Ep. 338: "Jelisa and Robert Saudi"
hello hi john oh hey merlin oh hi john i didn't see you there how are you hi hey uh i've been meaning to call you oh we're about due yeah i just uh boy i've been busy it's like me and baths every week whether i need it or not is that right bath that's my grandma used to say she had a lot of very memorable she's a funny wonder what the poor people are doing
Oh, yeah.
You say that because the joke is you don't have a lot of dough, but maybe you go out to KFC or whatever.
I wonder what the poor people are doing.
What are the poor people doing?
My grandmother used to say things to my dad that I can't repeat.
Oh, no.
Oh, see, she was from Kentucky.
Yeah, we had a lot of things that can't be repeated.
Yeah, it was all in order to get his goat.
You wouldn't think my dad had a lot of goats, but he did, and his mother could really get to him.
Oh, they're so good at that, aren't they?
They are.
All this in heaven, too.
You know, I was just thinking, do you know who Max Roser is?
It's not the jazz drummer or the Cards Against Humanity guy.
I'm going to say no, I don't.
Max Roser is a statistician.
Ooh, I love statistics.
Yeah, well, Max Roser is a statistician.
Oh, well, hang on.
I'm sorry.
Yes, I think.
Actually, I heard about this.
I want to say from Max Temkin.
I know.
Tell me about Max Roser.
So Max Roser, he's a very interesting character.
I guess he describes himself as an economist, maybe.
I mean, he's very philosophical.
I always think of him as somebody who likes to do, I want to say, data visualizations of long-term trends of living standards.
Correct.
That is the same Max Roser.
I think he might be at the uni of Oxford.
He is.
And the thing about it, you would never know he was a German by his name.
But he is really good at using data visualization to kind of turns out you about stuff you think you know about.
Like, oh, you know, the world is dying.
And he's like, actually.
That's so much shit, man.
Or people say, like, there's never been more.
And he's like, nope, actually, there's never been less.
He does it over and over.
He's really good at it.
He's very dispassionate.
But you can tell that he's passionate about the facts.
Anyway, I was reading some Max Roser because I like to do that.
His little website, Our World in Data.
Or Data.
And I realized when you and I were born roughly about the same time, the population of the world was 3.5 billion people.
And now the population of the world is 7.7 billion people.
The population of the world has doubled in our lifetime.
Oh, my God.
For every person that was walking around, smoking Paul Malls, driving Lincoln Continental.
Holy shit.
There's a full-on other person now also riding along with them.
The size of the world population over the last 12,000 years.
Yes.
Isn't that an amazing graph?
That is, oh my God.
Yeah.
It took like hundreds of thousands of years to get to like 500 million.
It took 39 years for the world population to double.
Yes.
Oh my God.
So it's a hilarious graph.
There were one and a half billion people about in 1900.
There were two billion in 1928, three billion in 1960.
Here's where we come in.
Yep.
About 3.5 billion there in 65, 67, and then four billion in 75.
Now it really starts cooking.
Five billion in 87 years.
6 billion in 99, which is what I still think of as the population of the earth, 6 billion.
But it's not.
It's 7 billion in 2011 and 7.7 billion.
That's 0.7 billion people, 700 million additional people.
Just from the time that we started doing this podcast until then.
Oh my God.
So, you know, you drive around Seattle and you're like, there's so much traffic.
It's like, yeah.
Think about the addressable podcast market.
You know what I'm saying?
Well, I'm talking about 700 million people that we just added during the program are, uh, yeah, they're, they're all buying Casper mattress.
It's a new, it's a new kind of hybrid mattress.
God damn it.
They're not currently a sponsor of our address market.
I wonder why.
Our World in Data, highly recommended.
Here are some of their topics.
CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions.
A short history of global living conditions.
That's a really nice one.
Literacy, life expectancy.
hunger and undernourishment, income inequality.
All of these little topics are going to give you food for thought.
Hopefully your thought is hungry.
Hungry for food.
He has an FAQ on plastics.
Yeah.
Wow, look at all that.
Oh, that's a lot of plastic.
This is an upsetting sight.
Well, it can be, but also it can be very – this is the thing.
It's food for thought because it's not – typically it is not ideological.
Right.
And so depending on what your ideology is, whatever your pet ideology is, you can take this information and you can really twist it inside your head if you're looking for it to be ideological.
Or you can just eat it and have it be food for thought.
Food for thought from Max Roser.
Food for thought.
And he has other partners.
It's not just him, but he's the German.
So, of course, that's the one that you want to... You know, they say in heaven...
Let's see.
See, I always get this wrong.
In heaven, the Italians make the cars.
Oh, right.
The English are the bureaucrats and the French are the chefs.
right and the germans run the government germans run the government in hell the italians run the government oh wait no i think the germans run the germans are the bureaucrats and the english run the government which one of those yeah but i remember the english make the food sorry guys oh yeah this is the hell yeah in the hell um uh what are the other ones i'm missing the english make the food the italians run the government the french are the bureaucrats oh boy
And the Germans, what was the other one?
Oh, the Germans make the, oh, no, wait, because the Germans make good cars.
The Germans do make good cars.
Maybe it's the French that make the cars.
The French make the cars.
Germans make the.
Oh, no, no.
You know what we forgot?
No, no, no.
Heaven.
Yeah.
The lovers.
Who's the lovers?
Oh, the Germans, right.
So the French are the lovers.
The Italians make the food, the British run the government, and the Germans make the cars.
Okay, that works for me.
And then you flip it around, and the English make the food, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians run the government, and the French make the cars.
Wow.
Oh, man.
Burn on Citroëns.
Sorry, continent.
Jesus Christ.
And all those Germans listening to the program, of which there are no shortage.
I'm here to tell you, man, Germans love podcasts.
Well, and they're like, we're great lovers.
What are you talking about?
We're very giving.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've been, uh, do you ever listen to, uh, I don't think, I don't know if he's even doing it anymore.
