Ep. 89: "Transparity"
hello hi john hi merlin how's it going good to get all your stuff done oh god i'm winded yeah i know it gets it gets harder i was all over town today yeah tell me about it what'd you do i was rolling all over i had meetings
I had a lunch meeting.
I had another meeting.
You took a lunch meeting?
I took a lunch meeting.
I did a TV interview.
I was over here.
I was over there.
John, as we record this, this is, I believe, our last episode before the election.
Oh, can that be right?
No, I think there's one more.
Isn't next Monday still before the election?
Is it?
You should know this.
So were you electioneering today?
Wait a minute.
Let me see here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Next Monday is we're still on the right side.
Just on the off chance you do decide not, well, if you decide to run for city council, I would go ahead and put that on the calendar just so you don't.
Yeah, well, I feel like my run for political office would have to be next election.
But I mean, certainly any listeners are welcome to write me in and maybe we'll find out how far reaching our podcast goes.
Two years goes by.
So we've done this show for like two years now.
That's right.
That's right.
If we had started two years ago, maybe I'd be rounding out my campaign right now.
I had a political meeting today.
One of my meetings was political.
I would love to hear about it.
I will tell you privately.
I will cut all this out.
I worry privately that...
When you are, you're, you're moving amongst certain corridors of power right now.
And I worry a little bit that you're saying too much.
Are you okay with everything you're saying?
Well, this is the thing I, I, I have increasingly been, I've been having a lot of discussions with people and they keep saying like, well, I mean, uh, you know, you're certainly a, you're certainly in the running for this or that sort of, if not elected job, then like politically appointed job.
You could, I could be hired right now.
In other words, uh,
in a in a job in a political job you could be the recipient of some political largesse some largesse that's right i could i could be a member i could get some patronage some political patronage that'd be sweet but but increasingly it has forced me just like all this involvement in politics the last year has forced me to clarify my feelings
And this is the strange thing because, you know, we always say to one another, like, well, just decide what you want and do it.
Like, why don't you just tell me what you want?
That is a very common thing that we say.
And we direct that energy at kids and teenagers too.
Like, what do you want to do with your life?
Just pick the thing you want to do and do it.
And the actual fact is that a very small number of us know what the fuck we want.
And I think the vast majority of us have no idea what we like even, let alone what we want.
We barely know what we think we want.
Exactly.
And the whole reason that we have like a 5, 10 or perhaps 35-year-old idea of what we want to do that we dare not actually mentally update.
That we're terrified to update, terrified to even open the closet door and look at our idea of what we think we want.
And that's the, you know, the more I think about it, that's the reason that there are newspapers and websites.
I mean, all these people telling us what we want are the reason we go to those things is that we're trying to finally read something that explains to us what we want.
And then I realize all those people writing books.
about writing like these articles about what it is we should want or what it is that that they think we should want they don't know what they want either they're just churning out this you know like here's the new thing here's the thing like is this what you want is this what you want and it's all people just trying to decide for themselves what they want nobody has the first idea
So I'm looking at all of these.
So as I got, as I waded into politics and I was confronted with these questions of like, well, are you going to go with the guy that you said you were going to go with?
Who is going to lose?
Or are you going to step into the winner's circle and go with the guy that you don't know that's going to win?
And I was like, what do I want?
Now I feel bad.
I felt good a week ago when everybody seemed to want me.
But now that I have to make a choice, now I feel bad again.
And as these options keep piling up and as people are like, well, you know, Mr. Man, the Mr. Guy in Charge was talking about you the other day and he's thinking that you might...
I'm realizing that whatever it is I have spent my life building...
It is a thing that I have built precisely so that I would never sell it to somebody for security or, or even power, right?
Like I do not want to take a job.
I don't care what job it is.
I don't want someone to give me a job.
If I wanted someone to give me a job, I could have spent the last 20 years training myself to be given a job, right?
And instead, I have spent that 20 years training myself to never, ever, ever work for somebody or be given anything.
And as I'm sort of cutseling up to these people and they're cutseling up to me, the reason that they're cutseling up to me is that I clearly like I have something interesting that they want a piece of.
And I don't think it is so much that I have a constituency because that's unclear to everybody what that is.
I mean, the first thing they want to know is like, how many people do you have that would follow you into the breach?
And I'm like, anywhere between four and 40,000.
Let me put on this cloak and I'll wander through the camp the night before.
I think the king's pretty cool.
What do you think?
Holding up your finger is a fake mustache.
Hey, I think this battle's going to go pretty great.
Don't you?
Don't you guys?
I hear the odds are on our side for Agincourt.
But rather, what they want is...
You know, I think what interests these politicians is exactly the thing that I have been working on, which is that I have a voice.
And the second I took a job would be the beginning of a process of trying to quiet and tame my voice.
And if somebody in politics wants to give me a job as their community outreach liaison or their rock and roll United Nations representative or whatever it is, immediately there would be somebody who said, well, listen, you got to tone down the super train talk because it's kind of scaring some of the people that are...
you know, that are really voting against the zip line project and, and, and thus would begin the death of me.
Yeah.
And so I don't know exactly what to do.
I mean, I, I, I, I'm, I'm honest with myself that I, that I like this attention.
I like being taken out.
I like the, I was driven around today in a car that was piloted by an undercover detective and,
And I was like, this is cool.
The driver of this vehicle is carrying a gun that they are licensed to use.
If somebody steps in front of this car, we could...
turn the sirens on.
It could also be because maybe if John steps out of line, they need somebody with some stopping power.
It starts friendly enough.
It starts killing hobos.
Everybody knows that I carry a piece of piano wire in my jacket.
They're not going to let me sit behind the driver knowing that I could pull a...
Hello, Carlo.
How are you, Carlo?
Everybody knows about John and his ersatz garage.
So I honestly don't know.
