310. Nofapvember

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge. Watch Russia 1985 to 1999. Trauma Zone.

Hello. Hello. Happy November, Merlin Mann.

MerlinRabbit, rabbit. Let me hear that bell. Let me hear it. Alexandra, I can hear your bell. I don't know what you did, but it worked.

AlexI don't believe you. I don't believe you. I'm going to go with the premise that I am sane.

MerlinYou don't believe me.

AlexNo.

MerlinWhy would you not believe me?

AlexWhy wouldn't you believe me when I was saying that you should be able to hear my bell two weeks ago?

MerlinIs this a form of logic that you found successful in the past? Hmm.

Alexthat's a trick question

Merlinno it's not it's a very salient question your bell could not be heard Santa said so

Alexand now it's

MerlinNovember November's one of those months aren't there a lot of things people do there's beards people grow beards in November people write a novel in November is this also when we're not supposed to fap

Alexoh you know what perhaps that's the the great proud boy holiday i thought nofap was like a lifestyle oh no no not november that's what it is that's right no no no no not november oh i see because of allergies uh yeah an internet challenge revolving around abstinence abstinence oh from masturbation sex and ejaculation during the month of November.

Oh, wow.

MerlinOh, so what is the, is there a canonical name? So what do we know? I'm growing a beard. I'm Nanamama Rama, Bananarama. I'm writing a novel. And then I'm not allowed to have any Onan pass my hole.

AlexCorrect.

MerlinOkay.

AlexYes. It's a very challenging month.

MerlinBoy. Do you take a day off on December 1st? I'll be late today I've ruined my whole trailer

AlexEverything's moist I've tried No, no, no I hate it Double wide

MerlinI hate it

AlexI hate it

MerlinI craved my double wide

AlexI'm going to have some sex right now. Oh my god. Well, you didn't ever watch the Will Blum... Oh gosh, what's his name? Will Blumfield's document. Will Blamberfeld. I'm not sure. I love anything by whoever that is. It's a documentary and it was

Merlinabout Proud's boy.

AlexWhat's it about? No, this Will Blunderfield, who is a yes. He is an interesting man who teaches a lot of, I don't know, lifestyle enhancement skills with for men.

MerlinCanadian singer, songwriter and yoga teacher. I see something here called Masculine Polarity. One was yearning for it in men.

Alexounce okay he's 37 years old he is uh mostly he goes into the woods and fondles other men's balls and do they know it yeah yeah oh yeah are they still attached or is it is he doing like a

Merlinlike a buffalo pill thing i mean

Alexi can tell because this says 14 in canada

Merlinsorry um so he goes out and he feels there's a guy named will so hello will blenderfield is a canadian singer and he goes into the woods and feels well you said he does things to men's balls

Alexin the woods yes and he has a documentary about that no um there there is a short youtube video about uh him and from from channel five which you continue to either pretend or actually not know about uh i've sent i've sent you this link out of zero context many times and i'm sure and you still haven't watched it but one day one day you will because don't you want to have a broader

point of view it strikes me this is i don't like to diagnose from a distance as dr fauci says but

Merlini'm gonna i'm gonna say something here which is i think i think your life has a concerning amount of irreality to it and it seems to me that your solution to that is to find things that make it feel less real basically your your life is a lot like an adam curtis documentary oh

AlexOh, that's sad.

MerlinThat's like one ruble worth of fabric in those trousers. You know what I mean?

AlexLook at what one glass of wine can do.

MerlinOh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Hey, can I just say one thing about the challenge this week?

AlexYeah.

MerlinHey, right? Wasn't that a thing?

AlexYeah.

MerlinOh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so what I've learned from Alex. Alex, Alex, it's very important. Alex that I learned what channel five is. And then I watched something called will blunder field in his short YouTube video about feeling balls in the forest.

AlexYes.

MerlinOkay.

AlexAnd there, he does.

MerlinAbsolutely not going to happen, but I do appreciate the outreach.

AlexIt's a good, I don't even talk to people going door to door who want to be supervisor.

MerlinLike why, why would I watch a Canadian ball stroker?

AlexUm, Hmm. Because I,

Merlinwhat is in service of Alex? Why, why would I do this? And I'm, I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be funny. i'm trying to be opposite of funny why the fuck would i do this that's in my history now why would

Alexi do that because 2022 merlin man wants to learn and grow and be less judgmental to the the me of two years ago did i say 2020 and not 2022 the listeners know you're right there is some unreality situation oh it would be annoying if i went in and changed it in post wouldn't it And then people heard 2022.

MerlinIt's because it's funny and we have a laugh. It's because we watch someone silly and we go lol, right? Is that why we do it?

AlexNo.

MerlinNo. Okay, why am I doing it?

AlexNo, no, no, no.

MerlinI'm sorry. I'm being a spoiled sport. Mal, send me all. Send me all of the videos.

AlexNo one comes to play in MySpace. What space is that, Alex? It's the BoFondler field.

MerlinWe remember the joke about the person of Polish persuasion holding the dog turd. In this case, I think you're doing a Polish dog paddle through a fucking outhouse and going, I really hope there's some sonnets in here.

Lol.

AlexHuh. Pronounce LaMau.

MerlinLaMau, boy.

Alexyou you did do you do halloween still because as as i definitely and now everyone knows that you participate in christmas and engage with all the great christmas characters

Merlinwhat do you do for halloween what do i do for halloween well um do children come to your doorstep or is it no no no no i mean i before i had a halloween aged you know youngster in my house i was always kind of like no we don't really get that many trick-or-treaters around here once i did have a halloween aged youngster i'm just i'm gonna say what i think i can't i don't have any kind of a proof for this but like i don't know if this is a national thing i don't even know

if it's like a fully like i don't know if it's an anything thing but people go places for halloween here like you go to these neighborhoods where people are super into it for us that's west portal and uh there's also my kid went to bernal heights uh with their pal uh for halloween so like there's not as much of the like whereas you see stuff like oh check it out you know um uh what's steve jobs is late wait no late steve jobs's wife what's her name lorraine or something lorraine

AlexLorraine Jobs.

MerlinAnyway, check it out. She gives out full bars and Lisa's and stuff like that. And you hear people go door to door. You go to the good neighborhood. I think there still is an element of going to the good neighborhood. As far as what I do, I mainly buy candy that nobody takes. And this year, bad on y'all because this was a full bar year.

AlexOh.

MerlinOn the way home, this would be what? Monday night as we record this. On the way home, I stopped by Walgreens. and boy have I got some new Walgreens stories for you. I went by Walgreens and I thought, oh, I should probably pick up an auxiliary bag of candy for the children who certainly will not come. But then I thought, you know what I'm going to do instead? Because we still have leftover Halloween, not from last year, but because, you know, you buy Halloween candy when it's Halloween time, you know?

AlexWait, no.

MerlinAnd I bought four Hershey's bars and four full-size Kit Kats. And I figure, you know, it's like Matt Damon says about crypto, you know, fortune favors the bold like if you're there and you're halloweening like you're gonna get a full bar my friend and absolutely no one except my kid got a full bar nobody came no it's all right it's okay but as far as what we do yeah yeah we do that we put out decorations um we've got uh you know the decoration things we get we get festive gourds and i personally am not a dresser up for halloween

i don't think i've ever once i'd kind of passed the age where most kids are doing that like it wasn't a thing that i put a lot of effort into it's kind of not my jam but i i have great admiration

Alexfor people who do what are the ages that kids stop doing that that i truly don't know i'm actually like i i almost think it's a regional thing because i i don't know oh okay well what do you

Merlinthink what's your what do you have uh and as with so many things in adult life it's probably useful give a range like do you have a sense of like usually kids start trailing off around this age and then 90 or or whatever are not doing it by that age do you have a sense of that for yourself

Alexi don't because in my neighborhood 28 year old uh trick-or-treaters well okay when you are a kid that's the thing when a when a uh like 15 you see a 15 year old walking around you fully assume that that's like a 50 year old man like that's just i assume that they're very sarcastic and won't

Merlinmake me feel bad the like look at that man he's wide hips hey like if like when i was eight i

Alexthought that every teenager was at least 40 and that's absolutely true yeah yes and there was a period of time like in the chicago the western chicago suburbs were basically like eighth grade was the hard cutoff for trick-or-treating. But then it was like everybody, pretty much everyone.

