RL126 - Big Cabbages and Baby Pigs

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John’s female personal style is more flamboyant, referring to John thinking that if he were a woman he would push the boundaries of personal style pretty far, more than he is now being a man.

The show title refers to things that they exhibit at the Puyallup County Fair.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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 being late to the recording because he didn’t immediately find a pair of socks (RL126)

John is a little late. He likes to plot his movements and plan his time so that he has everything optimized, but this morning he thought that since he got some cold coffee in the pot downstairs he wouldn’t have to rush to get out of the house because he wouldn’t have to stop for coffee on the way. Allowing for that little bit of extra wiggle time is never a good idea! You got to have a schedule, you got to stick to it, and introducing the idea of wiggle time was that little extra bit of chaos that then threw the wheels completely off the wagon and pretty soon he had 30% more wiggle time because he had to spend a little bit of time looking out the window watching the neighbors and he had to play one game of Threes. He usually plays a wake-up game of Threes that sets him on the course for the day.

Finding a pair of socks turned into an ordeal because he was on one side of the house and knew there was a pair of socks over there, but once he realized there wasn't a pair of socks readily at hand he didn't just go to the other side of the house where there is socks abound, but he stayed on the side of the house he was on because he knew he was going to find a pair of socks over there somewhere. Typically there are little sock caches all over the house, but the nearest stock cache only had one sock in it, not a pair of socks, and it infuriated him. There was one sock with a hat and some gloves. Then he was searching around in another sock cash nearby, he got a little bit sidetracked, he had to load the dishwasher, a thing you can’t just do, you have to work it out. All this was the reason he was a little late coming to their broadcast.

Not to get all Erma Bombeck here, but Merlin understands why socks get lost in the laundry, he even understands why his daughter only has one of any sock, she has 17 single socks and luckily she likes to have fun with it and mix it up, which is great and saves a lot of money. Merlin always takes his socks off in the same way and joins them together with a little fold, so when he finds a single sock he knows there is some monkey business up! There are certain small steps one can take to keep the demon dogs at bay, and one of them is to keep your socks paired.

John is like Merlin’s daughter, he will wear a couple of mismatch socks, but as a guy his age? When he was 20 he was seeing 30-year olds that were repping a level of quirkiness that wasn't authoritative anymore, but when he got to be 30 he thought he could still wear a Peacock feather in his hat every once in a while, but he was not going to be some 40-year old guy that is dying his hair and is wearing German orange glasses frames, and when he got to be 40 he was not dying his hair, but he might have had a pair of German orange glasses frames.

John is confirmed in the lifestyle of being a middle aged quirky guy, not quite all the way to somebody who has chosen to live in Berlin, but definitely somebody who is still very much in America, but he worries when he goes all the way to mismatched socks that he is becoming a little Cyndi Lauper. You want 4% Cyndi Lauper in everything you do, but you do not want to go into 14% Cyndi Lauper.

John’s female and male personal styles (RL126)

John is lucky that he is not a woman because his female personal style is more flamboyant than his male personal style. If he were a woman he would be pushing the boundaries pretty far, not that he would be wearing a skirt over pants or anything crazy like that, but there are a lot of fun clothes over in the women's section that he would be availing himself of. To Merlin John reads as a post-menopausal Bay Area lady, the kind of lady you would see at a silent film festival with chunky jewelry, a lady that is wearing a really big hat and when you look more closely there is a cat in it.

Too bad John wasn’t dressed like that when he beat that guy's ass (see RL124), but he was dressed pretty flamboyantly. Merlin thinks John should look like a flamboyant saftig 55 year old woman who reviews films and is very colorful with black, chunky-framed glasses that are perfectly round, she is an architect, maybe one of the lenses is 10% bigger than the other lens which would give her cartoon eyes.

John is going the other direction. All day long he is walking around, singing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man under his breath, trying to be a simple kind of man, to be something that he loves and understands. It doesn't make a lot of sense moving forward in the lyrics. Merlin sings under his breath constantly, he has a soundtrack for almost everything he does, and John says the same.

Amazon causing Seattle to grow and traffic to get worse (RL126)

Merlin understands that John has decided what the correct amount of time it is to do anything in the Seattle area. He has lived there a very long time, he is an excellent driver, and he knows how long it takes, but when other people talk about Seattle traffic it sounds that it is worse than anyone would imagine, and John confirms that it is crazy that it is getting worse on an hourly basis. Some of it is all the Climate Change refugees that are pouring in from California and other places, some of it is all the people that keep coming to work in what they call the new Boeing, which is Amazon.com.

