Ep. 155: "Crucibility"
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Hello.
Hey, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going okay.
How are you going?
John, the two of us need look no more.
Okay, I prepared that.
It wasn't very good, but I had something prepared.
I liked it.
I liked it.
You're singing to a rat.
A rat distortion pedal, or you are literally singing to a rat right now?
I never understood the filter knob.
Oh, it's just a... Is that a mid-pass?
Is that a mid-pass?
High pass.
High pass, I think.
Yeah, I think that was Michael Jackson's hit about the rat from that movie.
Oh, sure.
Algernon.
Yep.
Flowers for Ben Algernon.
Yeah, I loved that movie.
It's about the death of a salesman in many ways.
I've always found that it was a long day's journey into night.
Yes, it was an Ibsen of a dollhouse.
Let's keep going.
Come on.
I wrote a song.
That's right.
It is a hot L Baltimore.
It is a green light over East Egg.
You know, I prepared wrong.
I should have spent more time on Wikipedia.
You wrote a song.
You wrote a song?
It is a short happy life of Francis McComber.
All unhappy podcasts are different.
I wrote a song once called A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Was it a pun?
Was it like night as in like jousting?
That would have been, you know, that's more of a pollen story.
That could be a porno, Long Day's.
Night Slash.
Long Day's Journey.
I'm trying to work it out.
You know who's really good at that pun game is Ken Jennings.
Oh, gosh.
I bet he's insufferable.
He's really something.
I bet he's a guy who works on the railroad.
His name is Long Day.
Long Day.
Oh, hello.
It's a gay night porn thing.
It's got time shifting, maybe some Star Trek, and you have a journey in the night.
Long Day, and it's spelled D-A-I.
Long Day.
Long Day.
Yeah, my long day's journey into night song came from the era where I was writing pretty epic, but very precious songs.
There wasn't any.
It didn't have the kind of.
light-hearted uh uh like grace that my later work did well it's certainly graceful uh were you telling that story in a kind of proggy way through the music or was it through the lyrics good question good question because i don't think of you as you're a great lyricist but you seem like an uncomfortable lyricist oh interesting tell me more
Well, it seems to me that you, I mean, are you mad at me that I said that?
No, no, no, not at all.
I always love it.
I always love thoughtful, like thoughtful commentary on my work, you know, because even...
what happens right you you go online you read fans who are writing profusely and you read critics who are writing um insufferably often you know where they've listened to like the first 30 seconds of every song one time you hate that you hate that so much and um and so somebody that is like really familiar with your work and also has like an interesting comment on it that's i love that
Well, I'm happy to join.
I would also like to just say thank you to Roderick Nation, all the people who suggested campaign slogans based on lines from your songs.
How fun was that?
John Roderick's throwing more than shapes.
Really good.
Well, no, some of this is genetic and some of this is personal in terms of what sort of essay I'm writing here.
Well, before I knew you as a dude, I enjoyed your music and listened to it a lot.
But then as I got to know you, first of all, I came to realize that I made that joke a minute ago, but when you listen to music,
You like to be immersed in it.
You don't do other stuff.
You're not doing laundry while you're listening to music generally, right?
Isn't that a thing?
Like you don't listen in the car.
And as somebody who has been privy to some of your tracks before their release, I know that you appreciate people to listen to them with just listening to them all the way through, please, with headphones and don't fast forward.
But you were saying that there was something about me that made you feel like I was an uncomfortable lyricist, and that is very interesting.
Well, it's funny because – and there may be an element of a crucible here, but you – I mean you write great pop songs and you have a lot of – I don't know.
I just – I love the structure of your songs and the way that they work and I love the fruity parts and I love the complicated parts and the changes.
But it seems like especially in that – I just get the feeling that you end up writing a lot of lyrics –
later in the process you maybe maybe maybe you got a line i don't know but it seems like even that little documentary like didn't you write like that wasn't car parts that was an old song but aren't there songs that are pretty popular of yours that you kind of wrote in the studio oh yeah several like the um stuff from uh putting the days to bed
Well, definitely the song Hindsight, I wrote largely in the studio, largely in the last hour.
And Scared Straight, I wrote in the studio.
You came up with those lines, like just writing in the studio?
This is one of my major work problems, is that in the crucible, in the pressure cooker, I...
