Ep. 25: "Supertrain"
Hello.
Hi, John.
How are you?
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Merlin, Merlin.
It's going pretty well.
I'm getting kind of a late start this year.
So it's March.
So you mean you're getting a March start on a January year?
Oh, is it March already?
Oh, no.
I have so much to do.
Ah.
I haven't even sent out my something cards.
You know, I was in a relationship.
St.
Patrick's Day cards.
I was in a relationship for a long time with a person who is as, you know, this Anna Karenina, right?
We never have the same problems.
You were in a relationship with Anna Karenina?
Yeah, it really went way off the rails.
Oh, wow.
That's hot.
Hold for laugh.
We were bad.
We would have a Christmas tree.
We'd buy the Christmas tree late.
Excuse me, holiday tree.
Holiday tree.
Non-denominational Christmas tree.
It never, never, well, it was certainly not Catholic.
You know, I mean, really.
Catholic tree?
I would never have a Catholic tree, not in my home.
I wouldn't let them teach my kids either.
There was a Catholic tree growing on my street.
How could you tell?
It's a Catholic tree.
Come on.
That was a softball.
There's a million ways you could have taken that.
I don't know.
The kids that touched it kept crying.
I don't know.
I got nothing.
Transubstantiation made bread.
I don't know.
Transubstantiation.
It's hard to say.
It's got two S's.
I think it's misspelled a lot, just like misspelling.
I misspell misspell all the time.
Because it has two S's.
Yeah, that's called recursion, which is also known as recursion.
Yeah, that's recursive.
Transubstantiation has more than two S's.
I can tell you're not Catholic.
And I have braces, so it becomes very hard.
Halfway through the word, it's one of those words sometimes I bail out of.
Transubstantiation.
Oh, yeah, you mean Jesus.
We call it Jesus breading.
I don't get all the way through.
We just call it Jesus breading now.
Jesus breading.
Yeah, it's like you get some panko breadcrumbs, you roll that bastard around.
Not bastard.
I mean, I can't prove it, but he didn't have a dad.
You know, Anakin Skywalker didn't have a father either.
That's not true.
Anakin Skywalker had a father.
He absolutely did not.
Shmi.
Shmi.
His mother's name is Shmi, which I think is a very unfortunate name.
How did Shmi get impregnated?
No one knows.
I think she might be covering up.
Wait a minute.
Is that true?
Is that part of the Star Wars cosmology?
Well, at least.
I didn't read any of them.
At least Joseph and Mary had the kind of sham marriage.
He was called a cuckold.
Cuckolding is a thing.
Yeah, I know it is.
That troubles me.
I wonder how you say... It troubles you because you have a hot wife.
How you say cuckold in German.
That's cuckolding.
I bet there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of everything in Germany, John.
The point is that like our Lord and Savior, and yes, yours, like the man behind the tree... Anakin Skywalker also a product of a virgin birth.
Did not have a traditional... Yes, precisely.
Precisely.
Now, I don't know if she's a virgin.
Maybe she turned it around.
Maybe she had that surgery.
Maybe she got it from a toilet seat.
Oh, my.
That happens.
You think they got toilets on Tatooine?
I bet you.
Of course they do.
They got slave toilets.
Unless George Lucas devised some... Unless they're a special race that poops wheatgrass juice shots or something.
Maybe they got droids that do that?
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
No, they look like human beings in the movies, but maybe that's just a representation.
Maybe they're really like Jodie Foster's father in Contact, where they just appear in a humanoid form because we can't understand their true...
Oh, no, no, no.
Stop right there.
Stop right there.
You're getting close to actual religion, and I'm going to have to stop you there.
Now, Catholic trees in, what, southern Seattle?
Where are you?
You're in the southern part of town?
I'm in southern Seattle, yeah.
The south side, they call it?
Catholic trees are – they grow mostly in Bavaria.
Yeah.
Not in Romania at all.
No, no, no, not in Romania.
The Balkans?
Anywhere in the Balkans, John?
Do they get trees in the Balkans?
Oh, you won't see a Catholic tree in that whole area.
Oh, because it's all Orthodox.
Orthodox, right?
It's Orthodox.
Well, there are Catholics there.
Yeah.
But I made a pact with myself not to talk about the Balkans anymore on this podcast.
I want to learn.
No, no.
Please don't bank pacts.
You know what?
No, no.
No, no.
No, no, no, no.
Are you telling me I'm doing it wrong?
I'm telling you, I'm telling you, don't, don't listen to people.
You keep every key on that keyboard, my friend, and you keep it plugged in.
You know what I'm saying?
Or not plugged in, in your case.
You got the Bluetooth.
That's right.
I do have the Bluetooth.
I do have the Bluetooth, which is why I just bought stock in a AA battery company.
Yeah.
Yeah, we, you know, at our Walgreens, which is the worst, you know, apparently everything I do involves Walgreens now.
Our Walgreens, you can go and you can drop off your old dead batteries, which is nice.
And then what happens?
I don't know.
As Michael Stipe says, when you throw something away, where is a way?
Did I just blow your mind?
Oh, my God.
Whoa.
Where is a way?
Brady's pits.
And I want to go there.
I know.
I want to go to a way.
Lately, my daughter's been bugging me to have a picnic at the dump.
At the dump?
Yeah.
They told her at school that there's parts of the dump that are going to try and turn into a picnic ground.
So if you don't like ants, ask yourself how much you're going to enjoy seagulls.
Oh, and did I mention stinky garbage?
One time?
Actually, right after the first freight train I ever hopped, I got off the train in Vancouver, Washington, because it stopped in Vancouver, and I didn't understand that...
I didn't understand that it was going to keep going.
This is a thing I learned over time hopping freight trains.
They stop sometimes, but it doesn't mean they're done.
Is this after you had a pilot's license?
I had a pilot's license already, but I was learning a new skill.
I was learning a new thing.
Bust on a Guthrie.
So it pulls into Vancouver, Washington, it stops.
It just sits there and I'm like, oh God, I guess this was just a really short train that just went to Vancouver.
So I get off and of course, immediately the train starts up and off it goes.
And I'm standing by the side of the track in the middle of the night.
And so I walk across... For those of you who are not in the Pacific Northwest, there's a giant river across the... Well, it's called the Columbia River.
There's a giant train bridge that goes across the Columbia.
I walk across this train bridge.
I'm walking.
I'm looking for a place to sleep.
It's so late and I'm so tired and I'm so stupid.
And I find this big, beautiful, open area...
And I'm like, oh, perfect.
And I'm carrying a tent at this point.
And I walk over and I walk over this kind of rough ground and I find a clearing and I set up my tent.
And in the morning, I wake up to the sound of bulldozers.
all around me oh no and i and and it's it's already hot it's like 7 30 in the morning it's already hot middle of the summer and i poke my head out of my tent all sweaty and i look around and i have pitched my tent in the middle of a garbage dump on a on a patch of land that had apparently like
they laid down many layers of garbage and then they would put dirt over the top of it.
So I'm on a very thin layer of dirt.
You're literally in a landfill.
In a landfill.
They're filling the land, putting the land on top and then more filling like a big dirty garbage sandwich.
And all around me are those giant bucket loaders driving around full of garbage and the guys in the bucket loader trucks have never laughed so hard in their life.
And they're doing their job.
They're taking their buckets of trash.
And every one of them makes a point to just drive as close as he can to my tent and just laugh and laugh, tears streaming down their face as I get out in my underwear and get dressed, fold up my sleeping bag in my tent.
Is that really as comical as it sounds, though?
Were you amongst garbage or had you just found a clear spot?
I was surrounded by garbage.
I was just...
There was a layer of dirt over the top of it, so in the middle of the night, I thought it was just this really freshly plowed... You don't have a Coleman lantern you were busting.
You set this tent up many times.
I need this much flat land.
I need this much stuff that doesn't have a washer-dryer on it, and I can pitch my tent.
Yeah, and I was 17, so I was dumber than rocks, and I...
