Ep. 130: "Repping This Vibration"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
I couldn't find my microphone.
That's okay.
It's the one in front of you there.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
Oh, man.
You've been busy.
I have been busy.
America has been watching you drive.
Oh, I drove and drove and drove.
Man, we got a lot to talk about.
I know.
I drove from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio.
Oh, my God.
To Indiana, to Illinois, to Missouri, to Kansas, to Nebraska, to South Dakota...
to Wyoming, to Montana, to Idaho, to Washington.
Jeez.
And you did that probably in, like, a fuel-efficient hybrid or electric vehicle?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Just spreading greenness?
It's one of those bicycles that has a little electric motor on it.
Good for you.
Yeah, and it took me four years.
No, I average 10 miles to the gallon.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Ha, ha, ha.
I'm so glad your 79 Suburban does not have comments enabled.
That's right.
79 Suburban in full-time four-wheel drive the entire way.
I drove across America in four-wheel drive.
It's like a fast snowplow.
Yeah, basically, that's exactly right.
I could see guys in auto shops as I drove by eyeballing it to fit a snowplow to it.
To fit a snowplow to the front and a snowplow to the back.
And yeah, it was in the middle of the country, of course.
Gas is like $2.50 a gallon.
Really?
Yeah.
So there were a couple of times I put premium in it.
Even though I don't believe in premium gas.
I was like, you know what?
Premium gas is like $2.60.
I'm going for it.
This is America.
Fuck it.
Yeah.
I took a big gulp cup full of gas, poured it on the ground.
Oh, my God.
And so I don't even know where to begin.
So this is, I guess, for people who've been listening for a while, they know that this has been a grow quest for you.
White whale.
On the one hand, we want to find the right automobile, the right truck for you, but also you had something pretty specific in mind for a while.
Yeah, a specific thing, and it seemed like there just weren't that many of them.
My perception growing up in Anchorage
was that there were a limitless number of Suburbans because they definitely were the rich kid car in Anchorage, right?
If you were a pretty well-off kid, your family at least had a Suburban in addition to...
Three or four other cars and a boat and an airplane.
But Suburbans were everywhere.
And I just had this idea that in the 70s, the Suburban was the most popular car, maybe, I thought.
And then with a little bit more research, I realized that, in fact, Chevy...
Chevy was like solidly in third place of U.S.
truck sales all the way through the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
That's surprising.
It is.
Ford has always sold the most trucks.
And then Dodge sells more trucks than Chevy.
Which one's like a rock?
That's Chevy.
Okay.
That was Chevy trying to like, you know, and I think what has happened is that
General Motors, for those of you who are not in the United States, General Motors owns Chevrolet.
And GM has caught up in the truck races.
Driving across the country now, you'd be astonished how many Dodge trucks there are.
So I think Dodge might be number one.
You know what I see a lot of is Toyota Tundras.
Well, but see, you live on the coast, and this is a crucial... This is one of the crucial fogs that we're in living out here.
The cars that are on the road in San Francisco and Seattle are not representative of the cars that are on the road...
anywhere in the middle of the country.
Is that right?
Yeah, and there are huge, huge portions of the trip that I just took where every single car I could see, and, you know, the ground is flat, too.
I can see three miles ahead and three miles behind, and every single one is a pickup truck.
And they're all like hyped up, jacked up, customized.
I mean, they come right out of the factory now pre-customized, right?
In the same way that you could customize your... It almost puts a lie to the term because when you think of customizing...
You think of taking, like, your... No, no, just in the sense of, like, ordinarily back in the day, you'd go to some kind of shop in your area to get it tricked out, right?
You'd go and you'd get things added to it.
But you're saying you can get, like, the same kind of variety of tricked-out stuff, like, right off the showroom floor that you used to have to go to a specialty shop for.
That was an innovation, I think, that the Scion... You remember when the Scion was released and part of the marketing was that you could...
you could trick it out from the factory a hundred different ways or a thousand different ways.
And now my guess is that all automakers will embrace this soon, but for sure, if you, if you want, it's kind of, it's kind of like the, it's kind of like the, the, the, the nomenclature of the espresso wars.
Remember when, is that by Frank Herbert?
Yeah.
The nomenclature of the Espresso Wars, yeah, it was a module that I used to use when I was DMing.
The coffee must flow.
But you remember when a small suddenly became a tall, and then a medium was a grande, and then there was something else on top of that?
Get the Vente.
The Vente, that's right.
And on a truck, the smallest, least optioned truck is already branded as the Extreme Omega Vente.
Yeah, this four-cylinder Ford F-150.
Yeah, it's already got flames on it from the factory, and then you can decide how many more ridiculous skull heads, and you can get the grill so that it looks like shark's teeth.
This is the part that's so hilarious to me, is that because it's nominally for work,
I mean, if you're a cowboy or a construction worker, you kind of have to have a pickup truck because you need to put a saddle.
You're not going to be able to put a saddle into your Nissan Leaf.
You need something that big.
But the funny part is how many of these things, you hear them.
You hear that sound, and it sounds like a FedEx truck.
You hear that.
So you know it's a diesel, and there's not a single scratch in the bed.
Right.
Well, yeah, because all they're doing is – I mean –
Yeah, they're just going from... It's just obese children's soccer clothing in the back.
Well, and they're going from their weird... I mean, you know, hardly anybody really works anymore, but they're going to... You want to go to Costco after Applebee's?
They're not working in software necessarily, but they're working in some kind of...
you know, propane-based economy where they are doing work, but it still is like, it doesn't require hauling.
And what's astonishing is that all of the, like, rock and roll rebel...
Iconography of 25 years ago where the rock and roll rebel saw himself as the opposite of some dumb middle of the country hick.
All that rock and roll rebel iconography is now completely embraced and endorsed by these young guys in the middle of the country, including extreme sports talk and... And hip-hop.
Well, and yeah, super hip-hop.
I mean, it's like there's the coastal affectations that come out of hard rock and maybe even a little bit of punk rock, right?
You got that kind of stuff.
You got the dice tattoos over the checkered flags or whatever.
Yeah, the weird, I mean, the weird rockabilly offshoot of punk rock.
But still, you're right, like spray-painted graphics and no fear.
Arr!
And so all the way across the country, every single young guy is repping this vibration, right?
That he's radical, no fear, gar.
And his truck communicates that, and the driving etiquette certainly communicates that.
A lot of them are also pulling trailers that have more rad four-wheel off-road, you know, gas-burning things.
And as I'm driving across the country in my, like, vintage Suburban with its, like, bubble, you know, that basically all the logos are in Comic Sans.
I'm thinking, at first, I'm thinking, like, these guys...
coming up behind me right they're in a gmc truck i'm in a gmc truck they're they're gonna like tip their hat they're gonna recognize as they blow by me because i'm going 60 miles an hour in the right hand lane and they're going 90 and they're gonna tip their hat and as they go by one after another after another no recognition of me or acknowledgement of the the thing that i'm doing is cool they got no history
Not at all.
