Ep. 435: "Comedy Knives"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hey, Merlin, how are you?
I'm doing great.
How's it going with you?
Well, I've got a situation where I'm listening to you in mono.
And so it's going to be, you know.
Aren't I always in mono?
I'm sorry.
I'm listening to you in one ear.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Is it your good ear?
Is it your good ear?
I'm listening with my good ear.
Yes, in fact, it is my good ear.
But yeah, this happened with Dan last week.
I lost my...
eighth-inch to quarter-inch stereo adapter.
Oh, God.
The weak link.
The weak link in the chain.
I could only find the eighth-inch to quarter-inch mono adapter.
That's one of those pieces of kit that I know I have conservatively four or five of.
And they're either everywhere, nowhere, or in one place that I can't find.
Like my downside is I get organized or as I say, organized.
That is your downside.
I do.
But like, like sometimes you ever do the thing and this happens with packing and travel where it's like, I know I've got at home, you got, Oh, I've collected all the five pairs of scissors, but I'm not sure where they all are in the case of those guys.
Now I've gotten in the habit of every time I find one of those, I put it on my desk.
All the things that I start to become like a post-it note person because I know I'm going to need it.
But will I have it in the right place?
And your cans require that.
Your cans require the converter adapter.
The cans.
Now you're using a technical term for people listening in.
Cans are what we in the business call headphones.
I mean, is that like a normie thing?
Did I just pick that up or is that a thing that people say?
No, that's in the recording studio.
They always say cans.
Well, Jay-Z, on a number of occasions, if memory serves, Jay-Z says, I think he says, turn me up in my headphones.
And they leave that in, you know, it's one of those like Beatles joking around moments.
Jay-Z's always imploring them to turn him up in his headphones.
Turn him up in his headphones.
That's the rap term for it, the hip hop term, perhaps.
As an artist, I think that you can say whatever you want to say, but the guy on the other side of the glass is going to be like, you know, just adjust it in your cans or whatever.
You know, they like to say cans.
Oh, they like to do the mix.
John, are there other terms, if you can say, if this isn't considered speaking out of school...
Are there other terms like that that would be useful for people outside the industry to know?
Like an SM57, does that like have a funny name?
Are there funny names for other kinds of things?
Oh, I know one.
The drum, the seat that the drummer sits on is called the throne.
That's right.
It's the throne.
That's precisely right.
Yeah, so they could feel like the king, you know, even though they're the drummer.
I would always say typically, you know, because again, I'm the artist, I would say the drummer's chair.
Why don't you move the drummer's seat, the drummer's specific seat?
Oh, his little stool, like a tiny tin.
Yeah, the stool, exactly.
That's what it is.
It's a stool.
How is that harder to say than throne?
Stool.
But yes, you're right.
I have conservatively probably...
30 eighth inch to quarter inch adapters.
And I have done, as you just described, I've at different times in my life, put them all in one Ziploc bag.
Yep.
But where's the Ziploc?
I've put one in every bag I own.
I have, you know, sometimes with that, with the scissors, for instance, I collect them all in a place and then I Johnny Appleseed them around the house, like one in every bathroom.
That's the term I use, you're deploying them.
You're deploying the scissors in the places where there's a need for scissors.
But the thing is, at least in my house, and I'm going to guess maybe in yours,
The proper deployment of something like a scissor is not honored by certain members of the family because now they go, oh, there's the scissors I need.
Now it's gone.
And now we don't have our nice poultry shears.
Well, that's, and the poultry shears were the innovation that I never saw coming.
The kitchen scissor was a thing that I never conceived of or heard of until what?
five years ago maybe i mean i know there's a dedicated set of scissors that doesn't leave the the kitchen and maybe specifically doesn't leave this particular drawer because when you're cooking chicken breasts and chicken breasts they get done on the outside and then you want to spot we spatchcock you
know well so we batch talking i bought my lady nice shears for a for a holiday gift for once i got something that she wanted they're improbably sharp and those had to be put into like we had to have one of our occasional like surpassingly occasional seriously these are not for you these scissors are not here do not touch these scissors they are too sharp and it's for when mama want to spatchcock
Mm-hmm.
That's not for crafts.
If you're cooking Italian sausage, a lot of the time you've been cooking them a long time and you're like, these sausage have to be done.
And then you cut into them and it's like, nope, the insides are still not cooked.
And that's not a thing.
You don't want to eat sausage rare.
Nope.
And so these kitchen shears, they're incredible.
You know, zap, zap, zap, zap.
It's a thing.
It's a thing.
They're closer to ammunition than a tool in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And somebody like me that likes his food in chunks.
It's the perfect, it's the perfect chunk of it.
You like a hardy, rustic cut.
I do.
I do.
Yeah.
But I often will look up and see, uh, in, in the other room, my daughter using the, uh, food chunker shears to cut a piece of cardboard.
And I'm like, ah, yeah.
No.
Oh God.
How do I, how do I begin?
I mean, one problem is, you know, I have different kinds of tendencies that are at war, including tendencies from the past and tendency.
Yeah.
Fair.
And maybe tendencies from the future that are just visiting a little bit where I'm trying, I'm using thought and physical technologies to try and improve my life.
But so when you describe, well, the one, the one here, let's just get it out of the way.
Cause this is well-worn territory.
I can't keep anything around.
All of the things go wherever they're going to go.
Sometimes at one point the fire extinguisher was put away because it was regarded as not being aesthetic.
Yeah, right, right.
Because when there's a fire, you're going to really want to start hunting for the fire extinguisher.
Put it somewhere where we can't find it.
Somewhere where it's not in the way.
Out of sight, out of fire, you know?
So I just want to get out of the way.
First of all, 90% of this problem has nothing to do with me.
I'm an extremely responsible chief operating officer.
I keep buying more pairs of scissors.
My latest, I like the OXO kitchen scissors for a go-to scissor.
It's a nice scissor.
You can take them apart and clean them.
They're real nice.
And there's one on a hook.
There's one up here at different places.
I also like my Gerber utility knives to be deployed.
I have about 14 of these little knives.
It's basically a tiny carpet knife.
Mm-hmm.
And they're great for everything.
And, you know, once you start using the Gerber utility blade, you never go back.
You don't go back to some cute thing for opening Amazon boxes and cutting up airbags.
Oh, dear.
Oh, no, I'll send you it.
So this is the Gerber Gear 2241830 at EAB Pocket Knife Stainless Steel.
Is this familiar to you at all?
Will you just send me a picture of it?
Yeah.
Oh, I am familiar with this knife.
In fact, I have one of these knives.
It was given to me by a friend of the show, Jesse Uyeda.
Friend of the show.
Yeah, she's also a knife person and is somebody that's using these things as tools.
And she sent me one of these or gave me one.
She might have even palmed it to me like a challenge coin.
And I do have this and I use it around the house.
I just never thought of it as an Amazon knife.
Uh, you know, I just, I use it to dissect frogs.
No, now you know.
Well, now I know.
