Ep. 499: "A Ziggurat of Grievance"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
Are you calling me from under your pillow?
I can do that if you want.
That's very clean.
How's it going?
Oh, you know, pretty good.
Yeah.
How are you going?
Um, pretty good.
I was looking for, I remember I told you I was going to try and find old photos for you.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's what I've been doing this morning.
I'm looking through all those photos.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, stuff that's, you know, me, you and me, you, you, you, me, and long winners adjacent and friends of the family, you know, sometimes literally family.
Yeah, sure.
From your Flickr days.
Yes, from my Flickr days.
That's what it says right on the calendar.
I'm just going through and going through and, you know, all the ones where I can see your face are tagged with your name.
But then there's ones where like there's only a part of your face and the flicker doesn't know it's you.
So then I have to help it a little bit.
There's a lot of duplicates.
But I figure, you know, you like photos.
Sure.
They're terrible.
Most of them are terrible.
No, you know, you were experimenting.
That's what you were doing.
You're experimenting.
That's sweet.
Yeah, I don't know what I'm doing a lot of the time, but it's not going to stop me.
You understand?
Some of my favorite pictures taken by you.
Yeah, I mean, it's nice to have.
I mean, you know, and I never know, like, so to the listener, this starts because I was saying, well, how did this start?
I was looking for a photo of, some photo of you probably for show art or something.
I was like, you know, I got a butt ton of photos of you and...
you know, associated things.
And I said I'd try and find them and send it to you.
And it's fun.
It's fun to go back.
Yeah, it is.
Well, you know, over the years, think about a lot of water under the bridge.
Stuff's gone down.
Oh, yeah.
I have some really good ones.
We could probably just do a whole episode just on, like, weird photos.
You had to do some...
You got an assignment from someone to like, I don't know what it was, but you were using my palm, my palm, my trio.
And I have these really weird photos of you looking real weird wearing my Minuteman shirt, which you should never have been able to wear because you don't deserve it.
And I think you're where my clothes go.
That was a, that was an assignment.
Some magazine magazine.
It was like, oh, we're going to give you this, what was it?
It was like a nav program for a palm prior to, I guess, nav programs being commonplace.
I'm going to bet you that, because I was very into stuff like that, it was probably something where you got an app and then had to download stuff for a particular area, which, I mean, you can still do, but that used to be you had to do that.
And it's you with a little stylus.
I'll send you a photo.
It's a very silly photo.
Well, the problem, if I recall correctly, was that they sent it to me.
And I think they sent it either without any instruction for me.
Well, yes, A, no instructions.
And B, I assumed that they...
it worked or, you know, like it had all the information it needed.
And so we left Seattle.
Oh dear.
And, uh, the, and it only had maps for New York city.
Yeah.
And I didn't know how to get maps for it.
So I drove all the way across the country and they wanted like updates and like, how's it going out there?
Well, I can, you know, from East 15th to the Bowery.
Yeah, as long as it's, you know, looking for your keys where the light is.
Exactly.
As long as I choose for some reason to drive around Manhattan, I'll be fine.
From out here in Nebraska.
So by the time I got to you, they wanted photos.
And you took some pictures of me looking real weird with this thing that I didn't know how to operate and that never operated.
And I don't think they used it.
I bet you that's what it's like for a lot of, like, maybe not celebrity endorsements, but when you see things that are like, hey, you know, I love Roderick's Balm.
It's my preferred unguent for all of my piles.
And you're like, what is this thing going on?
I don't know.
It's just a thing we do, you know?
Yeah.
They just need photos of, you know, that rock star guy, you know?
That was one of my favorites.
There was a campaign a couple of years ago for, I don't know, Breguet or, or Rolex or something where they had a bunch of stars wearing Rolexes, except the way they had it was them.
Like clearly the theme was that they were going to kind of hold the watch half in their hand, half on their wrist kind of thing.
And it just looked like people didn't know how watches worked.
I, I, yes.
And, uh, and I think I, I,
I think I delighted in the idea that Matt Damon had never seen a watch before.
He was just like one of those like, oh, like a full page ad in Vogue.
And it's like Tom Hiddleston looking at the camera and he's like, oh, me, I'm just putting on this watch.
Is it supposed to be like an action shot of you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or just like, I'm just here, like just got done scuba diving in my three piece suit.
I just got my like my watch here that I don't know how to wear.
Yeah, and you get your chronograph.
I was reading about chronographs last night because I liked it in Drive.
Ryan Gosling, the watch, I love the movie Drive, and he attaches a watch.
You've got five minutes.
One minute on either side, he's out of there.
He's got a watch, and it clicks multiple times per second.
And so I use ChatGPT to find out what it was.
But it's a chronometer, and you can get ones that do like four ticks per second.
You can get more ticks per second.
But instead of being like... It's like...
It's really cool, like a 60 minutes kind of watch.
I love that the gauze is out in the rest of the world.
You can see the gauze.
He's on all the Louis Vuitton billboards.
Is that right?
But then in the U.S.
you don't see it, but then I was in San Francisco and there in Union Square there was some giant billboard of the gauze and a pink suit surrounded by...
surrounded by Louis Vuitton bags.
I see.
And I was trying to picture him like, when he goes traveling, do you think he uses Louis Vuitton luggage?
Or do you think the gauze is just like flying business class?
I don't know.
I mean, over time, I've really I've come.
He is.
But like, you know, like when you meet like people, they're like just, you know, it's like Depeche Mode said, you know, they're just doing their thing.
Sure.
Sure.
That's what they say.
People are doing their thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, that guy, he doesn't like those lyrics.
Now, the guy with the hair, he thinks his lyrics are kind of sophomore.
I love it at the time.
Really?
Got that fair light on it.
Um, but yeah, I sent that photo to you.
You're looking very intense.
I've got a lot of photos of you in different places.
I think that photo of me, I'm very intense because you can tell just by the way I'm holding the device.
I've never used it.
I have no idea how it works.
Oh, no, I think Ryan Geisland has probably used any kind of suitcase, certainly a lot more than you have used this.
It looks kind of like, I mean, when I say it's like a chimp, I don't mean a literal chimp, but it's a little bit like you taught a chimp how to use a rake.
Yes.
And of course you're disappointed because you had high hopes.
You know we share 98% of our DNA, but that precious 2% is where a lot of rake information resides.
Yeah.
Oh, it's Gucci.
I'm sorry.
It's not Louis Vuitton.
It's Gucci that the Gauze uses.
Yeah, I wasn't going to correct you.
I follow all that very closely.