Because the thing is, you're driving the 64 1⁄2 Mustang of their truck, or the 57 Chevy of their truck.
It's their grandpa's truck, and the fact that their truck is made out of plastic, and that most of it was probably made in Korea, it doesn't matter, because they're representing a whole different...
a whole different philosophy.
And honestly, I feel like calling up my good friend, Elon Musk.
Yeah.
And saying, if you really want to revolutionize this country, you know, electric motors have a ton of torque and torque is something that you hear talked about a lot in the middle of the country.
That's why they want a diesel motor.
A lot of torque talk.
Because they got a lot of torque.
That's right.
And nothing's got more torque than an electric motor.
And if somebody just makes a ridiculously torquey truck and then they build an advertising campaign around it featuring like Travis Tritt and Pauly Shore,
and peter torque and they're i don't know if you can get peter torque but they're in the truck and a bunch of guys in their dodge trucks are like in a mud bog and then here you come in your tesla truck and you just you just school these guys in the mud bog you're like oh yeah you think you've got pulling power
And you've got to make it so that it makes some blah sound.
They do that now.
They add sounds.
Like BMW, I heard a thing on NPR about how they add extra motor sound to come in through the speakers.
Yeah.
You add motor sounds.
You put a huge subwoofer in the back that's just making muffler sounds.
And you transform the country.
Because honestly, like...
They're not buying these things really because USA even.
Because all you have to do is open the glove box and it says made in China in there.
It's just a kind of like, it's peacocking.
It's a display of no compromise attitude.
And, I mean, nothing says no compromise like Elon Musk.
That's right.
There's no reason you get some nice green truck nuts on there.
No, you're absolutely right.
I think about it now because, you know, not to make it timely, but we're in the midst of a baseball tournament here.
Everybody's wearing their gear for the local sports team.
You know, I was in the town of the opposing sports team.
Oh, you know, did you get barbecue?
I did, and I drove past the sports stadium where the baseball tournament was being played.
The royalties.
And then I had the most American experience in my life.
I was driving out of Kansas City in the middle of the night trying to get the baseball game on my AM radio.
Delco?
Delco radio, and I tuned it in a little bit.
Yeah.
There's a pitch and it's out to center field.
And it's all dark.
There's nobody else on the road.
And I'm driving on these little roads outside of Kansas City listening to the World Series on the radio.
And I was just like, God damn it.
That's it.
You're there.
You're living the dream.
There I was.
Yeah.
I just remember first having this thought when I was in college, first time I walked into the college bookstore.
And even at our tiny little school, you could get, you know, hats, shirts, bags with the name of the college on it.
And I remember even thinking then... New college?
Yeah, yeah.
Thinking even more now, though, like, do you imagine that there's like a factory that just makes giant stuff?
Do you imagine that there's a factory, just because of the allegiance and the importance of supporting the local team?
Like, there's some place, like probably, what, North Carolina, right?
There's going to be some place where old ladies who love the giants are making giant hats.
They don't fucking care.
Yeah.
Like somebody in Asia, in East Asia, is making like 11 cents a day to stitch those official hats and jerseys.
And they have absolutely no allegiance.
They probably can't read the letters on them.
But the same thing is true with the trucks, where there's this whole mythology.
Nothing against the great car makers of America or the people who buy them.
But, you know, it's pretty hilarious.
This has been going on for like 25 years now.
But you're right.
It's completely cosmetic in some ways.
It's a car costume.
Yeah, but I had a lot of time to think as I'm driving across the country.
With just an AM radio.
With just an AM radio for company and my CB radio, which the antenna fell off the roof, so I wasn't really able to get a lot of CB traffic.
I thought you were joking.
You really had a CB for a while?
Oh, I still do have a CB.
I just need to get the right antenna.
Damn.
But, you know, the middle of the country is really different.
And it's also a really nice place full of really nice people.
You and I have had this conversation a million times.
And anybody that's traveled has.
And a lot of the people I met on this trip have never seen the ocean.
Right?
So, you know, in a way, there were moments where I had a kind of feeling of like, okay, we're talking right now about...
how the Jews control the media.
I'm not mistaking like what the subtext of this conversation is, but I'm the only person in this conversation that's ever seen the ocean.
So like you guys seem to all feel like you've got the truth of this story, but, but what you're missing is knowledge.
Like you don't, you may, in fact, you may have the truth, but you don't have any knowledge.
Um,
Oh, that's a really nice distinction.
You know, and I do not claim to have the truth at all.
But I do have knowledge.
And it was a, there were, you know, a lot of experiences I had, a lot of like side of the road conversations where I felt like,
I really do understand the center of the country a little bit, and I like it.
I like it here.
It's not primitive by contrast, but it's very different.
The values are different.
The trajectory is different.
They are not headed the same place that the people on the coasts are.
I can hazard a couple pretty good guesses why that is, why you feel that way, just given some conversations we've had in the last month or two.
Like you say, it's not like it's primitive, but it is, compared to some things, relatively uncomplicated.
You know what I mean?
I don't want to say simple even, but I mean, there's a version of how this goes, and they're not staying up all night worrying about it.
It really feels like...
like a trajectory you know that that people on the west coast are churning ideas faster and there is there are there are fashionable ideas people on the west and east coast people out in the out in the world people in paris too probably and auckland new zealand are churning ideas maybe not auckland
They're churning ideas, and they're going through them faster and faster, right?
You get an idea.
It flashes around.
Everybody's talking about it.
And if you're living in Kansas City, but your primary life is on the Internet, you're also part of this conversation, right?
But if you're not part of it, you're not aware of these intense fashions of thought, right?
that seem to be leading us somewhere, right?
We're the product, you and I and our listeners, over the course of the last three years, we're the product of 500, 5,000 idea storms that we can maybe...
kid ourselves, or maybe it's true, that those idea storms are building something.
We are further along.
And if you were living somewhere where none of those idea storms had happened, the tempo of thought is slower, you know, and your thought evolution is slower, and you end up on a different road to some, you know, you're headed, you're on the road that you perceive to be the road.
And out here on the coasts, we're like... We have this sort of fracturing all the time of what we think even the road is.
So... I did not... I didn't come over... I didn't come through the country feeling like more hopeful that we were going to achieve a national consensus at any time.
Um...
And yet I had that experience that you can't help but having when you're in the middle of the country, which is like, everybody here is great.
It's really nice.
And this is like, and everyone has goodwill.
You know, there are like very liberal people out here.
There are people with very progressive ideas, but in general, it feels like that part of the country is starting to really want different things.
Well, you know, I got a couple thoughts quickly on this.
One is there's that term I learned from you, Frishon.
You think about, like, depending on where you live, what are the sources of...
