Ep. 152: "Butterfly Farts"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Well, I'm finding my way back to you, Merlin.
I think I know the Frankie Valli version of that best.
It's a cover, right?
I like the way as you started to hum it, you started to hum it and then sort of the trumpets came in and then you're kind of doing a little bit of a marching band version of it.
i mean i'm intrigued by what uh marching bands decide to uh to play i you know it's fun they get to have fun with that they do it seems like that is one of the that's like the unifying characteristic of all marching bands isn't it fun
It is fun.
Like in stage band, you know, we played standards and we played kind of like light fusion.
But mostly it was it was we did a terrible version of Night Train, like awful version of Night Train.
It was it was pretty abysmal.
I mean, I'm on a night train.
Is that Bon Jovi?
What is that?
I don't think that was the version.
I was thinking I'm on a night train.
Yeah.
One of the nice things about marching band is you get that like reverb-y snares.
I love all the drums, all the great drums.
I love the glockenspiel.
We live kind of near high school, and I love hearing that.
It still sounds so great to me.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
I have, you know, my good friend Ariella was the glockenspiel player in the marching band, I'm pretty sure.
Brady's Bits.
My mother played glockenspiel.
What?
Like a jam.
Oh, Thunder Road again.
I was thinking about reverb the other day, as you do.
And I was thinking about how contemporary pop music
Almost all has this massive stadium reverb on everything.
Have you noticed this?
Yeah, I think I know what you mean, especially the kind of like – and again, I will at this point just see myself out.
I don't know the names of lots of bands.
But there's a certain kind of smooth, middle-of-the-road, emo-ish kind of thing that is very bombastic, very big.
I don't know.
I mean like I think I know what you're talking about though.
There's a – I mean –
I don't know.
I think I know.
It just sounds big, big, big.
And of course, pushed all the way up, all the levels all the way up.
Yeah.
I was thinking about it in terms of the fact that songwriting now, for the most part, we've talked about this before, where ELO has great songwriting, but also you can't divorce the songwriting from the production, right?
I mean, this is the thing.
Somebody asked me the other day, like, what do you think of Donovan?
Donovan.
And I was like, well, you know, those great Donovan singles, like the production of them is as important as the song itself, right?
Like Hurdy Gurdy Man is a sound as much as it is a song.
Yeah, they got a kind of spooky kind of feeling to them.
Spooky and groovy and like, you know, stony drone-y.
But in a way that if you take any of those great Cat Stevens singles, which are great sounding, but then you could also just, as we've seen innumerable times, you could play them with your baseball hat on the ground in front of a sports stadium on a four-string acoustic guitar and the song still translates.
Whereas Hurdy Gurdy Man, something would be lost to cover it.
because the tone anyway so as i think about contemporary pop music and i listen to the songwriting and i just am like i don't even hear the song really i'm not sure how you would even cover this song because the song is so much less important now than the sound
And all these big, big, big radio hits now are just full of this epic sounding, swelling, chanting, big drums, lots of like, hey, and stuff, you know, like really.
And if I were a young person and this was my contemporary music, I would really be under the impression that my emotions were amazing.
on a, you know, my emotions were very important.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, there's no sense of, like, the way the Motown... There's not a lot of ambiguity to a lot of it.
Right, and it's not personal, right?
It doesn't feel like, oh, this song is about me and my, you know, and my brokenheartedness and, like, it's just me and the singer...
I'm listening to this radio that's – I'm coming in on pirate radio from Mexico.
And now it just feels like every song is so epic.
And so as a kid, you'd be listening to this music and you're like, that's my tune.
And so it's a very important song and I must be a very important person.
Yeah.
And I attribute it to the use of this huge reverbs on everything.
This like, hey.
And you just feel like, whoa, it's just echoing off the back of the stadium.
I think I know what you mean.
But the nearest analogy from when I was younger would probably be disco.
Take a song like Casey and the Sunshine Band.
They had some really good disco party songs, but they were kind of just a groove a lot of the time.
And it really was all about the production and getting the drums and all the percussion and all of the bass way high and thumping.
Maybe so it would sound good in a club.
But I think it's similar in that way where the way it sounds is a huge part of what the song is.
Right.
The way it sounds is the song.
But the disco stuff, the biggest...
like the the biggest that that in the biggest space that that intended to convey was a club right like you're listening to that stuff and you're like yeah i'm feeling the bass and i'm on the dance floor and i'm in a club and it's saturday night like that was the biggest uh that was as big as the space would be and so even still it could contain like the person i like is here they're dancing with someone else you know there was it was still in the realm of the personal right
but like these tunes now like the space that they are trying to convey is like we are marching through the desert waving giant red banners we are a lot of urgency yeah we are an army on the move we are we are crossing the steps and we are coming into hungary
With Geico ads.
It's so much huger sounding.
And at least to my ears, it doesn't feel like there's any space in there to be like, I'm a person and the person I like is across the room.
It's much more like, I'm in this army and we're moving together forward to like...
to do something ambiguous, you know, like, I mean, I think the, the Taylor Swift lyrics are still to the effect of like haters are going to hate, but, but it feels like, it feels like haters are going to hate in a giant, giant, um, right.
Crystal, uh, cathedral type of setting.
Um,
Yeah, I'm trying to think about this, though, because you know more about how this stuff gets made than I do.
But I have a, you know, I'm not even going to say grudging admiration.
I've developed a kind of admiration for pop culture products, even if it's not something that I really enjoy.
Sometimes I'll hear something like, I think her name is P!nk.
I'll hear a pink tune.
Mm-hmm.
And that Raise Your Glass song, it's such a great tune.
Yeah.
But I think it has that feeling you're talking about where it's such a rallying cry.
And I think it's a rallying cry about a party.
Uh-huh.
All right.
Rally and cry about a party.
But, you know, there's a lot of those songs where, like, you know, it really it's this sounds so derogatory.
And I don't I don't mean it because, you know, to each his own and people have a lot of success with it.
But, yeah, it does really feel like it really more and more is is made to.
This is the same thing people have been saying since the 30s, probably.
He's not even using a megaphone.
Well, what is that?
A microphone?
Well, in my day, we used to sing into a cup.
Nuts to that, Charlie.
But I think there is something to it in the sense that a lot of covers that you see of modern pop tunes, the cover really seeks to reinvent the tune.
If you see somebody do a cover of a modern pop tune, it's almost always like they take a really hyped up big stadium tune and they play a sad acoustic guitar, slow, weepy cover of it.
Okay.
Yeah, they kind of arcade fire it.
Yeah, they have because they have to because there isn't a way to do a straight cover of it.
Right.
In order to do a straight cover, you would need 18 people in your band.
That seems a little antiquated to do like even back to what 1520 years ago to the unplugged era.
where Nirvana doing Meat Puppets covers in the way that they were doing them, unironically, but also really reinterpreting them significantly in a lot of ways.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the tunes had a chord structure, right?
They weren't just like a drum loop and a...
And just tons and tons of reverb.
Yeah.
It's an interesting evolution and I find myself driving along listening to pop music and feeling this kind of epic swell that I might have once felt
listening to the scorpions worldwide live.
Right.
Yeah.
Uh, but, but the scorpions, you know, uh, even them at their biggest emotional swell, it was, it was still contained somewhat.
Right.
It was like,
There's no one like you.
And, and you're, and you're imagining yourself in within the, within that song and thinking like, I think a lot of metal, the way you were meant to imagine yourself in it was as a member of the band, uh,
Oh, that's really interesting.
You know what I mean?
With Motown music, you weren't meant to imagine yourself in the band.
The music was capturing who you were.
You could use the song personally.
Yeah.
In metal, you were meant to imagine, here is how I'm overcoming my circumstances.
I am the guitarist in this band, and I'm singing this song, and maybe the person the song is about is in the back of the auditorium, and I'm singing it to them, but that's the level of triumph.