But, you know, I say good for them.
When I see somebody in an ad now, unlike the days when I was mad at the shins for a week because of the McDonald's commercial.
I remember.
And as I always like to say, credit, credit, Dan Cohen.
Mm-hmm.
Dan's the one who got my mind right over on LiveJournal.
Very smart young man.
He said, well, wouldn't you like them to have a van?
I said, yes, I'd like them to have a van.
But the baby with the French fry made me a little bit mad.
Also, that guy continues to make good records.
Look at him now.
Just look at him now.
They buy vans and drive them right into the ocean.
They'll get a Rolex van and drive it right into a Balenciaga van.
They don't care.
No, they're building reefs for seafood out there.
Is that what they're doing?
Seafood reefs?
Yeah, out of watches and Gucci bags.
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And so I got a lot of good photos.
I'm going to try and de-duplicate those, and I'll put them up somewhere where you can get a lot of you in a cape, as we know.
But that's all in there.
Oh, there's some ones of you at Great American with a friend of the show, Sean Nelson.
There's us with Luke Burbank on the radio when you had your tooth issue.
Oh, I didn't know that you had pictures of that.
Aren't you funny?
Here's us with Colton at getting a sandwich to eat over a sewer.
That'll happen?
Yeah.
Oh, sure.
The sewer night.
The sewer sandwich night.
I ate everybody's Subway sandwiches.
You were so excited.
You were like, no, no, there's a Subway.
It's down on, it wasn't on Mission.
It was on Market.
Market, right.
It was a few blocks away.
We were near the International Museum of American Art, which if you've never looked it up, is a hell of a thing.
It's run by a cult.
And that's amazing.
They have the world's largest collection of American colonial art and Buddhist art that looks like it's those weird things that kind of look like a sea anemone or something.
Uh-uh.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they've got a treasure room that you can rent.
Anyway, I might have been excited because for a time, there were still limited numbers of subways that
In the city by the bay that would have seafood and crab, which was always my jam.
It wasn't always my jam.
That must have been it.
Yeah.
You know, that particular place on market at that hour of the night, not really like appetizing.
A lot of characters.
Not really the place, not like a destination.
It's not like the House of Prine Rib.
You know, it was nicer then, too.
It's not as nice at all.
Are you aware of that?
Are you aware of that?
I've heard.
According to everything I read, the entire length of Market Street turns into an open-air market selling all that deodorant that was behind plastic at Walgreens.
Yeah, I like to tell people that I remember back when people would throw shit at you and throw their own feces at you in San Francisco, and you'd be grateful.
Not like today.
Because you know what it is?
They would pull up their pants, so to speak.
They knew to throw their own poop.
You know what I'm saying?
And there's a time we were at MC Hammer's 50th birthday party.
You spit on a cable car.
Oh, and I got yelled at.
Yelled at by the cable car.
Yeah, I remember that.
The cable car yelled at me, yeah.
So, I mean, things are going fine.
I got a lot going on.
I'm doing a big purge at the house.
I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff.
And, yeah, yeah, you know, there's some thought technologies at work.
What have you been doing?
Oh, just putzing around here, you know, trying to get a good night's sleep, and you know how that is.
I do.
You know, we're getting close to summer.
What that means?
Well, it just means, you know, we're going to transition from school to camps and swim teams.
Oh, we move into expectations season.
Yeah.
Well, so many things are expected.
I've got to get up in the mornings.
I've got to stay up at night.
I've got to watch episodic television again, uh, because lots of good stuff on TV.
I had, I met a friend for lunch the other day and I came home and my daughter's mother slash partner said, said as part of the debriefing, you know, how to go with your friend.
She said, did he mention any good TV shows?
I said, no.
Why?
What a weird question.
And she's like, well, these days.
I don't think it's weird at all.
That's like when we all get home, we all show each other the dogs we saw.
Exactly.
These days when you meet a friend for lunch, you ask them what TV shows are good.
And I was like, oh, damn.
I didn't know I'm.
I've been screwing up this whole time.
Do you think you'd want some help on the sly?
Because, I mean, you don't even own a TV, so that's going to be difficult to begin with.
It's a problem for me, yeah.
But, I mean, I'm not saying it would, I'm saying it could be me.
I'm like Shiv Roy here, like putting myself up, you know?
Yeah.
I'm the one saying, you know, I could be your content CEO if you want, or a team, you know, we could slip you some things that you might want to, like, mention to people, some things you recommend, some things you think to avoid.
Would that be helpful to you at all?
I think it would.
You know, I think if I were going down, you know, when you go on those shopping sites and it's like, oh, there are 64,000 pairs of shoes.
Do you want to narrow that down by clicking a few boxes?
And I'm like, yes, I'd like only my size, please.
Okay, now there's only 2,500 pairs of shoes.
Okay, I guess I want it to be done.
Oh, you need somebody to squeeze your funnel.
Yeah, so squeezing my funnel in, one of the things I realized...
is there's a lot of television, very popular with people, to watch TV, to watch people in really uncomfortable situations, awkward people in uncomfortable situations.
That's a whole genre of television.
Isn't that what secession is?
Oh, yeah.
Isn't it awkward with people in uncomfortable situations?
I don't love using this word because it's, well, it's dumb words, but, like, things that are, like, cringey.
Oh.
Right?
I mean, like, for example, you take something like The Office, The Old Office, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, stuff like that, right?
Yes, yes.
A show that's been really good.
Actually, this could be one you don't recommend to people.
The other two have been very good up until this season.
Now, this season has really lost me.
But, like, that's kind of a fun, cringe show.
It's about a Bieber-type kid who becomes a YouTube sensation, and he has a brother and sister who are older and still very ambitious.
But you're talking about, like, you know... I feel like if you're going to squeeze my funnel... Yeah.
I do not want to watch...
a fantasy television that is showing me things that I try to avoid in my own life.
Like I try to avoid that kind of encounter with people.
And so I don't want to come home and be amused by watching the
fake people yeah live out that's me an entourage and i don't want to hurt anybody's feelings because i understand some people really love that program or ironically love that program or i don't know there's kinds of things you're like i just don't like hanging out with this group of people yes yeah there's nobody sympathetic in this show i don't want to be i don't want to spend any hours with these people i do want to spend hours with spies
Oh, I have all kinds of spy things for you.
How are you watching that show, The Diplomat?
Lady and me killed it in two days, whole thing.
Yeah, well, so Diplomat.
Diplomat.
I'll walk around those embassies with those people getting all upset at each other about foreign policy stuff.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Those are difficult people that I would like to be hanging out with.
