Ep. 114: "The Gentleman's B Party"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Good morning.
Pretty good, yeah.
It's pretty early.
I was up in the high desert for a few days, and I came back down here to the low swamps, coastal swamps, and last night I woke myself up sneezing in the middle of the night, and I sneezed so hard I pulled a muscle in my chest.
LAUGHTER
Welcome to the 40s.
For the past week, my nose has been as dry as the Sonora Desert.
There's a reason we don't work on crab boats.
So other than that, I feel amazing.
Yeah.
I think I got more allergies as I've gotten older.
I got more sensitivity to those kinds of things.
And like I used to have a friend who had really bad allergies and she would always bemoan when it was like a nice day because of the high pressure.
It would wreak havoc and I would think that's insane.
You're obviously a crazy person.
There's no such thing as being allergic to grass and high pressure systems.
What's wrong with you?
And now as soon as the weather gets nice, I wake up in the morning and I pull muscles.
yeah pull the muscle in my chest and muscle I'm not even sure I remembered I had and I'm not sure how sneezing could have pulled it but you know John I think there are many small muscles in the body that we don't think about I think I first learned about this roller skating you know when I was a kid and you go and you roller skate when you don't normally roller skate and you discover that there are so many tiny muscles in the area near your ball area you know what I mean
Your groinal muscles, they call them.
That's right.
That's the technical term.
Yeah, right.
Well, you learn that by trying to shoot the moon or walk the dog or whatever it is that you do on a roller skate.
I think those might be yo-yo tricks.
This one's called the sleeper.
Yo-yo tricks can hurt you in the groinal area, too.
I have not been roller skating.
Roller skating just came up.
in conversation i have a lot of trouble seeing you roller skating well you know of course in our era when i was in sixth grade i don't think there was a cooler thing to go do than go to the roller rink i mean that that was the first i guess you know what it was that was the first my first experience with clubbing right that that for a sixth grader that is going to the club
And all the cool kids are there and some of the kids are there like unchaperoned.
Kids skating around, they know how to do the skating things and the girls are there.
It was Congress, the Congress skating rink on Congress Street was absolutely the center of, it was like going to the disco in Saturday Night Fever.
It was the thing everybody talked about all week.
And then like I went there like twice and I felt completely out of my depth.
I just played Quicks the whole time.
Well, and Quicks, listen, no slight against Quicks.
That's a hell of a game.
But, you know, I think I had an advantage.
This is one of the weird things about being both younger than your ostensible peers and also less mature than them.
At that age, where girls were starting to really be interested in boys, I remember girls getting interested in boys a long time before boys seemed to reciprocate that interest.
But again, that might have been my maturity.
But there were definitely kids there that were making out and engaging in boy-girl activities.
But I was so immature that my response to it was just to like skate right up to two kids who were clearly like about to neck, you know, skate right up to him and go, you know, like I was, I was such a dork.
You're on the skating rink spectrum.
You had trouble, like, understanding the emotions of those other people.
I did not understand, and I also did not understand, like, that there was a new kind of hate that someone could feel for a person, which was the, I was just about to kiss that person, and you skated up to me and said, kiss army!
You know, like...
I was so, I was such a, and the thing was, these were my peers and friends in school.
We were the same class, the same grade, but I was fully two years late maturity-wise.
Mm-hmm.
And so, just, I was oblivious.
I was still a little kid, and we were listening to Blondie, and things were happening, people were feeling feelings, and I was not feeling feelings.
I was feeling only...
the thrill of the speed of the wind in my hair and the pure adrenaline panic of not understanding what was going on with my friends.
I totally agree.
I've said this a hundred times.
I'll keep saying it.
I feel a little less like this now, but pretty much for all of my life, I felt like there was a manual that I didn't receive.
And particularly that there was some kind of, I don't know, some kind of afterschool class that everybody was getting on how to be a person.
Because at every step of the way, I felt like...
How do you guys understand what this system is?
How do you understand how to navigate in the system?
And I think it's a fucked up system, but I think girls did understand that there was a system and what their place in it could be better than a lot of guys and earlier.
But back then, it was completely inscrutable to me.
It was a very lonely experience.
I don't even know there's no library book that I could get that would help me explain how to – not just even like find a girl who would want to kiss me, but like to even like fit in at the most basic – I was invisible.
I felt completely invisible at a place like that.
Yeah, I think about this a lot because that missing manual.
I mean, in one way, I remember hearing stories about there was a girl in my class who was super bright, super funny.
And in a way, like I felt now I'm talking about seventh grade, but I felt a kinship with her.
And then the story went around that she not only was drinking alcohol, but like drinking it before school.
And later on, I knew her well when we got to be adults and understood that she had a terrible family life and was drinking before seventh grade.
She actually was doing it?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
I can't imagine that.
Well, and the other thing is, like, this is Alaska, and a lot of kids were...
You know, a lot of otherwise normal kids were huffing paint and drinking before school and, you know, going out to their car to do, like, whippets just to, you know, in between class that they'd shoplifted just to, like, black out the...
There's a base level of trauma happening among Alaska youth in the 70s that I can't imagine is true anywhere outside of West Virginia.
But I remember hearing – Very stressful.
Well, yeah, because the adults up there were not running the show the way that you would – it was a frontier mentality.
A lot of people were up there making a ton of money.
during the oil boom.
And they were irresponsible people to begin with.
They were like oil workers.
So not what you're going to... Not people that have a lot of impulse control.
You talked about your friend who had gone through that.
So it's kind of a case of...
Is it fair to say luck, like lightning striking, and you just suddenly go from being a schlub to being somebody who has ten times more money than you've ever had before?
Well, yeah, and I think you're seeing this happen in Edmonton, Canada now, and kind of around the world.
What happens in these frontier situations is that guys, people who are like...
very, very working class like wrench turners and you know, like Derek workers are suddenly elevated just through cash alone into like the like firmly upper middle class
So people are coming from Oklahoma, they're coming from Arkansas, they're coming from Louisiana, and they've been working on the oil derricks down there.
And they come to Alaska and their pay is quadrupled.
That's a really mixed blessing in the long run.
Yeah, and they don't have any roots up there either.
And the nature of the country is anything goes, right?
So you get, I mean, a massive influx of sex workers, a massive influx of drug people.
Everybody's up there and there's just money everywhere.
And this happened over and over and over again in Alaska because the fishing went crazy.
You know, it's a gold rush mentality.
Yeah.
So a lot of these people had kids, and they weren't looking out for the kids.
And the drugs and the sex and the violence was all happening all around this kind of generation of kids.
I'm talking about kids that came of age between 1970 and 1985 or something.
There was so much intensity, and the adults were so checked out.
They were probably working a lot, too, right?
Well, and that's the other thing, like two weeks on, two weeks off.
So dad is just fully gone.
And then when he comes back, his pockets are full of cash.
He's raging.
Um...
And very, very nutty life, right?
And I didn't... My family was relatively stable by comparison.