I mean, this is the type of thing that if you were even the ripe old age of 18, you probably would have stood there for a second and thought, wait a minute.
What is this place?
You would have caught a whiff of it or something would have kicked you off.
Yeah, that's the part.
As somebody who used to read books, this is the part of my mind where it's unresolved, is that I feel like for myself...
When I'm anywhere even slightly near a dump, there's a very specific smell to a dump.
I would call it the dump smell.
It is a dump smell, but there were a couple of things working here on me.
The dirt.
All right, the dirt for sure.
There's the dirt, and also it was right next to a river, and so there was a strong breeze.
It was open country.
I don't know.
It was very late at night.
Oh, so there was a river smell too?
Yeah.
There was a river smell, but also the combination, I think, of the fresh dirt and the breeze disguised the dump smell long enough for me to pitch my tent and fall asleep.
But boy, in the morning, in the hot sun, it sure smelled like a dump.
And in retrospect, you look at this as a rookie mistake.
Because again, I try to be sensitive to these things.
If we need to cut this out, we can.
I try to be sensitive to the things that you've learned in your training in autodidacticism.
My question to you is, in retrospect, does it scare the living shit out of you to know that you made such a potentially poor decision about location?
I bet it was not a defensible position, I'm guessing, for one thing.
You may have been on lower ground than you would have liked.
Well, and here's, I mean, it occurred to me later, like, there was absolutely nothing keeping one of those guys in his dumper load.
He's a little bit hungover.
He rubs his eyes for half a second.
And pretty soon, you have the contents of three days ago from KFC is now covering a 17-year-old John Roderick.
That or they just think like, oh, it's a piece of tent trash that didn't get mushed down.
Is that what they call hobos there?
Tent trash?
Tent trash.
And the first thing they do when they get up in the morning is see which guy can roll over the ratty tent first.
Yeah.
It's like a little game of coits.
They just try to get in there.
Hey, look up there.
What's that?
Oh, something we missed, a spot we missed last week.
Let's get it, you know?
I mean, seriously, if I made a list of the top 50 rookie mistakes I'd made where I should have ended up covered in KFC buckets,
I think at a point when you've been out of the business long enough and the variety of businesses that you're in, it would be very interesting for you to put out a probably unsuccessful e-book about the places where you learn because you went a little wrong.
Again, the things that you can talk about.
But you know what I'm saying?
I'm just saying, in this case, now you, I'm just guessing 17-year-old John, setting aside that you were probably not a big e-book reader.
That probably wouldn't have helped you.
That was a lesson you had to learn.
It's true.
And yet, I'm just going to guess.
We can always guess.
It's like when you get broken up with by some awful girl and you realize you're probably not the first person to do that.
Or in this case, probably literally hundreds of women that you've broken up with.
In this case, I'm just guessing hobo in a tent is something they were dealing with a lot between the river and the railroad.
Between the river and the railroad, absolutely.
But probably most hobos at that point were seasoned enough to not pitch their tent anymore.
In a garbage dump.
They call them salty travelers.
I'm going to guess that I'm in the decided minority of people.
I mean, surely people pitch tents in garbage dumps that have been capped and turned into parks and picnic grounds.
That happens all the time.
Capping.
I got mixed feelings about capping.
Oh, yeah, I do, too.
That's kind of like putting saran wrap over something and thinking that you won't go bad.
Well, here's my feeling.
That all the landfills that have been capped and turned into public parks in America are actually trash mines for the future when the future is mining trash.
So they're just going to uncap that stuff and mine all those plastic.
It's going to be the cheapest way to get petroleum products.
Oh, my God.
You just wrote the beginning of what will be an awesome, if it's not already something you're just stealing, speculative fiction series on what happens.
We're talking way beyond peak oil.
We're talking post-post-counselor.
Pardon my French.
You're talking about literally the only oil we have is by melting a Mr. Potato Head.
Yeah, right.
Mining all—I mean, because by that point, all the biodegradable stuff will have at least turned into, like, pink slime.
Mm-hmm.
And then all that's left in there is plastic crapola that has already—that's just ripe to be recycled, reused, reduced, and recycled.
And then re-re-recycled.
And then re-re-re-reused.
It's going to have to be a fourth triangle.
Mm-hmm.
That's a really good point.
Here's the thing.
They always say – I think we've discussed this on a previous visit, but they always say one thing that all these gloom and doomers get wrong about lots of things, whether that's population growth or running out of food or whatever.
For example, they've said ever since I can remember that the problem in the world of starvation is not really that the food isn't there.
It's a distribution problem.
then it's an economic problem of caring enough to get that on a boat and take it somewhere.
But in this instance, they say, you know, we're not thinking enough ahead about how the technology changes.
I'm still not persuaded that technology is changing fast enough, but if I could say, this is your speculative fiction series, not mine, for the sake of argument, let's say we realize how majorly fucked we are on the fuel situation, and we do find some way, this cold fusion-style way, to get way more energy out of way less.
You're saying...
if I understand correctly, that you could potentially run a future dump of tent slammers on maybe just a few Mr. Potato Heads that have been melted down in the appropriate way, setting aside the pink slime, which we could use for something.
You're saying maybe we become so efficient, we uncap, we go in and we fill our tanks with Mr. Potato Heads of our past.
Look at the third episode of Back to the Future.
Really?
Is that really something I need to write on a card?
I mean, we know already that that car requires 1.21 gigawatts.
Okay.
And in the third episode, or in the end of the second episode, or I don't know which, maybe it was the first episode.
I think they filmed them concurrently.
Oh, well, yeah.
At one point, he comes back from the future to the present in the 80s, and he goes and gets some trash out of the kitchen and throws it into the trash compactor inside the Deloitte.
Oh, right.
I think he does that in the first episode.
Yeah.
Okay, that's the first episode.
Well, in any case, we know it takes 1.21 gigawatts, so he's getting that amount of energy out of some coffee grounds and some plastic... Probably, I'm going to guess, a two-liter Pepsi bottle.
Two-liter Pepsi bottle.
So we know that energy is in there.
Pepsi-free.
And these trash dumps are right in the centers of our cities, so there isn't going to be a transportation problem.
It's cheap energy.
Oh, John, I'm sorry.
I've been getting you way wrong.
You're a fucking futurist.
Have you really thought about this or are you just stealing this from somebody else?
No, I'm not stealing it from someone else.
I'm offended.
My real plan, my real project is to go out there to those giant floating seas of plastic detritus that are out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Oh, those big, those big, like, those reefs of trash.
Yeah, the big... Those are scary.
Sargasso sea-sized dead zone of garbage, floating garbage, and just go out there with some kind of long net fishing trawler and just gather it all up and process it on my converted Exxon Valdez future ship.
LAUGHTER
You were so ready to be like a Jonathan Colton character.
You're going to be the garbage czar.
I'm garbage czar.
You know what?
My daughter and I have started reading.
Last night we read a Batman comic from 1941, which was awesome.
But you're like a James Bond maybe.
You're some kind of a supervillain.
Or maybe Smirsh, right?
Smirsh?
That's the bad guys, right?
Smirsh.
That's where all the girls wear combat boots.
And so here's what happens.
What's going to happen is the people at MI35 or whatever are going to be sitting around going, we've noticed some very unusual activity, right?
People are using Swiss accounts.
They probably have lots of pistols in them to buy out capped garbage dumps across the U.S.
Right.
Who is cornering the market?
There seems to be a lot of interest in buying capped dumps near... And old decommissioned oil tankers.
And old decommissioned oil tankers.
Yes, but there's a pattern here and they go and they make the giant... You know, like every supervillain, you got to have like your giant miniature version of whatever you're building, like in Die Hard or... Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Is it Goldfinger?
It's one of those.
No, For Much With Love, I guess.
The model.
Exactly.
You need to get a pointer.
You got to have a pointer.
And then it's nice to have a midget if you can find one.
Right.
Oh my God.
They're everywhere.
Yeah.
