Ep. 113: "Big Comedy Rock Solo"
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Hello?
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good, although I reached up to click on the answer button on the Skype, and I accidentally clicked the button that said, software updates are available for your computer.
Would you like to download them now?
And I clicked on yes, apparently.
Oh, dear.
You don't want to do that.
And the thing started to, like...
started to work.
And I was like, no, no, no, no, I don't want that.
But the X button now is shaded out.
I couldn't click on it.
And there was no canceling.
It wasn't an option anymore.
And so something right now is working behind the scenes on my computer to update my software, which I do not want.
Should we open a support ticket for you?
I think so.
I'm going to send a report to Apple.
Windows PC or Apple Macintosh?
I don't even remember.
I stopped updating back before there was a difference.
Thank you for your response.
Have you tried restarting?
I'm going to unplug the machine from the wall.
Thank you.
Have you tried running the diagnostic?
My favorite of all the programs, the diagnostic.
The diagnostic indicates that it is not working.
Diagnostic cannot connect your computer to the internet.
Thank you, diagnostic.
That's how I feel with lots of things.
I was about to say that's how I would feel like if the electric power went out and then there was a diagnostic base that required electric power to tell me whether the power was on.
Yeah.
But my favorite one, I think I've mentioned this before because, you know, John, this is an evergreen program.
We've done this for many years now.
Listen to any episode at any time.
My favorite is when my Comcast connection goes from being merely a piece of human shit to obviously not working.
And I can glance over at the modem and see that the lights are not on.
Something is wrong.
I restarted.
I do the rain dance.
And my favorite, though, is then when I have to determine why it's out.
And so you call Comcast and they tell you to go to the website.
Right.
That's my favorite.
Yeah, that's nice.
They're smart.
Although I met your Comcast guy.
You certainly did.
Isn't he a gem?
He's a very nice man.
I was in Colorado.
I forgot about this.
This is a wonderful story.
Well, it's a story.
I don't know how wonderful it is.
Did he ask you for panties or something?
No, no, no.
The reason that I was in that situation is I went to the conference on world affairs.
Just this first time?
For the first time, yeah, just earlier this year.
And I had a great time at the Conference on World Affairs.
And just as I predicted, as I'm getting further and further away from it, I am remembering it as being a spectacular event that I would, you know, I would highly recommend.
But the one bummer was that I was... They had me on their... They had me in...
In their system, I guess, on their radar as a musician, primarily, although the people who invited me, the people really who invited me to come, I think, understood that I was there as a, I guess, podcaster.
Yeah.
But the musician... It just keeps getting worse, doesn't it?
It does, it does, it does.
To be misattributed and find out... Misattributed as a musician first instead of being a potential retired director of the CIA is bad enough.
Right.
That is what they... I should have been there as a retired director.
We don't even have a slot in Excel for podcaster.
Yeah, and all week long I'm talking to 70-year-olds and I'm like, podcast.
And they're like, podcast?
No.
But so I went to the big music performance and they were like, you got to get up and play with all the other musicians.
Take a load off, Annie.
No, have I told you this story?
I don't want to derail you.
I totally want to hear all of these stories.
Was an acoustic guitar that wasn't plugged in thrust into your hands?
No, it was a thousand times worse.
So all the other musicians that go to this conference are like middle-aged jazz musicians.
Some of them old jazz musicians.
Some of them like properly old musicians who have played the Newport Jazz Festival.
All their progressions have a two chord in them.
For 40 years.
Well, you know, they have progressions on top of progressions.
Other progressions have progressions.
And they're like, no, no, no, it's just a simple jam.
Nobody knows the stuff.
We just all get up there and jam.
And I was like, yeah, it's not my scene.
I don't do that very well.
Like, I like to jam.
Can I share an anecdote?
Yes.
No, I'm saying that would be you.
That would be your scatting.
Yeah, let me riff.
18-minute story.
Yeah, no, I'd walk up and grab the microphone and go, have I told you this story?
But so everybody's like, they're all like super jazz.
They're cats, you know?
These people are jazz cats.
And throughout the whole week, I keep saying, like, I'm not really a jammer.
I mean, if there was, like, a half rack of Strohs and we were in the basement of somebody's house, yeah, I would jam.
But I don't know.
I don't get up on a stage with 25 people and, like, unless we're doing...
Unless it's an extended... Bring it on the heartbreak.
One, two, three.
Yeah, exactly.
Bring it on the heartbreak and everybody takes a solo.
That's fine.
But anyway, so I'm standing on the wings of this place and they have rented a Stratocaster for me.
And there's an amp and I'm like... I'm all set up.
There's a spot for me on this stage where there's 18 other players.
And they are...
Let's see, there's two saxophonists, two other guitarists, two bass players, a guy playing the flugelhorn, three scat vocalists, a couple of drummers, one of them from Israel, people from all around the world, and they're out there playing basically the theme from Taxi.
You know, they're playing that smooth jazz.
Like mid-tempo.
Mid-tempo 70s cool jazz that I'm sure in the late 60s or mid-60s was heavy-duty shit.
But even by the late 70s, it had, you know, I just kept seeing a Stephen J. Kennelly production.
Yeah.
You know, like, sit, Ubu, sit.
It was music that I could not comprehend listening to, let alone making.
And that's not to say that it wasn't amazing.
But not a thing that I could gain any traction on.
And so I walked out on stage at some point being pressured backstage by people, pressured in the friendliest way, but by someone holding a clipboard who was like, you got to get out there.
This is part of the spirit of the whole week that we get out and we just take risks and we just go for it.
And I walk out on stage, and I get this Stratocaster, and the band leader guy is the trumpet player.
And he looks at me, and he's like, all right, we're going to do something real simple, like just a four-bar blues.
And I'm like, yeah, okay, four-bar blues.
I'll find some way to dig into this.
And he turns around and like... And the band starts... And I'm just like, what the fuck is this?
This is not a four-bar blues in any world I live in.
And I'm sitting on the guitar and I'm just trying to find the root.
And I can't find... I don't even know what key it's in.
I don't know what key it's in.
No, I think the guy shouted over to the piano player right before...
He's like, all right, we're going to do a real simple four-bar blues.
It's going to be just fine.
And he looks over to the piano player, who's blind, and says, what key?
And the piano player, he's like, leaves it up to the piano player.
He should have looked at me, and I would have been, E. E, please, E, please, E. He looks over to the piano player, and the piano player's like, I don't know, B-flat minor?
And they're all like, yeah!
I'm like, B-flat minor, my guitar doesn't even have that.
And so I'm sitting up there and I'm just hunting.
And I can hear... I mean, it's fully jazz because every note I play is so far out.
It's like the hippest note in jazz.
Because these guys are just... And the reality is that none of them do know what they're doing in advance.
It's just that their musical language enables them to...
like hear the progression go by.
They think about, they think about music so differently than we do.
They, they might study theory really, really hard for years until they never really have to consciously, they can explain something with theory.
I don't think they think in theory.
No.
Whereas with us, you have to go like, okay, one, two, four, five or something like that.
Yeah.
And I think every once in a while, a guy, you know, there's like, there's music stands around and there, there's like stuff on the music stands, but it's one piece of paper.
that has um 80 000 notes on it and so every once in a while a guy would point at a piece of paper like hey there it is right there didn't you see it and you know and i look over at it and it's like it's like a rorschach test i swear to god john it sounds like a dream a nightmare it sounds like one of those like i woke up with no pants on the day of the math final so i'm standing and the other thing is i'm right in the middle of the stage
Like I conspicuously walked out into the middle of the room because that's where my stuff was.
Oh, the best part was I had sound checked this guitar and amp.
I showed up at five when they said like sound check starts.
