Ep. 135: "Fire Was Always the Star"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
They asked us not to read an ad, so hey, just enjoy the show.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
You had a little vocal fry at the top there.
Ah.
Vocal fry.
Vocal fry.
Lady voiceover artist.
Lady voiceover artist.
Chocolate.
Chocolate goodness.
I was...
I was never aware of vocal fry except as a subtle feeling of uncomfortableness until one time I was standing out in front of a bar in Brooklyn and this young woman was talking to me and I was like, I'd known her for a while and I was like, what is the matter with her?
I'm thinking to myself, you know, she's talking to me and I'm like, something's changed.
Living in Brooklyn is no good for this person.
And then another friend walked up.
As she moved on in conversation to someone else, another friend walked up and said in my ear, God, the vocal fry.
Huh.
You think it was an affectation, like a little strap-on?
She had adopted this vocal fry as an affectation, trying to make it in the big city.
And I had had an unconscious, not an unconscious, but I had had an...
a visceral reaction to it but i didn't know what i was reacting to and as soon as he said vocal fry i did i'd never heard the term before but i understood immediately what it was and i was like oh that's right she was speaking like her voice was a little frying pan uh she was just sitting there free you know like frying some bacon and
And I was like, vocal fry, that is a new concept.
And then all of a sudden I heard it everywhere and I was like, oh, stop doing that.
It's everywhere.
Well, I'll tell you, this might be on the Netflix.
Lake Bell made a movie called In a World.
In a world.
In a world.
And it's about voiceover people.
I've been meaning to watch this movie.
I heard many good things about it.
It's great.
It's about a young woman trying to break into the overwhelmingly male voiceover world.
And her dad is like the...
Oh, what's that guy's name?
Don, what's his name?
Anyway, her father in the movie is like the king of voiceovers.
And she's really good.
I think she might teach accents to people or something in the movie.
It's exactly as you described it, though.
And Will Arnett is in it, which, of course, makes it triple funny.
But what's great is she was on the Fresh Air.
She and the actor who plays her father were both interviewed on Fresh Air.
And she went through... The great thing about a voice person is they can illustrate...
Everything that they want to describe to you.
And so she talked through all of the annoying things that female voice artists are expected to be able to do, including the fry.
The fry.
And the baby voice.
Oh, the baby voice.
Oh, the baby voice.
I hear it a lot, you know, because I have a kid now.
When you turn on the radio, you know, you hear it in commercials, especially.
I think I feel like I hear it a lot at the time.
So we're listening to radio.
You hear all of those horrible affectations.
Well, it's funny because you and I, on this program, and again, I know that some of our listeners are opposed to me breaking the fourth wall, or even the third wall.
What listeners?
I don't know what you're talking about.
But you and I are voice artists, right?
Are we not?
Yes, we paint in obscenities, Hitler, and snot.
Okay.
Although fortunately for us, we have never had to describe our art as ever exploring the intersections between anything.
That's one of the things that I'm really adamant.
Do you like it when people explore intersections, John?
I feel like whenever I see an artist say that their work explores the intersections between, I'm just like, ah, I put the brochure down, I turn away from the gallery wall, and I say, I do not want to explore intersections with you, artist.
And I, as an artist, have been fortunate never to have to explore an intersection, and I don't want us to do it on this program.
It's funny.
If you think about, like, you know, reading interviews with musicians you like or filmmakers you like, you know, they'll sometimes talk a little bit about technique, certainly.
But, I mean, they'll talk about it in really practical terms.
But it seems like today, especially in the Internet-related trades, it's not uncommon at all to talk a whole lot about your philosophy before you've ever actually made it.
Yeah.
And talk about the thing that you will eventually produce is going to be the intersection of these two things.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, I hope that we've played some small role in that, in encouraging young people to really put forth a philosophy before they've ever really made anything.
Yeah, a lot of work lacks a persuasive theory, as Tom Wolfe would say.
Your work is interesting, but it lacks a persuasive theory.
Yeah.
It's so early.
It's really early.
Oh, you know, I received my first spam text this morning.
Oh, welcome.
Did you get it on your phony phone?
I get it on Google Voice forwarded to my phone a lot.
But were you cast in a movie?
Nope.
No, no, no.
This was even grosser.
So I'm embarrassed to say.
I'm so embarrassed.
It's the intersection of embarrassment and texts.
But lately, I don't know what has happened to me.
I tried to put a little bit of a moratorium on thrifting.
Just because it just seemed like I just need to just chill it out for a little while.
If you want to lose weight, stop buying potato chips.
That's right.
If you want less stuff that requires classification, don't go to the thrift store.
Stop going to the thrift store.
Right about the time that I found a whole series of tiles...
Then they were old, and each one of them had a different crest of a different province in Czechoslovakia.
I was like, I have to own these things.
Like, look at that.
It's the checkerboard griffin of Moravia.
Yeah.
And then I got them home and I was just like, what is going on?
I mean, you've decorated your house now like a beer stube.
And you don't even drink beer.
So I was like, I'm not going to go to thrift stores anymore.
And then all of a sudden, at 3 o'clock in the morning, I'm lying in bed and I'm scanning eBay.
on my fucking phone.
And I'm on eBay, and I'm searching, searching, searching, and I'm like, you know what I don't have?
I don't have any Italian climbing boots.
Yeah.
You know what else I don't have?
I don't have silk pajamas.
That seems like an obvious one.
Well, right?
Silk pajamas.
I have a lot of cotton pajamas.
I don't wear pajamas, but I have cotton pajamas because I feel like they need to be archived.
That's something a gentleman needs.
Uh, and anyway, and at some point, so then I'm on eBay and then I'm getting, uh, then I get, I get, uh, I get all, uh, I get all excited about like, oh, you know, you know what I, the problem, the problem isn't that I don't have any Italian climbing boots.
It's that I don't know enough about Italian climbing boots.
And so then I'm researching Italian climbing boots on the internet.
Which leads me to all of those sites where men are talking to one another about their clothes and their fashion.
And there's a whole world... And I know you don't know anything about this.
How?
How would you know that?
Because you tuck your dad jeans into your socks.
Well... Because it keeps... Socks like these you don't keep to yourself.
Right?
It keeps the Skeeters out.
But...
And so then I'm reading message boards where guys are like, I bought a pair of Italian climbing boots and I found that an 11.5 is actually closer to a 12 or whatever it is.
I mean, the people just talk...
I don't have to tell you.
The thing is, whatever it is, whether it's the seduction community or the Italian boot community, you get deeply into jargon, technology, insider information, who knows more, who's more legit.
I think that's common to pretty much every community eventually, especially if it involves men.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
Men are good at that.
They're bootsplainers.