You ever listen to hardcore history?
Uh, I, it has been recommended to me for, for centuries.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is my, like, maybe you're my bim bam where you're like, now you just like stop recommending it to me.
Yeah.
But it's also like, it's, it's definitely feels like a time commitment.
And, um, and from what I understand, he does a tremendous job.
Deep diving on things that would be of interest to me.
It's just very hard for me to listen to podcasts.
I understand.
And the one – I mean I've hopped around, but I finally –
late last week jumped into his three-part series on World War I. Oh, I've heard about this.
I've heard about this.
Yeah, you're thinking about yourself, thinking to yourself like, oh, okay, I can handle 60 minutes.
I can handle three 20-minute episodes.
It took me several days to get through the three-hour part one episode.
But God, it's relevant to so many things.
I have a note here for the future.
At some point, we need to talk about a Game of Thrones versus real wars in the world.
Something I posted, oh, let's say two weeks ago on Twitter.
On Monday, May 13th, was about the episode, World War I. And basically, there was this one, I guess, one of the very earliest battles.
First, he goes through all of the run-up.
And it was fascinating.
But you get to the point where the Germans, which are still a fairly recent country.
It's at that point a 40-year-old country, something like that.
Sure, sure.
Before that, it was Prussia sprawled all over the place.
And you still have Austria-Hungary, right?
But anyway, God, I feel like I'm really off my game the last couple of weeks, John.
I don't know.
But he talks about, as I said in my tweet two weeks ago on May 13th, he basically talks about one of the earliest battles in World War I.
demonstrating how what was about to happen was going to be very different from what came before in at least a few major ways.
One major way was your whole, like, Charge the Light Brigade, romance of war, guy with a saber and a feather hat, right?
Red uniforms.
Right.
Right.
And this is, you know, this has been running up for a while, but there was still a very proud heritage of like, we are these, these noble warriors that that was going to run into some problems.
But it was this particular battle where the Germans were attacking Belgium and they were in this, like a big fort.
And on the one hand,
The Germans didn't know what they were getting into for this skirmish.
And you can go listen to the three hour podcast.
But basically, Belgium just sat there with fucking machine guns.
That's the difference.
Mowing down row after row after row of Germans until it was basically a battle of the bastards type situation.
They had to actually ponder.
It's getting hard for us to shoot them.
Should we run out there and with our hands make a hole in the pile of the dead to be able to keep mowing them down as they send company after company of militaristic, proud Germans to just be fucking mowed down, just carved in half by a machine gun fire on the ground and from the...
The castle, basically.
Yes, that makes a big difference in the way war is conducted if you cannot even get there to do the war.
But then the twist on the twist is this one fella whose name escapes me, who was a German general who just kept going up.
He's just like this fucking hardballer.
And the guy who was leading one big part of this died.
And he basically took over this guy's companies.
And just did this daring raid, like, into the fucking fort.
And, like, basically, like, breached them.
And they were pretty much, I guess, ready to surrender to some extent.
But they still couldn't get to, like, where, you know, the Red Keep, basically.
They didn't have a dragon.
Do you know the story about, like, calling in literally the big guns for this?
Yeah.
They were starting to build big guns at this point.
They were starting to build big Bertha.
Well, yeah.
And so, I mean, actually, if you go back and listen to the thing I should never post, but something I posted, you can get to the timestamp, something I posted on Monday, May 13th.
You hear about basically calling in their ace in the hole, which is this new gun.
a new cannon that was that you would shoot from i think it was 4 000 feet away where in order to even fire the cannon they had to be three football fields away with their mouth open so their eardrums didn't burst and they were shooting this we're not talking like we're not talking napoleon level cannonballs we're talking some really really
big explosive shells.
Explosive shells, yes.
Shells that could pierce through your castle, like a dragon could pierce through your castle.
And so basically, once they got the trajectory right, they're just dropping these, I think, multi-hundred-pound bombs.
And eventually, they hit the magazine, the armory, whatever.
And they're able to just sit there and, at will, drop in these bombs
bombs from so far away.
Nobody's ever seen anything like this.
It really cuts into the idea of like a guy on a horse with a feather in his cap going, hurrah, boys, let's go.
And I mentioned it in context with some recent television, because it's like, this is when I guess, according to Dan Carlin, this is one of the times we realize the future of this kind of fighting is going to really change, and not least the idea that having a fort...
It's going to be the thing that protects you from the outside because that game has changed.
The fort game has changed.
Yeah.
I mean, you would think that you would have a couple of test cases like that and then not just go ahead and do the same exact thing for four more years.
But not everybody was paying attention.
He calls out.
I think he didn't say it by name, but I think specifically he's saying, you know, imagine a line like it took a long time to like get this message through.
Anyway, I don't know.
I thought it was really good.
I listened to it.
I fell asleep a couple times and then rewound.
But I don't know.
I just – I thought that was – when you're up against something that's so fundamentally, if you like, it disrupts your idea of the possible.
Can you imagine what it must be like to be sitting in there and just see like –
And apparently the gases, when the bombs would hit, they were not deliberately like choking gases, but they were the equivalent of I guess like a chemical weapon also because they would just knock people out with the horrible gases from these things when they landed.
I don't know, man.
Don't want to be in a war.
It ain't as pretty as it used to be.
You know, war is hell, Merlin.
Well, that's what William Tecumseh Sherman said.
You know, these days.
Let me just quote this entire three-hour podcast.
What a dead end.
I'm sorry I brought it up.
No, no, no.
It's quite all right.
You know, we don't talk about war enough.
We got to make this evergreen.
If we talk about 1914, it's going to bring the milkshakes to the yard.
Well, that's true, but also not even 1914.
Let's just swing it all the way back up to here where we're working really hard to make it so a war is something that we just inflict on other people and American soldiers don't even have to go there.
And that's going to be interesting.
It's going to be really interesting when we are capable of –
Because we're close.
We're halfway there.