When you think about all these ideas being hustled in one place or another or as you like to say, like trying on new ideas, like where are the sources of friction in those areas?
And I think that's one key difference is whatever – I mean a really oversimplified way to look at it, whatever your culture is, is whatever gets approved or talked about mostly favorably a lot tends to be the thing most people kind of agree with.
I think, generally.
And, you know, you can have your own sort of, like, disagreements about those things.
Maybe you want to get organic kale instead of regular kale or whatever.
But I think that where your sources of friction exist are really interesting.
What are the things that you mostly agree with other people on?
And I think that's one...
One way in which that's different is that, like, for me and a lot of my friends and, like, coastal dummies, it's, like, as soon as I have an idea that feels too fixed in my mind, that's when I get nervous.
Because that's when I feel like I'm probably full of shit.
Is when I get too positive about anything and everybody's agreeing with me, like, that's when I start to think, whoa, this is an idea that needs to be reexamined.
But the other thing is, I'm not sure if this makes any sense, but...
I haven't traveled a great deal, and most of the traveling I have done has been in the U.S., but I'm starting to feel like there's – you've got – let's say you've got kids, and we'll just completely write off anybody who's under like 12.
But from like the age of 12 to like 27, you've got what I would call like young people.
And no matter where you go in America, they're fucking insane.
They're completely crazy, but they're kind of crazy in somewhat similar ways.
They take a lot of risks.
Yeah.
They are very skeptical of authority, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
At the other end, you've got people at my age and older who where things slow down a little bit.
You become a little bit more forgiving and humane a lot of the time.
But I think that – I wonder if the biggest differences in America are in like the 33-year-old male across America –
You know what I mean?
Like you think about how different what you want to rep to the world is when you're still like you're just enough out of the oven that you got a little bit of a crust on you.
But like you still you still don't really have any fucking idea what's going on when you're in like your late 20s, early 30s.
You know what I mean?
Like you take like the guy who thinks he's the guy repping the coolest thing in Kansas City versus Berkeley versus, you know, Seattle versus New Hampshire.
Did you notice big that's that's to me like where I feel like I see differences.
Well, and part of it is that I'm looking at 33-year-old guys, right?
They are peacocking the hardest.
They're the ones that are the most expressive about the ideas that they're repping.
And they maybe got a little bit more money to spend on demonstrating that through peacocking.
Well, and yeah, and I think a 33-year-old is the peak, but I mean, it starts at 22.
I mean, I had several tweet-ups across the country, and I could walk into a bar and pick out the people that were there to see me from across the room.
Because they were looking at the phone and crying.
Well, and it's not because they were wearing beards, because everybody's wearing beards.
And it's not because they're wearing Warby Parker glasses, because you see enough of that.
But there's just a subtle combination of the ironic Negro League baseball shirt or just the cut of their jib.
You can see it from across the room.
I know what you mean.
Yeah.
And...
So for sure, I'm conscious of that difference between 33-year-olds because I'm looking for it.
But also, I do feel like those are the places where the idea fashions lodge themselves.
Those are the progenitors of the cause of the day.
And in Kansas City, for instance, suspicion about the government.
You know, when I was a young guy, when you were a young guy, the difference between liberal and conservative was that conservative people were generally pro-government and liberal people were generally suspicious of government because government was the cops and government was Ronald Reagan and government was the man.
It was the entire culture that allowed Richard Nixon to happen.
Yeah, right.
And leftism was the counterculture.
That was the other name we had.
That was still the narrative into the early 90s, I think.
Yeah, right.
All the way through the grunge years, the left and the counterculture were synonymous, and the right was...
was synonymous with like the small town people and the church values and so forth and so on.
They were connected to the government and the status quo.
And now we're living in a world where all of the people in the prime of their life in the middle of the country
if they think of themselves as conservative, they think of themselves as opposed to the government, which they perceive to be a product of all these years of political correctness, all these years of university people and the liberal media.
I get the feeling like smug intervention, like thinking you know better than everybody and then forcing that down their throats.
Exactly.
I mean, it started when...
Somebody came to their dad's club and said, you have to start letting women into the club.
It can't just be men only anymore.
And they were like, what the fuck is the government doing telling me blankety blank.
And that kind of, you know, the liberalism that that in a way did have a grew a tremendous power.
in American government at the bureaucratic level.
It's funny how the demographics shake up when you just have slightly fewer people who are systematically kept from making money and having power.
When you change that formula just a little bit, it's disruptive to everybody.
But the liberal project...
was really to colonize the bureaucracy of the government.
In a way, it doesn't matter who the president is.
And at a national level, we talk about like, oh, George Bush is in Iraq and we're in a police state.
But at the Department of Health and Human Services...
they are still enacting a generally liberal project.
You know, and we have these... Oh, yeah, even setting aside what the actual goals or implementation is, the whole idea of it is essentially a more liberal idea.
Right.
Yeah.
So as long as there's public housing, as long as there's public assistance, as long as there's Social Security, as long as there's food stamps, as long as there is...
And not just that stuff, but every time a government regulator comes and tells you you have to clean the asbestos out of your furnace flue, it is in general a kind of liberalism in action.
And it doesn't matter who the commander-in-chief is.
And the middle of the country perceives that and perceives the – because they perceive it at a street level.
They see those changes enacted and they feel – and they've grown this estrangement.
to the government.
So they've adopted all this froth that sounds anarchist almost.
They see themselves as a counterculture to the forward motion, the inevitable forward motion of this liberal conversion.
And the only problem is that the liberals on the left coast also still see themselves as a counterculture.
So everybody in the fucking country now sees themselves as a goddamn counterculture.
And the culture that we perceive ourselves to be at war with, you know, I mean, if you went down and talked to people at El Centro del Raza and say, like, do you feel like the government is on your side?
Yeah.
They're going to say, no, are you kidding me?
We're living in a white male supremacist police state, which still has systemic discrimination.
And then you go out to the country and you get some kid off of the back of his truck and you go, you feel like the government's on your side?
And he's like, what?
Are you kidding me?
Nobody feels like the government represents them.
And it's fucking bizarre.
Actually, it's about ethics in video game journalism.
We'll be right back.
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Not all men!
Not all anything.
So, you got a 79th Suburban.
You covered, I don't think I even knew half the states that you mentioned.
That's an asinine number of states.
And you covered it all in, what, like five days?
No, well, I mean, you know, I stayed in Ohio for four or five days.
Did you see family?
Saw some family.
I was, you know, I have a nephew who's a firefighter, and we were there at his fire station in Ashland, Oregon.
And he was showing us around.
And then just like on, do you remember the television show Emergency?
Mm-hmm.
Gage and DeSoto.
And just that.
I mean, I think I remember.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
That sound... I get a total boner from that sound.
I should make that my ringtone.