It's a, it's a very, it's a very, it's very, well, relatively inexpensive and I deploy them because.
I'm currently still using comedy knives to do a lot of those jobs.
What?
Tell him, tell him about a, oh, is this like a jokey, like a Walmart paring knife?
No, no, no.
Nothing like that.
Like, uh, you know, when I was a young person and this may or may not be true of you, but the, but the, but my father's side was,
Which I'm realizing after having gone on this long drive across the country and thinking about it a lot, my father's side always considered themselves fancier than my mother's side.
And they were fancy enough that they never accepted my mother into the family because they felt like she wasn't fancy enough.
Whether or not, however much David loved her, she didn't really fit in with the profile of the family's perception.
Right.
Right.
And that was always a source of kind of like wry laughter, uh, on between me and my mother, because of course my father and his family were always getting in kerfuffles, uh, you know, and sinking the family car, uh,
And whatever else.
And my mother was practical and honest and worth right.
She doesn't put on airs for anybody.
That's right.
And so the fanciness was always like, oh, come on, you know, you guys.
And how fancy are you exactly?
Because you have no money and you're a bunch of, you know, you're a bunch of white Russians.
But in going back to the family towns, it became clear to me on this trip, my father's family was fancy and my mother's family was not fancy.
Is that a fact?
That was true 200 years back.
My mother's family wasn't fancy 200 years back.
Oh, they were born into it.
Yeah, they were making their own furniture back then.
And my dad, you know, my dad's family were, you know, had like probably six knives on the table at dinner because each knife had a different thing.
okay but um but so oh this this never happens merlin no you're good i was telling you about my gerber utility knife and you were telling me you were using comedy knives oh thank you wow that's just so you probably don't know this about me but i pay 100 attention i almost i hear almost nothing anyone says in life owing partly to my hearing and partly to my inattention but um when i do a podcast i do listen to the other person
I think a lot of people don't appreciate that.
A lot of people out there, they're checking their email or something.
I'm listening to you.
I'm 100% on you.
I'm just worried that I might have long COVID.
When was the last time you heard me start into a story and then not know where I was?
More recently than you think, apparently.
Wow, ouch.
No, no, no, no.
I just mean in the sense of...
You need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.
If we use our memory to try and recall how good our memory is, now we've got two problems.
Okay, okay, okay.
I see what you're saying.
Talk to John Syracuse.
He's got a lot of thoughts on this.
You put it back to me.
You got my ball back in the court.
And what I was saying was my family, my father's family, all had letter openers.
The kind that looks like a dull knife.
Yeah, they sat down at a certain test.
That's the kind you get from a bank that goes, slish.
No, I don't even know about the knife you get from a bank.
Sometimes they have a magnifying glass, John.
It's a little plastic dingus with an arm above it and a tiny little, not that sharp blade.
And you go, slish.
And you cut through your envelope like that.
Now, letter opener, that's a fancy piece of work.
I think my dad's family went to banks where the man, where first of all, they did all their banking in an, they actually were invited into the office of the person that had an office and they sat in there and there was probably a letter opener on that desk too.
That's a different time.
My gosh.
So my great uncle, you know, he had these letter openers on his desk and a letter opener was an opportunity for someone to demonstrate that they had been around the world because the letter opener is clearly from India or it's from, you know, from Japan or something.
It's an opportunity to have a non-sharp knife from another culture, South Africa or something.
And you go, wow, that's a cool letter opener.
Yeah.
And it's almost like ladies with long nails, because you can open a letter with pretty much anything or nothing.
But to have this bespoke device for the gentleman who gets so much mail, and obviously you're not going to want to screw up your manicure or whatever.
And so you have this thing that could be like an Indiana Jones letter opener.
That belongs in a museum.
But you've got that.
Maybe it's made of a skull.
Something, or maybe it's ivory.
Right.
Yes, that's right.
It often was ivory or some kind of hardwood you can't find anymore.
Some hand card thing.
I can't find my hardwood.
Bonk.
And, you know, my mother could open a letter with a perfect, you know, none of them ripped into letters like I do.
I don't like it.
Or when people tear the end off, I don't care for that.
And they blow into it, I don't care for that.
No, no, no.
That's too fussy.
But my mom could open a letter along the top of the seam and she would just do it by looking at it hard.
And the letter would open for her.
If it knows what's good for it.
That's right.
Now, my father's family had all these fancy non-knives, and it was a thing.
Yeah, I think one of them had one that had a rhino horn as a handle.
Wow.
So what happened was it translated over to me.
Of course, I have all these mannerisms and affectations that date back to Victorian times, and I don't even know where they came from, but I have all these knives that are...
You know, uh, relics or they are, um, talismans and, and some of them are talismans of something.
I don't even know where it came from.
What is this?
My, oh, uncle Jack, uncle Jack had a, had a, uh, a letter opener that was made out of a yak horn.
Yeah.
A yak horn.
A yak horn.
It's the spiral.
It was like an Ibex horn or something.
Damn.
So anyway, this Gerber knife that you're talking about sounds very practical.
And, um, and I'm not sure exactly how many yak horned letter openers I'm prepared to replace with a Gerber knife, but there are other things that you need.
You need a knife for that.
You can't use a yak horn.
There's certain things in life.
I've been compiling a document with everything that I know in it.
Is that going to be available for distribution?
Oh, yeah.
It's just up on GitHub right now, but I'm going to make a website eventually of everything I've learned in life that's good.
And there's a lot of good stuff in there, a lot of things that have spun out of this show, things I had to learn in life.
But for example, one of them on there, which seems very arbitrary,
Unless you know or you don't know.
And then you know, you know, you know.
Buy the nicest screwdrivers you can afford.
Oh, boy.
You just said it, sister.
Okay.
Because, yeah.
Because you think you've used some screwdrivers.
Oh, you can use a dime.
No.
Get good screwdrivers.
The other thing I do is I have one of those magnetizer things where you can magnetize or demagnetize the tip.
Those two things together will change the game, but getting nice like craftsman and above level screwdrivers, especially kind of at the smaller sizes, you don't understand that there are sharp blades and not sharp blades.
And I'm talking Phillips too.
You can have a sharp Phillips, but like if you've been using like a screwdriver that like just ended up at your house for years and then you use a good screwdriver, you're not going to believe that.
The difference, okay?
And that's neat.
Do you run out and knock on the side of the Snap-on tools van and ask the guy to sell them to you, you know, on the down low?
Like, where are you getting better than craps and screwdrivers?
Do you really want to know?
I do.
I research everything endlessly.
I research and I have whole levels to how I do this kind of research because Google's mostly useless, but...
I've got like a three-step process.
Wirecutter or you've moved on to, you have a 10-step process.
Wirecutter is where you go to find out the second cheapest one.
It's not like it used to be, but- Throwing shade.
Hard shade coming in hot.
It can be helpful, but that's just one of the stages.
You go, if you're going to Google for something and you search for what?
Best screwdrivers.