The DARPA is... Well, drones.
And then, you know, DARPA is constantly working with... Everybody loves to see those Boston...
uh dynamics or whatever boston yeah whatever you get there we get the terrifying uh like dog robot that can open yeah you get the dog robot that can open doors uh but you know they're not doing that uh to make pets right they're not doing that so that you when you go to town you can have this thing uh carry your groceries right they're making these things uh so that they can drop them out of airplanes in somewhere stan
And have machine guns all over them and just control them from Fort Bragg or whatever with joysticks.
That's why the army is 100% behind all the video games.
And I know I'm going to get a lot of letters.
I know I'm going to get a lot of letters.
But those first-person shooter video games are just trying to raise up a generation of...
Of infantrymen that can sit in a Aeron chair.
Oh, yeah.
You got an Ender's Game type situation.
Right.
But the thing is that the people in the other place are still going to be people, real people.
That don't have remote control machine gun dogs.
And so they're just going to be out there working, doing whatever, growing poppies, keeping their daughters out of school, you know, just doing stuff.
As you do.
And then something from the sky that sounds vaguely unlike a mosquito is going to drop a hellfire missile on them.
And then the other people are going to like run away from the crater.
And then the robot dogs with the machine guns.
Oh, my God.
Turn them into hamburger.
And then we're going to be here in America reading Twitter about how mad people are about the latest TV show.
We're not even going to know about it.
There's no reason for them to tell us about it.
Yeah.
And there aren't any reporters anymore because BuzzFeed something.
And so there aren't going to be any reporters.
Why would you?
You just check Twitter.
That's where all the information is.
You're not going to embed somebody from BuzzFeed with a killer dog robot.
Oh, you are not.
They're not going to ride that robot along so they can report.
Oh, but they will be over here.
They'll be over here in this airplane hangar seeing the cute doggos, the robot doggos that you can pet, and they think they're people.
Cute doggos.
Well, you know what?
It may be that somebody, let's say BuzzFeed, has their own robot dog.
And they fly it over there in some kind of BuzzFeed airplane.
But can that robot dog be everywhere?
No.
Is that robot dog – like what kind – how much are they going to have to pay a kid who could be making money working for the Army joystick in some killer dog?
How much are they going to have to pay him –
It's going to be somebody.
It's going to be some Chelsea Manning that got that got out of the army.
Yes.
And they're going to be like running the reporter robot dog.
OK.
But that's I don't see how that's going to produce.
how that's going to actually produce news.
If you're trying to bring in the best and brightest of the joystick generation, are you going to, so you look at something, I think it's called eGames.
EGames.
Where people are on Twitch.
Twitch.
And they're screaming the N-word.
What's your kick?
What's your kick?
What's your kick?
Kick is something that people go on.
That's different from keck.
Keck is, yeah, Keck is completely different.
Keck is the publisher of The Stranger.
Oh my, okay.
I'm so confused by online communities, I have to be honest with you.
I'll tell you what.
There's so much going on that I don't understand.
I feel like I could use a robot dog, but I'm not sure I could even control it.
I mean, I just wonder if they're going to be fighting for talent with the e-gamers.
Now here in Korea, you can make a big career for yourself as an e-gamer.
I think that's coming to America.
And now you get on a Twitch and you can Keck, ask people about their Keck, and call them, you know,
the homosexual nicknames we try not to use as much.
Is that the kind of person they're going to want to bring in to remote control a robot dog?
Well, now let me... This is tough because you're going to get a lot of letters.
People don't know what my email address is, but they do know yours.
And they're going to give you a lot of letters, I'm guessing.
I wish I had a robot to archive them.
So the letters are – do you remember a long time ago when the first people – I'm talking about absolutely the first people who ever were.
The children of the forest.
The original children of the forest who first suggested that there was some link – wait for it – between video games –
And school shootings or other violence.
Oh, yeah.
And do you remember the trouble those people got in for even suggesting that there might be any kind of connection between games where people were violenting and violence?
Do you remember that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to regret this.
That was troublesome, wasn't it?
I know a setup.
I could feel a setup coming.
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Okay, so... I mean, I don't want you to get emails any more than I want to get emails.
But I don't... You know, it felt like that question got resolved.
It got resolved...
By virtue – and this is true of a lot of questions these days.
They get resolved sheerly by the number of angry people that reply with a feeling about it.
You know what I mean?
Like the – there's not – it's like it does not take much to yell –
Something to the effect of research shows, right?
You got to look at the data, right?
Yeah, you can say research shows that that well, but you know, it's hard to do research.
It's expensive.
Oh, yeah, sure.
It's very hard to do research that proves that.
That this kid, for instance, who grew up playing violent video games and then went on to commit violence, that there was any connection between that.
You understand?
It's very hard to prove that anyway.
Oh, I mean –
I think I'm going to end up being quiet for a few minutes, so I'll just say the one thing, which is it is, I think, because I'm interested in this data stuff and understand just the tiniest bit about it, it is less difficult to look at existing data and say why that data has not shown something or why the results that we have seen –
more often than not, just need more data.
We need more to be done with this.
I mean, that seems like a pretty straight-up, honest way to end your study is to go like, well, here's the thing that's not conclusive, and we really need more study of this aspect.
Like, we found something interesting, but no way can we say it's connected to this thing.
It's very hard, as they say, to prove a negative.
And the thing about that is it's one of those sayings like...
That maybe everybody's using to mean the opposite of what it means.
I'm not sure.
That's the exception that proves the rule, whatever that means.
Yeah, whatever that means, right?
I still don't know what that means.
It begs the question, whatever that means.
But so anyway, we're doing a good job of having a lot of people who know how to shoot other people remotely remotely.
And those people are often zombies or faceless drones.
Could they be drug dealers?
They could be drug dealers.
They could be just villagers that are a different – that are a different culture from you that are just sort of trying to get their – Like the butter side up people.
Yeah, or trying to keep their daughters out of school.
