RL113 - Big Comedy Rock Solo

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John’s guitar doesn’t have B♭ minor, referring to John being invited as a musician to the Conference on World Affairs and ending up on stage with a 18-person Jazz band that was playing a simple 4-bar Blues in B♭ minor.

The show title refers to John’s school of music not allowing people to play a solo because that would be egotism, and when he did it on his own shows it was ironic and a big comedy Rock solo that his bandmates would openly scuff at.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John accidentally updating software on his computer (RL113)

John reached up to click on the answer button on the Skype and he accidentally clicked on the button that said: ”Software updates are available for your computer! Would you like to download them now!” and he clicked on ”Yes!” apparently and the thing started to work, but the X-button was shaded out and cancelling wasn’t an option anymore, so right now something is working on his computer to update his software, which he does not want.

Merlin asked if John had run diagnostic, which is John’s favorite of all the programs, it indicates that it is not working. Merlin’s favorite is when his ComCast connection goes from being merely a piece of human shit to obviously not working, and he can glance over at the modem and see that the right lights are not on and he restarts it, does the rain dance, but if it still doesn’t work and you have to call ComCast they ask you to go to the website.

John at the Conference on World Affairs as a musician instead of a pundit (RL113)

Earlier this year John went to the Conference on World Affairs for the first time (see RL108, RL197) and just as he predicted, as he is getting further and further away from it he is remembering it as being a spectacular event that he would highly recommend, but the one bummer was that they had him in their system as a musician primarily, although the people who invited him to come understood that he was there as podcaster. Misattributed and musician first instead of being a potential retired director of the CIA is bad enough.

All week long he was talking to 70-year old, going: ”Podcast!” - ”Podcast?” He went to the big music performance and they told him to get up and play with all the other musicians. All the other musicians who go to this conference are middle-aged and some of them properly old Jazz musicians who have played the Newport Jazz Festival for 40 years, they have progressions of top of progressions, they told him it was just a simple jam, nobody knew the stuff, and they just all get up there and jam, but that was not John’s scene, he doesn’t do that very well, he would rather grab the microphone and tell an anecdote.

These people were Jazz cats and throughout the whole week he kept saying he was not really a jammer. If there was a half-rack (12 cans) of Stroh’s and they were in the basement of somebody’s house he would jam, but he doesn’t get up on stage with 25 people unless it is an extended version of Bringin’ On The Heartbreak and everybody takes a solo. They had rented a Stratocaster for John and there was an amp and he was all set up, there was as spot for him on the stage together with 18 other players, two saxophonists, two other guitarists, two bass players, a guy playing the Flügelhorn, three vocalists, a couple of drummers, one of them from Israel.

They were up there playing basically the theme from Taxi, mid-temp 1970s Cool Jazz that surely in the mid-1960s was heavy-duty shit, but even by the late 1970s that was no longer the case and John just kept seeing ”a Stephen J. Cannell Production”, like ”Sit, Ubu, Sit!” (Book by Gary David Goldberg) It was music that John could not comprehend listening to, let along making. Not to say that it wasn’t amazing, but it was not a thing he could gain any traction on.

He walked out on stage, being pressured backstage in the friendliest way by people holding a clipboard, saying: ”You got to get out there, this is part of the spirit of the whole week, that we get out and take risks and we just go for it!”, and he got this Stratocaster, and the band leader guy was the trumpet player and he told John: ”All right, we are going to do something really simple, a 4-bar Blues”, which John thought he could find some way to dig into this, and then the guy looked over at the piano player, who was blind, and asked him what key they should play and he suggested B♭ minor.

Then the band starts playing and John was just: ”What the fuck is this? This is not a 4-bar Blues in any world I live in!” and he was sitting on the guitar, trying to find the root. His guitar didn’t even have B♭ minor. John was just hunting, and he could hear it was fully Jazz because every note he played was so far out, it was the hippest note in Jazz. None of them do know what they are doing in advance, but their musical language enables them to hear the progression go by and follow it unconsciously. There were music stands with a single piece of paper with 80.000 notes that looked like a Rorschach Test!