Yes.
Yeah.
I owe you so many things right now.
I owe you photos.
I think we're going to make a shirt.
There's a lot of things at OU.
We're doing a very special episode soon.
Oh, Robert's on the line shirt.
Ooh, ooh, ooh.
Oh, yeah.
So I've been working on them.
Yeah.
We haven't had one in a long time and people love them.
Yeah.
I've been working on something around.
There's a Star Wars idea that I don't know if I'm so sure about, but I'm thinking about something involving the phrase thought technology because I think that's such a powerful thought technology is the idea of thought technologies.
I like that.
And I 100% agree that thought technologies are a thought technology.
I might try to make it look a little bit like the opening card from Master, one of the opening cards from Master and Commander.
Oh, Master and Commander.
Are you pre-selling?
Are you pre-selling?
No, because I don't think we should talk about things until they're things, but there's a very, very special ambitious crossover underway.
Let's just leave it at this.
Y'all can relax.
Master and Commander is now officially a part of my work.
Okay.
So it's part of the Marvel Comics universe or the Merlin Comics universe?
The MCU!
The Merlin Comics universe!
John Syracuse already refers to the MPU, the Merlin Podcast universe, believe it or not.
Oh, sure.
I guess that follows.
No.
If you don't credit him, he gets really sour.
The thing is that he's absolutely right.
Yeah.
There is a Merlinverse, and it's crazy where the Merlinverse goes.
Yeah.
You run into people all the time where he's just like, well, how do you know about that?
Well, you know, Merlin.
And I'm like, oh, Merlin.
Whoa, Merlin made it here?
Merlin made it down into this weird hole.
I would just like to know that at least one person in Israel who knows Krav Maga really well knows who I am.
That would please me.
I'm thinking about taking Wing Chun, but still Krav Maga, it's pretty badass.
Czechoslovakia is where Krav Maga comes from.
It's really cool.
There's this guy, he was like a self-styled golem.
He kind of looks like a John Pulido sort of character actor guy, and he came up with Deadly Krav Maga by combining some of the other, you know, of the arts of Marshall.
See, to me, it sounds like you're having a stroke right now.
But I don't know whether that's, whether everybody else is nodding along.
Of course, it reminds me immediately of my favorite, one of my absolute favorite moments on BoJack Horseman, of all things, where Todd and BoJack are standing there and they misspelled the name of Herb Kazaz.
And Todd says to Bojack, he goes, I'm sorry, I'm just making a joke about a TV show.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It's a terrific show.
And Todd says, Jerb Gazazz, that sounds like it's something you'd order at a Mediterranean restaurant and not eat all of.
And then the waiter would say, you want me to box up that Jerb Gazazz for you?
And you'd go, no.
TV's funny.
That's, you know, there's that.
We'll work on that.
Woodshop that.
Oh, woodshop.
Woodchuck it.
Woodchuck that.
How much shed could a woodshed shed?
It becomes a watershed.
Now, see, that sounds like one of those dumb Sphinx riddles.
But we should quit faffing around and get to the stuff at issue.
Can we talk about where you've been?
What do you mean?
Oh, yeah.
Well, this is our first show since I've been back.
I've only been back from my trip to overseas for just a few days.
That's right.
And I just got back on Wednesday night at 11.35 p.m.
Wednesday night at 11.35, and you're back.
And as far as catching folks up, you had decided that you needed to go to Israel.
Yeah.
Israel and then the Palestine.
You're like Hyman Roth in a lot of ways.
I'm like Hyman Roth.
Yeah, that's right.
You're a retired investor living on a pension.
Did I ask who gave the order?
Did I ask who gave the order?
I watched it over the weekend.
I can't.
When I wake up, if the bag is here.
Walking around.
Then I'll have a partner.
Saying loud things.
I know I'll have a partner.
If not, then I know I'll.
You don't talk to a man like Mo Green like that.
I went to the Palestinian territories.
I went to the West Bank.
I tried to go into Gaza, but they don't let you go into Gaza.
Okay.
And then I went to Jordan.
Whoa, so you really did get around a little bit, huh?
The great nation of Jordan.
How long were you there?
A couple of weeks.
A couple of weeks.
I went and covered myself with the mud of the Dead Sea.
Oh, see, did you capitulate it?
You sound like you were on the bubble about the Dead Sea.
I went.
I went.
There were a lot of things I didn't do.
One of the things about going to a place like this is that if you talk to people, everybody's got a lot of things that you need to see.
And no matter what things you see, somebody's always going to go, oh, you didn't see the thing?
QED, you were struggling with this, and you were thinking about reaching out to your friend Josh's rabbinical brother to get the real inside deal.
Right, Avi Rosenfeld.
But once I got there, I realized that, of course, everybody's got their own Palestine, man.
Whoa.
I know, I know.
I know that just came out.
That just came out.
So there were a lot of things that I was like, you know what?
Maybe this is, even though every single thing you read says, wow, if you don't go to Masada, it's like you weren't even there.
And I said, maybe this isn't the Masada trip for me.
I'm not going to see all the things.
I'm going to see only a few of them.
Masada is the big— I know Masada is the name of their version of the CIA.
What's Masada?
That's Mossad.
Mossad.
But Masada is—it's like this clip—
plateau, kind of like a butte.
It's a butte that they had a castle on and they made their last stand on the top of the castle.
Against whom, John?
Against whom were they standing?
Oh, they were standing, you know, against the Hittites or the Phoenicians.
Yep, yep, yep.
Or, you know, it was the Judean People's Front, I think.
Might have been the People's Front of Judea, but I'll defer to you.
Anyway, and then they threw themselves off the cliff.
And it's really one of those things.
I didn't go to Petra, where Indiana Jones is riding around.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
I didn't go to the Red Sea.
A lot of things I didn't do.
Well, John, it's a big area with a lot of attractions.
It's not.
It's like, well, you got to go to Disney World for, when I was a kid, you go to Disney World at least two days.
That's right.
Just for the Magic Kingdom.
The thing about it is it's not a big area.
It's a small area.
The whole of the nation of Israel is—well, let's see here.
I'm just going to do—that's 8,500 square miles is Israel, and California—
is a California size.
Why don't you show me?
It's like 163,000 square miles.
So that can't possibly be right.
But yes, anyway, it's very small, and everything's right there.
But I had other things to do.
I was looking at other things.
What state is closest in size to Israel?
What U.S.
state?
Oh, there you go.
You look that up, and I bet you it's Delaware or something.