I don't know how vulnerable I am to being co-opted because when I actually think about what I want, you know, and this was my mom's counsel.
I told you this, right?
That she said, you would hate running for office and you would hate being elected.
And because she walked my dad through a half a dozen campaigns and was in politics all through the fifties and sixties.
And I was like, come on who, you know, like I'm, I bring something to the table.
And she was like, bullshit.
You would get, you know, you hate PowerPoint demonstrations and you think you're going to get, you're going to sit on the city council.
Do you know that it would be eight hours of PowerPoint demonstrations every day of your life?
I was like, well, but I mean, I'd be the reform candidate.
She's like, you don't, you are, you're just so far up a tree.
You don't even know.
And she said, you know, yeah, sure.
You're the reform candidate.
And you get in there and you start thinking that you're reforming things.
And all you're doing is pissing off all the people who spent hours making this PowerPoint demonstration.
Like you're the, you're the one that, that puts his feet up on the desk and mimes that you're snoring.
Who is going to be impressed by that?
Like, everybody's going to be mad because this is their job.
There's nobody who's making a diagram to figure out how to get more of that guy.
No, no, nobody wants it.
We need more idea men in here.
Everybody wants it when the idea man is out of the picture.
You know, like, if you are outside the corral and you're out there throwing pomegranates over the fence...
Every once in a while, somebody's like, oh, that guy, he's hilarious.
Or, you know, let's bring him in for a second and see what he has to say.
But you don't bring your bushel of pomegranates into the corral.
I mean, that's... I'm sorry, I'm quoting somebody there, but...
I got a strong feeling on this.
Yeah.
And it's – I have to imagine – This is kind of right in your wheelhouse of philosophy.
It's really in my wheelhouse.
When you talk about the work stuff, I mean I realize like how much I –
I don't like working for other people.
How can I put this?
Here's a big pattern.
A big pattern is that when somebody gives you what appears to be power or gives you what appears to be largesse or anything that feels better than what you've got, they're figuring out the least amount of effort, including money, including power, including square footage, the least amount of anything possible to keep you neutralized.
And I don't want to be gender normative, but I mean that in the true sense of the word.
They want to figure out how to – some of you can still be valuable, but think about it like a chessboard.
Or think about it in terms of companies and the kinds of acquisitions that they do.
A lot of times they'll acquire a company just so nobody else can.
Just to kill it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Well, I see this in relationships too.
It's always a question of like you cannot cede power to someone else.
Yeah, even within even in a couple's relationship, you cannot say like, I hereby give you the power to have me be in love with you.
Like, you know what I mean?
You can any power that you cede to somebody else you retain.
Well, nobody gives anybody enough power that they could choose to unseat them.
Right.
That's one way to look at it.
So, you know, and I'm trying not to sound cynical about this, but it's one reason I have not looked forward to going and having a job with somebody because the job is a way of saying, like, here's somebody who has a certain amount of value to me and I need to give them just enough of something or some things to make it make them need me.
in some ways.
And so when I say neutralize, I, you know, I, you know, you, you don't want to give, you know, so I don't know.
I can't speak to politics, but just in terms of jobs, I mean, people will sell you just these big dreams about how great this thing is going to be.
And they're all into you for this five minutes or whatever, you know, and they bring you in and they give you just enough that now, so let's say they give you a job with
you know, let's say somebody gives you a job and offers you $500,000 a year or something that's, that's most of us would look at and go, wow, that's really a lot of money sold.
I'll take it.
Yeah, exactly.
But now you need that job.
Like you're going to start spending on a, like we said before, you're going to start spending on a $500,000 a year basis pretty quickly.
You're going to need that job.
And, you know, just to get back to whether it's the Godfather or the wire or whatever your flavor, this is at some point, you know, it's going to be the day of your daughter's wedding and somebody is going to come to you and they're going to want something from you.
And you're not going to be in a position to say, well, you hired me because I'm an idea man and a troublemaker and I make fun of PowerPoint.
Well, that's not what they brought you in for.
I'm not saying this is you, but I suspect it's a similar impulse that we share where whenever somebody starts talking too big with me, I know it's bullshit.
I really admire people who say like, hey, here's this much money to do this thing.
That's what it's worth.
That's really cool.
Or I want you to interview me for your website because it will help sell copies of my book.
Oh, my God.
I love you.
I love the honesty of your cynicism.
Instead of going, hey, man, I love you.
Well, what's interesting about the conversation – What you really want, you want this thing that I've got and we find what amounts to a proper price for it.
And then we both move on.
But I mean, the thing is, when you're in politics, it seems to me that a lot of it is about neutralizing people or introducing enough fear that they would never think of going to the other guy, for example.
Well, what is appealing about it is that in politics, you are offered, like the non-cynical side of it is that you are offered the opportunity to help people.
In a way that is substantive.
Like all the stuff that we sit around arguing with all the time, like how do we deal with the homeless problem?
The homeless problem is a problem.
And we can, we have the, we have the benefit of historical, you know, retrospective insight to say like, wow, that whole decision to close the asylums in 1970 was ultimately like not, not very well thought out.
Like maybe the asylums were ripe with abuse.
Maybe they were terrible environments, but we didn't really think what would happen to those people.
And the rest of us,
are in a position of, what, writing angry letters to the editor?
Or maybe, like, going to public meetings and banging our shoe on the table?
But the reality is that the homeless problem in San Francisco and in Seattle, like, massively affect the quality of life in the city.
It's a massive undertaking to solve it.
But some of these people that are offering me, like, and there has been no offer, but, like, cultivating me,
grooming you grooming me they are actually in a position and not just in a position from the standpoint of like i am in the position of power but they are interested in a solution to the homeless problem they are interested in it for the right reasons and they have worked their lives to put themselves into a position where they actually have a shot at trying something new and and the same is true of the schools and the same is true of the of the
public transit you know they are not they are not in politics exclusively for cynical reasons they are they actually are interested in these things as i am interested in making a huge difference as i am and they actually are in a position to do it and the question for me is like well i mean at lunch today i spent an hour and a
power grids, water transit, homelessness, and we're carrying on a casual, friendly conversation, and yet he is ultimately the person who is in charge of it.