John was right in the middle of the stage because that was where they had set up his stuff. They told him that sound check was at 5pm, but as he showed up no-one else was there except for the sound guy and he checked the guitar and a vocal mic and he was thinking they might ask him to play one of his songs and all the saxophone players would play Cinnamon together. he checked this rig, he waited around, nobody else came, and the sound guy said that Jazz guys usually just show up right before the show, and John had expected they might so a run-through, do a 4-bar Blues, pick a key.

John went for a walk and as he came back the guitar was out there, and as he walked out on stage in the middle of the show, trending toward the finale, and one of the other guitar players who was from Argentina, was plugged into John’s rig, which was a bit odd, and he said he had played a lot for the night and handed John the cable and left and he had been the one guy that John was going to be able to look at his instrument and tell what fucking note they were playing because the other guitar player also put his guitar down and started playing the bass, facing the piano player with his back to John.

John was standing on stage with 20 people and he could not see one stringed instrument, except maybe a violin, but not a thing that he could look at anybody’s fretting and hand and at least know what quadrant of the guitar they were at. John was hunting for notes for 45 seconds and flop-sweat was pouring down and a voice in his head told him: ”You fucking idiot! You knew! You never should have walked out on this stage, you should have hit your hand with a hammer before walking out on the stage!” and John turned the volume knob completely off, got a big smile on his face, took a a step forward, and started to just strumming the shit out of that thing.

The trumpet player looked over to John to take a solo, but John waved him off as if he had told him to pitch a fast ball: ”No sir, thank you!” with a big smile, and they moved on to the next guy who took a tambourine solo for 20 minutes. John was up there, just chinken pickin and cooking on his completely off guitar, and it was the only thing he could do. Nobody in the room could tell or gave a shit, except maybe a couple of people who were aware that he was going to be playing, and as he talked to them afterward they both said: ”Yeah, it was great! I couldn’t really hear you, but it seemed like a lot of music was getting made!”

As the show was over John put the guitar down by the door on his way out, he was not going to hang around and have a cup of tea after the show. He was frustrated so many times in his life he had been in that exact situation enough to have learned that it is never going to play, and yet hope springs eternal and there is a competing voice that says: ”Be experimental, just get up there and just do it, what happens if tonight’s the night? What if the stars align and it is amazing and you feel like an idiot if you say that you don’t want to do it and then the last song they do is Smoke on the Water and there is a guitar in the center of the stage with a spotlight on it that was meant for you and you didn’t jump out and do it? Take a risk, go for it!”

If John would have walked out there and said: ”… and now I would like to take it down a little bit and play you a little song of mine called Hindsight, it would have been just the worst. The only thing he could have done was go out and say: ”Okay, I am here now, so Blues in E!”, but he was the Junior Partner by a factor of 15. The piano player was probably 75, and a lot of these people maybe hadn’t played together, but they had all heard of one another. These were people who were gigging in a different realm.

As John walked out the back door of the theater, still flop-sweaty, having this argument with himself while walking down the alleys of Boulder, going: ”Ah, idiot! Why did you ever walk on that stage? Don’t ever do it! You know not to do it!” None of his friends who do a similar thing, John Vanderslice, Dave Bazan, Ben Gibbard, would have agreed to go out on stage under those conditions! They would have said: ”Let’s set up a separate show that is more a songwriter night at one of the bars and I will play a little set of songs!”, but nobody would have gotten up on a stage with Jazz musicians and tried to comp along.

John inviting to a tweet-up in Boulder after his performance on the Conference on World Affairs (RL113)

John was kicking himself, he was mad, he was sitting on a park bench, and he does what is naturally the thing, which is go on Twitter and say: ”Tweet-up! I am sitting on a park bench in Boulder for the next 40 minutes, kicking myself! If anybody wants to come and say hi!” He had to get out of this head space because he was turning sour about a thing that doesn’t really matter and that actually worked out just fine. He didn’t know anybody in this town and he needed to turn the night around.