MerlinThis might be important. Eighth grade's middle school there? Like your last year of middle school?

AlexIt's the last year before high school. Right, right, right. But more importantly, very few people even did trick-or-treating up until eighth grade. But without exception, everyone who was a senior in high school would go trick-or-treating. That's fine. Just it's it's weird. It was fun. But in retrospect, it was like, oh, man, we're not cool. Like, I don't know what like why I thought that my 10 year old self felt very cool, not going trick or treating. It was free candy. I don't know.

Instead, we sat around and watched scary movies.

MerlinI mean, it's not just I mean, yes, it's candy. But America, I once heard someone say something and I could probably be talked out of this. Somebody said, you know, you always hear you growing up and you hear like on Schoolhouse Rock about the great American melting pot. And one day I heard someone say, no, America is not a melting pot. It's a salad. It's a bunch of distinct, different, you know, leaves, many of them white. But that's why my answer to this is going to sound really weird. I can speak for myself. Exhibit A. I think I stopped pursuing it with gusto and in a totally, well, how can you put this?

When you're getting older and you're really struggling with all the things you do and don't want to be in life, which is life. But I think around 12, I started drifting off. And then in that case now, I'm kind of a bad example of that because I moved and it was a different state and all that. But I'm going to give some examples here. I think in general around what I call junior high and everybody now calls middle school, I think there's going to be a pretty severe tapering off with some huge exceptions. Kids who were having fun with it. Kids who were being a little bit troublesome.

Groups of friends doing things together. Like in this case, my kid was Benny the Astronaut in a group Lego-related costume. And like, you know, I'm thinking in particular of like, you know, like you have four, six, eight girls going out having fun together. Not doing sexy stuff, but like dressing up and going around. I can see being 16 or 17 and do that. My final note on this is this.

If your costume's good enough, people won't know how old you are. One problem, we see this in the wonderful TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry, on principle, refuses to give these two girls candy because they're obviously older and they're not wearing a costume. If you wear the right costume, nobody's even good. And you know what? If you show up in costume and it's good and you lean into it, they're not going to care what age you are.

AlexThat's what I'm starting to wonder, is what if we as a society were just sort of decided to to maybe shift gears a bit and we all leaned into costumes so much that that that like age gap or or i don't know like like the threshold for halloween kind of like becomes even murkier this was like my idea for everybody

Merlingetting a comb over yeah yes because i thought you know when uh when only bald people have comb-overs, only comb-overs. That doesn't work for that. But I thought in sympathy, all men should get a really, really extremely bad comb-over. And what we're going to do, we're going to normalize it, Alex. We're going to normalize...

AlexYes. I want to dress up and get free candy. I didn't do it.

MerlinWell, put a pin in that because I want to hear what you like to dress up as. But I feel like I remember hearing a factoid in the era, especially of Martha Stewart's ascent in the mid to late 90s Maybe I remember hearing at some point something that now seems fairly obvious, I guess, which is that far and away, pound for pound, year over year, the holiday that people spend the most money on is Christmas. Big surprise. But it was a pretty big deal. I feel like I want to say in the late 90s when Halloween moved.

I don't know what the other ones were, but Halloween had moved into the number two slot. And now today I feel like that's, I don't know, that feels very true to me. I don't know if it's irrefutable. but you know again Walgreens like you know you don't get that big of a section for Easter plus they don't even have the edible Jesus anymore which we used to like to get day after Easter my kid and I edible Jesus well it's a cross you know oh okay on a hill far away is an old hollow cross of chocolate our Jesus did hang I mean this is like another Catholic blind spot because I'm

AlexLike, wait a second. That sounds like an emo band. Jesus. Yeah. It's also a podcast.

MerlinI'm discovering slash rediscovering. I'm more like Math Rock right now and some emo stuff. And the names have not gotten less silly.

AlexThat's for dang sure. They don't.

MerlinI discovered a band yesterday called There, There, There with slashes. And each one is a different way that you can spell that word. It's a terrible name for a band. But I also yesterday discovered a band I'm very excited about called. it's two words you ready okay here's the name of this band giraffes giraffes that's the name of the first question mark and then an exclamation point i think that's delightful and you could google it um if you google there they're there you're gonna get grammar girl or whatnot right hold on

Alexthere i guess it's t-h-e i don't know which what order it's in but you know that's that's the

MerlinContraction for they are, there as in possessive, and there as in indicating. There's a thing over there.

AlexOh, yeah. You get Grammarly. Oh, come on, Grammarly. But boy.

MerlinAnyway, it's fun to eat across. But I don't know. But I think this is one of those things where it's like one of those fight versus invisibility kind of debates. It's like, well, there's not really. It's a false dichotomy. Nobody cares if you do Halloween if you're being cool about it. Like, if you're really leaning into it, like, you know. The closest I had this year.

AlexThat's what I've realized is only uncool people. I was thinking about carrying a sink around this year was my only idea. Oh, God. Oh, no. No. No. Bad. Bad. Bad. Well, because it breaks the primary Halloween rule. All of you, bad.

MerlinYou know what I think I've ever told you this, Alex? I have a primary rule for costumes in general, but especially Halloween. and this is a challenge, but I want you to think on this. And then I want to hear you put a pin in your costume and I want to hear that.

Sometimes it can be sort of difficult to know what somebody's costume is, even if they've got an outfit and they got a hat. Maybe they got makeup, they got something. But often there's something, like a Richard Scarry character, that really seals the deal. So like my kid, one of my kids, My kid's other costume this year was Sam Neill from Jurassic Park. And it kind of could have been mistaken for a farmer. You know, if my kid had carried a pitchfork, you'd go, oh, that kid's a farmer.

Whereas if my kid had sunglasses they took off, you'd go, oh, well, obviously that's Sam Neill in Jurassic Park. I think you have to be circumspect because it's so tempting to have something that you carry. If you're a devil, you carry a pitchfork. You probably have other examples of this. This is an addition to whatever you put your goddamn candy in. There's something you may have to have in your hand that shows who you are. And I think you need to, to the extent possible, avoid that. Because you don't want to have to carry something all night. Plus, if you lose it, you don't have a costume anymore.

AlexSee, I think that's a feature, not a bug. That's like the hallmark of a diverse costume. If you're Luke Skywalker.

MerlinFor example, I made a Luke Skywalker. I made a Luke Skywalker Lego Tauntaun last night and I really admired the fact that they had a little lightsaber holder on the side. So to me, if you're going to be Luke Skywalker, like if you've got a lightsaber holder and you don't have to hold the lightsaber all night, that's okay. I'm just saying if it's something you've got to, there's an episode of Happy Days where Richie goes on a date for Halloween and the woman is the Statue of Liberty. I hate to spoil this 1973 episode of Happy Days for you. They run out of gas. She's the Statue of Liberty, and she turns her torch into a thing they can use to put gas in the tank, which I think was kind of a clever twist.

But it's a real pain. All night, not only does she have a spiky head thing on, but she's got to carry around a torch all night. You don't mind that, though. You think that's, as you say, a feature.

AlexYou like carrying things.

MerlinI don't like being handed things.

AlexIt's true, actually. It means you're valued if somebody hands you something.

MerlinThat's what Pepper's there for.

AlexI actually don't like being handed things. Why?

MerlinI often have to point and I say put that there. I don't want you to hand that to me. It happens with Inscart shoppers, process servers, really anybody. Put that down. Put that down. Doesn't even know she's allergic to strawberries. Alex, tell me about some of your favorite or memorable, if you'd like. Tell me how you feel about it. You're excited about holidays in general. Cockspices around the corner. When you're looking at a Halloween, you like a costume. You like carrying something. Tell me about your Halloween ethos.

AlexIt's changing quite a bit because now I think that honestly, anyone who has very strong feelings about how Halloween should or shouldn't be done, it is boring or mean.

MerlinAnd like, I think they're feeling or your reaction there.