No one else is there except for the sound guy.
And I show up and I'm like, hey, I'm here for the sound check.
And he's like, yeah, nobody else is here.
but they rented you a guitar and an amp.
And so I stand on the stage and I strum my guitar and do a sound check.
And I actually check a vocal mic and I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe, you know, maybe they'll be like, Hey, play one of your songs.
And all the saxophone players are like, and we'll play cinnamon together or something.
So I check this rig and then I'm waiting around and I'm like, well, you think anybody else is going to come?
And he's like, ah, you know, jazz guys, they'll probably just show up right before the show.
I was like, oh, all right.
Well, I guess I'll go for a walk.
I'll come back.
Were you thinking you might do a run-through or something?
Yeah, yeah, right.
Like, let's do a four-bar blues.
Let's pick a key.
So I come back, and the guitar is out there.
Well, I walk out on stage.
You know, it's the middle of the show, trending toward the finale.
I walk out on stage, and...
One of the other guitar players who is from Argentina or from Antarctica or something is plugged into my rig, right?
And I was like, oh, I was going to... And he's like, oh, I just plugged into that because it was here.
And I was like, right.
Right.
I mean, yeah.
And we're trying to transact this on a live stage while people are talking about the... You know, like, hey, welcome to the stage.
It's the guy.
And so the other guitar player...
Says, well, you know what, man?
I've played a lot tonight.
And he unplugs and hands me the cable and walks off the stage.
He was the one guy that I was going to be able to look at his instrument and tell what fucking note we were playing.
Because the other guitar player went over, put his guitar down and went over and started playing the bass.
Playing the bass facing the piano player.
Like, he put the bass on himself, turned with his back to me, so that he could look at the piano player and, like, jam.
The piano player couldn't look back, but, like...
And so, I'm standing on stage, there's 20 people and not one stringed instrument.
Except maybe a violin.
But, like, not a thing that I could look at anybody and say, like, hey, show me, like, your fretting hand so I can, like, at least know what quadrant of the guitar were I. Anyway, so, about 45 seconds of hunting for notes.
And at this point, it's just flop sweat pouring down.
And I'm standing there.
And inside my head, this voice is going, you fucking idiot.
You knew you never should have walked out on this stage.
You never, ever.
You should have said you should have hit your hand with a hammer before walking out on this stage.
And so I turned the guitar.
I turned the volume knob completely off.
got a big smile on my face, took a step forward and started just strumming the shit out of the thing.
Like, yeah.
And the guy, the trumpet player looks over and like points to me, like take a solo.
Oh God.
And I waved him off.
Like, like he had just said, pitch a fastball.
I was like, no, sir.
Thank you.
Big smile, though.
Like, thank you.
No.
Woo.
Hot.
And they moved on.
You know, he just like got off me and went to the next guy.
And, you know, the next guy took like a tambourine solo for 20 minutes.
and so i'm just up there just just chicken picking and cooking on my completely off guitar that's that's you did exactly the right thing yeah yeah it was the only thing i could do and it's best for the audience too and nobody in the room could tell or gave a shit except you know i think there were a couple of people there who came to see me or were us were like aware that i was playing and
and talked to them afterwards, and they were both like, yeah, it was great.
I mean, I couldn't really hear you, but it was really, you know, seemed like a lot of music was getting made.
And if I had just walked out and not even bothered plugging in a guitar and had just like...
Anyway, so the show is over, and I put the guitar down.
Like, I think I put the guitar down by the door on my way out of the stage door.
Like, I am not hanging around here.
I'm not going to have a cup of tea after the show.
I am out.
Because I was just... I think I was frustrated so many times in my life.
I have...
been in that exact situation enough to have learned it will not it's never gonna play and yet hope springs eternal and that other voice the competing voice that says
Be experimental.
Just get up there and just do it.
What happens if tonight's the night?
What if all of the stars align and it's amazing and you're going to feel like an idiot if you say, no, I'd better not do it.
And then the last song they do is Smoke on the Water.
And there's a guitar.
B flat.
Smoke on the Water and there's a guitar in the center of the stage with a spotlight on it.
that was meant for you and you didn't jump out and do it, you're going to feel like an idiot.
You know, that other voice that's like, what's the matter?
Take, you know, take a risk every once in a while.
Go for it.
But your, well, I don't know, superego or whatever put you in the right place, which I mean...
as an outsider looking in i mean that's not your show right and those are the grown-ups the grown-ups are doing like their thing this is not your thing and you're a gentleman about doing it but that's the thing is if you were the star of that show if it was a john roderick review and you had maybe even it was the same setup you could find some way to go to the mic and do something fun and entertaining that you knew your audience would enjoy but almost anything you would have done i'm not being negative i'm just being honest almost anything you would have done would have been disruptive and stupid
Absolutely.
That's the thing.
If I had said... If I had walked out there and said, and now I'd like to take it down a little bit and play you a little song of mine called Hindsight, it would have been flabbergasting.
It would have been a train wreck.
Just the worst.
And so...
I mean, yeah, right.
The only thing I could have done is walk out and say, okay, I'm here now.
And so blues in E. Right.
But I was the junior partner by a factor of 15.
You know, like I think the piano player was 75.
And a lot of these people...
Maybe they hadn't played together, but they'd all heard of one another.
These are people who are gigging in a different realm.
And...
so anyway i walk out the back door of the theater and i'm just like i'm still flop sweaty and i'm and i'm i'm having this argument with myself i'm walking down the alleys of boulder going like ah idiot god why did you ever walk on that stage don't ever do it you know not to do it and i'm saying like roll is a pro and i'm saying he knows the progressives all of your friends name a single one of them any one of your dudes
that does the same thing that you do.
Vanderslice, Bazan, Gibbard, would any of them have agreed to go out on stage under those conditions?
No, not a one of them would have.
They would have said, let's set up a separate show that's more like a songwriter night at one of the bars, and I'll play a little set of songs.
I think they actually tried to do that, and I shot it down.
But nobody would have gotten up on a stage full of jazz musicians and tried to like comp along.
And so I'm kicking myself and I'm mad and I'm just, I'm sitting, then I'm sitting on a park bench and I'm like, ah, grr, ah.
And so I do what is naturally the thing in that situation, which is I go on Twitter and I say, tweet up.
I'm sitting on a park bench in Boulder for the next 40 minutes, kicking myself.
If anybody wants to come, say hi.
Wow.
Wow.
I don't know why I did that.
I never do.
I never tweet up, but I was just sitting out there and I was like, I've got to get out of my head.
I got to get out of this head space because it's, you know, I'm, I am turning sour about a thing that doesn't really matter.
I'm turning sour about a thing that actually worked out just fine.
And I need to just, I don't know anybody in this town and I need to just like, get out of, get out of this.
I need to turn tonight around.
I need to turn the ball around.
And so I said, you know, tweet up.
And within about 10 or 15 minutes, two people showed up.
Wow.
One of them was your good friend.
Jason.
That's right.
No last names.
No last names.
We got to get him out of that company.
He's of the Italian persuasion.
And he is moving to the West.
I didn't know if you knew that.
Hmm.
Anyway, shows up.
He's delightful.
Then a young woman shows up.
She's delightful.
We're all meeting for the first time.
And then as we're sitting on the park bench talking, a car goes by.
And as it goes by, the rear tire comes off.
I mean, the rear wheel comes off.
And the car, like, lands on its axle and starts scraping a big Lincoln Continental.
Wow.
And so then, then of course, then that attracts all the juggalos that hang out downtown because there's like flames and then the cops are there.
They do.
As soon as you're scraping metal on metal, the juggalos come out of all the doorways.