And I feel like now that evolution has continued and it's like the only way you can put yourself into a song now is as the star, as the pop star who has triumphed over all.
And in the case of somebody like Taylor Swift, her songs, which I think are often just extremely catchy and well done, I'm not the mega fan that some of my friends are, but I really enjoy it.
Every time I hear that Shake It Off song, I think that's a really, really great... It's killer jam.
It's a great jam, yeah.
But in her case, I think you are supposed... Boy, this is going to get so first-year philosophy class.
I think you really are supposed to put yourself...
In her position.
In Taylor's shoes.
She's in Taylor's shoes.
She's singing a song about her life and this breakup, I think more often than not.
And that's supposed to have resonance with you both on the level of empathizing with Taylor Swift, but also feeling that same feeling yourself.
Yeah, that maybe one day if you play your cards right, that you too will be able to stand up on the big, big stage, be the star, and shake it off.
Shake off the haters.
But, you know, having any kind of a message of empowerment in a song is going to resonate with somebody, I think.
You know what I mean?
Whereas in the Scorpions, they got a guy with forks in his eyes.
You know, that's a tough gig.
What a great cover.
Remember Breakout?
That was such a great cover.
i love that solo so much i was uh you know i i saw the scorpions uh several times during the worldwide live you made eye contact with um that's right with uh we get this wrong every every year or so you may well one of the guitar players go ahead dubus rockin his eyes said uh dubus rockin
Is that his name, Dubas Rocken?
Dubas Rockenstein.
That's so stupid.
Yeah, he looked at me right in the eyes.
Yeah, it was probably a Wolfgang or a Klaus or a... It's not a Schenker.
It wasn't a Schenker, was it?
No, it wasn't the Schenker.
I guess it's not important to the story.
It was Matthias Jabs.
Matthias Jabs, yes.
And he and I had a moment, boy...
I'm sure he had 40 of those moments that night, but it really stuck with me.
I always wanted a guitar with some stripes on it.
Oh, yeah.
He played kind of like a modified Explorer.
Yeah.
Or a V. No, it was an Explorer.
It was Schenker.
It was the other Schenker that had the – it was the young Schenker.
The lesser Schenker.
Schenker feel.
Or Schenker pair.
Schenker pair.
Yeah, I know.
You got the original Schenker from Michael Schenker.
Michael Schenker.
And then Rudolph Schenker.
You got Kleiner Schenker.
Have you ever seen Michael Schenker?
The Michael Schenker group?
MSG?
Mm-hmm.
I don't think I can name one of their songs, to be honest.
Well, he is a phenomenal guitar player.
And the songs maybe – that's a good example of the metal –
corollary to this conversation which is that the songs are less important than the fluidity the fluidity of his he's recording like late 70s early to mid 80s he's still touring i saw him last year wow i saw him at a barbecue restaurant
in Tacoma, Washington, where every 15 minutes, all of the waitresses suddenly jumped up on the tables and danced to a song in short shorts and then got down and started waiting tables again.
That doesn't seem hygienic, John.
It was really...
Uh, instructive.
Um, it, I, I was reminded of, I remind, I was reminded that the rest of the world continues puttering along, even, even as, as we here in our, uh, in our internet tower, uh, like to think that we are somewhere else.
You know, sometimes it's useful to know that.
Okay.
Can let me get an update from you.
We haven't done an update with you from you in a while.
Uh, so you, you're still mostly driving the big new truck, right?
Uh,
No, I have a – so I have a Jetta.
But the Jetta – first of all, the Jetta is ridiculous because it is a black Jetta and it looks like it's ridiculous.
1999 called.
They want their web developer car back.
Exactly right.
I feel like – Everybody had one.
We had one.
Everybody had one.
I feel like every time I step out of it that the theme from Friends should play.
We have a jetta wagon, so don't feel too bad.
Yeah, no, a jetta sedan.
But the tabs expired recently.
And in order to get the tabs renewed, I have to get an emissions test.
So then for a while I was driving sort of a borrowed Passat wagon, a little bit bigger wheelbase.
That was our aspirational mom and dad car.
That's a sweet ride.
Passat was a nice car, but now that's gone again.
That's been taken away.
So today I am driving the truck, yes.
Okay, so I ask because when you're riding around, I know historically it has not been your habit to just listen to music as background stuff.
But when you're in your repose and you're putting on the – do you turn on the radio?
And when you turn on the radio, what do you listen to?
Is that an interesting question?
Because I think that's an interesting question.
Yeah, you know, I always used to listen to –
Sort of oldies and watching what met the criteria of oldies change.
That was really interesting to me.
You know, it used to be like, rock and robin, bop, bop, bop, rock and robin.
And then pretty soon it was like, wait a minute, did I just hear...
Black hole, son.
I mean, not quite that, but the first change was like when you started to hear Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and you're like, is that an oldie?
Is that what we're calling that now?
I thought that was a classic rock.
And now, for sure, it's like Tom Petty.
It seems like there's a shift in the last 10 years where it used to be like when we were coming up, you had like the AOR stations.
That we're playing, you know, whatever current and classic rock, you know, classic rock.
But then at some point, you know, of course you always have the pop stations, what I would then call a top 40 station.
And then at some point, we've talked about KOIT here in town.
There are a lot of stations that are like the best of the 70s, 80s, 90s and the 2000s.
And it's just this mishmash of unobjectionable music a lot of times.
Well, yeah, and that's what's so crazy to me is that all that music used to mean so much within the context of its genre.
Well, the thing is, it's like I'd like to say lobsters don't think of themselves primarily as food.
And in this case, fans of Big Chill and post-Big Chill music have a very strong association with like, there's so much specificity to like which Jackson Brown record you like.
That sounds like really old timey, but you know, which Cat Stevens, which Van Morrison records, like they aren't, those are not oldies.
Those are like works of art, you know, and you wouldn't think of it as just getting tossed into the same pile based on age.
That still seems very strange.
And I have to say somewhat artificial.
I get why they do it demographically, but it is still strange to somebody who loved that music and,
And sees the distinction between all these different things.
I don't know.
I'm not mad about it.
But I do think it's interesting that we mainly do it based on age with a slight axis for demographics.
Well, we always did.
But like recently I have noticed within the dance music radio slot.
that there is now I mean and I think that this is happening in rock music too and in folk music right there it's divorced from context
increasingly and i think for a while i was just as all of us old people are uh i was freaked out by divorcing it from context you could not put an acdc song next to a talking head song on the radio it didn't make any sense they were from different universes uh
I don't understand it.
Right, right, right.
And then I realized like to the ear of a person who didn't come up knowing that those were different universes, they sound great together.
At the time, we've talked about this so much, but ACDC and Def Leppard and the Lang stuff or any of that stuff, even like looking at Husker Du, it all sounds so much rougher at the time.
And now with time, you go, these are pop songs.
Yeah, they're pretty bellow.
But I was in a shop the other day and they were playing what could only be called like dance music mix.
Dance music mix jam.
And every tune had like... But they were completely agnostic about...
era.
So they were playing Le Freak and then right into some kind of 90s British house music and right into some very contemporary DJ-based jams and then back to Nile Rodgers and it...
It just was a seamless mix.
The only unifying characteristic was that it had this like disco dance beat.
Right.
And I realized, oh, sure.
If I were 20...
That's what I would be listening for and not – and I wouldn't necessarily care that one of these things was the pioneer of that and one of them was a later iteration and one of them is a modern iteration.
It's all just a genre or a sound.
How many people could identify whether a given Bing Crosby song was from the 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s?
To a lot of people's ears, I bet it sounds virtually identical.
Yeah.
Maybe 50s may be a little bit different.
But hearing like an old timey song that sounds low fidelity in that case.
But here, I bet you that's partly a consequence of what I'm just going to guess is satellite radio and the demographics.
I don't know how this works, but I'm guessing that there's like, give me the kind of music people fold clothes to at The Gap or Hot Topic or whatever.
