Ep. 154: "West Coast Noncommittal"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
This month, they asked Paul and Storm to help me say hi to John.
I'm not a doctor, but you know I'm feeling fine.
Turns out all I need is you and Roderick on the Line.
Good morning, John.
Hi, man.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you today?
That's great.
Oh, that's just swell.
Bob's your uncle.
I've got my raccoon hat on and I'm ready to broadcast.
As a side note, can we do that for 90 minutes?
Here's the problem.
First, you got to keep moving, then you got to get out of the way.
That's number one and number two.
You can put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Take it to the bank.
Feeling frisky, Johnny?
I got nothing.
I'm done.
The amazing thing is, you know that quality when you look at really old photographs of people, like you'll find a photograph of a whole class from a school, but they're adults, like a technical school or something.
You look at their pictures, and their faces, they're
Their physiognomies just look old.
Oh, yeah.
They don't look like modern people.
And then when you listen to recordings of the way people talked in old movies, radio, they don't talk like...
normal people either.
They talk like old-timey people.
You mean civilians, not like trained broadcaster types.
The thing is, the difference today, everybody wants to be on TV and on the radio.
So everybody's already, you go to a man on the street, a person on the street, and they're going to have a bit.
But back then, you hear interviews with people from like the 50s and 60s.
It's delightful because they sound like normal people.
They're normal people.
And also, when you look at those classic movies from the 1930s or the early talkies,
There's that kind of almost British quality to the way they speak.
But at the same time, there's a self-awareness of their diction.
Right.
That feels a little bit put on.
It is.
I think this is... God damn it.
I'm going to have to... I'm not using the internet now.
This comes up twice a year, and I need to find out what this is called.
But it was... I think it's the way that people were trained.
Elocution.
I bet you part of it... Part of it is...
stagecraft out of being in plays and stuff.
But then, you know, in the early days, as we learned from singing in the rain, John, you have to speak very clearly.
Your voice, you probably, you probably sound like a clarinet when you talk.
You got to have a real resonant voice.
But I think that's, that was the, what do they call it?
Like the received pronunciation of Hollywood.
Yes.
You know, like the BBC English.
I think that was our version of that, the received Hollywood pronunciation.
Well, and this is one of the, you know, I've said for many years,
That I believe that the English language has continued to evolve as it has moved away from its place of origin.
And that actually the most perfectly spoken English is that which is spoken by the educated people of Alaska.
Because it's been through every gate –
It's made its way through all this sort of Midwestern nasal and southern drawl and West Coast noncommittal.
And it's made its way to... That's a genre, West Coast noncommittal?
West Coast noncommittal.
You hear it all the time.
It's kind of spoken from your teeth.
But then you get to Alaska, and everyone since Alaska has been so recently settled by Europeans, it's a mishmash of all the different spoken Englishes, and we have refined it until it has become perfect.
And, you know, it is broadcaster English, but even better.
And when I advance this theory to people, for instance, from England, they find it laughable.
But they are still speaking a kind of archaic English language.
Some leftover hodgepodge, some steak and kidney pie that's been left out on the counter.
Snap.
And meanwhile, we have... Meanwhile, we're up here in Alaska perfecting the language.
That's right.
We've sent it through a thousand cheesecloths, and here it is.
The best version.
Not some Boston baked beans of English.
No, it is Alaskan English.
I think you hate beans and pie.
The perfect version.
The problem is Alaska has a very small population and everyone else is allied against this theory.
But I really do think there's something to it.
Is it anything that you can demonstrate?
Well, I demonstrate it only in the perfect way that I speak English.
You just blew my mind.
I've been getting the demo the whole time.
That's right.
That's right.
If you can... I mean, and there are some...
There are some small, like, glitches, right?
Some brief moments, some max headroom moments where you see behind the curtain.
You see the Matrix.
For instance, I do say AirBuddy.
Everybody get over here.
You got, you know, I don't like to make a big deal about it.
You got several of those.
I know I've got several of those.
Now, wait a minute.
You're saying several?
You can name more than one AirBuddy?
What's the name of the place where you did your show last year?
Rendezvous.
The rendezvous?
Yeah.
How is that supposed to be pronounced?
I think it's rendezvous.
It's French.
I like the way you say it, but I say this because I'm being defensive because I have more of these than I realize, and then once people start pointing it out, I become self-conscious.
Yeah.
People yell at me for saying Sasquatch.
Oh, instead of Sasquatch?
Sasquatch.
What about what your kids put on to go to bed at night?
Pajamas.
Pajamas.
Yeah.
Well, what do you say?
Well, I don't know.
I'm really, I'm on the horns of a dilemma between pajamas and pajamas.
Pajamas?
Yeah.
Doesn't that sound a little fancy?
Come on.
That's like aunt.
Okay.
Thank you, John.
God fucking damn it.
Aunt, aunt is like writing a sentence without an Oxford comma.
Aunt is, aunt is terrible.
Aunt is terrible.
It really – and the thing is my wife – the thing is this is – you know what it's like to be in a relationship, right?
Barely.
You don't know whether to hit the bell or throw it out the window.
Hit the bell or wipe my tears with it.
You know, I have said – I'm not saying I have success with this, but I think a big part of being in any kind of a long-term relationship is learning the things that only you are allowed to be right about.
If you can minimize the number of things that only you are allowed to be right about –
That's a thought technology because I think it makes you a better person.
And I'm pretty sure even though you may still think in your mind that you need to be right about something, there's just so much stuff where I want to really keep my powder dry, right?
And the thing is I also know how desperately fucked up I am.
So I'm always looking for improvement opportunities.
But I have to say there are some things I capitulated on aunt.
A long time ago?
Well, because of my lady.
Everybody in her family says aunt.
So I'm the only one in the family that refers to Aunt Sue instead of Aunt Sue, and they think I'm talking about, you know, insects or something like that.
But then sometimes I find myself saying, yeah, that's right, Ellie, later in the month we're going to your aunt and uncle's house.
Because I catch myself having to speak it phonetically.
Uncle.
I don't know.
I guess I see why.
But I've got through this with a few people.
Like I was talking to you on another program about how you take the first name of the guy who was the deputy on Andy Griffith.
And you take the phenomenon of sun coming up in the morning.
And I pronounce both of those the same.
Barney Don.
Oh, Don and Don.
Okay, now do you say those any different?
Don and Don.
I'm sorry, you are saying them differently, right?
Yeah, Don.
Okay, this is like me in colorblindness, not to be ableist, but I can't really hear that difference.
You cannot hear the difference between Don and Don.
This is a prank, and that's okay.
No, that's because I feel like the vast majority of our listeners would be able to hear that I was pronouncing a whole different word.
I'm never going to be a good audio professional.
I know people from the tri-state area.
I feel like people from the tri-state area will say, Dawn.
By tri-state area, you mean New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado.
The original, the OG.
No, I'm talking about the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania triads.
Yeah, right.
I get you.
I don't know.
And, you know, it's funny because I don't think of myself as being – I know people who are very sensitive about their pronunciation in the same way that you might be sensitive about like a lazy eye or something.
Right.
People are people because they feel like they are overcoming some some like regionalism.
Maybe.
But also we talked about this, that phenomenon.
And I know some very smart people that have the same problem where if you're a reader and especially if you're an Internet reader.
Oh, I see.
You know where I'm going with this.
Yes, yes, yes.
And you have read a word.
You have one of these.
I remember.
I can't remember what the word is.
But you'll have read a name or you'll have read a given word potentially thousands of times.
You might actually know more than 80% of the population about this noun, but you've never actually had to say it out loud.
Well, wait.
I used one at the very beginning of this program.
I used the word physiognomy.
Right.
Oh, this is your physiognomy?
Physiognomy.
And neither one of them sounds right.
And as a writer, I have used this word a thousand times.
I think it all the time.
Like, that's an interesting physiognomy.
But I do actually not know how it is pronounced.
And every time I start to say the word, I become aware that I have gone too far in the sentence to not say it.
And then I'm committed and somewhere halfway – I'm in the air doing a daffy.
You don't have time to think about whether you should have jumped.
You just need to figure out how you're going to land without breaking something.
And I'm going to land it and I either – and depending on who the person I'm talking to is, I either go –
Physiognomy?
Physiognomy?
I try and get out of there.
I try and get to the ground.
You just cycle through an array of every conceivable pronunciation and mispronunciation until you look like you're genuinely damaged.
Yeah, and the problem is I have gone multiple times to dictionaries and looked at the jumble of upside-down U's and other diphthongs.
trying to figure out what the pronunciation of that word is.
And I can't make heads or tails of it even when I really investigate it.
And no one ever uses it.
No one ever says it out loud.
Right, right.
You're a trailblazer.
So I walk through the world waiting for someone else to say that word to me so that I can at least latch onto their pronunciation of it and say...
I know one thing.
I've heard it once, but no one ever speaks it.
And I think it's because no one else knows how to pronounce it.
I think it's true.
I think as writerly people, we tacitly understand that if you don't know the meaning of a word, don't use it.
You could go look it up.
That's good.
You're improving your word power.
You know what I'm saying?
Improve your word power.
You want to improve your word power.
I'm just saying, though, you might want to be careful if you are using the word and don't look like the times, for example, that I have said expendable when I meant flexible.
Okay.
That was really super embarrassing.
Right.
I used to say momentum when I meant inertia.
Right.
Oh, you know, I notice these things a lot more than I used to.
And I don't even think of myself as a word nerd, but I really like using the appropriate word, and it drives me crazy when I realize I've been using an incorrect or inexact word for a long time.
Yeah, yeah.
The hardest part of doing that is getting corrected correctly.