AlexThey're like, um, no. if they think uh sorry i think they are probably either boring and or mean if they have a strong aversion or opinion about halloween that like yucks on another's yum oh you're gonna make this about gender no i what oh i was gonna make it about candy but but you could go as a different kind of eldritch horror you could go as a cat box a litter box what wait wait i i was no i was going

much more i was asking what kind of costumes you like to wear and then you started talking about people who think things are boring well that's the thing i don't i do not enjoy wearing costumes that's that's why i like uh something that you can hold like i i'm a very uh like a like a jeff

Merlincostumer oh i see you got a phone your costume is not their culture i get it okay

Alexlike i i i'm not a um a uh shirley kind of person like i don't mind if somebody thinks i am a miss piggy like i i want someone to to ask i it's it's like a challenge i see yeah like we like challenges on this podcast i've been told i'm very challenging you're a try they yeah i am um and damn it uh that's but it's you know you can you hold a soccer ball you're david beckham you

hold a pokeball you're ash ketchup it's the it's the no i was going somewhere i was going somewhere I have my microphone and now it's speaking.

MerlinI just keep looking at this Will Blunderfield.

AlexWill. Hey, I heard your bell. I know. I've been slowly adjusting settings and tampering with things, and it's back on all auto, but you can hear this?

MerlinAbsolutely, yeah.

AlexWhat in God's name? Oh, my goodness.

MerlinI made it up, Alex. I made it up. I'm not mad at you. I Venmoed Santa $40 because the gaslighting is still happening. I don't know.

AlexLook in your shoe. There's a card. Okay. Two of hearts. Did you ever dress up with your young'un? Like, did you have a big family costume?

MerlinOh, I love those. And you know what's funny? I'm glad you asked. We threatened to do it. You didn't really tell me any specific costumes. We threatened to do it. We threatened to do it every year. And I think especially with a baby, that can be super cute. I saw, what's her name? She's got three names now. The Christian reporter, Haley Bird. The woman who's married has a baby and a dog.

AlexThe lady with the round glasses on political Twitter.

MerlinShe and her husband and baby and dog dressed up as, I think, the Wiggles, and it was really cute. I think stuff like that is extremely cute. And I like a clever costume. No, I don't think we have. Boy, there's sure a lot we've threatened to do over the years. And I probably got them in a text file somewhere. But no, no. But you know what? This year was a little bittersweet, though, because this was the first year that, like, I mean, I didn't do any how. Well, I didn't do any Halloween night with my kid.

AlexIt was a no-go year for you? Well, my kid had things to do with other people. Oh, my gosh. Which is awesome.

MerlinWhich is awesome.

AlexOh, my gosh.

MerlinYeah, I did miss it a little bit.

AlexOh, the seal has been broken. Aw. Loose seal. Be sad. Loose seal. It's a double-edged sword.

MerlinYou know, independence. It's a double-edged sword because you're happy and if one can say proud that the kid's developing. But then it's also, you know, let's say mo' money, mo' problems. except for me that's independence and I don't like the same Mo give me a costume that you've liked do you have an all time favorite like for me there are some people especially when you get smart and you go to liberal arts school and like oh there was a woman who was a smart ass and also a really good visual artist and she had a slip

like a long underwear thing you'd wear under a dress and she did a charcoal drawing of Sigmund Freud on it and I think that was pretty funny. What was she, Alex?

AlexWhat was she? What was she? What was she? She was the anchor chief.

MerlinShe has a Freudian slip.

AlexOh. Oh, that's even more clever. I thought you liked it when people asked about your costume. Oh, I get... Oh, I thought it's not the monkey. But I like things that made me feel good and made me feel strong.

MerlinLike being Batman and things. Over.

AlexAnchor chief. Oh, I... Well, this year I was Nathan Fielder and I wore a laptop. Oh, fun. Did you actually do that?

MerlinAre you being silly?

AlexNo, I have. Let me see. I don't think I think that has the pictures. But yes, I spent $40. Well, OK.

MerlinOK.

AlexI actually had, you know, the thing that Nathan Fielder wears so that he can have the laptop strapped to his body.

MerlinYou identified it, I think, as you called it the hottest thing you've ever seen, I want to say.

AlexYes. And I had something similar. Yes. And I still stand by it. Good for you, man. Good for you. I stand by it. So, yeah, I did have a sexy Halloween costume this year.

MerlinYes.

AlexBut I had something similar to that, except it just didn't work as well. Oh. So, Vice.

MerlinYou know the thing we got for a challenge that would, like, hold your iPad out in front of you?

AlexYes. I still. It's not that I still use it. I'm sorry. Yes. Go on.

MerlinOkay. So, but, like, did you do, like, a hair thing? because it feels like the bangs would be very you know what i mean there's certain things like

Alexi'll send you these pictures of my kid i put gray in my hair but it didn't stay very well i love his gray yeah i was like basically i just want to be the like the hottest thing i've ever seen was my costume this year and yeah and then uh i wore a hat and it made me ash ketchum and uh maddie was my Pokemon, which now sounds like a weird sex thing. It is. It for sure is. Oh, no.

MerlinGet back in the closet. There's no Fremont Street for you. That's real weird. Let me look at these photos. I'll send these to you. For example, in my kid's costume, I was getting really nervous because it's not a perfect replica of Benny, but my kid did their own...

AlexWe're talking about the astronaut from Lego Movie, right? I just sent it to you. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

MerlinBut what's great is, like, first of all, he made that logo on the front and, like, figured out how to cut it so it would work around the zipper. That's not me.

AlexThat's the kid. Holy shit.

MerlinBut up until, like, 15 minutes before leaving, I was like, you're going to cut out. You're still going to cut the helmet, right? Like, the most critical part of a Benny costume, in my mind, if you wore a helmet and it didn't have the crack in it, the break, that wouldn't be Benny.

AlexThat's Benny. benny's always got a cracked helmet yes i mean i i agree but you know what the cracked helmet is what shows i made this costume and i did not buy it which i don't i don't necessarily have a strong opinion about me neither buying versus wearing but like it's it's uh i don't know you're right it's it's definitely like the hallmark of yeah well this is for the true when you get a weird

Merlincostume or an obscure i mean like i'm i i'm not trying to be unkind but like if you got a costume like in an extreme example sexy nurse or whatever or even slightly less extreme like your j random football player and like you've got a jersey that has your name on it like that's you know that's fine that's all pretty like you know bell curve halloween costumes but if you're trying to do something even just slightly obscure it really helps to get it right and i say this as the guy who wants the thin but deep slice of pie. Like, you need the thing that when somebody looks at it,

they go, oh, you did that thing. That's cool. But there's a lot of doctor-related things that are like that, you know, where you'd have to, like, really want to get this one part about it right.

AlexNo, wait. Give me an example.

MerlinOkay, if you show up in a pinstripe brown suit that is, as we like to say, raggedy, like, I need to be able to read that as, are you supposed to be 11th hour?

AlexOh, no, I mean, what do you mean? Oh, doctor. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry.

MerlinI meant doctor who. You mean like a sexy doctor?

AlexI'm not a nerd.

MerlinLike a sexy osteopath?

AlexYes.

MerlinSexy PhD in medieval studies, sexy chiropractor, sexy dentist. Doctors all. Be a doctor.

Did you see, though, in the pocket, the tell here is that you've got a Laura Dern and a, I don't know if you zoomed in, but you've got a Laura Dern.

AlexI was going, of course I did. Of course I did.

MerlinI wish you wouldn't.

AlexBut why in the pocket?

MerlinYou can see our huge switch on the wall. You can see an old drawing.

AlexI do.

MerlinShitty drawing.

AlexThe shitty, that's a beautiful drawing. that's uh and there's more importantly in the lower left hand corner in this frame i'm cleaning i'm cleaning you're cleaning that's my husky don't make fun of my husky my wife hates

Merlinthe husky that's my husky that's my very very very large garbage can like you would use to

Alexclean up a frat party no no no we were focusing i am oh well now i see the husky hello team is

MerlinThe low acid dark roast coffee box?

AlexYes. And there's a, no, I was talking about the framed picture. No, the framed picture of the house.

MerlinYes.

AlexThe adorable drawing.

MerlinThat was drawn by the little lord.

AlexYes. And then, but the bottom left-hand corner, is this going to be a situation where, like, I'm the only one who sees this?

MerlinOkay. I forget what that thing's called, but you might know. But there's a thing that's out there that my kid is aware of, and it's a character from some kind of thing. And my kid made stickers of that thing. and put it all over the house, kind of wears Waldo style. And we keep finding them. It's some kind of a little creature. I think it's some kind of a creature who might be on the spectrum, and it has big eyes. And I don't know. I'll find out.