I think the midgets are going to come to you.
The thing is, when you're a supervillain, they come to you.
I think that's where you send your resume.
Little people, too.
Little people become droids.
I think the midgets, that's the bad ones.
They're the ones to look out for.
They're the ones that carry vials of poison and blowguns.
Little people, there's always going to be jobs for droids.
You know what I'm saying?
Or munchkins.
Did you know that Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis used to have a cabaret show together?
The guy who played R2-D2 and the guy who played... I didn't know they had a cabaret show, but then I don't follow the trades.
But the pattern they notice... I'm sorry, I'm almost done with this.
I swear to God.
Here's the thing, though.
I learned this from you, fucking John Roderick.
You've just brought it all together in a way that will...
Well, it's blowing my mind.
You got the water.
You got the dumps.
You got the trash.
You got the railroads.
Again, we're back to this same thing.
That's right.
How do you learn about a fucking city?
It's transportation.
It's energy.
Warren Buffett knows it.
He bought all the railroads.
That's right.
You know what he says?
He says you should buy things when they're inexpensive and then sell them once they become expensive.
See?
That's all you have to do.
Why didn't anybody ever say that before?
That is the one thing that those Wall Street fat cats don't want you to know.
And all I'm saying is if James Bond or somebody else who has a miniature model and a pointer and some midgets starts pointing, they're going to notice that a lot of the places... Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
All our garbage dumps and all decommissioned oil tankers have all been bought up.
Oh, where are all the midgets?
We're also having a lot of trouble finding used pump chili containers.
But no, I'm saying you buy these, it becomes like a fucking gas station.
If you find these near a waterway and a railroad, you have a built-in.
What do you mean if you find them near a waterway or a railroad?
They are precisely situated near waterways and railroads.
Eventually this business will grow and you know what you're going to need?
Office space?
Can I just say mobile home parks?
The poor people live in mobile homes in the shittiest part of town, low-lying, right?
It's probably near the railroads and the dumps.
So you're saying that there is a potential script for a Bond film in this.
But instead of the Bond villain being a super billionaire, the Bond villain is a genius white trash dump living.
If by white trash you mean rich procrastinating sometimes musician, I would have to say yes.
A rich, procrastinating, sometimes musician who knows how to speak white trash enough to communicate with all the denizens of these outsider communities.
Okay, listen, I'm totally fine with your head getting bigger and you getting more self-involved.
Do you honestly believe that you can talk white trash that well?
No, I know I can't.
I know I can't.
I can see you getting super, super frustrated at a little general about two in the morning.
It's one of the things.
I had a really interesting conversation with a guy many, many years ago where I had been prowling through America's underbelly, America's undercarriage for a few years.
America's lady basement.
And I was talking to this guy.
It was upstate New York.
I was at Cornell.
And he was a smart kid at Cornell.
But he was from the Bronx.
He was one of those smart kids from the Bronx where he had street smarts.
And I was telling him about all these places in West Virginia and Alabama, Tuscaloosa that I had been.
And how I was trying to communicate with these people in their native dialect.
And this kid, we're both kids still, you know, when I was 19 years old.
And he looks at me and he goes, what are you talking about, native dialect?
I just talk to people like I talk and then they understand me and they respect that I'm speaking in my own language.
And I was like, well, what are you talking about?
You don't want to talk to people around America in your weird accent.
You want to try and get inside their minds and get inside their culture and seem like you're from there.
And he was like, what?
You're never going to fool anybody that you're from there.
You just talk like you talk, and then they know who you are.
And he blew my mind.
And at the time, that was...
That was a heavy, heavy lesson I learned from this kid.
And I stopped making the rookie mistake, which I had been making.
The rookie mistake of going into places and trying to figure out how they do it.
Were you trying to pass?
No, not trying to pass.
Obviously, the first thing I said was, I'm not from here.
But I didn't understand that.
But half the time I would go, hey, y'all, I'm not firm around here.
Or you talk jivey.
Yo, dog, I'm not firm.
I would try and adopt their local mannerisms because I thought that that was how you...
how you greased the wheels.
And this guy from the Bronx was saying, no, I have a comically Bronx accent.
And I go everywhere and people are fine.
And he was a wise man for his 19 years.
And I was actually embarrassed when it was revealed to me that I was being kind of a turkey by going around and mimicking people's accents back to them and thinking that I was...
that I was really getting inside.
I've done that.
I have done that.
I know I continue to do that.
And what's weird about it is in my head when I'm doing that, and now I really notice it when other people do it.
There's this guy I see around the neighborhood, and whenever he talks to anybody, he acts like they are an ESL, like English as a second language person who is profoundly retarded.
Everything he says to them, he explains like this.
I think that he does things like buy and sell cars.
But what I want to do is explain to you that I will park it here and then you can get it later.
It doesn't matter.
He talks that way to me.
He talks that way to anybody.
That's how the guy talks.
But what's funny is like – Maybe he's from the Bronx.
It could be.
It could be.
Maybe there are very candid people there.
Here's the thing though.
I think that is ironically enough in my experience a weird kind of provincialism because –
Because my provincialism, I'm so provincial that I think I'm fancy.
I don't know enough to know what I don't know, right?
So that's what a fucking dumbass I am.
And so I go out and act like the entire world needs to have my brilliance dumbed down a little bit.
Oh, sure.
And you know what?
I'm not saying this is you, but for me, and you know what?
I'll even throw in a little bit extra by trying to catch up with your little code-switching patois.
My dark friend.
Yeah.
Coming from Alaska, I really did come to America as though America was a foreign country.
And not just a foreign country, but multiple foreign countries within one big continent, right?
How long were you there?
You were born in Washington, right?
Yeah, and then I grew up between Seattle and Alaska and moved...
Your mom did oil-based computing?
Oil-based computing, and my dad was a lawyer, a government lawyer, for a long time.
In the corridors of power?
He was the chief counsel of the Alaska Railroad, which at the time was a federally owned railroad.
It doesn't connect to any other railroads.
It's just the railroad that goes across Alaska.
And so he was...
He was a big wheel there.
He had a pass in his wallet that allowed him to get on any train.
It's like a Euro Pass except in America, and you can just ride?
Oh, my God.
It was so amazing.
Oh, my God.
What was it like?
I still have it, but it doesn't work.
Was it like trains with seats?
It was like a cargo plane kind of thing?
Trains with seats.
Yes, yes, yes.
You got to ride on consumer trains?
Not only that, sometimes when he had a reason, he would call up and the Alaska Road had a presidential car.
Oh my God.
Which was a three bedroom apartment with a living room and a kitchen and a butler's pantry and a balcony on the back.
And he would have them attach this train, this presidential car, which had been Truman's
whistle stop car.
Are you kidding me?
He would have him attach it to the back of any Alaska railroad trainer.
We would go choo-choo training around Alaska.
The Ferdinand Magellan rail car.
Oh, you're looking it up?
I'm looking.
There's several here.
What I'm telling you, John, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I've just got such a train boner you can't even imagine.
I can't imagine.
John Roderick, do you understand what people pay to do practically fucking anything near Alaska today?
You mentioned Alaska and Wales, and people are writing checks.
I should do that more.
To ride around in a really nice three-bedroom train car in Alaska, oh, my God.
Did you ever get to do it?
All the time.
Are you kidding me?
My sister and I have pictures of ourselves just partying in this train car, leaning off the balcony, you know.
Sleeping in the train.
We'd sleep on the way to Fairbanks, and then we'd get to Fairbanks, and we'd stay in the train car while they turned it around and got ready to go make the trip back.
We did all kinds of stuff.
Did they have TV in it?
I don't remember, but this was...
This was not—watching TV was not a thing you would have been doing.
I would have.
But, I mean, did you have books?
You would have books or games.
You probably had board games and stuff.
Well, I mean, you're on a train going through Alaska.
You're, like, hanging off the back the whole time.
We would spend hours hanging off the back.