But, you know, I would hear this story about, oh, yeah, you know, what's her butt is, like, coming to class drunk.
And the story goes around, and it's not... People aren't telling it, like...
um, that that's a, that that's reason for concern.
They're telling that story because that makes her incredibly cool.
Like, did you know that, you know, that a is like gets drunk before school?
What?
Whoa.
Yeah, I know.
Cool.
Right.
And so that kind of information and, and this happening kind of among my, among people I know, my friends, um,
Put the manual so much further out of my reach.
I've never had a beer.
I mean, I guess I had, but I wasn't intentionally getting drunk yet.
And...
That's a real line to cross when you're in high school or younger is when you consciously go – I think.
Maybe I'm just puritanical or silly or something.
But it seems like there was a real difference between people who were like, teehee, I'm going to have a beer and a half while we drive around in a car versus people who would like plan ahead to have alcohol and get drunk on more than like a quarterly basis.
It really felt like a big divide.
I think it's a huge divide.
And the only reason I think you would be doing that is that you are trying to, you know, you're trying to put X's where your eyes are.
Yeah.
Because whatever else is happening is, like, way worse.
And so there was a lot of that going on, and then the sex that attended that.
And I was, you know, honestly still...
Still worried about whether the agents of Cobra were going to succeed in their plot to capture G.I.
Joe.
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I am feeling the beginning, the very, very, very beginning of something that I know is going to get 100 times more complex.
But, you know...
Even in kindergarten for my kid, like there are certain kids that – I mean there are certain kids that are aggressive.
Certainly little boys her age are very aggressive.
There are some kids who are – who have some stuff going on and then there are some kids who are dicks.
And it's when you're around so many – like I have to honestly say and I imagine you've had this too.
It's kind of amazing how many of the kids in my daughter's kindergarten class were actually really like nice, cool kids with parents and they're a pain in the ass or whatever.
But they were like pretty normal kids.
So it really does stick out and it's a pretty diverse.
It's a pretty diverse class.
But in most ways.
but it really does stick out when there's somebody who's like always getting in trouble because of a combination of not just impulse control, but also lashing out where you see a kid.
It's, it's, it still feels weird to see a five or even back at her preschool.
So in some cases, three or four year old boys, there's one little boy that she was friends with who was a really sweet kid, but like everything would be going fine.
He would suddenly become pretty aggressive, then become violent.
And,
And then burst into tears.
Like one day he hit her with a shovel.
And they're really good friends.
And then he would just burst into tears.
And the kid's three or four.
And so I got to read on that personally.
And I don't know how to translate it, but I want to say to her, well, you know, that kid's got some stuff going on probably.
And what I want to say to her though is like when you meet people who do stuff that seems outrageous or are allowed to do stuff that seems outrageous or you see them behaving in a way that's very outrageous, like that may not be just because they have cool parents that let them do what they want.
A lot of – I mean what I've tried to say to her is like when you meet a bully, almost every bully you meet –
got that way for a reason.
And it's because somebody bullied them and it might be their dad or it might be their brother or their mom, but that kid probably may, I don't want to say, but that kid may not have the happiest home life and school ends up being the place.
I'm not trying to excuse this, but school may be the place where they're trying to figure out, you know, how do you explain that to a five-year-old though?
Like why'd your friend hit you with a shovel?
Well, I know his dad's a little hard to talk to sometimes.
Does that resonate though?
Yeah.
Well, watching the little kids interact with each other at school and then extrapolating that to watching the adults that I know and then just trying to live in the world.
It's hard to keep those two thoughts in mind, which is that...
That everyone in the world is simultaneously less monstrous than you want them to be or less monstrous than you think.
Everybody's doing the best job they can and everybody has a fairly similar toolbox and people are generally good.
We're probably more alike or more almost alike than we would imagine a lot of the time.
Exactly.
And it's the insight that you get when you're like, oh, you know, like we've talked about a million times, like people in the South are amazing.
And we spend a lot of time in the North demonizing them.
And then you go down there and you're like, these are the most amazing people in the world.
What was I talking about?
And it's true around the world.
Everybody is generally great and everybody is like smarter than you think and better at what they're doing than you think.
And then on the flip side, like...
How are we – how do we manage even to have one day of peace in the world?
How do we manage to even have – It's absolutely perplexing.
You said this a few shows ago.
Why – how is it – and I really am going through this today because don't get me started about local public transit today.
Oh, my God.
But you were saying something about like I don't know how people drive to a job downtown and don't get in a fistfight every day.
And I know that's an exaggeration, but I have to say I'm kind of surprised it doesn't happen more often.
I mean the kind of friction that you have with other people every day and just knowing how many people are really out on a limb every day and barely keeping it together.
Well, and how many of these kids – like our little preschool draws from a fairly affluent –
subset of the sort of Capitol Hill population.
And there are a couple of kids who have beautiful homes and obviously like educated, caring parents and
But those kids are out of control because the parenting choices, it seems like, that are being made are mostly like, boy, I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to do about it, so I'm just going to give him a candy bar and set him in front of the television and then half an hour from now he'll have calmed down and I guess that's what parenting is.
There's a lot of that going on that it feels like
Yeah, over time, that kid will become socialized by his peers and by the world and by school so that he can go out into the world and get a job.
He can go to college.
All these things will happen.
But at the center, at the core of this person, there is no relationship to other people.
You know, the core relationship, which is like my mom and dad didn't let me be an animal.
Sort of never happened.
And the kid is insulated because they have wealth.
And so he isn't an animal because he's in this big house and nobody can hear him.
He's not bothering people on the subway.
Not to find a point on it, but also because they may have the resources to help that –
And I'm not trying to sound judgy.
It's just something that I struggle with, and I'm aware of this, is that if you have the resources and the time – and time really means resources.
Resources really means money.
It means you've got a place where you can be all the time, like you've got a home.
Maybe you've got childcare all the time, and you have a way to perpetually help your kid take the edge off.
And you're always there to give them – maybe not exactly the next drink, but you know what I mean?
You're always there to give – something I've talked about this a couple other places lately because it's really been on my mind is – and really inspired by you in some ways is how to help a kid get to where they figure out that –
It's not a good idea to expect other people – to assume that other people made you feel bad or to expect that other people are going to be there to make you feel good, whether that's through TV or whatever.
Just because I do struggle with that.
But you're right.
And the thing is, as long as those resources are there and there's a TV there and there's another bag of M&Ms there, everything will be fine.
Right.
And so this kid grows – I'm seeing it more and more.
And this is kind of what we – when we see these terrible –
videos or when people reveal themselves on the internet to be um you know gross kind of frat boys like that that expose that just went around about all the all the ceos of those startups in their 20s who it turns out are like racist frat boys or whatever and it's like yeah that that's that's happening a lot
That's happening in a lot of places, you know?
And the resources allow the person to grow up with a good vocabulary, a good education, a good... You know, they have a lot of friends and they have the ability to...
They have a cool car and they're popular and successful.