Then I'm getting bootsplained to by a thousand guys, and I have no way of telling whether these guys are 65-year-old former mountain climbers or whether they are 22-year-old people who live on the border side.
And eventually, and the thing is, my judgment is impaired.
at four o'clock in the morning and i'm you know and right next to me on the bed stand i have an ipad but i'm not doing it on the ipad i'm looking i'm using my phone and i'm you know i'm scanning these little message boards researching some esoterica and then invariably somebody says
Well, you know, J.Crew has a really good set of reissued Italian mountain climbing boots.
And even though it's against everything that I stand for, I went and was trying to look at something on the J.Crew website...
And they wanted me to log in.
And I was alone.
I was vulnerable.
I was a little impaired.
I was a little sad.
I was longing for information.
And I entered my information into the J.Crew website.
Then I was logged in.
Now I had an account.
I was logged in.
I realized that
that the website was just an elaborate shell game.
Oh, you weren't on the J.Crew site.
No, I was.
Oh.
But all internet commerce is some kind of a shell game, right?
I got there, I found the thing that I was trying to find, and then I clicked all the way through to the end game, and they were like, oh, so sorry, sold out.
Would you like to see another...
thing that doesn't it isn't anything like it j crew so i think it's one of those companies where a lot of times you get to a page and they say wouldn't it be easier if you called us oh that was my daughter yeah well i'm trying to order a backpack for my daughter like a real specific and like well to get these certain features why don't you just call us that's yeah certain things you have to call they really i think want you to call well anyway you're stuck you're stuck in a shell game and you're vulnerable
I'm vulnerable in this shell game and I'm like, ah, why did I do this?
You know, this is garbage.
Get me out of here.
And I log off and I try and I go and I wash my hands and scrub them really hard.
And I'm just like, oh, that was a bad experience.
And I wake up the next day and there's spam in my email from some clothing company.
And I'm like, fucking J. Crew, that fast?
You sold my stuff?
You sold me down the river that fast?
And now it's two days later and I got a freaking text from somebody that's like, Michael Kors is having a huge sale.
What?
You think they sold your information?
Thong underpants.
I didn't even put my phone number in this thing.
I don't think that's related.
How could it not be?
I've never received it.
There's so many ways, disturbing, sad ways that things cannot be related.
Michael Kors?
I'll tell you this.
I don't even know what that is.
I did buy my daughter every year at the beginning of the school year.
We get our daughter a new backpack, and we ordered her this special backpack with the purple backpack with the owls, and we're going to put her initials on it, so we called them.
That sets up a really weird...
A really weird precedent for her.
Why is that?
Well, she's going to be 42 years old and she's going to be like, oh, it's fucking September.
I need a new backpack.
Oh, mid to late August, I still want new Duotank folders.
I have no need for them.
I crave them.
I crave writing my name and my room number and subject at the top of every one.
Yeah.
So, okay, here's what I will tell you.
And nothing against J.Crew.
And I'm pretty positive it was J.Crew that we got this from because they make a nice backpack.
But it was funny because I remember, like, I guess I feel like I probably maybe signed up for a new account because I didn't know my old password or something.
Long story short, I think I got at least eight emails from them having bought exactly one item.
Some of them were things saying, we've received your order.
Other things are, your order is on the way.
But then I started getting, like, daily emails from them after that.
And it's like, you know, I –
The thing is there are – let me just say there are good mailing lists in the world that are worth signing up for and people will send you something informative every day and that's a good thing.
I have never, to my knowledge, at least in the contemporary internet age, like in the last 10 years, I have never intentionally –
asked a vendor to email me about anything ever.
In fact, because I know stuff about computers, I scan the page for the place where I can click the dingus to say I don't want to get the emails.
Sure, you have to dig down through several layers to find the place where you say please don't ever email me.
Right.
But even still, like if you buy stuff from third parties on Amazon, they send them your information.
So something that I bought like three years ago, I still get stuff about that.
And so finally I had to just, you know, mash on the spam button a bunch of times to get, you know, the crew stuff to stop.
Anyway, I think.
And so what was the nature?
What was the nature of your text?
Well, I've deleted it, but first of all, it had a lot of emojis.
Emojis.
Little star emojis and happy face emojis and snowflake emojis.
It was a very long text, and it was telling me that there were special offers for me about Michael Kors products.
Michael Kors, you're talking about the great American designer, Michael Kors.
I'm assuming that he is a clothes designer, a fashion designer.
He has stores, he designs things, and he looks like an Oompa Loompa.
I am not familiar with his work, and it is not the type of thing.
I mean, generally, when I see things like that, when I see a name of a fashion designer...
I lodge it somewhere in the back of my head as a thing to... You can make a joke about it sometimes.
Well, as a thing... Nice shirt, Karl Lagerfeld.
I put about half of it in a place in my brain where I catalog names of things to hate.
And then half of it in the other part of my brain, which is like, what if I'm at a cocktail party and I meet this guy?
I'd better have some connection.
The familiarity of this guy is a fashion designer.
So I don't walk up to him and say, I loved your show.
Oh, the great fashion shows.
What show?
Ah, fuck.
You know what you can watch for?
The one that everybody gets at some point, watch out for a text involving discounted prices on premium brand sunglasses.
That's the one everybody's been getting for like the last year.
I have noticed that the thrift stores now almost universally recognize the value of their vintage sunglasses.
Oh, interesting.
Used to be I would find Ray-Bans by the bucket load for 99 cents at Goodwills, and they were oblivious to them.
And I walked into a Goodwill the other day, and they had a pair of Ray-Bans under the glass.
which was a bad sign.
And then I was like, how much do you want for those?
Because, you know, I've converted to the new way of thinking.
I'm willing to pay a little bit of money.
That must have been tough for you to accept.
But it's like, I get it.
It's very hard for me to accept.
These things are worth money.
I knew it before.
You seem to know it now.
But they're outrageous.
I mean, John, you've been to the Goodwill by our house, the now fancy Goodwill, where those shirts, there's no way that that 10-year-old shirt cost that much when they put it out.
That's ridiculous.
That's exactly right.
And I said to the woman, like, how much do you want for those?
And she said $99.
And I said, $99?
That seems like a lot of dollars for you sunglasses.
They're not that much more new with a case.
And she shrugged and was like, I know.
What can I say?
I was like, oh, man.
$99.
Somebody.
Well, you should respond to some of those texts.
Here's some that I've gotten.
About every week or two, I get a similar text message.
Here's one recently.
Merlin, so they know my name.
You have been matched with TV show starring Dennis Leary.
Auditions approaching soon.
What?
What?
Yeah.
Pays $842 a day.
It's a very specific number.