Within 10-15 minutes two people showed up, one of them Merlin’s good friend Jason, the ComCast technician, a very nice man of the Italian persuasion. He said he was moving to the west. Then a young woman showed up, also delightful, they were all meeting for the first time, and as they were sitting on the park bench talking a big Lincoln Continental goes by and as it went by the real wheel came off and the car landed on its axel and started scraping. That of course attracted all the Juggalos that hang out Downtown because there were flames and as soon as you start scraping metal on metal they come out of all the doorways, and then the cops were there. It ended up being a very positive night.

When he was finally walking home by the end of that night he felt very light and all was right with the world, and it was that he had reached out to humanity, but it also was a risk because he could have heard crickets and then it would have been just him watching the Juggalos and he would have been even more bummed out. But two wonderful people showed up out of the gloom and it was great!

John coming from a school of music where you don’t solo (RL113)

John has certain insecurities, like almost any musician would, of not being up to the game. He ended up on a much larger panel with some of these cats and it came around to me, and he said: ”Unfortunately I come from a school of thought that spent many years pretty solidly feeling that soloing was an act of egotism or even colonialism. In the school of music that I came up in, nobody took a solo at all, except maybe intentionally bad ironic solos!” John’s life shows often have big solos that he would love to be playing earnestly, but for a long time he played those big solos ironically, it was the way he allowed himself to do it. His bandmates would be sitting, openly scoffing at him as he did his big comedy Rock solo.

Unfortunately he comes from a school where they feel like soloing is bourgeoisie, and you could hear a pin drop. This was a multiracial group of musicians and Jazz is the path and John was sitting there, saying that they act of soloing is bourgeoisie, he felt like a member of Gang of Four all of a sudden, but not the band (the Maoist political faction). By the end of the week John had made a circle and traced back to the beginning.

Knowing your limits, not letting other pressure you into doing something you don’t want (RL113)

The idea that you know what you are good at and you set limits about how you will be pressured into singing at somebody’s wedding, or a long time ago he said that he doesn’t do karaoke, if he is at somebody’s wedding and everybody is drunk and somebody hands him a microphone he would generally say: ”No!” unless it was the bride asking, but you can’t do that because there are those moment where you say: ”Yes, alright, I will do it!” and it ends up being the greatest night in your life.

Merlin on a conference with his former advertising group (RL113)

Merlin argues that one of the myths of getting married is that it is the bride’s day, and it is the bride’s day, a lot of those women have been thinking about that day their whole life and have really particular ideas that should be honored, and once you are in the machinery you realize it is all about other people. If the bride wants you to sing a song, that is a nice thing to do. One time Merlin was at a conference that his old Internet advertising group put on, it was a boutique shop run by a very famous guy.

It was nice to be part of the group, it was a great money maker, they were great people, it was nice to even be invited, but one of the reasons he ended up leaving was that they were doing more and more sponsored posts on their site, which is nowadays completely okay, and Merlin left a lot of money on the table because he couldn’t do that anymore, even the 1-2 times he did it he felt so dirty because he is stupid and old and that is how his mind works. Even today it irks him when sites don’t announce that it is a sponsored post while they are purporting generating independent and journalistic content.

When Merlin first met Jonathan Coulton, and he is no longer unique in that regard, he told him that what he admires about him is that he is circumspect about who is allowed to fuck his shit up for almost no money. Merlin doesn’t want people to frame him unless he understands what he is accepting from a monetary standpoint, you are giving away part of yourself when you let other people decide who you are and then put you under the rubric of their brand.

Merlin showed up at this conference where he mostly had to sit at a round table with a pad of paper and a pitcher of water and smile and applaud, but then he found out that he was going to be on a panel after the announcement, he didn’t know any of the other people on the panel, except by reputation and it wasn’t good. He was up there with one person who had a blog about celebrity babies where she wrote about the baby products of celebrities with affiliate links and how that was growing, another person talking about how they were hiring people in Australia so they could have people posting around the clock, while Merlin was a 1-person site where he was hosting the server and doing everything by himself.