I can already tell in your biopic you're probably massively overfunded and behind the heaven's gate of a biopic that you will have someday.
I can see that.
Now, if that were me, I'd be sitting there going, like, why can't I watch Shazam?
Yeah.
I could see you curling up with a book on special forces, special ops, just getting up in the Skycar and just sitting there.
I'm just looking at the photo of this right now.
The best way to see Alaska is on the railroad, the Alaska Railroad Corporation.
And I already – I've got a total train boner.
I would love to be in the Skycar reading an encyclopedia right now.
This is gorgeous.
Yeah, and the thing is that this is something I learned when I was a kid traveling with my dad because my dad always stayed in... My dad was a high roller, so he would always stay in high-rise hotels, classic hotels, hotels that had full-size swimming pools in them and not in the basement either.
Hotels that had full-size swimming pools on the eighth floor.
You know what I mean?
Like pretty nice places and private train cars and this type of thing.
And what I learned is that when you stay in a giant hotel...
or when you stay in a deluxe train car, you can entertain yourself almost indefinitely by finding things to throw off the balcony.
So if you are in a train car and you're going across Alaska, you're scouring the train.
And the thing is that the train is connected to the regular train full of regular people.
And actually, there was a man, an Alaska Railroad employee, who was posted at the door of our car to keep the regulars.
Are you kidding me?
Not at all.
You had a riffraff monitor?
We had a guy in a coat and tie who sat on a stool and was like, oh, sorry, this is the end of the public train.
So we would go through the train and we would just collect all the things that might be interesting to throw off the back of the train as the train is speeding through the countryside.
And I'm not talking about litter.
Litter wouldn't be interesting.
But things that might break or things that might fly...
These were also all the things that I would scavenge hotels for.
Because my dad, being the guy that he was, he would often say, you stay in the room.
I'll be back in a couple hours.
And then I'd be in the hotel room.
And I always took that to mean you stay in the hotel or you stay around the hotel.
As I got older, it was like, you stay in the vicinity of the hotel.
Yeah.
So I would collect stuff.
I would get a bucket of ice because you're going to want to throw some ice off the 18th floor.
Evidence melts.
That's right.
And I would get lots of paper and I would try and find matches because you want to make paper airplanes and light them on fire and throw them off the...
Off the 18th floor, out of your 18th floor hotel room.
And I would sit and just huck stuff out of the hotel.
And I cannot tell you the number of people who looked up from the sidewalk in the busy urban environment and shook their fists at the sky because I had slimed them.
Yeah.
From high up in the air.
Yeah.
I'm just glad to know that you wouldn't abuse power if you had it.
Not at all.
Not at all.
You know, in addition to having my pilot's license when I was 17, my dad took me down to the rail yard one time and had a man teach me how to drive a locomotive.
He knew that this is something I would be interested in.
Was this something they planned ahead?
Did they put this on a calendar?
Did your dad show up and just disrupt the thing to teach you?
No, I can't really tell.
He knew this engineer.
It's all a little foggy now.
You know, they all knew him because he was at the head office.
Well, let's state the obvious here, which is that your father was important, powerful, whatever, enough that he was a man that you...
If you had the choice, you'd rather not disappoint him in any role, right?
And let's just be honest, even if you're the hotel serving him, he's a big gun in the travel industry.
And so you wouldn't want him to fill out that card and say, I'm Dave Roderick.
And some bellhop chastised my son for throwing a bucket of ice out of the window of a 24th floor.
Flaming planes out.
But also now it sounds... I'd like his job, please.
Yeah.
Like, I want to see this kid.
Bring him to me.
Now, that would be funny if every time he got mad, he insisted to that person's boss that you got to have that person's job for a day.
But driving a locomotive... Oh, sorry about that.
Locomotive, yeah.
Oh, my God.
So fun.
Because, really, there's not much to it.
You have a little handle that's their throttle, and you have a brake, and you have a horn.
But, boy, when you put that thing in gear and it starts to move...
Oh, also, they let me ride on the front of the locomotive.
By the cow catcher?
Yeah, up there.
There's a little railing, and you can walk around the nose.
I think that's for maintenance, John.
It is for maintenance, but they let me go out there because I begged.
I was like, come on, please, please, please let me ride on the front of the thing.
You get to do a Titanic thing?
That would be so fun.
In front of a locomotive, yeah.
It was very fun, but I'm sure everybody was shitting bullets because...
I was climbing on the front of this train.
All the guys inside were like, oh, it's the boss's kid.
And the great part is your dad would probably have to adjudicate the case.
Do the case when I went to trial and the people from the insurance company were there?
At the time, because... I just want to understand.
According to the lawyer, the lead counsel for your company asked that the child be pushed to the front of the prowl.
At the time, there was no such thing as child abuse.
So they wouldn't have put my dad on trial for letting... They didn't have a name for it.
It was like autism.
Yeah, they didn't have an info.
It was like, oh, I don't understand why all these kids are so sad.
Anyway, let's sue the schools.
Yeah.
Okay, well, so far I've got three lessons.
I've got lesson one, and again, we can cut this out if this is too much, but lesson number one for your e-book is don't pitch your tent at a dump.
Right, good.
Number two, don't have a fakie patois to act like you are understanding someone better.
Exactly.
And if you're going to lean out a window, have stuff to throw.
That's right.
You've nailed it.
You've nailed all the topics.
I may end up being your Boswell.
So I'll just capture all of this here.
I'll keep it here and nearby.
If we can, I don't want to get too far away from something much deeper here, though, which is – well, it's your show.
But I don't want to get too far away from the idea –
That I hope is not stealable.
I think you may be so far in front of this idea.
We don't need to worry about it being stolen.
But I think it's going to be obviously.
Well, here's the thing.
You've got contacts inside the industry.
You've ridden the front of a fucking locomotive that you are driving.
That's right.
How many people have ever even fan?
That's a terrible idea.
That's an awful idea.
You've done that.
And people are way too timid to throw things out of high-rise windows now.
You've thrown flaming paper from a Harry Truman car.
Like how many people can say they've done this?
So here's all I'm thinking is when you do have this – I don't know what you want to call it.
When you have this dystopic future empire that involves tearing open garbage dumps in order to melt Mr. Potato Heads or what have you, I think you conduct that by train.
I think you go from one mobile home park to the other.
Super train.
Via John's Super Train.
Super Train.
And here's the thing.
Can I just point out?
It is scalable and extensible.
You can literally hook new cars on.
You're going to be so rich and so fucking weird at this point that you could have just a new throwing car.
Super Train could be whatever you want it to be that fucking week.
Supertrain with a giant claw, like a giant claw crane, and you can drive Supertrain right up to old trash dumps, and giant claw crane reaches out, grabs the whole trash dump in its giant claw, and puts it on flat cars.
And you take it to your super tanker.
Would that be on your own train?
Here's the thing though.
You'd have trains all across America.
If it's too much, you break it off.
You call somebody else and you have junior train come in and take care of the rest of it.
You're saying you literally tear the top off of that where the children might be camping or having a picnic.
People are out there playing frisbee and here comes super train.
Tear it off like a cheap toupee and then Mr. Claw goes in and grabs that and starts filling all the potato containers for future fueling.
I think it's a fantastic idea.
The thing is that in the future, right, like already we know we notice that plastic cutlery is being made out of compressed potato starch, right?
We don't need compostable.
Yes.
Yeah.
We don't need oil and petroleum products to make plastic forks anymore because they're making them out of potato starch.
And we don't need petroleum to power automobiles anymore because we have these electric automobiles and we'll have hydrogen cars or whatever.
So we're going to need a lot less petroleum in the future.
But there are some things that petroleum, that you really need petroleum for.
Like lawnmowers.
Yeah, and petroleum jelly.
Oh, okay.
You need petroleum for anything that has petroleum in the name.
Okay, you're saying there could not be, for the sake of argument, a solar-powered jelly that would have the same performance features as a petroleum jelly.
You couldn't have like a hydrogen jelly.