But whoever it is –
that is going to get killed by a machine gun dog, somebody's going to be driving those.
And I'm betting it is not the kids that were really into theater.
Oh, right.
You're not going to recruit from community theater to get somebody to drive those dogs.
If you're going to control some deadly robot machine gun dogs, the last thing you want is, say, an improv group.
Oh.
Right.
Or somebody who spent, you know, spent like most of their childhood, like sort of doing role playing stuff with dolls.
It's less likely than that you would pick somebody who knew how to use a controller, switch between weapons.
Oh, in like a first scene.
My daughter just killed the Gannons in Breath of the Wild, which feels like kind of an accomplishment.
But who's to say she might get a scholarship at some point?
At some point, they're going to go through – what's going to happen is there's – you know how the SAT works, right?
You get a bunch of people in a room and you ask them questions that require that you be white and middle class.
This is – theories show – or I mean, I'm sorry, data shows that this is true.
Anyway, science shows that this is true.
But the new SAT is going to be sit down in front of a controller and they say, can you get Mario through this maze and collect the gold coins?
Okay.
And then they're like, do, do, do, do, do.
And it's like, you've got a good score.
Now can you get Mario through that same maze, but with a gun to get the gold coins?
And you're going to go, how can I ever?
Oh, man.
And then they're going to say, what if Mario was wearing a turban?
Could you do that?
Oh, no.
And then you're going to get into college studying what they call computer math.
What if he just wants to keep his daughter out of school?
Right, right, right.
Or what if he doesn't?
What if he wants to make you put your daughter in school?
Because data shows.
Because science or like, you know, demanding, you know, that people not get vaccinated in the state.
I don't know.
It could be a lot of things.
But the point is Mario will be armed.
Mario is going to end up being armed.
And the thing is, I don't know whether it's going to be incentivized, whether this behavior is going to be incentivized.
Because Boston Dynamics actually puts a Mario face on the dog.
That would be so cute.
Right?
It wouldn't be hard.
It wouldn't put Wario.
They put Mario, or as John Siracusa says, Mario.
Mario.
Yeah.
Now, let me add to that.
Yeah.
What if you put your headphones on?
Mm-hmm.
And there's some music that is composed by bands that are funded by DARPA that goes.
And you're like, fuck, yes, I'm having the fucking best day.
And it basically sounds like machine guns.
And you're out there with your doggo because doggos now are allowed in restaurants.
Oh, they just let him go anywhere, John.
Sure, but dog goes outside my window barking all day, and I go over and talk to the neighbor.
They're like, why do you hate dogs?
And if you post about it on Twitter, they're like, fuck you, why do you hate dogs?
And you're like, fucking dog.
But no, no, no.
What if they have to fly somewhere, John?
What if they have to go on a commercial airliner?
Do they bring the doggo?
What happens?
Oh, they do.
And they don't buy a seat for it.
The doggo just sits next.
It sits on the floor next to you.
Yeah.
They let it out of their thing and the dog is just like brushing up against you.
You paid the same amount for your ticket as they did, but they got a free doggo.
Yeah.
And they're just brushing you with it because it makes them because it's a comfort turkey.
Yes.
What I'm saying, if there is a dog outside my window with Mario face and machine guns and that dog is barking.
Yeah.
Do I go talk to the neighbor?
Oh.
I'll be honest with you.
There's a variety of things about the pictures that you have drawn that would really make me think twice.
Exactly.
There could be some repercussions from talking to that companion.
If you post that on Twitter, are you going to get –
Flamed by some millenniums who believe that dogs are people too?
If the robot Mario dog goes into the Panera Bread without shoes, who's going to say, read the sign?
Who's going to say, read the sign, service aminals only?
Yeah, no machine guns, no shirts, no service.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
So these are things that I think, you know, what's going to happen is they're already happening.
Okay.
Okay.
And what's going to happen is the military.
Now, this is an argument that I used to have with Mark – I'm sorry, Matt Martin all the time.
Why am I all of a sudden like vocally dyslexic?
I keep –
I keep looking, you're getting older and you have what a friend of the show, Marco Arment, or if you like Mark Arment, he calls the, it's the snap to grid problem, which is when you have a name that's closer to a more popular name, or in your case, you might have an aphasia.
And so you see, you say the wrong thing because your brain is snapping to the grid while it's thinking about the content.
And then I think you get the name a little bit wrong.
Well, so, you know, I think I was trying to say Matt Martin, but I think I might have been trying to say Marc Maron.
You might have known Mary Martin, who played Peter Pan.
She sure did.
Anyway, Matt Martin and I— Later Sandy Duncan, but she didn't have an eye.
She would be a terrible robot dog controller.
Sandy Duncan's eye was one of the great 80s bands.
So Mary Martin, you and him will go back and forth about materiel.
You and Mary Magdalene would have conversations about materiel.
What we would say is I would say this is bad for our health, and he would say anything that saves the lives of American service people is good.
Oh, John.
It's very hard to argue.
Oh.
That more American service people should be put in harm's way.
Blood and treasure.
Because you're going to put those people in harm's way.
How are you going to defend that to mom and dad at Peoria, Illinois?
And I know whenever I say that, there's somebody in Peoria who writes us and says, hey, thanks for mentioning Peoria.
Oh, I think we'll be lucky if that's the worst thing we get this week.
However, so you don't want to put people in harm's way, except in my opinion, if you don't put people in harm's way, then you got no stakes.
got no stakes then it's just robot dogs and there's no reason to there nobody's got a robot dog that's reporting on it for the for buzzfeed it's like ned stark says uh you know uh without uh without uh without fear you can't have courage something without fear you can't something like that i'm paraphrasing a lot of people call him at art but like but the point is like you know uh you know the uh the courage is when you're scared and do it anyway
Yes, right.
And it's like Dany's says, before she burns down her, spoiler alert, before she, before she burnt, she, uh, Dragon Lady's everything, which anybody that watched that show knew was coming for the last five years.