Merlin, you have been matched to the TV show directed by Mark Wahlberg.
Auditions this week.
And they're all Las Vegas telephone numbers.
They're all from 702 phone numbers.
Robert De Niro.
I could work with Robert De Niro.
I could work on the hit TV series Sirens.
I could be on a fall modeling shoot for something called Entrez Bleu.
Now, how does this, I mean, this seems very specific on the, in the sense that they have to know that you are somebody who, like, this feels like it's coming from inside your brain somewhere.
Yeah, inside the house.
Right?
Well, yeah, I mean, you don't want to know how much your stuff is already out there, but it's, no, they know my name and they know my Google Voice number and they text it.
So, yeah.
But that you might, like, seriously be considering,
I mean, for me, right, a text like that, I would I would I'd be like, finally, tell me more.
Finally, De Niro has finally asked for me by name.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the thing about a scam is it's been years now and since a scam looked like the scam you thought it was.
And the problem is today the scams are so complex that.
that, I mean, I think sometimes with things like this, I wonder if some of these are just a way of verifying the most important thing in a scam, which is that you will respond.
Right.
Is there something on the other end of the line?
Well, yeah, and here's the thing.
These have a pattern to them.
These are basically just spit out by some kind of an algorithm.
So it says, Merlin, you've been meshed with something.
And then it'll say where it's accepting submissions for something, the name of a celebrity, something about auditions, a phone number, and then it always ends with reply stop to stop.
Because in SMS, you're supposed to be able to – I think maybe legally, you're supposed to be able to type the four letters S-T-O-P and they'll never contact you again.
Of course, it doesn't work.
It's the same way people used to reply to spam and go, please, could you please put me on your do not mail list because I don't like to receive unsolicited email.
And all that does is prove that your email works.
When you respond to spam, it just shows that your email account works.
And B, you respond to things.
And here's what every salesperson knows.
There are people out there who think they don't respond to salespeople, but as long as you're talking, they're still closing.
So if you're talking to a spammer, why are you talking to them?
You might as well yell at a wall.
But now they know that your account works.
So maybe if they don't get you with that one, they'll get you with something else.
Ten years ago, my wife replied to send in some card from a magazine, and I've been plagued by you salespeople ever since.
Oh, let me see.
Let me see.
Grace, Grace, you're going to need $10,000 in cash and the American Express card.
grace oh i really i really want to get you into that oh i wish i could have gotten you in last time old gill really needs this one do you know i i know you don't follow my work but do you know how much i adore that movie it's a very good it's a very good movie and the guy in that scene is we're talking about glengarry glen ross and the of course jack lemon is peerless can there be can there be anybody who listens to this program who isn't who hasn't watched glengarry glen ross uh a hundred times
There's always something to surprise us, John.
There's always something to surprise us.
I think it's safe to say probably they have not watched it as many times as I have watched it, for example.
Right.
It's a short film.
It's a film you can watch in 90 minutes.
There are young people out there.
Your classic 22-year-olds.
You know, who it's very hard to know what they've seen and what they haven't seen.
They know all the words to what the fox said, but they've never seen a Hitchcock film.
Right.
Oh, my God.
I suddenly hate myself so much.
Did you see... Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.
Entirely unacceptable.
Did you see this Road Warrior reboot?
No, no.
I saw all this talk on the internet about a Road Warrior trailer.
Easy joke.
And I said, what?
Oh, that's right.
Easy joke.
Did that just set off a bot in you?
No, sorry.
Easy joke, easy joke.
Sorry, I'm just sitting there in the peanut gallery watching all the people who hate their life waiting to make the easy joke about anything anybody says.
Wow.
Red Warrior, more like... It seemed like I just caught a glimpse behind the curtain.
I think I might have been hacked.
Really?
Ronald Reagan, more like... 450,000 different scripts that are running in you all the time.
Am I right?
Easy joke.
So people are talking about the Blade Runner, or not Blade Runner, the Road Warrior trailer.
Mm-hmm.
On Twitter, and I'm like, why suddenly are half a dozen people I follow going back and watching a movie trailer from 1981?
And then I was sitting around the house, and I was made aware of the fact that they are making a new Road Warrior movie.
And, you know, Road Warrior was very important to me.
I would say one of the real foundational artworks in my canon.
Oh, you can't be serious.
You can't be serious.
See, I'm like those 22-year-olds you hate.
I'm like the app class.
What were you doing in 1981 that the Road Warrior did not appeal to you?
Masturbating and throwing saving throws.
At separate times, I'm a gentleman.
And you know, my dad took me to see it.
He was like, I was so into it, and of course I couldn't see it.
How did he say it to you?
It was rated R, and I was, well, how old was I in 1981?
13.
You were, yes, 13.
Over 13.
So I was with my dad.
Is that right?
Yeah, I guess that's right.
You're 668, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
And I think I was probably 12 because my birthday is in September.
I think the movie came out, I don't know, in the summer.
But anyway, I went with my dad.
And the movie was, you know, obviously graphically violent.
And there's every kind of violence.
But as a pyromaniac...
There's a lot of fire in that movie.
That was very exciting to me.
That was at an age when any appearance of fire on the screen... Fire was always the star of any film.
But it had all the ingredients.
It had all the Red Dawn post-apocalyptic lawlessness...
Yeah, cool outfits, big guns, cars, people with neat hair.
Yeah, people with neat hair, people, lots of quotable lines, foreign accents.
It just seemed, and you know, like, yeah, like fast driving and dangerous behavior.
Number one dangerous behavior movie.
So anyway, this thing, this movie resonated with me.
I've seen it 1,000 times.
Did you seek out the new version, the trailer for the new one?
Well, so this was the thing.
So I heard about it, and I was like, God, I have to go now and watch this thing.
I don't want to.
You have to decide what part of this is going to make me mad.
I'm so mad already.
And interestingly, when I found out that Charlize Theron was in the film...
That did not turn me against it right away.
Why would that turn you against it?
Well, this is the thing.
There were 400 actresses that could have been cast in that movie, and 390 of them would have turned me against it immediately.
Oh, okay.
You're thinking, no guarantee, but she could pull it off.
But of all the actresses, Charlize Theron has been a very small group of people where I'm like, okay, I believe it still.
Like, it could even be good with her.
It's not a disaster on the face of it.
Because she is an actress who's willing to make herself ugly.
in order to... Yes, she's famously that.
She's also got a hilarious sense of humor.
Very funny, lady.
Self-effacing.
Did you ever see her in that Between Two Ferns?
No.
Oh, boy.
That show's a little close to home for me.
Interviewing people in your basement.
She has a real physicality.
There's a lot of things in which I could see her sort of like be the proto-humongous and take over the film.