And my nephew, who's standing right in front of me...
with kids all around him talking about the pumper truck his eyes went black like a shark and all of a sudden he did not see us no one saw us and all that was communicated to us was you know by body language he's like a public safety sleeper cell yeah right it was like get the fuck out of the way do you hear the sound and we all scrambled and they were in that truck
And haul an ass out the door with the siren on in what's appeared to be seconds.
And I've known firefighters.
I have a good friend who's a paramedic.
I think about firefighters all the time because they go by you on the road.
But to be in the fire station and in this state of basically padding around in your underwear...
Having a day, ba-ba-da-ba-da.
Checking on the chili, watching your stories.
That bell, and then they leap into action, and as they were going out the door, I was conscious of the fact that they have no idea what they're about to go see.
And it could be a cat stuck in a tree, or it could be a Lincoln Continental on fire with six people in it.
Can you imagine that?
I cannot.
I can't imagine the not knowing of that.
And probably it is a Lincoln Continental full of people often enough that you don't just slack it off.
You've got to treat each one like it's 9-11.
Yeah, and I think statistically, at least for these guys out in central Ohio, it's not a big car wreck full of people that often.
It's not a house fire that often.
98% of the time, it's somebody who...
Who finally ate the last Cheeto that put them over 750 pounds and they have to go get the winch to get them out of their house.
They have a special truck for that, by the way.
They have a special truck in Ohio to get people out of their houses.
They can't go off the door anymore.
I don't want to talk about that on air, but I really want to hear.
I want to hear about the Obesa winch.
I mean, it was seriously because this is the type of question my mom asks.
And she was there and she was like, what do you do about the people that are too big to get out of bed?
And he kind of like gave a little head nod and he walked us around to the back of the fire station.
We're in Obama.
We write him a check.
You can't fit him in a normal ambulance.
And here's the ambulance that we use.
And they opened it up and they're like, wow, there it is.
But the idea that through the entire career of a fireman, that they are sitting there in this state of like,
Like, hey, nothing happened a minute ago.
Nothing's happened in this minute.
I'm stirring the chili.
I'm watching my stories.
Yep.
And then that bell, and then it's like, oh, maybe I'm going to go see the worst thing I've ever seen in my life right now.
And I have to know how to, I have to, I'm the only one on the scene that's going to be able to fix it if anybody can.
That seems like superhuman.
Right.
It did.
To be able to have the Chilean stories moments and be in your repose and not be freaking out all the time or, you know, having, you know, a minor cardiac.
Yeah, just sit around.
Yeah.
And the other thing is they're on duty 24 hours.
Ugh.
So it's just like, all right, for the next 24 hours, you're going to be oscillating between these two poles, total calm and like manic, like borderline.
I mean, you'd have to compress your emotions so hard.
And then, oh, then you're off work and you're just like a normal kind of family guy bumbling around the house for a few days.
And then you're back in this situation.
It's extraordinary.
Yeah.
Why the 24 hour?
I mean, I don't understand.
Like my wife works with has worked with doctors for years.
I've never understood that.
Why the long stretches for work that involves so much careful detail and presence of mind?
Why do you think that is 24 hours?
I don't understand it either.
There's a reason I'm not in the corner office.
That makes zero sense to me.
I half understand the hazing of needing to get people's head around the idea that this is going to be an intense experience and you're not allowed to complain.
I understand six weeks of that.
I don't understand years and years of systematically putting people in conditions that have been scientifically shown to make you inefficient and slacky.
I don't know if you've ever had the experience of being worked on by an emergency room doctor who's been on shift for 23 hours.
I'm going to hazard to say not nearly as often as you.
But I have.
And that bleary-eyed hyper-competence of somebody who's been up that long...
I mean, in a way, you're there injured and you feel like, hey, we're in the same boat a little bit.
Together, you and I are in an off world right now.
You're here tripping balls and I'm tripping balls.
You're just tripping different balls.
It may be that if you only worked an eight-hour shift in the fire station, you'd have guys that worked for eight hours and nothing ever happened, and then you'd have guys where it all fell on them.
I get 12 hours.
I get 12 hours.
I don't get 24 hours.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, they have Murphy beds at the fire station that they pull down and go to sleep on their Murphy beds.
Yeah.
I was watching a thing about submarines not long ago.
I think it might have been some, maybe that Steven Johnson documentary thing.
But it was about how they set their own time on submarines to be, what is it?
Basically, they monkey with the clocks so that you have this totally artificial three six-hour shifts in a day.
So you have six hours of on-duty, six hours of light duty, and six hours of sleep.
Hmm.
And it sounds completely – because, you know, you can just basically create whatever environment you want.
There's no light.
You can make it whatever you want it to be.
But that just sounds like a recipe for insanity to me.
I like sleeping so much.
Yeah, I feel – I mean, as I was driving across the country, there was a moment where the light – every day, you know, there's this sort of perfect, like, late afternoon light.
Yeah.
And I said to myself, out loud, why does the sun have to move smoothly across the sky?
Why can't it just be four hours of early morning light?
Four hours of one in the afternoon, four hours of five in the afternoon, four hours of eight o'clock at night.
You know, like there are these perfect moments of the day and night.
You'd be squelch it to kind of attenuate on the light that you like.
Yeah, and then it could just be dark for eight hours when everybody went to sleep.
If I were George R.R.
Martin, I wouldn't have done this whole like, oh, winter comes every once in a while.
Who knows?
Never.
Not yet.
And I would have done this other thing where the sun kind of ticks across the sky like a little like an old knob.
Like the like the really less like the second hand on a clock and really more like the hour hand.
Click.
Yeah.
Click.
Click.
Click, and now the sun goes.
It's a different time of day.
Zoop.
I mean, it would require physics to be different.
I could be pretty into it.
If you're a fucking novelist.
We could still have what amounts to a 24, what we now call a 24-hour day.
It would be so much more convenient if we only had six actual hours that we measured, though.
So you say somebody will see at two, and you're roughly there at new two.
Wouldn't that be nice?
That would work.
I could totally make that work.
I don't need this much precision in my day.
I don't need 15-minute increments in my day.
Let me ask you this.
I don't want to start a whole thing here, but I've been thinking about this.
You're driving down the road, and let's say you haven't recently been in a fire station.
Let's say it's just a normal day.
You hear sirens coming from behind you.
Do you pull over?
Do I get off the road to let the car go by?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, I do too.
I do too.
I think it's the law to do that.
I would like to think that that's the law.
When I was a child, when I was a child, there was never any question about it.
Every single person on the road fucking pulled over, and you let the ambulance or the fire of the truck or whatever go by.
And now today, they're more like, is it cool if I get by?
I can't believe how many people don't pull over anymore for a fucking ambulance.
Do you notice this?
I mean, I really notice this.
I don't even drive that much, and I notice it.
And I'm like, what is wrong with you people?
A lot of them just sit there.
They just stop their car, you know, like that's going to help.