What about other kinds of lubricants, like for motorcycles or butt plugs?
Because you shouldn't use a petroleum one for that.
You can use whale oil for some of that stuff.
How do you get that?
Do you have to kill the whale?
You could milk the oil.
You know, they're mammals.
Did you know that?
Yeah, you can milk them.
Milk the oil out of them.
Okay.
And then throw them back.
Okay.
And that could be a subset of my super tanker.
It has a whale milker on them.
Well, here's another obvious.
Again, I'm sure you've already thought of this in part of your probably very large book of plans.
But it would be pretty cool also if you basically never had to get out.
Let's say there's one Truman car that it's always yours.
It's always there.
It's like your bedroom.
And it goes into the super tanker.
Into the fucking super tanker.
The super train goes on the super tanker.
It can move you around.
It becomes sort of like a what?
Like a large-scale rascal.
Yeah, right.
It's like a super rascal.
You know what?
You're going to be so fucking rich, you could potentially have a super rascal on the super train.
So you could just move around very easily.
And the thing is you're going to have a lot of those cool little levers and knobs.
Maybe even the kind of thing like – maybe you could get one of those – what's his name?
The universe guy where you could blow to make your chair move around.
Or to, for example, say, tear the toupee off of this picnic ground and put the contents inside of my potato car.
Right.
Because I'm not... You know, when I tear the top off of that, off the picnic ground, I'm not just harvesting old plastic bags and I'm not just turning that into petroleum.
No.
There's also all those batteries that Michael Stipe threw away fucking 50 years before.
Right.
That are full of... Who knows what's in those batteries?
Probably they have a solid gold core.
I've never...
There's probably a lot of stuff.
And also I know, I know this from San Francisco, what people live on the street.
People will get rid of stuff that is still kind of mostly good.
A little bit of elbow grease and that will be fine again.
So you could also have a Goodwill car.
You could have a Goodwill car or you could have a Goodwill super tanker.
Here's the problem though.
A lot of that stuff has been sitting in a landfill for 50 years.
Probably like the kind of okay couch.
I think the consumer is going to get way less picky when they can't run their lawnmower anymore.
They can't use their butt plugs and they're wondering how they're going to get a new Mr. Potato Head.
I think they're not going to be asking questions.
They're just going to say how much.
You'll also have generations of hipsters by that point who will be so starved for vintage material that it'll be like, this is vintage.
I know it's been sitting in a landfill for 50 years and it smells like a dump.
And it's like...
permeated with batteries yes and whale oil but this is this vintage couch how much will you pay you think you think if you think if you think your appreciation of steelers wheel is ironic now just wait until i give you a literally non-functional a-track that has literal battery acid and human shit on it if someone has an if someone is listening to this podcast and can only appreciate steelers wheel ironically yeah i will personally come and be your ass we go right there on your train
Because, my God, Steelers Wheel is amazing.
And that was what Jerry Rafferty was in.
That's right.
Mm-hmm.
It's a scene in that movie.
Big scene in that movie.
Remember that?
Oh, Harold and Maude?
No, I was thinking of that.
Star Wars.
Okay.
come back to that i'm sorry please go ahead all i'm saying is talking about you're talking about the uh the mr pink movie yeah exactly then tip okay so sorry please continue all i'm saying is i i i fear you i have a few questions i'd like to ask later from some follow-up of the way you say please continue and talk
Okay.
All right, let's continue.
But the main thing I want to ask, I would like to get just a rough idea just generally so I know whether I need to start getting weapons.
Please don't answer now.
Whenever you're done, after you continue, do you think this will be largely benevolent?
Will you force people to perceive it as benevolent?
Or will this really truly be like a dark dystopian vision where you really run the entire universe based on your own capris?
I think I know the answer.
You know, power tends to corrupt.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
That's what Lincoln said.
That's George Lincoln.
No, no, no.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Lincoln Rockwell.
The second president of the United States, George Lincoln.
Okay.
But I think what will happen is initially it will be presented as an ecological, you know, I will be a benevolent eco-warrior.
It seems like a friendly, helpful option.
Yeah.
And the super trains will all be painted kind of iPhone white.
And it will be and the super crane will also be iPhone white and it will look like a very nice, you know, like people will flock to fund this operation.
I'll have lots of IPOs.
I'll have seven or eight IPOs.
Um, and each one will raise billions of dollars and, uh, the president will shake my hand and it will, and I will, I'll, you know, and I'm thinking I'll dress like Tom Wolf.
I'll have like three piece cream colored suits.
You could trim your beard and get a walking stick, a green walking stick, a walking stick made out of park benches that used to be milk cartons.
Right.
And people will think.
They'll think John Roderick, eco-warrior, super-trained founder, like hyper-recycler.
How about this?
How about this?
John Roderick, white-suited eco-peacemaker.
He's got children.
He's giving jobs to children.
And not in a mean way.
He's handing out—he's going across the country in a green train that is literally creating energy as it travels across the country.
You know what?
Maybe it's got Wi-Fi transmitters, too.
You're helping people, poor people, to get on the internet.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
You give out CFL Wi-Fi train.
You give out CFL light bulbs and vegan meals, but nice vegan meals.
I let kids ride on the front.
I let kids ride on the back.
Yeah, but not in an unsafe way.
There's a whole section where you can light paper airplanes on fire and throw them in a way that will not start a larger fire.
Oh, you're saying it's like a renewable airplane source.
Well, let's say it's not non-renewable.
Right.
It's not non-renewable.
No, but I think people would fall for that in a second.
Are you kidding me?
People go to fucking Whole Foods.
They would love what's called Super Train?
Super Train?
Super Train.
But then as time goes on, of course, as I become richer and control more and more garbage dumps and more and more public parks are disappearing.
No one can play Frisbee anymore.
There's no place to picnic anymore because Super Train has been there.
But at this point, who cares?
Because BMW and Bear are doing great.
They're very happy because under the SuperTrain system, everybody's making money.
Everybody's happy.
The poor people have CFL light bulbs and vegan meals.
But things are subtly changing.
That's right.
Subtly changing.
Pretty soon people are addicted to vegan meals.
And where do they get them?
SuperTrain.
SuperTrain.
Can't get them anywhere else.
SuperTrain cornered the market.
Pretty soon you can't afford to buy a mobile home anymore because there's so many super office parks.
Well, and a lot of those mobile homes have been recycled by Supertrain.
But they're all green technology, so at first it all made sense.
I like this a lot.
You got people burning sage and hitting fucking drums.
I become evil super genius.
It writes itself.
There's no question about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, here's the thing, John.
I hope nobody steals this idea.
Well, see, here's the thing.
I don't think anybody can steal this idea, right?
So, you know, success, you got execution is ideas are a multiplier of execution, something like that.
I'll look it up later.
The point is, I come up with ideas as a dime a dozen.
It's how you implement it.
And so here's the thing.
You've got to say to yourself, who do you want having this job?
If you had your choice of different dictators, I say you want a truly competent dictator who knows where you shouldn't pitch a tent, if you know what I mean.
I think you want John Roderick.
Because here's the thing.
Oh, these other guys are going to come along, and they're going to have their own pale version of Super Train.
It's going to run flash.
The battery's not going to last for very long.
But they're going to be all copycatting.
on the super train program.
Right.
Right.
And still those garbage dumps are going to sit there with their little hats on.
Nobody's going to make any money.
Mr. Potato is just sitting there doing nothing.
Yeah.
I think, I think you, I don't know.
I just think you can change.
I already figure just by having spoken about it.
I mean, normally super genius wouldn't talk about his plan like this until he had the hero tied up.
Oh, they're floating over the shark tank full of acid.
Yeah, exactly.
Tied up floating over a shark tank full of acid on the super tanker and the super train branded super tanker.
That is when I would be explaining this whole thing to him as I was about to drop him into the shark tank full of acid.
But the reason I'm doing it now, the reason I'm talking about it now is that I'm very confident that it will produce some fan art.