And I'm like...
Wow.
This is extraordinary, both in terms of access, but also in terms of opportunity.
Because he knows, he's a super smart guy and knows that the homelessness problem is not intractable.
It does have, there are solutions.
And you have to just get it, you have to get the ball out.
down the field through the... I'm starting to talk like a total asshole.
You have to get down the field through the goalpost.
Let me ask you a question.
You're familiar with cricket.
If you have a test match... Listen, I know the rules of rugby are... Let me start over.
Homelessness is like a cricket match.
Homelessness is more of a scrum.
You throw one guy up in the air and rubber buttons.
You have to run backwards holding a ball that is not shaped like a ball.
It's time for some fresh ideas.
So the appeal of it, there's this tremendous appeal that when I think cynically,
I call power.
But the reality is that the people who are best at this job have an idealism and are idea people ultimately, but they're also good at sitting in a meeting and not looking bored.
And the ones that are brilliant at it are good at getting 20 people to agree about something and then they share the credit in such a way that nobody remembers whose idea it was.
Mm-hmm.
Everybody feels like it was their idea.
And I am recognizing in myself that my deficits are that I'm not good at that.
If I get 25 people to agree on something, I'll be goddamned that they don't all feel that I chapped their ass or that their eyebrows aren't singed.
And, and the really gifted people are, you know, they, they do it in this jujitsu where you're just like, I don't, I don't even remember that his hand on my wallet, but, but now I'm like kind of being ushered out of the room on a, on a floating carpet.
You're dancing around this, but I'm not trying to say that politics is a con, but a con in general, there are cons in every aspect of our life.
To make something effective in my house, it helps a lot to make it seem like it was my idea.
The way that a con works is it's a confidence game.
That's what a con is.
If you ask somebody to do something as a favor, they're much more likely to do it for you because now they actually trust you more, weirdly enough.
Yeah.
Well, and I think we have come from an era like politics and government when we were kids was still a business of being in a room with a bunch of people who were trying to match each other highball glass to highball glass.
And that small group of men...
white men all knew where one another's bodies were buried.
And that was the trust that enabled them to get business done.
Because it was like, oh, yeah, the judge, you know, the judge, I happen to know that the judge likes little boys.
And so the judge knows I know.
And I'm going to try and get his approval on this, you know, this project where I'm going to tear down the old folks home and build an oil well.
And the judge is going to sign off on it.
And that's how business gets done in America.
And that's how it was when we were kids.
And there has been a long and ugly transition.
But I don't think that's how government gets done anymore.
Certainly local governments, Seattle, San Francisco, like all these cities that have progressive mayors who are gradually, incrementally kind of changing the way business is done.
it's, it's very much less.
I mean, I remember going to vetoes restaurant with my dad and him walking down the bar and he knew every guy in the place.
And it was just like, that's, you know, that's a superior court judge.
That's a U S congressman.
That is a, you know, that's the, the publisher of the newspaper and they were all there and they were all drinking together and that doesn't exist anymore.
Right.
And in place of that,
There's a lot more transparency.
Everybody, everybody is, did I just say transparency?
Yeah, I wrote that down.
That's good.
There's a lot more transparency, but there's also, I mean, like there's also a lot, there are a lot fewer cigarettes.
There are a lot, there's a lot less chronic alcoholism.
Yeah.
And a lot more accountability, I guess.
And I believe I'm actually starting to think that progressive politics are actually capable of making things.
It's a hopeful position.
I just wonder if I have the mettle for it.
Well, you definitely have the medal for a certain kind of place in that.
I mean it would be really oversimplified to say that that means you should be an elected official.
There are things that you could do working with elected officials where you could do something really amazing that really taps into the stuff that you're really great at.
But I like your point about there's all kinds of things that we just – the other one that I'm always thinking about, we talked about this before, but like think about all the guys in that room too, all the congressmen and the newspaper publisher.
Like there's a pretty good chance they were all in the army at some point too.
Mm-hmm.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
If not in World War II Korea or Vietnam, at least, they were probably in the service.
I'll bet you a majority of the people in that notional bar or meeting or whatever had all been in the service at one point or another, which might sound silly to generation Facebook, but that used to be really meaningful.
There was a lot of common ground in having gone through that together, having been through those wars and that kind of stuff.
It's incredibly true.
And I mean, I can't tell you how many times I have sat at a table with those guys while they talked about the war without talking about the war.
They, you know, they would sit there and argue and bicker.
and it would be, and I, and I'd be sitting kind of listening and rolling my eyes and then I would realize they were talking about the war and I, and I hadn't, and I didn't get it, you know, because they were non-demonstrative and they weren't actually talking about the war, but that is, that was the subtext and the, and the, and the glue of,
The glue that bound them to one another, but it separated them from their wives and it separated them from everybody else.
It is the exclusive club that we as a culture have spent 40 years trying to dismantle.
And like emptying the asylums, we have dismantled it more or less.
There are still the Dick Cheneys and their world, and surely there are all kinds of places in America that are absolutely still run by the sons of those guys in the same method.
But looking at Seattle, you cannot say anymore that just because you are a Nordstrom or even a Paul Allen that you necessarily have carte blanche.
Because as a culture, we have spent 40 years putting in place all these boards and all these referenda, and there is nothing that escapes the attention of the larger people, you know?
And for good and ill, there was an interesting article about the local schools here.
And the school that was the lowest, crappiest, least performing elementary school has just had an incredible bump in their test scores in the last year because they put in place this renegade principal, renegade lady principal,
who brought with her the novel idea that you should take the underperforming math students and put them in a different group.