I produce, but I don't like to be in the pressure cooker.
It's not a happy place to be, and I can see it coming, and I don't want that to happen either.
That's why I spend so much time trying to devise a way to stop time, stop the progress of time so that I can just have four more hours.
And knowing that if I could do that, I would just squander that four hours just like I squandered the four hours previously.
Leading up to this moment where I spent that four hours thinking about how I could stop time.
And so when I finally get in that crucible, I do make things there.
And part of the reason that there was never a fifth long Winters record is that I very deliberately and through methodical process...
eliminated all the corners that anybody could put me in.
I just eliminated out of my life all of the ways I didn't need other people's money anymore.
I didn't need other people's approval anymore.
I moved out of my mom's house so she couldn't
Wag her spatula at me and tell me to get off the couch.
And, you know, and I found that having now I was in a round room and nobody could corner me.
And that is the, you know, that is, that's very telling.
I think about it all the time.
I thought about it this morning.
I think about it in the context of this, the campaign, too.
Like, I'm in a corner every day now.
And, yeah, it's...
You and I have both experienced this thing where we feel like on the one hand, it's good to have external pressure.
On the other hand, we don't want external pressure.
But for me, like external pressure is a real, it is an important component.
It's a motivator.
and thinking about the you think about we use that phrase the crucible of the studio um the other thing is that you're paying to be there there's extra crucibility because because now you you're paying everybody there you're paying tucker you're paying whoever for you to sit there and feel bad i think generally people don't like having to pay to feel bad about things this is why i don't subscribe to magazines anymore i don't want to pay to feel guilty about the new york times
You're paying and the feeling that this is your last chance.
If you don't get this done now, this is in some ways your last chance.
You're going to end up...
not not only not getting this done but then you this dream is over and um you know and that was another thing that i got to the i kind of rounded that corner off too because it was evident that i did have a little time my career wasn't going to be over if i took another week or took another two weeks and then
Twitter and the internet and, you know, podcasting and all the other things came in.
And they also had, you know, there were rewards to those things.
Like my career, there were a lot of musicians that were at my level in 2006 or 2007 that kept making music but did not, but their careers didn't really continue.
Yeah.
Because times change.
Business, man.
But I jumped from one ice flow to the next and jumped to another ice flow and another.
And some of that was running from the corner, but it all produced...
new exciting things.
And so, yeah, we talk about this all the time and I think about it all the time.
I'm utterly fascinated by this topic and to get back to what you're actually talking about.
To me, it's such a dark art to try to understand, well, first of all, why anybody wants to make anything really differs a lot from person to person.
And whether that it differs in terms of the, I despise that word in that context, motivation or inspiration, but what you think you'll get out of having done it
And it's one of those weird things where you can look at somebody who's very prolific and successful and it is a little like Anna Karenina where you can look at somebody who's doing it great and they're having a great time and people are enjoying what they do.
And they're just, you know, I have friends like this who are just, they just write all the time.
Look at that John Scalzi guy.
Like he's such a cool guy, such a nice guy, so prolific and so like Johnny on the spot to get involved in anything.
I really feel like I learned a lot by being around that guy on the cruise.
He was really actually inspiring to me.
But look at somebody like that.
Of course, you're going to kill him because it's super frustrating that they get so much done.
It's easy enough to look at somebody where everything is clicking on all cylinders and go, well, obviously, that's the way to do it.
But there's like...
10,000 ways to not do it, and there's many multiple ways to not do it, and it's almost impossible sometimes to understand why you're not functioning at a tenth of the level of somebody else.
And part of that could be pressure, and I think, of course, the obvious, the elephant in the room is the pressure you start to put on yourself, because now you make – one makes an impossible situation more impossible by constantly –
Raising the bar, moving the bar, hiding the bar.
And then that just creates self-doubt and anxiety and all the other kinds of stuff that make you utterly uninterested in even attempting something.
Because you feel like – and I'm speaking for myself as somebody who's getting later into life.
This is – of all the things I'm morose about, this is not the top of the list.
But one thing I do think about is, well, what if I do make something and it's not what everybody was expecting?
And now they're disappointed and I've wasted my time and why did I bother in the first place?
I think that's kind of a common feeling.
Yeah, I think so, too.
I think so, too.
And definitely a feeling I share.