Which I'm going to use to galvanize people.
Oh, what do they call it?
Instead of grassroots, they call it astroturfing?
Is that what you call it?
I'm astroturfing.
You're astroturfing.
Yeah.
Huh.
You know what I'm thinking about?
There's a scene.
I want to say there was, and I can't remember, it might have been in Billy Jack.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was Billy Jack.
Where the guy says, the guy's facing off.
with this actually kind of elderly man who actually, if memory serves, may have been dressed as Colonel Sanders.
But what I recall is Billy Jack, or it might be a different movie.
I'm old.
He says something along the lines of, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to kick you on this side of your face with this foot.
And you know what?
There is not a damn thing you can do about it.
You know what he does?
He fucking kicks him in the face.
With that foot.
Yeah, and you know what?
Can I just tell you?
There was not a damn thing that guy could do about it.
Nothing that guy could do.
What I want is a BLT.
I want you to hold the lettuce.
I want you to hold the tomato between your knees.
You know, once you get into as the president for life of Supertrain Industries, I think you're going to very easily be able to have these kinds of conversations with people who actually literally can't do anything about it.
Yeah, well, I hope so.
You know, my present project, here's my present plan.
Oh, I can't wait to hear about this.
I got a good plan.
My present plan is that all through Silicon Valley and in Seattle, too, there are all these startups that
These tech startups where people who are working in the tech industry are all sort of in this mutual masturbation society where they all think they know what the world is made of and what the world needs.
And they're making apps and they're launching apps and they're launching sites and they're making techs and they're teching makes and whatever it is that people are doing.
And they're all on each other's boards of directors and they're all making IPOs.
Thought leaders.
They're thought leaders.
Well, they think they are.
But here's the problem.
Here's the problem.
There's not a single person on any of those boards of directors with real world experience.
And I bring that kind of real world experience to the table.
So my current plan is to start marketing myself as a potential director
member of the board of directors of some of these internet startup companies because they really need somebody that can speak truth to power they need somebody who has thrown stuff out of a high rise they need somebody who once had a pilot's license they need somebody with this kind of real world experience to help guide them through the rocky because you see a lot of these a lot of these companies you know they they're like a flash in the pan right they arc across the sky and then then kaputsville
If they had me on their board of directors telling them like it was, telling them, hey, you guys don't need to speak in a fake Southern accent to sell your app in the South.
You just speak in your regular Brooklynese.
Regular stupid Stanford accent.
Just talk in your Stanford accent and people are going to buy it or not buy it based on whether or not it's a useful app that works on the iPhones.
This is the amazing part, though, John, is these guys, the ones who they're taking mechs and making techs and taking, what's your phrase, tech and makes?
Tech and makes, yeah.
That's like techs mechs.
They're out there doing all this stuff, and like the ones, oh, I'm a serial entrepreneur.
I've had all these different startups.
The ones who consider themselves really smart and really, as we say in the business, forward-looking, if they are really looking as forward as they claim to be with their forward-looking, they are going to want to be on the good side of the guy who owns the super chain.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
It's not precisely extortion.
It's pre-stortion.
It's pre-stortion.
It's just a way of saying, you know, hey, you know, you're going to have a real pretty daughter someday.
It would be a shame if at some point something were to happen to her involving an extremely costly train.
I do that around Seattle all the time.
There are a lot of people.
I interact with people at the mayor's office.
I interact with a lot of people that are part of the machine here.
The quarter is a power.
The quarter is a power.
And I don't even have to say it.
It's just understood.
among these people, like, I don't know what Roderick does.
I don't even know why he's here at this meeting.
Isn't he a singer-songwriter?
Why is he here?
Why is he so involved in civics?
But at the same time, the mayor is listening to him, so...
There will come a time, maybe, when I don't want to be on the wrong side of him.
I don't know why, but I'm going to be nice to him and give him what he wants.
This might have been how your dad started.
It's how everybody in power starts.
You just end up, you show up places, and people go, why is he here?
And then...
They go, well, I'd better not cross him.
And if enough people do that, then pretty soon you walk in a room and everybody applauds.
Well, they better applaud if they have any sense.
Here's the thing.
There's a guy in my neighborhood.
We've got a handful of really colorful guys in my neighborhood, by which I mean crazy homeless guys.
And one of these guys who I tend to avoid because he cycles.
You know, as you do.
You mean he's a bicyclist?
Yeah, he's got a fixie.
Well, I think he's bipolar or something.
Or maybe it's me.
No, he's probably schizophrenic.
He's not bipolar.
So you're saying he cycles through many phases?
Well, he has days where he doesn't stand in the street throwing fried rice at pigeons.
And days when he does.
And that as a kind of cycle.
Like both of these is wheel.
Yeah.
It turns around and around.
And here's the thing.
I avoid this guy because I don't want to get fucking fried rice thrown at me.
I mean, I'm a pretty snappy dresser.
Even though you're clearly not a pigeon.
Okay.
And as much as I don't like to admit it, I do go to the KFC slash Taco Bell, which, as you know, is near my home.
I go in there.
And probably three out of five times I go in there, that guy is in there.
This guy, I'm pretty sure, does not have a lot of dough.
But every time I go in there, I should explain a little more.
He wears basically like filthy sweatpants, and he ties lots of plastic newspaper bags around parts of his body.
And then he has kind of an ad hoc.
He's a real San Franciscan, it sounds like.
Yeah, he wears this kind of like, if you took like a, if you made like an acid helmet out of, you know, like a bandana kind of thing, out of like a rag you'd use to clean off tools at a car.
He wears that on his head.
He has a very large salt and pepper beard.
He looks a little bit like a young Oliver Sacks.
He needs the shit out of some fucking chicken.
If I was this guy, I would be very,
Careful about how close I got to Super Train.
Super Train might just pluck him.
The big claw?
He sounds very recyclable.
He sounds eminently recyclable.
What he needs to worry about is being reusable.
Because Super Train's going to have a lot of technology that Captain Bird hate is not going to be ready for.
So it is kind of funny.
You know me.
You know my brain.
I see things.
I tell stories.
So he eats a Kentucky Fried Chicken, but he hates birds?
He fucking hates birds.
He throws – he stands in the street taking handfuls.
So, like, you know, people will leave food around.
He finds some fried rice from, like, the Thai place.
He's fucking screaming in the middle of Terraval Street and throwing rice at pigeons.
And the pigeons are just fucking with him.
At first, they're like, obviously, that guy's crazy.
Then pretty soon, what – if you're a pigeon and somebody is throwing rice at you, what do you do?
This guy's a fried rice fountain.
Exactly.
Oh, don't throw me in the briar patch.
Okay.
They're just fucking laughing.
They're just standing there.
He's got to know that, though.
First of all, he has to know that.
He does know, John.
He's crazy.
That's the problem.
So here he is.
I go in and two out of five times I go to the KFC.
He's sitting there and he is.
I've never seen anybody eat angrier than bird guy.
He's fucking going after some dark meat.
His beard is shiny.
He's digging in.
And you know what?
I've never seen the guy ever, ever, ever pay.
So I and the things I haven't asked, but, you know, me in my head now, I'm wondering about things.
Right.
You know, maybe Super Train has an answer for this at some point.
But all I'm saying is, I don't know if they're doing this out of charity.
I think they're not.
Is he digging in the trash and just pulling out?
He is not.
He's sitting right at the table next to where my daughter and I are enjoying a cookie.
He is sitting there and literally shoving dead dead fried bird into his face.
You get cookies at KFC Taco Bell.
I don't want to have to eat the chicken.
That's not healthy.
Oh, right.
Good man.
Yeah.
Smart.
And so I don't know.
It could come out.
I'm sorry.
I'm not precisely sure where I'm going with this.
Even fried chicken that's made with Jesus paintbrush?
Okay, I go there a lot, all right?
They have those chicken bits now.
There's nothing that isn't wrong with KFC.
Every single aspect of KFC has something that's wrong with it.