They succeed.
But at the heart of their experience, there's something crucial missing.
They weren't domesticated.
They were just like, when you get tired in this giant room full of toys...
Why don't you go into your other giant room full of toys or why don't you scroll through a thousand videos you could watch or why don't you, you know, you know, and it's just like you're saying, take another hit off of the crack pipe and then literally something's wrong with you.
Let's go to the doctor and get some medicine.
That's going to, you know, that's going to,
Yeah, like, why do you have trouble sitting still when you're expected to not do the thing you immediately want to do for five minutes?
Yeah, right.
You must have a disorder, let's put a pill in you.
Right.
And then you see other kids at the school whose parents are, you know, what you would call, I guess, I mean, they don't seem strict to me.
Maybe when I was a kid, I watched other people's parents and was like, wow, that's a strict parent.
But there are parents that go to the co-op preschool that my daughter goes to who are just watching their kid.
And when the kid hits another kid with the shovel, the parent is on them instantly and not angry, but the parent is there.
The parent is saying, I see you.
This is not good.
You are done or whatever.
And that kid is at the center of their existence is...
something, right?
There is some feeling that somebody that loves them
is watching them, I guess, for better or for worse.
So anyway, yeah, I look around.
I mean, I just did a bunch of traveling last week, and everywhere you go, like, there are people everywhere, and they're all making it work somehow in this fractal way of, like, every single person is paying their water bill this month.
Every single person is, you know, manages to, like...
Put gas in their car.
But yesterday I was on an airplane and I kept hearing this clacking sound and I looked across the aisle and there was a woman cutting her fingernails.
Oh, God.
On an airplane.
That's toenails in our neighborhood.
Toenail cutting is a popular event on the streetcar out here.
Sure, sure.
I'm sure it is.
Click, click, click.
And I'm sure she would have been clipping her toenails if she didn't feel like there was some line.
She's not a monster.
She's not a monster.
But she does have something missing in her.
And it isn't just, I don't think that no one ever told her, you know, she's a, she's a woman in her forties or fifties.
And, um, it's just a, it's just, it's, it's all those people that reply to me when I say, don't wear sweatpants on an airplane or whatever.
They're like, they're comfortable.
Well, yeah, it's comfortable for her to clip her.
She needs to get this done.
It's comfortable for her.
But, but somehow, uh, like all, all of the, uh,
As we loosen certain restrictions in order to have new, exciting freedoms, we draw the curtain back on a lot of people who...
who were only being held in the, in the pack by, by the rules, you know?
So I, I don't know.
I'm a, I'm continually astonished that we manage as people.
And I feel like that alone is, I feel like that alone is, is all the proof I need or whatever, you know, like all the faith that I need in my life is that it continues to happen.
It's a, I guess it's a, I guess it's real politic, right?
A feeling that, yeah, we're managing, and if you zoom in or zoom out too far, it all looks insane.
So the solution is don't do that.
Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Well, don't do that.
And that's a weird place for somebody like me to arrive.
Yeah.
Because I want to zoom in.
I want to zoom out.
I want to find the place where it hurts and poke it, poke it, poke it.
But, uh, but like big, big identity way, big identity land.
Yeah.
I just feel like we're doing it.
We're making it.
And, uh, it's, it's really improbable.
It's, you know, the, the other thing is that like, I'm not to make this all about the kids stuff, but you know, it's, there, there's so much stuff that is pretty boring, I guess.
But like, you know, every kid has an innate, if slightly flawed sense of justice, uh,
And the most basic way – I mean the one kind of straight-up way that comes out is if there are five kids at a party and only four of those kids got a slice of cake, well, I would have to agree unless there's some circumstance I don't understand.
Somebody screwed up and that actually is kind of not fair.
If it's a party where everybody gets cake, that would be a nice thing.
But even stuff like it becomes really difficult to try and say –
For example, at our kids' school, there's real super mixed signals about stuff like whether it's okay to have sugar there.
We've got all these lectures about how you can never have sugar at school, nothing with sugar in it.
But even the teachers bring cookies sometimes, which I think is fine personally.
But the thing is that's what – the problem becomes and that becomes a mixed message that is much more –
It's much more – it's about a lot more than sugar.
And it's because if a little kid consistently sees something that's at odds with what we said it would be, that's the original confusion is if it doesn't square in that way.
And to me, that goes straight back to Congress skating rink where, man, my mom worked so hard and tried so hard to give me what she could and to keep me from not becoming a reprobate.
But of course I envied –
The boys whose parents didn't – who were like the Nelson Muntz kids.
You know what I mean?
Whose parents didn't care where they were.
I envied them so much.
I thought they were so cool.
And the girls who in some cases had some pretty clouded judgment about how to be spending their time.
I just – that world, I mean –
It just, it seemed magical to me.
Like, how do you get into that group?
And now I'm just, I'm so glad that I wasn't.
Well, yeah, the, the, the, when, when feathered hair,
was introduced to the world i could not make my hair feather no matter what i could do it it wouldn't work there seemed to be this line where there were these people with effortlessly feathered hair yes and they and effortlessly feathering hair and like cool getting drunk before school seemed to be like those venn diagrams overlapped a lot
And right up until feathering hair became universal and everyone had a giant comb sticking out of their back pocket.
Out of their white painter's jeans.
My mom was still cutting my hair with a ruler.
Like a straight edge ruler?
Yeah, pretty much.
You put your head slightly rounded.
Not really.
And cutting my hair with a ruler.
It's a poor carpenter that blames his tools.
Or a measuring tape or whatever.
And then she would go to Sears and she would buy me outfits that matched.
The off-brand goranimals?
Yeah, like a... Well, this is a blue and orange velour v-neck sweatshirt top.
And so we should have some blue and orange striped pants.
This is an orange and yellow striped baseball shirt.
We should have some orange jeans.
You know, like I was... I looked like...
Yeah, I looked like an ice cream cone or whatever.
Like a sherbet experiment.
Yeah.
And I was perfectly comfortable in those outfits because, you know, first my mom had picked them.
And so they couldn't be wrong.
But also, like, my favorite color was orange.
And I had orange jeans on.
What other criteria would a person have?
If your favorite color was orange and you could have orange jeans, why would you not?
And then I sort of walked through these giant doors into teenager-dom.
And, like...
Leaving aside the orange jeans for a second, just the fact that my hair looked like a motorcycle helmet.
And all these kids with this hair that really looked like feathers.
You kind of have that haircut.
You've got a cross between the ruler haircut and a little bit of Charlie Bucket on the cover of your first record.
You kind of got that rocking a little bit.
Well, and that's the thing.
It's basically the haircut that every member of Creedence Clearwater Revival had.
um and i call it the modesto straight edge yeah it's you know it's it's like i mean my mom didn't not know how to cut hair she she cut it as as well as needed to be cut because it's i know it's just my attitude about the child too it's like it's a child but you're you'll grow back you'll have options and also like you're giving it a cool haircut why the hell would you give a child a cool haircut
Like, oh, I see why you would give the child a cool haircut, because the child is a toy to you.