I mean, same classroom, but just put them together in a group together.
and put the high-performing math students together in a different group.
That's pretty radical.
That notion is actually incredibly radical because education policy over the last 20-plus years has been that that dividing of students...
Like does not help the bad students or the underperforming students.
It just excludes them.
And generally is, you know, ultimately you can make correlations between that and economics.
And it turns out those are all the poor students.
And the teacher is just teaching to the smart students and the poor students just end up getting flushed out.
But it also must depend a lot on the somewhat obvious thing that gets left out, which is that, well, I always think that phrase from The Simpsons, you know, no, you're in the Brown reading group.
When you get moved into the Brown reading group, I think the kind of the grace note over the years has been that
and you're going to get the not very good teacher and the not very good textbooks and the leaky classroom.
It would be another thing to say, we're going to take the kids that aren't doing that great in math, we're going to put them in here with our best teacher, and they're going to get 20% more resources than the best group.
And I think that's what this principal is doing.
But she's really bucking the trend, and there are a lot of people who are kind of rattling the bars, saying, separating students out...
is, you know, maybe in a specific instance is fine, but in general it is non-progressive education policy.
And one of the interesting things they quote in this article is that there was this kid who quite naturally, when you think about it, thought that one-sixth was more than one-fifth.
Like that makes sense, right?
If no one has explained to you the concept very well, you would naturally think one sixth was more than one fifth.
I mean, just as much as like 0.9 sounds like more than one.
Right.
If you don't get it.
And so this kid, and obviously he also was probably shy or English as a second language or whatever.
So he doesn't ask.
He doesn't raise his hand and ask the question.
He doesn't want to feel dumb.
So he's sitting in the class.
Trying to digest all these concepts based on not understanding the fundament of it.
And across the room, you've got a kid like me who wanted the teacher to just shut up, please, and let me have the book.
And if they had on the first day of fifth grade said, if you get through this book as fast as you can, then we'll give you a harder book.
to get through on your own as fast as you can and i would have just been like thank you god and would have tore through that fifth grade math book in a in a month you know and why you wouldn't why you wouldn't be able to why why education policy would would try to mandate that those two students be taught at the same speed that is that's the dark underbelly of not not to get ping pong um
of uh of progressivism you know the the the forced equalization and anyway trying to reform those things those well-intentioned policies are like trying to solve the homeless problem by busing everybody around the town you know or giving them vouchers or trying to treat them in emergency rooms rather than
just have some low-income housing bills but i mean also i mean as long as i'm assuming my mantle of guy who clearly understands what caused it but doesn't know how to fix it it's very it's very i think it's very common or not unusual in america for people to feel that because we can clearly see the antecedents for why something got a certain way then we must just as clearly understand how to solve it and the example of ronald reagan you know
The way I understand it, it sounds like the way you've heard it, which is we decided, hey, how about we just start cleaning out all the asylums?
And we take all these people who have been sitting around getting free lithium for years.
Let's put them on the street and just see how that goes.
And now you got –
Something something San Francisco, for example.
But boy, you talk about a hard problem to solve.
My God, homelessness.
I mean to anybody who comes here from Missouri and goes, wow, San Francisco really doesn't care about homeless people.
Look at all these homeless people.
It's – that is such a complicated problem.
I would say probably more complicated than education, mostly primary school education stuff because there are so many reasons that that problem has gotten to where it is.
It might be a 40-year-old problem from its main antecedent, but what we can do to change about that and why those people are still there –
It is so much more complicated than anybody can even begin to imagine.
And it's hard to even have that discussion with somebody from out of town here because everybody in town knows that.
It's not as simple as saying, if I give this person $5, they're going to put that toward a security deposit.
Yeah, I heard the other day that there was a big town hall meeting in San Francisco where you have decided that it's no longer okay to just be naked on the street.
Is that true?
Well, it's a little bit more subtle than that.
I think it was determined that within certain – I think what – well, what I heard – You could no longer be turgid on the street?
You could no longer – if you had a Propecia-style accident, you had a four-hour pre-apsis or whatever it's called –
Okay, so can I ask you a historical question?
Sure.
So your dad – I remember I think I was in your guest bathroom or I was somewhere and I saw one of your dad's old campaign ads.
What was he running for back then?
It's a really cool, like, it looks like something I would have made in the mid-90s with clip art.
Yeah, it was a clip art, a flyer for his, I think his first run for the Washington State Legislature, which would have happened in 1948.
He was still in law school.
your dad was involved in, in politics, elector elected.
And otherwise he was involved in the unions.
Do you have, this is, this is totally out of nowhere, but do you have a gut sense of what you're like looking at it from like your dad's point of view?
Like, like you're right now, you're in a place where you are, you've got a good heart about this.
And you're saying, I believe that there is, there's hope for progressive politics in a large town, like, you know, with the right people in place and a good heart.
Like, do you have a sense of what your dad would consider his biggest win or,
in terms of not just not, not getting elected, but like, is there something where, what was, what was, what was his big constitutional crisis that where he came out and went, wow, that, that turned out way better than I could.
Do you have any sense of that?
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like he, he spent a lot of time in it.
He's a lawyer.
He's a fucking lawyer for a living in union for union guys, for, for train companies.
Like what, do you have a sense of like what felt like a big win to him in his career?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think generally, overall, the civil rights movement was the big win for everybody of his generation.
And we don't think of it as a win because it feels like it's so intractable and we're still fighting it all the time.
But the difference between the world...
The difference between the world that he grew up in and the world that he left was, from their standpoint, astonishing.
You know, Jack Tanner used to tell a story that he got drafted into the army during the war, and he was a very light-skinned black guy, what they used to call high yella.
In photos, he reads as black guy, for sure.
He reads as black guy as an old man.
But as a young guy, particularly, I think he probably conked his hair, and he kind of looked Italian, or vaguely Mediterranean, or it was unclear.