I was going to say probably something like a Minnesota or something, but is it really pretty narrow?
So narrow.
So narrow.
You can shoot an arrow across it.
Well, it would be like an arrow that had been provided by Hezbollah, but it still says arrow on the side, but it's really like a little missile.
Um, U.S.
state clinton size is New Jersey.
Israel has a land area of approximately 20,000.
So 8,000 square miles.
New Jersey has a land area of, uh, 8,000, 723.
So pretty close.
Yeah.
So it's New Jersey basically.
Uh, and you can see all of New Jersey in like six hours.
So, so, uh, but then I flew from Jordan to Lebanon, which is an even smaller country.
Um,
And then I was in Beirut, Lebanon, for a handful of days, and then I made it all the way back to here.
Family must freak it out.
Nobody was happy about it.
Yeah.
Not because something will happen, but, like, you know, something could happen.
Oh, well, the State Department very definitely had big—well, the State Department says don't go to Lebanon.
If you don't have to go to Lebanon, don't go to Lebanon.
It's on the list of countries that you shouldn't go to unless you have to.
I almost feel like that's—warning shot's obviously a wrong term, but it almost feels like a coded way to say, hey, look, if you get into something sticky here, we'll do what we can, but you're kind of on your own.
That's exactly what they're saying.
But, you know, the State Department also says don't go to Nepal, or at least they used to.
The State Department's got, you know, they're a little bit, they're like a, they're like a overprotected helicopter.
Sure.
But then there are places within Lebanon where not only does the State Department say, don't go here at all ever under any circumstances, but there are big signs on the side of the road that say, don't go past this point.
No foreigners passed here.
And then there are like checkpoints.
Where people are standing there going, who are you?
Why are you coming here?
Is everybody pretty clearly labeled and uniformed and stuff?
Do you know who you're talking to when you're talking to somebody who, I don't know, is carrying a rifle or something?
Yeah, kind of.
I mean...
The thing about Lebanon is that there are a lot of different kinds of people, and the areas of Lebanon are under the control of different groups.
So there's a government of Lebanon, although a lot of people in Lebanon would throw shade on that comment.
There is technically a government in Lebanon.
which is kind of not doing a very good job.
But in southern Lebanon, it's really Hezbollah that's running that whole part of the country.
And the United Nations is there.
The vibe you heard was that they're professionals.
You can deal with them.
You know Hezbollah, a lot of people say they're really nice.
And I have a new friend that I met over there who told me that really Hezbollah is just a jobs program for youth.
And unfortunately, unlike scouting— Don't they have a lot of missiles for a jobs program?
Every once in a while— I'm not casting any aspersion at all.
I am deeply out of my depth in every part of this conversation.
I would never want to, with even a glancing blow, do dishonor to, like, what's happened on— No.
I'm serious.
I don't want to, like— It's like Florida.
It's different now.
And the NAACP says, don't go there.
No.
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So... No, it's... The thing is that it's the whole part of that... The whole part of the world and everything that's in it
As you're kind of indicating, it's taken very seriously.
It's taken very seriously by everybody there.
It's taken very seriously by everybody in all the international institutions around the world, the United Nations, World Bank, all of the—everybody's very serious about it.
And no place more so than in Jerusalem, where they have divided the city into four quarters.
And they're all very serious about that.
You don't come over here and build your synagogue, not in this quarter, sir.
It's so serious.
But of course, once you go there, like going anywhere, and you spend any time there walking around,
You go, oh, right, it's real serious, except this is just all the same as everywhere.
So much of this seriousness is self-seriousness, it's theatrical, it's religious seriousness.
For better or for worse, the lives...
lives go on everywhere i mean yes even in the hollowed out um god what's the the city that's been wrecked in ukraine uh but so many um but there's there's the one where there's oh the one that's happening right yeah buck master some yeah but like i'm god the the drone footage of that is so depressing but like you still gotta you still gotta find a way to take a dump and find water and get food for your kids there's like every life goes on in all of those places right yeah you
And you don't want to take a dump next to where you find water.
That's a key.
I want to write that down.
That's key.
That's a thought technology.
You learned so much when you were there.
I did.
Nothing about Krav Maga, though.
But it's really, you know, the effect of going there where you're like, listen, man, this is sacred ground for a lot of people and serious business.
And, you know, lives are lost on a daily basis.
And, you know, and there's so much grievance.
It's grievance on top of grievance.
And this is the center of the world's grievance industry.
And then you get there and you spend any time.
And I mean, I tried to talk to everybody and listen to everybody tell me their story.
And, um, and, uh, yeah, the, you know, the takeaway is like, yeah, it's real serious business, except, um, you gotta, you gotta take a dump and you gotta get water for your kids.
And, um, and actually like all of this stuff is kind of about some magic rocks and
And everybody's got a magic rock and they don't want anybody else to see their magic rock.
And so they put their magic rock behind a, under a bushel.
And, uh, and, and just, you know, as a, as a person of the world, when you're standing there and, and you want to be respectful and you want to go, listen, I honor your magic rock and all the lives that have been lost, trying to conceal that magic rock from other people that want to see it and touch it.
You can't help but go, after a while, like, but remember, this is all kind of fake and baloney, too.
Like, it really is just a— Is it specifically about, like, differences in religion?
Well, I mean, not even— I'm thinking of Hatfields and McCoys.
Again, no disrespect.
I'm thinking about Ireland.
I'm thinking about South Africa.
And I'm thinking about the fact that, like, well, that particular— The United Goddamn States of America.
Oh, 100%.
But like that bomb didn't happen, you know.
You go back and again, you think about when the hunger strikes were happening in Northern Ireland and like things were so bad and there were regular bombings in London.
And it's like, well, yeah, that's an offensive bombing, obviously, because that's kind of what a bombing is.
But it's also...
tit for tat makes it sound too you know makes it sound like not the big deal that it is but like you know you're doing that for somebody in your family who died maybe like you know what I mean like you're isn't there some element of that you know I don't mean to just default into that American thing of going oh Bosnia Herzegovina like we'll never figure that out it goes back thousands of years I mean I'm sure there's always something to it but isn't that some part of it is like just to like get by you have to have
You must necessarily have less trust in a lot of the conventions of civilized life.
What you just said a second ago, I think is it in a nutshell.
We're really taught and really trained right now, these days especially, to say, like, if you don't have a stake in a thing, then you can't speak to it.
Mm-hmm.
And— This was part of your motivation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in this situation especially that goes back thousands of years and that involves some of the popular phraseology of today is generational trauma going back—
as many generations as there are, right, in this one particular space.