So I'm like, okay, I'm into it.
And I go and I click and I watch this trailer and it's one of these movies where a car gets into an accident and the tire comes off the car and instead of
Bouncing across the desert.
It comes straight at the camera.
Oh, boy.
And then you see the tire treads on it as it goes by.
Splash cut.
Right.
And there's, you know, all super slow-mo and things blowing up.
Implausible car wrecks.
CGI flames.
Yeah, where cars are tumbling upside, you know, like they're in a wreck and they roll 40 times.
And in the space of that, somebody slides out the window, manages to walk across the ground, pick up the car keys and get back in the rolling car.
And then the explosion behind them without turning around.
Yeah, right.
And they open the glove box and the car is still rolling and it's just like, fuck you a thousand million times.
Yeah.
So people are real excited about it.
They're really excited about Star Wars.
I don't share their enthusiasm.
I just think you may have just turned some kind of important public corner in old man-ness.
So I watched the online advertisement for the film.
And it was alternately...
Disappointing and implausible.
Some people like Star Wars.
I didn't get the boots.
If you can picture me in a giant shawl collar cardigan sweater.
Angrily slamming a book closed.
I'm basically the French father in Munich.
I'm, you know, chopping up some shallots.
I'm like, you could have been my son.
Oh, NPR, Dad.
So no boots for you.
No.
I actually did get some boots.
Oh, good, good, good.
Did you ever get a wooden fork?
They weren't Italian climbing boots.
You did swear, kind of on the record publicly, I think.
It sounded like you were really heavily weighing toward as soon as you hit the Skype button, you were going to walk outside and buy a wooden fork and spoon.
Well, so here's what happened.
Someone on Twitter.
Yes, I saw.
Yeah, right.
They made us aware of a thought technology that we've been missing.
They did.
They were like, what are you doing, ding-a-ling?
Why don't you get chopsticks?
And I was like, what the hell have I been doing?
Why am I not carrying chopsticks all the time?
Because chopsticks you can use for a thousand applications.
Yeah.
You know, points to the clever Twitter guy.
Yeah, that's great.
Next time you are around a fire where people are eating stew, pull out some chopsticks and see what kind of response you get.
Good point.
Good point.
Wait a minute.
Did you bring a fork?
No, but I have these chopsticks.
They turn into a pen.
Good point.
Okay.
Because part of it you're repping, right?
Yeah, sure.
Part of it is you want to go whoosh.
And you want there to be like an audible whoosh.
Like you're pulling out your claymore.
And you go here.
And you got a fork.
Classic scene in The Road Warrior.
Hmm.
Where the road warrior himself, Mad Max.
The titular road warrior.
That's right.
Opens a can of dog food.
He has a dog.
Yeah, right.
He's got like an Australian Shepherd kind of dog.
That's right.
A little Australian Shepherd dog.
He opens a can of dog food.
And you, as the viewer in 1981, as a 13-year-old boy in 1981, you're like, oh, he's going to feed his dog.
And then he pulls out a fork from inside his leather costume and starts eating the dog food.
Which was maybe as shocking a thing as any of the death or dismemberment that you see in the film.
On first viewing.
Like, he's eating the dog food.
We've seen so much gross stuff in the 30 years since then that you forget that there was a time when something like that would really kind of put you off your lunch.
Just like, whoa, but then... I think Kevin Costner drinking his pee very heavily influenced.
I'm not sure I saw that movie.
That would be Waterworld.
No, didn't see that movie.
Didn't see Waterworld because I follow the adage of whichever director it was who said, never direct a film on water.
I forget who that was.
That's a quote.
That's a wiki quote.
It sounds like Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride.
I think it was before that.
Never fight a land war in Asia.
Never direct a film on open water.
Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
The cliffs of insanity.
It's still so funny.
The way he says that, that clips of insanity.
Insanity!
Oh, man.
Andre the Giant.
But wait, there's more to this.
Oh, sorry, sorry.
You got your Australian fork.
There's more to this dog food story.
Okay.
So he's eating the dog food, but of course, that's the moment when the film blows up in your mind.
Smash clip.
Because you're like, it's not just...
That they're driving around in the desert and that there don't appear to be any police, it truly is...
Ten times.
It's a great example of show, don't tell.
A can of dog food.
Today, you would get a crawl, like a four-paragraph crawl with a voiceover and some sporadic news bits.
That's what they do today.
They did it in that Planet of the Apes movie.
They do it in all these movies now.
They did it in 28 Days Later.
People eating dog food.
Oh, my.
Yeah, but in that, all you do, you show that scene.
You're like, oh, shit got real.
Right.
Now I understand the entire world of the film.
Yeah.
But as he's eating the can of dog food, the dog is watching him, licking his lips.
But also, the gyro captain is watching him.
Sounds like a guy who was a Greek restaurant.
The...
Not the Euro Captain.
The Gyro Captain.
I gotta look this up.
I'm sorry.
I'm derailing you.
Is this Mad Max or the Road Warrior you're talking about?
This is the Road Warrior.
The Gyro Captain's watching him and the Gyro Captain reaches into his Gyro Captain costume and pulls out a wooden mixing spoon.
That is like heavily used.
And then again, show don't tell, the world double, triple explodes because you realize every single person in this world is carrying an eating utensil in his coat.
And the gyro captain has chosen a wooden mixing spoon, not because that's the best tool, but it's because it's the tool that he found.
And you're just like, this film is owning me, owning me as a 13-year-old.
And I think that is the beginning.
That's the beginning of this feeling that I should always have an eating utensil.
And the question is, are you a road warrior who has a fucking fork?
Or are you a gyro captain who's carrying around a mixing spoon?
Very smartest on Twitter who has chopsticks.
Excuse me.
Actually, you can have a lot of the similar effect just by having chopsticks, which is an ancient tool that you could use.
You wouldn't even really need to do anything special.
You probably have it in your house right now.
I should have a little leather toolkit that I unroll, and it has a spoon, a fork, chopsticks.
What do they call it?
You got your daily carry?
What do they call it?
Those douchey sites where people show what they put in their pockets.
Oh, I have seen those.
Daily carry.
It's a thing.
It's a whole genre.
It's like, let me take you on an excruciating tour of the various kinds of costly knives I keep in this leather bag.
Oh, my daily carry.
You got to show off your costly wristwatch, your expensive pen, some kind of a fancy knife, and then there's got to be usually some kind of a dingus that's extra super too clever.
It's like some kind of a pen that's a lighter or something.
A pen that's a lighter.
Yeah.
Brian May did the music for Mad Max 2.
Don't have to tell me.
Wow.
I love that guy.
And the music is very evocative.
There's a lot of that.