Yeah.
um so it ended up being a very positive night and it was i know you just pulled that out of your ass but now just the image of several dozen people in makeup like looking a little tentative at first like look like kind of like a raccoon looking around a doorway and then coming out like a moth to a flame yeah they're just like what is that scraping is that scraping their little heads poking around the doors i can i can i can be free i like fire
So, but it was a case of, by the end of that night, when I was finally walking home, I felt very light.
I felt very, I felt let all was right with the world.
And I think it was that I reached out, I reached out to humanity.
Now, I think I was taking a risk if I had said, I'm going to be sitting on this park bench for 40 minutes and I just heard crickets.
And it was just me watching the Juggalos.
I would have been even more bummed out.
But two wonderful people showed up out of the gloom.
And it was great.
It sounds like the nature of your frustration...
I mean, obviously, the experience of going out there and, you know, you manned up and you did it.
But it sounds like you're you're you said as much that it's mainly it's the decision to have gone out was the bad decision.
Yeah.
You saved you saved it from being something that was, you know, bad for the audience and humiliating to the band by not, you know, noodling along.
But you think you should have just said, no, thank you.
No.
It's a kind of, like, at a certain point of self-knowledge, and obviously, like, I have certain insecurities about not being, like almost any musician would, of not being up to whatever the game is.
And a lot of these guys, and I ended up on a panel, a much larger panel, with some of these cats.
Yeah.
And it came around to me, and they're all talking about like, yeah, man, you know, you just get, you play with people, you just, and it's amazing, and zabbity-doo.
And it came to me, and I said, unfortunately, I come from a school of thought that spent a lot of time, spent many years really pretty solidly feeling like soloing was an act of...
egotism and even colonialism like the school of music that i came up in nobody soloed nobody took a solo at all only certainly kind of like ironically ironic solos yes and those were intentionally bad or intentionally like i mean basically mocking like a dead milkman punk rock girl kind of solo like a deliberately sort of like wackadoodle thing
Well, and you know, my live shows often have big solos that I would love to be playing earnestly, but for a long time played those big solos ironically.
I confess that I did.
That was the way that I allowed myself to do it.
I mean, my bandmates would be sitting, like, openly scoffing at me as I took my big...
comedy rock solo and so you know and i'm sitting on this panel and i'm like unfortunately for me i i come from a school where
We feel like soloing is bourgeois.
How do the cats feel about that?
You could hear a pin drop.
And of course, this is a scene where it's a multiracial group of musicians and jazz is the path or whatever.
And I'm sitting there saying that the act of soloing is bourgeois.
And it's just like, okay.
I mean, I felt like a member of Gang of Four all of a sudden.
Not the band.
Well, the real one.
Anyway, so by the end of the week, it was... I had come full circle, or I had made a circle.
It's not that I had come full circle, but I had at least traced back to the beginning.
But the idea that you know what you are good at and that you...
that you set limits about what other people set limits about how you will be pressured into like singing at somebody's wedding or, you know, a long time ago I said, I don't do karaoke.
And, and yet if I'm at somebody's wedding and they hand me a microphone and go, come on.
And everybody's drunk.
You know, I would, I would generally say no, unless it was the bride asking, um,
But again, you can't do that because there are those moments where you say, yes, all right, I'll do it.
And it ends up being the greatest night of your life.
So it's just one of those, I think it is just life in a nutshell.
Yeah, but you're describing something that I've really struggled with at a higher level.
There are instances of this that are specific to the kind of thing you're talking about, but you're talking about two very different things.
On the one hand, one of the myths of getting married is that it's the bride's day.
It is the bride's day.
I mean that is the bride's – a lot of those –
Women have been thinking about that day their whole life, and they have real particular ideas that should be honored, and we're all there.
But once you're actually in the machinery, once your arm is actually in the gears, you realize that it is all about other people.
So you know what?
If the bride wants you to sing a song, that's a nice thing, and you can see doing that.
Now, you put me straight down a memory hole of a conference that my old –
internet advertising group put on.
At the time, a very powerful group.
It was kind of the boutique.
We were making CPMs three, four, five times what anybody else was making.
CPMs big time?
Basically, anytime one of our ads loaded, it made a ton more money than anybody else could even touch.
It was very prestigious and run by a very famous guy.
Seriously, though, what is a CPM?
Cost per thousand views.
It's just a way of quantifying what you charge based on, you know.
How does 1,000 views equal M in that equation?
M like 1,000, I think.
Oh, cost per mil.
Something like that.
Cost per mil.
I went to this thing.
I was very happy to be involved in the group.
It was a great moneymaker.
They're great people.
Like I say, it was nice to even be invited to be in the group, let alone be invited to say, hey, a lot of our advertisers are coming to this conference.
All the other publishers are going to be there.
But –
Nothing against these guys, but one of the reasons I ended up leaving this particular group is because they were doing more and more of what has now become completely okay, which is like having a post on your site that's sponsored by somebody.
And I actually kind of –
Gave away or as we used to say, left a lot of money on the table because I just couldn't do that anymore.
And even like the one or two times I did it, I felt so dirty because that's just – I'm stupid and old and that's how my mind works.
I don't think that's right.
Even today, it really irks me when I see sites where – especially if they don't announce that it's a sponsored post.
Like it's – you know what I mean, right?
You know this feeling of like – I do.
Hey, here's the deal.
if this car company wants to use my song in an ad, pay me appropriately, but nobody's ever going to confuse this song with this car and think that... You know what I mean?
That's separate things.
Buy this t-shirt.
You get a t-shirt, I get money.
These are clear transactions that make sense.
Yeah, because all those sites are purporting to be also generating...
content that is independent or even journalistic that's that's the word is one reason a lot of us really relish the rise of things like blogs and now today podcast as a thing was that you got to make you know you were always i always find myself calling up jonathan colton but he's no longer unique in this regard somebody and the way i phrase this to jonathan you know when we very first met i said what i admire about you is that you're circumspect about who's allowed to fuck your shit up for almost no money and i've always been since i got a little smarter about this i would get
I would start to feel from a monetary standpoint, like don't just let people frame you in a certain way unless you really understand what you're accepting.
And you're actually kind of giving away part of yourself when you let other people decide who you are and then put you under the rubric of their brand, for example.
So anyway, long story short, I could feel the –
The kind of the velocity of this group was getting more and more into stuff where like mommy bloggers would just have something sponsored for a year and they'd go on trips sponsored by computer companies and stuff.
And I just – that gave me the fear a little bit.
I show up at this thing where I think I'm mostly going to have to sit at one of those round tables with a pad of paper and a pitcher of water and smile and applaud and stuff like that.
I find out I'm going to be on a panel.
Yeah.
After the announcement, I'm going to be on a panel.
I don't know any other – I don't think I knew any of the other people on the panel, and if I did, it was only by reputation and it wasn't good.
And it was basically – I was up there with one person who had a blog about celebrity babies where she wrote – it was a she, but she wrote about the baby products of celebrities with affiliate links.
Uh-huh.
And how that was growing.
And another person talking about how they were hiring people, you know, and this is me being a one person guy with a one person site where I run the server and everything.
And there's people out there talking about hiring people in Australia so you can have people posting around the clock.
And I, I got up there and I said the best I, you know, I think I ended up being a little bit of a karma suck.
I didn't.
So first of all, I made the mistake that you made, which is I agreed to do it when I thought I really shouldn't do it, but I felt obligated.
I did feel in some ways like the bride was asking me to sing.
Sure.
Here you are.
You're at the thing.
Yeah, and I mean I don't want to be disrespectful, but I didn't really know what I was in for.
And then once I got up there, I think I, being me, especially me of like six or eight years ago, I said some things that were slightly at odds with what everybody else up there said.