No, you have to get out of the way.
You have to move and let this thing get by.
Are you with me on this, though?
Yeah, well, I see it.
I see the declining standards everywhere, Merlin.
Well, this is my thread I'm trying to bring up here.
Yeah.
Because I thought about this.
I thought about this.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, yeah, people are not obeying the mores.
It might be time to revisit a little bit of keep moving and get out of the way.
But here's my thought on this.
I was thinking this the other day because that happened, and I'm always amazed by how many people don't.
And then last night, I was watching the bases ball game.
It was a great game.
And at the end of the game, they're interviewing this pitcher, this 25-year-old kid who's this amazing pitcher for the Giants.
And while they're on, the camera comes on, the mic goes on.
You can hear the audio now inside the stadium of them interviewing him.
And like only like a couple words get out of the interviewer's mouth before he turns and he tips his cap and he says to the audience, thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
And I was like, fucking A, yes.
It was so great.
He did it like three more times.
And it wasn't like, ooh, look at me.
You know, I'm Madison Bumgarner or whatever.
He's doing what people used to do, which is you tip your fucking cap to the stadium.
You say thank you.
He's got a little class, this guy.
When you go off the field, you tip your cap.
The people apply.
You look up and you graciously, like a gentleman, you fucking tip your cap and you say thank you.
Oh, well, don't get me started on tipping your cap.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the rule is... John, I actually do.
I actually want to get you started.
I'm looking for a new canon here.
I'm looking for a new canon with two N's, not three.
But we can heal the divides between all these different vehicles and what they're repping.
And I want to look... I don't want to talk about money.
I don't want to talk about politics.
I want to talk about what's the stuff that just we all need to get on the same page with.
And I think moving over for the ambulance and tipping your cap is a great place to start.
Well, the place to start is...
Take your goddamn hat off when you walk inside.
Oh, these kids today.
You can wear it.
Oh, it's not kids.
It's guys my age.
Well, you know why?
Because they're the only ones that are wearing stupid hats.
Well, that's their proxy hair.
Oh, they're bald.
Yeah, exactly.
But I don't give a shit.
They think it's like asking somebody to take off a prosthetic leg.
They're like, I'm not taking this off.
The thing is that in 1980, being bald was difficult.
I admit it.
Everybody looked like Wallace Shawn.
It was in a terrible condition.
The standard was that you were the star of the Bee Gees and not his bald brother.
right everybody wanted a big head of hair and if you didn't have a big head of hair yeah you had wallace sean little tufts on the side and it was embarrassing but somewhere along the line in the 1990s we invented the technology of shaving your head and now bald guys look amazing bald guys look tough and cool and only you bald guy even know if you're bald and you found your power through being bald yeah you're the bald you're the bald tough guy who doesn't take any shit off anybody bald bald bald is beautiful
So your hat is no longer like bullshit.
Your hat is a hat.
And if you want to bring hats back, you also have to bring the whole retinue of hat etiquette.
The first and easiest thing, the first and easiest part of which is that you take it off when you come inside.
And I recognize that once you're inside and you've taken your hat off, now you have the awkward problem of carrying your hat around.
Where it's much easier to carry your hat on your head where it was before.
But wearing a hat is not easy.
It is not a simple thing.
It brings with it certain responsibilities.
It does.
It's like fucking carrying a sword around.
You don't get to carry it on an airplane.
And you don't get to wear your freaking hat.
wherever you goddamn want.
You don't have to check it, but you should put it in the overhead bin.
If the doors of the building that you're walking into are barn doors, you can keep your hat on.
Yeah, I think it's a little nuanced because I think definitely, no question, the one that drives me crazy is when people sit down to eat dinner and they're wearing a hat.
I don't know why, but that really bothers me.
You don't know why?
You don't know why that bothers you?
Because it is a front to humanity.
Yes.
Yes.
Take your goddamn hat off and take your hat off when they play the national anthem.
Oh, that's number three.
It's right here on the list.
Number three.
First of all, get up and fucking sing the national anthem.
I don't care if you're a patriot or not.
Just get up and sing the damn song.
Put your hand over your heart or take your hat off and put it over your heart.
These are just simple little things.
This is exactly what I'm looking for, John.
Small shit.
See, I feel like there's some gray areas.
I think if you're in an elevator, you take off your hat.
If you're in somebody's personal residence, you take off your hat.
If you're in the lobby of a hotel, I would say probably take off your hat.
Lobby of a hotel, if you're wearing your overcoat and you're carrying your suitcases... What if you got a newspaper?
If you got a newspaper under your arm, can you keep your hat on?
I feel like keep your hat on.
I feel like in a lobby of a hotel, you're still in a transition between here and there.
Yes, but once you get on that elevator, especially if there's a lady, take off your hat.
Take your goddamn hat off.
And... And...
Like, rejoice in it.
Rejoice in... You are already rejoicing in what you perceive to be... And this includes baseball hats.
I'm not just dumping on people in fedoras.
Like, you're wearing your hat...
It means something to you, right?
It matters.
There's something about having it on that it's not just... Even if it has become an absent-minded thing, at a certain point, the hat, you recognize this hat is going to be part of my identity.
This hat is part of my thing.
Rejoice in...
In all of the little dance that wearing a hat allows you to engage in.
That was an awkward sentence.
No, I was with you for every awkward step.
You know what?
I'm going to change my game.
Because I wear a Carhartt hat a lot of the time.
Just because I like to keep my head warm.
It's a warmth issue.
You should switch over to a Filson hat.
But yeah, I agree.
You know what?
I also got a new haircut.
So it's going to be easier for me to take off a hat without having a hat head now.
But when I was walking across Europe, very shortly after I started really walking across the flat plains, which, believe it or not, starts all the way up in Holland, I was like, oh, my God, the sun is beating down on me all day long.
And I'm not going to be able to survive this.
This is like it's brutalizing me.
And I stayed the night in a little farmhouse.
And in the morning, the wife of the house said, you need a hat.
And I was like, I was just thinking that I do need a hat.
And she reached up on a peg and she took down this straw farmer's hat.
And she said, here, you can have this.
And I was like, I can have this amazing straw farmer's hat.
And she was like, I go, you know, you need it more than we do.
And I wore this hat all the way across Europe.
And over the weeks, I realized that out in the country, all these little hat gestures still convey a ton of information.
You put your finger up to it.
Like a little mini salute?
Yeah, one finger up to the brim to salute a guy that's on a tractor.
Yeah.
You, you know, you grab the brim and pull it down slightly to salute somebody who's driving by in a car.
You reach up and lift it off your head just slightly and put it back down.
If you pass a woman who's walking on the road, you take it off when you're asking a question.
Never ask, never ask someone a question without taking your hat off.
Because the gesture of taking your hat off says, I beseech you.
It's deferential.
That's right.
Hello, I need information.