The reason that Seattle isn't a city of 100.000 people is that Boeing made big jet airplanes here and for 50 years people came because there were good, high-paying jobs here, and now Amazon is apparently able to do the same, although John thinks of Amazon as one of those never-profitable companies, but maybe that is his 1999 talking. It is still accurate as of today, it is a break-even company right now, it is all still loss leader stuff for some future profitability and John just doesn't understand how that works, but there is a reason he and Merlin are not in the corner office.

John would love to have a company that employs 15.000 people all sitting at desks made out of recycled doors, trying to corner every single market. In the interview he had a recycled door, that was so fucking annoying! Part of the cult of Amazon is that they all use recycled doors and because there are 10.000 people there they are tearing down old houses in Seattle just for the doors, and they deliver paper towels, a cardboard roll with paper wrapped around it, wrapped in plastic, wrapped in a cardboard box to Merlin’s house for free. John doesn't understand how it works, but they are clogging the roads.

A lot of the people who constantly vote down all the public transit initiatives, all the light rail initiatives, all of the HOV lanes, are precisely the people who are driving in their cars, it is a 1:1 correlation. If you have a Dodge Ram 2500 diesel dually King cab truck, a) you vote down every transit initiative and b) you are stuck in traffic from 5-7am both directions every day, and those people are also unreflective generally, sitting in their cabs yelling and pounding on the steering wheel, driving aggressively.

Those initiatives would take other drivers off the road and make more room for their truck, but they vote against those things reflexively, one of the great paradoxes of the world: Reactionary people vote against their own self-interest in every respect because they imagine that they are somebody different than they are, or they imagine that their interests are different than their actual interests. John is on the road, he is a guy in a car, and he is legitimately part of the problem. He used to live on Capitol Hill where he walked everywhere, but then he moved out to what by the 1965 definitions of the city is a suburb.

Now he is in a car, he is recapitulating this problem in his own life, but sitting on the highways his solution to the problem is more technology. Cars are barbaric! Did people not see the movie Minority Report? It was maybe not a good movie, but those cars that are swarming over every surface like cockroaches, those were pretty cool cockroach cars! Cars that are obviously driverless drone cars, all moving super fast, paid for with targeted advertising, we are headed there!

Google is working in a bubble making robot cars on their own for their own purposes, Elon Musk is across the street on the other side of Cupertino Drive Avenue making electric cars, giving away his electric technology because he is the Punkest of all the goatee wearers, and Amazon is making everybody sit at recycled doors, while the city government is juggling 15 balls, trying to get all these cars through the town. Some guy is sitting at a desk in charge of synchronizing the traffic lights and he obviously got a vape pen that is full of Buck Rogers’ orgy drug because whatever buttons he should be pushing, he should be pushing the other buttons!

Nobody is talking to anybody else, nobody from Google is coming to the city of Seattle saying: ”We got these electric robot cars and we should be using Seattle as a test case, we should be implanting little GPS nubbins in the streets!” It has to be integrated. Google can't just sit there and make robot cars on their own! Merlin says it is a big difference between rethinking our infrastructure versus coming up with a way to hack on a 500 year old way of traveling. A road where you have to sit and pay attention while you are on the road goes back a pretty long way, and putting all that technology into a car that would now ride on these legacy costly roads is not super useful. We should try to make something really basically different!

It is the constant process of wallpapering over the last wallpaper, and the dimensions of your room just are getting smaller and smaller because you are just slapping wallpaper up on the idea of Roman roads. On America's highways every single person is alone in their car, and John can see the appeal of it in 1918 or in 1950, but he does not see the appeal of it now. He doesn’t want to share a car with his neighbors any more than the next person does, but that is just a different way of thinking about the old way. What we really need is pneumatic tubes!

Merlin has been in this stupid town long enough, and he has been walking and taking public transit primarily for 15 years. It is one thing to take a car ride out of town and go to a beach, that is a pretty noble use for a car, but when he has to get in a car to go buy things, he feels like he has really lost. It is not one particular green impulse, but you got to drive, you got to park there, you got to go deal with that infrastructure so that you can go spend money somewhere. That feels really stupid!