They were hoping you were going to say like, I sell a lot of cameras through my sights.
Buy a fucking camera.
You think these video tutorials are free?
Listen, buy a camera.
Buy a fucking camera.
If you don't click on that link, you're stealing from me.
But anyway, I just – I'm sorry.
This is a big derail.
But I don't know.
There's something about that.
And again, it's why I – I'm not saying people like whatever, Dylan or Perfect, but people out there who are very –
reluctant to let other people frame them.
And if you do license the song, you understand what it is that you're licensing.
You're treating this like a business.
You're treating this like this thing.
And you're never, you know, when people try to pay you in compliments, I know you have feelings about this.
People try to pay you in compliments.
People try to pay you in reputation.
Like nobody ever offers you that stuff unless they're going to get more out of it than you will.
And they take a little tiny piece of you with them when you do that.
So
I still – you can tell.
This has been like whatever, six or eight years and I'm still sitting like on my toadstool feeling like a dick that I got up there and had to like explain my position alongside somebody who has affiliate links to celebrity baby products.
Right.
Right.
Kanye and what's your name?
Kim.
You know her brother is not going to their wedding because he's heavy.
Oh, is that right?
I don't know why I ever look at a news site.
I was on BuzzFeed today looking at 25 people that are dead.
You won't believe what happens next.
It should be dead.
It's all pictures of people in skateboard crashes.
But yeah, I was talking to a friend the other day and I was like, what do you really want to do?
What do you really want to do?
And she said, I don't know.
How do you become a travel writer?
she says and i was like well what kind of travel writer do you mean somebody who writes for glossy magazines where they never ever ever say anything bad about a hotel right like those people have a job those people are how do you get to write the top 10 steakhouses in america for an in-flight magazine exactly start an advertising company yeah those people are publicists those are ads those are ads those are not those are not actually articles
But there are magazines all around the world.
There are stacks and stacks of magazines.
You could build the foundation of a house with all the magazines that basically are PR people writing glowing reviews.
So much more than people, I mean, even smart people, I think have no idea how heavily, I mean, obviously any fashion magazine, any travel magazine, nothing gets in there unless there is some money associated with it.
Right.
When was the last time you read a review of a really expensive hotel that was basically like fear and loathing in Las Vegas?
I walked into this hotel and the first thing I smelled was blood.
When do you ever read actual travel writing?
You hardly ever do.
Maybe find it on an independent blog.
Maybe you find it on an independent blog.
But those people are not making a living, presumably.
They're clearly not being flown around.
And they're not being compensated for... It's not like a Lester Bangs type situation where they're being compensated for their personality in describing this travel experience.
Right.
I don't think Rolling Stone has a travel guy on staff whose job is to just go out and just write about the shit he gets into.
Right.
And she said, well, what about the New York Times Magazine travel section?
And I was like, what about it?
Like, those people perceive their job to be that they go find interesting experiences and package them thematically.
And then, yeah, but the part that seems so obvious is like, oh, but I'm a really good writer.
I would be perfect for that.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's great.
And you should work for an advertising company.
Because, I mean, it's like, oh, 25 spas in the Seychelles that don't have long lines.
It's like, what kind of writing is that?
Yeah.
I've read a lot of anecdotes over the years that I've heard this same flavor of this one kind of anecdote a lot.
And my feeling about it has really changed.
And the basic anecdote is this.
Super fan goes up to super creator.
It could be comics, could be books, could be movies.
They go up to the person and say, how do I become a best-selling comic book writer or whatever?
And the person basically looks at them straight in the eye and says, if you have to ask that question –
Well, and then insert answer here.
You're an idiot or you've never really thought about that question or you've never actually tried to do it.
If you have to ask that question, then I can't help you because it's kind of like asking how do I become president of the United States?
Well, it's actually in some ways extremely easy to become president of the United States.
If you meet the criteria and you get the electoral college victory, you become president.
But how do you get to that point?
Well, boy, sit down.
Bring a bag lunch because there's a long road to getting to that point.
It's already too late for you.
Yeah, well, there's that one gateway at the end where you see you get your coronation and you get your sash and a parade.
But, like, you know, I think most people, like in the case of I've become a travel writer for the New York Times, I mean, ask the thousands of people who have tried to get that job before.
Right, right.
Well, and there is this, and again, I mean, I hate to put everything on the shoulders of Elizabeth Gilbert.
Yeah.
I wasn't going to say anything.
But yeah, there is this whole culture of manifesting.
It's why there are so many freaking photographers now.
What do you want to do with your life?
Oh, I think I want to be a photographer.
And I'll just manifest that.
And now I'm a photographer.
It's like, wow, you are a photographer.
You take pictures.
But to be a photographer of that kind, it's just like being a videographer or a landscape architect.
A lot of it is just code for like, my dad is rich.
Yeah.
I'm your videographer, people.
Yeah, right.
And if you don't have a rich dad, if you're not just looking for a cool thing to justify your time on Earth, but are really looking for a job...
I think you should cross travel writer off of the list of fantasy jobs.
Or replace it with publicity flack.
Because the idea that you have of jet setting around with a series of silk scarves billowing in the wind as you visit...
five-star hotels and give them glowing reviews but have but retain your like personal integrity um one of those things is going to have to go
And this is really the old man in me talking, but there's a question that very few – I'll just say young people or naive people or people who haven't had enough experience yet.
There's a question very few people ask, which is what industry could I go into where working improbably hard and never taking no for an answer and looking for every opportunity and sacrificing everything would be a good choice for me?
Because that's the answer to a lot of these is you can do a lot of things, but you'll very rarely.
I don't want to turn this into another show, but like you'll very rarely end up in this one place that you saw when you didn't understand the business yet.
Unless you understand like how people he'll still very rarely get it.
But you might end up becoming one of the best copywriters by starting out wanting to be a television writer.
It's just that you never know which opportunity is going to come along, and they all come down to an extraordinary amount of sacrifice, including the sacrifice of some kind of pie-in-the-sky dream that you had that was never really –
a sane goal because you didn't really understand what the job was.
You have to just go out and work really hard for a long time to get anything.
I hate to say work hard because it isn't like you're working in a mine, but you do have to have this tenacious personality of getting back on the horse over and over and over even though there's no money in it for a long time.
But just waiting around for the New York Times to call you is a pretty long shot.
What does Dan Benjamin usually say in these moments?
I'll tell you about something I like.
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Yeah, right.
Obviously, the thing is that if you had that personality, you wouldn't be sitting around dreaming about being a travel writer.
That's such a disappointing answer, though, because it really does sound like every piece of bullshit you've ever heard from everybody in your family.
The advice you hear that – I mean you'll hear that advice often from people like me, from failures like me who are like, well, I thought that was going to be really easy too and now I'm laid off from the auto parts factory or whatever.
The concept that I think intrudes or pollutes the water –
is that there really is, maybe more than any time since the Renaissance in Florence, there is this sense of patrons...
And of magic money, magic income streams that it's very hard to perceive where the center of the stream is, but if you can stumble along...
If you can bumble into a situation where some billionaire decides that you're his pet project or somebody...
sort of innocuously seeds a reference to their product into your content in a way that you feel doesn't diminish the content, but they are a rich person and they believe their subliminal advertising is really effective and they are willing to pay mightily for it.
Or, you know, the...
The idea that there's all this money out there that is essentially free money and you just have to be in the right place at the right time and tap into it.
You just have to.
And this is when you go on a cruise and you become aware that the cruise lines and the watch companies and the perfume companies and the people who run the duty-free stores and the liquor companies...
are all in bed with each other.
And not a single Rolex gets sold where every one of those people doesn't take a cut of it.