Merlin ended up being a bit of a karma-suck. He made the same mistake as John did at the Conference on World Affairs: He agreed to do although he thought he really shouldn’t do it, but he felt obligated, and he didn’t want to be disrespectful, but he didn’t know what he was in for and once he got up there, being him of 6-8 years ago, he said some things that were slightly at odds with what everybody else up there said.

There are people out there who are very reluctant to let other people frame them, and if you do license a song you understand what you are licensing, you are treating it like a business, and when people try to pay you in compliments and in reputation, nobody ever offers you that stuff unless they are going to get more out of it than you will, and they take a little tiny piece of you with them. This has been 6-8 years ago and Merlin is still sitting on his toad stool, feeling like a dick that he got up there and had to explain his position alongside somebody who has affiliate links to celebrity baby products.

John was on Buzzfeed today, looking at 25 people who should be dead, and it was all pictures of people in skateboard crashes.

Creative jobs that are not as independent as they seem to be because there is always money involved (RL113)

The other day a friend said that she had been thinking about wanting to be a travel writer, but didn’t know how. Somebody who writes for glossy magazines where they never say anything bad about a hotel? Those are people have a job, they are publicists, they are not travel writers. There are stacks and stacks of magazines all around the world, you could build the foundation of a house with all the magazines that basically are PR people writing glowing reviews. Nothing gets into those magazines unless there is some money associated with it.

When was the long time you read a review of a really expensive hotel that was like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? ”I walked into this hotel and the first thing I smelled was blood!” You maybe find it on an independent blog, but those people are not making a living and they are clearly not being flown around. It is not a Lester Bangs (music critic) situation where they are being compensated for their personality in describing this travel experience. Rolling Stone doesn’t have a travel guy on staff whose job it is to get out and just write about the shit he gets into.

But what about The New York Times Magazine travel section? Those people perceive their job to be finding interesting experiences and package them thematically. You think you are a great writer, but then you should be working for an advertising company, publishing ”25 spas in the Seychelles that don’t have long lines”, what kind of writing is that? Merlin says that if you have to ask the question how to become a great writer, then you have already failed at it.

John doesn’t want to put everything on the shoulders of Elizabeth Gilbert (the author of Eat, Pray, Love), but there is a whole culture of manifesting and that is why there are so many freaking photographers now. ”What do you want to do with your life?” - ”I think I want to be a photographer and I will just manifest that and now I am a photographer!” You might be taking pictures, but to be a photographer of that kind is like being a videographer or landscape architect, a lot of it is code for: ”My dad is rich!”

If you don’t have a rich dad and are not just looking for a cool thing to justify your time on Earth, but are really looking for a job, you should cross ”travel writer” off of the list of fantasy jobs or replace it with ”publicity flack” because the idea you have of jetsetting around with a serious of silk scarves billowing in the wind as you visit 5-star hotels and give them glowing reviews, but at the same time retain your personal integrity, one of those things is going to have to go.

You can do a lot of things, but you will very rarely end up in this one place that you saw when you didn’t understand the business yet. You might end up become one of the best copy writers by starting out wanting to be a television writer. You never know what opportunity is going to come along, and they all come down to an extraordinary amount of sacrifice including some pie in the sky dream that was never really a sane goal because you didn’t really understand what the job was.

The concept that pollutes the water is that there is more than any time since the renaissance in Florence a sense of patrons and of magic income streams, and it is very hard to perceive where the center of the stream is, but if you can stumble along and bumble into a situation where some billionaire decides that you are his pet project or somebody innocuously seeds a reference to their product into your content in a way that you feel doesn’t diminish the content, but they are a rich person and they believe that their subliminal advertising is really effective and they are willing to pay mightily for it.