The messaging, the posters, the photography, certainly the oil that they make things in.
Every single... Oh, the signage.
Don't even get me started on the signage.
I'm going to take a photograph of the signage for you.
Where Colonel Sanders is no longer a person, he's just an action figure?
No, no, I don't mind that.
You know, we've got a big bucket here.
The bucket is bigger than you think because of what is known as foreshortening.
The bucket's actually quite large, but can I just mention one other thing in passing?
You know who likes to sit around the rim of the bucket?
Birds.
Oh, birds.
Birds.
Mm-hmm.
Birds.
They know which side they're... I mean, they're cannibals, those birds.
But much like the man throwing the rice, I think there's a certain kind of self-destruction, a need for self-harm.
But all I know is that guy's getting fucking free chicken, and I'm not.
Maybe I just haven't asked enough.
But Pauline, who I don't think listens to the show— So now you're envious of the guy with the plastic bags around his leg.
Envy's a strong word.
Because he's getting free chicken.
I'm not envious.
I would say I'm jealous.
I want him to not have it either.
I see.
No, that's not accurate.
But anyway—
I understand what you're saying.
I think Supertrain is going to solve all of this.
I don't know if Supertrain is going to solve these problems.
But I'm saying there's a lot of complexity and America has a lot of stories to tell.
And a lot of people are going to need help.
Now, I can tell you, John.
Are you familiar with pink slime?
Do you know what pink slime is?
That's different from gray goo.
Is Kurzweil the guy that makes the keyboards or the guy that makes the gray goo?
That's Ray Kurzweil, right?
Kurzweil makes the keyboards.
It's not Robert Moog.
You say Moog or Moog.
How do you say that?
You say Moog because you're not a dope.
I totally agree.
If you're a music industry dope and you want to call him by his real name, it's Moog.
How do you pronounce the French film festival that is a homonym with what you drink a Coke out of?
I think it's Cannes.
cans i think con is fake white trashy patois i think you're doing i think you're sorry is that right it's i think you might be you might be as your as your as your boswell or excuse me as your boswell i think you may be at least bending rule number two the patois problem how do you how do you pronounce the capital of vermont uh pier montpelier montpelier right
Montpelier?
I guess Montpelier.
Montpelier, Montpellier.
I just know from Montpellier.
The whole Houston and Houston thing.
Again, this is more ways that New York is trying to fuck us, and I'm going to be glad when Super Train drops that giant fucking claw on New York.
No offense to our friends who live there.
There are a lot of people in New York.
Most of our friends have moved out of Manhattan, and I think that's smart.
There's a lot of trains in Manhattan.
I think Super Train is going to have a huge influence over all of that monstrosity that we call Manhattan.
This is a good question.
Will Super Train be able to, because as I am working to convert people in America over to my way of thinking, will Super Train also be converting the other trains?
Oh, I think it has to.
Supertrain will speak train to them.
Oh, it'll speak train fluently and not in any kind of a jokey Bronx Patois.
I think you're going to have something like 160 years of parallel tracks behind you on all of this.
I think, again, it's like the Treaty of Versailles, let's be honest.
People are going to be looking for a hero.
I think there are a lot of trains out there that are not happy with their work.
There are so many great trains and they are held back by people with insufficient vision.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And especially the law.
I mean, when a lot of those laws were signed, I think those trains already felt a little bit, let's just be honest, a little bit neutered.
And there's things they couldn't do.
Sure.
Well, the whole Amtrak business.
I mean, why is there even an Amtrak?
It makes me so mad.
They should just call it rolling vagina.
What about that train that was going to go from New York to L.A.
in five hours because it was in a vacuum tube under the ground?
Oh, come on.
What happened to that train?
There was going to be a tube train?
Did you not ever read Popular Science magazine?
I can't believe you did.
I know about Maglev.
So you take Maglev.
And put it in a tube.
You put it in a tube, and then you vacuum all the air out so there's no resistance.
Are they allowed to have air in the train?
Well, yeah, you have to have air in the train.
It's got compression of some kind.
The train is compressed like an airplane.
Okay.
The train is, you know, it's sealed.
Would they have food?
Well, yes, it would be a super... They'd have incredible food because it would probably cost...
$20 million to ride this train because how much would it cost to build a pressurized tube from New York to L.A.?
It would cost a lot of money.
Yes.
But... You'd probably have to move a few things around.
If you did it, you could have a train that went from New York to L.A.
almost as fast as an airplane.
And you're underground, which is pretty appealing.
I think it would be even faster.
I think if it was magnetically levitated and you had no air resistance, you could go conceivably faster than light.
And that's based on science?
You're saying that?
You could go faster than fast.
It would be so fast...
I think you could go as fast as is safe and practical, which is not true with a plane.
A plane's got a lot of problems and a lot of overhead.
You ever do this?
You ever have to go somewhere in the northeast corridor, but you have to go through New York?
I'm telling you, I always do the math, and it's frequently faster to jump on a fucking Peter Pan bus rather than do anything involving changing at an airport.
Oh, absolutely.
When I went to Connecticut, I did that.
When I went to Rutgers, I did that.
It was just so much easier.
You know what I'm saying?
It's such a pain in the ass.
If we fly to Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh is still there, that's still considered an incorporated city?
Yeah, yeah.
Pittsburgh is still there.
And in fact, there's that guy, that bald kid who's the mayor of one of those outlying factory towns who's turned his little town into a mecca of entrepreneurship.
That sounds like an NPR story.
Yeah.
I think I read about it in Parade magazine or maybe I read about it in the United Airlines in-flight magazine.
But it's a guy.
And he's like my age.
He's your age.
He's our age.
But he's a big guy.
He's bald.
He's part of the super train generation.
He's super train generation.
He's bald.
He's probably 350 pounds.
And he got himself elected mayor of this town where all the factories closed.
It's like a Billy Joel song, this town.
Yeah.
And then I'll form standing in line.
Yeah.
The union people go away.
I don't know the lyrics of that.
But he and he's turning this town into some kind of he's trying to turn it into.
Well, if you read Parade magazine, he's turning it into utopia.
If you've ever been on the ground in that part of the country, you know that he's just trying to keep like the radioactive devil dogs from eating children like right up.
They call it a tech incubator.
You know, he's just trying to keep the glaciers back.
What kind of dogs?
I want to write this down.
What kind of dogs?
Radioactive devil dogs.
They're rife through that whole area.
He's basically standing out there with a Bic lighter at the front edge of a glacier, and he's trying to hold it back.
He's melting it back with his lighter.
That's his plan.
It sounds like you admire him a little bit though.
Was it because of his weight or his hair or his prestige?
It sounds like you admire him a little bit.
You look at him and you go, ah, right?
You're sizing him up.
Thing is, you know, he is mayor of like ass pimple Pennsylvania, which is more than I can say.
Supertrain needs him and he needs Supertrain.
I think it's true.
That bit's going to run out at some point.
He's going to want to shove some Mr. Potato Head into that and that's only available with your giant fucking crane hand.
Well, and he's a visionary.
I'm a visionary.
We're going to meet at the TED conference.
Because that's where visionaries go.
I'm sorry, I don't want to ask personal favors.
We're not close enough to do that.
But is there any chance that you could just destroy the TED conference and just replace it with something much more Super Train-like?
I think the TED conference is doing a very good job of destroying itself.
Okay.
Would you think about having a conference, maybe literally on a parallel track to Super Train?
Here's what's happening to the TED conference.
It has already become a brand.
It's like I went to Marshall's the other day.
First of all, I went to Ross's.
I had to get some new pillows.
Because I was looking for a blanket.
I have enough pillows, but I was looking for a blanket because all my blankets were dirty.
And the only way you can wash a blanket is in one of those super-sized blanket washing machines at the laundromat.
Which Super Train will have eight to ten of.
But I hate going to the laundromat.
So I was like, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to buy a new blanket.
I'm going to put these dirty blankets in the closet.
I'm going to go buy a new blanket.
So I go to the Ross.