Give me, you know, I want some chill jams.
And it's like, all right, well, let's put on some chill jams.
all right well what's a chill jam uh you know tubular bells sure that's a chill that's pretty chill jam that's some chill bells you know music for airports um the the you know talk talks the color of spring
That's some chill jams on that.
And pretty soon you're into like, well, what about this latest track from Ibiza?
I'm sorry.
Ibiza.
And pretty soon you got a chill jam mix.
Maybe it's also like a Pandora thing.
I think a lot of places do like a Pandora thing where you can make a station.
I've discovered it's a pretty dark art.
I don't use Pandora as much as I used to, but I discovered it's a real dark art to pick the right band to base your station on.
I've got a long winter station.
What plays on the long winter station?
oh you know a lot of don't yell at me music right like uh what's the what's the one thing that came up on a long winter station we were like what i don't know i have to go look it up but i think it was a lot of like men gentlemen with beards kind of music you know you know the kind yeah the hog butcher music but um but you know for example like i really like old old country music and uh and
But the thing is if you go in – this is really boring.
If you go in and make a station based on Hank Williams, you end up with all kinds of nonsense.
I don't know why.
But if you go in and base it on Hank Williams, oh, you get lots of songs about regret and wife beating.
But no, you get a lot of contemporary stuff.
But if you go in and make one based on Hank Snow –
the I've been everywhere man guy, like you get all of this amazing stuff.
That's much more contemporary to his time.
Like you might get some old like Conway Twitty and stuff like that, but it's mostly pre cosmic.
What do they call it?
Countrypolitan or whatever.
It's kind of pre mid sixties, uh, music.
And it's, it seems much more cohesive.
What's funny is, I don't know if you can still do this, but it used to be, I think it was on Pandora.
It was on one of those services.
Uh,
You could go in and you could flip a card in your iOS app and it would show you why it picked that for you.
Oh.
Have you ever seen this?
No, I don't use any of these programs.
Well, I had like, of course, I had a Guide to My Voices station and it goes, you know, we thought you liked this song because it includes a major chorus versus a fast beat, distorted guitars and lyrics about, you know, thus and such beer or whatever.
Really?
But they've got a reason.
They can actually, when they choose to pull back the curtain, they can actually show you how they calculated that this would be something you'd like.
Mm-hmm.
Have you ever really studied the cover of the Scorpion's record, Animal Magnetism?
Is that the chewing gum in the limousine?
No, that's the one that... Oh, it's the one with the dog, right?
The dog, yeah.
It really has to have inspired the spinal tap.
Oh, smell the glove.
Smell the glove.
It really, it's like so...
I haven't thought about it in years.
Oh, my God.
I haven't looked at this in years.
Fast forward 40 years.
This is pretty bad.
It doesn't really stand up.
What's the one with the chewing gum?
Just for my own purposes, what's the one with the chewing gum in the limo?
That's the Scorpions one, right?
It might be the... Blackout is the forks in the eyes.
Love Drive.
Love Drive is a guy – go search for Love Drive.
It's a guy in a three-piece suit and a woman with her dress pulled aside and it's like he's gotten his hand into chewing gum by touching her boob.
Oh, the chewing gum on the boob.
Look at that.
We should spend some time on animal magnetism though.
There's something very special going on here.
A lot of good jams.
You know, the Scorps, like a lot of the best metal bands, right?
They made the live record.
And I have to say to all of our listeners that have not listened to the Scorpions, the worldwide live album is a great introduction.
Just as Judas Priest's Unleashed in the East
Live at Budokan is the great introduction to Judas Priest.
Because these are live records in name only.
I was just going to say, I wasn't going to say it.
Like Kiss Alive, those are three tentpole.
I know how you love Kiss.
But three tentpole albums that weren't really live albums.
No, not live at all.
But there's crowd noise and it makes you feel really epic.
It makes you feel like you're on stage with the band and the person that you love the most is there in the room and you're playing your metal solo and they're looking at you and saying, I never should have let them go.
I would try to change the things that killed our love.
Your pride has built a wall so strong that I can't get through.
Is this really the end?
Okay, so Scorpion's Animal Magnetism.
I think this is probably a Hypnosis cover.
Oh, okay.
Hypnosis.
It's a German design.
They did the Peter Gabriel record.
It's like...
All the wackadoodle photography-based – I think they did maybe Wish You Were Here maybe.
But anyway, a lot of the wackadoodle photography-based weird album covers of the 70s were done by this couple guys in Germany, I think.
Hypnosis.
I'm going to guess.
But anyway, so we got – what we have here, half of the – I mean, do we describe this?
There's a beach.
We see that the primary thing that we see is the backside of a man in looks like tough skins walking on a beach drinking a beer with his hand in his pocket.
I would call those are those Lee jeans.
I don't recognize the mark.
I would say they were – yeah, I don't think they're tough skins.
Maybe they are – but what's interesting is they're brown colored jeans and that seems very ahead.
That seems a little French to me.
I can see a brown jean.
I can see a brown jean.
Yeah, certainly German or French.
Maybe they're like – there's almost a run Lola run feel to those jeans.
Yeah.
He's drinking a beer.
Yeah.
He's got his left hand in his back pocket.
It appears to be sunset, even though he has the brightness of 1120 a.m.
shining on his ass.
Right.
Yeah, he does.
There is some strange, like, where is that light coming from?
Light.
I will probably feature this as the cover art for this episode.
There's Doberman Pinscher.
And then... Staring at his ass.
The Doberman Pinscher is staring at his ass, like inexplicably.
But then kneeling in a kind of... I wouldn't describe it necessarily as a submissive posture.
It's a submissive posture.
It's a submissive posture, but she has a look that could be described as defiant, right?
Or there's a little bit of...
There's a little defiance interface, but there's a German word for shameful curiosity.
There's a blonde woman in high-waisted jeans with a, with a like a handkerchief blouse tucked in and she is kneeling, looking up at him.
And with it, with the look that I would describe as not admiring, but certainly waiting for the next, waiting for a signal.
Let's, let's call it waiting for a single.
Do you think, would you describe it a different way?
Yeah, I mean, if it was just her, it would be weird.
But the fact that the Doberman... It's her and Adobe staring at this guy.
Well, she's looking up at him, and the Doberman is just looking straight at his pants.
That's animal magnetism.
And so I guess my question is, and this was the question I had when I was 11 or 12, is his fly undone or not?
Oh, right.
She's not looking at his fly area, but maybe the dog is.
Maybe the dog is looking at his...
at his unzipped fly she seems to she's like studiously avoiding it right she's making eye contact up here right right right right right she's looking she's looking at the she's looking at his meat beard yeah and not at his underwear area but the dog definitely is looking at his underwear area
I've reached the point in life where so much – it's kind of like the dad engineering stage of life where you mostly think about how something got made, how much it cost, and how it got made at all.
I look at this and I'm like, this is what?
This was probably Mercury.
It was a major label that they were on.
And there were meetings where somebody set aside three to five other designs and said, this is the one we should go with.
yeah yeah well i'm pretty sure that i'm pretty sure it's a that this is the uh inspiration for smell the glove and also i bet you there was somebody in the room that was like come on no this is terrible but you know it was the 70s there were a lot worse like how do you feel about the album cover for um what was that eric lapton super group that had the
Oh, yeah.
With the girl.
With the girl.
Traffic.
Traffic.
Well, no, it wasn't traffic.
No, it wasn't traffic.
It was Derek and the Dominos?
Was it Layla?
But the one with the prepubescent girl on the cover, right?
Yeah.
Is that the one you mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it was...
Not traffic, huh?
Was it traffic?
I want to say it's traffic.
I'll find out.
It's important.
Who was it the other day that said, I love listening to John and Merlin look at the internet?
One of the great podcasts of all time.
This is what happens.
John and Merlin looking at the internet.