Like the momentum inertia one, I knew I was using it wrong.
I mean, I knew I was, it was one of those things where you're searching, you're doing the Terminator and you're searching your heads up display for fuck you asshole.
Momentum asshole.
And I just didn't have inertia entered into...
my dictionary for that application.
And it's not that I hadn't learned it.
I just hadn't gotten, it wasn't on the short list.
And I kept getting to momentum and just saying it because I wanted to get on with the thought.
Right.
And Nate, the bass player of the Decembrists once in a bar said, do you mean inertia?
And I was like,
I do mean inertia.
Thank you.
And then that use of that word is now tied to Nate Query.
I bet you still think about it.
I cannot say the word.
I cannot say inertia in the way that I mean it now without picturing his kindly face.
And I happen to like him very much, and he meant that in a very nice way.
I mean, he wasn't trying to shame me.
I still, this is a little bit of a callback, but now for the last few months, every time, that's rare that I drink from a water fountain, but every time I drink from a water fountain now, I think of your friend that I've never met.
Who told me to think of him when I drank from a water fountain?
That's right.
Oh, my God.
It's a mental virus spanning 30 years.
It's ridiculous.
And I'll bet you right now there are people listening to this show that are going to go drink from a water fountain.
They're going to think of me thinking of your friend that they've never met.
Language is a virus.
It's insane.
He planted that bug knowingly because he's a sadist.
What a dick.
Here's the thing.
I feel myself slowly grinding into permanent old man mode.
It's happening to us so fast.
When we started this podcast, we were still young men.
We were a podcast of ideas.
And now we are just...
Liebschnitz and Stoller.
Here's the thing.
I am not one of the – I don't think I'm one of those people that feels like the language should be static because obviously it's always evolving.
You're not a member of the French Academy, for instance.
May know.
Who believes that we should say from a bourgeois.
Yeah.
Instead of cheeseburger, he's got the fromage bourgeois.
We used to like to harass our French literature teacher who was also the French language teacher.
And so we would just ask him asinine things in the middle class all the time.
And he would say – he was a professor.
We'd always call him Mr. Hickson just to get on his nerves.
We'd say, Mr. Hickson, how do you say my nails are salon perfect?
Would you say maize angla sans parfait du salon?
And he'd go –
Talking about Flaubert, but you would have to say, no, my nails are perfect as though I have just come from the salon.
I was explaining to my daughter yesterday that the actual words of Frédéric Jacques, the actual English translation.
You're still singing that at night?
Yeah.
And the actual translation should be, Brother John, Brother John, sleeping are you?
Right.
And she was just like, what?
Yeah.
This is insane.
And I was like, yeah, I'm telling you, that's why.
We're in a very tenuous military alliance with France.
That's true.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
There's cognates and there's cognates.
You know what I'm saying?
I do.
My problem is – and I like the evolution of things.
I do get – I'm not a big fan of Hela –
When I hear that, I mean, Hela is kind of the like as Hela is to this generation as, you know, was to ours in some ways, just in the sense that it becomes something that you are just you're putting in everywhere.
It's that's OK.
That's OK.
Here's my general overarching issue.
It's not really a language problem.
It's a communication problem.
I think there are probably think pieces about this on Medium right now.
I think young people don't know how to communicate with other people anymore.
Hmm.
Tell me more, old man.
Well, for example, you think about talking to somebody on the phone.
I try not to.
I know.
I know.
Nobody likes talking on the phone.
But there are times when it is the quickest path to communication.
And I – maybe this is just because, again, because I was a little kid in a different age.
But I speak very clearly –
when i'm on the phone i focus very heavily and i risk sounding like i'm being very repetitious by making sure that we all understood what we just said and agreed right just just because i think it's really useful to go i do that in emails i do that all the time just to just to clarify we're meeting tomorrow slash tuesday that dumb stuff you know and just but i feel like i talk to so like sometimes we get groceries delivered from this place in town and they have to call if there's a replacement
They're not even talking into the phone.
I don't know what they're doing with their phone, but they don't know how to communicate.
They don't know how to pause to let the other person speak.
They don't know how to account for latency in a call.
It's just kind of this meandering, like, it's just, do you know what I'm talking about?
Do you ever get this?
And I've heard it said, turns out, I've heard it said that a lot of people say, a lot of people say that also millennials are not so into eye contact when they talk.
Makes them uncomfortable.
I see.
You have to send them an emoji.
An emoji.
John, you should get more into emoji.
I'm really behind on emojis, John.
I'm an old enough guy that I can't see what half the emojis are.
They all look like the turd, right?
Somebody sends me like a winking devil cat, and I'm like, is that a turd?
I look over with the top of my glasses.
Are they sending me a turd?
How dare they?
What is that face?
Anxious?
Is it scared?
What, the turd face?
No, the turd face you get.
It's turd.
The other thing is also the, I refuse to stop using sentences and punctuation when I text people.
And I'm told that that makes me sound angry.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, right.
You need to end everything with an exclamation point.
You have three options.
If you're saying thank you, you're supposed to say thanks with an unnecessary exclamation point.
Failing at that, you say thanks with no punctuation.
And if you say thanks with a period, it's considered a fuck you.
Oh, right.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Well, you know, I have struggled with this a lot.
And we have really jumped the old man shark.
But I've definitely struggled with the lack of... Why are socks so hard to put on?
Where does that other one go?
I put two in the dryer, I'm sure.
Don't they know old people like hard candy?
Why are the jars so hard to open?
I have succumbed somewhat to the exclamation point escalation because...
I recognize, you know, I do a lot of texting and I recognize that the thanks with a period is a little bit of a... It's a little cold mayonnaise, you know?
It's a little bit of just like... But I have said hella...
For 30 years.
And Hela is one of those things like dude or like in the early 90s.
Well, late 80s.
there was that verbal tick that went around for a while where you'd say like, oh my God, today is beautiful.
And the other person would say, yeah, it is.
Yeah, right.
And you'd be like, yeah, it is.
And they're like, yeah, it is.
Yeah, it is.
And it felt like it was a challenge.
And then I picked that up.
And dude and hella, both were words that I started using initially as...
uh i was i was a parody so i was parody sarcastic yeah like oh hella uh and then it just became like i say dude and have said dude that takes that takes about a week and a half yeah to go from doing the eddie vetter voice as a joke to not being able to stop yep and and hella is one of those for me and and you don't use it a lot though
no i'm not like you're not an animal i'm not like some kind of like hella hella dude no you know like i don't use a hella amount i'm a dude guy the other one i've been that i think i actually saw an article somewhere about this recently the uh the ascendance of no yeah or like that movie was really good no it was great like when did that happen i do i do it all the time no really it was great yeah no to agree with somebody by starting by saying no
So lately I have really – I know what we're getting at here, which is that – We're irrelevant?
Well, no, that we're both very confused because on the one hand, we do want language to be useful and meaningful and follow some rules, right?
That seems normal.
That seems regular.
Yeah.
But then we don't want to stand in the way of the constant evolution of communication and be like old and be angry about it.
But at the same time, the entire theme of this podcast for three years has been that standards are declining everywhere.
Yeah.
And we need to like pull up our pants and go back to work at our jobs and
And so I don't know – I'm talking now personally.
I'm navigating these very precipitous hills in my own life and just wondering – I cannot surrender, right?
That isn't in my nature to just surrender.
Right.
You mean to capitulate?
To capitulate.
Thank you.
That's the better word.
But at the same time, it's important to listen and learn.
You know, there's a lot of, I've been seeing this a lot lately where people say like, well, you just need to listen now.
And I go, I'm comfortable listening.
And learning, I really am.
I've been doing that my whole life.
I like it.
It's a great thing.
But at a certain point, that like you just need to listen is being used as a way of saying you just need to capitulate.
Right.
And like listening and learning is wonderful, but then there's also some, you know, there needs to be some back and forth or some pushback on some ideas, right?
Or some asking to clarify.
Yeah.
Right.
Asking to clarify or, you know, or just thinking, churning on it.
Right.
I mean, there's there's that little tick that I just did, which is to end every sentence with right question mark.
Oh, yeah.
Super annoying.
And it was pointed out.
It was pointed out not that I was doing it, but I was at an event where the host.
a very educated and erudite woman who was giving a long presentation said right at the end of every sentence until it was like... You really notice it.
It was like a foghorn in the room.
And it didn't detract from the real smartness of the presentation.
It just was like you started to wince at the end of her sentences.
Like, oh, God, don't... Oh, she did it again.
Pretty soon that's all you can notice.
But so I don't know.
You know, we do have an obligation.
This must be the terrible thing about middle age.
This must be it, Merlin, which is to stand to thwart two eras and to say, now hold on.
Wait, wait, just everyone hold on just a second.
And that must be why middle-aged people are so uncomfortable and why they buy red Corvettes, why it's talked about as such a difficult time.
Right.
And we're experiencing it.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't stop thinking of this recent episode of Louis C.K., The Louis Show, where he begins by being mad about the way he's treated at this cookware store.
It's a fantastic episode.
And the woman basically just confronts him.
She's like, yeah, I'm 24.
I own my own store in Manhattan.
Yeah.
Are you always this threatened by being around young people?
And he's getting his dander up and, you know, like, why don't you learn about customer service?
And she's like, oh, go to Williams-Sonoma.
They'll treat you nice there.
But, you know, because this cute 24-year-old Asian woman who owns her own store won't kiss his ass like he's accustomed to.
And she basically calls this shit on it and goes like, well, you're getting older.
You're becoming less relevant.
Don't you want your kids to evolve and become better than you?
See, things are working out fine.
Yeah.
But it also makes me think – I guess it was a long time before I really thought about that distinction between – you talk about having to – people saying you should just go out and listen.