Thinking that money will come to you when you are in the right place at the right time

The idea that there is all this free money and you just have to be in the right place at the right time and tap into it. When you go on a cruise and you become aware that the cruise lines and the watch companies and the perfume companies and the people who run the Duty Free stores and the liqueur companies are all in bed with each other and not a single Rolex gets sold where every one of these people doesn’t take a cut of it.

Nobody is getting rich, but everybody is getting a little percentage of promoting the idea that everybody is rich, and that luxury brands are perfectly appropriate. There are people with more money than they know what to do with, and every once in a while somebody does get their Kickstarter funded 1000% more than they asked or somebody does hit a jackpot or work on a project and they forget about it and it turns out they are now part owners of a big thing, or spray-painted a freaking mural on the wall of the Facebook startup and got paid in shares.

There are enough of those stories that it gets into the subconscious of the culture in a way that a lot of people, John included, are walking around, going: ”Where is my pay day?” He could have fucking spray-painted a mural on the Facebook wall if he knew it was going to be worth $300 million, and that little tickle of feeling like it is really just a question of riding the elevator with the right person and on the other end of the elevator ride you are shaking hands and he is saying: ”My people are going to call you!”, that de’Medicis fund your little sculpture studio, that is part of the lottery culture, it is total magical thinking, and yet it happens every once in a while.

Merlin mentions the File Drawer Effect where you exclude some of the research in your study because it didn’t meet the results that you wanted, which is effectively cheating. It is very popular today to talk about what you have learned from your failures, but nobody asked what they learned from their failures of somebody who didn’t have a big success, and you don’t hear all the times where somebody got in the elevator with a de’Medici and it didn’t turn out with funding their sculpture studio. Those stories don’t get out!

John went to school with a bunch of computer science majors in the late-1980s, they were studying computer maths and were designing programs that were impenetrable with really bad user interfaces, all the exact same stuff that made certain people millionaires, and he hasn’t talked to these friends in a while, but of this whole handful of guys none of them are millionaires. Even in his own life John has that experience, because sometimes he walks around and regrets not having gone into computer science in the 1980s and he would be a millionaire now. But he knew all the people in computer science at this one college, they were all stoner pals and Tetris buddies and none of them are millionaires. Most people don’t become millionaires.

Deadwood as a metaphor for international systems

John watched the first season of Deadwood, but he didn’t make it to the second season. Merlin has watched it all the way through once and he has watched the first 5 episodes 5 times each. It is the old joke that in all those transaction the only people who make sustainable money, not a lottery or a one-day lucky shot, are lawyers and financial people who will always make money off the cost of other people’s transactions, and it is the people who sold the equipment who got rich, the people who sold the pans and the shovels and the picks.

The city of Seattle is built on the crushed dreams of 100.000 people who headed up to the Yukon to get rich in the gold fields. Seattle sent all the goods up to the Yukon and collected all the gold. If were among the small handful of people who actually struck it rich up there or got gold, you would take it down to the pop-up general store and that guy would weigh it on his scale, put it in a bag, send it by dogsled down to Lake Bennett where they put it on a paddle-boat to take it to the train and eventually it would make it into Seattle. The Filson company was built originally to send clothes up to the gold miners.

Alaska is what built Seattle, trying to exploit Alaska, but none of the names that ring out from that era are names of miners, they are all names of merchants, bankers, shop-keepers, and gold-pan sellers, those are the ones who have their names on buildings, and by the time most of the miners arrived the gold was all claimed and it just became a rush town of people spending the last dollar they received back from Boston, outfitting themselves like a dude in all the latest gear, and then they lose it all in a poker game and have to wire home for the money to get a one-way ticket bag.

Merlin continues to talk about how much he loves Deadwood and how the setting reminds him of John. What John finds great with a town like in that TV show is that there are always microcosms of the big picture. It is what he always tells people who come up to him with elaborate conspiracy theories: Al Swearengen is in charge of this town and everybody is terrified of him, but it is a lot of work to be him, it is incredibly stressful and people are fucking up on your behalf all the time and you are constantly mad and you are out there killing people who need to be killed, but you seldom really relish it.

