Ep. 50: "Check Your Six"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
I'm Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
You caught me in the middle of a peanut butter sandwich.
Did I?
I caught you.
Yeah.
I mean, I was sitting here expecting your call, but I thought in the meantime I would have a peanut butter sandwich.
What kind of button do you get for something like that?
Oh, a peanut butter sandwich button?
They were one of those elephant six bands, if memory serves.
Is this still a good time for you?
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, years of making music records, I've learned to think of... They call them music records.
Music records.
I learned to think of vocals as a kind of like a digital graph.
You know what I mean?
Like you see the...
You see the visual of the waveform of a musical instrument.
And so my first thought is, is there a filter we could put on that that would just take out all the smacking and the food sounds?
It's a really – it's a very, very good question.
It's certainly something that I've thought about.
As you know, as somebody who's made lots of music records, you know that there are various sorts of things.
I believe they call them filters.
Filters.
Filters.
I think they're music filters.
Filters.
Filters that will intelligently go out and find certain kinds of things.
If you get the hum, you can pick one area.
Get rid of the hum.
Say take out this – I believe it's called a music frequency.
You can get rid of the hiss.
The hiss, exactly.
But can you get rid of the peanut butter?
And the streetcar.
Okay.
The peanut butter in the streetcar.
One of the great Aesop fables.
Now, one of the things I need to say right before we start is that last night I was eating some food, and I broke my tooth off again.
I was going to write it off to peanut butter, and then I was going to ask if you had your orthodontics all done, right?
You said you're done with that.
Yeah, but now I'm missing my tooth again.
That one tooth?
The one tooth.
Oh, no.
The one, my Achilles tooth.
I'm so sorry, John.
That must feel weird to have that back.
By back, I mean not there.
Back being not there.
It's not that weird.
I'd be running my tongue over it all the time.
Yeah, I'm doing that.
But I did that when I had a fake tooth in there.
But anyway, I'm noticing I don't have the plosive power that I normally have when I say words that start with F.
Like fake tooth.
You hear the ph.
It's like I've lost some of my ph power.
Right.
No soup for you.
That's right.
Maybe we should try to avoid words that start with that letter.
Or you know what?
You're John Roderick.
You're fucking John Roderick.
You should drive that train right into the tunnel.
Maybe we should just really hit the Fs hard.
All right.
You know what?
Let's try and use as many F words as we can.
Now, I think I've asked you about this, but it's worth sharing with our audience.
I'm curious.
Now, for those who don't know, John, as memory serves, it's like a whole diagonal.
It looks like somebody cut a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in half diagonally, except it's your tooth, right?
You've got a whole kind of half a tooth missing, right?
No, no, I have an entire tooth missing.
In fact, missing all the way.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
It looks like a bad hobo costume.
It's maybe the best hobo costume the world has ever known.
In fact, I've definitely thought about going down to Hollywood in this state.
A little bit on the nose, probably.
Listen, do you need to cast someone who looks like he's not thriving right now?
I am that actor.
Yeah.
Boy, that's so easy for me.
It's kind of a running joke with a lot of my friends that I look homeless, which is like I have a home.
Seriously, let's come back to this.
I want us to start having a lot more nuance because I think that term is abused.
Yeah, well, I think you're right.
No, it's a huge difference.
Okay, I'm going to write that.
I'm going to capture that here.
We're going to come back to hobos, bums.
Hobos, bums.
Let's shoot for nuance.
While you're writing that, I'm going to take a bite of this sandwich.
Yeah, go right ahead.
Does it hurt?
Does it hurt?
Does it hurt?
Does it hurt?
Does it expose a nerve?
Oh, it doesn't hurt.
No, there's no tooth there.
No tooth.
And so no tooth, no nerve.
Nothing there.
Hobos, bums, homeless, and street rats.
Okay.
The thing about a typical street rat is...
They're going to lose one of their eye feeds.
Are you sure this is a good time?
Well, you were talking.
You were writing a card, so I thought maybe I'd have another bite of a sandwich.
Oh, man.
Are you going to hear it this week?
Now, you lost that tooth quite a while ago.
Now, they call that a crown.
Is that what they call what they put in there?
What do they call the thing they put in there?
A bridge?
What do you have?
What is it you haven't lost besides the tooth?
Have I not told you this whole exasperating story?
Is this the story that I think it is that I've been wanting to hear for a long time?
Bye.
It could be.
Yeah.
Well, I'd like to hear that story.
I'm going to write that down.
I'm going to write down that one story.
My question to you is this, and I don't know, I'm sure most of our listeners at this point, like me, like I, like myself.
Most of our listeners do like you, Merlin.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, John.
I want you to know that, and I want you to feel strong.
Do you have any way of quantifying that?
Is that just a gut feeling?
I feel like the number of tweets that I read that say, I love Merlin Mann.
Hmm.
is a good indicator of how many people out there in the world love Merlin.
I think we're on a different Twitter.
We should double check.
I think a lot of your fans send me their appreciative tweets.
That is so nice.
Oh my God.
We don't want to blow Merlin's mind.
We don't want to bug him.
We know he's busy, but why don't we send John Roderick some nice...
Merlin-themed... That must be bittersweet for you, John.
On the one hand, we're pals, I like to think, and you look out for me and my welfare, you're happy to see me doing well and are probably a little bit sad when I'm sad.
But on the other hand, it must be a little bit galling because you shouldn't be having to carry my mail.
Certainly not my theoretical fan mail.
You should be the one receiving compliments.
You're the one who's helping people.
It doesn't bother me at all, in fact.
Not galling at all.
In fact, I enjoy it because my inbox is...
It's so crowded with fan mail directed to me.
That's a good point.
It's nice to see fan mail directed to someone else every once in a while just to realize that there are other people in the world.
You've taken a very broad view to this, and I'm very grateful for that.
So here's the thing.
uh uh like me and the people who love me i think the world has finally i i'm gonna guess you never expected this i'm gonna guess that you never expected how many people that should have known about your band the long winners a long time ago it's turns out surprising to learn how many people had not heard of the band or had not associated you with the band or that one song they heard in that one place and i don't know if you see this on the twitter that i get i see a lot of people uh because that's my only means of interacting with people
Is that a lot of people now are – like they go out and they're like, oh my gosh, John has been helping me and terrifying me with his train.
And now I just went on iTunes and I bought every Long Winters album and I can't stop listening to them.
Yeah, that's lovely.
It is lovely.
It is lovely.
And now that we're done congratulating ourselves, my point being, I think for people who are new to the John Roderick scene, they may not realize that for a surprisingly long time –
You looked horrifying.
No, in a good way.
Like you had – the picture of you with my daughter that I treasure, several that I have, is you really looking like something like a Memphis Yeti.
You got creepy Elvis glasses.
You have – like when I say dishwater blonde, I mean maybe like hydrogen peroxide in literal dishwater to your shoulders as memory serves.
And just to be clear, you got super creepy smoky glasses.
Mm-hmm.
They were molesty.
And then, uh, you're missing a tooth.
Yeah.
And you, no, here's the thing.
You rocked that look, not for a week or a month.
You didn't, you didn't go buy some kind of putty at the fucking Walgreens.
You rocked a fucking giant ass.
You, you were Santa with a missing tooth, if memory serves.
Yeah.
For several years, because I, I felt, I felt like, uh,
Here's the thing.
There are a lot of cosmetic improvements that one can make to oneself to mask the inner grotesqueness.
And in my case, I arrived at a point where there was not enough spackle on the earth.
to smooth out the cracks in me, and I just thought I would let it roll.
I just, you know, for many, many years, during the grunge years, when I was a terrible person, and on drugs and doing, like, un... Oh, boy.
Uncharitable?
No, no, I was never uncharitable, but I just was not living a life that you could...
that you could show to St.
Peter, let's say.
I was not living a life that when they opened... You were looking forward to that guy opening up the book and putting on his glasses.
When they opened the book and they said, here we go, let's take a look at this.
I was going to be bashful, I was going to be touching my toes together and staring at the floor.
It was not only that you were going to definitely go to hell, but it was going to take a really fucking long time.
You had to sit there and listen to it.
They were going to talk about a lot of stuff and I was going to go... Oh, that.
I forgot about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, no.
I mean, yes, but come on.
It was the 90s.
Got a guy some slack.