But all the Ross blankets, that's gross.
They're gross there.
So I went to Marshall's because it's a higher caliber.
It's a higher quality blanket store.
And I discovered that there are blankets.
There's bedding.
Let's call it bedding.
There's bedding branded with Valerie Bertinelli's face.
It's the Valerie Bertinelli line of bedding and home face.
fun stuff is it remaindered items from somewhere besides marshall's or is this an exclusive to the marshall's brand it's remaindered i'm sure the valerie bertinelli line is only available in the finest department stores huh and it's got a picture of valerie and it's a bertinelli blanket yeah and it's not a picture of valerie valerie it's not the one i would have picked yeah you know like i would have picked she's in the baseball cap and she's still little and live with ann romano
Well, that's the one I would have picked.
Me too.
That's from my fanfic.
But no, it's a picture of her, but they tried to make her hair look like it was blown in the wind.
I don't know.
They did the Jacqueline Smith at Sears, too.
Yeah.
And the thing about it is, well, first of all, I didn't realize that Valerie Bertinelli still had enough cultural cachet that people trusted her to sell them their household goods.
Mm-hmm.
But also, I really noticed how much she and Eddie Van Halen, who already looked alike when they met, grew to look almost exactly alike.
I mean, Eddie Van Halen looks like a desiccated version of her.
You know what I mean?
Like if you took Valerie Bertinelli and you put her in a fruit dehumidifier, it would look like Eddie Van Halen.
If she got plumped up a little bit?
Well, no, like a dehumidifier.
If she got all the water to fish out.
If you make the raisin back into a grape.
That would be Valerie Bertinelli, yeah.
Wow.
Eddie Van Halen, God bless him, like Mick Jagger.
Wow.
You think it's smoking that does that?
I think they both look like they've been in a smoker.
With like wood chips?
Yeah, I think that they have been wood chip smoked.
I think they're going to be covered in some kind of regional sauce in the next couple hours.
If I was a cannibal...
There would not be enough meat on Eddie Van Halen to keep me going through the afternoon.
You're so bummed Mike Anthony left.
Oh, my God.
He would fry up so nice right now.
Make some steaks.
I was wrong.
I was wrong about him.
You know what?
You thought he was the weak link, but you realized... Was that on this show?
This is years before the show, right?
I said this.
This is one of our many visits that led up to this, our ongoing public visits.
Yes, all of our long conversations where we would yell at each other about Van Halen and the Beatles.
I think this might be one of the evergreen ones that I continued to stand behind at least twice or three times.
And you were adamantly...
oddly enough adamant about saying i was wrong about was is that is weird is is is is mike anthony in fact a a a competent let alone good bass player and we held two if memory serves held two extremely different points of view let's put it this way yes but also was he even a fucking important part of van halen and and can you can you reiterate your stand
I was fucking wrong about everything.
My stand was that... Here's my... Here's my eight-note Mike Anthony joke.
Ready?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, but here's the thing.
Signature bass line.
I used to make that sound with my mouth when I wanted to make – I usually do just one measure because that's kind of boring.
And to me, that represented – and then to me, always his biggest move was, hey, look at this.
I got the Jack Daniels bass.
And he'd do that thing where that real – let's be honest.
It's kind of a douche thing where you don't pump your fist.
Yeah, you pump your fist laterally with your left hand while you hit an open A or E. Oh, yeah.
which i have never that's very winger i'm really super winger you know what can i just say on many counts uh i was dead wrong on the new record which is not great but okay it's got moments where they have replicated the super important harmonies i always thought it was edward i thought it was edward edward's in there but he's not the crucial harmony right it's mike anthony was the crucial beautiful girls right that's him high harmony he had it that was him okay so eddie was singing along do you think he was just mouthing along or was he really singing
He had the Linda McCartney mic, I think.
Oh, gosh, he had the McCartney switch.
Do you think, okay, so when they were recording with Ted, though, was that three?
You think you were doing three harmonies?
Do you think Mike was doing, because it sounds like a three-part harmony, at least.
You know Diamond Dave had harmonies that he was like, oh, hey, man, give me a microphone.
And you can definitely hear that on the first couple records, especially when they do, you know what I'm talking about?
There's the tight harmony.
So let's just stipulate.
We're talking about early Van Halen.
There's the tight harmony, like it sounds like a fucking glorious machine harmonies.
And then there's the slightly more rowdy sing-along harmonies where Dave's harmonies.
I'm sure Eddie was in the sing-along harmonies.
But who knows?
Who knows what Eddie Van Halen's singing talents are?
He's a great musician.
Yeah.
It's fun when he sings along, though.
It's nice to see him singing along.
Key element.
I swear to you, back in the 80s, if anybody had to pick a weak link of R.E.M., it would have been Bill Berry every time.
Sickening.
But it turns out he's the only one with any taste.
He's the only one with any sense of what a good pop song is.
Because as soon as he left the band, they couldn't pick their songs.
They couldn't...
He was the guy... He was their Tommy.
He's the one who kept the taste up.
He was the one that was like, Michael, you know, that's not a very good lyric, or I don't think that's a good song, or I don't know what he was doing, but he was the one that decided...
what the good songs were.
And once he was gone, Michael Stipe was the only, nobody can say anything to Michael Stipe.
Next time you're sitting around not drinking wine with Mike Mills, I would like you to have the super trained stones to ask about that.
Cause I bet he has a different point of view.
You know, Mike, uh, Mike Mills, uh, once accused me of being a homophobe.
Oh, is he don't like houses?
Because I don't like words that sound alike.
Oh, of course.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
A homophonophobe.
But that was because Mike Mills had had four bottles of wine at that point, and he didn't know.
He probably meant something else, too.
He turned, and he was talking to the fern next to him at the restaurant, and I happened to be, you know,
on that side of the table.
Thank God alcoholic bass players are out there getting in front of this on behalf of our nation's homosexuals.
It must be nice to have a friend in him.
I saw him at a show in town a few years back and you know what?
Never mind.
He seemed fine.
He read a little creepy to me.
A little creepy.
He read creepy in the room.
He read as I'm Mike Mills in like a Todd Rundgren circa 72 outfit like Spangly Granny Ghost.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
The thing about REM
is that, in a way, I feel like R.E.M.
became a cult, but... By 1982, they were a cult.
I mean, sure, they were a cult to girls... Oh, I'm sorry, you mean the talent was a cult?
Yeah, I'm saying, yes, they were a cult to girls in Rhiannon skirts, but they were a cult...
Within that, where the members of the band were actually in the cult themselves.
And it was hard to tell who was making the rules of the cult.
You know, Mike Mills is a tremendously talented guy and probably like just a regular indie rock guy.
But because he was in REM and because they had this kind of weird groupthink policy where you're not allowed, you know, no one ever says anything on the record anymore.
You know, or you watch those videos of them when they're really young and they already took themselves so seriously when they were 18 years old or whatever.
Mike Mills just never had an opportunity to have a good time.
Oh, he's like a child actor.
Yeah, he has been his whole life.
He went from being a child actor to working on a really super weird commune.
Yeah, and now he thinks that... This is a theory that was advanced by a close friend of mine who happened to once have been in R.E.M.
Was he a vampire?
I'm not going to say who, but one of my friends who used to be in R.E.M.
said that what Mike Mills should have done many, many years ago was release a Mike Mills solo album.
He writes songs.
If he had just put out a record of his own music...
then he would be free.
He would have been free of this, like, I'm the bass player.
Get it out of a system?
Get it out of the system.
And also break that weird spell that was over those guys.
Like, Peter Buck ended up getting out.
He had side projects and stuff to keep him lively.
And what is Peter Buck doing right now?
I guarantee you, wherever he is in the world right now, he's playing the guitar right now.
Is he still doing that mandolin thing?
He does all that stuff.
But Mike Mills, he's living in some hotel room somewhere.
He's probably putting cocaine in his penis.
And he never got out.
Near wild heaven.
Ow!