It is work you have to do to maintain your position, because otherwise there are all these grabby rats around your ankles that are just waiting for you to slip up, but from the perspective of somebody who is scraping by in the town, Al Swearengen seems like he has got it made, that he is in charge of everything and his invisible hand is everywhere, but from Al Swearengen’s perspective it is a shit-ton of work, he didn’t ask for it, and he perceives it to be his duty to maintain a certain kind of order. When you take a step back you realize that all the international systems are just giant extrapolations of that.

People have conspiracy theories about the trilateral commission that is running the world and there are secret rooms where men are making secret plans, and the reality is that there are people sitting around in these rooms making plans, but there isn’t this additional level of intention behind a further curtain, they are just guys who are improvising and they have power, but they don’t have unlimited power. There is no great-great-grandson Rothschild who is moving the levers like his grandfather did and we are all slowly poisoned by our water bottles.

Everybody is scrambling and improvising to keep the ball moving incrementally and ultimately stupidly. If human beings were smart enough to keep even the smallest conspiracy a secret and alive for longer than half a generation, the evidence would be everywhere that the world actually ran that way, but in fact the streets are full of shit and we are trying to walk from one saloon to the next without getting in a gun fight. There is no system, and you never sat in Al Swearengen’s office and watched the ins and outs of how a guy like that keeps the ball in the air today.

Merlin says that there are three things that are super-hard to do and super-hard to sustain: Working with other people, getting shit accomplished, and keeping secrets. Doing all three of these things for 10 years independently of one another are super hard, but it is what every conspiracy requires, and it is so ironic that the least trustful people in the world are being conspiracy theorists. They have a reason for everything, and have an incredibly bizarre idea of how much bad guys can trust each other.

John’s peculiar advantage is that he really does not think that there is anybody out there who is any smarter than John. People claim that there are people up there who are a lot smarter than the rest of us and they are doing things we do not understand, and John just does not believe that. He has met a lot of people across a wide spectrum, some of them with tremendous power, some of them he thought they are smart and he liked the way they talked or thought, but smarter than himself? No, not really!

As a result of that his interpersonal relationships with people are a template for how people interact with one another. His interactions with people are not principally different from the way any other person interacts with any other people. If he cannot keep a conspiracy going among his friends for more than 4 weeks, if he can’t tell one person a secret and not hear it back from a third person 4 weeks later, then how could anybody?

Traditional gender roles, women being actually in charge, even if the men are the front figures (RL113)

It is one of John’s theories of the book he is about to write on Feminism: All the most powerful people in his life are women and always have been, which does not square with the cultural narrative that we have accepted that women are in a disadvantaged position vs men. Clearly our culture is structured so that men are ”in charge”, but in John’s own life the women are in charge, and that is true of anybody he knows and every woman he knows. He doesn’t know a single man who is really in charge of the women in his family.

There is a tremendous tension in John’s own first-hand experience between what he perceives to be real in the microcosm of his own life and what he is being told is true in the macrocosm. It is always anecdotal, but in his reality of how he perceives life he lives in a matriarchic culture, and the perception of our culture of being patriarchic is one the he is interested in unraveling. He has as theory as to why we perceive it that way and certainly you can point to a lot of anecdotal and statistical evidence to bolster that theory, but his first-hand experience is that mom is the head of the family and so was grandma.

It feels very much in the family of the idea that for example in your personal life person X is sleeping with Person Y’s wife and everybody knows it except for person Y, but we are all willing to believe that the government or the Jews control the media, that there are international systems that are hundreds of years old where everything is being puppet-controlled by people who have back-engineered alien technology, but the people around John who have everything at stake can’t even manage to carry on a simple and normal affair with one another!