AlexSpectrum creature. I'm sure nothing is going to. Oh, you know what?

MerlinActually, today's a short school day, so let me at least get a feedback in, as you say. I will say, what is the name of the, act like I'm typing spectrum.

Alexuh little four what is the name of four legged is there four legs i don't know

Merlincharacter oh i'm ending with a preposition but that's okay you made stickers of um yeah we hang art we hang art uh we do that what's your all-time favorite costume you had

Alexi don't i don't know i don't know that's that's the problem is i was never into halloween but And I don't want to become one of those adults who's suddenly very, very into Halloween. Why? Because I feel like I haven't earned it. I need to earn it. I was disloyal as a child.

MerlinOh, you're a fake Halloween day.

AlexExactly. Yeah. Yeah. I need to work to get the fentanyl candy. Did you know that? I was a little bit ashamed that I didn't know that the fentanyl candy has a double turns out. of fentanyl actually was transported in large containers of candy which is very clever yeah yeah the as a means of concealment yeah to it was there was a large barge large barge

large barge uh hold on fent fentanyl candy there's a large barge and the barge the barge

Merlinhad the rainbow fentanyls but it was mixed in with like pez or something um no um we believe

Alexin ghosting us and we don't believe in criminals um oh um the oh gosh i will put this in notes

Merlinnotes so so there's the first turns out is that of course anytime you hear the word rainbow we learn this with rainbow parties the thing was oh my god there's so much lore around fentanyl fentanyl, which is harming so many of our first responders, if you're in the same county as fentanyl, you might get very, very sick as a cop. You definitely didn't just take it or eat it up yum, but you get very sick from the fentanyl. And then we heard that there's a new kind, kids are calling it rainbow fentanyl. And that is a kind of fentanyl that, like all of these

insane things people make up, that the pushers, as we used to say, are using, it looks almost like fruity pebbles i don't know if those are from your vintage but like some kind of or fruit loops like some kind of oh we'll attract children to fentanyl yeah with this by making them colorful and then we'll give them away i mean like you know that's that's boy that better be venture funded that's

Alexthat's going to be hard to turn a profit on my favorite um and that's and so we heard we heard

Merlinbe careful because rainbow fentanyl is out there and the pushers are after your kids for their probably their adrenochrome i guess that was the first turns out it was like oh come on really like another one of these rainbow things but you're saying there's a double turns out here

Alexoh yeah that there was a big shipment of fentanyl that was uh trafficked in large skittles containers which i just think is like a great like a barrel yeah let me i'm trying to find the uh and they ship skittles that way i feel like they would package it at the factory I'm sorry. It's not your story.

Exactly. No, I know.

MerlinI know. I like to really, I pride myself on knowing who to blame for things.

AlexMm-hmm.

MerlinAnd consequently, you know, you catch some breaks that way for now. What's your favorite Halloween costume?

AlexI was proud of Nathan Fielder, although I wasn't, I was very upset that my hair didn't get gray enough. Um, I, I don't know.

MerlinThis seems like something like an anecdote that you made up and prepared in order to share with Earth people.

AlexNo, I wanted to hear. No, no.

MerlinMy name, Joy Earth costume.

AlexOh, I was an off-brand Batman once. Oh, wait, wait. That's, I take it back. I take it back. Fuck. Oh, there, I totally forgot because no one, oh, I'm going to say something. It is a podcast, Alex. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. Never mind. I did not. You can hear the bell.

MerlinThere we go.

AlexNow it's not as satisfying that I know you can hear it. I don't know why.

MerlinThat's very weird.

AlexHave I ever said anything and you were like, yeah, that's normal? I don't think that's ever happened.

MerlinSyracuse pushes back on this phrase, but I find it really useful when I use that phrase within normal parameters, which I think is extremely meaningful. I mean, if you want to think of it as a bell curve, you could. But like there are things that happen that are weird. Right. I mean, there are things that are happening that are weird within normal parameters. But then you get things that are weird outside of normal parameters. you know like we used to use that increasingly meaningless uh phrase like a hundred year flood which is to say that based on what we know this is the kind of flood we should be seeing every

hundred years like this is a what a what a black a black swan uh like this is one of those i know we don't say that anymore but like there's there's some kind of a thing here that is outside of it's sort of like a corner case versus uh or like what's what's so you got like a corner case and edge case whichever the really weird one is you know i'm saying yeah i didn't know there was a difference oh look at me well i mean some some cases are edgier than others but you i feel like i know you just well enough that i understand how you are because i know when it's within normal

parameters it's when i don't have any context at all for the word salad that you're serving that i get i get a little confused and sometimes i like to play with it and other times i think well that's mean you know it's like flicking flicking boogers at the weird kid like why would you do that oh yeah real smart big target it's i think i sometimes get what you're saying i often don't understand don't entirely understand your motivations for things but i do appreciate

Alexyour enthusiasm oh interesting yeah i don't know if i want to unpack that i don't know yeah no no

MerlinI mean, I enjoy your enthusiasm for the Canadian ballman, but I don't understand your motivation for that. And I sometimes, are you trying to drag me down into the latrine is a question I find myself asking. Do you want me to be dog paddling around in the poops with you? Is that just what it is? Or do you think it'll make me happy? Do you think it'll give me a broader understanding of something? I did you a kindness today and I didn't even tell you I did a kindness

until the kindness was already done which is I saw something that I've been telling you about and I said to myself this is something Alex needs and then I did a reach around I went and I reached out and now you're using the thing so that to me because I want to talk to you about this thing that we can't talk about just yet it doesn't matter it's nothing don't worry it's software it's a private beta of some software that I know Alex needs.

AlexYeah, it was to the point where I was showing Maddie the service. Like we were, because we opened our another vacation. I'm like, oh, I love this thing so much. Oh, oh. And he was like, why don't you just ask for an invite to the beta? And I'm like, no, I can't do that.

MerlinWell, I'm glad that was nice of that person to take care of that. So in that case, I am trying to do a kindness. But I mean, I have my own reasons. Like I'd like to be able to talk to you about it. But I also want, you know, I know that there are ways in which we improbably make a good team because of our hangups. You know, we have complimentary hangups in some ways. And I thought, you know, there's things we can both learn by taking this journey together. So that's the kind of thing. Whereas you send me, I think for the third or fourth time now, you sent me a video of a ballman.

And then demand that I learn what Channel 5 is because it's very important to me and I'm not sure why.

AlexI am just very curious. I'm being unkind. I'm glad you paid.

Merlinattention to me like you're one of the handful of people who's allowed to pay attention to me everyone else just stop stop yeah okay all right you went out i'll get i'll get you out what get out you went out you went out of the attention circle what take you out of my ring i don't know

Alexi don't know i'm still thinking why wouldn't you want to be in there uh i like you

Merlinnormal parameters is what i'm saying

Alexoh i like being in within is it one guy's balls or does he is it like a haunted house where he

Merlingoes around oh i feel these grapes that's a guy from saskatchewan like how does it how does it why is he feeling balls in the woods is it is there more to it than that is it a journey it's a journey it's a spiritual journey okay and the guy you like who has different haircuts who's channel five he does that and and he just sits there and lets the person talk right

Alexyes i uh there there was a time when you could say i'm just asking the question and you really were just asking the question i think it's still entirely plausible i still just no no no it's a

Merlinshame that that's become such a so synonymous yeah i mean it's sort of like i mean it's a very dim memory at this point but there was a period of about oh let me look 16 hours where fake news meant exactly what it means which is misinformation disinformation especially deliberate incorrect information we don't say lies anymore um but yeah but that but then of course that immediately got weaponized you know by the by that guy and now everybody now fake news means it's just a thing you say when you don't want to have to explain why you like

fuck the donut in the break room or i break news yeah and it there's i was fucking that

Alexdonut within normal parameters yeah and it is it is your uh you know i would not like to steal your a bit of wisdom about how you know words need to mean things because i i don't think we put too many meanings on words but you ever look at the word ramp it's a as far as i know i i feel like it