I mean I think the first distinction between listening and hearing that I became aware of is that you can hear stuff –
Just stuff.
You have to hear what's going on around you.
I hear traffic noise outside, but I'm not paying a ton of attention to it.
When I'm listening, I'm focusing my attention on what people are saying with the implicitly, now I'm hearing a train go by.
I hear these things, but when I'm listening to them, I'm focusing my attention with partly the idea that I want to understand it better.
But I think that's a pretty good distinction.
But a more recent one that's really been occurring to me because internet is the difference between hearing and listening.
Listening means that you pay attention to something for more than content.
I think when you listen to someone, you're looking to go way beyond what –
they think they're saying, what you think they're saying, to learn more about who they are and what they think and the context for why they're saying what they're saying.
And, you know, goddammit, you fucking Gamergate douchebags, it means more than just trying to contradict the facts of what somebody says.
It means trying to hear what they're saying and then listen to why they're saying it so that you can understand the context for more than why...
They're not looking for a note from you on how they said it and what they said.
They're looking for you to have some empathy that sometimes means not talking.
Sometimes that empathy means you just have to you're going to have to sit here.
It's like meditation.
It's not going to take one minute to get good at this.
You're going to have to be here for a while and just not talk for a little while in order to really understand what these folks are talking about.
Yeah.
And that's listen to me.
Ultimately, listening is an emotional exercise.
As opposed to hearing, right?
A listening is – so often, right, when someone says just listen to me, what they mean is don't ever offer a solution.
Like don't ever offer a critique.
I just want you to listen as an emotional –
To be emotionally receptive.
So many people want to just be heard.
And it's alien to me because I'm from the beginning.
I was at a preschool meeting the other day and the teacher got up and said to everybody in the room, can you remember the first time that you really felt heard by a teacher?
Yeah.
And everybody nodded thoughtfully and she was like, I remember the first time I was ever heard by a teacher.
I was in 11th grade and a teacher really heard my project and his response was what made me decide to be a teacher myself.
And we went around the room and everybody told a story about the first time they were ever heard, really heard and noticed and seen by a teacher.
And
The problem for me was that there was never a time in my life when I didn't feel heard by the teachers.
When I was three years old, I assumed I was being listened to by the teachers.
And...
All the way through school, it never once occurred to me that the teacher didn't know not only my name and what I was working on and was validating my process but was like celebrating me.
And I see it in my daughter too.
There's no question in her mind that everyone is listening to her.
And I was sitting next to a woman who was like, well, you know, no one ever listened to me.
But I got straight A's.
And that's how I knew.
That's how they knew me.
They knew me as the girl that got straight A's.
But, you know, I don't think anybody.
I never spoke.
I was like, it's very different, a very different experience that I've had.
And in contrast to what kind of surprised me was the majority experience, which was feeling unheard.
And so my whole life I've spent learning to listen without...
offering uh an opinion oh boy because you know the because the it was a it was not my instinct right and i've i've known a lot of strong people who have said over and over since the time i was 22 years old i i'm going to i'm i had a bad day today i'm going to talk about it to you and i would like you to just listen
And that was something when I was 18, 19, 20, it was really hard for me to just listen.
But I learned to do it.
It's like you say, it's one of the things you do in a relationship.
I'm trying to avoid the elephant in the room.
I think that what you're describing is absolutely true.
And I think that for something like 25 years now, we've looked at it as this Mars and Venus thing.
I'll speak for myself.
I didn't realize how terrible I was at just listening to people for a very long time.
I realize I'm still not as good at it as I can be, but I'm at least aware that I need to just fucking relax and let the other person talk sometimes.
Not just because – well, one thing also with both of us, this is not an excuse or a forgiveness.
But when we say things like, right?
You know what I mean?
I think that shows in some ways that we're – it's not just that we want you to agree with us.
I'm constantly doubting whether I said what I was actually thinking, whether my thought made any sense, and whether I'm really just having – if I'm just not realizing I have an aphasia yet.
I'm constantly thinking, do I make any sense when I speak to people?
Right.
So when I hear myself and I say things like, does that make any sense?
Like, I know how needy that sounds.
But part of that is actually me going like, ah, my brain just runs all the time.
It's just going and going and going.
And sometimes it's like a little gumball machine.
You pop the little slot open and sometimes stuff comes out.
And I'm just not even sure if that constitutes anything meaningful.
So I think part of that is when you say things like it becomes a tick, but it starts out as from not a terrible place.
Um, I mean, to me, that's even different from, you know what I mean?
Like, you know what I mean?
Or like, you know, Walter Subcheck, am I wrong?
Like those are, those all mean kind of different things.
Yeah.
It was, it was, uh, there was a little bit of adjustment, uh, when you and I got to be friends, when you would get to the end of something and go, right.
Right.
And I would hear – That means I'm done talking.
Well, or I would hear like that you expected an affirmation and then later on as time went on, I realized that you were seriously asking, am I correct?
Sometimes, yeah, for sure.
Does what I've just said and does my perception square with your perception?
But beyond the Mars and Venus part, it is something that I think most men, probably in America, men of our age, are really thinking about this.
Maybe I'm projecting here.
But are thinking about it seriously for the first time.
Because we've expected that everybody was going to listen to us and what we had to say.
And if they didn't, they were dumb or black.
Like, they just couldn't get...
like how what we were saying should be receive wisdom in some ways.
And I don't know, I'm finding it a very interesting challenge to get better at that.
And back to that other personal example, that was, man, I used to be the worst.
Like if I had like a girlfriend who had a bad day, I was always ready to just be the problem solver.
Before she could even, she would exhale, start to speak a sentence, and I would start coming up with ideas.
Why don't you take a bath?
Want to take a walk?
Should we get some dinner?
Oh, that probably wasn't what she thought it was.
And I'm offering all these things to do what?
To A, solve a problem, but importantly, B, just make her feel better.
And the thing is...
That's not my job.
I'm not there to make her feel better.
I'm there to shut the fuck up and let her describe what it is, work through what she's feeling.
Although, part of your job as being in a relationship with somebody is to make them feel better.
And that's what's... It's just not always on my terms.
I think there's a difference between making somebody feel better about something versus just trying to make everything go back to this the way that you're comfortable with.
I mean, this is the primary...
The primary problem in my mother's relationship with my sister, which is that my mother is a solver and my sister wants to talk about her feelings.
And so, although their, you know, their mother daughter bond is, is very strong.
my sister comes in and starts to vent about her day, and my mom says, well, why don't you talk to your boss tomorrow and tell him that that's not acceptable?
And my sister goes, and then she starts to talk about her day a little bit more, and my mom says, well, why don't you just, if you just enrolled at the community college.
So many problems with that.
And it's just my mom's nature
to do that because you know it's very hard to because because the expression my my the way that my sister expresses her frustration about her day is very discomforting right or discomforting yeah where you know where she's expressing frustration by means of saying like it's just it's it's unjust
That my, you know, that my boss just doesn't see that it's not, you know, like, I should be able to have a five-minute smoking break.
And, you know, my sister's mad and she's venting.
And my mom says, well, you know, I mean, did you think to take your five-minute smoking break, you know, when you go to the bathroom or whatever?
You know, my mom's trying to... And now, at that point, she's more like an editor or a coach where she's trying to, like, help improve performance.
Yeah, a coach.
But part of that is that, like, I think I've been watching this dynamic for 40 years.
But, you know, my mom feels like my sister's agitation is...
something that she wants to help resolve.
Sure.
That's the biggest part in some ways, right?
Right.
And that, that resolution, that part of that resolution is that my sister isn't seeing or, you know, that, that she could change her behavior and, and resolve this problem or that she could take a different tact and what, and my sister is once just to vent her emotions and
And then the feeling will pass and then she'll go back to doing the behavior that got her in trouble with her boss.
And partly my perception of it is back to introvert-extrovert polarity where –
Susan wants to vent her emotions.
She does not want to solve her problems.
And my mom wants to solve problems so that emotions do not ever enter into it.
It's a completely different paradigm.
A different paradigm.
And watching it over the years be characterized in the press as a Mars-Venus issue, but then watching it play out between the two primary women in my family, I've been forced to see it as a
As part of the either introvert, extrovert paradigm or the emotional, rational, you know.
Yeah, right.
And honestly, like sometimes I laugh and laugh and laugh because I hear my sister start to go on something and I realize that it isn't a – you know, she just is –
She just needs to offload her feelings about something.
And I look over at my mom and I'm like, please stay out of this.
Just please stay out of it.
But there are other times when listening to my sister vent, like I also feel like you yell about this every afternoon.
It's the same problem every time.
Why don't you just stop taking your smoke break right under your boss's window?
Is that so crazy?
Yeah.
And, and it's, uh, because ultimately like I don't want to hear the same emotional vent every day.
Like it is emotional venting of that kind is actually stressful to even just to be a passive witness, just to be a listener.
And that's the relationship part of it where you realize – and the thing that emotional venters maybe don't always see is that listening to them is – requires energy also.
Even if they're not in the room.
I mean, just kind of preparing for going like, wow, I hope today went okay.
Yeah, right.
I mean, and this is the classic problem that introverts have with extroverts, which is that introverts are very, very aware of
of what extroverts need extroverts are typically not even conscious that there is such a thing as an introvert let alone that an introvert has different needs and so you know my sister is conscious of the fact that that we you know that we somehow are bad listeners and
but not aware of how much it takes out of us to listen to a litany of complaint where it seems like the solution is easy.
And when I say us, it's only that my mom and I have a similar nature.
I got out of that game a long time ago in my own family.
That's where pretending to read
Has been a fantastic strategy in my whole adult life.