But during that entire time, I looked like a cop, you know, like I was as straight looking as a guy could be.
I had short hair.
I was fresh faced.
I had, you know, I had blue eyes that looked innocent.
Yeah.
I mean I would go to situations all the time where I would walk in the door and some guy dressed all in black sitting behind a table covered with drugs would stand up and yell at the guy who brought me, why did you bring a cop here, man?
And then I would have to stand there in the doorway while –
Everybody jumped out the windows and my friend was like, no, no, no, man.
I know him.
I know him.
He's cool.
He's cool.
I was like, I was the, I was the undercover cop that everybody could tell.
And by cool, you mean he stole every pill in his house.
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In any case... This might be diarrhea medicine, it might be digitalis, but you never know.
It might be a Benny.
Never know.
So many, many years later...
when all of that behavior came home to roost, which is to say that the decisions I made during my youth when I felt that I was going to live forever and that nothing could ever hurt me, all those things were saving up their consequences for right about the time I turned 40.
And basically the day I turned 40,
Everything that was in me that was held together with bailing wire and toothpaste, it all broke at once.
My tooth fell out and my knees gave out.
It was a catastrophe.
And now I'm living in the post-consequences world where I realize that everything you do in your youth just lights a fuse.
Yeah.
All the scars, they just wait kind of dormant until there just comes that one moment where all your connective tissue stops working and you're just a pile of bones.
This is three or four years ago.
Yeah.
Wow.
So I knocked out my front tooth a half a dozen times.
But it finally...
It finally was so corrupted.
It had been broken so many times that there was nothing left to cap.
And they had to just extract this little bit of a root that was left.
And most people you see who are missing a tooth, their eye tooth is gone because they were using their tooth to check the veracity of a gold coin or something.
Yeah.
But you don't see a lot of people whose main front, the largest tooth in their face, the most visible one, their main front tooth is missing.
That is not a charming missing tooth.
That's much more of a like that you have been drinking hairspray kind of missing tooth.
Yeah.
It's a poor judgment space.
Yeah, that's right.
That's what's so interesting.
And you think for one fucking second you're getting away from this.
You're not because this is really super interesting.
But it's – this is going to sound strange, but it's almost –
shockingly medieval in a way, a feeling of going like, oh my gosh, there's all of this shit inside of me and all of this fake connective tissue holding me together.
And believe me, brother, I understand.
There's all this inside of me, but I can shave.
And I can put on a tie or I can do whatever.
I can become this shockingly normal-looking person who's quivering inside.
But then you lose your fucking front tooth.
And when I say medieval, it's – there's almost this idea of – well, you think about a time even, what, in the 1600s where you would try and make a lady float to see if she was a witch or whatever.
There's this weird Theodoric of York feeling about like there was a time when you really thought that you could look at somebody and tell a lot about their morality.
Sure, or phrenology.
Phrenology, sure.
They got the plague and they didn't.
If somebody was running their hands over my head trying to discern my character, it would be like running your hands through my hair is like running your hands over a model train set.
There are so many crisscrossing scars on my scalp and various places where...
From traumatic injury?
Yeah.
No shit.
Yeah.
Did I ever say about the time I got jumped by three guys with axe handles?
I don't think you have.
That sounds like an Alaska story.
No, no, that happened in Seattle.
No way.
But, you know, so when I shaved my head, boy, I look like, you know...
You look like George the Animal Steel.
You got that whole bumpy topography thing going on?
I do.
All the wrestlers used to cut themselves.
That's why they're so scarred.
They'd cut themselves with a tiny bit of razor blade to get all that bleeding going.
Oh, right.
To get the face bleeding.
If you cut your eyebrow just a little bit, any head wound, you bleed a lot.
I don't want me to derail this with wrestling talk.
No, believe me.
I know.
Hey, I've been to parties.
You got to have a distraction before you can get to the pills.
I want to talk about how much bleeding you do out of a head wound up your guy.
So you shaved your head.
No, I don't shave my head.
No, no, no.
I'm talking about the accident.
Oh, okay.
But the accident incident, you were jumped.
And when I hear the word jump, I think of you were sort of surprisingly attacked by three guys at one time in a completely unfair fight.
Yeah, that's kind of a description of what happened.
I was heavily intoxicated.
But I was intoxicated on a cocktail of intoxicants that made me very lucid while also being very intoxicated.
Yuck.
I've been to that bar.
And I was on the street, and these guys were, I think, this was during the era of gay bashing.
When this was a thing that people from the sticks would come into town and gay bash.
And so I don't know why these guys were so heavily armed.
But I was, in all honesty, I was standing on the street with a lighter, lighting posters on a phone pole on fire and watching the posters burn.
Was this where you were enjoying a hallucinogen?
You know, I'll get to, I'll get to the, I'll get to that part of the story.
First, first the poster burning.
So I'm watching, I'm just standing on this, on this, on the street, uh, watching, uh, lighting posters on this phone pole on fire and, and a couple of cops pull up and they say, Hey, knock that off.
And I was like, oh, yeah, man.
Hey, why do you pigs have to step on my scene?
Or whatever it is, however we talked back then.
And the cops were like, listen, if you don't knock it off.
I mean, it was a busy Friday night.
And they're like, we got shit to do.
You're small potatoes.
But if you don't knock it off, we're going to get out of the car and we're going to put handcuffs on you.
And I was like, oh, sorry.
Sorry, I'm burning your phone pole, cop.
And so I momentarily stopped and the cops drove away.
And then I immediately started doing this again.
And I don't know why.
I was 22 years old.
There's no excuse for standing on the street corner.
This is the kind of petty...
delinquency that a 13 year old should have grown out of but here I am and I'm on a variety of intoxicants and I'm lighting the phone pole on fire because it was fascinating to me suffice to say so anyway I stand out there here I am I'm doing it a little bit longer and all of a sudden there's these three guys and they have they have bats and they're like
what are you doing, man?
And I turn around, I engage them in conversation.
I'm like, I'm just lighting this foam pole on fire.
And they're like, we'll fucking knock it off.
And that was a challenge that I felt I really needed to, I really needed to stand my ground because this was important work I was doing.
And who are these three guys to tell me to knock anything off?
So I was like, you know, why don't you knock off telling people what to do?
And I noticed that they have bats.
I mean, I am acutely aware, but I also feel like I'm in command of this situation.
And they kind of circle around me in a triangular-shaped grouping, and I'm in the center of it, and I feel like I have this matter quite in hand.
Yeah.
And I start to lecture them on how cities work and how phone poles are coated with creosote and so are inherently not flammable.
And at a certain point, they are no longer interested.
And one of the guys that has circled around, you know, they're just arguing argumentatively arguing with me because they already know what they're going to do.
And this was before I had learned to protect my six.
And somebody got around behind me and just took a massive swing like he was swinging for the outfield.
And it hit me on the back of the head with what turned out later to be an axe handle.
Oh, my God.
And then once I was down, all three of them just stood over me and just pounded on me like they were tenderizing a side of beef.
And at this point, I was aware that I was in trouble.
So I was yelling, and I was crawling to try and get under a car.
And they were just going to town on me.
And they broke both my hands.
Wow.
Wow.
And they, I mean, from top to bottom, I was just black.
Black and blue, but mostly black.
I crawled under this car, and some girl up the street started screaming, and eventually somebody nearby screamed loud enough that these guys kind of took one last whack each and ran off into the dark.
And so then...
The cops came back.
The cops who had yelled at me 10 minutes before came back.
And the aid car came.
And I was laying there convinced that I was holding the...
holding the back of my skull on i had my hands up and i was like you know i can't move my hands and the aid card guys were like you know you got to move your hands we got to see what what's going on i was like no i can't because if i do the back of my head's gonna fall off and the aid card guys you know they were all shining lights in my face and they were like are you on any kind of drugs
I was like, no, I just had a beer.
And, you know, they're looking at my pupils and they're like, no, we need to, you need to tell us like what your, what drugs you're on.
And I'm like, no, I just had, I just had a beer, but I can't move my hand because my, my, my head is, is going to, you know, fall off or fall apart.
So they take me to the hospital and the doctor and the emergency room.
Again, kind of says, listen, we need to know what you're on.
You're obviously like on some drugs and we need to know what they are because we can't treat you.
We can't give you more drugs unless we know what drugs you're on.
We can't treat you unless we know what's going on.