Merlinmight be the word that has the most definitions ramp i've always kind of wondered in the back of my mind you know what i mean like because ramp can mean a surprising number of things that's what you're talking about right like you we're not just talking about homonyms we're talking about like tom tom club says in wordy rapping hood we're talking about like you know how words words are deceptive and strange and you know semiotics and whatnot this is just sort of breaking

Alexmy brain a little bit what's that what's breaking i never thought of i you're right ramp has so many different meanings oh god like if you were to say what what word has the ah oh well i mean there's

Merlinsome words that you can that by the nature of the word that is true of i just i always thought that ramp was unusual uh in that way because like it's not just like edge case stuff you know like when you're looking here la vowels are a e i o u and sometimes y or like did somebody once say sometimes w that might have been welsh but like you're like well there are some y's they're usually greek but like you know but but but in this instance like ramp and also what's cool my friend michael his dictionary definition of ramp uh it just had a picture of like a of a highway cloverleaf which

i thought was an unusual choice for the word ramp in a dictionary you ever seen the webster's dictionary have you ever seen the webster's dictionary drawing from a previous time of the word afro well they changed it over time the one that was in my dictionary the one that was in my dictionary in seventh grade eventually it got upgraded so that when i saw upgrade when i saw it again in like college in a different red webster's dictionary like everybody had they'd improved afro but i'm gonna do webster's dictionary afro because it might be my all-time

favorite um dictionary image oh i don't see it here i may have to go find my old dictionary it's it's a picture of a of a smiling black man and you know like usually sometimes in photo or in dictionary photos there will be like it'll be like dotted out or grayed out so you can say oh like this part of the flower is the pistol or pistol or whatever you know what i mean or

AlexRight, yeah.

MerlinStem. And like in this case, it's just a picture of a smiling black man. It says Afro. It's really weird.

AlexThat checks out. That's like, oh, yikes.

MerlinOh, here's one of an African-American lady. This does not have the same joie de vivre as that one. What were we talking about?

AlexI think Halloween costumes, ramps, dictionaries, balls and forests.

MerlinOh, normal parameters. Nathan Fielder.

AlexT-B-T-B-H-O.

MerlinOh, God. My kid's speaking in child Patois. I don't know what this means. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dubai Friday. I think we should do the challenge, if you're into it.

AlexWe should, yes. Very.

MerlinWell, let's look. Is there anything else that we need to cover?

AlexNo, I was utterly unprepared today. See, I didn't even need to use that adjective. See, this episode is never going to be released. I don't think ramp is an adjective normally. Never going to be released. You know what? Let's make ramp an adjective. Yes. It'll be like fetch. Mm-hmm.

MerlinOr bucket.

AlexOh, that's totally ramp.

MerlinOr bucket.

AlexOh, man, that's so bucket.

MerlinThat's ramp. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, that chick was ramp. Oh, I kind of like that.

AlexMm-hmm. Yeah. Okay, we don't know what it means. Real ramp.

MerlinMaybe in the after show.

Alexin the after show wait ramp slur let me just make sure uh what okay no if ever you're trying to start using a word you should type that word and then type slur into google just to make sure just to do a quick see check because but no as far as i know ramp is not a slur that's a terrible piece of advice no wait wait wait wait you're saying if it's conceivable that it's a slur

Merlinyou're saying abundance of caution make sure you aren't saying something unintentionally hurtful

Alexcorrect okay what oh boy what did it sound like i was saying how many times in the last week have

Merlinyou searched for how many times in the last month have you searched for something and added the word

Alexslur to it just out of curiosity uh this is a thing you do yes okay well okay do you but do you Done and done.

MerlinChicago sun leaf. Slur.

I found the word with the most definitions. Are you ready?

AlexYes.

MerlinIt's a really good one. It's a really good one. According to six seconds of Googling this, are you ready?

AlexYes.

MerlinSet.

AlexFuck me.

MerlinBecause, well, let's just get a couple of the big ones out of the way. I mean, there's so many verbs, you know, for set. There's so many nouns for set, like a TV set. But you could also have a menu with a set price. That could be an adjective.

But is it an adverb? oh maybe it could be an adverb that modifies ramp man that chick was that chick was set ramp

Alexthat doesn't work at all all right a little bit a little bit yeah we a quick quick quick diversion quick diversion i i haven't one thing i have not searched for is whether or not a chicago sunroof is real because i don't know if i want to know and i oh god you're so fucking weird

Merlinwhy i'm just the opposite of that well when jimmy says it was just a simple chicago sunroof and i you he explains in that scene where he's calling bingo that amazing fucking scene we've calling bingo and talks about the chicago sunroof for the i think the first time then later on there's the point where chuck's visiting him in jail and he says oh it's just a chicago sunroof um because my my initial thought was that that is such a terrific urban dictionary thing, I bet it's real. Whereas you would go, you would say something like,

oh, I was delighted to find out that they were Onan within normal parameters. And then you'd go Google Onan within normal parameters slur.

AlexWell, no, I just thought it was... It means Jews.

MerlinJewish people, sorry. The tribe we call them. Oh, my God.

AlexSet. Challenge. Set. This episode's set ramped.

MerlinOh, Set is also, I think, an Egyptian god.

AlexOh, yeah. Wait.

MerlinIs Set a cat?

AlexWhat is Set?

MerlinI should know it's from deities and demigods. Luckily, I have. Because I download all my things to PDFs, I do have a deities and demigods here that I can look that up in.

AlexIs that a deities and... Hold on. Why do I know that?

MerlinIt's, um... Well, the basic advanced D&D books. You've got the player handbook. you've got the dungeon master's guide monster manual um and for a long time i think jim ward

Alexbut oh yes okay yes here we are okay i was a fake gamer girl again dungeons and dragons

Merlinthat's my dm guide where's my deities where my deities at it's in here somewhere anyway not important set okay well i can also just search the internet set egyptian god oh set set the bird man oh what a baller check out set google set egyptian god

Alexoh oh is this the this is the meanie oh oh shit pretty cool brother of osiris isis and horus uncle to horus the younger that's not creative horse is the one with the bell okay and we've got

MerlinGods of Egypt. We should explore this. Anubis, Ra, Set. I don't know how to pronounce this, and I don't want to offend anybody. Thoth? Thoth? Thoth?

I'll look in the demigods. Hey, everybody. Digga, digga, digga, digga challenge. Challenge this week, I think, is mine. And the challenge was to watch.

Challenge this week was to watch the new Adam Curtis. It's pretty new. Adam Curtis series called, it's got a long name, off the dome. Let me try it off the dome. I'm going to say Russia, 1985 to 1999, trauma zone. Was I close?

AlexYes. But is there a space between trauma and zone?

MerlinNo.

AlexIt's Camel Case. There is not. No, it's Camel Case. All Camel Case.

Merlinand as I imagine we'll talk about Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker who's really got his own thing going on he's an English guy who makes these pretty wild documentaries that I don't know that I don't know there's times where I'm watching them and I wonder is this kind of what it's like when you're in QAnon like the fact that I'm so into what he's doing here am I blinded to like how that plus the fact it feels very like extreme and exploitative Adam Curtis really has his own thing going on.

I'll get it out of the way. I like the thing that he has going on. Max, I believe, I'm almost positive, Max is the one who turned me on to hyper-normalization, which is now like a tentpole in my life. But Adam Curtis has a new documentary, and it's basically, oh God, in the deck, or the subtitle, whatever it's called, is so good.

What it was like to live in Russia during the fall of communism, and then the words appear on screen under it and democracy.

AlexIt was fucking chilling.

MerlinI know, I know. So that was the challenge this week. And of course, by the rules stipulated here, that means, you know, if it's a book, you read the first chapter or so. If it's a TV show, you watch the first episode, stuff like that. So technically the challenge, and we don't really score on this here, was to watch at least the first episode of that, which covers kind of a fair amount of time chronologically. It ends up covering like right up to like really five years, I think, like into 90, kind of technically a little later.

Because I had watched it, and I thought you might enjoy watching it. I thought you would, for all of the reasons, I thought it would be something, you're a documentary person, you're weird, you like being upset. I thought you might enjoy it.

AlexThat's the challenge. Mm-hmm. I watched the first episode 1.5 times at regular speed. Thank you. I did the math on that, Alex.

MerlinThere's no way you watched that one and a half times this morning. There's no way.