It was obvious to him, he got inducted into the army, and
Goes through the whole process here in Tacoma and they put him on a train down to Georgia or somewhere where he's going to go to boot camp.
And he's riding on the train and he looks around and he realizes, oh, he's the only black guy on the train.
And he realizes then that this was in an era when you weren't ever the only black guy on a train because you wouldn't be allowed on in the car.
Right.
And he realizes that unless you're serving drinks.
Right.
Right.
Sure.
If you were if you were if you had white gloves on, he realizes that they think he's white.
And that he's on he's headed to boot camp in Georgia.
Right.
And they think up here, they put him on the train thinking that he's white.
And he realizes he's going to get to Georgia and they're going to know he's not white.
And he had to think on this train ride, like, do I try and pass or do I cop?
And he went and said, like, hey, I think there's been a mistake.
And got himself reassigned to what was still a segregated army to a black company.
And he ended up being a... He was a boat driver...
And drove what now those, you know, the ducks that we all have in our cities that drive around our coastal, our water cities.
You guys have ducks there, right?
The amphibious.
Amphibious duck trucks or whatever.
He drove one of those like in the big beach landings at Okinawa and, you know, Leyte Gulf and all this stuff.
Like he was a landing craft driver.
But that is a very, you know, compare that to him 30 years later where he is a federal judge and, you know, a man of enormous both power and also like held in pretty high esteem.
That transition for my dad's generation was incredibly profound because in 1938, there was not any sense that you could make that much progress that fast.
I think my dad's own...
success was all measured in you know like he he worked out he you know he was a great conflict resolver and he worked out the relationship between the dock workers and the shipping companies you know and a few different uh big disputes about how the seattle waterfront was going to work
And then when he went to Alaska and was the chief counsel for the railroad there, he was really instrumental in the implementation of the Native Claims Act.
And, you know, my dad was, for his generation, a completely colorblind guy.
And the Alaska natives learned to trust him working at the railroad.
I don't know if I've ever told you this, but the
there's a city called Arctic circle, Alaska.
And, um, it's a, you know, it's a native town and they had a, like a council or whatever, like a town board, I guess a town board.
And they called my dad up and said, will you come be the mayor of Arctic circle?
And he went up there and,
ran the town for a while and eventually took my car, my 1977 Chrysler Imperial that he had given me when I was 16 years old.
He took the car and he drove it all the way up to the Yukon River, put it on a barge, floated it down the Yukon and gave it to the town.
And for a while it was
They're like town, the town car.
I mean, they had obviously there were other cars there, but this was like the city car.
Right.
Which, you know, would be fine, except that he took the car up, put it on a barge and sent it down the Yukon without emptying the glove box or the trunk of all my shit.
Yeah.
And without mentioning it to me.
He's on a Trojan one hitter.
I came home from some trip and I was like, where's my car?
And he was like, oh, I gave it to Arctic Circle.
And I was like, you gave it to the town?
And he's like, yeah, they needed a city car.
I was like, did you get my shit out of it?
He was like, oh, was there shit in it?
So somewhere up there, they have a couple of cool jackets of mine, and I think I had some, I don't know, golf clubs.
Who knows what was in the car?
Oh, but there's no weed in there.
Oh, probably.
Probably.
I mean...
that would have, that would have, that would probably gone, gone over like gangbusters with the administration of Arctic Circle, Alaska.
But so my dad was a guy that, you know, the guy that everybody trusted and he was a guy that, Oh, wait a minute.
Not everybody trusted him, but like he was a, he was a particularly, I mean, both my mom and dad were, were colorblind people in an era before that was common outside of kind of the Quaker era.
Like that Quaker vibe of the Northeast where people are hyper colorblind to the point that you almost don't believe them.
But they were just natively that way.
Just naturally judged people on the look in their eye.
My sister inherited that from them too.
I'm much more of a hard case than any of my people in terms of just accepting everybody
assuming the best of everyone first.
You know, I walk into a situation, I'm just like, ah, the Italian guy, I know, you know.
Over here, hey, Irish guy, come here.
But yeah, my folks were never like that.
Well, did he ever end up getting elected to a regular, you know, electoral, publicly voted thing?
Well, he was a state legislator for a couple terms in the late 40s, early 50s.
And then he was the darling of the Democratic Party in Washington State in the 50s.
And...
their heir apparent, but he drank too much.
And then he went to work for Kennedy and he was Kennedy's advanced man through the 60 campaign in 60.
No shit.
So he traveled ahead of the Kennedy campaign.
My dad was in, you know, Kennedy would be in Chicago on Thursday and my dad would have gotten there on Tuesday and said, here's where the president's going to stand.
Here's who he's going to shake your hand.
Then he's going to move over here.
And those doors need to be closed and these hotel rooms need to be blocked off.
And then so my dad kept leapfrogging.
ahead of the campaign, squaring away the local Democrats, explaining how it was going to run, and, you know, being his kind of guy, leading the, you know, the events across the country.
And the presumption, and I'm imposing all this from way in the future, but
I would think that someone in that position would then have a role in the new administration.
Yeah, almost always, right?
That's where that largesse comes in, is you get some kind of an appointment, right?
That's right.
But my dad was in the throes of his alcoholism at the time and drank...
himself into a situation this is all very this is all referred to in my family in this very uh gauzy language where i tried and tried and tried i confronted people i sat people down and said
What happened exactly?
It's just one of the rare places where the language just gets all weird.
Even my mom, who has nothing to hide or whatever, it just all gets very confusing.
But my dad sat down in a bar with a reporter from the Washington Post and said some candid things about Bobby Kennedy.
That while he was drunk, that were meant to be taken off the record.
Who knows exactly what it was, but some event, some moment in time.
And, you know, the Kennedys were very, you know, Bobby and Jack really circled the wagons and they were like everybody in that position and in that era, hyper paranoid.