Pretending to read, struggling to actually read while people are fighting in the other room.
But so that communication style, like right now we're in an era where listening and talking are very au courant.
Different ways of listening or being sort of challenged to listen better.
But the awareness that listening is also a very active...
And if you are listening actively, it is a strain.
It takes, you know, not necessarily a painful strain, but it is an exercise.
It does take vitamins.
If it isn't passive, then that means it's... Yeah, if there's not an effort, the person's probably not really listening.
They're probably barely even hearing.
And that effort is also real.
And for a lot of introverts, that effort is...
It makes them need to go sit in a dark room with a wet towel over their head.
There's also an element of – I guess I always use this word wrong.
Now I'm sensitive about it.
But there's also an element of having to – Inertia or momentum, velocity, torque.
There's an element of empathy.
And I think that – I don't know.
I'm not sure if that's exactly the right word.
But I think one way to think about empathy is that it's easy to feel the feelings or understand the feelings of somebody who has the same feelings as you do.
It's very – you know what I mean?
When somebody has been – if you have a –
God forbid, you've got a sibling that died, and you talk to somebody who recently had a sibling that died, you might be really a good person to talk to because you're probably somebody who can understand what they're going through.
I'm sure that could get even more specific, but no matter what it is, it's not as difficult to have empathy for somebody that you think, A, has the same feelings as you, and importantly, B, deserves to have those feelings.
I think where it gets challenging, though, and where you get into the real actual idea of empathy is when...
you start trying to understand not just how somebody feels, but why they are, how they appear to you, whether they deserve that feeling or not.
That's true empathy.
True empathy, and I'm not saying I'm any good at this, but it's what I'm working toward is to get better at going, gosh, it sure is easy to chunk everybody into one of these 11 boxes that I've got.
And that sure makes life a lot easier.
I can then focus on, like, one or two of these boxes most of the time and just know the rest is garbage people.
The difficult part is to become a truly empathetic person, and I'm going somewhere with this.
To become a truly empathetic person, you have to get good at understanding what's not just on the surface, whether you think that they're a good and deserving person to have those feelings, whether you think their grievances are appropriate, whether you think their ideas about what should change are realistic, that, you know...
It's very easy to get shortcuts about those things to where you can just write all those people off.
But I talked before about teachers.
I think to be a good teacher and to be – maybe to be a good – I hate to say politician because that implies mostly that you're there to electioneer.
But to be a good public servant, you have to have an element of empathy.
You have to be realistic about knowing what can be accomplished.
But it seems to me you have to become very empathetic about listening and hearing from people where you may not even understand where they're coming from.
You're still not trying to figure out whether they're a chemtrails person.
But does that make sense?
Here I am.
Does that make sense?
But to me, that's the empathy part is empathy is not just feeling for people who you like and agree with.
Empathy is learning to try and understand or at least hear people that you maybe absolutely don't agree with, but to at least hear them out and figure out like why they're how they are and then live with the fact that maybe you'll just never agree.
And maybe that doesn't make them the worst person in the world.
They're just really just fucking different.
Well, it's interesting because in Star Trek New Generation,
Is that what it's called?
Is it new or next?
I've been criticized for this.
Criticized or have you just been observed?
Momentum.
Have you just been listened to?
Ant.
And people have heard you say Star Trek New Generation.
I'm not putting this out.
Ant.
The house is being handed.
Okay, so in the second generation of Star Trek.
In the latest generation.
Not the latest, I'm sorry.
In the original next new generation.
So what we're talking about is episode two, episode negative two of the new generation of Star Trek.
This is the one with Professor X and the guy from the cruise.
Professor X. Professor X. Professor X. Is that his name?
Did I say that wrong?
Jean-Luc Picard?
Jean-Luc Picard.
Jean-Luc Picard.
Jean-Luc Picard.
You know, there is an empath character on the ship.
And that was – at the time when that show came out, it was like, oh, wow.
Isn't that a kind of – that's a cool bit of writing to imagine the future, to imagine a science future, which we're all geeking on.
having not just a doctor and a science officer and a navigator and a chemist, but also a feelings professional, right?
When Star Trek New Generation first came out, it was the first time that we had ever seen a feelings professional on a science show.
And that was kind of a little bit of like a brain tickle.
Is that Troy?
Commander Troy, right?
Okay.
And...
But very clearly at that point in time, and in the writing of that show, there were scripts, there were storylines where someone needed to go talk to Troy.
Go talk to Commander Troy.
She was the one who had the expertise.
And sometimes there would be an alien intelligence that they were encountering
And at that point, they hadn't had any Troy scripts for a while.
And so they'd figure out a way that Troy needed, they needed her wisdom and insight to interact with this alien life form.
But for the most part, it was still that they were using science to explore the universe.
And more often than not, the way to encounter an alien life form was to put the shields up and power up the photon torpedoes.
Right now we're going through a cultural phase where empathy, where someone like you is being encouraged by the multiplicity of voices in the world to really, really focus on empathy.
But there are empaths in our world and then there are people that will never – who are constitutionally really incapable of empathy.
And empathy is just another one of our talents like sports ball –
Like being able to run or jump.
And some people are really, really good at it.
And some people need to really train to activate it in themselves.
And there are cultural dampers that we put on it.
But then there's a whole swath of the world, 25% of the people probably, that just have no empathy or little empathy.
And so I don't think that empathy is a thing that everybody can have.
And I think it's something that it's great that we're, we talk about and are aware of, but like there are also, I mean, I've been on the Joko cruise five times.
I know what, I know what it's like to be in a world where empathy is the, is the language currency, but there are a lot of people on the spectrum for whom empathy is a, is a distant idea.
Um,
And, um, I don't, you know, I don't know where we're going to be in 20 years on this, but, and I'm, and I'm glad we're talking about it, but there's also like my mom has as much empathy as she can have.
And it isn't, it isn't enough for my sister and never will be enough.
Right.
And, um,
Over the years, I have said to my sister, you're the one that has this deep capacity for empathy.
Can you not show any for your mother who has no real capacity for it?
And that's where I've found the greater struggle.
My mom can say, I don't know how to empathize with this.
It just seems like complaining to me.
but I know that about myself and I, and I try to not talk.
I try to, you know, she's gone as far as to try to bake her way out of it.
What if I made cookies, you know, like literally try to try anything.
Wow.
But the, the empathetic one, the one with all the feelings, my sister doesn't, has never been able to find the reservoir of feeling that,
on behalf of the person with no empathy.
It's kind of the ironic part.
Yeah.
And so often it is in this conversation where it's like, yeah, this person has trouble sharing your feelings.
Can you feel that?
Do you have feelings?
Can you share those feelings?
So I don't know.
I think that
I'm definitely not a science officer.
I'm much more really of an empath, but not so much of an empath that I'm not ready to power up some photon torpedoes.
No, I understand.
That's part of the job.
Right.
You know what I mean?
You've got a mission.
You've got lives at stake.
Explore new worlds.
Yes.
Seek out new civilizations.
Yes.
Hit them with photon torpedoes.
Roddenberry's dream.
So, it's a struggle.
Yeah.
Well, as long as we're talking about our feelings, there's this other thing that, again, I always feel like, God, I'm just saying something that's so obvious, but it's something I want, I find almost impossible to deal with in my own life, and so I find it triple impossible to try and be something that I lightly, gently try to impart on my kid, which is this really...
Strange message about how much you can actually change about stuff at a given time in the world and how much you can change about other people.
I love that you just said impart on my kid instead of impart to my kid.
And as a dad, that's absolutely what it feels like.
Comprised of.
Listen, I am going to impart this on you.
I hate myself.
Yeah.
But here's what it comes down to.
I mean, here's an example.
I don't know why I'm always talking about crossing the street, except it's something we do a lot, and so it's something we have to think about a lot.
It's something where I want her to be actively engaged in the process of crossing the street.
I've talked about this a lot in other places.
You don't dance across the street.
You don't go across the street without looking.
You go across the street like you're in war.
But it's such a...
delicate operation to trying to explain to a little kid here's what i don't want to do there's a million things i don't want to do i don't want to make them careless on the one end at the other end i don't want to make her scared and so i try to impart something in between which which is that there's something very complicated going on here the basics are things like look left right and left but then keep looking keep making eye contact keep going across but then the thing that i i want to say very gently is even if we do this perfectly things can still go wrong i
And we have no control over that.
And understanding that has a strange – and I'm not about to explain this to a seven-year-old because I barely understand it.
But there's a certain existential freedom in realizing that things always could go wrong even if you do your best.
But that doesn't mean you don't still try to do your best.
And so in that kind of an instance, I guess the larger message I'm trying to impart –
on her is is that uh and the thing that i need to learn all the time is that just because they're let's say i try to be empathetic and i fail i see other people failing at being empathetic it doesn't mean we can't keep trying like even if the system is broken we still have to do what we think is right and we still have to and god willing in the right atmosphere we continue to learn and get better and we don't just you know um
dig in around something that may be an old dead or bad idea.
But, you know, but part of sanity in life is realizing that, you know, let's see, get to this part of thinking empathetically.
Empathetic is wrong.
I mean, justice, you can put it in a million different ways, but thinking about more than just your own dick in a given day and just getting to a point where you can go, look, I want to really try to understand where other people are coming from and then accept, you know what?
I don't understand where that person's coming from.
They're kind of a dick.
And then go, that's I just got to move on.
It doesn't mean I'm going to treat them badly.
But it means it doesn't mean that the life ends because I can't settle this one relationship.
That just means that that's just how life is.
Because it all is a question of how well my filter can make me feel like I understand how the fucking world works when I will never understand how the world works.