And I had it in my head that if you told a doctor that you had taken some drugs...
that that would somehow, I still, I still had it in my mind that my permanent record was something I need to be worried about.
You know, like that I was going to, that this was going to go down on my permanent record and I wasn't going to get into graduate school.
I don't know what I thought my permanent record was, but I had, I had grown up being told that your transcript was this thing you needed to worry about so much.
And I, I didn't want to tell some doctor in an emergency room, um,
uh what drugs i was on because he was going to write it down on a piece of paper and then it was then the then i the cia was never going to let me be the president of the united states and so i kept insisting that no i had only had a couple of beers and so the doctor goes okay you know what kid that's fine and he turns to the nurse next to him and he says don't give him any anesthesia
And so they proceeded to sew up my head and my hands, which were, you know, they were broken, but they were also like...
I think I showed you a scar on my finger one time where one of the bats hit my finger as it was trying to protect my head, and the finger meat squirted out the other side.
So they had to push all that finger meat back inside and sew it up.
And they just did it all without even giving me a topical anesthesia.
So I was sitting there being sewed like a rag doll, like three different people running thread through me at a time.
And then they rolled me out on a blood-soaked gurney into the hallway of Harborview Emergency Room.
Harborview is like the one level four trauma center in the Northwest.
Yeah.
But it's also one of those hospitals where they'll roll you out into a hall and there'll be just kind of one light bulb flickering up above you.
Like flickering and sometimes it goes out and then the power comes back on.
And the hallways are just on Friday and Saturday night.
They're just full of people like motorcycle wreck, gunshot wound, motorcycle wreck, gunshot wound.
And so they roll me out into this hallway and they just let me sit there as the blood on my gurney coagulates.
While people who are really in trouble are wheeled past me screaming.
And I was on hallucinogens, among other things.
And so it was... You were tripping while they were sewing up your head without anesthesia.
Yeah.
It was a really... It was a hell of a night.
I really like... I learned a lot that night about everything.
Certainly about mortality.
Right.
But yeah, so...
That was definitely when I started checking my six.
What does that mean?
Checking your six is like, it's fighter pilot terminology.
It means look behind you.
12 o'clock is straight ahead and six is 180 degrees behind you.
Right.
Check your six.
So, yeah, I check my six now.
And so should you, Merlin.
I'm thinking about it.
I'm thinking about my six right now.
You should.
I try not to think too much about my six, but that's probably a terrific reason to check it.
Yeah, well, you don't want to get to a position where you're now forced to check your six.
Do devil dogs count as six?
The devil dogs are on your six until you're checking your six because you know they're there.
Okay, I understand.
They aren't my six per se, because that's a notional concept.
But they're hanging by the six.
They're on your six, yeah.
And so when you're looking over your shoulder, I mean, it's why when I sit in a restaurant, when I go into a restaurant, I always pick my seat rather judiciously.
You're the one who taught Malcolm X this.
You always sit where you can see the door.
That's right.
You want to sit where you can see the door, but also sit where nobody's going to surprise you on your six.
Uh-huh.
I mean, there can be people behind me.
I just want to know who they are.
I just like the booth.
The booth is nice.
I like to pick a banquette over a chair.
John, that's horrific.
That's not even how I lost my tooth.
My tooth was in my head.
You still had a couple more trips before things settled down.
Until about what point were things like that...
About what era, year?
1994 was the last time I was about to say 1994 was the last time I went to jail.
But there were a couple of things that hung out, a couple of bench warrants that were still periodically active into 1995.
So I went to jail on things that had happened before 1994 a couple of times.
Because it took me a year or two to get...
It took me a couple of years to get a fully functioning set of credentials like your normal ID and stuff.
And to have all that stuff cleared so that every time I got stopped by a cop, he didn't go, oh, hello, and pull me out of the car and take me downtown.
There was one time they actually pulled one of those.
This is the thing that they're doing in cities now where they send letters out to everybody that has an outstanding warrant.
It's like, you won $1,000.
That's from The Simpsons.
That's not real.
No, it really happened.
Come and pick up your free boat.
Is that real?
Yeah, and then everybody comes down and they're like, you're arrested, you're arrested, you're arrested.
They actually totally do that.
And they got me – it was a legitimate – it wasn't a scam.
It was a legitimate thing where I went into the comptroller's office trying to get $400 that somebody had – one time a guy –
I was driving in a car with a guy one time over in Bellevue, and he was an African-American gentleman, and he and I had gone over there to go to the movies because they had a good movie theater.
And we were driving back at night through Bellevue, and we got pulled over.
And we weren't doing anything.
It was a case that my friend was convinced, as it was happening, that it was a case of them pulling us over because he was black and I was white and we were driving in a car.
Right.
That can't be up to, obviously up to no good.
Something isn't right.
Something's not Dutch with this.
So the Bellevue cops pulled us over.
And I was like, what?
That's crazy.
And he's like, no, I swear to you, that's what's happening right now.
I was like, oh, my God.
And so the cop comes over and he's very condescending to the driver, my friend.
But everything checks out.
And then the cop asks for my ID, at which point he finds that there's a warrant for my arrest.
And so he's very happy about this because to the policeman, it seems like a very ironic situation that the white guy is going to be the one that he's going to have to arrest.
And he's indicating this to us.
He thinks this is hilarious.
Ha ha, look at this.
Oh, he's having a little bit of racist O'Henry moment.
Yeah, exactly.
Look at this.
It's the blonde kid that I'm going to arrest.
What do you know?
And, you know, and we're both like, mm-hmm.
That's hilarious.
Quite piquant.
And I'm glad that I get to go to jail tonight to make this a story that you're going to tell this weekend at the bar.
Ha ha.
And so I go to jail and my friend, whose name was Howard, I said to him as the cop is putting me in his car, I say, here's my ATM card.
Go get the bail money, which is $400.
And so Howard goes and gets the bail money.
But of course, Howard, not having been through this before, bails me out under his name.
Rather than – because it was my money bailing me out under my name or stipulating that that's mine.
Oh, so he's the one responsible for the recognizance or the – Well, no.
So bail is a certain amount of money as insurance that you will show up for court is the idea, right?
Yeah.
Right.
And no, he's not responsible for me.
But if but they assume if he put 400 bucks up, it's his money.
He's going to make himself responsible.
In this case, it was my money.
I showed up for my court date.
And so now I wanted my bail refunded.
And they said, oh, that's not your bail.
That's Howard.
That's Howard's money.
And only Howard can come get the money.
Well, suffice to say, Howard was kind of a preppy guy.
And this experience of me getting arrested in his car kind of soured our, not soured our friendship, but it soured his interest in going with me to any more police stations or city courts or anything like that.
And so Howard kept dodging my phone call.
And, you know, and like, oh, yeah, totally, I'll help you do that.
And then he would, then he'd disappear and I wouldn't hear from Howard for a long time.
And this was at a time when $400 meant quite a bit, meant a lot to me.
Anyway.
I went down to the court one time to explain to them at great length that that was my money, not Howard's.
They were not interested in my story.
And also, while I was there, they discovered another warrant.
Oh, my God.
But the woman behind the counter who discovered this did not – she was not empowered to arrest me.
She can't hit a button and some marshal comes out or something.
So what she did was she said, oh, here's what you need to do.
You need to go across the street and hand me a card with an address on it.
She said, you need to go across the street to this place and they'll refund your money.
And I was like, wow, awesome.
It finally worked.
I finally met someone at the police department who understands and who cares about me.
I'm going to fill out a comment card on that gal.
I thanked her profusely.
I was like, ma'am, thank you for resolving this issue.
This has been an albatross.
This has been hanging over my head for many months.
I really appreciate your help.
And she was like, my pleasure.
And I took the card.
I walked out of the door of the courthouse.
I walked up the street, two blocks across the street to a storefront.
That was like kind of a had frosted glass windows.
And I was like, oh, this must be the city accountants office or something.
And I walked in the door.
And it's like the set of Barney Miller.
Oh, no.
It's a room with desks and a bunch of guys with pistols and shoulder holsters with their jackets off, sitting on the desks, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and chatting with each other.
Essential casting.
It really was.
And I walked in the door and I was like...
oh and they everybody in the room turns and looks at me and goes hey come on in buddy how's it going good to see you like this is not the first time that somebody's somebody a young young man has wandered in obviously not knowing why he's there and this is this has happened before janice has done this before yeah every single person that walks in that door is is about to be arrested and they didn't know it
This is the gag.