Just deciding which brand of shampoo is going to be in your hotel room, so many meetings went into that bottle of shampoo.
That's right.
And nobody is getting rich.
Everybody is getting a little percentage of
A little percentage of promoting the idea that everybody's rich and that the luxury brands are perfectly appropriate and so forth.
There are people with tons and tons of money.
There are people with more money they know what to do with.
And every once in a while, somebody does get their Kickstarter funded money.
a thousand percent more than they asked or every once in a while somebody does kind of hit a jackpot or work on a project and then they forget about it and oh it turns out that they're part owners of a big thing or spray painted a freaking mural on the wall of the Facebook startup and got paid in shares you know there are enough of those stories
that it just gets into the subconscious of the culture in a way that, that a lot of people and myself included are kind of walking around.
Like not, it's not, it's not, where's my parade.
It's like, well, where's my payday?
If I had just been in this one spot, this one time, like the rain would have fallen on me.
Yeah.
I would have gotten that.
I could have fucking spray painted a mural on the Facebook wall.
If I knew that it was going to be, if that, that I'd be worth $300 million.
Yeah.
And that little tickle of feeling like it's really just a question of like riding the elevator with the right person.
And on the other end of the elevator ride, we're shaking hands.
And he's saying, my people are going to call you.
You know, that the Medicis are going to...
Fund your little... Your little sculptor studio or whatever.
And I don't know how... That is part of the... In a way, part of the lottery culture.
Well, it's kind of magical thinking.
It's total magical thinking.
And yet, there really is...
It happens every once in a while.
There really is that.
Yeah.
There's a phenomenon behind a lot of the shitty turns out social psychology work and social psychology journalism that I find very interesting called the file drawer effect, which is – think of it this way.
The file drawer effect.
Yeah, which is like how much of this research did you not include in your study because it didn't meet the results that you wanted?
But differently, if I flip a coin 100 times and it lands heads up 51% of the time, if I throw out 30% of the times that it landed tails, that really makes it look like I can get heads more often.
But you're effectively cheating.
Right.
I don't mean to call this cheating, but in the sense that it's very popular today to talk about what you've learned from your failures, but nobody asks what you learned from your failures from somebody who hasn't had a big success.
Right.
somebody got in the elevator with a medici and it didn't turn out with funding the sculpture studio those stories don't get out and and when they do they're only it's only because somebody's talking to that person because they succeeded i'm not saying don't try but i am saying like don't look at your life as a game of kino where you just keep waiting for this thing to come along that's going to bring you up to the same bar of success that all these other people got so easily because they only got it easily after having stuff happen that was not easy
I was thinking about this the other day.
I went to school with a bunch of computer science majors in the late 80s.
And they were studying computer maths.
And they were designing programs that were impenetrable with really, really bad user interfaces.
You know, all the exact same stuff that made certain people millionaires.
And I haven't talked to these friends in quite a while, but I knew a whole handful of guys, and none of them are, I don't think, millionaires.
And realizing that even in my own life, I have the experience, because there are times when I walk around and think, God, if I had just gone into computer science in the 80s, I'd be a millionaire now.
And then I just had this kind of corrective realization that like, wait a minute, I basically knew all the people in computer science at this one college.
And we were all pals.
We were like Tetris buddies and stoner pals.
And I don't think any of them are millionaires.
And they are still working in computer science.
Like most people who were working in computer science in the 80s didn't become millionaires.
Like most people don't become millionaires.
And just as you're saying, the people that do get all the attention.
And over time, the cumulative effect is that everybody's a millionaire but me.
That gets reinforced because then you start looking for examples of that to add to your sad portfolio.
All you have to do is go on a cruise and it's like, who the hell are buying all these Rolex watches?
Right, right.
It's got to be all the millionaires that aren't me.
It's got to be everybody else that's a millionaire.
I texted you last night for no particular reason and saying, if you haven't watched... Just sending me dick pics.
Continued on next photo.
Ha ha ha!
That's a wide aperture.
That's Macro Lens.
I watched the first season of Deadwood.
Oh, did you?
But I didn't make it to the second season of Deadwood.
I forgot how good that show stayed.
What I remember about that show is I've watched the first five episodes in particular probably five times.
I've watched it all the way through once, and I've watched it through the first couple seasons at least twice.
So now that HBO is on the Amazon Prime, I've
I'm up to like the fourth episode of season two in a week, but you know, that's, but that's, that's kind of what you're talking about here.
In some ways it's, you know, it's like that old, it's the old joke about, you know, gosh, in all these transactions, the only people who really make sustainable money, not a lottery, not a one-time lottery, not a one day lucky shot.
The people who made the sustained, make the sustainable money today are lawyers and
Because lawyers will always make money off the cost of other people's transactions.
Financial people, same way.
And in that case, as we've said so many times, whether it's San Francisco or Comstock or Deadwood, it's the people who sold the equipment that got rich.
It's not – it's the people who are selling the $5 gallons of milk.
It's not the people –
Across the board, if you look at the actual numbers, I would bet you that most of the people who made the most money were probably – there were a few lucky people, and then there were extremely lucky people early on.
And then there was the people who sold the pans and sold the shovels and the picks.
that that's the sustaining money.
Cause even if you get one lightning strike from a Medici, that doesn't mean it's going to be there in the case.
Like, you know, the thing is if somebody comes to your, your travel blog and says, Hey, we'd like to insert these positive reviews of things.
You may not even realize that they're, they're experimenting.
They're doing that same experiment with 500 other sites because it's not that costly for them.
And after a month, they'll figure out who got the best results.
And suddenly your lightning goes away.
And then you're like, you're going, what happened?
I thought I, I thought I hit the lottery, but that that's how it works.
Like nobody gives you money unless they will think,
that they think they're getting more benefit than what they're giving to you.
And you forget that at your peril.
Yeah.
The city of Seattle is a city built on the crushed dreams of a thousand or the crushed dreams of, of a hundred thousand people who headed up to the Yukon to get rich and the gold fields.
Was that like one of the last places where you could get supplies that'll get you there?
Yeah.
Seattle, uh, like the,
Seattle sent all the goods up to the Yukon and collected all the gold.
If you were in the small handful of people that actually struck it rich up there or got gold, you'd take that gold down to the...
to the little pop-up general store, and then that guy would weigh it on his scale and put it in a bag and send it by dog sled down to Lake Bennett or whatever, where they would put it on a paddle boat and take it to the train, and eventually it would make it into Seattle.
You know, this was where the gold came.
And, like, the Filson Company was built originally to send clothes up to the gold miners.
And the whole city, I mean, Alaska...
Alaska is what built Seattle, trying to exploit Alaska.
But none of the names that ring out from that era are names of miners.
They're all names of merchants.
You might get a pass named after you where you died.
No, even the passes are named like Stampede Pass, Dead Miner Pass, Blackened Horse Face Pass.
No, all the names that ring out are the bankers, the shopkeepers, the gold pan sellers.
They are the ones who have their names on buildings.
And the miners, I mean, by the time most of the miners arrived, the gold was all claimed.
Pinched out, as they say.
That's right.
Limber dick cocksuckers.
It just became like a rush town of people spending their last dollar.
Spending the last dollar that they received back from Boston...
outfitting themselves like a dude in all the latest gear and was he sipping it and then they they you know they get it they lose it all in a poker game right and then they're like you know have to wire home for the money to to get a one-way ticket back
That's right.
There's a couple of things that I – I mean it's cool that you watched it.
There's a couple of things – again, re-watching it for the millionth time that made me think of you.
And I mean one of the things is – Basically all of the characters.
Yes.
Yes, but not the obscenity or anything, but just – I love the elevated language, of course.
