, that's a slice of bread, isn't it?
I don't know.
It's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Bacon, mushroom, roll.
See, now we're starting to sound good.
Except none of this sounds like any kind of Chinese food I ever heard.
H15, croaker.
Croker.
Croker is age 15.
But that's different.
That's $1.98.
Croker is different from boiled bullfrog, which is further up the menu.
No, that ain't no trotter.
That ain't no house trotter.
That's what you call a city trotter.
Croker.
Yeah.
Yeah, a croker is...
A croaker is something that you put on your carburetor, right?
I swear to God, I feel like I'm drinking.
This is the section called drink beer.
Oh, drink beer.
This is a section called drink beer.
Wait a minute.
Is it drink beer or is it drink beer?
No punctuation, all lowercase, drink beer.
So how would you pronounce it?
You're just doing a kind of flat.
Drink beer?
Drink beer.
I would say it's a tonal language.
That's true.
Drink beer.
I-28, Master Iced Tea.
I-30, Master Sydney Candy.
I-30.
Do not have that guy do a demo at your public library.
Hello, I'm Master Sidney Candy.
Master Sidney Candy is absolutely the most expensive dom top in the entire Northwest.
He's $1,500 an hour.
He's pretty from both sides.
Coming and going.
Coconut palm curd.
This is all under drink beer.
You can get coconut palm curd, honey jasmine tea.
Fuck you.
They got jasmine tea.
It says it right there.
Holy shit.
Why didn't we read this far down the menu?
We should go back there with our 40-ounce flask and whack that guy right in the head.
Freshly.
Take your human skin off, you UFO.
Freshly watermelon juice.
Freshly watermelon juice.
Coconut palm curd.
Excuse me, palm curd.
Hawthorne sugar-coated haws.
Yeah, I want to try those.
Acid droplets meat fried beans.
Acid droplets meat fried beans.
If I was still in college, I would try that.
Yeah.
Oh, are you kidding me?
Go down to the beach, walk along.
Give me two.
Stand on top of some stump.
Oil fire soup.
Oil fire like something off the coast of Santa Barbara.
One imagines.
Maybe it's a fracking related dish.
Oil fire soup.
A8 house trotter.
I feel like a lot of these dishes are going to make me have a bad time two hours later when I have to poo.
Mahiyahe satay goat.
That's Hawaiian food.
This seems like a lot of different kinds of food to have in this one restaurant.
Especially with two waiters that don't appear to have ever seen another living person before.
G9.
Griddle.
Smelly.
G9.
Griddle.
Smelly.
Fish.
G9 is actually my rating as a federal employee, too.
Oh, God.
I don't feel good.
I don't think I'm right.
Air-drying dried beef.
Air-drying dried beef.
Air-drying dried.
Griddle Australian beef.
Griddled Australian smelly beef.
Griddle Australian beef.
Griddle spicy lamb belly.
Griddle smelly spicy lamb belly.
Cauliflower tray.
Smelly cauliflower tray.
It works on so many levels.
From now on, put the word smelly in front of every fortune cookie.
In bed.
Thank you so much to our three sponsors this week.
I want to thank Braintree.
You can find out more about Braintree by going to BraintreePayments.com slash SuperTrain.
Thank you, Braintree, for your fast payments.
And thank you to Casper for their wonderful mattresses.
John's got two of their mattresses.
He might get another one.
Thank you, Casper, for taking me away from my penicillin bed.
That's Casper.com.
SuperTrain.
And finally, to our very old, very dear friends, not that old, but dear friends at Squarespace.
You can learn more about them at Squarespace.com with that offer code SuperTrain.
Thank you, Squarespace.
Please don't send me any more PDFs.
Spare Squase.
My goodness.
House Trotter.
We should go get a House Trotter.
I want you to go buy me that 40-ounce flask, which I'm going to fill with acetone, and then we should go get the Smelly House Trotter.
That's really going to cut some of the MSG.
You are the color of a tomato, right?
I don't feel right.
Food does not bother me.
Sometimes fried chicken makes me sleepy.
I can feel my forehead.
It's about an eighth of an inch away from my head right now.
My forehead's right out here, and it's both numb and sensitive.
I feel like it's a third eye thing.
I think I have a face flu.
Well, a top face flu.
That'll cost you a little extra.
I feel a little bit fine.
Yeah.
Because I'm good at processing all kinds of pollutants.
But yeah, you are really, you're flushing.
No, I'll be fine.
I'll be fine.
I'll be fine.
You're wiggling.
Yeah.
Griddle smelly fish.
Yeah.
Okay.
Griddle Smelly Fish.
Marinated Fountain.
Isn't Griddle Smelly Fish something, isn't that a song by Phoebe?
Is it?
Is that like a Kill Rockstars kind of thing?
I think, yeah.
The song's by Phoebe.
We should go.
Sautéed Pig's Intestines, F14.
I want to thank you for giving me your special nut blend.
Yeah.
I want to thank you for the fizzy water.
Yes.
I want to thank you for, Alexa.
Thank Merlin.
Wow.
Not even a sound.
Alexa, who is Merlin Mann?
Merlin D. Mann 3 wrote the blog 43 folders.
Wow.
Jesus fucking Christ.
That's it.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
Merlin D. Mann wrote.
Flea wrote, I thought she said.
Merlin D. Mann 3.
Oh, Merlin D. Mann 3.
The third.
Wrote.
Wrote.
The blog 43 folders.
Good night, everybody.
Wow.
You're so much more than that.
You want to ring it?
You haven't rung it yet.
Is that your bell?
That's my bell.
You can ring it.
Let me try it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Everyone, thank you so much, and thank you for enjoying this special episode.
John is crawling on the floor.
He's pulling a sure mic.
For paying extra for this special deluxe holiday episode.
I can't feel my hair.
I'm moving my mic, and I'm walking through Merlin's forest of old hard drives to give you this final...
It's a good bell.
House Trotter.