And I'm sure these guys all the time have to sprint down the street after somebody who turns around the doorway and runs.
And they sit me down in a chair and I'm like, oh, man.
God.
What a rip.
What a rip.
And they're like, good to see you.
Hey, we got a computer print out here that says blah, blah, blah.
So anyway, that was a it was a real it was a real prank.
Did you ever get your money back?
Never did.
And it's one of those things where Howard is going to get a letter someday 15 years from now that says, we have undiscovered monies for you.
And he's going to be like, what could this possibly be?
And he's not going to remember it.
I have not spoken to Howard in years.
That $400 is just – I have just decided that that is $400 I'm not going to pursue.
I just want it to go out into the world and pay for some – pay retribution in some way for some crime I committed against the city or the people of the city of Seattle.
It's like Ben Franklin says, you know, hit your child every day.
If you don't know what it's for, they will.
I'm sure you can find a good use for this.
You could re-creosote this phone pole.
If nothing else, it's to pay for all the parking meters that I didn't put quarters in when I just ran into a drugstore or whatever.
Gosh, there's so many interesting threads to this.
I hope it's interesting.
I think it's super interesting.
I think people are going to be terrified by this.
But there's that thing of – you were talking about worrying about your permanent record, which I buy on one level, but there's also just this sense of like –
you know, not evasion is the wrong word, but there's this sense of like, I'm running and I'm still running.
And like, well, of course I'm not going to tell them I'm tripping.
Like I'm not fucking stupid.
I may be high, but I'm not high, you know?
But the, but the permanent record thing has had a, had a more,
profound effect on me then then then it might be obvious really all i was gonna say though was like the same thing as the 400 there's times when a roll of quarters makes all the difference i mean big time you know what i mean it's and and so i mean but there's this this ongoing thread of like again your your body's like all mostly held together you're walking around you're kind of keeping it together on some level you're not like you know chained in a dungeon somewhere but like yeah you're out and about
But at the same time, like you're on the edge and you're going to be always looking for that tiny little adjustment that keeps you free and moving and drunk or whatever over the thing that's going to take you the other way.
That's absolutely true.
It becomes a habit.
It becomes a habit.
There was a simultaneous narrative going on in my head my whole life.
That was instilled by my father primarily because my dad was a politician.
My uncle was a politician.
My great uncle was a politician.
My great uncle who raised my dad.
They were all politicians.
And their ambition for me was to also be a politician and I think to be finally like a politician on a national scale.
Like these guys were all local politicians in the Northwest and they were in the back rooms smoking cigars and handshakes and making the port run and trading suits and tires with each other.
But
They had ambition for me that I would go on to national office and that that would somehow validate our political dynasty.
Oh, you're like the – not Jack, not Ted.
You're like the good Kennedy.
You're like the Kennedy that – Joe.
Joe.
He died in the war, right?
Joe died in the war.
But Joe is like the chosen one.
He was the one that was going to be big.
He was anointed and Joe died in a suicide mission.
You told me about this.
They fucked him over with his aircraft, right?
No, I don't think they fucked him over.
He knew what he was getting into.
It was one of those like, we don't know what happened, but he was in a bomber loaded with explosives that his job was to fly it over and bail out of it after he pointed it.
At a, what, a dam?
I don't remember what his... I think it was a dam.
Is this in Europe?
It was in Europe, yeah.
He was flying a bomber loaded with explosives, and he armed the bombs.
He armed the explosives after he was over the English Channel, and either...
He either slipped on a banana peel and pushed the wrong button or somebody in one of the – I think there was a chase plane that was supposed to – after he dived out, the chase plane was supposed to follow the bomber down.
Maybe there was a short in the electrical system, but the thing blew up into a million, billion, trillion pieces in the midair.
What a failure on so many levels.
Yeah.
I mean, it's such a chicken shit thing to do.
But then it's also, I mean, I don't know.
Who am I to say?
I'm not in the service.
But then it's also like, God, what a waste of a dude.
And what a waste of a plane.
What a waste of all those bombs.
Yeah.
I mean, you could have put those bombs to good use.
I mean, that is a non-civilian.
It is a strategic target to hit a dam, I guess.
Oh, yeah.
Big deal.
Hitting a dam is a big deal in a war.
Because it's all that electricity.
And the dam will send a big tidal wave down the valley.
And particularly if you believe the plot of Force 10 from Navarone.
That's with Harrison Ford, right?
Yeah.
The water from the dam can knock out the bridge where the Germans are coming across to attack the partisans.
See, now that you get a twofer.
That's a twofer.
Okay, so you were Joe.
You were going to be – now you're talking – there's Joe Sr.
and you're talking about you were going to be Joe Jr.
I was going to be Joe Jr.
And so anyway, even at the point when I was living very much in a kind of hand-to-mouth or like hand-to-drugs-to-mouth way –
And there was always a narrative in the back of my head that I needed to protect my reputation because I needed to be able to, because when they investigated me for top secret clearance, I needed to be able to pass.
because I was one day going to be a United States Senator.
And these two totally incompatible narratives, the one where I was like...
scrounging in the carpet for invisible crack rocks that I might have dropped and ended up smoking somebody's dog dander because I was sure that it was some kind of drugs that had fallen in the carpet.
That narrative, simultaneous with this, but I can't let anybody know because I'm going to be a United States Senator one day.
There's still a version of it in me now.
And I know...
I think about this sometimes, that I'm on record, and the problem would not be that I'm now on record admitting to having done a cornucopia of drugs, literally a horn of plenty of drugs.
A big Thanksgiving decoration full of drugs, some of which people have never even heard of.
Full of yams and mini pumpkins and bags of pure squeak.
You know, I did every kind of squeak.
What squeak?
Wow.
I'll look it up later.
I told you.
But anyway... The cornucopia itself is not the problem.
The admission of cornucopia.
But that isn't even the primary problem.
The primary problem for me being elected to the United States Senate is that I have gone on record
a thousand times saying, Seattle is a dumpy little shithole, and people who believe in God are dumbasses, and everybody that doesn't know how to drive in snow should be lined up against a wall and shot, etc., etc.
Storming the embassy.
There are numerous closets with numerous bones.
Yeah, if an opposition researcher was given the task... I'm like vetting you.
I'm just imagining the process of vetting you.
The guys in the back room with the cigars are like, look at this, John Morgan Roderick.
I think you could be our fellow.
Let's run some basic checks.
Holy shit!
That's a fucking cornucopia!
An opposition researcher would be rolling on the floor laughing within 30 seconds of trying to dig up some dirt on me because how am I going to run for office in Seattle having said all the things that I've said?
Well, you're just pointing out all the ways that you could help.
It's like my mom would say when I got a C-.
It's room for opportunity to improve.
Well, and it's what I would do and what I've always imagined.
is what Bill Clinton should have done when they asked him whether or not he'd slept with Monica Lewinsky.
You know, I never understood why he didn't face down the cameras and say, listen, that's none of anybody's business.
Next question.
Instead of falling back on parsing words.
Yeah, instead of hemming and hawing and saying like, well, you know, like there will come a time, and we've already seen it with Barack Obama's admission not only of having smoked marijuana but have done cocaine.
And he admitted to it in his book, and then he said, it's not a pertinent question.
It doesn't bear on my ability to govern.
Next question.
And if Bill Clinton had just said, that's not anybody's business, and if they had continued to throw questions at him...
Just said, all right, the press conference is over.
I'll be back when you can figure out.
I'll be back when you, the press corps, have grown up enough that you can figure out some reasonable questions to ask the president of the United States.
Goodbye.
Come back when you're ready to ask a grown-up question about running the world.
Yeah, because what ended up being Clinton's undoing was not that he slept with Monica Lewinsky, but that he lied about it.
And so there will come a time.
The lying about it was not something that he could count on everybody to help him paper over.
It was okay for us to not make a big deal of how much help Roosevelt got walking up to the lectern, and we had our reasons.
There was just a kind of decorum at the time where you know Kennedy got so much more tail than Clinton.
Don't you think?
I mean Kennedy had a lot of intercourse.
The problem with Kennedy wasn't that he – it wasn't just that he had –
that he made Congress with a lot of young ladies.