And religious conflict, deep and profound grievance about loss and death and theft and displacement and cultural destruction, et cetera, et cetera.
And we are all, because we've been living in this media environment our whole lives,
We've come to think of this space as some kind of land where the magic is so powerful and the problems and the grievances and the differences and the untraceable threads of all this stuff are so incomprehensible that none of us can possibly go there and understand anything.
And you cannot understand what the Palestinians are mad about unless you're a Palestinian.
You can't understand what the Jews are on about unless you're a Jew.
And going there and spending a couple of weeks in this world and talking to a lot of people, I had the same experience that I do when people in America tell me that I can't understand their feelings because I'm not them, which is that feeling of like, well, that's why we invented language, to tell other people about our experience and
And that's what books and music and poems and stories and paintings are for.
Like the whole of the human civilization is about explaining our experience to other people.
And so I reject the whole notion that you cannot understand a very complicated set of emotional and political problems that
Unless you're a member of that culture.
I don't accept that.
I don't accept it here in the States.
I don't accept it as a general principle globally as a human being.
Because you might as well throw all your books in a fire if you honestly think that you have to have a lived experience to understand it.
To understand it.
You throw all your books in a fire if you think that.
And, you know, I'm a songwriter.
I spent my whole first half of my career trying to get you to understand what it was like to be in a relationship with Megan Thompson.
And I think I succeeded.
And if you've ever listened to a Long Winter song and a solitary tear has gone down your cheek, then I know that you felt exactly as I did in dating Megan.
But in these places, listening to people talk about the extremely, absolutely, extremely complicated, generational, millennial-long dispute over things, I feel like I do understand.
I understand where these people are coming from and where those people are coming from, and I really am in understanding that.
Um, understanding it, not completely.
Although if you lived your whole life and to pretend thousand years, you wouldn't understand it completely either.
Right.
Um, but understand it well enough to kind of, to grok it and to go, right.
I get it.
I get it.
Um, but in the end, in the end it, you know, you have to boil it down to pop psychology at a certain point.
It, you can't,
You can't say that a thing is not knowable.
You really can't.
That's the whole—our whole journey is to know.
And to say this is not knowable or understandable or solvable is the same as saying we can all agree on cheese.
Or it's the same as saying, well, we agree to disagree.
You know, like that just crapola.
It's crapola.
I don't agree to disagree.
Right.
And I do firmly believe that the situation in the Middle East is absolutely comprehensible by normal people that spend just a little bit of time thinking about it.
And beyond that, there's no mystery.
You know, the magic rocks.
are mysterious.
Sometimes it feels like a slight form of Orientalism, as Saeed might call it.
He might.
Wasn't that his big term?
It sure was.
And that's what he would call
Well, I mean, I haven't read, like, whole books about it, but I'm at least familiar with that idea of what has come to be called Orientalism, which in America, anyway, kind of feels like this throw up your hands.
You'll never get those people because they're like how they are and blah, blah, blah, and it's inscrutable to us and all those kinds of, you know, coded words that people, including me, use.
But is that kind of a flavor of it?
Is the, like, oh, you'll never understand that, but, like...
Was there something about proximity to that and talk to those people, seeing how people live that helped you understand more?
What do you see differently now?
It seems like, you know, the, I mean, there is something that's, if you're like me and you don't travel a lot, like I get real, it was a Jerusalem effect or Jerusalem syndrome.
There's one for Paris.
There's all these different things where people get really weird when they go to Paris or Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem, it's because they're overwhelmed by God stuff.
Usually, I think in Paris, they're like a little disappointed.
But you know what I'm talking about?
There's those things that especially Americans get where we go somewhere and we're so overwhelmed by what we're in the midst of.
And, I mean, it sounds like you saw, you experienced some stuff firsthand that helps you understand that better now.
Yes?
I feel like it is, it boils down to this, right?
If you look at yourself, just as a human person, and you reflect on the times that you've had a grievance against somebody,
What that grievance was about.
They cheated you.
They insulted you in front of your friends.
They slept with your girlfriend.
In my case, they tried to take a 10 by 20 foot strip of your property.
Or in another case, the whole internet ganged up against you for three days.
You can develop a grievance about a lot of different things.
And then you can nurse that grievance.
Or you can try and resolve that grievance.
But it's very personal.
It's individual to you, right?
Well, like all problems, problems suck.
And the problems that people have are terrible.
But I think when we're being honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that.
But if it's happening to me, it's a bigger deal.
Yes, but if you're working on it, if you're working on yourself, if you're alive and trying, at least in my case, I feel like grievances end up being a thing that I inflict upon myself.
The more energy I put into nursing a grievance, the more damage I do to myself.
And in almost no instance in my life, I can't think of one,
where I have nursed a grievance, has that grievance ever been resolved to my satisfaction?
The person that slept with my girlfriend doesn't unsleep with her.
The person that insulted me in front of all of my friends, even if they apologize, in front of all of our friends, which almost never happens, it still doesn't really make up for it.
There's no amount of money.
That somebody can pay you to redress an injury.
There's no amount of... You can't unring that bell in some ways.
And so grievance, at least personally for me, I have, over the last while, learned to identify as a separate emotional state that's really not related to the problem.
Right.
Because I've talked to a lot of people.
It's what the Buddhists call.
I know I probably despise it when I say this, but they call it the second arrow.
The first arrow is one that gets shot at you.
And when you talk about something like a grievance or you talk about what I would describe in a very hippie way as you're feeling about a feeling, that's all on you.
For as long as you choose to keep turning, putting that second arrow in right next to the first one and turning it is on us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It does not bring closure.
It does not bring happiness.
And most, to me anyway, most usefully to remember is that also even though it feels like you're being safe, you're defending yourself, you're protecting yourself against future injuries, all you're really doing is like making an uglier scar.
Yes, exactly.
And so that is very personal.
That's a very, you can feel it internally as a personal experience, but it extrapolates.
It extrapolates to something.
Family dynamics, Hatfields and McCoys, as you like to say.
It extrapolates to neighborhood stick fights.
Yeah.
And it extrapolates to national, cultural, racial problems.
Grievance is a toxic state.
And grievance is also a massive political motivator.
Money collects around grievance, power and... Attention.
You can get so much more attention for something if you find a way to connect it to... I mean, the way I would put it, perhaps unfairly, is sometimes a confirmation bias.
Like, there's something about what this person wants to share with me that proves my priors.
And like, I have all the time in the world for that person to tell me I was right.
And globally...