I had the hot licks.
I had the hot licks for him.
Oh, you're talking about the how-to.
Did you ever buy the hot licks?
You ever get those?
It's a VHS tape, right?
Mine was a cassette that came with a little booklet, and it was amazing, because it sounds like it was all just recorded in one take.
Hey, this is Brian May from Queen.
Tie your mother down.
And they play the original, and then he slowly plays it for you, and that's how I learned to play Bohemian Rhapsody.
it was fantastic oh it was fantastic no I never one time I was watching MTV and for some reason oh this is even more embarrassing I was going to tell you what my daily carry is but no I'm not going to I want to circle back I'm switching gears daily carry can't forget it I'm watching MTV early days has to be about 1981 too and they're interviewing Eric Clapton
And this was before I had the realization that there was something dead inside of Eric Clapton.
It was also before his second big comeback.
It was before the... After Midnight.
No, no.
It was before... What's the one?
It's in the way that you use it.
It was before that.
Right.
And there was a good song on that record.
I forget how the fuck it went.
But there were some good... Some friends of mine actually went to see him on that tour.
I didn't go.
You know, that was the era when 60s rock stars were appearing on stage in, like, dusters.
Oh, absolutely.
They were all coming back out of the woodwork.
They were in their 40s, coming out of the woodwork with something, you know, a more palatable version of something that they'd kind of done in the 60s and 70s.
Yeah, but they had a mullet.
I think he did have a leather duster.
I think you're right.
A leather duster and a mullet.
And, you know, I'm sad to say, because now I'm in my 40s, like, oh, it could have... These guys were still feeling pretty relevant.
I've been more successful when I was young.
I could suck like they did.
Yeah, exactly.
Forever man!
Forever man!
She's waiting!
She's waiting!
She's waiting!
See, the thing is, you want to have a forever woman, because that's a nice pairing with a forever man.
Anyway, this is before I... He took almost the amount of time it said to say those words to write them.
This is before I understood that there was something permanently dead inside of me.
And he was on MTV, and I was like, oh, Clapton, Clapton, yeah.
And he's talking about his guitar playing, and he's got a guitar in his hand.
And so I reach over and I push record on the Betamax player that we had that I kept in there to record all the bikini running scenes at the end of Benny Hill.
Oh, so like if a ZZ Top video came on, you could just run over, hit record, and you know you were good.
And you catch it, right?
You got a burner in there.
And so Clapton's there, and he's like, you know, my guitar parts are the really simple man.
I mean, it's not like a – that's not a very good Clapton accent.
And he said, for instance, one of the things I do – I'm kind of doing a George Harrison or a Ringo Starr accent, aren't I?
I wasn't going to say anything.
It's a little bit Liverpool.
Yeah.
He says, you know, I play one of these licks.
And he goes, and I was like, he just showed me how to play a guitar lick.
And I rewound the tape a hundred times, and I learned this guitar lick.
That's a pretty good lick.
And I was like, wow!
Let me do that again!
And basically, that one guitar lick is the only guitar lick I ever learned.
And it's the foundation of every single guitar solo I've ever played.
Wow!
And I don't... When I was staying at your house, one of the first times we ever met...
No, no, no, not one of the first times we ever met.
We'd been friends for a while.
Well, it was probably one of our first high-level meetings.
Yeah, you showed me.
That's a pretty good one.
That is super handy.
And I was like, that's a killer guitar riff!
That was the second riff I'd ever learned.
If you ever need a reason to play everything in G, that's it.
You also know the Rocks Off one, right?
Which one is Rocks Off?
It's just one that goes... My guitar's all fucked up.
I think I got some kind of Chinese tuning on it right now.
But you're right.
All you need to know... Oh, wait.
I know one more.
That's good.
A little walk down.
So those are the guitar licks that I know.
And that one that I learned from Clapton, from my beta tape of him sitting in an MTV studio telling Martha Quinn that all of his guitar parts were actually really simple.
And I felt like after I learned that one guitar part...
I was good.
I was covered.
You can extrapolate a lot from those simple things.
Yeah, right.
And so then I did that every time I got a chance.
And little by little, I think maybe then, off of a cassette tape, I learned the solo for Bad Moon Rising.
That's a good one.
This is the one I was talking about.
This one you can always find a good place for this.
I'm not sure I do know that one.
It's a little Keith Richards-y.
Yeah.
That's a nice one.
What's you learn?
Learn the little box.
Somebody shows you the little box.
Right?
You know what I'm talking about.
Oh, yeah.
The little box.
Somebody drew me the little box on a piece of notebook.
It's permanently.
It's one of those things that's like, who's the guy?
Who's the psychologist?
Maslow?
No.
Yeah, it's like a pyramid.
Dr. Sears?
You know who I mean.
The guy that's not Freud.
The other guy.
Kant, Descartes, Marx.
I can't decide who I hate more right now.
It's like a Jungian thing for me.
Oh, Jung.
I see the little boom, boom, boom, boom.
That's not it, but boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Pentatonic.
I can see that on a fretboard in my brain all the time.
I see it, too.
The funniest thing, whenever I tune the guitar... Deckard.
Whenever I tune the guitar... Make me certain that you bend the fifth.
I think about the intersection of Northern Lights...
Are you doing an intersection?
And Benson.
I am.
I'm thinking about the intersection of... But I'm actually thinking of the intersection of two streets in Anchorage.
Right.
And for whatever reason, it's imprinted in a Descartesian fashion, a Cartesian fashion.
Cartesian pyramid.
I used to love that show.
The Cartesian water that makes our beer so delicious...
For whatever reason, this, and I'm sure, well, I hope other people have this experience, where certain, like, certain completely unrelated memories get attached to
actions that you that you do frequently that you've been doing for forever and you know every time you brush your teeth you think about the march of dimes or every time every time i tune the guitar i think about this particular intersection in anchorage
March of Dimes.
March of Dimes.
You know, when you think about that, that's kind of a funny... Every dollar's made of dimes.
And now from now on, I will think of the March of Dimes every time I brush my teeth, and I won't know why.
After I graduated from high school, I was at the mall with a good friend of mine, and he was moving away.
And we were walking around the mall, and we stopped at a drinking fountain...
And he said, you know, he took a drink and then I'm taking a drink.
And as I'm taking a drink, he said, I want you every time you see the little drain at the bottom of a drinking fountain, I want you to think of me.
whoa and i was like i said whoa he was trying to colonize my brain he was trying to put himself he just he did not i've never met him and now i'm gonna do that yeah he did not think he did not want to be forgotten i
And he was walking around the mall and he was like, how do I make sure that I am not forgotten?
It's like every time you bend over to take a drink of water at a drinking fountain, and you see that little drain, I want you to think of me.