But Kennedy was completely doped up 24 hours a day.
Because of Addison's disease?
Yeah.
I mean, he was in excruciating pain.
He could barely walk.
And Dr. Feelgood was shooting a cocktail of amphetamines.
That's the other cover-up thing that's so interesting that Joe, I think, didn't he have a big role in that?
Nobody ever finds out that every place the president ever goes...
is full of all kinds of drugs for helping him get by, but then all kinds of stuff in case he just goes tits up.
And that that's a serious security risk during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This would have been nice to know.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, if you think about now...
John Kennedy would – not only would he never be elected president of the United States, but John Kennedy from a very young age would have been treated as a special little flower who needs a little cup with his medication in it every day at lunch and every day – like John Kennedy –
Also, he'd be seen as kind of a fag because he wrote books and stuff too.
If you think about who John Kennedy was, he is entirely the product of A, being bullied by his father and his older brothers.
And of course, we've made that illegal.
Now, you can't bully a kid.
And also, he was frail and teased, and so he fought and fought and fought against being frail and sick and bullied, and he became president of the United States.
But...
We've made all those things illegal now.
He got a lot of help.
John Kennedy would be... He got a lot of help getting into office.
Right now, he'd be somewhere writing on his blog about his struggles with his struggles to get the right...
add cocktail yeah and that's true yeah yeah but i mean there's a lot of people there's a lot of there's a lot of uh people in their 50s in the south right now riding around on boats that their sheriff grandfathers got bought with joe kennedy's money oh don't worry that's gonna be fine you're gonna you're gonna carry no problem
They're all nicknamed Gator.
The other Gator.
Here's the problem.
It's 47 minutes and 56 seconds too late to make this a funny show.
But this is the thing, and this is why I think the Senate might be a waste of your time, but it's certainly why you should be in special forces.
You being elected, I think, is probably just a bad idea for a variety of reasons.
Well, no, I think it would be a tremendous idea.
But you think you've got to get elected.
The problem is you've got to have stupid people like you.
Yeah, but stupid people have always liked me.
Are you kidding me?
Is that right?
Stupid people think I'm hilarious.
You feel like you really get on with stupid people.
I mean, I can get on with all kinds of people.
Is that because you adjust?
Now, you don't adopt a Patois, but do you feel like you adjust?
Are you able to convincingly, what, squelch down your Veltenschon when you need to?
I...
I think it has to do with spending a lot of time trying to understand someone who does not want to make a mental effort but prefers to make an emotional effort.
Prefers to interact with the world strictly on a kind of like immediate emotional basis and not sit and think about even the basic building blocks of what their experience is, but just react to it.
Emotionally and immediately.
And I've tried to – I've spent my – In a simplified version, taking many things at face value without considering – like in my case, one of my obsessions is what is – whether it's a compliment or an insult or, to be honest, guys with axe handles.
Like what's really going on there?
Like what is being said and what's being not said?
The whole time you're telling that story –
all i could see was scared guys like those aren't real tough guys like real real tough guys wouldn't need three of them in axe handles like they were scared and they kept hitting you after they couldn't stop because now their adrenaline was high and they realized they could do it yeah you know that's that's and they weren't listening to me as i was patiently explaining to them all the reasons why me lighting this poster on fire a wasn't their business and b wasn't really a problem there's no reason that you guys couldn't have just found something to do together as a project
Right.
I mean, I think the Venn diagram for that, you certainly didn't have time to draw it, but I mean, like, that would, there was a lot more to it.
Yeah, let's, why don't the four of us take these bats and this lighter and go, like, make a fire somewhere.
Stone soup, right?
Yeah, have some fun.
But in your case, like, if you get, but the dumb people thing, I say dumb, I mean, you know, the...
stupidly abled or uh uh i think it's it's not it feels to me like from a remove it feels like even with my friends who are really really smart and are so into the politics you know they're they're so smart people let me just stipulate but along the line especially in politics there's just so much branding and looking for somebody that says something you can agree with without doing any of your due diligence on how that you know comports with what they've done in their life you know what i mean and
And, like, you're not out there going, like, well, here's a chart showing, like, what I should say this week.
You would be somebody who could go out there and say, like, believe me, I understand being fucked up.
I've been pretty fucked up.
No, that – but also, I mean, all politics is local is the phrase.
And one of the things that I learned growing up in – surrounded by people in politics was that the –
You get so much of what ultimately is national politics, what ultimately is all this, like, what are we going to do with our bodies?
What are we going to do with this?
What are we going to do with that?
These different versions of what we imagine is government.
And it all comes down to, ultimately...
Different ideas of like land use policy.
You know, it all comes down to zoning in a way.
And zoning is a way that you can really get inside your neighbor's heads.
And zoning is a way that you can start to understand why stupid people are so mad all the time.
Because when you're trying to govern a city, you're looking at zoning and you're saying, this is going to be our business district.
This area over here, these are going to be farms.
And if a guy wants to build a skyscraper out here on a farm, we're not going to let him do it because we don't have the infrastructure there.
That's not where you get to build skyscrapers.
We're confining the skyscrapers to downtown.
Well, so the guy that owns the farm,
says, who the hell are those guys downtown to tell me I can't build a skyscraper here?
It becomes not so much about skyscrapers as this larger states' rights issue.
It becomes the states' rights issue.
Not states' rights, but you know what I mean.
It's exactly states' rights.
The states' rights in the coded sense of I'm in the South and nobody's going to fucking tell me what to do.
Right, and that happens everywhere you go.
And watching it here in Seattle, where for a long time there was no zoning, and people were just going out and they were buying...
500 acres of farmland right on the edge of town and they were building a cookie cutter development as fast as they could nail it up until there were no farms left and so the city so everybody's complaining to the city why why are you letting them do this well you're they're ruining the city and so the city says okay uh you can't do that anymore you can't you can't we're going to preserve that farmland
and we're going to concentrate development downtown.
Well, instantly, every farmer within 400 miles of Seattle was infuriated.
Not because most of them ever intended to build a subdivision on their farm, but because the city had just taken away that possibility.
But in a way, it's like passing a law that says it's illegal, it's still legal for you to win a lottery up to $117, but you're not allowed to win a lottery over $15 million.
Right?
Think about that for a second, right?
You go to somebody – you know what?
Here's the thing.
You can keep playing for somebody.
But if you said to somebody, whoa, whoa, whoa, nobody is going to take away my right to win $170 million, millions and millions and millions of dollars, even though there's no fucking way in the entire world that they're ever going to win the lottery.
The fact that you've taken away their right to do that –
And are compelling then to be small potatoes is philosophically at odds with those folks now.
Well, not just that, but you're going to – if you went to each one of these farmers and you sat down in their living room and you said, listen, do you want to see a world where there are no more farms?
They would say, of course not.
Right.
It's just like selling somebody a vacuum cleaner.
You just get them to say yes five times, and somewhere around the seventh or eighth time, they will buy a fucking vacuum cleaner.
They've gotten so used to saying yes.
Would you say that the life of your children is more important than the fat cats on Wall Street?
Oh, my God, yes.
What the fuck does that even mean?
And people use that same sentence to sell both political views.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But if you go to an American and you say,
Do you want to see the death of the family farm in your lifetime?
They're all going to say no.
But if you say, okay, in that case, we have passed a law that you can no longer develop your property.
they're going to say, well, I want that line drawn right on the other side of me.
I want that restriction placed right on the other side of my opportunity to develop my farm and make $100 million, even if I never do it.
How many people would stop to think that if you really wanted to keep family farms alive, you probably shouldn't let fucking skyscrapers be built on them?
Now it's not a family farm anymore.
If you agree, if we agree, you're going to have to make this sacrifice.
We all make sacrifices.
You as a farm owner are going to have to make this sacrifice.
And that's the point at which most people don't want to be the one.
And most people walk away from that encounter not thinking about the big picture, but saying to themselves, and this is the narrative of all conservatism, which is, why am I the one that has to make the sacrifice?
If you listen to anyone on the conservative spectrum talk about being asked to make sacrifices, they all...
They all speak about it in language as though they are the only one who ever had to make a sacrifice.
And so that's the difference between, you know, that is where local politics expands to national politics.
And that is a world I've spent my whole life trying to understand.
So I feel like I could...
I could easily run for office and at least make myself understood to those people because I understand.