AlexNo, I started, when did you text me? I had already started it when you texted me. Nouns?

MerlinOh, nouns describe a person, place, thing, or idea.

AlexIt's a special kind of word.

MerlinIt's every name you've ever heard.

Alexi i watched the one on youtube hold on let me

Merlinum i'm glad you got a chance to watch it though i've watched that first episode

Alexthree times now how oh god it's so i mean it's you think it's worse than hyper normalization um i think or did you watch the other one did you watch his covid era series did you watch

Merlini didn't only hyper normalization wild what's it called um uh i'll find it for notes but uh anyways hey yeah and so just so y'all know it is uh it's bbc like all the stuff and this becomes important and a very interesting way to me it's a bbc documentary so if you're somewhere where you can get bbc iplayer you can see it if you don't if you're somewhere where you don't have bbc iplayer at least as of last night the first episode i noticed somebody uh what do we say freeboot is

Alexthat the word somebody freebooted it on the youtube yes except it doesn't have the second episode which is how i knew that i started watching the first episode over again uh

Merlinwhy i think you i know your internet's weird i sent you a link to all of them if you would like

Alexto download and watch it yes oh yes please do you remember i sent you a link and then but i was in a car uh and oh you can't get a link i can't get a link in a car huh i couldn't well i was i was editing and very little internet in my car so i was like oh i think i know what this is and then

Merlinuh it i can send it again if you want to watch yes i mean because i this is this is a very very upsetting program but oh my god where do you even begin with this should we give a little i mean Like, where do you begin?

AlexI don't know. Well, that's the thing, is I don't know what I was expecting. Like, I guess I was expecting some sort of voiceover, because that's, like, his thing. That's his deal, yeah.

MerlinOh, actually, I may have a weigh-in. Can I jump in?

AlexPlease.

MerlinYes. Adam Curtis, who's done a whole bunch of these, and I think they are almost all for the BBC. I mean, Adam Curtis, he's got a style. and I don't want to compare him to people like Michael Moore but oh please don't well okay what

AlexI'm trying to say is like I there's so much stuff Michael Moore a well okay like I have a rule of

Merlinthumb in life okay my rule of thumb in life if is if you if you add music to something it changes the nature of it and that's so extremely true with news what's the word a diegetic or what do you call

Alexnon-diegetic

Merlinif you add non-diegetic to a piece of video it's no longer news because you're telling me how to feel about that but really I mean anybody who knows the first thing about filmmaking knows that everything's about decisions it's all about editing as Bob Seger says what to leave in what to leave out I would not go to an Adam Curtis movie for all of your news I would not go to an Adam Curtis movie for all of your history but But, you know, if you can find a way past that, you know, and it's not like there's that much there's every everything's loaded.

Everything's fraught. And his his I think his feelings about stuff are very much on the table when you're watching things. And in a similar way to Stanley Kubrick, you know, they really on blank check as they talk about Kubrick, they're really there's this emerging theme of like Stanley Kubrick's upside. In addition to the fact, quote, Stanley Kubrick has no sense of humor. Oh, boy. But also the idea that he is kind of obsessed with broken systems and the way things break down. And in all these different ways, we see what happens when things didn't go the way that people hoped or expected.

And I think that is very much an interest of Adam Curtis's is the way that, boy, I can make this sound really boring by just putting my little Avery label on it. But there are a lot of really corrupt systems that breed more corruption. But what he brings to it that I super love is just this sense of really highlighting absurdities and ironies and letting the film, the visual, tell the story.

and so that's where my final thing on this is i i tried to get like a real deep dive on this and i found a bunch of reviews that i looked through but like it's my understanding that this project which is a seven part series about an hour each seven hours of tv and i think some of it is from home movies some of it is from an actual fiction movie but almost everything i imagine well over 80, probably 90% of this is footage that was shot by the BBC over the years. And in particular,

did you get this? That it was the BBC, like Moscow Bureau just had all of this footage, some of which improbably made it past Russian or Soviet censors, some of which didn't, but that he put together, he has told a story over seven hours using just other people's footage. and the fact that there's not the Adam Curtis voiceover. If you don't like Adam Curtis, you're going to fucking hate this.

AlexBut if you do like Adam Curtis... I don't think so. I think that a lot of people have a... They think of him the way that they think of like, oh, it's like a Michael Moore movie. I expected a very Adam...

MerlinOr even just another pussy hat observer. Like, you know, and that meal, that meal cost as much as what Chichenko would make in wages over 5000 years. That kind of like heavy handed stuff like he really in this one in particular kind of a lot of the time does just sort of lean back, does add occasional like fairly often adds all caps, not intertitles, but just overlays explaining, you know, what you're looking at.

and kind of giving you context for it. God, what was the one I sent you this morning? My favorite one. Oh, God.

AlexWell, of course, the one's my current Twitter header.

MerlinThe main cause of fires. The main cause of fires. The main cause of fires in apartments across Russia was exploding TV sets.

AlexHoly shit.

MerlinOh, here we go. This one. Moscow. It's a picture of all these people firing guns in a firing range. And the overlay says, Moscow police training with simulated shooting noise. And you hear the click, click, click of like pulling a toy trigger and then over loudspeakers they're playing the sound of gunshots it's so and which is like i'm so obsessed with stuff like this um i've been talking a lot so i'll come back to this i'm gonna put a pin in joel uckenbach and i want to talk about creeping surrealism um so yeah the first one is about about those years and like basically what happened

between i mean it includes chernobyl it includes perestroika it includes the transition and so and really Gorbachev, I would say in some ways, if you had to really narrow this down, it's like what happened in Russia as communism started sort of, or communism, or I would say Soviet communism around the world, was falling down in that period of time. And it's bookmarked in many ways by the time from Gorbachev to the beginning of Gorbachev to the beginning of Putin.

AlexI'm just, I got distracted looking through all the screenshots that I took of...

MerlinOh my God, I'm going to do a thread. Well, I'll probably do this on my Blot site, but I do enjoy, I did this with 2001 a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to make Twitter headers out of a whole bunch of these because a lot of these really want to be a Twitter header.

AlexCoca-Cola, is it? Is it? Oh my God.

MerlinAlex, I've watched this. I'll say it again. I've watched this three times and I can't even, I couldn't even write down all of the indelible moments in this first episode where I was like, what is happening? those tvs do not look very high quality no no they are like oh god when it i

Alexwhen i thought like it was going to be a bit because that was one of the first i think um like things that had a uh like a like a sort of a slant of his style i thought that was going to be but i looked it up i'm like oh no wait that's true literally the which part the number one cause of fires was fucking TVs.

MerlinI was also talking about like, yeah, yeah, but that is in the context of showing you this, everything, everything in almost every frame of this is super fucked. Like everything's broken, everything's fucked up, down to like the most basic indoor B-roll showing a room with like garments in it, and the floor looks like it's crooked, everything's filthy, everything's broken, everything's expensive and shoddy it's just it's so it becomes kind of like overwhelming in some ways it's a lot like watching

i don't know i watch a lot of world war ii stuff and it is kind of like i don't know like watching stuff about shoah you know and really watching stuff about the ghettos and you're like oh my god this just keeps getting worse doesn't it and obviously that's in that's a very extreme case i don't mean to god win this but like it is like just every single thing and i don't think he's cherry picking i get the feeling because this is what we were taught in school was like you know You go to the market and wait in line while Muzak plays. There's not a thing on the shelves. There's nothing. They're out of potatoes, Alex.

What are they going to do for potatoes? And yeah, you do very much get the feel.

AlexLike if the way we're talking about this, I feel like without watching it, it almost feels this first episode. I'm very excited to watch. Excited is not the right word. I know I'm the same way.

MerlinI tucked in. I watched like since I watched this one a third time last night I ended up watching the second one again and the beginning the third one I'm like what are you doing you've got to stop doing this so instead I watched the absolutely extremely upsetting new all quiet all quiet on the western front on Netflix which is extremely good talk about upsetting I intentionally put off watching

Alexthis because I was like in such a lovely place like I I know that this is going to upset me quite a bit so i'm just gonna put off watching it very very involving yeah very involving yeah

Merlinit's hard to describe because i mean i i it's you crush the bunny by over explaining it but what this guy does is he takes so all this stuff has been shot and and like boy can you imagine like we said in texts earlier the the i don't know what you call it research and production crew like i don't think you just go up to altavista and say show me everything funny that was shot in Russia for, you know, 20 years. I cannot even imagine. I can imagine some things. I can imagine there's some stuff that was probably really easy to put your hand to. But how did they find what you described, that footage of a trial?