But practically, what a kid needs is, like, no cool haircut.
I mean, honestly.
But yeah, the... Is it like giving them a beater car or a cheap guitar?
Yeah.
Same idea?
A little bit.
Or the Jiro loves sushi model of like, your child should work in your sushi restaurant their entire life.
Until they're old enough to cut trail.
Until I die.
And then you will take over the sushi restaurant.
That is the, you know, that's the premise.
Don't worry about haircuts.
Cut, cut, cut.
In my experience, like, the consistency is, the consistency of like the adult world.
I'm not worried about explaining that to my kid because I feel like in general, we've established with her that there are restaurant rules and there are library rules and there are home rules and those rules are different.
And that doesn't need to be explained to you.
You know that when we're in a restaurant, restaurant rules apply.
Those are different than house rules.
And so just follow the restaurant rules.
This is the sort of uncomplicated way that we traverse the world.
And if we're in a restaurant and some kid across the restaurant isn't obeying restaurant rules...
That's not our problem.
But it's still difficult.
I mean, even if you handle it well.
She's very curious.
She's very curious about it.
Like, what is that little boy doing?
Why is he doing that?
And it's like, well... And that's also where you get into the, when you go on, that further concentric circle out from, like, Cake at the Party is an awkward thing.
We're like, if we...
You just decide to do something at the last minute after school.
Like, hey, can we go to this place everybody else is going to?
Sure.
And that could be the comic book store.
It's the park or something like that.
Well, and the thing is sometimes one parent and sometimes that one parent is me is like, oh, sure, you can have an ice cream cone or sure, you can have a comic.
And then the other kids are like, oh, my God, what they get?
I should get that.
And that is like as much as that is clear in your mind or my mind is very difficult to explain.
And I get that.
yeah it seems extremely arbitrary and basically unfair but that is that is a kind of unfairness that i'm very comfortable communicating to her is just a part of existence like her her her childhood justice which is such a super which is super heightened and understood you know it it's like yeah sometimes the teat gets knocked out of your mouth kid you know like
We go to the backup.
We all would be just sucking on the teat all the time, but we're not.
And so sometimes other kids get ice cream cones, sometimes blankety blank.
And definitely within her parenting structure, like her mother...
is it's not it's not i don't think that she doesn't care but like she uh her mother is oblivious to her playing with ice in her cup at a restaurant by which i mean the waiter comes reach a filthy hand in and grab ice waiter comes over puts a pint glass of ice down in front of the kid and immediately i am looking at the glass and i'm looking at her and
Her mother is not.
Her mother is studying the menu.
Her mother is looking around.
And the first thing that she does is she reaches her filthy little hand into her ice, into what she sees as a fantastic ice water bucket that somebody put down here.
All she needs is a shovel.
to begin having fun.
And look, there's a giant spoon.
She does have a shovel.
And so away she goes.
And if you're not sitting there saying like, hey, hey, hey, guess what we don't do?
We don't
pull the ice out of our glass because you're a dumb little baby.
First of all, you're going to pull that glass over on you and then you're going to be soaking wet.
And we're all going to, you know, how many times does it have to happen before we just don't do it anymore?
But in her world, there is the fundamental inconsistency of when she's out to dinner with her mother, she by themselves, she might be playing in her water glass the whole time.
Ah, we're the worst at that.
But when her father is there, you know, like, no, you're not... And all of a sudden, that seems arbitrary.
Well, then she's staring at me with her dark eyes.
She's giving me the glare across the table, like, why are you prohibiting me from...
doing what i want and then we're then we have a new problem which is you're glaring at daddy which is also not a thing that we do and you know and but she understands that though the rules are different with daddy and they're not radically different it's not like daddy comes in and says before we eat we all take off our clothes and sing kumbaya and everyone in the restaurant staring at us but that's just what what we do with daddy i mean it's just no it's it's a level of it's within the realm of normal
But the rules are different and every person should understand that because otherwise you get situations where you are clipping your fucking nails on an airplane.
Yeah.
You know, like at a, at a, the rules are different, but there are restaurant rules, there are airplane rules and, you know, within, within, within a realm of variation.
Yeah.
But for me, the idea that you would take your shoes and socks off on an airplane and put your feet up on the bulkhead...
is out it's off the reservation it's outside of what anyone would call reasonable airplane rules but i have a picture of myself sitting in first class next to a guy who took his shoes and socks up and put his feet up on the bulkhead we were in row a and his feet are bare feet on the bulkhead and you know the the flight attendants aren't going to say anything
And here's this guy who's obviously like, he has enough privilege that he is sitting here and he's just taking it all the way, like his comfort above all else.
So watching other kids and watching the way that their parents are there and loving and caring and have the resources and ability, but there's just that key little...
piece of attentiveness or attention or, or like, or personal authority or just understanding what their job is.
Your job is not to give your kid a cool haircut and make sure that your kid ends up cool because then your kid is going to be getting drunk before school because that's, that's the only way they're going to fill that hole.
You know, your job is to say what the rules are and to make the kid feel loved as you take the glass of water away from them.
Right.
and say, we don't play with water on our table.
It's also kind of like, if you're really reductive about it, it depends on how you look at your job or how you look at your kid as a thing.
And I've had to become more aware of something that...
It's like, do you look at this person as a retired baby or as a future fucked up human?
Right.
Adult, right?
I mean, they're both human.
But like, so is it a retired baby or a future fucked up person?
Because everybody's going to be a fucked up person.
And if you look at that, I think there's ways that you can try and take those two faders and adjust them in a way that becomes a little bit more sensible.
Because on the one hand, you go, well, I understand why you're impatient.
I hate being here too.
This really does suck.
And so maybe I can do something to try and – you could play with the iPhone or maybe you could do this game or when we're done here, we'll take a walk.
And there's various ways you can try to relieve that.
But then the other part of it is, yeah, but you also do sometimes have to go wait in these lines because that's a thing we have to do.
Yeah.
I don't want to make it unbearable for you because I do remember how boring it was to be a kid.
It was really boring a lot of the time.
But you know what it makes me think about?
I don't know.
I'm going to throw you a bone here.
It makes me think a little bit.
I know you enjoy talking about things like entrepreneurs and the super wealthy.
I feel like I'm an entrepreneur expert.
Yes.
Yes.
I understand.
A retired entrepreneur.
I understand what their culture is.
And I really want to dig down.
I really want to open the kimono on entrepreneurship.
Deep dive.
I look at – and again, this comes from being – coming from a modest background.
The only thing that I find more flummoxing than I found –
cute girls in tight pants when I was 13, is to look at people who really do – like they make millions or like a billion dollars and then they move on to the next thing that's even bigger and they work even harder.
And even somebody – some dingling like Donald Trump.
I mean how many times has he made and lost and remade a fortune?