I can put myself, any of us can put ourselves in those shoes of feeling like that kid on Christmas morning and all of your brothers and sisters got a present, but the family ran out of money and you're the one that doesn't get one.
Right.
Well, at the risk of falling into this – what Lakoff identifies in that Don't Think of an Elephant book, the conservative model of government as a family or nation as a family, that's a paradigm that was very effective.
Like you don't – I don't need a permission slip to invade Afghanistan or – sorry, Iraq, so forth.
But I mean I think that family thing – think of it this way.
This is where that becomes valuable to me is like –
Imagine, like, if you were a parent and you had, God forbid, you had a bunch of kids under the age of six.
Like, do they get to vote about whether you're going to have M&Ms for dinner?
Like, do they get a vote in that?
Well, what you say to them is, and this gets to mind.
It depends on how liberal you are.
Because I know a lot of – As long as you bring your own bag.
A lot of hippie parents around here in Seattle, they're like, you want to eat a stick of butter for dinner?
As long as it's vegan butter.
It's made out of spider sugar.
No, but I guess what I'm saying is – I'm making a terribly mixed metaphor here.
But what I want as a candidate – and I've seen this.
I feel like sometimes in people like Barney Frank or people not just because of the gay part but because of the straight-talking part, the occasionally straight-talking part.
But I love a politician where – so one of my values, if it is a value, it's at least a value in the sense of I know when I'm fucking up at it, I think, and I definitely see when other people are fucking up at it.
It's like everything that you are – you're green.
OK.
You're green for what cost to you.
You're not green for like how much money it saves you, right?
And this is why my bit with the fucking hotels, you go in and every single thing they do to be green –
It saves them money.
Right.
And it does not save you anything.
Absolutely.
Or more saliently to this point, if they want it to be green, why don't they spend whatever it takes to become completely solar?
Or whatever.
What would it cost?
Not for you just to get more insulation to save you money.
I get it.
But you don't get to call yourself green just because you save money.
You get to call yourself green when you give things up.
including money including money and that's the thing in fucking politics that drives me bananas there's two things in politics first of all politics as pro wrestling it is about as valuable to follow politics as it is to follow pro wrestling if you enjoy it you should do it if you care fucking change it yourself get out there and be a man about it don't worry about twitter you don't have time for twitter you gotta go change the world go
Now here's the second one, and the second one is what the fuck did you give up because you're X?
So if you really care a lot about anything, I want to know what you gave up for that, not just even money.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
What are we going to do for our children in the schools?
It's like I want a politician who can fire straight back at that person and say, well, that's an excellent question.
Let me ask you what you're willing to pay for that.
And let me show you.
Here's the way it works.
We have this much pie, and we can cut it up in all kinds of ways.
But every day, I spend every day figuring out who to disappoint least today while helping the most people.
And just because you stood up there with your little fondie bag and give me some remarks about – I want somebody that can fucking take that person down and say, here's why we do that.
And there have been people like – I think Harvey Milk was kind of like this.
Maybe it's all just gay politicians.
But somebody straight talking who can say, here's what that costs, child, when we do that.
The problem with that though is that you do get politicians like that, like Chris Christie or even Mitt Romney with his 47 percent comments.
It's just that –
As soon as you start, quote unquote, straight talking with people, you start saying things that, you know, the opposition is like, here he goes.
I mean, you see straight, the gift is to be able to say those things in a way that, where you don't end up hanging by your own rope, you know.
Well, and straight talk, straight talk.
First of all, what – I'm going to shut up after this.
Who fucking cares?
Because I just don't care about politics.
But what passes for populism today really bugs me because it is the kind of populism that basically says if there's any other single person in the world that has the tiniest thing that you don't, whether you want it or not –
Like they're a dick and you're awesome and you're a fucking martyr.
And that drives me – that is not populism.
That is just selfish and stupid and provincial behavior.
Like everybody has got problems and when you grow up, you realize that everybody has got different problems and you can't always understand other people's problems.
But that is exactly the kind of attitude.
That opens us up to these charlatans and to all these people who can sell us on that emotion without ever causing us to think a little more.
Well, what did they have to gain by saying those words?
Precisely populism.
That's always been popular.
Really?
You think so?
Andrew Jackson ran a campaign based on even more.
Somebody who drops their G's and tugs their suspenders and says, oh, gosh, oh, golly, and makes it sound like you're a regular dude and I get you.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, populism is, by its very definition, an appeal to the basest emotions of the largest number of uninformed people.
There is no populism that isn't gross, ultimately.
And the problem is – I mean we were all raised to think that one day through education we were going to create a nation of philosopher kings where everybody was going to be hyper-informed and we were all going to sit around reading Alexander Dumas and talking about –
Talking about like the rarefied little adjustments we needed to make to our finely oiled, you know, complete, perfect democracy.
Right.
And in fact, education has, dare I say it, not produced this situation.
And as we hurdle forward, we have a...
We have a mass electronic communication system that has produced the appearance of information.
And we have 200 million people in America who feel like they are informed.
Because they are being told things all day.
They're watching and listening to people telling them things, and they see it with their own eyes, and they believe that they have – I mean, at least in 1830, you had people out plowing the fields, and if you came up to them and said, well, what do you think about this?
They'd say, listen, I've never heard of it.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Like, I have two books in the house, the Bible and the other Bible.
Yeah.
And that's all I know.
But now you walk up to a person with almost no capacity to be interested in things enough to self-educate themselves beyond just the thinnest, like one molecule deep understanding of things.
But they know...
They know one molecule deep about one million things because they're watching it on TV.
They know who won the Oscars.
They know that Scoochie just had a baby or whatever in New Jersey.
Good for Scoochie.
You know, Scoochie is my favorite character on that show.
Sure.
That one with the people.
Yeah, the show about them doing their thing.
And so she just had a baby.
And everybody knows all this stuff.
Oh, yeah.
And Oscar Wilde.
You know, people – Sinek is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
And that's why it reminds me so much of sports is that people who feel extremely well-informed about politics by tuning into the people that they nominally agree with –
And by basically reading the sports scores, it does not make you an effective part of the body politic.
It makes you a sports fan.
It makes you somebody who knows the box scores and who's leading in the National League Eastern Division.
And you know who is two and a half games ahead.
And you know that this guy is going to have ACL surgery.
Well, it doesn't make you a fucking expert.
And it doesn't – you know what I mean?
It's like you need to get past this point of seeing these two pro wrestlers as the answer to any problem.
I mean like it's just not how it works.
And it's – anyway, and I guess the reason I'm so cranky or defensive about it is I need a John Roderick.
I need somebody to make me care about politics and to be willing to bring my bag or for that matter, demand a bag depending on how it works out according to you.
And I defer to you on this.
But it just drives me bananas that I feel like amongst my friends, I'm the one who's the dick because I'm seeing the matrix.
And boy, if you say anything about that to people, they get so mad.
I remember – man, it wasn't very long ago at all in the election cycle.
Really, let's say halfway through, let's say about 2010 when the Democrats got their asses handed them.
And I've said this maybe twice.
How are those hope posters working out for you?
Because he's a fucking human being from Chicago who's a good man.
He seems like a good man, but he's a fucking politic from – he's a politician from Illinois with not that much experience.
People get mad though because –
Sarah Palin kind of said the same thing, and they're not listening to what you're saying.
They're just hearing you say something that sounded like something she said.
Well, what I'm saying is that I would never have a poster of a lawyer with the word love on it because that's not why I hire a lawyer.
Thank you.
I don't go out and hire a hitman for the mob because he talks about his feelings.
Like I want a president – I want fucking – well, accepting Vietnam.
I want a Lyndon Johnson in there.
I want somebody with a good Rolodex who knows how to kick somebody's ass and knows how to order a pair of pants so his balls are comfortable.
That's what I want.
Except for Vietnam.
Vietnam was a problem.
I just want to stipulate.
As we get deeper and deeper into this experiment of pure democracy, and America is an ongoing experiment.
It's 200 years in, and it keeps sort of rewriting its own rule book, but it is unprecedented in human history.
That there was ever a nation like this that was ever governed like this.
And as we move forward, we keep thinking that America is a thing that once was perfect and we are corrupting it, or America was on a path to being perfect and we have gone off the path.
But in fact, America is this petri dish that all the world is watching, and the world isn't watching... Has been for 200 years.