You know what?
I just stopped looking at the internet.
I'm not even going to look at it anymore.
I don't even care.
It's going to be the last thing I look up.
If I can't tell you the name of Eric Clapton's dumb super group that had the girl on the cover, then I don't deserve to talk about stuff.
I'm just going to sit here and talk about how these gummy sold shoes that I'm wearing seem to pick up hands.
hair everywhere i get that with mine too and i wonder where is all this hair like is this hair just on the ground everywhere i go has it always been there why am i only noticing this now is the earth carpeted with hair in a way that i i you have to wear gummy sold shoes to to fully comprehend
i guess it is we have an area we have an area rug in one room that we all like pretty well but it sheds pubes it's uh it the way the fibers work so so like pretty much all the time in our house there's there's stuff floating around that kind of looks like a hair oh yeah right but it's not quite a hair it's more a fiber it's a fiber fibrous hair like thing well so what this is the thing what's going to happen that's going to be the hair that convicts you
Yeah.
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Right?
They're going to pull that out.
They're like, this has a very distinctive signature, and it was found.
With all due deference, Mr. Mann, we had no problem whatsoever gathering what I would just have to describe as a multitude of individual curly black hairs.
I'm just going to bring in a couple pounds and let you peruse that.
Your southern lawyer is so much better...
than uh bob odenkirk southern lawyer oh come on that's who i'm stealing it from but yours is better you steal it and improve it you really do because i'm also i'm bringing in a lot of foghorn leghorn but just i mean just enough like there's there's a there's some matlock in it
You just you take it to the place where where Bob is trying, you know, Bob's Bob's Southern lawyer is is great in part because it's so bad.
It's like Peter Dinklage's British accent.
That's interesting you should say that.
We talked about him a little bit once before, I think, but I agree.
Some of the stuff of his that makes me laugh the most is when he dances poorly, sings poorly, does a bad accent, like a horrible German accent, or when he just yells inappropriately in a way that sounds ridiculous.
And it's always funny to me.
You never know fully how much Bob Odenkirk is conscious of the fact that he is not quite achieving what he imagines he's achieving.
That's one reason I love people who come out of improv and sketch comedy.
There's so much of – you got where you are because you threw so much shit at a wall.
You figured out what was funny, sure, but then you also learn to just ride it out if it wasn't funny and find a way to make it funny.
Yeah, right.
And that's exactly what happens on their sketch show.
You know, they're doing a new Bob and David.
I know.
I saw some photos of the very elderly cast.
I hope it'll be good.
You know, he's been so busy.
He did Tim and Eric.
He does the Saul show.
And weren't you watching that?
Were you watching The Better Call Saul?
Yeah, I still am watching it.
You know, the pace is so different.
That's what I hear, yeah.
And it's very – it's enjoyable, but like the challenge for me was always when Bob was on the screen –
My history with him as a fan always took me out of Breaking Bad a little bit.
Like trying to really have Bob Odenkirk be a serious character and not because – Oh, right.
Instead of just going, hey, look, it's Bob Odenkirk.
Yeah.
And like there were times when he played the role of someone who was genuinely scared that I felt –
that i was i was absorbed into into the scene but there were also i mean a lot of the a lot of the campiness of his character was just right in line with the campiness of bob odenkirk enough that i was i was i knew i was watching a guy i already knew yeah he does such a good greasy character well now so now i better call saul like with him as the center of
I can't decide where I am.
I can't decide.
I'm not far enough into it, I guess, to know where I stand.
Which brings us to our next update segment, which is you must be very busy right now.
Or at least let me say, are you occupied?
It seems like you must be very occupied.
I'm going to a lot of task forces.
Because that is – Task forces.
Task force.
I'm going to a lot of tasks force.
Yeah, I am busy and, you know, but there is still a very – there's still – the major component of what I'm doing is still –
formulating thinking about stuff you know like the the running around and and and attending pie eating contests and stuff like that hasn't that hasn't kicked into high gear yet because I still am trying to tackle the big issues in a way and and and and like put forward a a real program and
And that is really satisfying, challenging work, but it's not – but it's also like kind of fraught.
I feel like I'm – I feel like I have a big paper due.
Oh, yeah.
And –
And strangely, there's no clear deadline.
In some ways, it was due three weeks ago.
And in some ways, it's sort of one of those hand it in when you want, and you're not sure how you're going to be graded.
You've got the world's most passive-aggressive teacher.
Well, you tell me when it's done.
That's right.
You tell me what grade do you think you deserve.
I know it's going to be good.
It better be good.
So I'm busy...
but i'm also you know i'm also like crunching a lot of data um because i really do believe that i don't want to that i'm not somebody that's just running for office as a as a piece of theater and the more i see other people running for office i realize like
A lot of it is – a lot of them are, even the ones that are professionals.
It's all theater.
It's cynical to point this out, but it seems like there could potentially be an advantage to doing maybe not the opposite of what you're doing, but something very different, which is going in with your placard already –
filled out in permanent marker and on the wooden stick and you're carrying it around you know what i mean it seems like there could be a benefit to you of having a position however well or not reasoned from the very beginning you come out of the shoot with this like specifics that may have no relationship to anything that's actually going on so i would applaud you for for staying open to figure out what it is you're going to say i think that's a good thing
Yeah, it is.
It's a good thing, but it goes against expectations.
Everybody that has been doing this for a long time, everyone that's kind of – because the only people that know that there's even a Seattle City Council election coming, there's only 500 people in all of Seattle that even know it's happening, right?
Because who follows local elections six to nine months out?
Cranks.
Cranks.
You didn't say that.
I did.
And so –
So once the initial announcement kind of went around and everybody was like, wow, that's cool, people immediately want desperately to forget about it for several months.
And their feeling about it is like, well, I'll look at that again when it's closer to the election.
So the only people that are really invested in it at this stage are people that consider it either their profession or their avocation.
And
So I'm in a lot of conversations with people who talk to a lot of candidates.
And they all have this expectation of like, well, what's your one issue?
What's the thing that got you mad that made you want to run for office?
And I keep saying, I think that the basic premise that the only people that run for office are people that got mad about one issue.
What a horrible framing device.
Well, but that's the thing.
I feel like that's a flawed premise.
And then they look at me.
with a kind of look that is like either you can hear the gears turning and they're like okay so you're the you're the intellectual and i'm like well um i'm just somebody who believes in democracy and
And I feel like if your city council is always populated by people that got mad at the dog catcher and so then they ran for dog catcher and then they were the angry dog catcher who was mad at city hall about the dog catching and then they get elected to city hall, then you have a city council that's populated by people that are mad and they don't have a very broad sense of how things work.
But they were able to yell about the one thing that they're mad about and get several thousand people to say like, yeah, that is a problem.
People who agreed that that was a thing to be mad about.
And then all of a sudden, you know, that's who we send to public office, right?
The people that are like, I don't believe that the schools should be teaching sex education and that's why I'm running for local representative.
Yeah.
Well, and it makes me think, not to make this about comic books, but it makes me think a little bit like, you know, we've already got a Batman.
There's already one guy that had a bad experience with crime and decided to become a crime fighter.
I would not want every person serving in the police department to think that they're Batman.
Do you know what I mean?
There should be something beyond revenge, which is what you're describing.
What you're describing in some ways is having a chip on your shoulder.
It isn't just that, oh, my kid didn't get healthcare coverage or something.
You're talking about something where basically I think what you're describing is someone who has decided to turn a personal grudge into a career.
Well, and then at some point along the way, a person sidles up to them and they say, hey, you know this thing about dog catchers that you're so mad about?
Here's how dog catchers actually get elected and it's not anything like you're saying.
Right.
And then that person has a choice.
Either...
recant and learn about things or cynically smile and say, that's cool.
Yelling about dog catchers is what got me elected.
And so now that I know better, I'm still going to yell about dog catchers because that still resonates with people.