AlexOh, my God.

MerlinHow did they find that? And then how did he decide to cut it up the way he did? I don't want to spoil this for you, but you've already been introduced to a character who will reappear. Give me some money.

AlexOh, no.

MerlinOh, no. Oh, she makes, she, she, you watch her grow up a little bit. it's wild a little girl who begs for money she just goes up to cars and says give me some money and and and also there's there's other kinds like those the characters in that courtroom you know or like but it's the it reminded me favorably of that princess diana documentary i was recommending on hbo max in that it's told without voiceovers and talking heads it's all with it's telling a story with footage and and editing really and it's it is about i i really

recommend folks check it out if you get the stomach for it it's not very uplifting but it's and i mean you can just watch it for the like hyper normalization you can just get high and watch it for the sort of prurient i cannot even believe how surreal this thing is the juxtaposition of like but learning for example i was learning the history of oligarchs the first and second

Alexand third oligarch the first i've never thought of the first oligarch who decided what did he he

MerlinIt involved like some kind of disbursement of money that wasn't real. And he used money that wasn't real to make other money that wasn't real. Kind of. It was kind of like crypto. But he found a way.

AlexI was going to say he bit coined like the like tiny little capitalist system that Gorbachev left in.

MerlinHe Satoshi. He Satoshi Moscow.

AlexYeah. Oh, God.

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Merlin... ... ... ... ... ... This is not a spoiler, because it's history but like so Gorbachev comes in and again like so many things I love in documentaries like I didn't know that I didn't know that I always thought Gorbachev was like an unalloyed good guy mostly until I saw you know then I finally saw like I'm an idiot right like what do I know like I always thought he was like the hope for you know the Soviet Union but boy there are a lot of fuck ups and a lot of the shit in Tbilisi oh my god did you see the funeral with the carrying the coffin in Tbilisi

that's one of the most upsetting images i've ever seen in my life i just ordered people to

Alexshoot into crowds yeah yeah it was i even i mean talk about there are a number of coffins and funerals in this well not like a tim robinson level of coffins and funerals okay i hate though

Merlinthat it a little bit it just keeps happening naked body falling out oh god i never thought

Alexthat i would almost cry seeing uh what's his name uh uh the widow of um the the kgb spy like

Merlinoh my god how long did they keep the shot on kim i think his name i want to say kim philby who was like a famous, I don't know a ton, I haven't even looked at his Wikipedia page, but Kim Philby, I think, was a British national who spied for the Soviet Union for a very long time and did some incredibly destructive sharing of intelligence and then basically then defected or was accepted and lived out his life in Moscow, right?

AlexYeah, I know, that's the thing. He got like a state funeral, though.

MerlinHe got like...

AlexOh, yeah. it looked like the dalai lama died yeah it was it was very and but when i say it was very weird i mean from every aspect like oh it's super weird to have like a state funeral for for a double agent and like like the meaning of double agent in itself in this context is like a million

Merlinmeanings saying goodbye to him that shot must have been am i kidding alex it had to be 90 seconds

Alexthat is one part i sped up i'm like okay okay is it like what what seriously seriously and they just oh god there was no i have never seen i think a documentary shot that long like i i of something that there's zero movement i thought it had paused consumers tend to or viewers tend to

Merlinexaggerate how long something was so what was the famous example of this there's a famous like the famous example of um oh shoot somebody making a movie wanted to have something go black for like a minute or something like that if something goes black and stays black with no sound as in not even rumbling if that happened for 10 seconds you would think your tv was broken that's so much longer than you think it is it goes on but that's what he's doing he's juxtaposing all these these different images and they all they very much you know revolve around these issues of like this

crumbling system Gorbachev so anyway I was gonna what I was poorly saying was that Gorbachev's idea was that we could reform communism by introducing by carefully introducing these certain aspects of capitalism and at least in this telling of it it just led to this vacuum

Alexwhere people, oh, you know what the single most mind-blowing

Merlinnumber or fact in this is when they're talking, it was the second or third oligarch, that there's this automobile manufacturer in Soviet Union, which is like a really, really, really big industry, and there was so much corruption. And it's one thing to nick a couple of vehicles to sell to a mobster, but did I hear correctly that the guy was stealing at least tens of thousands of cars every year? Remember that point when they're showing them rolling off the line?

And it's like, that guy, how do you steal 10,000 cars in a year and get away with it?

AlexWell, at one point, I think it was either directly before that that there were so many, there were just mobsters on the floor killing each other and fighting over. Yeah, just literally different families fighting over the cars. And I'm like, holy shit.

MerlinBut the shoddiness and like one to me, one of the most enduring things about it is like just the demonstration of so much shoddiness. I say shoddiness like I know how to send something to the moon of Mars. I do not. But like that one was really poignant, like when they lost connection with their their Mars thing. But also just stuff like mines collapsing and people going on strike to say, hey, look, the mines are collapsing. The diamond mines are collapsed. All of these things, they can't get food to anywhere. It's just this utter, there's so much corruption and incompetence.

And the people of the Soviet Union, which is a lot of people, so many of them are just living in this netherworld. Again, he covered this so well in hypernormalization, which I really recommend. but just an idea I'll talk about in a minute, this idea of creeping surrealism where it becomes more and more difficult to know what is true and consequently what is real. And then you could become like dirtbag Twitter and just get all like, oh, lol, everything's a mess. You know, you finally get that black sense of humor,

that famous Soviet sense of humor, which is like a deeply black sense of humor because you've been around, you've seen all this. You know that's only one ruble's worth of material in that boy's trousers.

AlexIt's a one glass of oil. I don't have anything interesting to say about this because I don't think you really can't feel what it's like until you see it and just feel the silence. There were multiple times for the first 20 minutes. I'm like, is the Apple TV broke? what's what's going on uh no like he does the like i don't know i used to think that like okay

adam curtis is a really good filmmaker he i'm thinking certainly he's like one of the best documentary filmmakers who's ever existed at this point like i would not know that this is an adam curtis movie like i i would think like this could have been made um not not could have been made by by anybody but like you know how sometimes you're like okay yeah this is like an alex give me thing or like yeah well like i mean there's there's certain kinds i mean like a lot

Merlinto a trivial dumb example might be like a wes anderson movie where although he wes anderson has been hugely influenced by people like hubrick and howl ashby and people like that like when you see like a shot from grand budapest hotel you really know that it's a wes anderson movie for you know a variety of reasons that that kind of thing where you're like you would not have pegged

Alexthis as adam curtis you're saying uh not at not at first because but i don't but i also don't think anybody else could have pulled off this timing and this juxtaposition without any music without any like i mean the the title cards do so much work and even that i'm like i wonder i i don't think if uh if those had been gone i think i would have liked it just as much obviously it had

so much of almost his biting humor in those but still every aspect of this is done so well

Merlinlike leaving in the tone the tone i mean given that he starts with footage i mean he has decisions to make about what footage to use or consider even like what the story is that he wants to tell and he gets to make decisions um i mean i'm not a filmmaker but it strikes me he needs gets to make decisions about like how to edit it and he even gets to make decisions about there's some things where i feel like he did that thing where you're hearing audio from something else like when when that um cleric is speaking to the group in was it to police here or georgia like was was talking to

the audience and they hold on that very long shot of that guy looking like i need to get out of here and i think that some audio might have come from something else you can decide all of those things but he doesn't get to like he doesn't get to change the footage like it's all about editing editing decisions as in what gets in and like how much of it and how you cut it but like what an

Alexamazing way to tell a story and i bet that's real hard i cannot imagine how many hours went into just reviewing this that's what i'm saying that's why i'm saying they must have had so

Merlinmany people i mean i'm i would love you know what i would watch a documentary about how they made

Alexthis right i that's i i either feel like it like it on one hand it obviously needs to be a ton of people to get through all of this but i don't know if you can have that many people and still

Merlinget that tone you want i'd never seen the footage oh my god alex and and i happen to love the tv series chernobyl it talk about chilling but boy i i love that but even having seen that and i got so obsessed with chernobyl i listened to the podcast which is a very good podcast um the official podcast and i watched some actual like old on youtube you can find old other old documentaries about Chernobyl, but like to see people and just, you know, for example, revisiting the thing with the roof, right? Where you're going to, you're going to go out there,

you have to watch this video, you have to run out there, carry this many pounds of stuff and run back. And then you can never be around radiation again for the rest of your life. Thank you for your service. You know, remember that stuff from Chernobyl, but the scenes of them like using basically packing tape to make their own suits and then crawling into the reactor. I don't think I'd ever seen that. That was incredibly upsetting. And there's that really surreal scene where, I don't know how they did this, but there's a shot, and you've seen them. You've got the implied right to left of them moving into the reactor.