Billions and billions of tons of gold, dacks and stacks of guns and tanks and bomb will accrue around a grievance.
And there are wars, right?
Like right now, Russia invading Ukraine is not a, their grievance isn't the issue.
You know, the issue is like violence.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine may have been driven by a grievance.
But now it's a war, right?
And in the Middle East- A score to settle.
A score.
Well, right now it's just get these fuckers off of our land and now we have to rebuild.
I just meant in terms of the person in Russia that, you know, still kind of miffed about all these different kinds of things, wanting to rebuild the Soviet bloc, all those satellite countries, you know, the famous, I don't know who said it, it might've been Khrushchev, might've been another, we will never have another after World War II, after Stalingrad at all,
we will never have another drop of Russian or Soviet blood spilled on our land.
And that's why we need Romania.
That's why we need Czechoslovakia.
We need all those buffers, those satellite countries.
And that's what that guy wants.
He wants to like, oh, I was about to say 68 borders.
I'm not going to say that.
He wants to turn back the clock to a time before the late 80s, I think.
And that's his beef.
Before the late 60s.
Mm-hmm.
But in the Middle East, depending on who you talk to, everybody wants it.
There are people who will tell you that it is in a state of war right now, right?
That it is in a state—people will tell you that it is in a state of police occupation or military occupation, just like Ukraine.
There are people that will tell you it is in—
That it is a hundred different states, right?
It's vibrating at a level where the state of it depends on where you're looking from and who you are.
And it's grievance upon grievance upon grievance upon grievance stacked in a ziggurat of grievance.
98% of those grievances are self-sustaining, can never be resolved.
For any amount of money, as a result of any amount of war or politics, no negotiation will ever resolve them.
No concession, no payment, no apology, no retreat, no advance.
It's just a ziggurat of grievance that is...
That is keeping people's political careers alive.
That is keeping a global, you know, arms industry alive.
That is keeping whole continents pitted against one another.
And people are throwing coal into those fires every day.
with absolutely no intention of trying to resolve those grievances, no interest in resolving them, because fueling them gives them, as you say, attention, power, purpose.
And the amount of profound insincerity there is worldwide directed at this New Jersey-sized area
where people wring their hands and talk about solutions and talk about treaties and borders and walls and homes and farms and families and people hold up children that were killed in collapsed buildings and people point to something that happened in 1948 or 1648.
And really, and this is the part that...
that it's very hard to talk about because even listening to this program, right, there are going to be thousands of people that have an opinion, a strong, settled, unshakable opinion about who is right and who is wrong.
And so they're hearing me talk and they're, and they are, you know, scrambling to try and figure out whose side I'm on.
And who's, you know, and therefore who I'm again.
And they're, I imagine, scared that I'm on the wrong side.
Because if I'm on the wrong side, they have to abandon me completely.
It's just another one of these culture war things.
If I'm on the wrong side, then I'm an enemy.
You can't listen to me anymore.
Can't agree with anything I'm saying.
Because these are real problems.
This is real stuff, Marlon.
These grievances are real.
Right.
And this grievance, if it isn't resolved, you know, and we're owed and somebody's owed.
Right.
I think that any three reasonable people could sit in a room and agree on first principles or agree on fait accompli or agree on what's real, what's on the ground.
And then go, well, let's just start with an assumption that nobody wins.
Let's just start with an assumption that nothing is fair.
Nobody wins.
Nobody gets what they want.
Which is kind of, I don't know.
Yeah.
I've got really strong opinions now about the region that aren't, that are exactly the opposite of going to a place and
And getting my sympathies wound up.
And I think what I felt most acutely while I was there was that sympathy is the absolute wrong engine that
to deploy in diplomacy because it takes a relatively like specific individual act of like seeing another individual is it the individual versus the group stuff is it the legacy um or the what is what how does that how does that work for you
I mean, how do you, you know what I mean?
How do you, how do you sort of come at that?
You, you've got a, it sounds like you're saying like, obviously when you go and you meet, you know, no, um, no plan survives contact with reality or with the enemy as the general said.
But in this instance, like you've, you've, you've seen enough to understand things about what's going on over there as well as do you have any, is there a new road in understanding how we get how we are for you?
I mean, how do we, you know, in terms of like how we get so fixed with our idea of how things are and then tend to be sort of resistant to evidence that makes us see it differently.
There's the proximity effect, just in the sense of like, when we talk about the Mayans, and we talk about what Mayan culture was like, we almost never make a moral judgment of it.
You don't say, oh, the Mayans were really bad.
You say, oh, the Mayans did some crazy things.
There were brutal aspects to the way they practiced their religion.
But we're far enough away from it and unaffected enough by it that we don't put a moral judgment.
Boy, the Mayans were awful.
You'll never hear somebody say that.
Whereas the monks building the missions here, people have a stronger feeling about that because it's more recent and because I live here maybe?
It's more recent.
You live here and you have extrapolated the monks building the missions to include contemporary problems.
You can make a connection.
We never say the Roman Empire was so evil that
for conquering all around the Mediterranean.
You don't look at a map of the Roman Empire and go, evil colonialists, right?
Because it was long enough for going, we don't remember who they conquered.
There's nobody to sympathize with.
You don't go, wow, those poor Berbers...
They got pushed into the desert by the Romans.
You know, we might forget that the UK, what we now call the UK, I forget what they called it back then, but that, you know, England was, you know, conquered by the Romans.
But then also in turn that if memory serves, wasn't England the one who owned what became Israel?
Or was that Palestine?
Do you mean that during the Crusades?
At the time when, you know, at one time or another, the crown has owned a quarter of the Earth's land.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I'm trying to just recall.
Wasn't it a British protectorate?
Oh, yes.
This is why everybody should watch Lawrence of Arabia once a year.
Because it really, although it's a crazy movie,
It can locate you in time and space.
But yeah, from 1918 to 1948, the British were nominally managing a palatine.
Now from 1918, from 1518 to 1918, 400 years, it was managed by the Ottoman Turks.
So the only reason the British were there for the 40 years that they were, 30 years, I'm sorry, 30 years that they were, was that they had beaten the Turks in World War I and they reneged on their promises, basically.
And so although we spend a lot of time talking about the 30 years that the British were there, it's really the 400 years that the Ottomans were running the place that kind of still resonate.
There's still a lot of that there.
But in terms of not using sympathy as a factor in making international decisions is that, well, precisely, it's not objective in any possible way.
It's the opposite of objective, sympathy.
And so you're trying to make...
what are ultimately decisions that sympathy cannot make.