Visiting the Washington State Fair in Puyallup, going to dinner, and getting stuck in traffic on the way home (RL126)

The other day John’s family had a fantastic day. They went to the Washington State Fair, which involved driving down to Puyallup, Washington, which during his whole life was a total hick sheep-dip farm town, but now it has become a bedroom community for people who commute, but who drive Dodge Ram 2500 Diesel dually King cab trucks, people who still feel: ”I am an American! I live in the country! I live in a house that was stapled together recently by some staple carpenters and I work down at the Costco, but I am a country man!”

The Puyallup Fair is super fun, it is a place where they bring the big cabbages and the little baby pigs, and John’s family was stuck in traffic getting there, surrounded by all these Ram Chargers, and on their way out of the fair they were of course stuck in Ram charger traffic. They got up to the city and they were going to go over to some people's house for dinner, but as they reached Seattle it was a Husky football game that day and they were in football traffic. The city and the cops have it all figured out how they are going to get 40.000 football fans out of the University district all at once by blocking off a bunch of roads.

John was trying to get over to this neighborhood on the other side of Husky Stadium and he came up to 45th, which is the big thoroughfare, and they got cars coming out, but no cars going in. It makes no sense! Is the goal to just empty that part of town and no one can live there anymore? That is bananas! Also 50th and 55th were blocked it off with dedicated cops sitting there on their motorcycles just to keep you from going in the opposite direction of the football traffic, which was crazy. They were an hour late, but they finally got to the dinner party.

They went to this fair, then they went to dinner at somebody's house, and they had a hot tub and all the kids went in the hot tub. Eventually it was late, the baby was asleep in the back, they were driving home, and all week long they have had signs up on I5 saying ”I5 closed midnight to 6am because we are going to do some work!” and that work is not putting GPS nubbins in the road, but some other bullshit like replacing the bricks that hold it up or they are working on the electronic signage that should have said: ”When we said the highway was closed from midnight to 6am what we meant was we were going to start narrowing the highway down to one lane at 9pm!”

They came over the rise just past the last exit where you could get off before the longest stretch of the highway where there are no exits and traffic comes to a complete stop at 10pm, you are just sitting there in the dark, surrounded by thousands of people you hate, all trying to get five lanes of traffic down into one lane and John devised a whole new traffic scheme for the city, he had all the time in the world and he had all the motivation and pneumatic tubes is what he came up with. You can turn the roads into parks and just tube everybody there.

John and Elon Musk are so often on the same page, they line up with each other! How hard would it be? Tube-X! You vacuum out the air, you move people around! To Merlin it feels wasteful to spend $4 a gallon to put gas in your car so that he can drive somewhere to buy something and then bring it home, it feels vastly inefficient! Have you seen the movie They Live recently? On the other hand is the whole idea of the sharing economy. There are cases where it is way easier to take an Uber, it is super-costly in San Francisco, and you will let somebody else do your driving, somebody who probably doesn't have full insurance.

Merlin also very frequently uses a service here in town that will deliver groceries. In the .com age people thought they were going to start a company to deliver groceries, but they realized very quickly that they were actually going to be in the trucking business because now they are going to have to go out and start a trucking company. You go to a pretty website, you order your groceries, and then they get delivered to your house. But that ain't no Safeway doing that, that ain't no Whole Foods, it is Uber for groceries, and there are a bunch of SF State students who go buy your milk, put it in their filthy car, and then drive it to your house, and Merlin is hooked!

That is very hypocritical of Merlin in a lot of ways, but a lot of it is just the selfishness of: ”I don't like driving!” It is not fun to drive in the city. He used to like it when he had to drive somewhere for a holiday, he would enjoy a 4-6 hour drive from Tallahassee to the Bay Area in Florida. You go from Leon County to Pasco County, and depending on how often you stop and whether you observe the speed limits it is 4-6 hour drive.

In Florida there is no altitude of any kind and you are never distracted by coming up over a rise and having a beautiful view, which really helps you focus on your tube idea. You can drive 6 hours across Florida and feel like you are an ant in a terrarium the entire time.

John looking at 1899-1900 geological survey reports of people exploring Alaska for the first time (RL126)

John had an interesting experience the other day. There is America's hit-singing sensation Paul and Storm. They recognized that it was John’s birthday (about two weeks ago) and they sent him in the mail the 1899 to 1900 US Geological Survey of various mining communities around the country and their initial census of Alaska. 1898 was a pretty big year for Alaska! Prior to 1898 no-one had any reason to go to Alaska and after 1898 a lot of people had a very good reason to go to Alaska. Still today it is mostly a place you would go to escape an abusive relationship or hide out.