Bobby was hyper paranoid.
And, you know, you just get one chance to fuck up.
Right.
And whatever happened, my dad came home from the campaign and then that was over.
And there was no... It did not translate into him going to work for Kennedy.
And in the process...
His good friend and patron, Warren Magnuson, who was longtime governor of the state of Washington, who had kind of been, again, grooming my dad for some kind of appointment.
Like, all of that got kind of hazy.
And there was all of a sudden in 1960...
this meteoric rise where people were talking about him as a, you know, a Senate candidate, or he was going to get appointed to the bench or something.
He was, you know, a comet in the democratic party through the fifties.
And then post that post Kennedy post 1960, all of a sudden he's like the family story changes.
And now he's practicing law in Seattle and he's,
They moved out to the country and got a house on the water somewhere.
And my mom and dad were out there.
Nobody will give you a straight story on that.
And I said to my dad toward the end of his life, I was like, listen, you got to tell me what went down because I don't want to...
Because you're the last one that knows.
Tanner's gone.
Bernie Heavey is out in the weeds.
No one's going to give me a straight answer if you don't.
And at that point, right toward the end, my dad started to get a little bit... He started to stonewall me on some things.
And he said, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
And I said, what happened in 1960?
And he said, nothing.
Nothing fucking happened.
And he looked hurt.
And I didn't want to press.
I didn't want to press it.
Of course not.
And it was just like, I don't know.
I'm never going to know.
If my mom won't tell me,
And my dad wouldn't tell me.
And honestly, I think it might be as simple as nobody knows.
He might have just gone out sitting in a bar and said something in the Roderick style of like, yeah, Bobby Kennedy, what an asshole.
He might have just said something candid that everybody already kind of knew about fidelity.
Maybe the guy.
I mean, I think it's pretty... Gosh, how close to everybody knowing it could that be, that John Kennedy was a Tomcat?
Everybody knew that.
His famous story about Bobby was... Careful.
Well, it's too late now.
The Kennedys can't fucking touch me.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
You'd be amazed.
I watched half of JFK today, and I'm pretty fucking scared.
What's going to happen?
Is Rose going to rise up from the grave and stab me in the eye?
They're all gone.
Like Carolyn.
I'm not afraid of Carolyn.
You've never been afraid of Carolyn Kennedy.
I can fucking take Carolyn Kennedy.
No, the story the story was they were in a hotel somewhere in like somewhere in the Midwest.
And it's a it's the you know, it's the big it's the Davenport or whatever.
It's the big hotel in the center of town.
And Jack is upstairs in the presidential suite having a big meeting with all of his advisors.
And, you know, of course, that whole floor is blocked off.
There are state troopers standing at the elevator.
There are Secret Service standing outside the door.
And Bobby comes up the elevator.
And my dad is there.
This is a firsthand experience.
Bobby comes up the elevator.
He walks down the hall.
tries the doorknob of the room and finds it locked.
And rather than knock or turn to the secret service guys standing on either side of the door,
Bobby takes a step back and puts his foot through the door and kicks open the, you know, breaks the lock, kicks open the double doors of the, of the suite to the room and says, why the fuck was this door locked?
The principle being that Bobby Kennedy is never on the wrong side of a locked door where his brother is on the other side.
Hmm.
And that, I mean, my dad having seen a lot of shit, that was particularly impressive to him and to everyone in the room.
And Jack waved it off.
But imagine the entitlement of a guy and also like the ruthlessness of
Of somebody whose first instinct is to kick the door down.
Yeah, like only a brother.
You know what I mean?
Like, before he knocked, he didn't even rattle the knob.
Just took one step back and boom.
Wing tip onto the lock.
And so, you know, I think that that, particularly before Bobby became attorney general, when it was just a campaign...
And everybody was like, who's the kid?
How old was he, 38?
I mean, how old was Bobby during the campaign?
He was still in his 30s.
That type of thing.
I can see my dad in the hotel bar downstairs going like, you won't believe this guy.
And somebody, you know, two booths over, overhears it.
And who knows?
I'll never know is the thing.
I'll never know why there was this watershed moment in my dad's career where he went from heir apparent to, you know, it's not like he was... It was like...
you know, you're out Tom.
Right.
And, and, and Tom's like, but I can, you know, I can think I can help out Tom.
You're out.
And then the decisions made and it's, you know, dad was always, he was always on friendly terms with, with, with that whole generation.
And, you know, his good friend, Brock Adams was appointed secretary of transportation and,
And a whole handful of his friends went up to the federal bench.
Yeah, but there's such a big difference between being welcome in the sanctum sanctorum versus not needing to be welcome there because you belong there.
It's a big difference.
One thing I realized growing up there was that it never happens.
There's always an inner door.
Right.
Even Brock Adams has to knock on the door.
to get into the you know and he's a fucking member of the cabinet right but like you get it you see it in the west wing and that's what one of the things that made that show so good like the vice president of the united states is constantly pissed off about his access to the president
And, like, sucking his thumb over in the executive office building because, you know, because he has to call to get in to see the president.
It's just like there's no... You're always...
He's got me waiting in the lobby.
Yeah, exactly.
And I probably told you that story.
We opened for Keen for two and a half months a few years ago.
And Keen, the band, are brilliant to us and wonderful, wonderful people.
But they have hired a staff of people.
And part of the job of that staff is precisely to tell us, the opening band, not to step on any of Keen's cables.
And we have put some tape on the floor on the stage, and you need to be within that tape.
and don't touch anything and you get you get to choose one color for your lights because we are not going to use our lights on you so you could you could write an ebook just on being the opening act yeah pick a color make it good and we're like okay i guess i guess white and they're like fine done boom white and so we would walk on stage and the white lights would come on and we'd be like we're standing inside the line
And we were out there for two—and the thing is that the band is oblivious to it, but this is show business.