Well, you're going to get a lot of garbage, but you will- I did best hairbrush yesterday.
Really, but you'll often find what are called, used to be called thin affiliate sites, where somebody has, and I've done this, you can basically skin, with your own skin, you can basically put the Amazon store on your site.
I see that every day.
And so you come up with all of these, like, hey, here's the highest rated,
Bloop.
Like this kind of thing.
Okay, we'll get to that.
You look at five different sites and all of them have five different number one brushes.
It's true for air cleaners.
There was a brush made out of boar hair that was $270.
That used to be the boar standard.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But okay, so the final step, the third step, because there's always three things in there.
The third step is you, once you found what looked like pretty good things on Amazon, now you're going to go to FakeSpot and ReviewMeta, which are two sites that use science to determine which of those reviews are sketchy or not.
FakeSpot and ReviewMeta.
Yeah, and if you use, well, unfortunately, I don't have it for Safari, but on other browsers, there are extensions.
So I have an extension for Firefox.
I use this is really interesting so if I finally got into the third stage the vetting and I'm down to like deciding I go to Firefox fire that up I paste my search returns from Amazon into Firefox and the extension beep boop boop the extension sorts everything on the page by how likely the review is to be useful
So now last night, now this is going to be very interesting.
You there.
We'll talk about this in the after show.
Go ahead.
Well, no, no, no.
This is wonderful because last night, so a lot of times I'm doing omnibus research because I start to do something.
I start to look at something and then I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
You've been doing the show long enough that it must occasionally occur to you, hey, this would be really good for omnibus.
Exactly.
And the whole premise of omnibus was that we would do the things that we were already looking at
that we were already interested in.
And then at a certain point in the research, we would go, Oh, Hey, exactly.
Right.
This is something that I could do a show about, but it wasn't like we were out looking for shows.
It was that shows would find us.
And so I was, the other day I did a, I did a, um,
a show on, and it hasn't aired yet, but you're going to, you're going to hear it someday soon.
And that was, I did a show on Merkins because of course I was doing something and I was like, Merkins, hmm, that's an interesting thing.
Merkins are fascinating to me.
And then I went down and I started looking at more stuff about Merkins and I was like, after 20 minutes, I said, I
This is an omnibus.
What do you know?
And this is one of those omnibuses I like to do, which makes Ken very uncomfortable.
He doesn't want to think about Merkins.
He's probably never.
He has to think about, he's a very thoughtful, very intelligent man.
And it's fun though to sit there and think, knowing what you know about somebody and their foibles.
It's fun that he, to get to Merkin, he's going to have to think about some of the adjacent equipment.
You're exactly right.
It's not a thing that's ever come up.
And I bet he knows what the word means because that's how he wins Jeopardy's.
But I don't know if he's the book.
much thought into it.
And this is a, this is a pubic wig.
That's a pubic wig.
But, um, last night on one of these, like, huh, I wonder about that.
I wonder about this.
I wonder about that.
I started to do research on, uh, these adult dating sites and,
Because it had crossed a threshold of interest.
Some of your famous Pete Townsend research.
Yeah, I'm doing some Pete Townsend research.
Exactly right.
And I wanted to know whether Ashley Madison, the website where married people go to like...
publicly cheat on, on their spouses.
Which had a huge data breach that ruined a lot of lives.
Right.
Ruined a lot of lives.
Right.
A data breach that, that, that I was trying to figure out has this data breach ruined the site forever?
Is the site full of bots?
What, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I was, I was Googling around, you know, does Ashley Madison, is it authentic?
Are people actually on their
Like, are these real women in particular, right?
Are they successfully cheating on one another?
Or is this a thing where it's a, like a bot factory and it's a dangerous, scary place.
And also they're milking you for money with no results.
You spend all day.
Monetizing your desperation.
Monetizing your desperation.
That's exactly.
And I, you know, that might even be the title of the ultimate episode, but.
Okay.
So I'm looking at reviews.
Is Mashley Addison.
Mashley Addison.
Is it a real thing?
And there are all these reviews that are like, is Mashley Addison real?
And then under it.
Talk about like when you get down that little section that has the like, they've taken what you think you're looking for and phrased it as a question other people have asked.
Yeah.
And then you click on that and it takes you, you know, it's not usually a Reddit.
You keep diving further in like more like this and they get increasingly hilarious where it's like, you know, is our floors real or something?
Like you get into this really good stuff.
Can aircraft carriers fly?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I'm two or three pages down into reading reviews and all of them, the title of the review seems like it was written by a real person.
And it's really like, you know, let's get to the bottom of this.
You know, we tried out Mashley Addison and let's see.
And I'm thinking like, is this some wire cutter thing where they actually tried to go on dates with people?
And did they actually like end up cheating on those pieces?
How far does this go?
Yeah, exactly.
How did you get like, maybe get into like a multi-month relationship before you felt like, you know, you've gone basically deep cover to find out like, well, how real is Mashley?
Or did you, did you get into nine relationships?
Right.
Because there are all these, there are all these review sites that are like, you're saying, they're just like, what's the best hairbrush that I'm just skimming this site so that I can get an Amazon kickback.
But then there's the fellow that goes and eats nothing but McDonald's for a month or the guy that goes around the country going to Starbucks.
I know people are prepared to go the distance for their dumb idea.
I like the famous one.
I don't, I usually don't care for those.
They're just transparently stupid, but there's the one where the person went to like Chili's or Applebee's for the, like some endless, not endless pasta, obviously, but they were seeing like how long they could spend at the restaurant for the all you can eat thing.
You know what I mean?
I respect that kind of journalism.
When I first moved to Seattle, I didn't have a place to live and I would stay up all night walking around in the rain, uh, sucking my thumb because I was very dramatic.
And then during the day they would, there was a certain moment where they would open the Godfather's pizza because they had all you can eat lunch pizza.
Right.
It was terrible.
It was terrible, but I would wait until the, you know, the person came with the key and unlocked the front door of the, of the Godfather's.
So you get pizza and a warm place to sit.
Yeah, I would come in, shake off the rain, you know, pay the $5 or whatever for the all-you-can-eat pizza, and then I would get a little tray of pizza, I would go sit in the furthest back corner booth, and then I would put my head against the window and sleep.
That was...
Not the highest point.
You know, as my mom used to say, like if you're 45 and you have a missing tooth, it's not a sign you're thriving.
And if you are sleeping at noon in a pizza restaurant.
She doesn't put on airs for anybody.
You know, I'm not, I was not represented.
I mean, there are people that were my age that already had started software companies and already were driving around in Lamborghinis and I'm sleeping in the Godfather's.
It's the pizza, if memory serves, it's the pizza you can't refuse.
I could not refuse it at that point because, you know, there were all those guys.
Later on, I had a friend that worked in a porno theater, like an old-fashioned one where they showed 35-millimeter movies where everybody had giant Merkins.
Oh.
And...
He said about 50% of his clientele on the 11 o'clock to 4 a.m.
shift because it was 24 hours a day.