And I find those kinds of people – they might as well be from another planet because I'm that kind of person that would – like I'm like maybe –
Just a half turn away from a lottery ticket person where I'm like, hey, if I had a company that made that kind of money, I would try and do things like take care of college and settle my things and be – but mostly I would try to like have more time to do stuff.
That seems like the last thing on some of these guys' minds.
So what do you think – is there any connection at all to the kinds of things we're talking about here?
Not that you'd want to analyze what they were as kids, but do you think that comes from a super abundance of independence as a kid that made them want to try stuff?
Does it potentially come from –
you know, an unquenchable feeling of self that needs to constantly be refilled or something else?
Like, where does it come from?
What makes people, what makes, I guess Paul Allen's not a great example, but what is it that makes people want to go and just keep making these bigger and bigger companies and bigger and bigger products and be involved in bigger and bigger things?
Do you have any sense of that?
Well, I think about this a lot, and especially because some of that desire to do bigger and bigger things and more and more things is at the heart of my own problems.
I went into a coffee shop the other day, and the guy behind the counter...
was a guy I knew and I was like, Hey man, how's it going?
He's like, great man.
You know, how are you?
And we talked and he's got a couple of kids and he made me like the most delicious espresso.
That I'd had in weeks.
And I say that as a guy sitting here drinking week-old coffee that he kept in the fridge while he was gone.
But like this beautiful espresso.
And I was standing out in front of the coffee shop talking to another friend of mine.
And I was like, I didn't know that this guy... I kind of guess I didn't know that he worked here at this cafe.
I know him from around town.
And my other friend was like, yeah, he's worked at this cafe since like 96.
Yeah.
And I was kind of taken aback by it.
You know, he's my age.
He's got two kids.
He's...
in some crucial way, like he is practicing the art of espresso.
And this is a thing that happens here in Seattle.
That's that predates the artisanal mustache, uh, world where we were, we recognized espresso making as a craft.
And it was, I guess it was always sort of a hipster world, but that, that thing alone was,
was a was a world that you could go into with kind of pride and the guy who who started stump town coffee came out of this this particular cafe and and and this place never had the guys that owned it never had an interest in expanding and becoming a 20 chain thing they were just into their place and they just make perfect coffee there and and so this cafe has a whole culture of people who go there and
And it's kind of like a blast from the past, like it used to be before...
Everything needed to become a thing, you know, when it could just sit and be a little thing.
Yeah.
Anyway, and I was reflecting on the fact that I like this guy.
He did just make me a fantastic cup of coffee.
But the idea of deciding at age 24 that you're going to be the world's greatest barista, or not even that, you're just going to try and be a better barista every day.
And that a kind of contentment could come into your life through that practice.
And that you would not every day wake up and go, why don't I own this cafe?
Why don't I own the house across the street from this cafe so I can sit in that house and look out the window at my cafe?
Why haven't I written a book about how...
to be a barista that is a that is the biggest book ever about it you know that constant drive to to like
And on the surface of it, and the way that in the past, my ex-girlfriends have all criticized me for it, the outward expression of it always seems like, oh, you just want to be a big wheel.
You're not content to just sit and pull coffee.
You want to be a big shot.
You want to be the big wheel.
And that's an impure motivation, and you should...
You should find contentment in just living a good life.
And all these things that people say, like, if you have a couple of good friends and, you know, and a couple of low and brows, boy, aren't you living.
But I think at the core, at least for me, is this desire to, like, well, what are we doing here?
Like, if we're not moving the ball forward on what it means to be human, if we're not helping each other, if we're not making it easier for the next generation, if we're not trying to solve the problems that our fathers and mothers created, if we're not, like, engaged in this life...
in pursuit of something, something that maybe we'll never know, you know, something that ultimately is just that we one day send out a probe and it connects to another, it connects to extraterrestrial intelligence or, you know, who knows what the freaking purpose is.
But if you're not, if you're not pursuing it, like there is a purpose and, and within that, like, at least I feel like,
I should be part of the advance guard of that.
And I feel like maybe the guy who's making espresso every day is fulfilling that purpose also.
But I perceive my job to be as an explorer and as somebody who is trying to advance that ball.
But it comes up against this thing that actually came up in the course of a Roderick's Rendezvous the other day.
Where, as I was kind of free-talking, which is what I do at that show, basically, like, I roll my eyes back in my head until all you can see is the whites.
And then I free-talk for half an hour.
And then I... It's the secular version of speaking in tongues.
Yeah, where I'm just like, here's what I was thinking about today.
I thought about some thoughts.
Would you like to hear them?
Here I go, here I go, here I go.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
But I was sort of reflecting on the fact that there are limits to human pain and also limits to human joy.
And the way we can tell that there are limits to human pain is that if there were not...
There are some people who have experienced so much pain in their life that it would make life impossible, right?
How could you survive the Holocaust and then go on and live the rest of your life and live to be 90?
How could you do it?
There are people who have experienced such incredible trauma that if there wasn't a floor to the amount of pain we could experience, that people would drop all the way through.
And the thing is, there are people who do drop all the way through it.
There are suicides, and there are all kinds of people who fall and keep falling.
But for the most of us...
This is why when you're talking about drug addicts or anything else, you talk about they hit their bottom.
And there's another way of looking at that bottom, which is that it is this blessed limit.
There is a floor to the amount of suffering that you can experience.
And once you hit that floor, imagine losing your child.
Imagine losing your child where you are responsible somehow.
You couldn't survive if there weren't a floor to the amount of suffering we can actually experience.
And once you hit that bottom, then as they say, there's nowhere to go but up.
And we can survive these terrible things and we can continue on.
But the flip side of that is that there is a ceiling to the amount of joy that we can experience.
And a lot of these people who are what characterizes multimillionaires and billionaires is this constant trying to...
trying to achieve an enjoyment of luxury or an enjoyment of success that they just can't... They've hit their ceiling, and so they keep buying luxury watches, or they're like, I want all the furniture in my house to be made out of ocelot fur.
And if I get that, then that is going to... Then I'm really going to... You become desassant, or whatever.
You've reached that...
you've got no more opulence.
There's no, there's nothing that's not helping at that point.
Yeah.
But, but they are thinking like, that's what I deserve.
That's what's going to make me feel like better or whatever.
And, and like the, the fact is like, I have the good fortune periodically to stay at the Chateau Marmont in LA, which is a kind of shabby chic, you know, the people take care of you.
The food is fairly good.
The rooms are comfortable.
Um,
And realizing a long time ago, I was sitting in that hotel and I was like, if you had more money, if you had so much money that, well, first of all, there's the amount of money you could have where you could stay at the Chateau Marmont anytime you wanted and not think about it.
And that seems like a nice amount of money, right?
If you had that much money where you could come to LA and just be like, oh, I'm staying at the Chateau.
I'm going to stay there for two weeks.
Who cares?
That seems like a great resource.
And yet there are people for whom
The idea of staying in such a crappy place would be an insult to them.
And I see this in airports all the time.