Well, they pay people so they can be oblivious to it.
That's right.
And you could absolutely tell that at the monitor desk, there were six power amps, and they only turned on three of them for our set.
And then they turn on the other three and all of a sudden the sound comes alive for the headliner.
I mean, that's common business.
So all these months we're out opening for Keene and we're just standing inside this little box.
And then at the end of the tour, the guys in Keene were like, hey, we're opening for U2 at Madison Square Garden.
Would you like to come to the show?
And I was like, yes, I would.
And they said, great, fly out to New York and we'll put you up and we just want you there as our guests.
This is a big deal where U2 is playing five sold out nights at Madison Square Garden and we're opening for them and we want you to be there for them.
Talk about standing in a box.
I was like, how amazing.
And I get to the show and it's absolutely right.
Here's Keen, this band that I thought was like the absolute peak of, I mean, they were selling tens of thousands of records a week at that time.
All around the world.
And here they are standing in a box with one color of light.
And all around them is all of U2's gear covered with black blankets.
And you could just hear the U2's stage manager saying, listen, if you step outside of these lines, we're going to electrocute you.
We're hiding behind the drum riser with tasers if you move an inch.
And they're just like, and I'm watching and I'm like, you're always fucking opening for somebody.
There is somebody, I don't know if it's Kofi Annan or who it is, but there's somebody that you too has to wait in the green room until...
What until basically until the president of the United States walks past, right?
There's, there's nobody that the president of the United States has to wait for.
Right.
But everybody else, there's always somebody else that's like, sorry, we need to, we're going to have to bring up to rope off this area.
Right.
for no reason except to keep you on the other side of the rope like even warren buffett probably has to there's there's some moment in time when somebody puts a rope around him well do you imagine for a minute that in 1960 i mean i i i don't know a whole lot about it but it i bet next to dad next to joe i bet john knew exactly where he stood
He owed it all to his dad.
I mean this is not conspiracy theory.
I mean that's how he got elected was his dad.
Well, but think about the son.
I'm just saying.
He's the fucking president.
There is no – to your pal Bobby, there is no attorney general, future attorney general suite.
There is a presidential suite.
But even then, like it's like, yes, I can because Frank Sinatra says I can.
Like in that instance, like, well, yeah, I'm going to be president because my dad is working it out.
Well, yeah, Joe had Joe had suffered at so many humiliations by that point.
Like he got his kid elected.
But he himself was largely discredited as a Nazi apologist.
He made a lot of enemies without making a commensurate number of friends, right?
Yeah.
But when you think about the burden that Jack had, his older brother was supposed to be president, his healthy, hale and hearty older brother.
Jack was supposed to just be the callow playboy.
the sickly kid he's the sickly kid that's right i mean and he i don't think i don't think jack would have been attorney general if his brother had been elected president but his brother was killed in a suicide mission that dumb ass plane and that dumb ass bomb laden plane that exploded over the channel
I had never seen this very lovely obituary in the paper for your dad a few years ago.
It's really nice.
You're quoted in it.
And it's a lovely – if I may say uncommonly well-written obituary by modern standards.
Former legislator David Roderick, dead at 86.
Yeah, he –
You know, he... His funeral... I still think about his funeral.
I still wish I had done a better job at his funeral of... For whatever reason, in that moment, I didn't feel like I could make a speech.
And when I think about it now, my dad's whole life was about making a speech.
And he never once...
Was in an event like that where somebody where the room looked to him and said, you're going to make a speech.
Where he didn't stand up and say and, you know, tap his glass with his fork and say, I'd just like to say.
On behalf of all of my esteemed colleagues.
At the guest of honor sitting on the dais is a son of a bitch.
And everybody goes, you know, like my dad never missed a chance.
That's a tough day.
That's a tough day though, John.
That was the era.
I mean, I think you could be forgiven for not having the best day you ever had that day.
I don't beat myself up too badly, but I, but you know, my uncle Jack helped me rent the main room of the Washington athletic club where he transacted so many of his, his, uh, spilled drink, uh, you know, men's club lobby detents.
Yeah.
And like all the rock stars are there, the Seattle, the young people are all there supporting me, right?
So it's a room full of rock luminaries.
And then they start filing in these little old men and the room fills.
Yeah.
And I started walking around and talking to them.
I'm like, hi, you know, hey, how do you do?
I'm John Roderick.
And they're like, oh, yeah, your dad was a real son of a bitch.
And I go, yeah, he was.
And they're like, well, I've got a little speech here.
And I said, well, you know, by all means, like, make a speech.
And they're like, well, I'll wait until the speeches start.
And
I never started the speeches.
I didn't get up at the lectern and say, we're gathered here today to remember this old son of a bitch.
Because there would have been 15 guys walk up and say, he used to be such a son of a bitch.
They were all dying to do it.
And I never started it.
And my brother was playing the piano over here.
There was a shrimp cocktail over here.
There were people walking around in tuxedos with silver trays.
And I'm standing there in his suit.
I'm wearing his old three-piece suit.
And I couldn't stand up and say...
Let me tell you a story about this pain in the ass.
That was my dad and little by, you know, when we were there all afternoon, nobody got up and did it because it was my job to do it.
Even though I have two older brothers and there were 25 people there that, that, uh, that probably if you, if you ranked them by, uh,
uh, you know, by precedence or whatever, like, but obviously you felt like it should have been your job.
Well, obviously it was because for whatever reason, like,
In that moment, I was clearly being recognized as the new patriarch.
And this was a very weird experience for me at the time because there are a lot of people in my family and a lot of other people who were waiting for my dad to die basically so that they could be the old man.
And the energy in the family and in the room was that, oh, in fact, that had leapfrogged all those people and now it was me.
And I was like, I'm not anywhere close to being ready to be the patriarch.
I am not him yet.
And yet it was decided unconsciously by the tribe.