Well, you have a pretty good sense of how the world works.
It spins in one direction only.
I'm trying to move a little bit toward your project.
Because I'm curious how these kinds of... The reason I'm bringing these up is, first of all, to show you that I struggle to be a person.
But also that, like, how does this affect you?
I mean, how is your listening tour going?
It's going really well.
And, you know, the danger...
The danger of thinking of progress is that if you're a historian or at all interested or looking back at all, there is a feeling of progress.
over time, right?
We're not confronting the same problems that we were in 1650.
Well, it's not like the Middle Ages where we actually, on the grand scale of things, did move backward for a while, right?
Well, in some ways, learning moved backward.
But technology, sure, we lost a lot of ground.
But we were also going through a phase where we were developing through monotheism.
a whole complex set of new ideas about what constituted a person and what constituted our ethical basis, right?
The idea of justice that we have today is a product of all that –
religious churning that happened in the Middle Ages, which we think of as the Dark Ages.
So although we lost astronomy for a while, and maybe lost the Roman concept of the aqueduct for a while, and we lost a lot of intellectual ground, as we moved from a world where, from a polytheistic animist world to one that was rooted in this idea that there was one God and you could have a
You know, you could have a personal relationship with them and not just that you're out in the woods burning sheep bones to appeal to the God of scabies to relieve your suffering.
But that you know that your whole life and all of life is like rooted in this central authority.
That's where all of our contemporary ideas of the rights of man come from.
And so it wasn't that a lot was lost.
We were just building a new thing for a while.
And so here we are and we've made tremendous progress.
There's lots and lots of progress yet to make.
It's all thought technology and we're in a mode right now that's very active.
The generation that followed ours and the generation that followed them is just bigger than we are and louder than we are and maybe the biggest, loudest generation ever.
And they're going to set the tone a lot more than we did or are capable of.
And there's, you know, the spigot is wider.
So not everybody's coming from the same place.
And that's a very, that's maybe one of the hardest things to grapple with.
Because there's, as you try to resolve disagreement and you realize that
No one even accepts even one basic premise that the person they're arguing with accepts.
And that's kind of unprecedented.
I mean, even 50 years ago, the basic premises were all commonly held for the most part.
Or if you were an outsider to those, you didn't hold those.
You at least knew what they were.
And you looked at yourself in opposition to those common ideas.
But there are a lot of people now who just don't even know the first thing about where the other person's coming from.
Not even the first thing.
And they're not especially interested.
Mm-hmm.
When you think about – I don't know if you – there was a really cool article in the New York Times about Obama's visit to this little South Dakota town to give the commencement speech at their little technical college.
And I think a big part of the reason he went there was that he had he'd been to 49 of the 50 states as president.
Got the letter from that little girl.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so he came to South Dakota to give the commencement speech at this little college.
But this article was written.
This reporter just went to the town and talked to a bunch of locals before Obama arrived.
And South Dakota was overwhelmingly a Republican state.
No one in this little town voted for Obama.
And in the advance of him arriving, the reporter talked to all these people who were like, he wants to make it a Muslim country and he doesn't even, you know, it's just all that usual stuff.
And then Obama came and hundreds of people in the town turned out, went down to the airport to watch the plane land.
As he drove through the town, the reporter followed this group of people that he'd been talking to already, he or she, I don't know actually, I didn't look at the name of the reporter, but followed their responses and they were all thrilled that Obama waved to them, that they saw the president.
And then they watched his speech on television and they were moved to tears that he was talking about their town.
And then he was only on the ground for a couple of hours, drove his car back to the airport.
Again, people crowding the streets to see him.
Off he flies.
And at least through the narrow lens of this reporter's experience, a lot of those people were – their opinion about Obama –
was transformed by just that tiny little bit of physical contact where they went from thinking he was the antichrist to admiring him and thinking that he had given a good speech and like were surprised and astonished and touched and moved by the whole experience.
And of course that's true, right?
I mean, I was vociferously against Reagan and,
But if I had ever seen Reagan, let alone been close to Reagan, I'm sure I would have swooned.
And that sense of how much we share and how little actual differences we have –
you only get that experience by being around other people by, you know, by, I mean, we talk about this all the time, these disagreements on the internet where people are just screaming at each other.
And if they were in the same room, they would be, you know, fast friends or like, and anyone who has ever traveled through Alabama knows that they're the friendliest people in the world and, and terrible racists, but, but, but wonderful people in so many other ways.
Yeah.
Not as a, you know, not apologia, but just a normal human experience.
And that's what we don't share anymore.
And so being out on the campaign trail and talking to everybody, like I am the focus of a lot of energy directed at me.
I'm the hub of that wheel and I'm meeting people from a lot of different spheres.
And all I wish is that they could all meet each other.
You know, like I'm I'm seeing this incredible diversity of of thinking.
I'm meeting a lot of 25 year olds like the like the girl in the Louis C.K.
store who at 25 years old already has all the wisdom in it and that she thinks she's ever going to need.
And whatever that episode is trying to convey, what we don't know is six months later, is her store closed because she's rude to customers?
I mean, that's the thing that that kind of like, well, I'm doing fine and maybe you need to get with the times because it's just like, well, I mean, or –
Like so many 25-year-olds before you, you think you can start a store and be rude to people and you don't need to be nice to old white men because they're irrelevant to you.
And then your store closes because you're rude and a bad customer service person.
And then you learn like so many people have before you that customer service is part of the equation.
And so I'm meeting a lot of very active 25-year-olds, politically active 25-year-olds, who think they already know everything there is to know about a city, about government.
That's a great age for that.
It's incredible.
That's really the perfect age to feel like you know everything.
Yeah, right.
It comes so easily.
You are very smart at that age.
Maybe smarter than 40-year-olds because you still have all your brain cells.
But what you don't know is all the stuff that you don't know.
And so I'm talking to people all the time who are just like, well, the solution is simple.
And you go, well, that is a simple solution until you start to become aware that every solution causes 42 other problems you didn't anticipate.
And they go, well, no.
And it's like, yes.
I mean, I have conversations all the time with people who seem, with young people I'm talking about, who do not understand that they did not invent the civil rights movement.
And I'm like, you know, people have been doing this work for a long time
And the struggles have been different.
The challenges have been different.
But you are here able to speak this way because people have been doing this work for a long time.
And
So the indignation you feel that we're not moving fast enough, I would just like to direct your attention back just a few years to where we were then and imagine how indignant you would feel.
Like this is – and I'm not saying that by way of saying like respect your elders.
I'm just saying get a little context.
These ideas – just because –
Just because Twitter is new and Snapchat is new does not mean that the ideas that are being expressed there are equally new and unprecedented.
And it's a real challenge.
And so the excitement of the campaign is that I'm talking to people.
We had a meeting yesterday of my volunteer squad.
It was just people that had offered to volunteer for the campaign.
And 25 people showed up on Mother's Day.
And they were all ages from 20 to 65.
And it was like...
a real cross section of people in Seattle, people who had only lived here for six months, people who had lived there their entire lives, uh, people with a master's in social work, people that had worked political campaigns, people that were just artists.
And I don't mean just artists to say that being an artist is lesser, but just that that's, you know, that they are coming from the arts place and engaging in this campaign out of a,
Like pretty confused about what is even happening politically.
And it was incredibly inspiring just to have all these people in the room and listen to all their, you know, a couple of teachers, a couple of teachers.
You know, people from an activist background.
And what I really wanted to do was just say, let's all sit here for four hours and just talk about what, you know, like, just start.
What's the single most important problem facing the city?
And we could, it would have been a four hour long roundtable.
We didn't have that time, but that's what I'm getting every day is this roundtable where it's all being sort of directed at me, either people trying to train me, people trying to school me, people trying to connect with me.
people hoping that I will recognize their issue and then broadcast it for them.
And it's all really compelling and it's moving my heart.
And that's, I think, the best thing about it.
You get to be 45 and you're like, oh, maybe my heart can't move anymore.
Right.
But I sat in a meeting where 20 people got up and spoke about the fact that the metro bus system had raised the bus fare 25 cents, 50 cents.
And at first, it felt like, I mean, I know that there's always going to be somebody that's mad about anything.
But in actually listening to 20 different people testify that they were trying to survive on $750 a month and that they needed to take the bus.
They needed to take five buses every day.
And that what seemed like a small fare increase actually was...
was prohibiting them from getting certain foods at the grocery store.
And that they were supporting their children and their elderly incapacitated parent.
And they were the only earner.
And you hear one of those and you're like, whoa, that person has...
like a really bad scene.
But when you hear 20 people tell a story like that and you realize that these are the 20 of these people who are,
It took another two buses to come to this meeting to talk about it.
Right.
Right.
So you have to think that they are they're a small percentage of a very small percentage of the number of people who are surviving at this, you know, at a level where a 50 cent bus fare change or 25 cent bus fare change is a significant change in their in their welfare.
And you just go, holy shit.
Politics is important work and income inequality is desperately real.
Somewhere in this town right now, there are people who are throwing their Xbox in the garbage because somebody spilled some pop on it or somebody spilled a drop of pop on it and they don't like it being sticky.
Yeah.
And, you know, and over here I'm sitting in a basement listening to these stories and it's just like, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
You know, but at the same time, like I've been thinking about Jeff Bezos a lot.
Yeah.
I know you think about Jeff Bezos.
I've been thinking about him a lot because he's a big figure here in Seattle.
And he's an important key to what's going to happen in the city.
And he kind of keeps himself at a distance.
But he has a lot of employees.
A lot of them are like good people.
The culture of Amazon is very circle the wagons.
But I don't know how much you're aware of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin project.
I don't think I know what that is.