You cannot hold sympathy for everyone simultaneously.
Sympathy is by its very nature partisan.
You have sympathy for one, and that requires that you have less sympathy for another, right?
You're measuring your sympathy, which is not how you talk about the Roman Empire or the Mayans.
And we're living right now in a world where sympathy is the currency of the day, right?
We spend a lot of sympathy money every day and our language is all about sympathy currency when a lot of the time it's not about that at all.
It's really about like some brick and mortar stuff.
And the crazy thing for me that I never foresaw
was in recognizing that the United Nations, now I'm going to start to sound a little bit like your cranky dad, or in your case, your cranky friend John Syracusa, but the United Nations was formed by
and the Nuremberg trials happen, and the Geneva Convention was passed, and the state of Israel was declared, all in the same historical moment.
You know, within a year or two of one another, but all in the same moment of post-World War II, we don't want there to ever be another Hitler,
And so we're forming an international committee of all the big countries, and we're declaring a lot of new laws that never, ever existed in humankind before.
New laws about crimes against humanity, about what states can and cannot do.
Brand new.
And, you know, it started with the League of Nations after World War I, but that kind of petered out.
Yeah.
I think the Geneva Convention was older, but you're saying like with a kind of, well, not a stroke of the pen, but like basically saying 1948, this happens, this happens, this happens, and it all kind of feels like an omnibus kind of effort.
Yeah.
There was more, I mean, there's the good cause of like, hey, you know, League of Nations didn't go far enough, you know, back in the day.
And then Wilson never wanted to be in the war and, you know, understandably.
But like, so the United Nations comes along and he's saying it's sort of like caught up in that holiday season of like the war is over and now we need to start moving some pieces around to keep stability for us, the allies especially, who won.
I think there are two things.
And the Geneva Conventions, you know, obviously, like, what I'm talking about, all this League of Nations stuff, sure, it started all the way back...
French Revolution or whatever.
The idea that gradually we were going to leave behind a feudal state and we were going to, as we're moving toward democracy, inevitably democracy is going to spread, hopefully, just like once communism was invented, the idea was that communism was going to spread because these great ideas, in order for them really to work, they have to keep
A whole world of democracies works better than a world where there are only a few democracies.
But the Geneva Convention was only really ratified in 1949.
So in this moment, there are two things I think the United Nations was put there to do.
And one of them is, as the British Empire went away, we needed a daddy to
to manage we needed somewhere to appeal we needed there to be a manager that the british had kind of the british navy had kind of done right and the and america was doing but i think much more importantly we didn't want another hitler and one of the one of the key elements that that
that kept coming up to me while I was over there, was that up until this United Nations Nuremberg moment, right after the war, the law of conquest was the governing law of the world.
If a nation could take and hold territory forever,
There were a lot of people arguing that you should give Schleswig-Holstein back to the Danes or that you should give Alsace-Lorraine back to the French.
But there wasn't anything to do about it until you... I used to get very confused about the city called Cologne, which is, I think, K-O-L-N, which I know mainly now from a famous piano performance.
But Cologne always sounded to me like it should be in France.
Well, right.
Talk about Strasbourg.
Like Strasbourg, how many times did Strasbourg go back and forth between France and Germany?
Um, a lot of times, but you know, the, the only reason that there are Hungarians even in Europe, they're not there, they're, they were the last group of people to arrive in Europe and say, we live here now.
Um,
But the reason that all the countries of Europe are shaped the way they are is that the law of conquest was the governing idea, right?
The reason the United States is where it is, even though we are under a lot of—we're getting sweated with a lot of land acknowledgments right now for it.
But Manifest Destiny globally was true.
You took what you could hold.
And if you couldn't hold it, you lost it.
And in 1948, there was a brand new idea, which was, no, that's not true anymore.
You can't just take and hold.
And in this area, in the Middle East, the United Nations stepped in and the global community stepped in and started trying to arbitrate what happened.
what the conflict between people in a brand new way that had never, no one had ever tried to arbitrate this way.
There had been, there had been diplomats that went to negotiations, but states agreed, agreed on borders with each other.
And they,
Now there was this other entity, this global hat, this group that was brand new, that still hadn't moved into their offices, right?
The UN building in New York wasn't built until the 50s.
They were pushing papers around in a warehouse somewhere, but they were arbitrating.
And they've been doing it ever since.
And, you know, when I was in southern Lebanon, there are United Nations troops there in a broad swath across the bottom of that country that is controlled by Hezbollah, but is full of soldiers from Fiji and Ireland and China who have armed camps there trying to enforce the
What exactly?
I couldn't figure out the whole time I was there.
They're trying to, I don't know what.
I honestly have no idea what they're doing there.
And I think if you look it up, you will have less idea than I.
We could both spend a year reading about why the UN is in southern Lebanon or what, not why they're there, but what they're doing.
You know, at least I can only give you my impression over time, which is that when you see those blue helmets, it means they're trying to keep the peace.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Right.
It says here, the United Nations interim force in Lebanon is a peacekeeping mission to confirm Israeli withdrawal of
and to ensure that the government of Lebanon restores its effective authority.
They have been there since 1978.
And their mandate is to, A, confirm Israeli withdrawal, which I think you could do in less time than between 1978 and now, and ensure the government of Lebanon restores its effective authority in the area.
Also seems like a thing you would either do or not do.
but not just be there for, I guess, for eternity, right?
And I've been a UN booster my whole life.
I believe in the UN.
I think that the future of the world is that we all meet in a big room around a round table.
And, um, every once in a while, somebody pounds on the table with their shoe and people talk and, and they have little earphones where they're hearing it in Swahili.
Like I believe in it or I was always believed in it, but being there and listening to, to everyone talk about their grievances and you know, they want to talk to you.
They wanted to talk to me because I was an American and they believe that they need to tell their story to Americans and
Because Americans are going to go back, like I'm doing now, to America and tell their story to other Americans.
Because somehow over here in America, we are going to, if their story gets told here, then things are going to change there.
And I heard it from both sides of the wall.
You know, I want to tell you my story.
Take your story back.
Explain it to America.
Mm-hmm.
And the United Nations just kept coming up over and over, the United Nations, the United Nations, because there's a huge part of that world that's stuck in 1948, and they're stuck in 1948 because the United Nations, I think, stepped in and said, they did not say, we'll take it from here.
They said, now we're involved.
Like, we're the grownups here.
And I don't think they've proved to be the grownups, the United Nations.
So now I believe that the people that live inside the earth, the lizard men that live under the North Pole, are going to come and destroy the United Nations.