In 1899 the vast majority of Alaska was uncharted and this large geologic survey book represented the government sending dozens of guys up to the state and basically they said to them: ”You five guys see if you can figure out a way to go up the Copper River and if you can get overland to 40 Mile, then make maps of everything you see and then come back and tell us what you found! And you guys go up the Matanuska River and see how far up there you can get. We know somewhere up there is Fort Yukon, but that is going to be a long trip, just make maps of everything you see!”

There were no airplanes at the time, so no-one has ever flown over and surveyed it. The Russians were in Alaska in the 1830s, but they were there mostly in boats, and they were there interacting with the Eskimo tribes and the Indian tribes and collecting furs, it was all about furs until they discovered gold. A few whiteies had gone up the rivers and married an Indian girl and were living up there, but there was no real sense or the land.

Paul and Storm bought John this book and sent it to him in the mail. The book is pretty trashed, but in it are all these maps and color plates drawn at the time and there are first impression maps drawn of places John knows. They went up this Valley, they went up that Valley, but they didn't go up the third Valley. It is also a geologic survey, they are talking about the rocks, they are looking for gold, copper, and coal with the mission of identifying what it looks like the land can produce.

Lo and behold, these reports are incredibly chatty. These aren't guys with pocket protectors driving around Yosemite in 1955, trying to figure out if there is enough Feldspar in the shist to justify drilling a borehole, but these are guys in bear skins who are portaging sealskin-canoes and as soon as they go up the river and over the pass there is no information. They are not just exploring it, but they are also surveying it, making maps, and using technical instruments to try and make maps accurate.

The reports are a little dry, but they read like an adventure book. One of the paragraphs said: ”Well Steamboat Jim went over that pass two years ago, but his companion froze to death and so he turned around and overwintered by hollowing out a Tauntaun and then he came back down to Copper Junction and we put together…” all this adventure storytelling. One guy said: ”Two 11 foot long canoes are not as good as one 20 foot long canoe!”

People in the past were just as smart as we are

John, having just been to the XOXO Festival, was struck again by the fact that people 100 years ago were just as smart as we are. People 1000 years ago were just as smart as we are! Socrates was just as smart as the smartest one of us 2000 years ago. John has to be constantly reminded of that because, just being at the XOXO Festival, walking around, he was feeling like everybody there was really smart.

There was a certain amount of self-satisfaction in that group of people that are like: ”We are all really smart!”, but that festival was very pleasantly without a lot of smugness, there was a lot of humility there, but the general idea of a thing like that is that no-one has ever been as smart as us because we are developing these new technologies, we are making the world a better place, we are solving problems that have never been solved before, and there is the real seductive feeling that we are the smartest ones who have ever been.

John was reading this geological survey, and the adventure stories are racist as can be, these guys will come into a little village and they are just like: ”Well, the natives here are pretty sordid and shiftless, but they seem to be comparatively intelligent, such that you might be able to teach them to read!”, just matter of fact as can be: ”This is a report of the ground as we find it! You might be able to teach these natives to read, and there is a lot of feldspar.”

This was not that long ago, it was one year before Merlin’s grandfather was born, and one of John’s great grandfathers went to the Yukon to make his fortune in the gold rush and did not make his fortune there and John is still suffering the consequences of him not striking it rich in the gold fields. These guys do not have our mechanical technology and thought technology, but as far as intelligence it is all there and it has been there for thousands of years. John needs to have that embroidered and hung over his bed because we absolutely are standing on the shoulders of giants in the sense that we know how to split the atom now and they didn't know how to do that 50 years ago.

We like to bathe in the warm glow of other people's intelligence we have heard about so we could say things like ”We can split the atom!”, whereas Merlin can't understand why his sink is leaking and he has a big pot under it because he has not figured out what is happening yet. Our collective intelligence, meaning that the 25 people who actually know how to do things, we all get to bask in their glow, but we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ideas as though either we are the first people to ever have ideas, certainly that we are the first people to ever have these ideas, and then John reads any book from any time period and realizes that they were all churning those ideas all the time. We have made such minute progress, so: Back to pneumatic tubes! That is the next leap!