Jeff is one of, like SpaceX and like Elon Musk, Jeff is also a space visionary.
And he is building a manned space program.
I had no idea.
A lot of people don't know because he keeps it kind of, he's not real publicity hungry about it.
He's not a showboater like Elon Musk.
But he is using his own resources to build a space capsule for normals, for regulars to go into space.
And it is pretty far along, his quiet space program.
Like far enough along that they had a launch not very long ago of like an actual rocket that they had designed.
Not a rocket that they bought from Russia, not a used rocket, but a brand new rocket that they have designed from the ground up and constructed and launched.
I feel kind of dumb that I did not know this.
You shouldn't feel dumb because they're very quiet about it.
It's a rocket that – let me just put it – let me put it in a different context.
It's a rocket that when the bottom stage is done launching the capsule, it actually parachutes back and lands with like retro rocket firing like lands on the ground.
It doesn't fall into the ocean.
It's like it returns to Earth, the rocket.
Yeah.
And the capsule has like, it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing.
Six people can ride on a, you know, and their plan is in the very near future to start allowing people to buy seats on this rocket to go up and do a like near earth orbit weightless space experience.
So here's this guy.
He owns this company.
He's, he is, he's very wealthy.
He lives in Seattle.
He's hiring a lot of people and he is also building a space program.
That's also here in, in the Seattle area.
And as you know, I am a big supporter of space exploration.
I think that's super great.
And,
And the old canard that we shouldn't pour money into NASA because all that money could go to build low-income housing, I've always felt like was a bad argument.
I understand it from a liberal point of view that it seems like there's a limited number of dollars and why would you spend it going to space when people were poor?
Yeah.
But space exploration is like at the soul of what I think we should be doing and we should also find the money to feed and house people and where that money should come from is not space exploration but all the people that have gold bathtubs.
Find a way somehow to tap into the money and the energy that is going to build gold bathtubs for people and channel that money over.
But now that I'm spending a lot of time listening to people that need an extra 25 cents a day just to ride the bus...
like the context of all this stuff and this whole conversation is just like personally changed for me.
And I still want Jeff Bezos to explore space.
I just also want to, you know, to rope everybody in all the visionaries to, to regather them into the conversation space.
around around my town in particular right and try to figure out like we have we have this energy and this exploratory energy is great but i also want to say that it's it's an equal it's equally exciting to explore the idea of no one going hungry and
and it doesn't seem as exciting it's not as glamorous you don't get a space suit for it but it is also like part of this feeling of progress you're right the part of the feeling of like we keep moving and doing better and none of these things are it's not resolved that there will always be people starving
Well, I don't want to sound cynical, but it sounds like... And again, I have no idea how somebody like that thinks.
Somebody with that kind of dough, which, of course, nobody ever feels like they have as much money as everybody thinks they do.
But in that case, I mean, that would be a rounding error.
Like, even if they look like $100,000, right?
Like, you know, maybe a day's worth of their time.
Just on appearances, like the optics of it alone, it seems like, why would you not do that?
And that is the thing...
when you're talking to 25-year-olds and they're like, well, why doesn't Jeff Bezos just pay the extra quarter for everybody?
It's like, yes.
But the number of those things
The bus fare, the housing problem, the mental health problem, right?
Like what we really need.
Every person I talk to is like, what we really need.
And you go, we really do need a better mental health system where there are, you know, we closed the asylums.
and put all the people that used to be housed in asylums back on the streets.
Yep.
And really what we should probably do is build some asylums again or go get those ones that we decommissioned before they fall into the ground and paint them and get them working again.
And now we think about them differently.
We don't just –
One flew over the cuckoo's nest them, but there are some people that need a place to be, and they're never going to be reintegrated into society.
Besides nowhere or jail.
Besides nowhere or jail, right.
Besides a doorway or jail.
And it needs to be a thing that society funds and it needs to be a comfortable, safe place.
And some of those people are going to be violent or angry or – and there need to be trained people there.
Like at every step of the way, we need so much, right?
These facilities –
Think about all the single mothers who end up homeless and they end up homeless because it's fucking hard to stay on top of the game.
And you've got two kids and all of a sudden you're living in your car and you don't even think of yourself as homeless.
You're just in between places.
You're living in your car and the kids have got to get to school and you've got to get to work and you're in your car.
And that mother isn't even letting on to her kids that she's in trouble.
She's just like, hey, we're having fun.
We're living in our car for a little while while mama figures out the next move.
And what we could do to help her or to make sure that that
you know, that, that, that, that for a couple of weeks she's doing that and then she reach it, then something else bad happens.
The car breaks down.
Right.
Or, you know, and then she really needs, there's no wiggle room.
Right.
Then she really needs help.
And when she really needs help at that point, when she's like, Oh fuck, I'm up against the wall.
She rolls into some place and they're like, sit down and fill out this form.
Now you're on a waiting list.
Right.
six months from now we'll call, you know, and it's just like, no, there's, we don't have enough wiggle room for so many people.
And, and yet we have obscene amounts of money, right?
Rich kids on Instagram is also happening simultaneous to this.
And that, that does inflame people.
And it, and, and the, and the people that would tell us that it's unrelated is,
are wrong.
It is related.
But what is in our power to do?
And I think that the era of armed revolution is in our past, the era of really of using law as a cudgel
is maybe in our past just because those rich kids on Instagram have the best lawyers you can get.
I think we're entering in an, into an era where we have to, where empathy actually is the agent and where we say, Hey,
This is part of your wealth and success.
It is ultimately an anti Tea Party argument or an anti Ayn Rand argument, which is Ayn Rand, I'm sorry.
Ayn Rand, which is that we are all in this together.
Your wealth did not come to you.
Sure, purely by your own ingenuity, but because we have provided this incubator, which is our whole culture.
And now, you know, like you say, wouldn't it be cool if in addition to building a private space station or in addition to building really cool electric cars or
we also were able to bolster the, the, the part of the, of the couch where the stuffing is coming out.
And, you know, do you start making that argument on city council or do you start making that argument on your award winning podcast?
Yeah.
Like at what point do we get enough people together into this new way of thinking that's less shouty and finger pointy and that's more just like a bunch of people standing there with compassionate looks on their faces saying, hey, we don't begrudge you your success, but –
You know, chip in.
And that doesn't mean go work for houses for humanity.
It means like chip in right here.
Well, this is the interesting question to me is what you're describing.
It sounds really sensible.
It sounds like on the face of it that there should be something.
Let's put it this way.
It's not one of those things that is a basically impossible problem to solve.
Mm hmm.
There is obviously something that can be done by somebody over some amount of time.
Let's just take that as read.
So the question is, how in your approach or your strategy or however you want to phrase it, how do you differ from the other candidates in what you would choose to do differently in order to make something like that happen?
Yeah.
The exact question that gets asked every day.
I'm so sorry.
No, it's good.
I'm trying to be more empathetic.
It is a good question.
Ultimately, the first thing I can say is no other candidate is talking about this stuff at all this way.
Because the conception is that all we have at our disposal is either that we can sue someone or
or pass a law that requires that they – and usually requires that they submit to a tax.
I mean tax is our only model.
But you could also – I mean it seems like –
Part of what you do when you bring somebody in, I'm thinking this is a little bit random, but I'm thinking, for example, when you bring people into a foundation board, you might bring somebody into a foundation board because they're a rich person and they'll theoretically give you a bunch of money.
But it could also be, more importantly, that they're good at getting money from other people through, I don't want to say connections, that's the wrong word.
But it seems like you could also be kind of a statesman who's good at making that case to people where they go, well, of course, I'd love to help with that.
And I'll get my buddies to help with that.
Right.
Bill Clinton is great at this.
Bill Gates is good at it.
But it is, you know, it's so often that what we perceive to be the problem is, I mean, Bill Gates has done incredible work providing clean water to people around the world.
He's saving tens, hundreds of thousands of lives.
It's very much less glamorous to
to build a facility in Seattle for homeless mothers who have reached the end of their rope.
There's no glamor in it except, um, except in the, in sort of a, the big small picture, which is what if we built a city that had all of that, that took care of everybody?
Yeah.
it's also probably a, uh, if I could venture, I guess it's a difference in approach or outlook or, um, composure, I guess.
If you think about, think about the people who, um, if you want to talk about entrepreneurs in particular, people who made a lot of money, you know, through grit and determination and maybe dirty dealings, whatever.
But the point is, I, you know, in the same way that there are certain kinds of investors that are only interested in angel funding, there are certain kinds, you know, I, I would imagine that for most, uh,
They're not as interested in a system of nets at the bottom of the building as they are in potentially shoring up that top floor so people can't jump or even more deeply trying to fundamentally change why somebody would want to jump off that building.
And so in that case, I wonder if it's something where you talk about that not being very glamorous.
It certainly isn't.
And it's the NIMBY stuff and all of that.
I wonder if they'd be more interested in some kind of programs that try to get at that problem, maybe not as early as childhood education, maybe not as late as a shelter, but somewhere in between, some kind of intervention type thing.
You know what I mean?
But I bet they'd be more interested in getting the problem earlier on.
Well, but that is exactly the way that we've been thinking about it for the second half of the 20th century.
And then just becomes a series of costly experiments.
Well, and just a kind of whack-a-mole.
Like, yes, education is key and is proved to keep kids out of jail later on in life.
Mm-hmm.
There's a whole other thing.
Who wants to fund quality education in Seattle schools?
Any billionaire want to step up and do that?
Hello?
Hello?
Step right up.
Are you still on the line?
The only way we have to fund Seattle schools is through a tax.
And the only way that we are allowed to apply that tax is to everybody.