If you say Dracarys to the fucking Drogon and he takes a minute to cock his head, do your job, sir.
Discharge your service weapon.
You shouldn't pause before you burn the Baldy.
Like, just get to it.
What are you doing crawling around just trying to scare us?
You're thinking about there's no dramatic pauses for dragons.
No, you go hard.
So I think it's already lots and lots and lots of people are either being dyed or they're getting sweated really hard by people who are, let's say, 8,000 to 10,000 miles away looking at them through a video camera.
Yep.
And that is not going to get talked about over here.
So none of us are going to feel culpable.
We're not going to say like – Are they going to blame the dog?
I don't think blame is even going to enter into it until later when history judges us.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
But it's one of those things where there are a lot of people who are mad about –
For instance, that America got stolded.
from the people that were living here already, but all of the people who are mad about it, who, who are not directly descended from people who were living here already are also people who stole it.
Like if you got here by any, by any way, you are also living here and busy stealing it every minute, every day.
Every time you go to the store, you're stealing it.
It's done.
Stolded.
And it's real easy to look back and blame it on somebody, but it's you.
You know what I mean?
So when the dogs...
When the dogs of war are out warren, not necessarily driven by somebody that grew up playing first-person shooter games, but probably, and I'm going to say that because studies show.
Science, yeah.
I feel like, is there culpability?
Are you personally culpable because we're not paying attention to it?
Yeah.
At least Matt Martin has got an opinion about it, right?
He's got a justification.
He's saying, no, you're wrong.
My job as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force is to keep other people in the Air Force from dying.
Yeah.
And so if other people have to die, that's not my problem.
If robot dogs have to die, who's crying?
Who cries for the robot dog?
Who's crying now, yeah.
Oh, boy, that's a good question, John.
I mean, I don't want to do a show where you get letters because I'm in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
And I'm going to those places.
What?
Going to those places very soon.
Oh, my goodness.
What?
And I think even when this episode is broadcast, I may be in Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia.
Oh, thanks, buddy.
Wow.
Okay.
So you're going to be fielding some of the mail.
Oh, gosh.
But, you know, I want to say that because there are a lot of people, a lot of friends of the show who live in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
And I'd love to hear from you some recommendations of good places to get.
Yes, absolutely.
Like Lithuanian...
Say, for instance, sword canes or like I don't want a lot of just sort of dumb Russian military forgeries.
But, you know, if you've got some real interesting sort of places where they're just giving away cool stuff.
For cheap?
Yeah.
Might not even seem cheap to you.
Would it be a form of Latvian thrifting that you're looking for?
That's what I want.
I want a thing where things that are no longer or never were interesting to Latvians or Lithuanians or Estonians or even Belarusians.
but might be interesting to me where people tell me about those things in time for me to go look at them.
This is the first I'm hearing about this trip.
I don't know, for OPSEC reasons, are you able to talk about this trip?
Did you talk about something in your other program already?
I may have talked about it with Dan.
Oh, that was weeks ago, though.
Yeah, probably a long time ago.
What had happened was that I was – I have this motorcycle trip that I went on last year, and now I apparently do it every year.
A motorcycle trip where there are a bunch of guys that are all like – Motorcycle boys.
KTM super fanboys and motorcycle mechanics and racers and people that do wheelies and stuff.
Yep.
And they adopted me for whatever reason I don't know.
And now we go on a trip every year.
And this year we're going to eastern Oregon and driving around for like, I don't know, nine days or something, just popping wheelies.
I won't pop a single wheelie, but I'm going to be around them.
I'm going to be behind them pretty much.
And so we had this very tentative plan because everybody's everybody.
Everybody's doing the thing.
Yeah.
And the plan was to, I don't know, the third week of June, we were going to go drive around eastern Oregon.
And then I got a letter from the government the other day.
I opened it and read it and it said I was a sucker.
Is that right?
But they got a letter from these guys and they said, we got to move it.
We got to move the trip.
Because one of us got maybe invited to the Pikes Peak Hill Climb, which is a big deal in this circle of people that climb hills in motorcycles.
Okay.
So we got to move it.
We got to move it a week forward.
And I was like, no problem.
And weirdly, everybody on the thread was like, great, no problem.
Which means there's at least 10...
of these people don't have any problem moving a nine-day trip a week earlier of all the things that you have said to me uh in this episode that's the thing that i i i'm perhaps most confused by how do you get a block of time like that you could move on that time scale it's a it's it's impressive when i when i said sure no problem i pretty much assumed that like
Eight of the 10 guys would be like, what?
I can't just.
But it turns out they're all living a life.
Maybe that's part of motorcycle life.
Maybe maybe that it's that kind of attitude and that kind of openness to the open road that we call life that enables them to integrate that into their motorcycling and their life.
It must be.
It must be because, I mean, like, wow.
And I'm not complaining.
I don't mean to complain.
I don't want to sound like I'm complaining because I'm not.
I don't like going places, and I certainly wouldn't want to ride a motorcycle anywhere.
But that's a chunk of time.
Pretty nuts.
You go and you grab that banner in your calendar app and just move it?
My goodness.
Pretty nuts.
Anyway, so that happens.
Well, now wait, it gets better.
Okay.
That happened.
And I was like, oh, I guess I'm doing this instead of that.
And my daughter's mother said, oh, well, if you're doing the motorcycle trip then instead of that other time.
I'm going to be in Scotland because she does internet security.
She does web security.
Okay.
And she's at a conference in Scotland, some kind of black hat, white hat thing, gray hats, big hats, big wallets.
She says, I'm going to be in Scotland already.
And she's one of these –
She's one of these people that, although she's now a grown-up person that has a job, she still thinks about travel like a student.
She's still like, oh, well, it's too expensive to stay in a hotel.
We should stay in a youth hostel.
And I'm like, we are middle-aged people.
I'm not staying in a youth hostel.