And I think that's what happens more often than not.
It's why you get these, it's why you get politicians who are like, all right, well just between us, we know how things work.
But I'm going to walk out there on the big stage and start talking in these terms that I know animates an audience.
And that's infuriating.
There has to be a certain amount of misdirection, maybe not lying, but misdirection to bring it around to that point that you know it tests well, for example.
Well, and at a certain point, everybody wants a solution.
Everybody wants to hear solutions and nobody wants to hear, well, solutions are complicated.
And every time you apply, every time you pass a new law that you hope solves this problem, it creates four new potential problems, right?
It's just like you can't, if you look at the history, if you look at our history and you think like,
Well, let's talk about some laws that solve some problems.
I mean, you can see quite a few that have, but you can also see tons and tons of laws that like prohibition solved a problem, created 50 new problems.
Right.
And there are lesser examples, but lesser only because they are less ridiculous, but they created problem upon problem.
Right.
So I'm learning that too.
I'm going to meetings where people are pounding on desks and saying, we have a housing crisis and we do have a housing crisis.
And then they say, and here's the solution.
And I go, wow.
Well, that was easy.
We closed the file on that one.
That's really interesting because the housing crisis is a multi-tendrilled animal and that doesn't make it.
Oh, here's the other thing.
Then there's a separate part of the political class that understands that those problems are multi-tendrilled animals.
And they are the wry incrementalists who say, well, there are no easy solutions.
And so we just have to double down on unimaginative solutions.
small-scale, incremental, little process-based revisions to current policy.
So kind of like a professional politician's approach.
Exactly.
And so you get either demagogues or you get people that are fully invested in the process and they don't believe that imagination can work.
Yeah.
Somewhere between those two places, we're in this strange world where no progress really happens, but we have a lot of people in public office that are talking about we need to support Israel because that's what Jesus wants.
There are a thousand examples even on the liberal side.
And so I feel like stepping into that arena and being unwilling to speak exclusively in bullet points but also being unwilling to get chastised over and over for having too adventurous an idea kit –
You know, like I have started to seriously talk about gondolas here to people who know about them.
That's awesome.
And there are a lot of transit people who are really, really smart.
And a lot of them are like, huh, gondolas.
It's a really great idea.
We have done some studies on them.
But the problem is that you could never get it.
the voters to go along with, with a big dream project like that.
And my reply to that is like, imagine the people sitting in the room.
The first time someone unveiled a drawing of the space needle that they intended to build and said, here's the, here's a tower we want to build.
And people look at it and go, what?
What is it?
It's a tower.
Well, what good is it?
It's good for going up in.
It looks really expensive.
Oh, it will be.
Why would we build this?
Because it's cool.
I mean, can you picture the scene?
I'm thinking about exactly what you're describing, which is that it's like we can't even have this conversation because that's not a building.
Yeah, right.
Sort of.
We were saying like what you're proposing.
I mean, it's like giving me a plate of mashed potatoes and calling it a college.
And yet they built the Space Needle, right?
And when I think about – you think about the interstate highway system in the United States.
The original name of the interstate highway system was something like the Interstate Roads and Defense Escape Route Highway System.
You know, like a big part of the justification for building the interstates was that it would enable us to move troops around faster in case America was invaded faster.
By the Russians.
It's the same reason they made the internet, really.
And also, if there was a little bit of a warning from the civil defense horns, we could get in our 57 Chevys and drive out of the city and escape the nuclear attack that was coming.
That was part of how we sold what ended up being a $400 billion nationwide project.
Like, oh, you'll be able to get out of the town to escape the bombs and also we can move troops around and also it'll be great on Saturday afternoons you can get out to the country.
Nothing that – like this would become the backbone of how we built the economy with trucking or how it opened up like first like practical travel around the United States by middle class people.
I mean think about –
Is there anyone in America today listening to this program that won't spend some part of today on an interstate highway?
And that's not what it's for.
And to build those things, we tore down tens of thousands of houses, like destroyed entire neighborhoods.
And so when people are like, well, you know, there's no way we can muster the collective will to to start moving away from a fossil fuel based economy, for instance.
It's like, are you kidding me?
It's happening.
It's happening anyway.
And so the question is, well, how do you get ahead of it?
You know, how do you do it correctly instead of doing it accidentally or by happenstance?
And in Seattle, it's the same thing.
I mean, yeah, gondolas sound like a ridiculous thing.
They sound like a joke idea that the weird rock candidate came up with.
Except that Seattle is a city built on seven hills.
We're basically an alpine resort in summer.
and we keep talking about bike lanes we keep talking about all these methods of moving people around and in that conversation there's never any acknowledgement that everywhere you would want to go involves going up a huge fucking hill and so it's like we need to get more bikes well okay but the only people that can ride bikes in Seattle are like super athletes
And if you go down to Portland, Oregon, which is largely a flat city, you see people riding their bikes and they're dressed nicely.
They are pedaling slowly.
They have a little basket with some bread and maybe a dog in it.
And they're pedaling on their nice flat wide streets to go from one flat place to the next.
And in Seattle...
If you are downtown and want to go to Capitol Hill, which as the crow flies is a quarter of a mile or whatever, you basically have to be dressed like you're riding the Tour de France.
And
You're not going to get on your bike with your suit on right up to Capitol Hill for lunch and ride back down.
You would be drenched in sweat.
And you haven't even mentioned the weather.
Let alone the rain.
So I do believe that we should have bikes everywhere.
But if there were a network of gondolas, you could put your bike in the gondola, take the gondola up to the top of the hill, ride your bike around up there, ride your bike downhill, which is fun.
Everybody likes that.
And then at night when it's time to go home, put your bike on the gondola, back up to the top of the hill.
It's not crazy.
In a way, it sounds too fun to be real.
It sounds too fun.
It sounds whimsical.
It sounds whimsical until you picture like, oh, let's imagine this city in 50 years and we've got like trams running up and a funicular up this street.
And it doesn't have to be a fancy funicular.
It's a funicular that you hop on, you throw your bike on it, it takes you up the steep hill.
it's just infrastructure.
It's infrastructure that actually is aware, that reflects the fact that this is a really hilly town.
But so I'm talking to professional people and I'm saying, listen, this sounds like a joke idea from the Weird Rock candidate, but listen, I'm serious about this.
I think it's a good idea.
And you can just, you watch them
try i mean you know and it's their job in a way but on the other hand like they struggle to find reasons why it's a why they never are trying to find reasons why it's a bad idea they're always trying to find reasons why it can never happen well you must you must to some people let's be honest you the weird rock candidate you must sound like a flat earth person or like a historical revisionist or something in the sense that to some people you know you're gonna have like the i can't even conversations
where they're just going to be like, how do I, I mean, are you, are you actually saying this seriously?
I mean, should we all wear Dracula fans, uh, fangs?
Should we, should we all like, you know, get face tattoos, anything else?
Like that's, it's so outside the pale of what people think of as a conventional approach to such a, a boring and giant problem.
Right, right.
Well, and, and, and, and what I say to them is 100 years ago in 1915, uh,
There were still horse carts, horse-drawn carts all over the streets of New York City and Seattle and San Francisco.
And I'm sure at that time there were all kinds of people in power and just the conventional wisdom was, well, there will always be horses in the city.
There have always been horses in the city.
We need to scale up around horses.
Yeah, sure.
The motor car is coming.
But how – I mean how do you take the horse away from the small independent farmer?
Well, that's going to be unnecessarily disruptive to our existing infrastructure because what we have now works.
The horses are fine.
We replace them, right?
Isn't that part of it?
It's like you get so stuck in this idea of what kind of problem we're trying to solve that you don't even open up the door to going –
Look at Chicago and how Chicago revolutionized around the idea of not having literal tons of horse shit they had to throw in a river every day.
It changed the entire sanitation system.
Yeah.