And he had the night shift where he's, you know, and it's reels.
He's, you know, he's changing reels halfway through this hour and 40 minute long.
movie where the vacuum cleaner salesman comes and so forth.
And he said, you know, most of his clientele in the middle of the night are just guys who have figured out that you pay $5 to get in a movie theater, you have a warm place to sleep.
Yep.
It was like, we're just a hotel, basically.
And anybody that's in here actually for the porn
they're the real weird I mean there's 40 people in the theater right now and they're really I feel like this is why home video was so disruptive like in that case the guys who were there for the as your physician might say the on label reason of being at a men's cinema you know a lot of those guys they probably came in you know loaded for bear
And, you know, it might be 15, 20 minutes in, they're done.
What are you going to do?
You're going to wait till you reload?
You're going to force fluids?
You know what I mean?
Except if you are somebody who is looking for a place to engage with someone else.
I see.
Then you meet there.
Ashley Addison for the cinephile man.
Exactly.
You either take someone there or you meet them out in the town.
Oh, you mean like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
Exactly.
You go there and you're like, hey, you want to go to a movie with me?
Oh, okay.
Swedish, yeah.
And you end up at the Apple Theater or whatever.
Calls you a little piece of chicken.
But...
So in doing this deep dive, I could not find a single website that purported to be reviewing the actual success or failure rate of Mashley Addison because every one of them ended up having the exact same text.
Yeah.
Which was like, how, Hey, here's how you sign up and here's what the features are.
And we really did this and looked into this and here are what some of the features were that we discovered.
And it was like, none of this has anything to do with whether or not you ended up cheating on your wife on this site.
And that feels like, where's the deep dive, right?
I knew a guy named Gregor.
I still know him.
Gregor is still a good friend.
And Gregor, in the very early days, what was it?
Is that the name of the cockroach guy in the Kafka story?
Gregor Samsa?
The one that turned into a cockroach?
Yeah, that's a bummer.
It wasn't Tinder.
It was one of the early dating sites.
And Gregor was living in New York City, and he had a motorcycle, and he wore a leather jacket, and he was also a fashion photographer who lived in a giant loft.
Whoa, man.
He must get more tail than Sinatra.
Well, this is the thing.
He wrote a... He was maybe the first one to do this, Merlin, but he wrote a comedy...
uh, bio for himself on an early dating site that was like, I just like to, you know, I'm a guy with a, with a tall hat and, uh, you know, wear the gold hat if that moves her.
And if you can bounce, I bounce for her too.
And he got a lot of people, you know, who were like, ha ha, that's great.
Thumbs up.
And for whatever reason, you know, when you're thumbs up,
You go up the rankings.
Oh, I get it.
He's got more clout, as they say.
Yeah, that's right.
Clout with a K. They gave him more thumbs up.
And for a whole period in the, I guess, I don't know when those sites first arrived, but early 2000s, late 90s, he was the top profile on whatever the dating site was.
Wow.
The top profile in New York City.
And so all he had to do was, and his comedy bio was just a dumb FU type of thing.
It was easier to get famous back then.
It really was.
But he was like- But it must be a little bit like Best of Craigslist or Am I the Asshole, where people are doing it now today.
You might be doing that to get hearts.
Yeah.
But back then, that was a novel new idea to be yourself and not say that you're a yachtsman or something like that.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, no, he was not being earnest.
But then for a period, you know, and of course, at this point in time, the early adopters of something like that, they're tech savvy.
They're, you know, they're like, okay, I'll check this out.
It's not full of snorks.
And he just, he had a different date every night.
He'd roll up on his motorcycle.
Oh, so he was, I didn't want to ask.
He was able to convert this.
Uh, into actual dates.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, he converted it into dates for sure.
And I mean, he was a handsome guy.
I mean, he's not, he's not like a tall guy, but he's a handsome guy.
Kind of motorcycle.
Jesus.
He's got a motorcycle and he's, oh, this is the other thing.
He was good at motorcycling.
Oh.
It wasn't like he had a fashion photographer.
Yeah.
He didn't have a comedy motorcycle.
Like he could turn his motorcycle sideways going 60 miles an hour and go around the, you know, go around the corner.
Was it dignified?
Was it a crotch rocker or was it dignified?
Well, that's the thing he did.
He built it himself.
It was a BMW cafe racer that he built himself.
He had an endless amount.
Oh, it's like one of those little racing fairings?
It had a racing fairing that was made out of stainless steel or whatever, hand hammered something.
It was probably like, it was made out of a suit of armor of a French prince, or it looked like it was.
And so all he had to do was roll down Broadway and people were throwing bouquets of flowers at him.
And, you know, he wears it well.
He's not, uh, you know, he's, uh, he, even today, very handsome, uh, still making motorcycles.
He's a beautiful wife of
Family now, he's not at the top of the single state.
He could go back.
I mean, if I were her, I would move advisably because at this point today, you know, sometimes men get better looking over time.
He can still go back at any point.
He could hop on Mashley Addison any day.
And I bet, you know, I bet he'd be able, like Donald Trump, he'd be able to earn all his money back in a few months.
He's that good.
You know, my mom said to me last night, she said, you know, I didn't really come into my looks until I was in my 20s.
Like you.
And I was like, hmm, go on.
And she was like, you know, you were very handsome, you know, in your mid-twenties.
It took you a little bit of time to get there from 16 to 24 or whatever.
So you did look like a scallop.
Yeah.
She was like, you're very handsome at 24 from then on.
And then, you know, she doubled down on it.
She was like, you know, I think you're as handsome now as you've ever, you're even more handsome than you've ever been.
And I think she was saying this because I have a gray beard now and a waitress in Omaha asked me if I was my daughter's grandfather.
And so I've been licking that wound.
I got a thorn in my paw from that.
And so everybody around me is trying to say like, no, no, it's just, you know, you're very, very handsome.
And you know, when I was 25, I don't know about you, you know, I've seen pictures of you when you were 25, you were gorgeous.
I mean, like I, I, I, I did, I was okay for what I had to work with.
Oh, you were amazing.
You had a blonde mustache.
You looked like a, you look like Prince Wesley.
Um, I did, I did.
People thought I looked like him.
Yeah.
You walked around in your gold jacket with epaulets that had somebody else's name on it.
You were just, you were on fire.
Yeah.
And, you know, at that point in my life, I was like, oh, maybe I'll shave my head tomorrow.
And then I walked around like I was in a Japanese prison camp.
And then I was like, maybe I'll sleep in a pizza parlor.
Oh, maybe I'll start a band.
Like I had no plan.
That's a no good boss.
I had no, I had absolutely no plan.
I wasn't capitalizing on being young and pretty.
I feel like this is something your mom has done before, though, where she's, she's.
In a way that was not as helpful probably as it was meant to sound, was trying to pay you some compliment about your looks.
I feel like I've heard this before.
Oh, but also Eric Spurlock, the guy who said- Oh, no, no, no, no, no, the water fountain.
No, no, no, no, no.