But just the kind of the ethics of the town and the importance of honor and the importance of sort of doing –
doing what you say you're going to do and doing it within the fairly mature um as as weird and primitive as the culture is it is a mature culture where you know without anybody having to tell you like you don't fuck without swear engine like you just you get that pretty quick you know you get that you can shit on this part of the road but you sure better not shit on that part of the road and nobody has to write that down in a book and a lot of the pushback is
Through the whole first season especially, there's all this pushback about what happens if the United States comes in and disqualifies all of these claims as being illegal and starting over.
And that was one part of it.
But also the – I don't know.
Just the whole – the one thing that's so great through every episode is like nothing is easy in this town.
There's something where like you're going to have to buy something or you're going to have to deal with somebody.
In the case of like the first few episodes, they can't even buy what they want to buy.
They can't buy the land to build their store.
Yeah.
And I just, I love the idea of like every day being this constant struggle of like fucked up bureaucratic overhead, even though there's no rule book, that everything you do is you're going to have to like buy, like they say, the same roach and the same biscuit, like every day.
And I don't know, for some reason that seems like that would appeal to you.
Well, and what's great about a show like that, and I guess a town like that, is that there are always microcosms of...
of the big of the big world the big picture this is kind of what i always say to people who come up to me with conspiracy theories like elaborate conspiracy theories when you look at when you look at deadwood and you realize like al swearingen is in charge of the town and everybody's terrified of him but it's a lot of work to be al swearingen it's very stressful it's incredibly stressful and people are fucking up on your behalf all the time and you are constantly mad and
And you're out there.
I have to deal with this.
Yeah, you're out there killing people that need to be killed.
But you don't, you know, you very seldom really relish it.
It's just work you've got to do to maintain your position.
Because if you don't do it, there's all these little grubby rats around your ankles that are waiting for you to slip up.
And from the perspective of somebody who's scraping by in the town, Al Swearengin seems like he's got it made.
And Al Swearengin seems like he's in charge of everything and his invisible hand is everywhere.
But from Al Swearengin's perspective, it's a shit ton of work.
He didn't ask for it.
And he perceives it to be his duty to maintain a certain kind of order, etc., etc.
And when you extrapolate that out and you realize that all of the international systems more or less are just giant extrapolations of that.
Right.
From a remove, it seems like this great opportunity, but it's all pretty rickety.
And all it takes is Cy Tolliver coming to town to suddenly disrupt the whole idea.
Yeah, it's super rickety.
Yeah, yeah.
And when you think about like, oh, the –
Trilateral commission is running the world or whatever.
There are all these secret rooms where men are making secret plans.
And the reality is there are people sitting around in those rooms.
They are making plans.
But there isn't this additional level of intention behind a further curtain.
Like, they are just guys who are improvising and they have power.
But they don't have unlimited power.
Right.
And they don't have enduring power that always evidences itself in the same way.
Right.
There is no great-great-grandson Rothschild who has always been moving – his grandfather was moving the levers and he is moving the levers.
And we are all being slowly poisoned by our water bottles.
It's just –
Everybody is scrambling and improvising to keep the ball moving sort of incrementally and ultimately stupidly.
That if human beings were smart enough to...
To keep even the smallest conspiracy a secret and alive for longer than half a generation.
You know, we would be... The evidence would be everywhere.
The evidence would be everywhere that we were... That the world actually ran that way.
But in fact, the evidence is everywhere that we are just...
That the streets are full of shit and we are just trying to walk from one saloon to the next without getting in a gunfight.
You know, it's a... We are not in a... There is no system.
And the perception of the system is just that you've never sat in Al Swearengin's office and watched...
you know, the ins and outs of how, how a guy like that keeps it, keeps the ball in the air.
Keeps the ball in the air today.
Today.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, there's like, I just wrote this down.
There's like three things that are difficult in life.
Working with other people, getting shit accomplished and keeping secrets.
Three things that I think are pretty hard to do and they're super hard to sustain, to work with the same people for 10 years, to get things accomplished for 10 years, and to keep whatever you're doing a secret for 10 years.
All those independently are super hard, but it's what every conspiracy requires.
Three of the most difficult things in the world.
So it's so ironic to me that the people who are the least trustful in the world being conspiracy theorists, they got a reason for everything.
They'll figure out all these things.
But the people who trust least in the world have an incredibly bizarre idea of how much bad guys can trust each other.
Right.
Oh my God.
It's totally bananas that you could pull off something as large as like having stuff appear on the money and nobody would figure it out except this one guy.
It's so like those guys never told anybody else.
Like how does that work?
Is it Omerta?
Like how does that work?
Yeah.
Well, and I think I have the advantage and I feel like
I feel like my friends share this advantage, but my peculiar advantage is that I really do not think that there's anybody out there that's any smarter than I am.
And that is an advantage for me and also can be a disadvantage.
But I hear people all the time say like, well, you know, that's just, they're just those people that are just up there that are just a lot smarter than the rest of us and they are doing things that we don't understand.
Another form of magical thinking.
Right.
And I just don't believe it.
I have met a lot of people in my life across a wide spectrum and some of them people that have tremendous power.
And I just don't, I mean, I have met people where I'm like, wow, you're smart.
Like that you, I like the way you talk or I like the way you think.
But smarter than me?
Meh.
You know, no.
I mean, not really.
And so the idea that
So as a result of that, I feel like my interpersonal relationships with people are a template for how people interact with one another.
I don't feel like my interactions with people are principally that different from the way any other person interacts with any other people.
And if I cannot...
keep a conspiracy going among my friends for more than four weeks, let's say.
If I can't tell one person a secret and not hear it back from a third person,
four weeks later, then how could anybody, right?
And like my, my group of friends is a, or my group of associates and my experience in the world is just a, I can extrapolate from that to see what human behavior is.
And it's, you know, it's one of the, it's one of sort of my theories of my growing, like the book that I'm about to write on feminism is,
which I know you're going to be fascinated by.
But like all of the most powerful people in my life are women.
And always have been.
And that does not square with the cultural narrative that we've all accepted that women are in a disadvantaged position vis-a-vis men.
Like, clearly the culture is structured so that men are in charge, in air quotes,
But in my own life, the women are in charge.
And that's true of everybody I know.
It's true of every woman I know.
It's true of every man I know.
I don't know a single man that is really in charge of the women in his family.
And so, there's a tremendous tension in my own first-hand experience...
between what I perceive to be real in the small scale, in the microcosm of my own life, and what I'm being told is true in the macrocosm.
And it's always anecdotal.
Well, this person, that person.
Well, this statistic, that statistic.
But in the reality of how I perceive life, I live in a matriarchal culture.
And the perception of our culture being patriarchal is a question I'm interested in unraveling.
I have a theory as to why we perceive it that way.
And certainly that, there's a lot of, you can point to a lot of anecdotal and statistical evidence to bolster that theory.
But my, and I think everyone's first-hand experience is, like, no, mom is the head of the family.
And so was grandma.
And so was great-grandma.
And so how do you square the one thing?
with the other and it's and it feels like very much in the family of the idea that like well in my personal life you know like person X is sleeping with person Y's wife and everybody knows it except for person Y but we are all willing to believe that the government controls the media hmm
Or the Jews control the media, you know, that there are international systems that are hundreds and hundreds of years old where everything is being puppet-controlled by people that have back-engineered alien technology.
But the people around me who have everything at stake can't even manage to carry on a simple and normal affair with one another without the whole thing blowing up in their faces within a period of weeks or months.
So I know I'm going to get a lot of angry letters for this, but...
But I'm working on a comprehensive theory.
I'm looking forward to that.
I only discovered the last 10 years something that – you know how it is.
When you discover stuff from your past or your family's past and you go like, on the one hand, wow, that's really surprising.