And we're going to stop.
We're going to need another United Nations.
Something bigger.
A bigger omnibus project.
There you go.
That will also encompass the UFOs.
And you could be the emissary for that, maybe.
First, we have to get the pedophiles out of the Democratic bars.
And so...
So, as you can imagine.
It's a lot.
It's a lot to be chunking on.
I'm grateful to you for letting me talk this much.
What?
About it, just because I know that it's like I'm dancing all around like some magic fire.
You remember that stuff in the 70s that we kept in a can next to the fireplace that you would sprinkle on the fire to make it...
have colors did you have that stuff oh i think i know i've seen that in mood logs but you're saying it was available as like a as a mix-in it was like a huge uh like a huge canister that was kind of like uh what you get fancy salt in now and it looked like like a baleen i know what you're talking about or like a match a big round match box kind of thing yeah and you would you would sprinkle these crystals these magic crystals on your fire and then the fire would like shine and shimmer and that's like the un different color
What?
No, that's me dancing around the fire of this topic.
You have a lot to, you have a lot to process and I, I'm somebody, uh, this would be a big surprise to a lot of people.
I, I think by talking sometimes and it's, you know, sometimes I do need to hear it in the air.
Not, not for everything.
Sometimes it's just like,
let's put it this way.
There are times when I have had something banging around in my head and it wasn't until I said it out loud that I realized I either completely don't know what I'm talking about or I have a much stronger thought about this than I realized.
And sometimes you need to talk to think.
Yeah, that's right.
That's a thought technology.
I'm doing it.
I'm doing it right now.
And I, and, um,
You know, I met a lot of people on the trip, some of them way smarter than me, some really, really well-informed.
I wanted to tell you, I was in Jordan, and I got a DM in my Instagram because, you know, I'm not on Twitter anymore.
And I really was sad to not be on Twitter.
That would have been perfect for like a meetup or something.
Yeah.
I was sad to not be on Twitter in 2015, right?
Because Twitter now is not what it was.
And in 2015...
To be on Twitter and to be on this trip would have been amazing because I would have said, I'm in wide spot in the road.
And somebody would be like, I'm right there.
Yeah.
But Instagram, although a smaller, a much smaller engine, I get a DM from a guy and he says, I'm in the army here.
I'm stationed at a military base north of Amman.
And I was like, I'm in Amman today.
I'll come visit you.
And he said, oh, you don't have to do that.
And I was like, no.
What kind of base was it?
So it was a joint operating base.
There's a big sort of Jordanian Air Force-y base where they fly a lot of combat helicopters, but there's also a lot of Americans up there in secret squirrel compounds who are either technically not there,
Or they're, but technically just advising.
But really what they're doing is they're sharpening their buoy knives on their boots, waiting to get called and dropped in in the middle of the night somewhere dark.
And I was cautioned many times not to say that, but, you know, what can you do?
And so he's up at this military base because he's in the Judge Advocate General.
He's a lawyer.
Mm-hmm.
And I was like, I'm on my way.
And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
And I was like, on my way.
So I drove up to this military base and he got me on the base.
And then he was like, well, we'll try and get into this.
They'll probably say no.
And we got there and all the guards were from Arkansas and they were all 20 years old.
And I was like, listen, kids, have you ever heard of rock and roll?
And they were like, no, no.
I was like, great, either have I. But they let me on the base, and then we went up in the control tower, and there was a guy in his pajamas directing all these combat helicopters, and had a great day with this kid, this Army captain.
Well, while I'm there, I get another text, a DM, from a guy named Matt Hall, and he says, hey, there's a group of us here in Amman,
And we're all big Roderick on the line listeners.
We've been listening since the beginning.
We got a little expat community here.
Do you want to come to dinner?
And I said, yes.
Right now I'm on a secret military base, but I'll come to Amman and have dinner with you.
And this was after a big meetup I had in Tel Aviv with people that were also, you know, from our universe.
Oh, good.
Oh, so you were able to, Tel Aviv is where you landed, right?
Yeah, and I spent a day or two there.
Tel Aviv was really interesting because everybody that came to the meetup
They were all Israelis, but there was a couple that were Orthodox and they were living in a settlement and
And there was another guy from Haifa who was a liberal who felt a lot of, there was a lot of not stress energy between them.
He and that couple, if they were to pursue a conversation, might not see eye to eye on lots of things.
They did not approve of each other.
That's right.
And the Orthodox ones were like, hey, we got no problem with anybody.
And the other kid was like, well, yeah, but you live in a settlement in an occupied territory.
And I was like, no, no, no, shush, shush, shush.
But in Jordan...
I show up at this dinner party.
There's six people there.
They're all like expatriate children whose parents were in the foreign service in the 70s.
There was a daughter of an American ambassador.
There was, you know, there were kids that had grown up in embassies and compounds who'd all known each other in Cairo in the 90s.
And now they were friends in this kind of international group.
that it had never really occurred to me existed.
And now I was like sitting at this table, kind of head swimming.
One of them worked for the World Cup.
One of them works for Save the Children.
One of them wrote an influential blog called The Arabist.
They're all kind of fluent in Arabic.
And I'm sitting at this table.
We're eating Lebanese food.
And they're all talking about Merlin, man.
That's fine.
That's okay.
Stop.
You can stop right there.
That's fine.
That's, that's, you know what?
Thank you.
That's fine.
Let's just stop right there.
Right there.
Hello.
Hello, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
And I'm sorry for how I am.
Thank you.
They love Merlin.
You know, that's.
They love Merlin so much.
That sounds like a fun dinner.
It was.
Eat with your hands?
Is that a hands kind of thing?
Yeah, there was a lot of eating with the hands.
But it reminded me.
But you had some good dates when you were over there.
It made me lots of dates.
Isn't that a date?
Lots of hummus.
But you know that thing where you eat so much hummus that now everything is hummus?
Like I got close to that.
Mm-hmm.
But it made me realize.
Critical mass, yeah.
There's a way, and this is my new project.
There's a way for me to go around the world having dinners with people who want to talk to me about Merlin Man.
And I feel like I can fly first class.
I feel like I can go around the world, have 15 dinners with grown up people who want to talk to me about keeping moving and getting out of the way.
That I like.
The meat part less.
They just, you know.
Yeah, but let's not talk about.
They love the Merlinverse.
Oh, thank you, everyone.
Hello.
Thank you.
Thank you for, you know, just fucking up with it.
Merlinverse.
Okay.
Keep my name out of your horn.