Yeah, the water fountain guy.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I got it back in your head, didn't I?
Oh, it's in everybody's head.
John Syracuse got it from it being in my head.
In my head, it came from your head.
In your head, it came from Eric.
It's an affliction, John.
It has affected dozens of people.
Yeah.
No, it's terrible.
Every time you see a water fountain, I want you to think of me.
Yes.
And I've never met Eric.
I don't know what he looks like.
But it's Eric's all the way down, though.
Well, Eric's mother was the one that said to us as a couple of guys who are 17 years old or 16 years old, she was like, you know, girls aren't going to like you at this age.
But, you know, when you grow up, you're going to be considered very attractive men.
And we were both did not take it as a compliment.
We took, we took it as like a, a tire thumper to the knee.
And, uh, it's like me tell him, trying to say anything to my daughter about the second, now the second week of eighth grade.
Like, what could I say?
That's not either horrible or bullshit.
Did you know that I spent most of eighth grade sitting in class daydreaming about two things?
One, uh, the ability to stop time.
And if I could stop time, I would immediately go back to sleep because I was so tired because I'd stayed up all night.
And then I would go and find the world's best chocolate chip cookies.
Yeah.
Uh, isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
That was the one thing that I daydreamed about.
I would sit in class and they're talking before you were conjuring an orb.
Uh, this was circa conjuring an orb actually.
Is this when you're wearing flight suits and orange pants?
Flight suits and orange pants.
Precisely.
And, and, and weirdly, you know, kind of in that I was having puberty, I'm sure.
But most of my stop time behavior was not going around, uh, you know, like kissing a stop time girls.
It was, uh, where do I find the best chocolate chip cookies?
And then the other fantasy was, uh, that I would be sitting in class and there would be a nuclear war.
And the only one in the school that knew what to do, because I had read all the civil defense manuals at that point in time, and I could identify any Russian aircraft by silhouette.
that suddenly I would become very important in my junior high.
Wolverines.
That's right.
This was even pre-Wolverine.
This was pre-Red Dawn.
It was pre-Red Dawn.
And that's why Red Dawn resonated with me, because I'd been living it, already living it for four years.
But yeah, imagining that the siren goes off, everyone's running around in a panic, including the teachers, and I'm there in my orange flight suit going,
remain calm.
All is well.
Follow me, you know, to rally to my standard.
And then I would take them to the, to the bomb shelter.
And I would explain to them that you had belt built and nobody else knew about that was full of chocolate chip cookies.
And I would then from there begin rebuilding society and
in my own image it's a really it's a it's a good plan for you it gives you something to work towards and if we're being honest it's really good for all the snorks that don't know they're going to need somebody who's read some civil defense manuals exactly the problem was i was not learning algebra in eighth grade i'm not sure how much that story is going to help any current eighth grader because it's made out of very different source material
Yeah, I mean, Santa Karenina.
You know, every eighth grade is terrible in a different way.
Oh, yeah.
Anyway, so your mom was telling you how pretty you were.
You wore orange pants.
Yeah.
Talking about eighth grade.
What I'm trying to get is the best screwdriver.
Oh, right, of course, of course.
I feel like the problem with screwdrivers now is that metallurgy,
has changed as part of the global desire to make things as cheaply as possible.
And so screws themselves are such garbage.
I need the best screwdriver possible in order not to immediately strip
Every screen that comes with any problem.
It's a rat king of shittiness because, I mean, before we even get to the fact that most people like me don't really know how to properly drill a hole, there's lots of people who don't really know how to drill a hole.
There's people like me that have, you know, the typical sort of whatever 20 amp, uh,
black and black and decker that'll just like put a screw magnetized into the end and just goes right into the thing it's hard to get things out of things the craftsmanship is not there and you're absolutely right it used time was that you could you could say like oh craftsman for example or i know dan dan's all gay bones for snap-on tools how do you even get them though you can't buy snap-on tools at a at a store
But you know what somebody in his family told Dan was like, you know, there's a warranty for life on these.
But like versus these versus that, he says, yeah, but Snap-on tools, they don't break.
Yeah, they don't break.
That's what they say.
But no, I agree.
But I mean, it's emblematic of a bigger pattern.
Like so much of my wisdom, it's emblematic of this bigger pattern of like...
understand what kind of stuff it's totally okay to cheap out on.
And when it comes to buying something potentially kind of nice or important, like the phrase I always use that's virtually useless, but you'll know what I mean.
I want the good one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Give me the good one.
You know what I mean?
I want the good one.
Like, I don't need, I probably don't want the dollar one.
I probably don't want the thousand dollar one, but I want the good one.
I want everybody who uses this thing all the time, especially for their work, what's the one everybody gets?
And there is, I mean, look at, again, look at the Shure family of microphones.
Like there's a reason SM57s are like how, how the drum sound got on a bunch of your favorite records.
It's like you didn't get the Radio Shack mic.
57.
We say 57.
You just say, you leave off the, people know it's implied.
All you have to do is say 57.
Hammer nails with them all day, they say.
The 57, the 87, the, you know, the, the, uh, the 56.
You like a 7B.
I got the 7B.
That's your vocal mic full stop, right?
I'm using it right now.
I'm on Electrovox.
What do I know?
Well, you know, oh, the thing is the RE20 is, the RE20 and the 7B are the two, they're basically synonymous in a lot of applications.
I just, you know, I've A-B'd them.
I'm one of the fortunate few who has been able to sit and A-B'd them.
I have a voice like a bad saxophone.
You know, I thought this would make me sound like John Dickerson.
And, you know, I thought about that.
Yeah.
Well, I know you're not big on reads, but not a, not a, not a terrible saxophone, but a, but a saxophone part that is a little, that's squonky.
It's somebody that, Oh, for sure.
I mean, I'm like, yeah, the kind of thing, like if you're like gay, it doesn't matter.
But anyway, the point being, here's what happens though.
To your point, once you finally, and I do have a flow for this, we'll talk about it in the after show.
I have a flow and one of the last steps of that flow, because for better or for worse, I tend to buy things from the Amazon company, is I will run it through ReviewMeta or I will run it through FixBot.
And here's what those sites do to the best of their ability and in slightly different ways.
I kind of prefer ReviewMeta.
So if you just go try this, go to ReviewMeta.com and you can just, there's probably like a sample there you can click on.
But it looks at science.
It looks at all kinds of stuff it analyzes.
What is it, science?
They're using science.
They're using algorithms.
And what it does is, though, they go through and they look at all kinds of things that tend...
to happen with suspicious reviews.
So, you know, straightforward stuff like, well, does this person rate a lot of things?
Does this person rate, is it interesting that there are some people who only seem to rate one company's stuff and for a short period of time, almost as though they were compensated for it?
Are there other kinds of people where we think this might've been paid?
Word usage, all this kind of stuff.
How many people quote unquote liked this, but they come up with this and then they show you all the different sections.
And if there's stuff you don't care or worry about, that's okay.