But wow, that really makes sense.
And that makes so much sense that I can't believe it's this surprising.
But my grandfather was a very, very proud man and a mason.
And I've told you about him.
He's from British Guiana and very English and extremely racist and very – just really pretty much what you'd expect America was like.
He carried like a short bullwhip everywhere he went.
Yeah.
He might've had one on his lapel, but, but, you know, my mom told me, you know, a few years ago, something that I guess I should have realized, which is I knew that my father or grandfather and my grandmother both worked.
Um, and I, so the way it was always described, I always knew my grandmother was a secretary that says, you know, it was always understood that she was a secretary and my grandpa had a career at, uh, Cincinnati gas and electric, right.
Easy enough to understand.
Right.
And, uh,
That sounds like the story.
And that's the story.
But the little more texture behind the story is my grandfather had a pretty blue-collar job where for basically 30 years, he would shut off people's electricity every day.
He drove around in a truck and that was his job.
And he eventually got – I think his promotion was he'd been there long enough.
He eventually became what they called like – he said it was like deputy or something like that.
But like, no, I mean, his job was basically that he had a blue collar job his whole life, but he got benefits.
But my grandmother's job as a secretary, my grandmother was an executive secretary for many years to the founder of a pharmaceutical firm in Cincinnati.
She'd had a whole variety of jobs until she really just their faculties were not there to do it anymore.
But what I found out, she was the breadwinner in the family.
Like, yeah, he got good benefits and stuff.
But my grandmother made a ton more money than my grandfather did.
Yeah.
And to quote a line from Deadwood, a title, a lie agreed upon, I think it was – this does not do anything to either refute or bolster your book's theory.
But I think it was just understood that grandpa would always be seen as the patriarch of the family even though grandma is the one who was responsible for them being able to do stuff and pay their bills.
That's right.
And I – now hearing that, boy, that sounds so dumb now.
Like why couldn't I have figured that out before?
I had no reason to figure it out because everybody – that was the kind of thing that a family would just sort of – it was not the kind of thing that came up at Christmas talking about that.
You know, not just a family but our entire human family.
Yeah, so she let him be the boss.
She let him.
be the boss that's right i'm not saying that means anything you know political in a larger sense maybe it does but all i can say is that like that narrative as it was sat just fine with me yeah um for my entire childhood and young adulthood the thing is it sits just fine with everybody and and the you know the the the lion is the king of the jungle the male lion sits and sleeps for 20 hours a day sleeps for 20 hours a day
That's right.
And the culture of lions is absolutely a female culture.
But when we take a picture of the lion and put it on the title card of a movie company, it's the male lion with his big roar.
And he's big.
He's the biggest lion.
So when push comes to shove between him and any other one lion...
Like he's probably going to prevail, but he's a, he's a figurehead.
He is the, you know, he's the male, it's the male plumage really.
Anyway, the, the, uh, the angry, uh, the angry letters or the, or rather the, the, um,
I don't anticipate angry letters because I haven't really explained my theory.
Well, we'll save that.
We've got a lot of episodes to come.
There will be a lot of instructive, I think, emails that I get from people explaining how I'm wrong and don't understand.
Well, I...
I will just say in this case, I think one argument could be made that the system that needs to change is the one in which grandma feels like she should let grandpa win and let him be the figurehead.
And isn't it kind of a shame that you can't just call that what it really is, which is that there are two people trying to get by and that if it matters – and it shouldn't – but if it matters, grandma is the one that's really the one – she's the powerful one.
It's a system that makes it okay for her to demur to his power that I think is what people are struggling against.
That is the thing that we have been struggling against for the last 40 years or 50 years.
The idea that what is the perceived imbalance of power...
is the actual imbalance of power.
And so what we need to do is change what we perceive to be the structures that allow for this imbalance of power.
But there isn't really any awareness that the perceived imbalance of power does not actually reflect an actual imbalance.
And that...
Where we were starting from was a system that was actually in balance.
It just had components or was in a cycle of 100 years or 200 years where it had been out of balance after the Industrial Revolution.
And was kind of like, after World War II, it was particularly egregiously kind of trying to integrate new technology was making the imbalance kind of ugly, the perceived imbalance.
But we have been trying to put a system that actually was in a kind of equitable balance.
We've been trying to write it and put it into, because we were not conscious of what I think people were for thousands of years conscious of, which is that dad does this work, mom does this work.
And when it's time for somebody to stand up in church and say, our family is here and I am the representative of it, it's dad that does that job.
But when it's time to really set the standard of what our family does and what our culture is, it's mom that does that job.
And so for thousands of years, I think people did not perceive there to be any imbalance between the genders.
It was just a recognition that dad did the front man stuff.
He did the talking.
He was the one that went to town.
When it was time for somebody to write the history of our people, it was dad that did the job.
But that didn't mean he was in charge or to the degree that we wanted somebody to be in charge.
It was dad that naturally filled that role.
But the idea that he was in charge in such a way that he was dictating to mom what we thought or did, I think is unreal.
That doesn't exist in any family I know of.
And I don't think it existed throughout history.
And we're watching Mad Men now and reflecting back on this post-war time when we were living in these little...
These little subdivisions where all of a sudden grandma wasn't there anymore.
It was just mom and dad and the two kids.
And the system was broken.
But it wasn't that gender roles had always been broken and now we're finally discovering it.
But really that it was just a moment in time when...
Mom and dad, neither one of them knew what the fuck they were doing.
And we've got imprinted in our minds that those mad men gender roles are somehow indicative of how gender roles were for hundreds and thousands of years.
And we're not aware that that is the anomaly.
That was the outlier era.
So anyway, we're living in a world now where we have been trying to fix the underlying cause of a system where we're only seeing the shadow box of it.
The perception that grandma shouldn't be ashamed to claim that she is the breadwinner.
When in fact, you know, I think grandma was happy to have granddad be the puffed up, you know, the stuffed shirt at the head of the family.
That that is a traditional, that those are traditional gender roles.
And that those are actually traditional for a reason.
And that that is a system that is actually in balance.
Yeah.
So now I'm going to get some angry letters.
Oh, you'll be fine.
But the more that I apply this theory to what I perceive, the more I realize that for us to have accepted the narrative for the last 40 years that we live in a patriarchal society where women are enslaved requires of us that we...
That we deny what our eyes and hearts tell us about the people right around us.
Like about our own families, about the things that we see every day.
Like women are in charge.
They're in charge of our culture.
They're in charge of our families.
They are the prime movers of what we think and feel.
And so how all of us, men and women both, can walk out into the world and say, yes, but the fact that there is an income disparity or the fact that there is violence against women or whatever, all the evidence to promote the idea that there is a conspiracy, a giant conspiracy.
for hundreds and hundreds of years on the part of these men that are supposedly like in charge of everything who have these mysterious powers I'm very curious to know I doubt very much that William Buffett doesn't answer to his wife ultimately Warren whatever William Warren the Oracle of Omaha they call him yeah the Oracle of Omaha
answers to his wife, just as we all do.
I answer to her.
I'll answer to Warren Buffett's wife.
To Mrs. Buffett.
I'm on her email list, and she's like, what are you doing?
What is your culture?
Don't go too far off the reservation.
I hope that nobody takes my idea and starts working on a book, because I'm going to write this book, and it's going to make me a pariah.
I think there's plenty of room in the space.
What are some conspiracies that actually really happened and worked, do you think?
Well, I think about this all the time.
What are the conspiracies that worked?
Like the ones that worked for more than a month.
I mean, there are the conspiracies.
What history is littered with is attempted conspiracies that failed, right?
I think the Holocaust is a tremendous conspiracy that worked, right?