Well, and imagine the last person in Seattle to build a barn downtown to feed and care for horses during the day, right?
There was a last person who was like, I'm investing in horse care now.
That's back when candidates had to listen to Big Barn.
Right?
Big stables.
Like, listen, stables are a part of our economy.
A horse is how a... You know, how is a poor man going to make it into town?
He's going to ride a horse, and that's always going to be true.
My family's made money from owning this particular wooden structure for 65 years.
Right.
Well, and so 10 years later, 1925, I mean...
Not a lot of horses on the streets anymore.
It has completely switched, right, to... It changed.
It utterly changed.
I mean, yeah, it's a different kind of problem, but, like, I don't know.
I'm so interested.
Not to be all fucking Malcolm Gladwell, but, like, talk about improving quality of life and conditions.
I mean, just the stories you hear about what it was like to live in Chicago, New York, London.
I mean, there was literally horseshit everywhere.
Well, and so our contemporary equivalent to that is people...
Driving their own cars.
Right.
People are bad at driving.
Here's a plank in your platform.
You and I have been talking about this since we began this podcast.
driving is one of these strange things that seems simple enough that everybody believes that they are really good at it.
If they haven't died yet, they must be great at it.
And yet it is very difficult to do well.
And almost no one does it well.
So we've been living in an era for a long time where everybody drives their own vehicle and it results in tens of thousands of deaths,
incredible waste and inefficiency, total gridlock, and it is going away.
It's going away in our lifetimes.
And when driving your own car around goes away, it's going to change everything.
It's going to change the conversation about every aspect of the city.
And what's cool about it is that
it doesn't mean that cars are going away.
Just human piloted cars are going away.
And without human pilots, cars, I mean, can be, cars can be constructed without all this weight of safety devices because they're all going to be controlled by GPS.
They'll never ever touch one another again.
Right.
They can be small and light and quick and battery-powered and quiet.
And they can move smoothly around the city.
And all of a sudden you realize, oh, gridlock isn't because there are too many people.
You ever seen the graphics for what it would look like if it was all self-driving cars at an intersection?
You ever seen how insane, in a good way, it could be?
Where they just go zooming past each other.
You don't need signs.
Right.
You just need a little bit of the kind of basic probably chunking that your phone could do at this point to just direct the cars into the right place.
And so you could quadruple the capacity of the roads and everybody moves like 10 times faster.
Right.
Like the roads aren't the problem.
The problem is the pilots, right?
And that's coming really soon.
And if we're not – nobody else running for the Seattle City Council has even heard of the internet, right?
Let alone self-driving cars, right?
How many orders of magnitude exaggerated is that?
You're saying it's not a focus.
It's not a focus.
At the local level of government, there's still a lot of suspicion about technology.
Technology is still regarded as primarily a surveillance tool.
Cities are using it to collect data.
And nobody wants – privacy is an issue at the city level in a big way.
And this whole question of like should the cops wear body cams?
Well, wait a minute.
Does that mean when a cop comes into my house and talks to me in the middle of the night about my crying child that that video is going to get uploaded to the internet tomorrow?
There's a lot of confusion about –
That angle.
Yeah.
But there's not a lot of understanding that the internet right now, like we've been looking at the internet since its inception as a kind of like, whoa, won't it be great one day when this is like better than cable TV?
And very few people, even still, are looking at the internet in terms of, no, no, no, the internet is going to be, it's about to explode in terms of usefulness as we use it to connect everything to everything.
And when that happens,
the usefulness of everything will go up because we'll be, because we'll be talking about integrated systems rather than these siloed, inefficient, uh, like work duplicating, um, garbage piles.
And, you know, at, when I, when I picture Matt Howie on his bike, looking at his Apple watch, trying to get his coffee maker to work, uh,
And he's like, I downloaded four coffee maker apps to my new iPhone and it's not syncing up with my electric razor.
But he's at the bleeding edge of a thing that is going to happen at a municipal scale, right?
Right.
Because...
We're also right on the cusp of – I mean it's happening, right?
Solar energy finally is penciling out.
Oh, man.
The graphs on this stuff are nuts.
Isn't it insane?
You probably saw the same graph I did about amount that can be generated versus cost per unit generated.
Yeah.
And in the last, I guess, 10 or 15 years, it's completely – everything I thought – I mean to me, solar energy, number one, growing up, right?
Jimmy Carter.
Yeah.
Well, number one, solar energy is probably one of the greatest no brainers we could ever have.
But very important.
Number two, it is prohibitively expensive to do even just to like heat your water.
When I was in college, you could you could get a water heater, but it was very costly.
And now today, I'll try and find that graph.
You've probably seen it, though.
I mean, it's completely bananas, which you can do now for for less than twenty thousand dollars.
Well, and, you know, so we're across the threshold where solar energy is as cheap as other forms.
Or we're right there.
I mean, comparable.
I mean, given – it's no longer – it's no longer –
Gosh, I have a million things to say.
I don't want to interrupt you.
But there's so much about what you trade off to get there and how much you're willing to get away from your dumb idea of in order to do the thing I need to do, we replace a horse with a car and replace a car with a rocket.
Stop thinking about it that way.
Start thinking about it in terms of what we're actually trying to accomplish.
Stop thinking of the internet as Facebook and start thinking about it as electricity.
And suddenly everything starts to change.
And I mean, I'll shut up after this, but I really think there's one of our biggest problems and something I imagine you're facing is...
Everybody likes to either think that somebody's being practical or ideological, that they either have an ax to grind or they're just honestly trying to do the right thing.
And you tell so much by, in that case, somebody going like, well, that's great ideologically.
We'll just replace everything with solar and then we'll just charge 10 times as much.
That'll be great.
And it's like, no, stop thinking at these extreme ends of the spectrum and look at how the future, quote unquote, actually works, which is it never turns out the way anybody expected because we can only see it through the lens looking backwards.
Open your mind up to what could happen in two to five years rather than obsessing what didn't happen in the last 60 years.
Well, and I keep saying that to people.
What we never do, what we always do is evolve our cities in this game of whack-a-mole, right?
A guy builds a thing, and we're like, well, that's a shitty thing.
We've got to stop the next guy from doing that.
And so we pass a law about this guy who built a thing, and by the time the law gets passed, that was eight years ago, and
No one is ever going to build that thing again.
They're building something new that's shitty in a different way.
And what I keep saying to people is it's not that hard to go 20 years in the future.
Imagine what we want the city to look like and then reverse engineer it.
Right.
We do have this ability.
And.
We don't have to build everything out of Legos just rummaging in the box looking for one more green tile.
We can look ahead and say we are redesigning the grid.
What is the grid?
Seattle has really cheap electricity because we ship in this electricity from our dams up in the mountains.
What 20 years ago we thought of as the salmon-killing dams up there.
They've given us cheap power for years.
But another technology that's coming online is the molten salt battery technology, which would enable us at a municipal scale to put giant...
batteries that can soak up all that power soak up all the solar power that we're generating on the roofs of every home in the city store it efficiently and then redistribute that power at night when the sun has gone down and everybody wants to turn their jacuzzi tubs on
Wasn't the storage what used to be a very important part of the high cost?
Storage is the problem, right?
I mean, because if you're generating power in the middle of the day when the sun is up, that's not necessarily when you want the power.
Maybe when it's really hot, you want air conditioning on.
But that's the middle of the day when you're probably not even at home.
and your solar sensors are generating all this power, but if you can't store it, you have to burn it off, right?
It's just garbage.
Wasted sunshine.
But with these giant batteries of this superheated sodium,
that cities can build.
They can build them at a giant scale and create a kind of small grid where all day long we're soaking up the sun, we're sending that power to our local sink, and then at night it redistributes
And the internet and those interconnected technologies are what are going to enable us to understand how much we contributed to the pile, how much we're taking back.
It's an incredibly exciting time.