Has been for 200 years.
Holy shit, I can't believe they pulled that off for another five years.
Right, and the world is watching it not just in admiration, but the world takes...
Yeah.
And the further we go up this one particular path, the more everybody starts to say, boy, you know, oligarchy...
wasn't that bad in contrast to pure democracy and that is just that's a course adjustment you know we 50 years ago lived in a kind of oligarchical system where uh we had people like Lyndon Johnson who were taking care of things and we trusted FDR and we we trusted we trusted this sort of group of who were who were almost all like incredibly competent scumbags
yeah right i mean but that's i mean the but you know what i'm saying though it's like i think they're heroic i think they're heroic people but like once you know about how that sausage got made like you know they did some shit yeah well but you think about you think about somebody like gandhi who was incredibly competent and not a scumbag right he worked his whole life to free india from british oppression oppression sorry i'm missing a tooth
That's right.
Literally, the day he achieved independence from Britain, all of a sudden, Pakistan wants independence from India, and they're plunged into what is effectively a civil war and a religious war that persists to this day, and it has become like the nuclear flashpoint of the world.
And all of that is the whole India-Pakistan problem.
And one might argue the problem with Afghanistan is Pakistan and India fighting kind of a proxy war in Afghanistan.
And that whole problem is a result of Gandhi freeing India from British oppression.
So even the best...
even the best system, even the man with the most integrity in human history cannot produce a situation that doesn't dissolve into, in this case, not just Muslim versus Hindu, but, you know, and I'm not saying we should return to the Raj.
I'm not saying that freeing India from British oppression was a bad plan.
It's just that
Now the cats are out of the bag and people are going to do what they're going to do.
But you're also getting to another big problem, at least in my estimation, which is to never – people who – maybe people who aren't as fucked up and liberal artsy as me who don't take into account how many – how life is a tile puzzle.
There's like one little space.
Yeah.
And you want to get that in order from like 1 to 15.
You got to move a lot of fucking tiles around and it's super inconvenient.
And if your only goal in life is to make sure that number four always stays in the upper right-hand corner, there's going to be so much work involved in moving all those tiles around.
And if you sit around thinking, I want four to always stay there and don't you dare fucking touch it.
Well, that's not how it's going to work.
Everybody else wants their tile someplace too.
There are some people who just want the tiles to move.
They don't really care what the numbers are.
Those are called lawyers.
To get four back up to that corner, you're going to have to move all around the floor.
It might have to go somewhere real far, and you might have to just shut the fuck up and let somebody else be in four for a little while if you ever want to have it back.
It's like solving a Rubik's Cube.
Again, to me, this gets to this really cynical – I don't know.
It's a weak spot that a lot of us have in America because we all think we're smart and special, which is that if we have – a lot of us, if we find somebody who will tell us that your number four tile will always get to stay in the upper right-hand corner and I will defend all the people who think your tile should move.
You're going to misunderstand so many things about how the world works, setting aside the fact that there's still, you know, what, 14 other people who want their tiles to move.
And so – and this is why I say, well, I – and green is one that drives me crazy because I think it's so fucking cynical to say that.
And people say – and my question always is, well, green at the cost of what, right?
And in this instance, you could say to somebody – you basically – you treat them like a child.
You treat them like a child.
You treat them almost like – in my case, like a toddler, right?
With my daughter –
Three in the afternoon, I come home, if I'm lucky, and we get to hang out.
And there's this whole list of things that we could do that come up.
Well, you know, we could play some Wii.
We could go to the library.
We could read this comic.
Hey, you know, we have enough time that we could go to the Embarcadero or, like, go to the Ferry Building.
We could.
And there's all these things, and they present themselves a little bit over time.
We could get a chocolate chip cookie.
We could play in the backyard.
But the thing is, at 7 o'clock, when we still haven't left the house, she still thinks we're going to get a chocolate cookie at the Embarcadero.
And I'm saying you heard – it's like blah, blah, ginger.
All you heard is all the stuff that you wanted to hear, and you did not hear any of the parts about the really important part because maybe I said it wrong.
But what I really needed to say is we need to get the fuck out of the house by 3.15 to do anything, and now I'm the dick because I'm not going to give you a cookie.
Well, that's politics to me today is everybody hears all the ways that they're going to get to call themselves green and get their vegan meals, but they're not willing to pony up the dough to do it.
You know what?
I bought two CFL light bulbs last week for 99 cents.
It's all green now.
I don't mean to suggest that this is applicable to your relationship with your daughter, but this is why a punch in the nose is such an effective problem solver.
And they just took that away from you.
You woke up one day, and that was off the table.
Not for me.
They took that away from us.
I'm sorry.
They took it away from the people who might have that coming.
Off the table.
Because there's often a guy who's standing on his number four square...
And he's like, I ain't moving.
My family's been in the top right-hand corner since 06.
And at a certain point, you realize you cannot appease this person.
You cannot make it right.
They will never be satisfied.
And you still need to move that thing out of the top right corner.
You need to occupy square number four.
And ultimately, in times past, a punch in the nose was what was warranted.
You just punch this guy in the nose, and then it's like,
It'll sure give you some clarity, like having your head set while you're tripping.
It'll just give you a little bit of quick clarity, don't you think?
But it's the thing about imminent domain, or it's the thing about oligarchy.
At a certain point, we elect people because we trust that we don't have all the facts, and that these people are going to be more informed than we are, and they're going to make decisions on our behalf.
And in America now, we elect people, and then we second-guess their every move, because we all think that we're the smartest people in the world.
Because we heard there might be a cookie coming, even though we didn't understand how much was involved before we ever got near the cookie.
Or the guy got elected because he promised us a cookie and now wears our cookie.
Hope, John, hope.
The fact is that we can't all manage these things, and we hire people, basically, to be our representatives to go figure this stuff out for us.
And the problem is that we used to at least sometimes hire people that we thought were better than we are.
but in america is better than anybody now john that's right in america there is no one better than than anybody who just wants to stand up and say i'm the best yeah and so we hire people to go to public office for us who are you know who believe that the that the world was created in seven days or who believe that all you have to do is implement a two percent across the board tax and all of our bills will go away or people that
you know, that believe that L. Ron Hubbard got messages from space.
Okay, easy, easy, easy.
No, listen, we got, I'm sorry, please continue.
No, no, no, it's all right.
I just want to make sure, I just want to make sure that, well, there's two things we have to come back to.
If we don't think we have time for hobos and bums, we should say that.
But what I want to ask you is a two-part question.
Answer it, you know, as you do.
But...
If you had your druthers today, if you knew in your heart or thought in your heart, maybe you're just going to push a rock up a hill.
But let's say you are going to run for office.
At what level will you run for office?
And given where you're running, can you give me some basic planks in the John Roderick platform?
Yeah.
I'm just going to say to start out, I don't want to piss in your punch bowl, but I think the whole idea of you even conceding that you need to be elected for something is a goddamn holocaust.
I think a man with a plan like yours, a man, a plan, a canal, a super train, I think it's fucking depressing as hell that you would even consider asking somebody to do you the favor of voting for you.
The thing is, though, that if you get elected, say, for instance, mayor of Seattle, you have instantaneously all these agencies, all these people working for you who are trying to run the city efficiently, but also are kind of open to reform.
I mean, people are used to a new mayor coming in.
And it's infrastructure, but you can always clean house.
You do a little housecleaning.
I think that, you know, I don't want to say that being mayor of Seattle is a dead-end job, but I think that... See, now that's the kind of dependent clause that gets a man in office.
I think that running for mayor of Seattle would be a fascinating journey to go on.
And I think being mayor of Seattle, given what I know about the city, which is everything...
There are some changes I would make.
There are a lot of things about the way Seattle runs that I would leave alone.
I would just let Seattle run.
But there are quite a few.
I mean, there are relationships you have to maintain.
And our present mayor is very effective.
He's a hippie.
And so he has hippie values, and that squares with what everybody around here does.
If you want someone selfish and duplicitous, that's a good place to look.
But the thing about Seattle is there are a lot of people in Seattle who aren't hippies, and I think that they have a tendency to run roughshod over the mayor, to not respect him.
It's like there are too many bike lanes kind of arguments now.
It's like there really are there too many bike lanes and his problem is that he believes that we should have more bike lanes and he believes that that is self-evident.