Also, we don't have to stay in a youth hostel.
So she's like, well, I'm in Scotland already.
I don't want to come home without traveling.
you know, taking another week or 10 days to go do something, go to Portugal or whatever.
She says, why don't you load up our child and bring her over to Europe and we'll do some adventure.
And I was like, well, all right.
You know, cause the, cause the weekend, your calendar is really giving me the sweats.
It's crazy.
And it's all happening in the last, last week or two.
Uh, uh, the week that I'm in the motorcycle trip and, uh, and, uh, my daughter's mother is on Scotland.
Uh, our baby will be at the grandparents.
And when she's at the grandparents, she doesn't care whether we live or die, whether she ever sees us again.
Yeah.
That's a mixed blessing.
So I will go.
So she's not going to even notice we're gone.
It'll be her summer break.
And then I go get her, retrieve her and say, guess what, sweetie?
We're going on an airplane.
She knows about it already.
But so so the initial plan was like, why don't we go to Portugal?
And I'm like, yeah, Portugal's great.
But first of all, I've been there a lot.
And second of all, you know, come on.
Why don't we go to Portugal?
Come on.
She's like, well, what do you want to do?
And I was like, what about Malta?
And she's like, Malta?
And she's somebody that likes to go on the computer and find plane tickets.
She likes it.
She actually likes it.
Oh, my goodness.
Now, I would rather be in a Dick Cheney underground shipping container than go online and buy a plane ticket.
But she likes it.
That's amazing.
So she comes back and she says, in order to get to Malta, we have to fly into, you know, Slobovia.
And then we rent, like, motorized skateboards.
It was complicated.
And she's like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I say, blah, blah, blah.
Eventually she's like, well, where do you want to go?
And I just said, Latvia.
Whoa.
And she was like, okay, we're going to Latvia.
And I was like, well, hey, if we're going to, why don't we start?
in Lithuania and go out of Estonia.
Like, I want to see them all while I'm there.
And she's like, okay, we're going, we're landing in one place.
It's just more typing for her.
It's as difficult for her as typing.
I'm having a panic attack just thinking about what it looks like on a calendar, like three orders of reality away, and she's just typing.
She's just... And so we're flying into Tallinn.
We're renting a car.
And we're going down the road as you do.
And we're initially we were going to be there a week.
And then once we started to make plans, it began.
And she bought the tickets.
This is the best part.
She bought the tickets.
We had plans.
We were landing in town and we were flying out of Vilnius.
And then within 10 hours, she's like, we're not there long enough.
And I said, why?
We're there for a week.
And she was like, yeah, but it's not long enough.
I said, is this just one of those FOMOs?
And she was like, maybe, who cares?
And now we're there for like 10, 11 days.
Oh, boy.
Wow, wow, wow, wow.
So what happened is that now I'm going to MaxFunCon, as you do.
Oh, my God.
You got dragon-sized holes in your fort.
I'm doing a little mini tour of Friendly Fire.
We're just testing the waters.
We're just doing five shows.
So I'm only going to be home for one day in June.
Wow.
And I didn't know any of this the 1st of April.
Oh.
Didn't know a single bit of this.
None of this was happening except there was some nascent motorcycle trip plan that I didn't quite remember what month it was happening.
Okay.
And so I talked to my mom and she says, don't get sick.
And I say, how do I not get sick?
And she says, don't.
You know what she said?
She said, aloha.
Hashtag aloha?
Yeah, she said, you need to not give a good goddamn about anything.
Like, no matter what, you don't care.
You don't care what's for dinner.
Keep out the stressors that will contribute to one of those little bugs getting in you.
That's right.
She says, if you spend all afternoon at the airport because something...
Don't worry about it.
If somebody gives you some food and it's wrong, don't worry about it.
If you have to walk from here to there instead of take a whatever, don't worry about it.
You don't worry about anything.
You just go with the flow.
100% go with the flow and you won't get sick and everything will be fine.
But if you stop even for a second, if you clinch even for a second because you get bad customer service from somebody in Latvia –
Then the sick is going to descend on you and then you're going to be doing all this and you're going to be miserable.
And I was like, hashtag aloha.
This is where all... I'm on a 14-hour flight.
You've been training for this for months.
I have been.
I'm on a 14-hour flight with an eight-year-old.
And it's just going to be massively hashtag aloha.
She's going to be aloha because...
Because she can be aloha, you know?
I mean, it's not in the nature of it.
But in the event that for whatever reason, you know, heaven forfend, she's not hashtag aloha, that's not allowed to affect your hashtag aloha.
You need to stay in the zone.
Thank you.
It's like a movie.
I forget.
Some movie was like a version of Speed.
Maybe it was a TV show where you can't get your heartbeat over a certain rate.
And you're nervous about your heart rate going up.
There it is.
You know what I mean?
You kind of locked your keys inside the key.
But now you need to stay in the Aloha Zone regardless of what comes up.
And what's nice about my relationship with my little girl is that she often gets upset as a form of performance.
for a certain audience.
And I am not that audience.
Oh, interesting.
Because just to clarify, for those who are following the Dramatis Percent, IE, you're going to be going solo on that flight with your eight-year-old.
She and I are going to be traveling solo for a couple of days together.
You're not going to get a lot of breaks, as they say.
No, we have to get from one place to another in order to get from one place to another.
And then once we're there, we have to get from one place to another.
You've got to travel to travel.
That's right.
But what we have all noticed over time is that if she has a certain audience of people comprised of certain people, she will be much more upset about whether or not the bacon is crispy or whether or not the lights are a certain temperature than if it's just the two of us.
And when it's just the two of us, she really goes with the flow of
Queens of the Stone Age record.
Mm-hmm.
She just is like, oh, well, I mean, it's not that she doesn't get upset, but she manages her feelings a little bit better just because she doesn't use it as a springboard to a broader emotional situation.
Right.