Um, but like you will find the things that, I mean, like go search for something like fucking Bluetooth speakers or headphones.
There's these whole areas on Amazon that are just rife with garbage.
But then, but that's the neat part is then you can go in.
Now, I don't know if you can do that with a Smashley Madison, but it would be nice to have somebody go in and say, uh,
You know, I think that's what they call SEO.
A lot of it.
No offense.
I think a lot of it is.
I'm sure there are people listening.
Well, you hear the commercials for something like reputation.com and how they're going to go clean up your internet results.
And the general way they do that is you give them a ton of money and then they get people to post a lot of stuff.
That's not the bad thing.
And essentially, as I understand it, you pay them to push most of the stuff off the top page because that's all anybody ever looks at.
That's how that racket works.
but you can do it.
I mean, you can do that.
There's, there's products, there's sponsors I've had for podcasts.
I'm not proud to say where I eventually discovered that they were doing things like this and it made me not want to have them be my sponsor.
Yeah.
And I've said as much.
And so, you know, you don't be weird about it.
Never give the internet a puzzle.
That's also on my list.
Here, modern learning.
It's the new philosophy of German slavery?
What is it?
I'm not sure, but it has an Amazon.de rating of 4.1, but ReviewMeta has given it an adjusted rating of 2.1.
So scroll down a little.
Scroll down.
Isn't that kind of cool, though?
You can see the monkey business they found?
Yeah, I see that monkey business.
Ooh, and two good gourmet keto cookies, soft-baked healthy snacks, sugar and grain-free low-carb keto, they were a 3.5 rating and now they're a 2.1 adjusted rating.
That's very exciting.
It's good to know.
So that's how I do that.
But these knives, so John, I don't want to go all into my philosophy because this will all be in my e-book.
But, you know, one of my things I've talked about with a friend of the show, John Syracuse, I have a guiding philosophy.
One of my many guiding philosophies is a concept I call one hand and in the dark.
One hand and in the dark.
How have I not heard this already?
I don't like to bother you.
I only like you for the important podcast.
Yeah, I see.
This is the stuff that you do over on the show you do with Syracuse, which is basically a product review show.
Yeah, we do deep dives on all aspects of technology.
Apple products.
Apple products.
You know, we do a side by side.
We call it a showdown of like recent Android phones.
We do that.
Now you were saying you use Firefox.
Does that somehow make the world more honest?
Firefox is my second browser.
Okay.
Firefox is what we in the business call my other browser.
I will not have Chrome on my machine.
That's gone.
Uh, but Firefox is, is a great, uh, because sometimes one of the most basic things you need to do, why you would want your other browser is if something's not working on your main browser, whether that's in web development or just surfing the web.
Like for example, just now I was finding the, unless something better comes up, the show art for this episode will be the titular Gerber EAB utility knife.
Oh, good, good, good.
But when I went to their website, cause I don't like to send people Amazon links.
I think that's thirsty.
Yeah.
I was going to send you the link to the Gerber company site, but the image wasn't loading.
So I reloaded it with no content blocker, still wouldn't load.
Copy the URL, go to Firefox.
Guess what?
Uh-oh, still doesn't load.
So that way I'm able to isolate the problem, right?
It's with them, not with you.
Is it a me thing or a you thing is a question we should ask ourselves.
That's on the list.
So what I want to know is what's your first browser?
It's the Safari browser.
It's secure, it syncs up, it's got tons of great features, and it works with all my devices.
Oh, that's good.
Because a lot of people snark at me about using Safari, and they say, oh, you should be using Chrome because that's what real people do.
And I'm like... If you want your data stolen, sure.
I just use Safari.
Now, I will toggle between Safari Maps and Google Maps, and I'll tell you, boy, the...
The story isn't very good about either one of those.
In my personal experience, the new Apple Maps is better.
It does cool stuff.
You're going to like iOS 15.
It's very good.
It does.
The problem is that here's what I want to do.
99% of the time with Maps, what I want to do is put a location in between my current location and the other location.
Just to be clear here, John is not using it for directions.
No, no, no.
I'm not using it for directions.
What I want to see, I want to see a lot of different things.
I want to see a lot of different things.
I'm looking for data is what I'm looking for.
I don't want your map program to walk me through the basic steps of driving out of my own driveway and up to the corner.
What I want is data.
I want data.
Yeah.
And that, and maps are where you find, you know, you find a lot of useful data.
A lot of map data.
But you, what you want to be able to do is put not just one, but four locations in between your location and another location.
Because, you know, my mom and I can't every day leave one place and drive different routes to another place.
Right.
We can't do it every day.
And there are so many routes.
Right.
Right.
The route's not taken, as Frost would say.
Every time we're in the same location and have two cars, we immediately, as you know, we've discussed this.
You do what we in the industry call root talk.
Yeah, we look at each other, we nod, and it's understood that when one person turns left, the other one's going to turn right.
It doesn't matter if the other way we feel pretty strongly is not the preferred way.
You got to test it.
You got to test it.
Yeah, that's more data.
I'm doing that on map programs all the time.
And I'd also do it in things like, you know, if you were in Helsinki and you needed to get to Jerusalem, like, let's try a couple of different ways.
Do you go through Kiev?
What do you do?
And neither one of those map programs is really calibrated to make that easy for me.
You know, you can do it and I figured out the way to do it on both, but it's not a thing, you know, you want to be able to save that.
You want to be able to have, have a whole file of different routes from Helsinki to Jerusalem.
And it should be a lot easier than it is.
And it, and the thing is they've probably got 50 people on the team that,
Trying to, you know, trying to tell you where the nearest 7-Eleven is or car wash near me or whatever.
Right, right.
But what they don't have.
I find it more difficult enough to say, because I do like it for directions, especially if we're in automobile with CarPlay.
But I will say, like, we started here and we're going to there.
And then I just want, please show me, I wish you could just show me a Popeye.
Show me all the Popeyes along the way.
But show me the Popeyes that don't have, that have a rating above two and are easy to get to from the highway.
I would love that.
What is the percentage of Popeyes that have a rating less than two?
That's funny because different areas are easier or harder.
I noticed when we were in Rhode Island, I did not see many ratings for anything because you can't help but see the little dumb Yelp rating.
But almost nothing is like food that I looked at any place.
You never see above three.
I think I think little roadie people are tough with the stars.
There was a time when it was reputed that the Popeyes in the Atlanta airport was a good Popeyes.
Oh.
And everybody was going to the Popeyes in the Atlanta airport.
It's in one of those central, like, the junctions between the terminals where you'll get a bunch of food things.
Yeah, it's in a junction and it's a common, if you're a Delta person or if you're going from hither to thither, it's a common junction, even though there are 40 junctions in that airport.
It's a common enough one that you're always like, oh, there's that Popeyes.
My dad used to have, when it was four terminals back in the 70s, my dad used, there was no tram.
My dad used to have to always transfer flights through Atlanta and he would have to like run across.
You can do that.
Sometimes if I have time to kill, I'll take the long walk rather than the tram.