But when you talk – for instance, if you were running for city council of your city –
and you talk to people about it, you're not allowed to be excited about that stuff because it still sounds so pie in the sky.
You're the crazy rock candidate who's talking about molten salt batteries?
Well, what about a space station that has waterfalls?
And it's like, molten salt batteries are... Like, there will be... So the Faroe Islands have already started developing like...
like municipal scale battery complexes.
But there will be an American city that decides, yes, we are the pilot program for this.
This is where we're going.
Let's start building these things.
Talk about new jobs.
Right?
And that should be Seattle.
But we can't talk about it unless...
enough people believe that the future is a real thing that is happening you know that that these technologies are that we are really on the cusp of a huge across the board step forward
and all these things are going to be integrated, right?
So we don't have to just, we don't have to build more stables downtown.
We need to start thinking about the interconnectivity of everything.
And, you know, I swear to you, like a lot of the people on the Seattle City Council are like, oh, the internet, my daughter sends me pictures sometimes of my granddaughter, but I can't open them.
Are they a PDF or something?
I'm not, anyway,
That's very surprising.
It shouldn't be because, again, the people that typically run for local office are coming out of traditions that we have.
What are the criteria for being president of the United States?
You have to be a citizen.
That's right.
You got to be 35.
Correct.
No felonies.
No, you can have felonies.
You cannot have ever been in open rebellion against the United States.
Oh, so no treason.
Treason busters.
No treason.
No, you cannot have declared allegiance to.
No perfidy.
No perfidy.
But other than that, that is about, oh, you have to have lived in the United States.
You have to be born in America, but you also have to have lived in America for 15 years.
Okay.
So you can't be born in America and then go live in France your whole life and then run for U.S.
president.
There is somewhat of a residency requirement.
But other than that, there's no education requirement.
There's no experience requirement.
And that's true for a reason because I think personally that the founders understood that the more that you make politics a profession –
the more you risk... Well, that invariably leads to an oligarchy where the only people that can practice politics are the practiced politicians.
And yet, that is our instinct every time, right?
Like a lot of people have come to me and said, well, why are you running for city council?
Why don't you run for neighborhood council?
What's your real game?
And I'm like...
Well, I'm running for city council because that is the job that I want.
But the conventional wisdom within this group of 500 people that know that there is even a city council is that the way you get this job is that you start –
on your college Democrats and you work some campaigns and you, um, you know, you spend some time as an activist and, and, and they, and there really is this kind of farm team mentality because those are the people who, you know, those are the people who pursue elective office so often.
And typically they are not reading wired, let's say.
They don't have a podcast.
I don't know of any other candidates that have a podcast.
And I believe that we should be ruled by podcasters as a nation.
Oh, dear, dear, dear.
Right?
Imagine the McElroy brothers in the U.S.
Senate.
I don't think I know who that is.
Is that the guy with the tall hat in the Martin Scorsese movie?
But Abraham Lincoln, what's his name?
Yeah, it's Abraham Lincoln.
The Gangs of Capitol Hill.
Abraham McElroy Incan.
Incan Lincoln.
No, the McElroys have a podcast.
There are some nice guys.
The McElroys, of course, all the great shows.
Right, the McElroys.
They live up over yonder, across the Dell.
And sometimes one of their daughters comes over here and marries one of the Roderick boys.
We can sleep in my barn, but...
Whatever you do.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Gosh, I do find this interesting.
As much as I find politics personally tedious, I think there's a lot about what you're trying to do that is extremely interesting.
And the way that it has overflow with something else that I barely understand is management.
And the whole idea of the role that managers or leaders, if you like, have inside of a company.
And I don't know.
It always feels to me like people are trying to lavish managers with all these different ways to develop and educate and all these sorts of things.
And then the real problem, though, is all these worker bees over here who just don't get how it goes.
Mm-hmm.
And this is not a perfect one-to-one relationship, but it seems like somebody in your position has to really want that particular job and specifically has to really want to do a certain kind of work that requires a strange balance.
I'm doing something with my two hands here.
So on the one hand, it seems to me that a lot of your job is pretty down in the weeds, like implementation.
Yeah.
You're going to have to be involved in conversations about stuff that's going to happen in the next 3 to 6, 12, 15 months, right?
There's stuff you're doing that it isn't just a philosophy party.
There's stuff you're going to have to do every day that involves the extent to which the city continues to run efficiently.
But on the other hand, you have to make all of those decisions through a certain kind of lens.
It seems to me like on the one hand, B, you're electing somebody who's great at implementing and is a good communicator.
But A, also has the lens that you're looking for.
So even though you're not walking into this situation in a space suit with a ray gun saying, I am John from the future.
Like you have the state of mind to go, I'm not scared of the idea of smart innovation.
In fact, I'm going to welcome it and I'm going to make a part of my creed to like keep an eye out for the stuff we don't need to just be thinking about this week because that will always be there.
We'll always have the urgency of this week.
But, like, to be thinking about, like, how will I know the right pitch when it comes along?
Like, being able to keep up on the kinds of stuff that other people think is real tutti-frutti can help you make great decisions about, like you say, let's be specific, not building more stables in your analogy.
Like, everybody's going to always want more stables because there is a stable industry and people use stables, etc.
But, you know, it's like the Henry Ford, you know, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, right?
Same idea.
Like, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that, but it seems like...
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about your candidacy and saying like, you know, it seems even if you were to be, say, a senator, a senator or a congressperson, but especially like a senator, you have enough of a staff of people that you have to have a staff of people so that you can on some level stay up in the clouds a little bit with what you do.
You don't want to have to make sure that every document got signed and every meeting got made.
But in your case, you're not going to have more than what, two or three people for staff?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, you're going to have to be heavily involved in a lot of those implementation details.
So you can't afford to be all up in the trees.
But it does mean that – I'm not going anywhere with this.
I just think it's really valuable to have somebody there who even – just because you're not walking in carrying a sign doesn't mean you don't have your own idea of a vision.
And part of that vision is not to specifically implement this thing but to say we need to change the way we look at and think about options.
Yeah.
And that means making – to do that, we're going to have to all do something very weird and very courageous, which is to admit that the future is happening whether we like it or not.
And the future is not going to present itself as an app within in-app purchases.
It's going to come along as something that seems extremely strange and really out there at first.
But in order to make the right infrastructure decisions, we have to be thinking beyond the end of our nose and realize what future do we want to have here and how does that affect what we implement.
Yeah, that's right.
And we have lots of role models, right?
We are looking at San Francisco, your own town, and saying, wow, this wave of prosperity crashed on San Francisco.
And San Francisco has a culture, a traditional culture of like, hey, man,
Hey, man, you're blocking my son, man.
And so San Francisco is very laissez-faire about stuff.
Well, culturally.
Culturally.
Yeah.
They're not laissez-faire about a lot of stuff.
They're not, but what has happened is... You need a permit to take a shit in this town.
You can't... Well, boy, a lot of people are getting permits then.
Ha ha ha!
Continue.
Now, my opponent's going to tell you that we don't need to have an operation for somebody coming in wanting to get a license certificate.
Now, I just want to point the candidate to the Tenderloin District, where I have done a personal account of the bolus.
It's got to be like a prescription pad that somebody ripped off of a doctor's desk.
Oh.
Like, hey, you want one of these shit forms?
For the next 30 days, I can shit all that one.
It's not funny on any level because it's not funny because it is real and gross.
And it's also not funny because nobody shitting outside wants to be doing that mostly.
Exactly right.
It's fucking awful.
But it's emblematic and you cannot get away from it.
I just meant more of like good luck trying to get your movie made in San Francisco.
Like there's a reason Vancouver is thriving and nobody makes movies here anymore.
And Seattle has experienced a lot of those same problems.
And the thing is we are just – we are where San Francisco was some number of years ago.
It's hard to know exactly how many years behind we are.
But the money is pouring in.
The social services are not keeping pace.
The rent is going crazy.
The middle class is getting pushed out.