Merlin is thinking about the John Carpenter movie The Thing that he really loves, and Jonathan Colton is also a big fan of it. In The Thing or in Alien or anything, where you want to tell the story of people going out to do something not dissimilar from what John is describing, you have a mission in mind for people to go somewhere and we are going to need people who have the ability to do the basic engineering and the reconnoitering involved in finding out whether there is any feldspar here.

It is amazing that the first guy you send is the feldspar guy! In a John Carpenter movie or whatever movie this would be fucking 11 people, you would need the feldspar guy, you would need somebody who knew how to use a sextant, whatever they are using for surveying equipment, and by the way: ”You have to not die and you have to be able to conduct two 11 foot canoes into an area nobody has ever been to! Please make accurate records, keep a little blog, bring it back!” How many people today could you send off on a similar kind of mission? Certainly things have gotten more technological, but that would take a pretty fucking smart set of people to be able to go and do that and come back and have it be sensible.

It really struck John that the massive adventure of taking a steam ship up to Alaska and then bouncing down to some small little schooner and sailing with a one-eyed captain up to the mouth of a river that you know about, and the reason the Copper River is named the Copper River is that one of the first Western dudes to go up the river looked around and said: ”Looks like there is probably going to be a lot of copper around here!”, not because the waters are copper-colored or whatever, but it was named that as a way of notating on a map for the next guy that came.

Any map of America has things like Dead Man's Creek and Coal Sink Bottom or whatever, writing things on a map because you are not going to be there to explain it to the next guy and you want him to see what you are seeing. You go to the Copper River because that sounds like a good place to start and because one of the four guys who have been here before thought there might be some copper up there, and it is also a big river. Today we build a baseball Stadium that is named after a company that sells cellphone service.

It is palpable in the writing of these guys that they know they are on an adventure, they are having fun, but they are tamping that down because they have a job to do, and the fun is secondary, they wouldn't have identified it as fun, but nobody is really bitching about anything. The guy's friend froze to death and he came back and overwintered and then mustered a new group of guys and tried it again. The one guy who made it all the way to Dawson City was heralded as a hero in his day. He walked all this way across and was making maps the whole way.

This is one of the projects of John’s whole life, to see if that is in him. It is active in us all. The number of us who really would just lay down and die is fairly rare. Merlin would be back on the steamboat, bitching about his room: ”What do you mean? You are out of Seltzer?”

The guys that made all the money in that whole adventure were the Filson company and the guys who were selling shovels and gold pans, it is back to Deadwood (see RL113). Maybe that is still true today and a drone drop of paper towels is the contemporary gold pan? They are going to look back at us and the 1990s are going to make the 1960s look like the 1950s, and they are going to say: ”God, what a dead time! All the other generations were smart people! What an empty era!”

Communication companies paying to have stadiums named after them (RL126)

The ballparks in Seattle are named Safeco Field, a baseball field named after an insurance company, and CenturyLink Field, a company that links the centuries! John has no idea what CenturyLink does. College Bowl names are named after snacks. When Merlin was a kid you had the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, and today you can actually just pay to name it after your snack chip. There is probably a Dorito Bowl. CenturyLink is a local provider of high speed Internet, phone and mobile and the reason it is called CenturyLink is because it costs a Benjamin ($100) to get anything done, they should have called it Benjamin Link. John describes to Merlin how their website looks like with a corporate look and lots of stock photos and distinctions for residential, growing small business, and large business.

It is home of the soccers and that can only mean that CenturyLink is some Paul Allen Microsoft front company. Paul Allen and Microsoft are not going to let some company have the naming rights to their stadium if they are not all super mobbed-up in bed with each other. Paul Allen basically owns the Seattle soccers and the footballs. After they won the Super Bowls last year Paul Allen is suddenly on the field, hoisting up the trophy in his signature look, which is a look of a total lack of enjoyment, he can make any child's birthday party into a wake. It was very clear to everyone who owns the footballs, the guy who long time ago had a beard and wrote presumably some WordStar code and some MS-DOS that ran on some 64K pipes.

For whatever reason we determined in our end-of-history capitalism that this guy is worth $6-9 billion, depending on where the wind is blowing, and he owns the footballs and he gets to go out and hoist the trophy and now CenturyLink, whoever they are, doubtful that they are a profitable company, named the soccer stadium after themselves. What does that cost?