And we can do it through car tabs or we can do it through property tax or we can do it –
There are only so many ways to fund it.
And the rich people have really good, excellent ways of avoiding paying their tax.
And so it falls to the middle class over and over and over.
And it would be wonderful if someone stepped forward and said, I'll fund the Seattle schools with the rounding error on my ego project over here.
And then there would be people that are like, but what about the homeless mothers?
My principle is that if we – I mean we all want 40 years from now to have our city look –
And be a certain kind of pleasant, prosperous place.
I can't imagine anybody.
Nobody would just reject that on the face of it.
No one would reject it on the face of it.
And everybody's got a different idea about how to get there.
And a lot of people are like, we just need to build taller buildings with bigger fences to keep people from jumping off.
And then there are people that are like, well, the people that are falling off that building aren't jumping.
They're getting pushed.
I'm sorry.
That was a poor analogy.
But you know what I mean?
Like slipping or whatever.
And there are a lot of technologists that do believe that the technology is just eventually going to make it impossible to be poor.
Right.
But when you look at the way that that actually works, they're assuming trickle-down economics.
They're using George Herbert Walker Bush's philosophy that a rising tide lifts all boats.
And it just is demonstrably untrue, right?
The rich are getting richer.
Right.
But I do believe that we can say, here's the city we want.
Here's the city that we want.
And this is what it should look like.
And get everybody kind of on board for some basic principles.
Forty years from now, there shouldn't be a homeless person in Seattle that has no other options.
There's always going to be somebody who's like, fuck you, I'm going to live in a garbage can.
Right?
But most people don't want to.
And a lot of the people that are living it, that are like, fuck you, I'm going to live in a garbage can.
There comes that night in November where they're like, God damn it.
This was a bad idea.
And we're such a punitive society and a moralistic one about...
about homelessness and drugs and mental illness we spend so much time saying well that single mother with her two kids should have smoked less pot in high school and done a little bit better and gone to tech school you know there's that there's that instinct we are we have in as americans to be like it's probably her fault yeah
And that judgmentalism keeps us from being able to have a real compassionate system because there's always somebody that's going to say, I don't want my tax dollars to go to mollycoddle these whores.
Yeah.
And it's just like, well, you know what?
That's really not how it is.
And the most of us here in Seattle recognize that.
And that's what you need is just the most of us.
But to get that vision of the city and then start reverse engineering the practices rather than trying to build that city by each person saying, well, here's what we need.
Here's what we need.
Here's what we need.
Get the picture first and then say, what does that look like?
That's the 40-year plan.
Now, what did that look like at 30 years?
What did that look like at 20 years?
How would we get there?
And build backwards from the goal.
And I think it will surprise us as we get like, what did that look like at 10 years?
Oh, shit.
Right.
That's what it looked like at 10 years.
And so to get to there, we have to reevaluate what we're doing now.
Right.
we can't just keep, you know, keep flopping around like a bunch of, uh, like a bunch of koi who's pond drained, uh,
We need to get out of this rut and start doing some weird and wonderful stuff now that will put us there in 10 years, which isn't a solution, but it's on the path to where we want to be in 20 years.
So that's the story that I'm trying to bring to this election, and that's what I'm trying to say about Seattle, that –
We've tried all this incremental like, well, what we need is we need to hire one more social worker to help fill out the forms at the office where you get in line for emergency housing.
And it's like, well, we need more than that.
We need to build.
We need to build.
And we need to build across a wide spectrum and we need to fund the schools as though we're going to have to keep funding the schools and not – like the way we fund Seattle schools is we pass a bond for two years as though two years from now maybe we won't have to pay for schools anymore.
In that example, if I understand what you're saying, it's like, well, how did they end up with that as the best solution?
Yes, exactly.
I mean, Harvard University figured out a long time ago that they needed an endowment.
Right.
We don't have an endowment for our public schools.
And whether that was gutted or whether it's just in this back and forth of like, oh, now we don't pay taxes.
Now we do.
This person is against it.
This person thinks the schools are full of faggots.
Like how do we go against this?
How do we depoliticize things like schools?
So that the state legislature doesn't decide that because there was one gay art teacher in Shoreline that we don't teach art anymore.
Is that even vaguely close to a real world example?
I mean why the –
Why the holy Jesus fuck don't we have money for schools in America?
Why are those things tied to car tabs?
It's bonkers, particularly bonkers when you think that the state of California is subsidizing
the water for a bunch of raspberry farmers and the city of Seattle has two, three billion dollars on tap to build a tunnel under the city that will be obsolete before the paint is dry.
Right.
That must be frustrating.
It's really great.
But if you put three billion dollars in an endowment fund and never touched the principle and just used the interest to pay for
Some facet of, I mean, it wouldn't pay for all the schools, but it would sure as shit go a long way to funding the schools in perpetuity.
Right.
But nobody's thinking about that.
And so every year it's like, oh shit, we don't have any money for libraries or schools.
That's why the Bezos part of it kind of surprises me because I don't know what I'm thinking of in particular, but I'm remembering a few years back when it seemed very surprising to me to hear about how many leaders at big companies were speaking openly about –
what the achievement gap in america and that basically they realized that it was getting harder to i don't know i want to say this happened 20 years ago but i could be remembering wrong but that basically it was it was obviously getting harder to hire into certain kinds of high-tech careers that they were already seeing that it was getting harder and they were having to do more stuff like try and hire people from overseas and i feel like i remember a lot of people saying hey look we need to invest in these kinds of careers for people who aren't even in school yet
Like these are the kinds of systems like that kind of I remember first hearing that thinking, wow, that is really forward thinking and really abstract in a lot of ways.
No direct benefits to any given company.
No ROI.
They could put on a form about that.
Whereas somebody like Jeff Bezos, I don't think he's going anywhere.
I think he's or maybe Costco, any of those companies, Starbucks, that are so associated with that area.
It seems like kind of a no brainer.
I'm sure they give out bottled water and T-shirts and balloons at festivals and stuff, but it just seems like such a no-brainer to invest in the community as a thing, let alone trying to make a community that would be a desirable place for people to move.
Agreed.
It seems like there's like half a dozen reasons why you would want to find the budget even just to provide the nice things, let alone the essential things.
Well, and that is assuming that...
And it's an assumption that I think most of the people making this argument make, which is the assumption that our schools are basically trade schools, right?
Just making the economic impact argument that if we have better schools, that makes better employees for Amazon.
Right.
That alone.
That's a blunt instrument, but it's a pretty, I'll take it.
Yeah, right.
That alone is a reason for Costco or Microsoft or Vulcan or Starbucks or Amazon to take an interest in Seattle public schools.
Then you get the opportunity, I mean, way above that, a thousand miles above that is the opportunity to be a true person.
uh benefactor and say schools need art programs schools need poetry schools need dance schools you know we're not just using schools as a training program for people to work in assembly scenarios or coding scenarios with coding is being the modern assembly um
But we want our schools to create citizens because those are the people who are going to really advance the ball in 30 years.
And that's an argument that I think a lot of capitalists would be really interested in.
It just doesn't have – it's just much easier to show up at the job fair with a bunch of balloons than
and say you know apply for a job as a coder here and you know and then maybe you'll get a chance to join our program where we are uh we're building windmills in south america it just feels like winds all around because you know um gosh i don't want to get into san francisco but you know just thinking about my friend you are already in to san francisco
I know, but we were – I was just talking with my wife about this and how – I don't know.
The funny thing about a bubble is that the longer the bubble sticks around and the bigger the bubble gets –
The irony is that the bubble is not actually getting stronger.
The bubble is getting weaker as it gets bigger.
And that's true for soap bubbles and it's true for San Francisco bubbles.
The bigger it gets, the more we feel the huge impact of this bubble here.
I mean, it's bad.
I don't want to go into too much, but it's bad here.
It's really, really – it's gross.
Supernova.
There's a lot of gross stuff going on right now in San Francisco because everybody wants to get in on this growing bubble thing.
But again, I'm not an economician, but I think as that bubble gets bigger, it does become a lot easier to burst.
And you don't have to look more than five or six years in the past to see what happened in a bubble, which is that everybody thought the housing prices were going to go up and up and up without regard to how those loans were being made and whether people should have them.
And look, you know, look what happened there.
So, I mean, how long is it going to be here before you got a bunch of people suddenly – and I'm not even talking about the earthquake scenario.
I'm just talking about your basic economic tip where, boop, and suddenly the bubble's not there.
And there's a bunch of people with leases and mortgages on places that are suddenly within, say, six months, you know, 30% over market value, 50% over market value.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And that's –
it's the the scary part in some ways is you see so much destruction so many businesses that have been and families and artists and people who've been in town for dozens of years just going away because somebody else needs that space go go go go go shutting down all these bars because these condos moved in here now there's all this stuff and like each one of those little things in uh independent of one another is not like a huge momentous thing like any tragedy it doesn't all happen in one day but you know that really starts to add up until there's going to be a point i think where more and more people are going to go i
I'm not really sure I want to live there, and it's going to get super expensive until the day.
It doesn't get expensive, and then we're going to have a cultural wasteland where everything was a little bit overpriced a few months ago, and now what the fuck are we going to do?
It's almost like when Walmart moves out of town.
It's like first they shut down every place, then Walmart moves, and then you got nothing.
That's terrifying to me, that people are coming in here and treating it a little bit like a gold rush town without necessarily investing much in what would keep this place sustainable.
and desirable for people.
And we've talked about this before, but this is the moment in world history, I guess, where we are up against the fact that a pure market
is just a thought technology, right?
Right, right, right.