I'm walking around, I'm like, the airport is a kind of place now where if you are even in an airport, you're not in the top class of people anymore.
Well, that's been a shift.
So you'd be on your own jet or something?
You'd be on your own jet or you'd be in a charter jet.
You would be in a different terminal.
And so everybody in this airport is basically, we are all compressed into the same cattle chute.
And the people who are in double first class and who board early... And the Platinum Rewards double first class.
Platinum Rewards double first class are just fooling themselves because they're going to have to go through that same TSA line.
And they might have pre-check, but there's a woman in pre-checking on a rascal scooter with her pants full of beanie babies now.
Like, there's no... There is no...
There is no route through the airport that doesn't, at some point or another, end up with you standing there with your Louis Vuitton luggage, standing in line behind a guy who's got his toenail clippers out and is ready.
Right.
A guy who drinks a little too much and almost finished an associate's degree touching your balls.
But the idea that there's a ceiling on pleasure, and this is kind of the crazy thing about...
my relationship to capitalism, which is that...
like unlimited wealth, unlimited opportunity, unlimited success is not unlimited.
It is, it is absolutely limited by the compression that's on our own experience, the similarity that we all have to one another.
And the fact that past a certain amount of luxury, freedom, enjoyment, you know, pleasure, like there is no more.
You cannot, you cannot chase that dragon any further.
Um,
You cannot have any better sex than you've already had.
And you cannot have any better sleep than you've already had.
And so...
All of the rest of it is wasted effort, you know, like misdirected resources and wasted pursuit of something that is just like, here we go.
We're, you know, we're all sitting and watching these rich people like arc across the sky and thinking, wow, they're, you know, they must be having such an amazing white hot experience.
They're sitting in a very comfortable chair and they have a hangnail just like I have a hangnail.
And they're paying somebody $1,800 a week to take care of their nails.
But ultimately, that ceiling and that floor compresses what we can feel.
And if we could just acknowledge that somehow and feel like, all right, you know, you crossed the finish line.
You are in pleasure time.
Now, this is as good as it gets.
So, like, don't spend any more.
So, we're not going to devote billions of dollars of our collective wealth to support your...
Your pursuit of more, more, more.
We're going to channel that in a different direction.
Try and raise the boat for some other people to get out of the swamps.
I guess that's the logic of a socialist mentality.
That's the logic of socialism.
It's just that once a certain percentage of people are up above...
up above the ceiling, then what we should really do is turn our attention to all the people who are below the floor.
I think that's borne out in every single individual person's... Like, you look at those pictures of Richard Branson, who has his own island,
And he's out there with Mick Jagger and a bunch of 24-year-old Virgin Airlines stewardesses.
And they are having jet ski races.
And the only reason I know that this is happening is that there are photographs of it.
And the only reason there are photographs of it is that Richard Branson hired somebody to stand waist deep in the lukewarm ocean water and make sure that they documented this experience.
Because Richard Branson doesn't believe that it exists unless it's photographed and...
publicized.
And you see the look on his face, and he's a handsome guy who has got a lot of money, and he's having what we all think of as a peak experience.
He's naked jet skiing with Mick Jagger!
But the look of rigor mortis on their faces is the look of somebody who does not
who does not know how to enjoy things.
And he can only, you know, so, so you have to photograph it.
The only enjoyment he's really getting is making sure that other people saw this and making sure that, you know, he is, and he doesn't seem, I mean, he seems like a monster, but not the worst kind.
Right.
At least he is, you know, at least he's not using his wealth to like make sure that people don't get.
I'm kind of surprised that doesn't happen more often.
Yeah.
Because it seems like there's a fork in the road where you get – I think I understand what you're saying.
You get to a certain point and you've got everything anybody could ever want.
You've been on the cover of magazines and you start to get that.
Maybe they would never say this, but if you are a multi-gajillionaire and you start to get that fit of pique or that feeling of kind of emptiness, well, you go into charity stuff and you start a foundation.
And that's just a nice thing to do.
It's very nice they did that.
I'm sure there are some financial reasons to do that as well.
But anyway, you go and you start a big foundation and you start hanging out with Boutros, Boutros, Gali or whatever.
I'm kind of surprised there aren't more people who just decide to become supervillains, like secret supervillains where they're like they still show up for meetings.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They do some charity work.
But basically, man, if I could afford to buy an island, I would be doing some crazy shit that nobody could trace to me because you could afford.
You could afford to do stuff where it could never be traced back to you.
And part of the fun would be you're like anonymous now.
Or you're like, you know, some 4chan kid.
Like, you're getting away with incredible shit and nobody can figure out as you because you're hanging out with Poutre's Poutre Scali.
Yeah, right.
Don't you find that a little bit appealing?
First thing you would do is buy a submarine.
Well, and honestly, the reason I think that that doesn't happen more, and I think that is the underlying logic of all conspiracy theorists, is that all the rich people have in fact done that.
And maybe I'm the idiot here.
Maybe it's happening and I just don't know it.
Yeah, they are running secret games.
From submarines.
From their private submarines.
But I think what you come up against is the threshold of people's imagination.
I'm also interested in the idea of a public submarine, though.
Some kind of municipal submarine line.
I could see that.
I could see that.
Anything would be better than what's happening right now, my friend.
I'm picturing Seattle with the zip lines and the gondolas installed and then some submarine-based public transit.
John, you know me.
You know I believe there's power in a union.
But, oh, my God.
So the local Muni, you've been on the cars.
I've seen you dive out at the last minute.
I have been on a Muni for sure.
You know, my high school girlfriend.
The one that broke your heart?
Yeah.
Okay.
Met and married her husband.
The doctor?
Well, he's a PhD.
She's a doctor, is that right?
She's a doctor.
He's a PhD, depending on whether you call them a doctor or not.
I'll leave that to you.
But their meet-cute story is that she was on the Muni and was getting off at the stop that he was getting on.
And he got on the subway and either she turned around and got back on the subway, got back on the Muni that she had just gotten off, or it was the other way around and she got off and he was about to get on and then he got off.
That's a really creepy meet cute.
But there it is.
They're married and they have two beautiful kids.
Life goes on for them.
Yeah, good for them.
Yeah, Muni.
Hakuna Matata.
So they got a union.
And you know me, John.
I believe there's power in a union.
I know.
You're not a union buster.
I'm not a union buster.
No, no, I'm no scabber.
You're no scabber.
I'm no scabber.
But there are 600 vehicles that are operating every given day in San Francisco.
And let's just say it's already...
It's a shitstorm to begin with.
Just the fact – if everything is running perfectly, it's still so not running perfectly.
And these guys are a little unhappy about their current negotiations for their $32.50 an hour opening pay job.
So they're going to have to start paying for some of their own pensions.
These are guys who make $100,000 a year and live on golf courses.
And God bless them.
They're doing great work.
And two-thirds of them did not show up on Monday and Tuesday.
Oh, so they shut the city down, huh?
It's called a sick out because they're contractually obligated to not do that.