And did it work?
Well, no.
Because you don't use drinking fountains that much.
Well, or it's just a thing of like, I'm not so easily colonized.
But I do remember that moment, and I've thought about it many times as a kind of example of human frailty.
oh man i'm boo i don't know if i'm the opposite of that but i'm the opposite of that uh i can still i can tell you specifically i remember i i mean there's so much dumb shit where you could get into my brain so easily it's appalling so now i guess i'm for tooth brushing and the thing is i won't remember this conversation and now on the podcast six months from now you know what's funny is every time i brush my teeth i think i'm marching dives i don't even remember why i've ever told you this story it's pretty crazy but
But I remember one time I had my mom stop at a 7-Eleven type place.
She said, we've got to get filmed for the camera.
And I said, okay, just go in and get this.
You've got to get the Kodak film, Kodak 110-20 exposure.
okay what is it kodak 110 20 exposure 110 20 exposure 110 20 exposure 110 20 exposure 110 20 exposure that's when i was like 10 and i still have 110 20 exposure on my brain and if i have to come up with an anecdote yeah yeah 30 38 years ago my mom said 110 20 exposure to me and i still can think of it very very easily i will never forget 110 20 exposure
Loaf of bread, quarter milk, stick of butter.
Stick of butter.
Loaf of bread, quarter milk, stick of butter.
Martian Dimes.
I have to think that my brain is full of those things too.
And they come out all the time and you wonder when you get one of those flash memories where it just seems like you're filling up your brain with something else and all of a sudden it's like, well, we got to push this thing out.
And you're just transported to some memory that you would never have had access to.
It's like teleportation for me.
And I think for me, partly it's the musicality of the way somebody said something.
There's a certain musicality that really made it stick in my head.
Maybe it made me laugh and made an emotional impact as well.
But there's probably dozens of things like that.
The doorman outside of a bar.
As far as I'm concerned, all you new wavers are in purgatory.
I'll never forget that line.
Ha ha ha!
It was New Wave Night at a gay bar.
And the guy goes, well, as far as I'm concerned, all you new wavers are in purgatory.
And that line, it's just tattooed on my head forever.
Sure.
Murmur's a good record if you like keyboard-oriented music.
The phrase keyboard-oriented music has just stuck in my head.
Why would you say that?
There's like 50 different ways.
Why would you ever say Murmur's a good record if you like keyboard-oriented music?
Keyboard-oriented music.
There's not a thing about that.
No keyboards on Murmur.
There's camera.
You got camera.
It's got some piano on it.
And that's pretty much it.
Keyboard-oriented music.
Keyboard-oriented music, said the guy at Vinyl Fever in Tampa, Florida in 1983.
Oh, my God.
Sean Nelson is full of great quotes like that.
The most famous being... It's not a show friend.
No, not the show friend.
The most famous one is... Well, God, I can't lose it now.
Oh, no!
Um...
I've never seen anyone so god all stupid as you put oil on the radiator.
Is that a quote?
That's a quote.
Because Sean Nelson put oil in his car.
His car was overheating or something.
He was like, oh shit.
And he went and screwed the cap.
He was like, I guess you put oil in here.
And he put a fucking quart of oil in his radiator.
Are you kidding?
Took it to a mechanic somewhere in Virginia and never seen it.
Oh, no, no, no.
I'm sorry.
Never seen anyone as shit all stupid as you.
As shit all stupid as you put oil in the radiator.
110-20 exposure.
The memories that pour out of my head, and the problem is when that happens, I seize on them, and I say, please don't let this be the last time I remember this.
Please, brain, do not be disgorging this memory.
And now I'm experiencing it this last time.
Oh, I think about that, too.
And then it's gone forever.
Because you'd never know if that was the last time you remembered it.
You wouldn't know, right?
You're not going to recall it.
And so I grab these memories by the ankle.
And I'm like, please, don't go.
Don't go.
And I reinforce them.
desperately trying to hold on to this feeling of like and that just then that just degrades it i think of like remember when you're a little kid and like use number four for silly putty was you can make it flat put it on the sunday funnies and then peel it off and you got a reverse image of the sunday funnies on there why would you want why you would want to do that i don't know but of course you do that you get silly putty you make a little pancake you put it onto your uh dagwood and blondie and you pull it off
That's exactly what you do.
Dagwood and Blondie is where you put it, too.
Technically, it's Blondie.
But you look at it then, and so you've got two things now.
On the one hand, you kind of fucked up your silly putty a little bit with this pointless reverse image.
It's got some paint on it now.
But you know what happened?
You removed a lot of the image.
from the page in the paper.
You do it again, it takes a little bit more of the image off.
And to me, that's how memories are.
I worry that each time, at first I'm just removing a little bit of the clarity, then I'm removing some of the color, and eventually I'm actually destroying the line work.
1-10-20 exposure.
Attack ships burning off the shoulder of Orion.
Tears in rain.
Ah!
L-T-I-R!
I don't want, you know, the things I've seen, Merlin.
Oh, yeah, sure.
You got the C-beams?
Don't they are?
That's right.
C-beams glittering off the Tannhauser Gate.
You can remember that.
Let's not go there.
The thing is that the 70s lived so vividly
In my memory.
Ah, indelible.
Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
I miss them.
Every intonation of every commercial, I'm the sole survivor.
I still have every note of that music in my head.
My Balody has a first name.
But listen, this isn't... I'm not just talking about the Museum of Television and Industry.
Aren't you?
Like...
Do you remember when you would pull into a gas station and there was a person that came over and wiped his hands on a rag and said, fill her up?
I'll take you one further than that.
I heard a sound last week and I flipped out.
And then my daughter, obviously, who already thinks I'm nuts, I was like, that sound, that sound.
I was like, that's the sound you used to hear when you pull into a gas station.
And you know what that sound was?
Ding, ding.
Because you drive over the thing.
And it goes ding, ding.
You drive over the thing and it goes ding, ding.
When was the last time you drove over a thing that went ding, ding?
It's got to be 20 years.
It's got to be at least 20 years.
And it used to be you drove over a thing that went ding, ding every freaking day.
All the time.
Everywhere you went.
But the thing is, I don't know where it was.
It might have been a ringtone or something, something on the radio.
But I heard something that sounded enough like the ding, ding.
It's that tone.
Ding, ding.
And I heard that and I was instantly transported back to like the early 80s.
Oh, now I want one of those.
Oh.
That would be so handy.
If you had one just like out in front of your... Well, just the problem is, as you remember from the 70s, you could not make the ding with your shoes.
Nope.
I sure tried.
You'd stand up there and jump on that hose and couldn't make it go ding.