I am here at your service.
And there are so many times in a day when you can communicate, I am at your service to someone simply by taking your hat off.
And in a lot of cases, I had a language barrier.
But I was able to surmount the language barrier because I learned the sign language of the hat.
And you can take it off.
You can take it and do a couple of little hat tricks, flip it around or whatever to impress a little kid.
But people understand that you are a human being if they see you doff your hat or if they see you gesture with your hat.
They recognize that across cultures and I think across time, that is the sign that I am a civilized person and I am here.
I'm passing through your time and place, but I'm not a monster.
I'm not someone who's hiding under this hat.
Like the hat comes off when it's time to interact.
And it kind of puts me in the mind of sunglasses a little bit because I think some of the same people who never take their hat off don't like to take their sunglasses off.
I think it's because they're basically building up a little personal wall.
Yeah.
And they don't want to take their sunglasses off.
But, you know, if you're inside and you're wearing sunglasses, like you better be Jackie Gleason.
For people who want a little wall around them, here's a great solution.
Stay in the bathroom at your house.
Yeah.
There's four walls there.
You can wear your hat all you want.
You can turn the sink on and get water.
You can poop and pee.
It goes away.
And don't fucking come out and deal with the rest of us.
Like, you don't get to come out.
This is the thing that I see us trending toward.
And this is... Oh, we're going to get into the shoes here, aren't we?
This is more true on the coast than it is in the middle of America, for sure.
Is this the taking shoes off on a plane?
Is that where we're headed?
Well... But...
But, you know, I'm talking now to the early adopters, the technologists, like your Google Glass also, you are not entitled to them.
You know, you take them off.
Not because...
anything.
Not because anything.
You just take them off out of just an old-fashioned respect.
You shouldn't need a reason.
You don't need a reason.
And to sit and give me a list of 25 reasons why you need them on, those are 25...
those are 25 bullet points about what a bullshitter you are, you know, take that shit off and take your headphones off and take and stop, you know, like when you're interacting with people, when you walk into a room for the first time, when you meet somebody for the first time, when you're sharing a public conveyance with somebody, be conscious of the fact that your little bubble is,
is not you know your little bubble is rude basically and and you should every time you walk out of the house in your little bubble you should be conscious of the fact that it is rude and the rest of us are allowing for it because maybe you're out for a jog or maybe you're working on a big presentation you know like we allow you
To be in your bubble.
To a certain extent.
But your responsibility.
Is to recognize that.
That is not your entitlement all the time.
And you don't get to be in a bubble.
Out in our world.
Sharing our fucking world with us.
And also be in your bubble.
It's like not.
I went into a cafe today.
And there was a guy there.
My age.
In Moscats.
Like.
wearing top to bottom hipster clothes.
I saw him through the glass, and I was like, hey, there's a guy that I might be able to have an interesting conversation about Hitler with.
And I walk in and then all of a sudden he's talking into his phone.
He's the loudest thing in the room.
There's 40 people in this cafe and he's saying, well, I told him that we wouldn't be able to get the Johnson contracts until we had the pipe fitters union.
And I'm just like,
Are you kidding me?
I like your glasses.
I go as far as to like your glasses, and you're this guy?
This is how you repay me.
You know, this is an old one.
This is etiquette from another age, meaning about 20 years ago.
But if I get a phone call, I still walk outside.
I leave the table.
If I have to take it, I leave the table, usually go outside to talk.
You certainly don't stand in line in a place and then talk to someone who is serving you
while you're talking into a phone.
I should carry, you know when you go to truck stops and they have those little baseball bats to check tire pressure on big rigs?
Yes.
And all the truck stops across America that serve actual truckers.
This is an etiquette baton for you.
You should just carry one of these little tire thumpers.
Just knock the phone out of their hands.
No, either knock the phone out of their hands or just whack them on the side of the knee.
Wa-pow!
And then, oh, shit.
Am I next in line?
The guy's down there yelling into his phone, call the police.
You know how you love your ARKROM drawings on society falling apart?
I've seen this one with the evolution of the headphones.
Where, you know, for a long time, you know, it was kind of weird to like be somebody listening to a Walkman.
But no, I do it all the time.
I'm listening to podcasts all the time when I walk around on the street.
But, you know, I do have a thing I do where like as soon as I get in line, I tend to want to take off my headphones because I feel like I'm already engaged in a process here.
So, I mean, I don't want to get too far into this, but there is a chilling vision here.
So, on the one hand, you got the guy.
You got the guy who takes his headphones off, which is hopefully us.
Then you got the guy who does the douche thing where they leave one headphone in and talk to you and hold the other one in their hand like a petunia while they're talking to you.
Right?
But there will be something I see twice a month that is chilling to me, which is somebody walking up in the coffee place with their headphones on and the person at the counter at the cash register, the barista, also has headphones on.
And you start to think, this is like something out of Philip K. Dick.
This cannot end well.
You remember for a while there, maybe it was only in SkyMall, but they were selling a little universal television remote.
Oh, where you could shut off the TV?
You could shut off the TV in public places if you had this thing.
And I always thought about getting it, but it felt like...
I had to balance my desire to have that thing against my maybe stronger desire never to carry around a thing.
I don't carry around a bunch of gizmos, and the last thing I wanted was an asshole gizmo like this.
But if I was a guy that was...
That was carrying a bunch of stuff anyway.
I would love to have a thing that turns TVs off.
Oh, well, see, I have mixed feelings on that because I will just the small the small feeling is that that's a dick move to do that.
That's not your place.
But my much huger feeling is Jesus Christ.
Why is Fox?
news and cnn and sports ball why does that have to be on in every restaurant why does it have to be on in every airport i think it's partly because men in particular are terrified of being alone with their thoughts yeah but i swear now as long as we're coming up with the new canon i think one of them is like just shut that shit off like if it's if it's a baseball game you really want to watch have it on in your restaurant but like no remodel in our city is complete until two tvs have been added
Yeah, right.
And I don't think it's a problem of, like, TV.
It's a problem of, like, proliferation of TVs.
No, they got to have bathrooms, too, but they have doors.
Yeah, and there's TVs, you know, like, if you have a place, there should be a TV over in a TV place, and there should be seats arranged that are facing the TV.
Yeah.
Not a bar where seats are arranged as though people are going to be talking to each other and then TVs on every flat surface where you have to swivel your chair around to see what the person you're talking to is looking at.
But also in airports, TVs every three feet, like there should be a TV lounge in the airport if you want to go watch TV.
It should be like smoking.
they should have a tv area yeah the rest of the space should be because that particularly airports where they turn the volume on it's like i'm already my mind is already cluttered with travel thinking with like like flying thinking with i mean i'm trying to get my bags and my tickets and i'm trying to go up to the counter and talk to the woman about maybe i can get an upgrade and cnn is yelling at me about ebola like right in my face and right in my ear it's right it is
It's profoundly rude and intrusive, and it is perceived to be a bonus, right?