You might want to clarify that.
You mean in the sense that they were hoping they could get away with it and nobody would – they tried – especially in the later days, there was a lot of scurrying to cover their tracks.
They're very, very personally well auto-documented.
They documented in extreme detail and then tried to cover it up.
But the amazing revelation that we've had, you and I, just on this program, that the Holocaust really didn't start until 43.
The final solution.
The final solution.
And that it was over by 45.
Mind-blowing.
It's incredible that they marshaled that many people and that much materiel and that much information technology and were able to successfully perpetrate a crime on an unprecedented scale and
Like that is an example of a conspiracy that was predicated on the fact that there was already all those systems were in place and they fit the puzzle piece of mass murder into a bureaucracy that had been designed for a different purpose.
And while they rallied, certainly rallied and stoked that kind of hatred, it would have been a much harder sell to the people who had to make the machines if they didn't already kind of feel that way.
If there was not already such a poisonous feeling about certain groups.
Yeah, right.
But I don't think – You couldn't have just generated that about people with brown eyes.
I think it was so compartmentalized.
We're making it as a rat poison.
You know, that's what makes it such a conspiracy.
Like, nobody went to the Zyklon B manufacturers.
They didn't have an employee meeting and say, we're ramping up production because we've decided that what we're really killing is Jews.
I want everybody in here to give me 25 ideas for Zyklon B by noon.
Listen, everybody take a knee.
25 tags.
And this is the whole question of complicity.
Did the chairman of the board...
Of Merck.
Farber.
Yeah, Ijen Farber.
Yeah.
Did he know?
I mean, you have to say, yeah, he probably did.
Somebody went and stood in his office and said, we need a hundred times more of this pesticide than we were ordering before.
Wink, wink.
Right.
But did they?
Who knows?
Who knows what was happening at that point?
That guy, I'm sure, claimed that he didn't know.
And his sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters all, I'm sure, believed that he didn't know.
But at what point, I mean, the people who knew what was happening, it was actually pretty...
The Nazis did a brilliant job of controlling information.
But they were in a totalitarian bureaucratic state, and it only lasted for two years.
And I know that there are some listeners who would say, we are living in a totalitarian bureaucratic state, we just don't know it.
But we're not, in fact.
Like any other conspiracy that actually succeeded that came out a hundred years later.
Can you name one?
You know, this makes me think of – not really, but I think there's an interesting distinction to be made between an ongoing conspiracy and a cover-up.
So I think it's one thing to say, holy crap, somebody accidentally shot Johnny, and now we've got to go bury him, and nobody tell.
You could see that as a conspiracy.
I would really contrast that, though, with The Jews Run Hollywood –
Sure, sure.
That's a real different kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
Any of these nutball ideas that there's some kind of a pseudo-formal cabal of people who work behind the scenes to manipulate, that's the kind that I find incredulous or incredible.
It's just the idea that that many powerful people, a la Al Swearengin, could work with that many other powerful people and not have it get out.
You know, I think the reason it has such a popular hold on our imagination is that the Soviet Union really did, like, control information to such a degree and do that whole revisionism where little by little people get painted out of the picture.
Airbrushed out of a photo, yeah.
So that by the time, you know, if you were raised in the Soviet Union, born in 19...
30 and you know live to 1989 or whatever they're they're presumably from our perspective outside looking in we think of them as being people who are living according to one truth that is largely manufactured and
And there are all kinds of, you know, there's all sorts of evidence of that.
Just in my own experience, walking through Romania and like talking to the people where they're like, oh, yeah, well, the commissioner of this department promised Ceausescu that all the trees...
That this was the most fertile part of Romania and all the trees were bearing fruit at all times.
And so Ceausescu was coming on a tour of the area and we went, we had to go to the open market and buy 10,000 bushels of apples and then pay a bunch of peasants to take those apples and tie them in the trees.
Staple them to a tree.
Yeah.
And that for one long stretch of the road, some group of people who didn't know any better had tied apples in all the pine trees.
Is this a true story?
This is a story that I was told.
That's an amazing story.
So that Ceausescu, as he was driving through in the back of his limousine, that the person sitting next to him could point out...
And say, like, here, look how fertile it is here in Arad.
We have apples growing in the pine trees or whatever.
But the story as told by Romanians to me was... The point of that story was that Ceausescu and the people around him were the ones who were being hoodwinked or were too stupid to...
To know that you can't, that first of all, there aren't apples in the trees in April.
And second, that there aren't apples in pine trees.
And the story that I kept hearing in Romania was that what happened was, it was a, the culture of lies was a product of these incrementally small exaggerations.
Where a guy said, I have the most fertile part of the country and we're going to make – we're going to exceed our harvest this year.
Oh, it started as that – as you described, inert bullshit, like bullshitting.
It started as like tall tales basically.
Yeah.
And then the guy sitting next to him at the table was like, well, we're going to exceed harvest this year.
And then pretty soon everybody at the table is going to exceed harvest this year.
And that goes for a couple of years until they have a bad year.
But now everybody was already lying a little bit.
And so it's much harder to... Then you have a bad year and crops are halved.
If you'd been telling the truth, you could just say, well, we had a really bad year.
But you've already been lying by 10%.
And so now you have to keep that lie up.
And you're like, well, we didn't lose any crops.
And then nobody did.
But the guy at the head of the table is making economic plans...
And economic predictions based on what you're telling him.
So he says, we have a surplus and our neighbors in Hungary had a bad drought this year, but we have a surplus.
So we're going to sell, we're going to sell apples to them at an inflated cost.
And then we're going to take that hard cash and we're going to build tanks with them.
And so then the message goes out, well, we need a thousand bushels of apples from every department because we're going to sell those to Hungary.
And all the department heads are like, we only have a thousand bushels of apples.
Well, we can't reveal the lie, so we're going to send all of our apples to Hungary.
And then there are no apples in Romania.
But the people at the head of the table don't know that because they're being lied to.
So they sell those apples on the open market and then they build tanks with them.
And from our perspective, sitting in America, it's like those evil people are lying.
They're starving their own people to build tanks.
But the reality on the ground is much more complicated, and the responsibility is with every little tiny lie.
So Ceausescu, he had no idea.
People are putting pieces of paper in front of him that say, we're the richest country in the world.
He's not looking for information that makes him look bad.
He's not, and that's the thing.
And his crime is that he's not intelligent enough or interested enough.
He's incurious.
He's incurious to say, what's the real story?
And when he does say, let's go on a tour of this, I'd like to see that.
People tie apples in the pine trees, and he's like, uh-huh, well, sounds good to me.
Ultimately, he's a boob.
But the idea that that is a conspiracy that is coming from a tribunal as opposed to a broken culture that is feeding on its...
brokenness and it's a death by a million cuts it's actually much more depressing it's incredibly depressing but it's like it is fundamentally human in a way that in some sense it's easier to understand how a person through a series of small lies could find himself on a stepladder tying an apple into a pine tree it's easier to understand how that crazy story could be true
than it is to understand how a nation of people could allow themselves to be willing you know willfully starved for 50 years because they're just taking instruction you know because they're living in a culture of such total fear that
that nobody dares move left or right you know like the one thing the one thing sounds bananas but i can see how you would end up there well you know you can grow bananas in pine trees too well that's the thing i'm sure they were tying bananas up there too so i don't know i use that litmus test uh whenever i hear a story about like
about how somebody's in charge or about how the world is in balance.
I'm just like, if I import that story to my little world, my little group of friends, can I see that actually happening?
And sometimes the most fantastical ones I can.
You know, I could see you tying bananas in my trees.
He'd cut it down at daybreak the next day.
I gotta pee.
I gotta pee so bad.