But God damn, that's a big airport.
It's a long walk and you think like, I've got to be at the end of it now.
And you look up and you're like, oh, terminal three, I'm nowhere close to the end.
But I went to that Popeye's one time because I had never been to a Popeye's and I felt like, oh, Atlanta, Atlanta airport.
We had, we had, we had Popeye's at my, uh, baccalaureate, uh, uh, defense.
Oh, well, I wasn't invited to that.
No, I'm sorry.
It was really just mostly locals from Sarasota and people who noticed there was Popeyes coming into the building.
Well, their mom was kind enough for Popeyes.
There weren't Popeyes up here in the Northwest, I don't think.
No, it's a Southern-ish thing.
It's like a Bojangles or a Whataburger is like a Texas thing that we happen to have in Florida, but mainly a Texas thing.
We did a record release party in Los Angeles, I think for Pretend to Fall.
where Barsouk rented some small venue and invited all the music, uh, you know, the, not just the, the, uh, reporters and publicists, but also the music supervisors.
That's who you really want at your party.
And we enticed them to come, uh, by offering, uh, chicken and waffles, Roscoe's chicken and waffles.
We catered the entire event.
So smart.
Roscoe's chicken and waffles.
And we got a big crowd and then we played a, you know, we played a short set.
They're very appreciative.
They were all cramming down chicken and waffles.
But that was back in the heyday where, where indie rock labels had, you know, 1200, 1300 bucks to throw to think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, I went to this Popeye's at the Atlanta airport and it did not look like a clean environment.
It looked like a very haphazard thing.
There were, you know, there were like things hanging off the lights and
Um, it looked like there were wet wipes on the floor.
Like it just didn't look like a place that I wanted to.
That's probably not best for your first Popeye's experience.
My, my Popeye's experience at Atlanta a couple of weeks ago was, um, it was very strange going to Popeye's as the Marquez would say, you know, Popeye's in the, in the time of COVID is a very strange thing.
The way everything's arranged and the way you get it and they have a station, it's just where they hand you your drink and nothing's allowed to be out.
It's, it's not as fun as it used to be.
But you know, you had it, but Popeyes, like McDonald's, you want to get it when it's like just coming off the line.
It's real good.
Getting off the line.
I always had the advantage
As a kid, because all I wanted was a plain hamburger and they don't have any plain hamburgers sitting under the, the, the heat lamp.
I call it a grill order.
They have to grill it themselves.
And so you wait a little extra, everybody else in the party.
It actually involves a piece of paper.
We've got to write on the piece of paper.
Yeah.
So they're all standing, my friends are all standing, eating their fries out of the bag going, come on.
And I'm waiting for my plain hamburgers to come off the grill, but they were always so fresh.
You know, it's the... That's the best.
Peak hamburgers, those hamburgers.
So the idea is almost everything in my life I should be able to do with one hand and in the dark.
The one hand means that if there are tasks around the house that I... Let's say there are things around the house that could be done with two hands, but it would be so much easier if I could only do it with one hand.
A big example is getting a dish out of the cabinet.
Now, doesn't that seem like that should be a one-handed thing?
Like you open the door in the cabinet, stick your little paw in, you grab a dish.
But you can't do that if people have been stacking things on top of the dishes because there's room there.
Oh, they put bowls on dishes.
This needs to go in the document.
Just because there's room somewhere doesn't mean it's free space.
Right.
That's not where things go.
This is the footprint...
Of the refrigerator where daddy's seltzer goes.
And just because there's no seltzer in there right now, that doesn't mean that's not for you.
Don't don't put that there.
So one handed is like I and that also extends to I put a garbage bag in my office anywhere where my right hand likes to let go of a piece of garbage.
Hmm.
How many garbage cans are in your office?
Six.
How do you source garbage cans?
I use five-gallon buckets.
And are, oh, five-gallon buckets?
Five-gallon buckets with a 13, huh?
Like a five-gallon bucket where you would clean out your paintbrushes?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they're actually, they are like, you know, mostly like Home Depot type, you know, with the handle on it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the handle.
Oh, what a hack.
What a good hack.
But like, you know, in the dark part is like, if I'm looking for, let's say the scissors, I mean, in the dark, I mean, where do you begin?
Brown Legos on the floor?
Like that shouldn't be there.
I should be able to do this in the dark without harming myself.
But we should try to the extent possible for things that we use often.
We should be able to do it and find it, get to it safely in the dark.
And this also goes to the like, don't put things on other things.
I realize this is a rant, but here's the thing, John.
I want to be able to find my Gerber utility knife with one hand.
and in the dark they are deployed in the places where i will want them and there's a lot there's a lot but now i've gotten everybody but my wife under the gerber utility plate she still uses this cute i'll just call it a joke knife she uses one of these cute things we learned about from matt howey which is this japanese knife this this supposedly for opening amazon packages it's basically like a serrated letter opener and it's garbage compared to an eab a gerber eab knife
I just want to close that thread.
I think it's important to have things deployed.
And that doesn't mean you can just start collecting.
This is not a treasure hunt.
Don't go collecting all of my deployed blades to put into service somewhere in your room.
I'm looking at you, Emma.
Do you have...
I don't want to ruin your object.
Ask me anything.
No, please.
Do you have any home defense devices in easy reach of your sleeping area that you could access?
Like, for instance, when I think in the dark with one hand, I think...
I picture you using a butterfly knife in the middle of the night.
That totally makes sense.
And I have my most costly knife I ever bought.
I acquired about a month ago.
I'm not going to talk about it, but it's the nicest knife that I've ever owned.
It's way too long for even, some people call it an everyday carry, but it's huge and it's heavy.
It's got carbon fiber.
It's got the sharpest blade I've ever experienced.
Now, I am a knife guy and I like me a knife.
To answer the question you didn't ask, if I were going to have
you're talking about like a home defense weapon well of some kind you know there are a lot of people it would be a bludgeoning it would be a bludgeoning instrument because it's it's you can keep people it's kind of a little bit of a slightly ranged weapon compared to the personal melee weapon of a knife i would like to be able to just bonk somebody and make them think twice whereas with the stabbing you know it's like the chicken and the pig you know now i'm committed and now i'm stabbing somebody and i don't want to be somebody who stabs somebody
Also, you know, a lot of those weapons, they'll just take away from you and hurt you with it until they're tired.
They say never point a gun at somebody that you're not prepared to shoot.
That's correct.
And you definitely don't want to, you don't want to cut somebody with a knife in a shallow way.
I don't think I'd be a good knife guy, but I think, so to answer your actual question...
I couldn't put my hand to it right now, but because we live in earthquake country, we do that thing where we keep a pair of slip-on shoes by the bed and we keep a, as you say, a tire iron or a crowbar.
Civil defense helmet and a crowbar, yeah.
And a crowbar, yeah, exactly.
You got a lamp up there, but...
No, I don't have like an umbrella stand full of swords.
I probably should.