I mean, I'm talking about artists and art makers all the time now because that is, you know, that's the place I'm coming from as I'm talking to the city, right?
And I keep saying, like, you don't need...
They're not a unified group of people that all work the same way.
And a lot of them don't want your attention.
They just need – they need to be left alone.
They need to live in run-down places.
They need to – that's part of their thing.
That was definitely part of my process and my thing.
And how do you convince a city to preserve –
that look to people driving by in their Teslas like abandoned or decaying warehouses that could be replaced with big, bright, shiny things.
And the idea that in those dark places is where the culture of 10 years from now is being germinated.
Right.
And those spaces are actually like key elements of any real city.
Right.
And if you think of them just as underused property – and the problem is there's no way to do an economic impact statement about –
About those spaces and that kind of mental space, right?
Oh, God, yeah.
You know, this is just occurring to me as an emerging thought technology.
But if you think about the role of – for now it's limited to artists.
But limited to the role of artists in a city, what their role ends up being in the city is very –
if you have true artists as in people who are not just, not just people who are making, you know, are successful at making seashell art that people put in hotels, but people who are actually exploring, uh, new ideas and new approaches and maybe aren't successful quote unquote yet.
I, I feel like there's an analogy to be made where, uh,
artists are in some ways the city's children.
No, not in terms of maturity, but well, you know, not in strictly speaking, but in the sense of like, you know, if you're a parent, like the dumbest thing that you can do is to constantly expect your kid to be a grownup when they're not.
I mean, and there's so many ways you can fuck that up every day for 20 years, but you know what I mean?
Like it really is helpful to understand that.
Well, you know, at this kid's level of development, this is what they're capable of.
This is what they're maybe capable of.
This is what they're,
should be more capable of but you wouldn't ever expect your kid to like come home after school and write a novel in a day because that wouldn't but but we don't and a sane person does not expect that you certainly don't expect your kid to be profitable you understand that your kid is is a cost center rather than a than a profit center
My daughter can't even manage to go down to the corner store and get me cigarettes.
Every day, I'm like, it's simple.
You write it on her hand?
It's simple.
Americans.
She can't figure it out.
But we're, I mean, any sane person, this is a strange analogy, but go with me.
Any sane person would have those reasonable expectations and say, plus, you know...
you're kind of nice to have around.
And I'm very excited to be here to watch you become a more interesting person and to have a future that I could have absolutely no way to even fathom or predict, right?
So, you going with me on this?
And then, but with the city, we expect...
It's like we're interested in the artists once they're successful.
And in the New York Times, we're not as interested in the artists when they're just finding their way.
But that attracts a lot of people to a town, places where you've got an inexpensive place to live to kind of figure out a thing that you're doing.
But we don't treat them like we don't guard that like we would a space for kids.
We treat them like dirty hippies who need to have their homes turned into places where people who work at startups will live.
The next artist is never popular.
You know, the last artist is always, you know, the one that people recognize is like, wow, he started from nothing and he's there, you know, he or she now is enormously popular and isn't that an amazing, uplifting story?
And then the next artist is always the
is always back to square one, right?
I mean, there are people in the art curatorial world that are out there digging in the dirt, looking for the next big thing.
But for the most part, in terms of the way a city thinks, it has no provision for the fact that
hard scrabble is the, that is the pool where ideas are really generated.
And, you know, the, the, the mountain view Cupertino idea that you build a, you build a tower and you fill it with young people from Stanford.
And that's where the ideas are going to come from is one, is it, is like one vision of the future, right?
But traditionally, all the real ideas that push progress come from people that are in a corner and in that crucible.
And then they have that flash that comes partly because they're under pressure.
And just being under pressure to make $100 million before you're 26 is not really creative pressure.
That's purely just – there's the self-motivated component, but then it's just competition.
You're just trying to get there faster.
It's just ego pressure and that's why we have – that's why the internet economy is based so much on let's take that one idea that somebody once had and put a cat on it.
Or, you know, let's modify this idea and modify it again and just keep, like, grinding.
And, you know, it's not really moving the civilization ball forward.
It's just trying to move the profit ball around.
Right.
I mean, on the way into town today, I saw two interesting things.
I'm driving in and there's a – I'm driving past Boeing Field and there's a private jet.
parked on the tarmac, and it is painted in basically tribal tattoo graphics.