That is out of range for something they're not allowed to strike.
And they didn't like the way negotiations are going.
And so basically the city has been completely gutted.
The cable car lines are down.
If you brought your kid to San Francisco to ride in the cable car, come back another time when the city is working.
Oh, boy.
yep yep yep you get out to my neighborhood like you know just about where i am at my longitude or whatever you come out here uh the train stops and turns around and goes back because they need it for other places and there's a bus that will show up that will then take every single person that was on that train shove them into one bus and then maybe that'll get all the way out to the zoo that that's our that's our last three days here
And you're like – and this really makes me like a John Roderick character because it's one thing to put up with a lot, a lot of poop on the streets.
But like it's so – we really need that system to work because there are a lot of people who like – if I had my druthers, we would not have a car at all.
We do have a car because my wife works on the other side of town.
So we ended up getting another car.
But I don't want to have a car.
I don't want to need a car.
I don't want to fucking park a car.
Part of what makes my neighborhood cool, I'm lucky to be on one of the five – why am I telling you this?
Who cares?
Except that I think there's a John Roderick point to this somewhere.
Yeah.
And like today we got on because I had to take my kid to the zoo for camp.
We got five stops from our house, had to get out because the train needed to go back.
And then we stand there and we wait.
And it's just like you really – I start to feel like a George Costanza character.
Yeah.
Like, where's my private island?
Wait a minute, are you saying that the John Roderick character and the George Costanza character share any commonality?
Absolutely not.
Oh my gosh, I can't believe you would even infer that from what I was saying.
Thank you.
But we all live in a society here!
I think, you know, I think one of the problems is that that
You should not let the liberals run things in a key way.
You know, like, there is a reason that there are two... I mean, America could have 15 parties, political parties.
America has two.
And within those two political parties, we try and put the whole constellation of feelings.
But...
Luckily, they're so vastly different in approach and philosophy and practical real politic, as you say.
Luckily, they're so different that they really are two extremely stark choices.
And the reason that they aren't is that, yeah, the vast mass of people are right in the center.
And they pick left or right just based on who their parents were and just based on the kind of music they like or whatever.
If there was a center party, it would be the biggest party in the country by far.
The center party.
I like the idea of that.
Yeah, the center party.
Let the left be the left and the right be the right.
They should call it the C-plus party.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, the gentleman's B. The gentleman's B party.
But you need people who are sticklers to run a public transit system.
You need some Swiss.
You need to bring in some Swiss.
Apolitical people, that's right.
Neutral, right?
Right.
Apolitical.
Who are unemotional, but who have resources, right?
You cannot run a public transit system where the people who are responsible for keeping it running don't have the resources to do it.
And ultimately...
You're seeing this in the New York Public Libraries right now.
The New York Public Library is trying to support itself because unlike sort of its competition, big private institutions and Library of Congress or whatever, the New York Public Library is supported by the people, right?
And there's this fascinating article I was reading, I guess, in the...
Would it be the New Yorker?
Yeah, New Yorker just recently, where they're like, the New York Public Library sold one of its branch libraries.
to try and earn some money.
They sold the real estate to try and earn some money to keep the library functioning and open.
And they sold this building for $50 million in Midtown.
And that $50 million went into the $300 million budget or $300 million deficit that they were trying to resolve.
The $50 million building, beautiful old library building, was torn down by a developer
who built a $500 million hotel apartment loft, the penthouse of which sold for $60 million.
So...
The person who bought that $60 million penthouse could have just bought the old library and lived in it.
If I was a fucking supervillain, that's what I would have done.
That would be pretty sweet.
You'd be like a Batman villain.
That would be so cool.
I would have gone in and said, hey, you guys, leave the books.
Guess what?
I'm buying the whole thing.
Libraries, books, microfiche, everything.
There's nothing in there you don't want.
You know?
Globes?
They got globes and maps?
I live in a freaking library.
Oh, my God.
I would love to live in an old library.
So whoever this person is paid $10 million more to live in what is probably just an apartment that looks like a hotel room that has only the finest...
finishes on everything.
And it's just fucking garbage.
Everything about it is garbage.
Living there is to live in a place with no heart.
And to live there is to be a person with no heart.
And the person who bought that apartment doesn't even live there.
They probably live in St.
Petersburg or they probably live most of their life on Richard Branson's private island.
And this is just the place that they come to blow people's minds when they're in New York.
But so this idea that the New York Public Library is like scrambling, and I mean, that's the ultimate public institution, right?
That building with the freaking lions out front that has served the citizens of New York for over 100 years.
It has the collected knowledge of all of human history in it.
And we are so screwed up right now that the sense that it is New York City's responsibility to keep that library completely funded and that all of the billionaires that live there and all the money that's going through that city, that somehow that library would be in jeopardy.
Because some tax bill didn't go through Albany the right way.
And now all of a sudden, some administrator at the library has to worry about fundraising all the time.
And meanwhile...
Across the street, there is somebody buying a ring for his Ukrainian girlfriend that costs $30 million.
Because Queen Elizabeth II once swallowed the stone and shat it out.
Called a conflict diamond.
It's like a special monkey poop coffee, except it's a diamond.
A yellow diamond.
It wasn't yellow when it went in.
And so you've got these – so we are living in a world – and this is why I'm starting to focus so much on local government.
The state of California is so broken because of that fucking referendum 14 or whatever the hell it is that the state of California passed.
Oh, Prop 13?
Prop 13.
Is that what it was?
The Howard Jarvis thing?
No, the thing from way back where they just basically gutted the funding of everything in the state.
I'm trying to remember.
It's some proposition that was passed by popular claim.
A decade or two or three ago.
God, why am I blanking on it?
The tax revolt thing?
The Howard Jarvis thing?
Yeah, I think it's Proposition 13.
Proposition 13.
And so the state of California does not basically eliminated its own power to tax.
I don't know.
They do all right.
But the state is kind of falling apart.
And our country is falling apart.
Our infrastructure is falling apart.
Our public facilities are falling apart because we are collectively funneling our resources to
into ukrainian women's rings yeah well and into you know into all these guys who are who are designing apps for iphones okay well i mean seriously yeah yeah you know like a billion dollars okay a billion dollars is a would be a fantastic um let's let's call it a um
bequest to the New York Public Library.
Why doesn't the New York Public Library have a billion dollars in its coffers?
Why would Muni
Why would Muni not be, like, trying to expand and improve its service at every turn?
Which you said before, a patron.
We need somebody who can be a patron of municipal things.
But why are we not our own patrons?
Like, you know, that's the idea.
I do not want a prince of Muni who is...
Who's like, I hereby allow Muni to keep operating because I am a saint and I cannot no longer get pleasure out of my money.
So I'm going to turn it over to Muni.
Well, I wish somebody would write a book.
Yeah.
called Everything I Need to Know I Learned Planning a Wedding.
Because I think there are certain kinds of things in life that I would say dealing with planning a wedding and dealing with getting ready to have a baby are two really good examples of this, of something where you might have the best ideas and the best intentions in the world.