He doesn't have to explain it.
There are not – so he's saying there's not enough streets that have a bike lane or we need like five across on this road.
I think our present mayor would be gratified if there were only bikes.
That's a fascinating conversation to have.
So I think that I would run for mayor of Seattle.
Okay.
But ultimately, my father will not rest.
My ancestors will not rest until I'm a United States senator.
And that's a harder job to acquire.
I don't even know how to frame this.
But, you know, that is – yeah, John, that is a great goal.
You are aging a little bit.
I think that's actually more than you may want to admit is going to be your – people could probably care less about your tripping.
But, I mean, you're pretty old to get into office at this point.
Well, it's true.
I'm pretty old to start at the bottom.
Unless you do something heroic recently.
Well, I mean, Sonny Bono got elected –
to the united states yeah but he you know he wrote needles and pins well see yeah that's what so he did car parts that's a i have always felt that the that for me the my my entree into the jobs that i've always wanted which are united states senator uh professor of uh history emeritus
You want to be, I'm sorry, that's so awesome.
You want to be a professor of history emeritus.
Yes.
Would you, if you had your druthers, I want to hear your third one too, but if you could, you would skip over the ignominious career of being a professor of history and go straight to being emeritus?
Correct.
Correct.
I have no interest in being a professor of history teaching survey courses.
That is so forward thinking.
I want to be a professor of history emeritus.
It's a lot of work.
Yeah.
Or.
Or.
A retired general of the army.
Yeah.
And in order to get to those three jobs, the standard model is that you start at local level and you work your way up through the ranks.
Here's the thing.
You might have to be an assistant alderman before you're an alderman.
Then you become an alderman.
Then you're going to be a lawyer for a couple years, become a lobbyist.
Then you might run for mayor.
Yeah.
I'm not interested in any of those things.
Can I just say, John, no offense to anybody in politics, but that's just undignified.
Having to work your way up.
What are you, in elementary school?
That's ridiculous.
I don't need to know where the bodies are buried.
I'll have people for that.
Using Sonny Bono as a model, or the guy who played Cletus on Dukes of Hazzard.
I think he's thinking of Cooter.
The guy who played Cooter.
His real name, by the way, is Joseph Vagina.
You just parlay your fame in a different vernacular, and then at a certain point you start saying, you know, you pull an Arnold Schwarzenegger, you start talking like you know about stuff, and enough people go, oh, that sounds reasonable, that pretty soon you're the governor of California.
He's not a bad example.
I think he's a better example than Sonny Bono.
Sonny Bono seems like whatever.
But Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, say what you will about that guy.
And there's a lot to say about that guy.
But you know what?
He worked really, really hard.
Or Jesse the Body Ventura.
Well, that's a lot of work being a wrestler, a lot of travel.
But I mean, you know, you go back and read a little bit about his bio.
He worked really.
I mean, sure, he took steroids and stuff, but he still, he worked really, really hard.
He cut off his eyebrow with a razor blade about a million times.
You get paid a little extra for that.
It does heal.
So that's my plan.
I feel like rather than – You're going to work inside the system.
This is the part I'm struggling to understand.
You're going to work inside of an electoral system where people who have no business voting are theoretically the one that are going to give or take a job from you.
Boy, John, that's... Because I admire the system.
Ultimately, all the stuff that I say that sounds like I'm interested in running a monarchy, basically, I really admire the American system with all its faults.
Absolutely.
Let me ask you this.
I don't know even if there's a way to do this.
I don't know how you apply for this.
How would you feel about being a retired senator?
Here's my thinking.
You could become – let's say you skip over being a senator because let's be honest.
It's a lot of work and you're not going to get it.
But if you were a retired senator, you could be – look at Jimmy Carter, right?
Right.
Not a senator, but in this case, I think he – it's become conventional wisdom that his fairly undistinguished term in office has almost been outshone by the massive amount of good stuff he's done since then.
So I think it's time for you to put your past behind you, talk openly about the fact that you've done some kind of silly things in the past, and get past this whole electoral process, which is, as I say, in my opinion, a little indignified, and you go straight to being an elder non-statesman.
Well, for instance, David Petraeus, the former general of the army.
General Petraeus.
Who is right now director of the Central Intelligence Agency and who is being courted to become the president of Princeton University.
Phew.
Now, this is a career path that I would like to inject myself into right at this point.
That's opportunities you're not going to get until you've had a job and left it.
Right.
So he was generally in the Army for many years.
You have to write a book before you can call yourself an author, right?
You've got to be a Marine before you can be a Marine.
And I don't want to – whatever Petraeus did when he was a lieutenant –
whoever's boots he shined to get promoted to captain, I'm not interested in shining those boots.
And frankly, you know, all the wars he waged there during the Bush administration, you know, take them or leave them.
But now to be retired general of the army, director of the CIA.
That's a nice position, John.
Considering a move over to be president of Princeton University.
People would want to interview you.
Boy, that would be so good.
Are you familiar with the concept of the CLEP test?
Do you know what CLEP is?
No.
C-L-E-P.
It's a college-level examination program, and basically the idea is if you go in at certain kinds of schools – not the kind of schools you and I would go to – but at some schools, you can go in and take a test called the CLEP and say, you know what?
I'm going to skip over all of these distribution requirements because I can demonstrate.
It's kind of like a smart person –
GED.
Like you go in and go, you know what?
I really don't need to take composition 101.
You see, you take a CLEP.
And so you skip straight over the stuff that all the civilians have to take, and it's called CLEPing out.
So I wonder, I don't know if this could be part of the SuperTrain program, or if it's something you might want to initiate as one of your own pilot programs internally, but I think you should be able to CLEP over certain jobs.
Just CLEP out of having ever been in the Army, but still have people call me general?
god that sounds good general roderick the problem with that though is what my freshman year in college they gave a writing test to the entire freshman class to place us somewhere in the you know it was one of those writing tests where you write four essays and they and you get a score of one through five or something like that and that's how they know how how smart you are what could possibly go wrong
And I was like, this is going to be great.
This is amazing.
I can't wait to take this test.
And I sat and I wrote a big disquisition.
I forget what the topic was, some dumb thing, but I ignored it completely.
And I wrote a big disquisition on how everybody needed to just adopt the 15 planks of Roderickism and the world would be made a better place.
And I got a zero out of five on my writing exam.
And the kid that I thought was the dumbest kid in our whole dorm, the kid that spoke as though he had been, which I knew him to have been, hit on the head 1,000 times with a lacrosse racket.
He got a five.
And I got a zero.
And I was like, mm-hmm.
So that's how it works.
That's how you make a supervillain and shit like that.
So my sense is I would try and clip out of having ever been in the army and go right to being director of CIA.
And I would get a zero because somehow I wouldn't have...
There's got to be something where all of these things that you look at as deficits, and let's be honest.
The world and the body politic looks at as deficits.
Some of this stuff, saying what you said so candidly about the city in which you would –
theoretically govern yes i could see how that could cause problems but it's a shame that you can't get some kind of you know like like with clapping that you can't get some kind of special credit for what you've survived and what you've put other people through because it seems to me you know petraeus i mean i'm sure it wasn't all just you know uh beer and skittles he probably had to do some shit some lbj kind of shit right yeah i think he did
I don't know.
I don't know.
It's very troubling to me, John.
You know what I think it is, Merlin?
And you're ahead of me on this.
You're aware of this in a way that I'm only now just, it's just dawning on me.
But it might be that we have clipped our way into having a podcast where we talk to each other back and forth.
And that that is the thing that 25 years from now, people will be like, oh, man, if I could just clip into a podcast.
Oh, you're saying we're generals of a kind.
We're already there.
How the fuck did those guys get a podcast?
Right, right.
We are effectively... How is he on the board of ExxonMobil?
You know, that kind of thing, right?
Exactly.
Boy, we make it look so easy, don't we?
We really do.
You show up, you got a broken fucking tooth, you're eating a sandwich.
You talk about getting your ass kicked with an ass handle.
With an ass handle?
You get your ass kicked with... I gotta pee so bad.
An hour and a half later, one of the guys says, I really have to pee, and then the show's over.
You know, I already peed once, and I filled a liter bottle.
I almost drank it a couple minutes ago.
While we were sitting here talking, you peed?
Well, I mean, I muted it.
Oh, my God.