And then there's this weird shot where there's a camera going down what looks like a tube or like a small tunnel and going into this room. And it looks like something out of a cyberpunk novel. Like, remember all the, like, the tubey looking things just hanging down? and like no no you don't understand the core the core is gone yeah and then they didn't of course we know this from chernobyl they didn't um you know evacuate people for a couple days and it just just that whole sense and like it's as

recent as today's headlines you know in that sense of like the phrase i keep using i feel like a america we've lost the recipe for america like we just don't understand how to do stuff anymore we don't know how to make things we don't know how to like and there's a million reasons for that But like, you know, you really feel for those folks. Like what a fucking shitty existence.

Oh, Yoltsin will fix all of this. He's a very good dancer. Well, I'm sure we'll learn that in some future episodes. He loves to dance.

AlexI hate this challenge. I hate that I've seen this. I hate it. I hate it. I hate that I'm going to rewatch this and then watch the other. God.

MerlinWell, if you're like me, you'll end up straight back at hyper normalization.

AlexYeah. That song, the...

MerlinAnd dragging the bodies around, all that blood on the floor. You know, the Syrian guy's very oddly shaped head. You ever notice how upsetting that guy's head is?

Asaj?

AlexNo. Oh, here, I'll send it to you. Hang on. Wait, no. I'm trying to imagine which... I'm waiting for Richard Speck to show up on screen.

MerlinI'll just mention this in passing. I wish to God I could find this. There's a guy who now I know now as somebody who writes for The Washington Post. But I became aware of when I was working on my thesis project in college because he'd written this piece that was that had gone around in the mid 80s called Creeping Surrealism. The guy's name is Joel Achenbach. He's a really good writer, like I say, still around at The Post. And it's really difficult to put your hand to this actual full article. I think I had it in a compilation or I might have gotten.

I don't know how I got it. But he wrote this piece, you know, a piece in the newspaper, in like a Miami newspaper. He wrote a piece called Creeping Surrealism in like 1986. OK. And it was about how life is getting weirder and sort of less difficult to believe. But we don't seem to mind. Like, you know, if the and hey, like, you know what? Can I just also say don't watch the trailer for this. Don't watch the trailer for hyper normalization. They don't do the movie any favors. But there is that line.

AlexI would say it hurts.

Merlinlike yeah because hyper normalization they use that that it's a really good line but they ought to use it because it sends the wrong signal but you know they know we know and we know they know we know but they don't mind and they keep doing it anyway that's kind of what this stuff is about and that's kind of what joel achenbach i don't know if you realized how prescient he was back then but there's a line in that song of mine dairy queen um we're like and that comes from that article or from inspired by that article. So,

you know, like those cookies from Pepperidge farms that really come from factories line in that song. And that's because he can, I think he opens the piece by talking about how reading the back of a package of Pepperidge farm cookies. And it says something like, and you know, they deliberately made these cookies that are a little bit fucked up on purpose. They have to look homemade. and it basically is described on the back of the package as like yeah like these are made in a factory but like don't they look kind of real and isn't that cool that we did that it's that sense

of like we all know that this isn't real but we're not going to have that conversation instead we're going to have that conversation about how if you buy premium pepperidge farms cookies you're going to pay a little bit more but it'll look look homemade and we all agree that that's okay and i'm not saying that's the beginning of it i'm not saying pepperidge farms caused you know the downfall of Western civilization that remains to be seen. But I still do think about, I think about creeping surrealism a lot. Another example he used, I wish I could, I wish I could get this phrased the way that he wrote it, but there's one paragraph where he talks about Shirley MacLaine.

This is way off the dome from almost 40 years ago, but I'm talking about Shirley MacLaine, the actress right and how shirley mclean had done a role in a movie oh god i don't know if i can get this right basically shirley mclean oh i know what it is shirley mclean had written a book i think a biography an autobiography the autobiography got made into a movie she wrote another book about the movie and like it was just like shirley mclean all the way down title like there's just

so many levels of abstraction from this. And now, now that has become, we're like dirtbag Twitter now. We're all, we're also like, lol. But like, we see that all the time now. We see all these examples of, you know, this is fake, but you're into it, right? Whether that's adults at Disney World or, you know, whether that's, you know, Fleabag's sister planning her own surprise birthday party. Like, there's just so much stuff. And like, but you, you really, you really see, We may have adopted the creeping surrealism, but Soviet Union was born into it.

It's very central to the way that place operated, that sense of fear and performance. Did you ever see the video? This might have been in hyper... Yeah, this must have been in hyper-normalization. Did you ever see the video of when Saddam took over and he walks in? It was like 1979. Remember, he walks into the chamber and people just start getting pulled out one at a time. me smoking a cigar and just stands there. There's just something about the utter brutality of what a lot of these people do for their reasons. And then the way that we have to

cobble together. A phrase, a word that I've been using more and more lately, how do I integrate this into my sense of self? How do I integrate what happened into my life? You know what I'm saying? It's very difficult to do, and we all do need to not just sleep at night, but then be alive during the day and how do you i'm experiencing it today like i i'm spending a lot less time on twitter and looking at the news uh i know that's a bit on here but it's really it's so upsetting

how many people are sad about twitter on twitter and they go to twitter to talk about how sad they are about twitter and i get it i totally get it you know what i mean you you know you you take your food cart where people eat lunch not hope that they find you but like there is something about like the way we've resigned ourselves to this sense of lull about our whole society just to like survive don't you think kind of you can't care about everything

Alexi when i was uh we talked about that i was i was driving uh i had a five-hour drive and uh that's when oh you were the one who told me you're like he he brought a sink in to twitter and i was like oh oh boy oh boy and i hadn't i downloaded the twitter um the like actual the the first party twitter app on my phone and i from only like a couple weeks of using what um doing like a

completionist timeline like syracusa does in chronological order well wow chronological order uh and going back into this app and like just seeing oh twitter is just talking about twitter now that's just that's what this whole app is that that's it right like in the course of like 12 hours apparently this happened it was fucking weird and that's it did feel like almost a little to hyper normalization and i don't know i remember that observation i made a few years ago that still

Merlinfeels kind of real everything as there's that point probably maybe by 2018 where it felt like everything was ultimately about trump and twitter and twitter and trump right it either became something like i don't know if i'm using that word right a singularity the word like the gray goo in which we lived was using twitter to talk about how we were sad about trump and trump being mad on Twitter and like it all started to feel like, you know, we eventually get like, I don't know, you, it's, it's, it's hard to conduct a wholesome life when you feel like

those particular parameters, those abnormal parameters are, are bookending so much incredibly difficult to understand or even difficult to believe shit. And then on top of it all, what's, what's the most galling part of all of it? What are you going to do about it? you know if you don't like if you don't like the cost of that those boys pants don't buy them go somewhere else you know if you don't like that teapot well we delivered a million of them to the wrong place but if you go there you might be able to get a teapot but you'll probably be fired from

work and like it's just it's i don't know i don't know if it's learned helplessness i don't know what it is but like it sure is depressing but that does not take any way thing away from the fact alex is not gonna tell you this but i will i think people should watch this i think it's really good I think watching hyper normalization once a year is not a bad idea at all

Alexbut once a month you're sending pictures of ball striking Canadians and I'm not supposed to recommend a very good documentary I'm not wholesome I'm just saying

Merlinpretend he doesn't know what channel 5 is

Alexset ramp set

Merlinramp match

Thank you.

Show notes

Transcript

310. Nofapvember

Show notes

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