Oh, God.
It's not useful.
I want it.
Unless you own a garage or unless you are a car rental agency or some other thing where you want to be signaled that a customer is arriving by car.
I didn't mean to derail you, but I had to mention that just because it was like less than a week ago that that sound I hadn't heard in years.
And it was instantly like it was a sound that I heard every day still.
It instantly transported me back.
I feel like our young listeners right now are rolling their eyes so hard in their heads that they're going to have to go see a doctor because we are having an old man podcast now where we're talking about things.
I remember the oil embargo.
it's not it's not i said that to a kid there was a time when you couldn't buy ice cream everywhere a lot of people don't know that now you can buy cigarettes at a pharmacy like a gentleman what were we doing we were waiting in line i was waiting in line with a guy that i could tell was 30 probably and i said to him by way of trying to like break the conversational ice bet you're too young to remember the oil embargo
He looked at me like I said something to the effect of, did you ever visit Prussia?
You win the bet, JR.
You're too young to remember the oil embargo, I said, by way of trying to commiserate with this guy that we were waiting in line at a coffee shop.
It sounds like an awesome, terrible pickup line.
Hey, how's it going?
How's it going?
Man, it's loud in here.
I bet you're too young to remember the oil embargo.
Say, how much do you know about the Carter administration?
Because I know a lot.
He's a big new Brzezinski.
Remember he told us to turn down our thermostats?
Remember that?
It was crazy, man.
That helicopter in the desert, man.
Oh, it was only a few years, too.
Four short years.
Remember Walter Mondale?
Oh, my God.
My God, the first person I ever voted for for president was Dukakis.
Oh.
Me too.
Oh yeah, really?
Yeah, that's right.
You were of age then?
Tukakis and Benson.
Oh boy, that was a killer lineup.
It sure was.
It sure was, boy.
And we lost.
We lost big time because he rode around in that tank with that ill-fitting helmet.
Oh, that's a turns out story, I think.
I think that was a jam up.
You know, he came to Spokane and this was one of my first moments of pure...
like pure crowd work.
Dukakis was coming to speak at the big student sports pavilion at Gonzaga.
Called the Monk Dome?
Yeah, right.
It's called Father Sitter Dome.
And the sports arena sat, what, let's say 8,000 people.
And 20,000 people showed up.
to see Dukakis in Spokane in 1988.
And then no one was prepared for it.
And he was supposed to be there at 8 p.m.
And the sports stadium was full of people.
And then there was another, you know, there was just thousands of people outside who couldn't get in but didn't want to leave without getting a glimpse of Dukakis.
Yeah.
And the police were there and they'd strung up ropes, but they were completely outmatched.
And so the young Democrats were trying to do crowd control.
And the audience was kind of... This huge crowd outside the stadium was kind of surging against this rope line that they had.
And Dukakis didn't come.
Then it was 9 o'clock.
Are you kidding?
Then it was 9.30.
And people kept walking the line...
You know, like a guy from the National Democratic Party would walk the line.
He'd say, he's on his way, everyone.
We're sorry.
He's on his way.
It'll be a little bit longer.
And the crowd is really a lot of people and pushing against this rope line that's just being held by some undergraduates.
And they have this look of like total fear in their eyes.
And I'm in the crowd.
Not involved with the young Democrats, not a part of the scene at all.
Just came to see Dukakis.
And once I got into the mob scene, then I was just there to see the mob.
And it's kind of cold out.
The crowd is getting really restless.
This guy's been by five or six times saying, hey, you know, he'll be here in a little while.
And people are starting to not believe him and they're starting to shout back at him.
And the crowd is pressing forward so that the young Democrats in their little blue suits and their little blue skirt and jacket combos are starting to get afraid.
They're starting to get panicky.
They're getting pushed against this wall.
And there's no room for them to maneuver.
What a horrible way to die.
Right?
To be crushed at a Dukakis.
At a Dukakis rally.
That he didn't show up for.
And they're squeaking at the crowd like, can you please, can you please, everybody just take one step back.
Everybody just take one step back.
And nobody hears them and nobody cares.
And the crowd is starting to rubble, rubble, rubble, rubble, rubble.
And at a certain point, this gal that's right in front of me, and she's exactly my age.
She's probably 20 years old.
And she's just like, please, please, everyone, please.
And she starts to get the sound in her voice.
And I'm watching this all go down, and I was just thrilled to be in a crowd, right?
But I see it and I just have this flash of like, oh no, this is actually a bad scene.
It hasn't gotten to be a bad scene yet, but we're at the threshold where once we cross it, it's just a bad scene.
There's a point where it goes from, oh boy, I hope this doesn't get worse, to it's a matter of time until something terrible happens.
And you really can't pull back from that once it starts.
What had happened was no one was respecting anybody anymore.
And it was just a question.
If Dukakis had showed up at that moment, it would have just been chaos.
And so for whatever reason, I ducked my head under the rope.
And this girl looked at me with total panic.
Like, here it comes.
I ducked my head under the rope.
I turned around, faced the crowd, and I was like, hello, everybody.
Can I get your attention, please?
And I went into David Lee Roth mode.
And all of a sudden, the 400 people that were closest to me had something to look at.
All of a sudden, there's a guy, big guy, who's talking in a voice that is audible.
All these undergraduates were like, please, everybody, step back.
And then all of a sudden, there's like, hello, people.
And so everybody looks at me and I'm like, I want to try something right now.
Can I get everybody to just do-si-do back two steps?
And everybody steps back, takes two steps.
And I was like, very good.
All right, now let's take another two steps back.
You knew the secret was to just do it like you're David Leroy.
Yeah.
Can I get a...
And everybody takes another two steps back.
And then I was like, tonight is going to be one of the greatest nights of our lives.
Because we are going to see Mike Dukakis.
And everybody kind of cheers, but they also know that I'm mocking.
So they're like laughing and cheering.
And I just, you know, the top of my head's caught on fire.
And I was just like, so all of a sudden now there's 1,500 people.
listening to me and laughing.
And I did 45 minutes of top of my voice stand-up comedy based on Mike Dukakis not having arrived yet.
And it was, I mean, one of the first times that I'd ever had that experience where it was just like, oh, I know what I'm put here on earth to do.
I am put here on earth to do this, whatever this is.
And, you know, the young Democrats were like all rallying behind me like they I was their hero.
And they were like, you know, oh, my God, you've got it.
You know, please join the young Democrats and all this kind of crazy stuff.
And with my and then I had a team.
I had 10 people who were willing to work with me and for me.
To move this crowd and to get them to do things.
And I was like, I want everybody to say, on the count of three, I want everybody to say, hey, whoa.
You found your instrument.
You found your instrument.