The Giants park in San Francisco is a cool park new-old park that looks old, but it has sushi and garlic fries and stuff. It is a lot of fun. Just like the Miner 49ers: Sushi and garlic fries are what set those guys up the Copper River. The original name was Pacific Bell Park, which Merlin can totally live with because it has Pacific in the name, and then it got bought out and became SBC Park after the people who bought Pacific Bell, but in 2006 after the merger with SBC, this is inside Baseball, it became AT&T Park. Whatever antitrust frenzy we went through at a certain point when we were deciding that AT&T couldn't be a monopoly (see OM414), we have definitely abandoned that kind of thinking. Facebook should just buy AT&T and Comcast and make it easier on all of us: Just one giant death laser company that is trying to take us all down.

Antitrust suits that have long been forgotten, Microsoft, Amazon, Jeff Bezos (RL126)

It wasn't very long ago that the US government was pursuing Microsoft for some antitrust problems because Internet Explorer, their web browser, was bundled with the software. Of all the things to go after Microsoft about, that seems pretty weird. They were spooked for years! It really inhibited the whole idea of restricting access to the Internet. No-one would dare try. The crazy part is the way the Justice Department went after Apple for price fixing with books, nobody else has done that since, it is not an integral part of the Amazon business model.

Merlin is always obsessed with the super villain persona and Jeff Bezos got the drones, the recycled doors, and he has now decided that his company that started to sell books will just not sell books and that is going to be okay, even if they don't make any money. There is something going on with that guy and he is always smiling in photographs, which isn't common among those guys. Paul Allen has never smiled, not even on his 5th birthday. Bezos looks like a Raver, like somebody at Burning Man with a bike out of plywood and he is just snorting stuff, but by all accounts he is a very disagreeable person. His laugh is very aggressive. Everybody likes to point and laugh at Steve Jobs and what a mean character he was, but Bezos sounds like a pretty rough character.

Jeff Bezos and his secret Campfire meeting

Bezos has an annual meeting called Campfire in Santa Fe, New Mexico every year where he hand-picks a bunch of famous writers like Tom Hanks, Martha Stewart, or Neil Armstrong, he sends his private jet to wherever you are and you fly in. They put big long tables out under the night sky with candelabras and white table cloths and they serve you a beautiful meal, you are all up at this lodge and you have famous guy X talking to famous guy Y and probably some innovation is going to come out of that and Wheezy is talking to Martha Stewart and they are going to come out with a new Hip Hop label or whatever, a TED-kind concept, but not open to the public and he doesn't publicize it or trade on it, it is just for the smarts and the riches.

You walk around in the fleece jacket that says Campfire on it, and then other famouses in first class look at you and go: ”Oh, hello!” It is a little bit of a Masonic ring or something. This year, and this is the chutzpah of this guy, he invited all the famous writers, including a ton of people that are published by Hachette to his party and most of them said: ”Yes!” because no-one says ”No!” when a billionaire wants to pick you up in his private jet and take you to a fancy party where Tom Hanks is. A few of these Hachette writers staged a bit of a revolt and wrote and said: ”For obvious reasons we are not going to come to your stupid party because you have screwed us out of our book sales!”

There were a handful of writers whose books came out right about that time. It was like if your record was released on 9/11 or something, it is all over, if Amazon isn't stocking your book: Forget it! John was talking to one of these writers who had a best selling novel, and the follow-up to the best selling novel came out on Hachette and was one of the books targeted by Amazon to be kept out of the virtual stores, but then she was tendered an invitation to Campfire, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Merlin wonders if it is Elizabeth Gilbert, but John won't name the writer.

They were talking and they started to devise a plan and John believes that their audience has the power to actually put this plan into operation, whereas he does not. The night of the big Campfire dinner, when everybody is sitting out under the stars at their big tables up on top of a Mesa above the city of Santa Fe, their proposal was: Swarm of drones with cameras, like cicadas. First just one comes up over the Mesa and does a long fast run right over the dinner table, and everybody looks up, and then fucking 50 drones of all sizes just fucking swarm it, videoing the whole thing while people are running, screaming, it is like the scene at the end of Animal House, Bezos is standing there, fragged by his own troops.

This is a great idea, it would be very easy to do, and it would be so hilarious! The real problem is that would be his Pearl Harbor and that he would never let that happen again, so he would make sure that he bought out all the drone manufacturers in the world and nobody could ever fuck up this party again. Never again! Never forget! They would have their dinner party next year not under the fucking stars as though they own the universe, they would have it in a submarine somewhere. ”I suppose you are wondering why I have called you out here?”

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