I'm making this analogous to going into government for a good cause.
and why I think sometimes even a billion dollars wouldn't help I guess is what I'm saying is the thing is that in the case of a wedding or in the case of having a baby like no matter how like you thought this out and no matter how many good ideas and how many good intentions and how much energy you have like it's all going to be ground up in the machinery of that process and
So like if you've got an idea for how you want things to go, you can tell the DJ.
I can't tell you how many people I know that have said specifically to the DJ.
The first question was, are you going to talk over everybody?
Are you going to do all this bullshit?
No, no, no, no.
I'll make sure to play if you leave at exactly this time and stuff like that.
And they don't.
And they get up there and they announce the fucking chicken song and the bride is weeping because they just spent $10,000 for this guy who didn't do a single thing they asked him to do.
And you know why?
Because that's how it works.
And you can go in and say you want the puff patriots to be this way or you want these kind of covers on the chairs or like the thing is you think – so on the one hand, you're thinking I can fix this.
I can make this the wedding that I want.
Mm-hmm.
By throwing money at it.
And the thing is, there will always be so much more money that you can throw at that.
And all it's going to do is be more money to go into the gaping maw of the wedding industry.
Kind of similar thing with having a kid, I think, where there's all these books and websites that will encourage you to have your birth plan and all these things that you want to do.
And eventually it's going to come down to some people saying, well, you can engineer that as heavily as you want, but there's still so much stuff that just runs the way that it runs because that's the way that it runs.
Let me say this about that.
Yes.
One of the fundamental problems with economics...
is that economics, when people talk about economic models and they talk about the capitalist model, our typical economic model does not take into consideration that natural resources are limited.
Right?
I never thought of that.
That's interesting.
If you have a company whose value is in oil extraction...
The company is valued by the amount of money that they have invested in their machines, by the cost that is required to get the oil out of the ground and to process it and to ship it.
And that is the cost of oil and that is why that company is worth money.
What is not factored into that cost is that oil exists in a limited quantity that we presumably collectively own it as residents of Earth.
And that the oil has value intrinsically in the ground before it's moved.
And who owns that value and how is that value... How do we factor that in?
The thing is, we don't.
We don't think about the value of gold before it's extracted from the ground.
The scarcity that is involved in gold is the scarcity that is a product of, well, it's hard to find.
And it's hard to get out and transport around.
But not that it has value where it lies.
And so all economics...
ultimately is broken it's a it is a it's a game that we're playing it's a it's a it's a story that we're telling ourselves about how things work but it's a completely false story because to begin any economic idea you would have to say like well we're all on one planet and it is limited and we collectively own it we have to
There's no way you could say, unless you believe an origin story where God says, you, Adam, own it and your descendants get divided up.
You have to say, like, we're all on the planet.
We collectively own it.
And so...
All the games that we're playing about like, well, I own this much of it and you own that much of it and you don't own any of it are just games.
They're just stories and they are stories that have evolved because our understanding of where we came from used to be less complete.
And back when it was like, I don't know, the earth is flat and I live on this part of it.
It made sense to say like, this is mine.
I found this first or whatever.
But now we would... To actually have...
a system you could call economics that made any sense at all you'd have to start completely over and say that's just i never thought that's super interesting point it's yeah it's almost like the same kind of this is gonna sound silly but like why you on a certain level i can understand why people like the gold standard it makes a lot of sense because you're saying even though it's still an abstraction you're saying what makes this paper valuable is this other stuff that's valuable and but in this case you're saying like we never we never talked about the most basic part about this which is like where that gold came from right where that
gold came from who if anybody owns it because of why because of why right and so so the idea of taxes for instance which we all spend all of our time like bemoaning and thinking about and blah blah blah blah blah taxes taxes taxes taxes are just an idea that somebody had to try and solve a problem by apportioning resources that are that are largely fantasy and
In these different directions and to try and resolve inequalities and perform functions.
Taxes are not something natural.
God did not invent them and they are not in the earth.
Taxes are a comedy which we have placed on top of a comedy.
And the idea that we can look at the earth and look at our cities and look at ourselves and say, this is not... We have to look through these comedies that we've written to describe how we got here and instead say, where are we?
How do we apportion resources where we need them?
How do we have a... How do we write a new story where we understand that this is a collective...
action, it is spaceship earth, and resources are limited, and we now have the technology that we can move them around fairly effortlessly, how do we really want to do that?
How do we do that that would make sense to a child's sense of fairness?
How do we do that that takes into consideration that we do not want people living beneath the floor, and we are not particularly interested in people living
this dragon chasing existence because it's because it because it's ludicrous and you know so so taxes themselves are just a it's just a game to try and pry some resources away to direct them to these sort of collective actions and when you talk about like collective action versus individual freedom
Those are games.
Those are jokes.
They are novels, I guess.
And the reality is, like, here we all are, right?
We're all, like, breathing the same air.
And your individual rights and my desire to make progress that can only happen through collective action are...
are just the tip of the iceberg, really.
And that we spend all of our time fighting over and believing that those two things are antithetical to one another is just because we have such a limited imagination and we're so taken up by these stories that don't work anymore.
There are great, great, great grandfather stories and they do not actually describe our world.
I really want a nice car, though.
Yeah?
Are you still shopping?
You still have a nice truck, maybe?
Yeah.
But nice big gas guzzling truck.
I was down in New Mexico and I saw this Cadillac on the Craigslist, 60s Cadillac, and I was like, you know what?
I'm just going to fucking buy it.
I'm down here in Santa Fe.
I'm just going to buy this Cadillac.
I'm going to drive it home.
And that's going to be...
That's me.
You know what I mean?
That's how I do.
I'm just down here.
I'm going to throw some cash at this 60s Cadillac, and I'm going to drive it home through the wilds of the West.
And when I get home, then I'm going to be the guy in the Cadillac who drove it home from Santa Fe, and that's going to be a great story.
This is my new origin story, my latest one.
There are people that just fucking do what they want, and I'm one of those.
And I'm going to be a badass, and people are going to be like, what the what?
And I'm going to Instagram the whole trip, and fucking my legend's going to go through the roof.
Look out.
When I put out a record, a lot of people are going to talk about it, and they're going to be like, that's the fucking guy that buys a Cadillac whenever he wants.
I wonder why it's taking you so long to buy one.
Well, so then I'm like, that's a fucking dumb idea.
That's not practical.
And sitting in that hotel room, my path changed, right?
If I had gone the other way, I wouldn't even be talking to you right now because I'd be driving through the desert somewhere.
And I'd probably at some point stop.
Answering questions, posing in photos with children.
Yeah, I'd get a turquoise belt buckle.
It'd be like the opening scene of Showgirls.
You know, there'd be some girl outside of Las Vegas standing out there with her thumb out.
I'd pull over and be like, what's up, baby?
You want to get into my Instagram reality?
You ready for this?
I'm a dancer, not a whore.