The airports are putting those in there because they're like, look what we're doing for you, everybody.
Look at this amazing thing that we're doing.
We're giving you this opportunity.
And it speaks to the degradation of public space, the degradation of...
Of the idea that we should ever be alone with our thoughts or have a moment of quiet reflection.
I mean, 20 years ago, I was a member of a little group of people here in Seattle who late at night, periodically, would go climb and alter billboards.
We had a little billboard-altering gang.
And we did some, I think, some pretty great work.
It was only a couple of years, and we probably altered altogether maybe 15, 20 billboards.
And we would target...
The really graphic anti-abortion ones or the real compensatory jacked up truck ones.
And we would make a good joke and it would get in the newspaper.
And we had a good time wearing masks and feeling like we were kind of Banksy before there was a Banksy.
But really the argument was...
that these billboards, that billboards are a thing that give you no choice.
Like, whoever owned the space, the airspace on the roof of their building, sold it to somebody who put up this big, big picture that you have no choice but to look at.
Right.
And as billboards proliferate, we all get used to the idea that
And we all just sort of tacitly accept the notion that you should not be able to just look around your town without people shouting at you.
to buy things and when you really start to look at billboards in your town and and as you're driving down the road it becomes like like grossly offensive that your eyes which you need to have open in order to walk or drive your your eyes then are targeted
Everywhere you look by people who have no more right to do it than just that they own or think they own or rented the, you know, the space where the feet of the billboard are.
Right.
There's no there's no set.
We don't have a cent in our culture of like renting the the space.
They don't actually own cubic inches of sky.
Right, but they are renting space in our minds, you know, and it's space that they're not entitled to.
Just because they own the three square feet where the foot of the billboard goes doesn't mean that they own this real estate in my innocence, in a way.
The real estate of just the innocence of walking around with your eyes open.
And we have become... I mean, 20 years ago, it seemed like we could still mount a resistance to billboards proliferating.
But now we're on the other side of that.
And because we accepted that...
Because we accepted years and years and years ago, decades before, this idea of the billboard.
Now our online life is just billboards.
And everywhere you look, you have no I innocence anymore.
Somebody's trying to get in there every chance.
Get inside.
Think about when you're on the plane, like even like on Virgin America, they show the safety video and then you have to sit there and watch a commercial or three that you can't turn off.
That's about a foot and a half from your face.
And, and when I, when they first started doing that, I would, I would flag the stewardess down and I would say, do you have a piece of tape?
Yeah.
And they would always kind of say like, I think so.
And they'd come back with a piece of tape.
This is why you should always carry Gaffer's tape.
I'd tape a piece of paper over my TV screen because I was so offended by it.
Actually, the original one was when it was just liquid crystal on the back.
When they first had phones in the back of the airplane seats.
And then they realized that that little liquid crystal display, they could program it to try and sell you a MasterCard or something.
Yeah.
I would tape my piece of paper over there, and then everybody looked at me like I was wearing a tinfoil hat.
It's like, no, this little thing is yelling at me, and it's programmed to flash in such a way that I keep looking at it.
And like you say, it's one foot in front of my face.
And I already paid $400 for this chair.
The other thing about the airports that drives me crazy is there's all this, you know, obviously there's all the security theater stuff, you know, with TSA.
But then there's all of these.
So you go in, you sit down, you're trying desperately to find out if there's anything that's changed with your flight.
So you got to kind of listen with half an ear to find out what's happening with your flight.
And you got to hear everybody else's flights, which is fine.
You got to hear CNN and Fox, which are blaring.
And then you hear the robo announcements with the extremely important security information about not leaving your bag unattended.
Yeah.
Is there anybody who's going to process that every time it comes on?
Nobody fucking cares.
It's just a drone.
Yeah.
The airports... I flew Frontier this last time when I flew out to Massachusetts.
Or I didn't actually fly Frontier.
Here's what happened.
I had a ticket on Frontier and I missed the flight.
Because that's apparently something that starts to happen to you when you're in your 40s.
I've never missed a flight before.
before the last two years and in the last two years i've missed i don't know three four flights but you're flying with family right yeah but like we're over getting you know we're getting some supplies and going potty and then we get to the gate and they've closed the door because they closed the door 15 minutes before now anyway i missed the flight on frontier and i was like well that sucks let's try and get us on another flight
And Frontier is a discount airline, and they don't... And part of how they achieve the discount is that they don't partner with other airlines, and they don't... They don't have... So they can't talk to their friends at Delta and work out a trade for people who need to get somewhere.
Right.
And they don't fly to a lot of places.
They just have a small... And I was like, okay.
I mean, I'm flying a discount airline.
This is...
This was an experiment, and now I see kind of what the problem is.
Like, yeah, they can't get me on a Delta or Alaska flight because they just don't have the... The most amazing thing happened, which was Frontier Airline did not have another flight coming in or going out for several hours.
And everyone who worked for Frontier in that airport disappeared.
You got a real knack for that.
And I went through security to go back out to the counter, and there was no one there.
And I said to the woman at the JetBlue counter next door, I said, what do you do in this situation?
And she said, well, they just go away and then they come back in four hours and you can go pound on that door.
I've done it a million times.
Go make them clock out because it's not their time.
Or something.
So I called Frontier on the phone and was like, hey, I've got a problem.
I need to resolve it.
And they were like, yeah, you have to resolve that at the airport and no one will be there until five or something.
And
And it was, I mean, I've complained about having this same experience with United, one of the hugest airlines in the world, where if they're not actively doing something, they're not paying that one person anymore to just stay at the counter all day in case somebody needs help.
You had a really horrifying anecdote about the time where something got messed up.
It was the one flight out of Washington with your family that day.
It was the one way.
And you couldn't find anybody in the whole joint.
In the whole airport.
To find the person with the juice, as you say.
Yeah.
And this idea that this is where we're living now, in a state where you call up on the phone, and the first thing the recording says is...
probably you'll have better luck if you go to our website.
And the machine is pushing for these efficiencies, like direct everybody to the website, direct everybody to the website.
It costs us a lot of money to have somebody talk to them on the phone.
And it's like, really, does it cost a lot of money?
I mean, you're a billion-dollar company.
Is it really that much money to have somebody on the phone?
Is it that much money to pay somebody?
Just to pay one extra person to just work the counter.
And, you know, these are companies where the CEO is flying back and forth across the country, probably in a giant airplane six times a day because at the corporate offices in Minneapolis, they're out of coffee filters.
And so it's like, oh, well, shit, you know, we've got coffee filters in the warehouse here in San Jose.
I'll just fly out there.
I had to sharpen some pencils anyway in Minneapolis.
It'll be a twofer.
But their cost savings are at the level of, well, we can't have real people anymore do any of the jobs where they're interacting with real people.