I did.
It was.
You had the Monk Dome putch.
I was just sheep herder.
I was made to do this.
You know, I had my crook.
I had my robe.
I had my can of dog food and my wooden spoon.
And I was like, I will go.
I will follow this crowd now.
The crowd and I are together and we are one.
And then Dukakis arrived.
And I was whipping this crowd into a frenzy.
And I was just like, he's here!
The man himself!
Mike Dukakis!
And the crowd's just like, ahhh!
And Dukakis arrives, his car drives over in through a garage door.
We never see him.
What?
He gives a 45-minute speech in the stadium to the 8,000 people that are in there.
And the whole time I'm out there like, he's going to come out.
You know, I'm making promises on behalf of Mike Dukakis.
No one has authorized me to do this.
But I'm like, he's going to stand on that stair.
And he is going to tell us his plan for America.
I've turned into Al Pacino.
And then at the end of the thing, at the end of the rally, and this is where I lost my faith in the Democratic Party, because there were national Democrats
who were there and who were very happy about what I was doing and very proud of me.
And I was like, he's going to come and stand on that stair, right?
There are thousands of people out here.
We've been waiting for hours.
And they were like, oh, yeah.
And they're talking into their little headset microphones.
And when Mike Dukakis was done, he got in his car and he drove away and never appeared before this massive crowd that had...
that was standing at basically the foot of a staircase that he could have walked out the door and been like, wave, blow a kiss, we all would have voted for him.
And instead, his handlers probably didn't even tell him that that crowd was out there or whatever.
But it was a moment where when that crowd dispersed in a feeling of disappointment, like I stood there and shook hands with people,
I was like, you know, we went through this together.
This was us, you and me.
And I was born again.
I was born again in the light.
But that could have been, you know, if he had five or ten more moments like that around the country, it could have been maybe a little bit different.
Oh, I feel like it was – I saw a glimpse behind the curtain of how not to run a political campaign.
Because he really seemed defined by that kind of lack of energy and enthusiasm.
Yeah, and it was – and I have to imagine – I mean if some guy – if some like balding guy in a –
in a light blue suit walked up to him after his speech and whispered in his ear uh uh governor there are like 8 000 people outside here and there's we could just walk you up and like walk out the door and wave to them just make an appearance yeah
I don't believe that he ever received that information because no politician of any kind, even a lackadaisical one, would say, nah, I kind of want to get to the hotel.
I want to catch Carson.
So what it was was a failure of the balding guy in the blue suit.
Mm-hmm.
who was concerned with timetables.
Governor, we're already late.
We need to get back to the, you know, and this is the thing that never would have happened with Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton always stood.
He would go out and shake those people's hands until 2 o'clock in the morning.
But somebody, you know, the person whose job it was, and that was what was so interesting about it because what stood out to me was there is somebody whose job this is, but that person doesn't recognize that this is their job.
They've been given a job description, right?
They are following that job description, and they are missing the fact that this is their job, actually.
And so there is this concept of a job description which is solve problems as they arise.
Or, you know, another way is just to think that your job, you know, I have this feeling sometimes, I don't mean this to sound like mean or something, but like that, you know, once you get any kind of, to do anything good or big, you eventually need to have some structure.
You eventually need like infrastructure and bureaucracy to run anything.
The problem is once you introduce infrastructure and bureaucracy to anything, the infrastructure and bureaucracy becomes the most important part of the whole entire process.
Yeah.
In my opinion, like the bureaucracy will always win.
And again, you and I, we – Isn't that a Clapton song from the 80s?
The bureaucracy will always win.
Win.
And so in this instance though, you have to understand that like yes, your job is certainly to do your administrative stuff and make sure that he doesn't get sniped or anything like that.
Right.
You know what your real job is in that campaign, no matter who you are, is to notice an unrecognized opportunity and capitalize on it.
Because that's how you change an election.
Is to go like, oh, shit, man.
There's got to be at least a couple people in this, whatever, 7,000 people that could have a huge impact and we don't even know it.
It's not going to take that much more energy.
They're already here.
What a no-brainer to go out there as a photo op and go, oh, he could have just gone in and watched Carson.
But he came out because it meant a lot to him to get in touch with the people who believed him in the program.
And it's the weird thing of... Opportunity finders.
Everybody's job on that campaign is ultimately to get him elected.
And so... And I'm sure there was... I'm sure the guy in the blue suit was like...
Well, you know, he probably, he needs his rest.
He's been going all day.
And this is Spokane, Washington.
Like, unimportant crowd.
Like, it's better to conserve his energy.
You know, people making that kind of decision.
And making them incorrectly.
Because ultimately, like...
So everybody's job is the same on that campaign, and it is to do whatever it takes to get him elected.
And I mean, not whatever it takes, whatever it takes within the law.
Right.
Whatever ethic, whatever it takes within ethics and the law.
But there's so much dynamism in every campaign.
Like in retrospect, you get to see these big patterns and go, well.
Really, everything after this date, it was a foregone conclusion.
But you don't really ever know because you never know what's going to come up.
You don't know when like a Gary Hart kind of thing is going to happen.
You don't know when this game is going to completely change.
And you've got to be scanning that horizon, being ready for any kind of an opportunity.
Do you remember, it wasn't that long ago, Marilyn, do you remember when Mitt Romney was running for the American presidency?
Mitt Romney was a Republican candidate for the presidency.
That's right.
I remember the name, yeah.
In recent memory.
Well, I suppose.
And his people...
Who comprised some of the best connected political minds in our country believed that he was going to be the victor.
until uh until after the polls had closed i think they thought he was going to walk away with it they were gloating about it that is how little anybody knows don't you think part of that is okay get ready john you get to be here for the premiere of one of my most despised douche catchphrases uh don't you think that's mostly optics
Don't you think that's mostly we need to make it look like that's the case, whether we believe it or not?
No, no.
I've seen a lot of those optics moments, as you describe.
I hate it so much.
Optics moments.
Is that optics with a K?
O-P-T-I-K-S?
No, it's optics with a C, and it's another one of those words where you could use something that's perfectly fine instead, how it looks.
You gotta work on the optics.
Yeah, optics.
No, I believe, honestly, that a whole lot of those people, the lion's share of them, really...
honestly believed that there was no way he could lose to Barack Obama and that it was in the bag.
That's why they were so devastated when it was so devastatingly not in the bag.
I don't think Dukakis thought that he was going to win.
Past a certain point.
And it showed.
It really did show.
He really limped to the finish line.
And, I mean, imagine losing an election to George Herbert Walker Bush.
It's like losing an election to an animated cardboard Halloween skeleton.
11020 exposure.
11020 exposure.
11020 exposure.