Merlin’s grandfather was a very proud man, a mason, he was from British Guiana, very English and extremely racist, pretty much what you would expect that America was like. Merlin always knew that his grandmother was a secretary and he had a career at Cincinnati Gas & Electric (see RL24), which was the story, but the reality was that he had a pretty blue-collar job and for 30 years he would shut off people’s electricity every day. His grandmother on the other hand was an executive secretary to the founder of a pharmaceutical firm in Cincinnati, and she was the bread-winner in the family.

For the last 40-50 years we have been struggling against the idea that what is the perceived imbalance of power is the actual imbalance of power and we need to change what we perceive to be the structures that allow for this imbalance of power, but there isn’t really any awareness that the perceived imbalance of power does not actually reflect an actual imbalance, and that we were starting a system that was actually in balance or was in a cycle of 100-200 years where it had been out of balance after the industrial revolution.

After World War II trying to integrate new technology was making the perceived imbalance ugly, but we have been trying to right a system that was in an equitable balance because we were not conscious of what people had been conscious of for thousands of years: Dad does this work, mom does this work, and when it is time for somebody to stand up in church to represent the family Dad does this job, but when it is time to really set the standard of what the family does and what our culture is, Mom does this job.

For thousands of years people did not perceive there to be any imbalance between the genders, it was just the recognition that dad did the front-man stuff, he did the talking, he was the one that went to town, he was the one to write the history of our people, but that didn’t mean that he was in charge. The idea that he was dictating to mom what we thought or did is unreal, that doesn’t exist in any family John knows of, and he doesn’t think that existed throughout history. We are watching Mad Men now, reflecting back on a post-war time when we were living in little subdivision where all of a sudden grandma wasn’t there anymore, it was just mom and dad and the two kids and the system was broken.

But it wasn’t that gender-roles had always been broken and now we are finally discovering it, but really it was just a moment in time when neither mom and dad knew what the fuck they were doing and we got imprinted in our minds that those Mad Men gender roles are somehow indicative of how gender roles were for hundreds of thousands of years, and we are not aware that that was the anomaly, that was the outlier era. We are living in a world now where we have been trying to fix the underlying cause of a system where we are only seeing the shadowbox of it, the perception that grandma shouldn’t be ashamed to claim that she is the breadwinner, when in fact grandma was happy to have grandpa be the stuffed shirt at the head of the family, those are traditional gender roles, and they are traditional for a reason, and that system was actually in balance.

The more John applies this theory to what he perceives, the more he realized that for us to have accepted the narrative for the last 40 years that we live in a patriarchic society where women are enslaved requires of us that we deny what our eyes and hearts tell us about the people right around us, about our own families, and about the things we see every day. Women are in charge of our culture and our families, they are the prime movers of what we think and feel.

How all of us can walk out into the world and say: ”Yes, but there is an income disparity and violence against women!”, all the evidence to promote the idea that there is a giant conspiracy for hundreds of years on the part of these men that are supposedly in charge of everything and who have these mysterious powers. Warren Buffet probably answers to his wife, ultimately. The oracle of Omaha answers to his wife, just as we all do.

John hopes that nobody else takes his idea and starts working on a book because he is going to write that book and it is going to make him a piraña!

How many people really knew that the holocaust was going on? (RL113)

John thinks about this all the time: What are the conspiracies that actually worked? History is littered with attempted failed conspiracies. The holocaust is a tremendous conspiracy that worked! The fact that the holocaust didn’t really start until 1943 and it was over by 1945 is mind-blowing. The fact that they marshaled that many people, that much materiel, and that much information technology and they were able to successfully perpetrate a crime on an unprecedented scale is an example of a conspiracy that was predicated on the fact that those systems were already in place and they fit the puzzle piece of mass murder into a bureaucracy that had been designed for a different purpose.