She's not trying to go to the macaroni and cheese store as hard with me as she is with other people, because if I say we're not going to the macaroni and cheese store, there's not any other kind of.
Like there's not a there's not a second.
You can't open a second front.
You know, there's no it's not like you bring out the big cannon and and lob the explosive shells into the castle.
It's just sort of like the macaroni and cheese store.
We're going to we're going to go to that a different day.
And so there's so the performance isn't really it's not productive.
And so we just she and I just sort of bobble along.
Interesting.
OK.
So we have a good time.
We also you know, we explore different systems.
So if we're on an airplane, there are a lot of systems.
To explore.
We get to keep moving and get out of the way.
Yeah.
And then once we're on there, we're conscious of all the people around us, which takes, as you know, a lot of energy.
Maybe try to figure out who farted.
Who farted, right?
That's one.
That was stupid.
People do fart on a plane, though.
Oh, they do.
It's a fart tube, Myrna.
It's a little gift for everybody in coach.
Here you go.
Yeah.
This is for you, long pigs.
Will you have... I've only been... I've been trying to follow this through your other program as much as I can.
Yes.
Will your housing-related situation things be settled by the time you go?
Here's the double, triple.
The one day...
of june that i am home is the day that my house closes whoa so you gotta you you okay well i got up to the part where you had several different people looking at it and making offers and there was one you liked over the other but you didn't want to be you know uh duplicitous about it so you got you're doing this so what's happening what happened was i got a bunch of offers i liked i
None of them were offers that made me feel like, hooray, triumph.
But they were all fine.
They were all just like, oh, right.
Not every time you sell a house is it like an incredible triumph.
A lot of times you just do it.
It's a success.
But it's not a thing where the rest of your life you're like, and then I bought a thing for a dollar and
And I sold it for a million dollars because it was a Picasso.
I got it at a thrift store.
This was just a thing, a thing I bought, and I sold it later, and it was fine.
But I got these offers, and one of them was a family that I liked.
I thought they would be good, good for the neighborhood, good for the house.
Yeah.
And another was kind of an anonymous offer.
couple of young people.
You think they were Saudi?
No, I think they were young people that worked in tech.
Okay.
And it's not that I'm against young people in tech, but I knew more about the other... Or Saudis, yeah.
Or Saudis.
Sometimes people need to move a lot of money around, according to TV.
Well, this is not the house I don't think that you would do that if you were a Saudi.
Which makes it perfect.
Interesting.
Good point.
I hadn't considered that.
I don't have a single problem with it.
Well, I do.
But in your case, you're on the horns of a dilemma because you want your home to go to a good new home.
I do.
I did.
I did.
You did.
But the problem was the people that I liked had...
A little bit of, you know, they were one of the things probably that was like most likable about them was that getting my house was a little bit of a stretch for them.
Oh, you're pulling for them.
And so they needed they needed to be accommodated.
Because they didn't have the money.
Like down payment wise?
Down payment wise, they didn't, the bank.
Big credit wise.
Yeah, they just needed an awful lot of help.
Yeah.
And for my part, I had spent the last year in both professionally and personally feeling like every day there was a new whammy.
Yeah.
You wake up every morning and you're like, no whammies, no whammies.
And then
It's another whammy.
And I just was so exhausted of whammies, particularly since when this house went on the market, everybody said, well, good luck.
You're going to sell it in two days for 100 million bitcoins.
And then it was on the market for five weeks without a single offer.
I was just like, I really don't want any whammies.
And then the people, the Saudis, let's call them.
Sure.
I came in and they were like, here's an offer where there are no whammies.
We're taking all the possible whammies out of the offer.
Because, you know, real estate, you got this kind of whammy, you got that kind of whammy.
You see them out in the distance.
And it felt like the family that I love.
I mean, like, is it one of those things?
It feels like it's one of those things where there's one way this could go right.
And then like five, four or five ways that this could go wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the type of thing where they would say, oh, well, we did an inspection and the hot water heater needs to be replaced and we'd like you to replace the hot water heater.
At which point now I'm in a situation where I sold the house, but not yet.
I have to spend more money or I have to... Their offer now becomes less of a good offer.
Right, you're not out yet.
Right.
And...
and the other people the saudis had even more of those things they were like this julissa and robert saudi julissa and robert saudi had uh had a bunch of those things like oh well because they were the you know they're saudi so they were like oh we're going to inspect it we're going to knock you down every chance we get um but the problem is here's the real estate secret if your house goes and gets marked as pending
which is what it's marked when someone has made an offer, you've accepted it, but it hasn't closed.
And then for whatever reason, the people who are buying it say, we want a new water heater.
And you go, I really can't go down.
And they say, well, we're backing out.
Then your house goes back on the market.
It looks distressed.
Yes, it looks like somebody.
I get it.
I get it.
It's sort of like to previous conversations.
It's like you're closer to having agreed than you would prefer.
And now you bear the dark mark.
Well, like, yeah.
So, I mean, like you look a little bit like damaged goods.
Like, why did that go wrong?
What was up with that?
Because then people are like, oh, did they need a new water heater and you wouldn't buy it?
You know, it's just it's bad.
It's a look, bad look.
So anyway, I decide to sell it to the nice family.
It means that they're going to be a bunch of whammies, but, you know, it's they're better than the other guys and and whatever.
And then the Saudis come in out of nowhere and they're like, we will waive all inspections, all financing questions.
we will give you a close date and the thing will close because there's nothing that can stop it closing.
Oh, they're giving you a clear path to an exit with no whammies.
No whammies.
They basically say no whammies.
No whammies.
Which in effect made their offer worth way more money because there's no, everybody else was going to try and chip me down.
So as bad as it felt,
to not sell it to the nice people.
It did not feel bad to spend four more months waiting for the whammies to drop.
But what that means is it closes on the one day that I'm back.
And it's totally a coincidence that I'm back that day.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like it's in the Tetris game.
The weird irony is there's exactly one slot and of course that fit.
It was that day.