And then all it takes is that that person has their headphones on, and we have finally arrived.
We finally arrived at the moment where Super Train is necessary.
They're sitting there listening to their MGMT remix.
I'm just waiting.
Wait a minute, this is an airport.
Incidentally, every young person I talked to in the entire trip across the country, which was innumerable people under the age of about 25, they're all listening to electronic dance music.
Nobody listens to guitars anymore.
Oh, brother.
Everywhere.
Across the country.
It's the one thing that unites us.
EDM, they call it.
Fucking America.
I frequently – I have to pee really bad.
I frequently come back to something you said in the midst of that epic rant about the airport, which is that – I don't know.
I mean I'm just repeating what you've said.
But it's so interesting to me your point about like – on the one hand, yes, you have to find somebody who can get you the juice.
Right.
Like obviously there's not a channel.
There's nowhere to go and pick up a phone, tell them your boarding code or whatever and have them fix it.
There's no infrastructure for that.
So first of all, you got to find somebody.
Then you got to find somebody who can do something about it.
Do something about it.
You got to find somebody who can do something that will do something about it.
And so primarily, as you said, this really stuck with me.
You have to make them like you.
Yeah.
You have to, you have to be put differently.
You have to be a likable victim in order to get anything.
So with this frontier thing,
What happened was my bags were on the flight.
My bags went to Cleveland.
Oh, Christ.
And I ended up buying tickets on Alaska and flew us to Boston.
And we didn't get to Cleveland for three days and our bags were there.
But as I'm sitting in the airport in Seattle, I don't know that my bags are on the way to Cleveland.
No one's told me that.
I think maybe my bags were taken off the plane because they used to threaten to do that.
If you didn't get on the plane, they would take your bags off.
So I was about to get on a flight to Boston and I was afraid my bags were downstairs somewhere.
And I couldn't find a Frontier employee.
I hate this feeling.
So I called the number.
And the first woman I got said, well, there's nothing we can do.
There has to be somebody there at the airport, and they won't be there till 3, so I don't know what to tell you.
Sorry.
And I hung up the phone with her, and I ran around the airport for an hour trying to talk to somebody.
And I talked to somebody in Alaska, and I talked to somebody down in the baggage area, and nobody could help me.
So I called that same number back, and I got a different woman.
And she said, well...
Uh, let me call, let me try and call the baggage people.
And she called, nobody answered.
She said, well, this is something that's never happened before.
That's the thing is I don't want to interview, but like, it drives me fucking crazy when it's like, if there was an actual emergency here, how would you handle this?
Because this is like a sandwich shop where you've never actually made food.
Like every situation like an emergency to me.
Sure, sure.
But, I mean, like, if they said we've got reason to believe that there's somebody who left a bag behind, you know, who's trying to blow the shit up.
I'm just saying, like, it really feels like – like, I have this thing that feels like this must happen, you know, a dozen times a week.
And you're treating this like this incredibly weird edge case that's – you've got to call down to the baggage?
Like, is that a big deal?
And so I said to her, like, well, I mean –
where is the bag likely to be and she was like well i just can't say i don't know there's so many places it could be john yeah and i was like well is there a way to uh i mean is there somebody that i can i'm about to get on another airplane is there somebody i can leave a message for no there's really not you're just gonna have to call back when the office is open at six and so i hang up and i'm walking around and i'm in that state of like
panicky, angry.
I've got to go through security again to meet my family on the other side to get on a different airplane.
And I'm about to get on a plane and just my bag is just in who knows where.
So last ditch effort, I call the same number again.
And the thing is, you get the original operator, and then you have to go through the voice mail where it's like, you should try our website.
Yeah, phone jail.
And then you say operator, and it goes, I think you're asking to talk to an operator, but maybe you can give me just a little more information.
Operator.
So then you get the operator, and then you say, can you connect me with the baggage operator?
woman and then they make that so each time it takes five minutes to get to a person okay it sounds like you're trying to find a bag yeah the third time a woman answers the phone and i'm like hey here's my situation she goes oh all right well hang on uh give me the number on your ticket and this is the first time anybody's asked me for this
And so I was like, huh?
Oh, yeah, here's the number on the ticket.
She was like, OK, is there do you have a baggage number?
And I was like, yeah, I do.
Here's the baggage number.
Nobody's asked me for this.
She's like, hmm.
OK, well, you're just you keep this seems so sensible.
You're bracing for what's going to go horribly wrong.
Yeah.
And then she goes, oh, I see here that the bags made it on the flight and they'll be in Cleveland.
And I was like, how did you have access to that information?
And your coworkers, two of whom I've spoken to, neither one of them... And what it was was I could hear in her voice the voice of experience.
This woman was...
Someone who's worked here for a while.
With presumably the same equipment and nominally the same experience, she was able to do something the other person just simply didn't think was possible.
Right.
And she did it effortlessly.
But think about that's harrowing to think about.
Yeah.
There could be somebody there who doesn't even know if this is possible to do while there are other people who can just do it.
That's pretty scary in an industry that is where safety and competence is that important.
Well, and this is true.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever called AAA from the side of the road running out of gas or in an accident or something.
But when you call AAA, AAA is an amazing company and they have saved my ass a million times.
But when you call AAA, there is a...
one in four chance that the person that answers the phone will be able to actually help you.
The other three times, you are talking to somebody who is reading from a script, and you say, listen, I'm on the side of the road, I'm by exit 124 westbound, and I need a tow truck.
And they're like, okay, so can you tell me if you are near an exit?
Oh, yeah.
You go, yeah, I just said I'm on exit 24 westbound, I need a tow truck.
And they're like, okay, have you tried...
Have you tried to turn the key in the car?
And you're just like, oh, my fucking God.
And then when you get somebody at AAA who has been there for a while, they're like, okay, great.
Truck's on the way.
And so anyway, this situation in Frontier, I was like, so you're telling me that the bag is on its way to Cleveland?
And she's like, yeah, it's on its way to Cleveland.
And I say, well, what do I do?
And she says, here's the number of the baggage handlers in Cleveland that
I'm going to send an email to them right now flagging those bags.
And when you get somewhere, call them, and they'll probably have your bags set aside.
And I was like, whoa, why didn't this happen an hour ago?
Like, an hour of my life.
It's like magic.
And you just did it.
And it was like, the whole time, that's what I was thinking to myself, why isn't this possible?
Like you say, this must happen all the time.
Why isn't the first person that you call able to do this?
And then it turns out they are, they were able, they just, you just didn't find the person with the juice who was willing to do it.
And that is, that's a crazy business model.
And it feels like it's nationwide.
It's nationwide any time you're dealing with a big company now.
It's just like, sorry, this, yep, sorry.
Oh, you're on fire somewhere and your children are dying?
Oh, well, are you near an exit?
Try turning the fire off and back on.
Okay, I really got to pee.