You know, there's all those survivalist magazines all have things where, you know, daddy can, you know, hit the headboard of the bed with one hand and a thing pops open and there's an AK-47 in there.
But that's mostly that they like to do.
They like to show their neighbors when they give them a tour of the house.
It's cute.
It's another one of these things.
It's like guys like me thinking with great confidence they'd probably be pretty good in a street fight.
It's like, dude, I couldn't even get through a neighborhood stick fight.
I'm certainly not the kind of guy who's going to tap a headboard and a little door gives me a Walter PPK.
I, I, uh, having just.
That's a very cool looking gun though.
Sidearm.
Very cool.
Yeah.
I mean, if you, if, uh, for me, like basically what I, if I were going to be a gun person, I would have pearl handled, uh, silver plated revolvers, two of them.
Yeah.
In a holster.
Yeah.
See, that comes from your father's side of the family.
Yeah.
If you show up to a gunfight with, uh, with, with that, with a Tom Mick set up or a, uh, or a George, George Patton, uh, set up.
Yeah.
You know, who, what, what.
That's going to run a lot of people off your lawn.
This is a person who's serious about branding and weapons.
Well, that's right.
And you're not trying to have a tactical camouflage gun.
The sun is going to glint off your gun and blind half of your opponents before you even have to pull the trigger back.
Best gun is the one you never have to use, huh?
That's right.
That's right.
The gun that shines is the gun that finds its target.
Okay, that's good.
That's a mnemonic.
I like that.
But having driven just recently across the country, I definitely noticed many, many, many, in many states...
particularly western states, southwestern states.
These are the majority of the states that I crossed.
There are a lot of long driveways where it's clear that the person whose mobile home is up at the end of that driveway, they want you to know right where the driveway hits the street that you shouldn't come up this driveway.
Don't
you dare.
Oh, right.
Press passers will be shot or something like that.
Don't you dare.
And out in Nevada, some of those driveways are 40 miles long, but all across the country, you know, Kentucky, Oklahoma, there are people throughout that region who really want to stop you right at the end of the driveway and tell you that somewhere up that driveway, there's a headboard behind a bed that they're going to hit with their hand one time and an AK-47 is going to pop out.
And the, and the, the collective, the collective, uh, sense impression of, of seeing these long driveways many, many, many, many, many, many, many times all the way across America.
I couldn't help but ask myself over and over what exact amount of civil unrest did
or even like spate of burglaries would it take before a person would arrive at the end of this particular driveway, already in the middle of BFE,
And think twice about going up that route.
Like how bad would the zombie apocalypse have to be?
How many, um, how many burglars would there have to be before the burglar would end up here?
You know, the only people that are going to rob you are your neighbors and friends.
There's no stranger danger to,
out there where your sign that says, you know, you are being watched.
Oh, you're saying like, uh, like, uh, Squeaky and, uh, Leslie.
Squeaky and Leslie.
And, uh, you know, and, uh, and, and, and Tex are going to come in.
Squeaky, Leslie, and Tex are never going to come.
Black Lives Matter is never going to come.
Antifa.
I saw, I heard somebody say Antifa.
What is the, is it?
Well, the ex-president used to say that.
Antifa.
It's called Antifa.
And I think that's how most people pronounce it.
How do you pronounce Antifa?
Antifa.
Antifa.
Antifa.
I mean, Antifa.
I don't say it.
Antifa.
You're Antifa.
You're Antifa.
You're not Antifa.
Well, contra my thing about how I am very much, you know, a little...
you know what do they say like a uh shrinking violet it's true i'm not a violent person but like every time i see one of those signs i just see fear fear fear fear fear well yeah but that's a confident person a confident person doesn't put up a sign like that no it's crazy how much fear there is and how much of it is masquerading as strength i mean i guess absolutely i mean i guess that's how it works but like you know whatever happened to being like a dignified gary cooper type
Yeah, that's right.
You don't leave.
Everybody else is running behind.
They're closing their gates.
They're shuttering their shutters.
Everybody's saying, Gary Cooper, just get out of here.
He's going to give a couple hours of speeches and then go out into the town square.
That's right.
He can't leave.
And he's not going to explain himself.
He can't explain himself.
Well, he did explain himself a lot.
I don't think it's as good as people think.
Yeah.
I just meant, I just meant even though you could even say a Jimmy Stewart and it's not just men, but like you don't have to be taciturn.
You don't have to be bellicose.
You don't have to be any SAT words.
Can't you just be a confident adult and not constantly need to perform some kind of potential violence?
It makes you, it makes you look, it makes you look like a bald version of a 14 year old bully.
Well, because I tried to think, like, let's say I'm a visitor from a different country.
Let's say I'm coming to America.
Oh, like one of those Nordic countries where everybody's nice and has health care.
That, or even if you are here from Indonesia, what if you're driving across America, you're Indonesian, you came for college, you wanted to drive across the country.
Your first impression would be, man, this country is full of tough hombres.
Think about how
tough.
I bet in Indonesia you don't run a quad.
Well, I mean, they've had their troubles.
Sure they have.
There are a lot of tough hombres there too.
Did you ever see that documentary about, uh, it's called the act of killing.
Did you ever see that?
Is this a Suharto thing or was it?
It's about, oh, I'll tell you about it later, but it's, it's amazing.
But like in that case, like how often do they encounter signage outside of a resident's
That says like, like, if you come in here, you're going to meet my bazooka or whatever.
A lot of what's nice about America is everybody's got elbow room.
There's so much elbow room here.
You can put your thing up a long driveway.
You don't have to be rich.
If you're, if you're living in Southern Missouri, you don't have to be rich to have a long driveway.
Hell it's, you know, the long driveway comes with the, comes with the lease.
But your first sense is like a lot of tough hombres in this country.
Everybody here is such a, you know, they're all such badasses.
Everybody's mad.
Oh, I don't know.
I don't think they're that tough.
I think everybody's kind of a puss.
It's a, it's a country full of pusses.
How, what does it take to be tough?
What takes to be tough is you, you know, you walk in and your regular shoes, you don't have these, you don't have shoes that are designed for something that you're not doing that day.
You have your regular shoes and you're not.
You're driving moccasins or like you could be the kind of person who hits somebody with that sign instead of, uh, instead of, uh, uh, saber rattling about some notional guns that you have in your home.
Yeah, that's right.
Hit him with the sign.
I say that as somebody that actually, you know, at least used to walk around with sabers in his yard.
Yes.
That was mostly for trimming, you know, that was hedge trimming.
And a lot of, I was trying to project to my neighbors that I was bonkers, but not in a...
Yeah.
Like I'm a crazy burglar.
No, that you make unusual choices.
You're a little bit of a wild card.
Yeah.
As many times as I had a saber, I had my jingle stick.
I was out, I was walking around jingling it at the raccoons.
The raccoons got to know that that was a sign of friendship.
Jingle stick.
But you know, the neighbors were like, he's there with the jingle stick again.
What does that symbolize?
Is that a new robe?
It's not.