Wow.
And
All that means is that I come back that one day and I just have to stay hashtag Aloha.
Yeah.
Now, if that all happens, they agreed to let me stay there an extra month.
But what that means is that then I get back from my trip to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
Mm-hmm.
possibly Finland and Belarus, and I have two weeks to get all my stuff out of the house.
Ah, John, how can you tolerate this?
Well, I have to stay hashtag low.
You're doing the trench run at the Battle of Yavin.
Bombs are dropping.
You've got to get a two-meter target, right?
It's a two-meter target, but it's got to be there.
You got to use what?
Is it proton torpedoes?
I have to use a Gaia bomb.
Oh, God.
You're going to assault the Earth and then start over, take away the sun.
Sean, how are you not so stressed out?
How are you staying aloha?
Spock is going to be alive, though.
That's the thing.
Spock's going to come back.
As long as we find a way to remember him.
holy crap john you i don't want to say anything because i want to keep you in that aloha state but that's aloha that's a lot i gotta stay there a lot's happening a lot is happening it is it is and that's why i want some recommendations i got a letter today from someone in latvia cool who said he's a you know he's i think he's
maybe a little bit younger than we are.
And, um, he said, I really, you know, it's great that you're coming to Latvia.
I really want you to enjoy yourself.
Uh, and then he, like he spent three paragraphs disparaging his city.
There's no place to park.
Is that customary in Latvia?
I think it's typical of, uh, of Baltic peoples, but also I think you would, you know, like, I think it's somewhat maybe a product of being slightly younger than us and,
and feeling maybe it's the thing where you introduce yourself and go i suck in it could be like living in florida or like you know when you when you bring it up you feel like there's probably some things that you should say before you get to the part you want to say right as an explanation right kind of yeah like some context yeah nobody asked for but still but yeah and that's the thing that's the other thing it's like if you're i think the younger thing is maybe don't send a three-page email when a when a two paragraph email will suffice yeah
But that just is a product of once you get a little older, you got a kid, you don't have time to sit and write a bunch of sended letters to people, you
Anyway, I'm going to read that letter.
I didn't have a chance to do it earlier because as I scrolled through it, it kept going.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I get you.
But I think when this episode airs, I will be either there or on my way there.
So I want to hear people tell me what to do while I'm there.
I'll ignore 90% of your suggestions, but maybe there's one that's pure gold.
Yeah.
And I'll just be like aloha-ing the shit out of it.
I've always wanted to go to the Baltics.
The area comports with a lot of my interests, right?
It's part of the grand duchy of, you know, Lithuania, which is stuff that I like.
They got all this Russia time that I don't think anybody there is happy with.
And Russia's breathing down their necks again, which nobody's happy with.
But the thing is, here we are here.
We sit over here and they're sitting there every time.
Every time Putin rattles his saber, they can hear it in their houses.
And we're just we're just playing first person shooter games here.
We got no knowledge of it.
Could be Russia invades Estonia.
And we don't even hear about it because BuzzFeed shuts down or whatever.
Right.
We only hear about it on Infowars, and we don't listen to Infowars.
Have you looked at the coat of arms of Latvia?
No.
I just sent you a link.
Not recently.
And it's really fascinating.
What's great is, I guess, I was aware, and there actually is an old podcast bit about this, about the way you describe a coat of arms, but I didn't realize how sophisticated...
uh, the descriptions are, so I'm going to literally just read what it says here on the internet science page.
The crest is an arc of three mullets or, I guess an or is a thing.
Could be.
Oh, you think so?
Three mullets or, Oh God, you sure?
Like or like gold finger.
Yes.
Now, for somebody like me who doesn't speak coat of arms, what that doesn't say is...
You love the band Argent.
Hold your head up, big zombies fan.
But in this case, I am loving the recursion.
It's crazy because there's a lion and a griffin.
On the outside, holding up the shield.
Holding the shield.
But then inside the shield, there's a lion and a griffin.
Boom, a lion and a griffin.
And they're in the same relation to one another.
It's not like they flipped or something.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's saying the same thing twice.
It's a hat on a hat.
If I could say all respect to Latvia.
Now, wait a minute.
Does the second griffin, I'm talking about the inner griffin, is it holding a sword?
He looks like the second griffin is holding the sword.
The second lion is just going, isn't he?
Yeah, his mouth is more open.
His tongue is more out.
Yeah.
The second lion is more, but he's kind of like back on his heels a little bit.
Uh-huh.
I fear the second lion more than the first lion.
Actually, I fear the second Griffin more than the first lion.
The second Griffin is armed.
The second griffin is armed and just seems more like he's more aggressive.
The first griffin looks like he just woke up from like a little unexpected nap.
Yeah.
The other griffin is very focused.
The lion and the griffin and the wardrobe that are holding up the shield.
Yes.
They have a job to do.
They're holding a shield.
Oh, absolutely.
Where the smaller lion and griffin are just fighters.
Yes.
Yes.
But then there's like some mistletoe and some Christmas garland underneath.
I don't know if that's technically what they call it, but that's what it reads as to me.
Boy, I'm glad you nailed it with that ore thing.
Oh, really?
And Argent is silver, right?
Argent.
Argent.
Second, Argent.
First, Azure.
Azure is blue.
A Gryphon Segrient brandishing in the Dexter claw a sword.
So Dexter must mean right.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dexter as opposed to sinister left.
Yeah.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Two oak branches fructed.
Oh, my God.
The compartment.
Dexter, Alliant, Rampant Ghouls, or Jewels.
You're on the supporters?
You're on the supporters.
I'm looking at the compartment where you got two oak branches fructed vert tied together by a ribbon sanguine charged with a bar argent.
Holy shit.
Will you give me a shirt, like in whatever a Latvian large is, if you find it?
Can you give me a Latvian large with the coat of arms of Latvia on it?
Oh, Latvian large.
It's going to take somebody from Big Wallet.
Safe travels.
Uh...