And the history of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were histories of political ideologies that attempted to reign in and govern politics.
market mercantilism and we saw a lot of different attempts to do it and you know unfortunately some of those attempts were very ideological they came at a time when technology allowed people you know to literally stamp numbers on other people and mass murder them in conjunction with market reforms
And that really discredited a lot of the ideology.
And some of that ideology was way up in the sky and it did not reflect the actual truth of people.
But it doesn't mean that the end result is that we just accept that market is the God.
And people keep saying to me, like, well, what are you going to – I mean –
It's the market.
You can't – people want to come in.
They want to buy.
You can't stop them.
And it's like the market is a lot more complex than that and it is governable.
Well, yeah.
I mean it seems a little bit, Ayn Rand, and a little bit intellectually flabby to just say, well, supply and demand are these natural forces in the world.
Because – Fucking hella.
Hella, yes.
Uh, cause there's a lot more to it than that.
I saw an article in the paper, uh, in the last six months about it's become, um, very easy.
I don't know.
I don't know why I always think about parking because, you know, the number of cars in San Francisco versus the number of spaces is just, is completely bananas.
And right now there are, there, it's pretty easy.
Like you can walk down the big street near my house and see almost every, not almost every car, but probably a third to half of the cars have a disabled permit.
If you have a disabled permit, you get to park in a meter for free.
Mm-hmm.
It's very desirable.
And last I heard, the number of disabled permits that have been given out versus the number of spaces in the city, there's approximately twice as many just disabled permits.
No way.
I think that was accurate.
Here's another fun one.
My wife just changed jobs.
She's gone back to like a...
a real full-time career.
And so she's going to this new, she's working at this, the nice new campus on, uh, in town, but she found out that, and of course it's, it's impossible to park, you know, you, you, you could take Muni, but then that's going to be an hour and a half to two hours.
So she drives a lot and that, that might be 30 bucks a day.
She found out that at the main campus where the hospital is for UCSF, you know what the waiting list is for employee parking?
25 years.
Wow.
So there's two things that are funny about that.
One thing that's funny about that is that it's a fucking 25-year waiting list to get a parking permit.
But then what makes that extra funny?
There's still people adding their name to that list.
That's the market.
There's the market for you.
Yeah.
Is that sane?
It's so good.
Well, and as I keep saying up here, and it's true of San Francisco, right?
From the day that San Francisco was founded until the last 10 years, you could be a working class person and live almost anywhere.
I mean, you know, there are a few neighborhoods you couldn't live in.
But for the most part, you could live in downtown San Francisco as a working class person.
Yeah.
And you could do that all the way through until just recently.
And in Seattle, that's been true until just 5, 10 years ago.
You could be a working class person and choose any neighborhood you wanted to live in and live there.
And so in the 150 plus years that Seattle's been a city, for us to say, well...
In the last five years, you can't be a working-class person and live anywhere in the city.
And that's the new normal, and that's just how it is.
That's just how markets work.
Sorry.
It's the market, John.
Sorry.
Next.
That's just how it is.
I mean, what are you, some kind of communist?
What are you?
You want to boop-a-derp-a-derp like the markets?
And that's how it is.
I'm John.
I want to change natural law.
Blah, blah, blah.
Figure something else out because you can't do anything about that.
And it's like one of those mentalities is crazy.
And I don't think it is that you should be able to live anywhere in Seattle still as we have always been able to do.
I don't think that that is the crazy one.
I think the crazy one is that if you're a working class person, you should have to drive for 45 minutes and pay $30 a day in parking because what we've decided now is that the market has just determined that Seattle land is worth more than diamonds.
And the reason for that is that
That's where people – that's because people want to walk to – people who have $250,000 a year jobs want to walk to work.
It's like that is good but we didn't do very good planning.
And planning is the key and a sense that –
that none of these things are set in stone.
Capitalism did not win any epic battle of ideologies so that it is just unassailable from here on out.
And it has its acolytes who are going to argue for it, and they will call you a communist if you try and talk about any kind of regulation.
And there are people who believe that governments are the soul of evil,
But the fact is this is an ongoing process.
We're still trying to navigate how to be human beings and govern ourselves.
And it's ongoing and we're in an exciting moment and the pressure that's being put on us by this
by this insanity is the pressure that's going to develop new thinking and that should be always exciting to us you know yeah new thinking and the people in san francisco and new york city and and seattle who are realizing like
My house was worth $200,000 in 2002.
Then it was worth $500,000 in 2007.
That seems crazy.
Yeah.
Then it was worth $198,000 in 2007 and a half, which seems crazy.
And now it's worth $600,000 in 2015.
And I'm starting to see a pattern, which is that that is crazy.
Yep.
And so what do you do?
Do you lay down in your bathtub and eat a meatball sandwich?
Or do you run for fucking city council?
Yeah.
I agree.
I try to explain this to my kid.
She has drills at school.
Oh, boy.
Welcome to the 2010s.
She has drills like, you mean earthquake drills?
No, they literally give them drills.
No.
Yeah, they have different kinds of drills.
You get fire drills.
You know what they have?
They have lockdown drills.
Can you believe that?
for a gun yep in case there's like a school lockdown but the point is like i you know you got to try to explain to a kid like i'm trying to explain look i understand that you have made a great chinese wall of stuffed animals across your room and that that's a thing that you don't want to disturb but like it's important for you to leave a space in there so because if there's a fire i don't want to scare you here but if there's a fire you're going to want to be able to get out of the house without tripping on a bear
And it's very difficult to explain why we have to practice these things, like a fire drill or any of that stuff.
Why we have to practice them in moments of quiet and repose, do it until it starts to feel like it's not going to be a panic.
Because when the actual fire happens, you don't have time to think.
Mm-hmm.
The poor analogy I'm trying to make here is that the problem is now we're in the middle of a blaze in our town.
It sounds like to some extent in your town.
It's coming.
Well, it's kind of too late to figure out what this fire strategy is because now we just need to focus on putting out the blazes.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, in San Francisco, you can't even live in Oakland anymore.
Right.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.
She's my wife was talking because it certainly sure thought about.
And yeah, she's like, oh, it's actually not too bad.
You know, it's just only like it's like a two hour BART trip.
Pretty much.
It's like, wow.
Talk about quality of life.
Yeah.
No, no, it's pretty bad.
I'm anxious to see, I'm anxious to see how this continues to evolve and it's going pretty fast.
I just saw on your Twitter, we shouldn't talk about this probably, you raised good money it looks like.
Oh, in my campaign.
Yeah, now I'm failing on every count here.
Your Vilt Roderick Twitter account just retweeted something that says you surpassed your competitor in fundraising.
Oh, no, not the big guy.
Oh, this is the little guy.
Yeah, the big guy's got tons and tons of money because he's got... Tons of money.
Tons of money because he has actually fewer contributors than we do, but his contributors all give $700.
Right, right, right.
Which is the maximum.
And our contributors, a lot of them, give $25 and that's what they can afford and that is amazing.
But it makes fundraising more of a challenge.
And the thing is, I'm a huge supporter of campaign finance reform.
And now I see how much better it would be even in something as small as a city council race, let alone imagining campaign finance reform on a national scale.
like a senate race what a difference that would make you know think about the million plus dollars you have to raise and every dollar you take from somebody they hand it to you and look you in the eye and go you're not going to fuck me later when i need you to change the law for my bulldozer company are you and you know you see it every day like oh jesus uh no sir thank you know you've got that you've got half the check in your hand and he's like you know
One day I'm going to ask you for a favor.
And they may not be on this day.
Look what they did to my beautiful boy.
Do you seek a lot of help from morticians?
You probably grant a lot of favors to morticians.
You know how this business works.
You come to my daughter's wedding and you ask me for this.
I thought it was like Marlon Brando.
It sounds like your dad.
It's the only one I know.
You know, my dad and Marlon Brando once had a confrontation.
What?
Can you tell it?
Well... Well, I mean, they're both, you know, the statute of limitations has run out, right?
It's true.
It's true.
Like in person?
An in-person confrontation over...
Over a lady.
You are shitting me.
I'm not.
I'm not shitting you.
What era?
In the 1950s.
Whoa.
So my dad was an actor.
That was one of his, like...
You know, my dad always wanted to be, you know, one of the bohemians.
Yeah.
And was.
But in the 50s, when he was lawyering and drinking, he also was a member of a theater group in Seattle called the Cirque Theater that did productions in the round.
And...
In the 50s, he was doing a play at the Cirque and a young actress by the name of Rita Moreno.
What?
Was his co-star in a play.
And my dad and Rita Moreno had a little, some sort of little, you know, time.
Yeah.
wow and uh one night uh my dad came out of the theater with rita moreno and marlon brando was waiting in the shadows waiting in the in the bushes as my dad described it uh and he and rita moreno were already acquainted
and we're also having a, um, a fair decor.
Hmm.
Uh, this is, you know, early fifties and they had a, uh, they had a little bit of a, you know, a confrontation in the bushes.
Didn't, you know, no, no, no one raised a fist.
It was just like,
and my dad went you know and it was like uh and then uh you know i think that she uh saw that marlon brando was of the two of them the one that was probably oh man your dad had to live with that suave her
I mean, speaking as someone who has had similar sorts of experiences.
You've been in the bushes.
I've been in the bushes, not with Marlon Brando, but with other younger Brandos.
You know, you take that away.
You walk away with that.
You realize like, you know, we're all just a couple of kisses away from Kevin Bacon.
You know, there's nothing that really special about other people.
It's just that some of them are really more beautiful and talented.
And, you know, how do you... I mean, basically how you...
How you deal with that information, how you shoulder that burden determines your course in life.
I mean, my dad could have dived into those bushes.
He could have grabbed Martin Brando around the ankles and said, take me with you.
I'll be your Carl Malden.