There is no – we're becoming a city where everybody is either making $200,000 or $20,000.
And there is a Seattle alternative.
There is a Seattle way of experiencing this growth that is different from anywhere else.
We have to believe that that's true.
And we are able to impose our...
values on what's happening in our own city but it does require some it requires chutzpah it requires will to say wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait
We all know that the free market is just a thought technology that we've all been duped into believing.
There aren't enough air quotes for the phrase free market.
You know, it works if you believe in it.
It doesn't work if you don't.
It is just another.
It works if it benefits you.
Yeah, it's just another idea.
Yeah.
It's not legally binding.
Yeah.
None of these thought technologies that we have enshrined in law are any more legally binding than the laws that we have written to enshrine them.
And so we are capable of writing new laws.
We are capable of envisioning a new form of city.
And
Yet, it's never as simple as – I mean, there's a kind of movement right now to try a new version of rent control, which is much closer to – I think it's more accurately described as controlling the rent.
Changing the abilities of landlords to rent –
According to what they think the market is and putting restrictions on like, well, rent is a different category of service now.
Oh, it's a really a different approach.
Completely different approach.
I'm sorry.
That sounds really insipid.
But instead of saying like here's a law about how much you can raise rent, it's taking it from a different angle.
Take it from a different angle, like rent is a thing and it's going to be tied to the consumer price index.
So rents cannot rise any faster than the consumer price index.
How's that for a new idea, right?
And then it's like, oh, that's a pretty novel idea.
Yeah.
You said as much in your – I think on your webpage and probably in a speech or something, you said something pretty smart, which is that you were gentle about it.
But it sounded like you were basically saying what rent control does is ensure that anybody lucky enough to have gotten here a few years ago has cheap rent while everybody else just is swimming.
Yeah, old-fashioned rent control just creates a new class of people that have cheap apartments.
And those people are not – they don't have cheap apartments because they are virtuous and they don't even have cheap apartments because they are needy.
They just have them because they were there first.
But this new vision of rent control where it's just like, listen, rent is not a thing like gold and diamonds.
Right.
Where the market determines that gold is suddenly worth $1,700 an ounce when a year and a half ago it was worth $400 an ounce.
And we all go along with that because we believe that the market and these factors, scarcity, et cetera, et cetera, like that these are somehow real forces like the wind.
But we can say, no, as people's wages rise, so too can rents rise, but in a way that is commensurate.
The problem with that is that it's this old game of like, well, does that apply to commercial rents too?
Well, the hard part is going to be the enforcement, right?
I mean, in some ways, like the innumerable loopholes people will find, like the way the Ellis Act has worked in San Francisco has just been a debacle.
Well, the number one way that people will get around it is they'll say, great, I'm turning my apartment building into condominiums.
Right.
Go fuck yourself.
Oh, you're back to whack-a-mole now.
I mean, unfortunately, there's not a better word for that, but it does actually really describe how much life is like The Sims, where there's this one little thing that you think you're fixing here could just be making seven small problems somewhere else you can't even figure out.
It's butterfly farts everywhere you go.
Well, thank you for saving me a few minutes this afternoon.
Yes, yes, John, you were saying butterfly farts.
Right, a butterfly farts in China, and all of a sudden you're paying $4,500 for a studio apartment in Seattle.
You're so much closer to the country lawyer than you realize.
Nobody sits around in their own cocoon and feels bad about the scent of their flouters.
But the butterfly on the run, he's flying through China and he's fighting up a breeze.
Now, that is one of the most growing economies alongside of India that you could possibly have.
You're going to see climate change.
You're going to see a funicular.
It's going to be real super confusing for everybody.
Oh, the butterfly on the run.
He's on the hoof.
Now, see, there's innovation.
That's probably going to go a little faster sometimes.
You know, and the thing is, Seattle, the way the wind blows across the Pacific, it hits Seattle first.
That's going to look good on license plates.
I'm telling you, when I'm on the city council, this is how city council meetings are going to go.
Horse before cart, butterfly fart.
Get on the fucking funicular.
There's a guy in this town building the last butterfly stable, and I want to meet that man.
Uh-huh.
Bart's people.
Here's a man who feeds ducks.
All he has left is his barn.
Oh, my God.
Oh, you sound like you're holding up really well, though.
Well, yeah, but, you know, I mean, the number one thing I'm scared about is that there's ugliness to this process.
I don't believe that ugliness
is necessary.
I don't think it has any place in it.
And yet I know that it is there.
Ugliness is there.
And, um, and I, and I'm, I'm just not looking forward to the ugliness getting activated.
Um,
Amongst the voters, the media could be anywhere.
It could be another candidate.
It could come from anywhere, right?
Yeah.
And the closer you get to – I mean it sounds like you're already being taken maybe surprisingly seriously.
But as you are taken more and more seriously, it may not be there today.
But as you get closer to August and you become – threat is the wrong word.
As you become more of a viable candidate, then you get to be a bigger target.
I sat down at two big tables.
One of them was with the Sierra Club and they interviewed me because they are trying to decide who they're going to endorse in my race.
The Sierra Club and I sat at a table and they're bored or whatever and we talked about things.
Oh man, you could develop some programs for them.
And then I sat at a table with the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
And for the Seattle Chamber of Commerce meeting, I put in the address of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and I put it into Apple Maps.
Oh no, I saw this.
Which took me to the top of a windmill.
out on the beach somewhere and i was like please somebody draw that fuck you you know i'm in my little suit i got my briefcase and i'm like this is not where the seattle chamber of commerce is so i'm late for the meeting i show up back at the at the meeting i you know they wait for me i walk in for whatever reason that day i chose to wear a tweed suit so i'm in a tweed suit i'm a half an hour late
And I appear to be the guy who believes – who doesn't know where downtown is and who legitimately thought that the Seattle Chamber of Commerce was in a windmill.
John Roderick.
He's the candidate who's still learning.
So I'm like, hi, everyone.
Sorry I'm late.
I really am sorry that I appear to be exactly the kind of candidate that would not know how to find the Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
But I'm here now.
Let's talk.
And we talk.
And they're asking me questions.
And they go around the table and introduce themselves.
And each one of them is like, hello, I'm the legal counsel for the big major developer.
I'm the property development officer for the...
local sports franchise snidely whiplash group i'm the uh you know i am scrooge mcduck's uh like vault treasure bath consultant and so i'm sitting at the table and we're talking and i'm just like listen you know what um funiculars and uh anybody and they're like funiculars and they all lean forward and write down on their pad and
And at the end of the thing, I was like, listen, there's no way that you guys are going to endorse me.
I understand that.
All I want you to understand is that when I do get elected, I want you to feel like you can work with me.
Oh, that's good.
And they're all like, oh.
And then I said a couple of more things about funiculars and zip lines.
And at one point I said, you know, here's the thing I never hear about.
Why don't we just print more money?
You did not.
Nobody laughs.
They all just look up and then look down and write on their pads.
Google funicular.
All right.
I see how this is going.
And then as I leave, I'm like, once again, sorry that I was late.
I believe in small businesses and free enterprise.
God bless America.
uh and um i do hope that we will see each other again goodbye and i walk out and i'm in the lobby talking to the receptionist and i hear a huge laugh like the whole room starts laughing oh shit and i'm like are they laughing because one of them said we should absolutely endorse that guy and they all are laughing in agreement
Or are they laughing because they are full of fear?
Or are they laughing because someone said something funny, completely unrelated, just to break the tension that I created in the room?
Who knows?
I know that they can't be laughing at me as an unserious candidate because I raised more money in a week than any city council candidate has ever raised in Seattle's history.
Wow.
So they know that that is real.
So who knows?
The Seattle Chamber of Commerce is not going to pick me as their endorser, endorseee.
But...
But when I win the election, I'm going to show back up there and I'm going to say, so, funiculars.
Scimitar.
Scimitar.