And so I just kind of just stood there and, and you know, I talked to every single one of those people, but like, I didn't, I didn't make the speech and I didn't let them make the speech or I didn't give them permission to make the speech.
And so we had a, we had a lovely party for him that was six hours long and nobody made a single fucking speech.
And to whatever degree I feel like my dad watches over me, I feel like he's also maybe trapped in purgatory until I make a goddamn speech about it.
I think he just did.
Until I stand up in some hotel lobby and say... He did a pretty good job just now.
This guy...
Well, it was nice because we had another funeral forum in Alaska, and my uncle, who does not accept my authority, my uncle Jack, who does not recognize my authority as the new patriarch.
The rules are different in Alaska.
Who very much feels, and rightly so, that he is the last Apache.
He said, so we're standing around there, and that was an amazing funeral.
There was a former governor there, a former senator there.
who had not spoken to each other in 20 years.
And the obituary in the Alaska paper, the headline of the obituary was Ted Stevens and Tony Knowles make up their 20-year feud at Dave Roderick's funeral.
They resolved their 20 years of not speaking to each other.
But at that event, my Uncle Jack walked into the center of the room and he said, all right, you sons of bitches.
Let's hear it.
Let's hear your stories about this old son of a bitch.
And everybody went crazy.
I mean, that was very fun.
That was the day I met Sarah Palin.
Really?
Yeah.
She was there?
She did not come to my dad's funeral, but she was down the hall.
at a Alaska state Republican fundraising convention.
It was before she, um, she was governor, but it was before she had been tapped to be the vice president.
And all of my friends that came to my dad's funeral were like, have you seen our governor?
have you seen Alaska's governor?
And I was like, I don't think so, no.
And they were like, dude.
Sexy Peggy Hill.
She's the hottest governor of all 50 governors.
I was like, amazing, really?
And they were like, yeah, dude.
I said, but isn't she a Republican?
Yeah, but it doesn't matter, dude.
She's fucking hot.
She's a hot governor, dude.
That's basically my Alaska friend impression.
So hot, man.
She was pretty hot.
She was pretty hot.
No, she really was.
Not so hot anymore.
Now that I know more.
I stand by sexy Peggy Hill.
Nothing wrong with that.
Is it wrong for me to feel like the only redeeming quality of Family Guy is that the mom is hot and that I find her really hot?
No, no.
It's wrong that you're confusing Family Guy and King of the Hell.
But no, totally.
I have so many friends that just cannot even stand to watch Family Guy.
Well, no.
It's the worst television show in the world and it's evidence of our decline.
Except...
That the mom, the redheaded mom.
She's real perky.
It's just like, I don't know what it is.
You can tell that she's a dangerous actor.
You know, you can just tell.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm just saying that like, you know, in the right mise en scene.
You're talking about the character.
Oh, I was talking about the cartoon character.
Yeah.
The cartoon character.
Right.
Yeah.
Like in a way that Betty rubble should have been hotter, but there wasn't that danger.
She didn't have that element of danger.
in the way that what's her fuck Griffin Patty Griffin yeah I think that's the country singer I think I make that mistake a lot but very hot you know like there's only been a couple of times I've ever gone on the internet and googled rule 34 like rule 34 tricks rabbit or whatever it is that you want to see rule 34
You're saying that's the rule that says that there is going to be a girl version of things?
Rule 34, as I understand it, is that if you can think of it, someone has made porn about it.
Oh.
I thought that was that Eddie Vedder had covered it.
I had this, so I was on Todd Berry's podcast.
Yeah, I listened to it.
And I, and I should get a microphone.
Oh yeah.
Todd has bad microphones.
Oh, he was, but it was, it was charming.
The part that I, I, I listened to, um, I listened to almost all of it and I'm going to listen to the whole thing, but he sounds like a very, very nice guy.
I like him a lot.
He seems very down to earth.
Well, I wouldn't say that.
Okay.
He lives near Uniglo, am I right?
But he... At one point, I said something about Pearl Jam.
And I got an email the other day from the music editor of the LA Weekly...
Who said, hey, I thought what you said about Pearl Jam in the Todd Berry podcast was really hilarious.
Would you mind if we just transcribed it and used it in our article about the upcoming Pearl Jam shows in L.A.
?
And I said, I don't remember.
I replied, I do not remember what I said, but I am now having written the punk rock is bullshit article and spent like four weeks getting 40 hate mails a day from from people who run youth centers.
I am now very, very cautious about saying something.
Let me just start out by saying I used to be a really big fan of your work.
I don't want to say something about Pearl Jam that might even slightly be construed as anti-Pearl Jam.
quoted out of context quoted out of context because i just don't i don't ever want to get a deluge of like rabid hate mail again not you know i i retract nothing but i just don't want to i don't want to encourage people who are crazy to see me as a target
And the LA Weekly was like, oh, no, you don't say anything bad about Pearl Jam.
I mean, you just talk about how they were like a jock frat funk band.
And I said, you don't think that that would make anybody mad in the Pearl Jam family?
And then it was just a day ago or so that a Roderick on the Line listener tweeted something to the effect that he was still mad at you and me for having said something bad about Pearl Jam.
I don't think we've ever said anything bad about Pearl Jam.
Well, no, there's nothing bad to say about Pearl Jam, but I think I might have spoken about Pearl Jam in a way.
Of all the shit we said, how could you listen to this show more than two or three times and think the worst thing we've ever had to say was about fucking Pearl Jam?
This is what I'm saying.
You're friends with Pearl Jam.
I think Pearl Jam is fine.
There are people who are probably mad at us for having spoken ill of Bruce Springsteen.
And that was just me.
I absolve you entirely of that.
And yet they're so mad, they probably won't even tweet about it, which is like, by modern standards, as mad as you should.
I wish everybody would get that mad.
I'm so mad.
I'm so mad.
I'm not even going to tweet.
I can't tweet.