The people who were making Zyklon B were making it as a rat poison, that is what makes it such a conspiracy. Nobody went to the Zyklon B manufacturers, had an employee meeting, and said: ”We ramp up production because we have decided what we are really killing is Jews! Everybody take a knee!” This is the whole question of complicity: Did the chairman of the board of IG Farben know? He probably did because somebody probably told him that they needed 100 times more of this pesticide that they were ordering before, wink wink. Who know! That guy surely claimed he didn’t know, and his sons and daughters surely believed that the didn’t know.

The Nazis did a brilliant job of controlling information, but they were in a totalitarian bureaucratic state and it only lasted for two years. Some listeners might say that we live in a totalitarian state today, we just don’t know it, but we are not in fact. Any other conspiracy that actually succeeded that came out 100 years later? Can you name one?

The reason those crazy conspiracies like the Jews run Hollywood have such a popular hold on our imagination is that the Soviet Union really did control information and did the whole revisionism where little by little people get airbrushed out of a photo so that if you were raised in the Soviet Union and born in 1930 and lived to 1989, from our outside perspective looking in, we think of them as people who lived according to one truth that is largely manufactured and there is all sorts of evidence of that, just in John’s own experience walking through Romania and talking to the people.

The commissioner of this department had promised Ceaușescu that this was the most fertile part of Romania and all the trees were bearing fruit at all times and so when he was coming on a tour of the area they had to go to the open market and buy 10.000 bushels of apples and pay a bunch of peasants to tie those apples to the trees, and for one long stretch of the road some group of people who didn’t know any better had tied apples in all the pine trees.

The point of that story was that Ceaușescu and the people around him were the ones who were being hoodwinked or were too stupid to know that 1) there aren’t apples in the trees in April and 2) there aren’t apples in pine trees. The culture of lies was a product of incrementally small exaggerations where a guy said he had the most fertile part of the country and they were going to exceed their harvest this year and the guy sitting next to him also was going to exceed harvest this year, and pretty soon everybody at the table was going to exceed harvest this year.

This works for a couple of years until they have a bad year and crops were halved, but now everybody was already lying a little bit and now you have to keep that lie up and you will say that you didn’t lose any crops, and then nobody did, but the guy at the head of the table was making economic plans and economic predictions based on what you are telling them, so he says: ”We have a surplus and our neighbors in Hungary had a bad drought this year, so we are going to sell apples to them at an inflated cost and we are going to take that hard cash and build tanks with them!”

Then the message goes out that we need 1000 bushels of apples from every department because we are going to sell those to Hungary and all the department heads go: ”We only have 1000 bushels of apples!”, but we can’t reveal the lies, so we are going to send all of our apples to Hungary and then there are no apples in Romania, but the people at the head of the table don’t know that because they are being lied to, and they sell those apples on the open market and build tanks with them.

From our perspective, sitting in America, we say: ”Those evil people are starving their own people to build tanks!”, but the reality on the ground is much more complicated. Ceaușescu had no idea! People were putting pieces of paper in front of him that say: ”We are the richest country in the world!” and his crime is that he is not intelligent or interested or curious enough to ask for the real story, and when he does want to go on a tour to see it for himself, people tie apples into pine trees and he is: ”Mhmm, sounds good to me!” Ultimately he is a boob!

The idea that this is a conspiracy coming from a tribunal as opposed to a broken culture that is feeding on its brokenness and is a death by a million cuts is incredibly depressing but fundamentally human. It is easier to understand how a person through a series of small lies could find himself on a stepladder tying an apple into a pine tree, it is easier to understand how that crazy story could be true, than it is to understand how a nation of people could allow themselves to be willfully starved for 50 years because they are living in a culture of total fear where nobody dares move left or right.

The one thing sounds bananas, but John can see how you would end up there. They were probably tying up bananas into those pine trees, too! John uses that litmus test whenever he hears a story about how somebody is in charge or how the world is unbalanced: If he imports that story to his little group of friends, can he see that actually happening? And sometimes the most fantastical ones he can. He can see Merlin tying bananas in his trees, but he would cut it down at the daybreak the next day (see story in RL112). Merlin has to pee so bad.

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