And I'm like, that's, you know, like Mike Tyson face tattoo style.
Like an Aboriginal kind of.
Yeah, Polynesian, Neo-Polynesian tattoo graphical stuff, but with no real ethnic aspect.
It's been, you know, it's been taken out of context, modified enough that it just looks like pointy lines.
But that's where it's coming from.
And so I'm looking at it and I'm like, is this some kind of Red Bull thing or something?
And then on the engine written in Gothic script, so you see where we're going now.
Oh, no.
There's a Latin phrase.
that's basically like Ipsum Dolor or, uh, you know, like literally, I don't remember what it sounds like vice magazine, but you know, even vice has enough self-awareness to, if they were going to make that joke, it would have, it would have had one other element, like a, like a, like a silver skull and crossbones or something.
But this was clearly somebody, some person who got rich and,
and had a like a maxim magazine or a lad mag uh aesthetic and now all the money in the world and this was not a small jet either you know it was a it's not it wasn't a huge one but like a medium size like a gulf stream yeah somewhere in the citation gulf stream zone and
And this was their choice, right?
This is like, I've got my own jet and I'm going to make it look badass.
It's like a giant skateboard.
Badass.
And you just know when you got on board, it was just going to be like it was going to be like being inside the hat of the guy from Jam Iroquois.
Yeah.
Right.
I know exactly what you mean.
Right.
You just climb in that like fake fur hat and I'm just, I'm driving past and I'm just like, you know, that's exactly, that's exactly the thing.
Right.
I mean, I was, I was thinking about, I woke up this morning singing, I'd like to buy the world a Coke.
And I thought about it and I'm like, I used to love that song.
It's a really nice song.
And I realized like,
Well, Cokes are expensive in America, but they're not very expensive around the world.
But let's assume that you can buy like over the course of the earth.
The average price of a Coke, let's just say is 50 cents.
And I think that's way higher.
I think that's way too high.
I think you could probably get if you if you like aggregated the cost of Coke around the world, Coke is probably three cents a cup.
But let's say it's 50 cents.
So there are actually people, a handful, but lots of people, lots of a handful, who could literally buy the world a Coke.
They could buy a Coke for every person in the world and pay for the logistics to supply that Coke to every person in the world.
That's pretty astonishing.
Right there are people in Seattle who could buy the world a Coke.
Oh my God.
So anyway, I'm driving past this airplane and I'm like, and what did this guy do?
It's hard to know whether he is an internet entrepreneur who...
who has who's just broadcasting this aesthetic because he's a badass or whether he's some kind of actual like he owns oakley sunglasses and this branding is sort of part of his overall brand of like badassitude and i'm just going i'm shaking my head and then i pass a little one of those little sprint cars coming the other way
And it has the logo of a company across the hood of the car.
And the logo is something like Graffiti Be Gone.
And it's sort of a brand new car and a startup company who, just from the name, I have to assume, is...
is selling this service, get out there and really, like, really finally get on top of this plague of graffiti that's happening, that's sweeping the world, that's causing our cities to be so uninhabitable.
And it's like the aesthetic of this guy's airplane is,
And what these people in this little car are imagining is the real trouble here, the broken windows syndrome.
And there's just no awareness that like –
Graffiti artists are exactly the people who are backed into a corner and then produce something at their best.
The best graffiti work is up there with the best art.
And the worst graffiti art is still speaking in a language that most people don't understand.
Don't recognize it as a language, don't understand what's happening.
But there's a whole philosophy behind it of reclaiming the brutalism of the concrete public space.
We've acquiesced to most of our public space being...
Just bare concrete walls.
I'm talking about under freeway passes and, you know, there's so much space in the city that we just stood idly by while big, you know, like big infrastructure determined that what we were going to look at was gray concrete.
And as you're driving around, it's just like you're in a world of gray concrete and that's the, that is an aesthetic of,
And it's an aesthetic that is practical, but it's still a powerful aesthetic.
And graffiti has a whole philosophy or a whole... It's ideological in a way.
We're reclaiming that space with color at the very least.
And here these guys are puttering along in their car.
Graffiti be gone.
And I'm sure that what they're doing is going to businesses who have had their front doors tagged and mitigating that.
But...
And I'm just thinking about this guy sitting in his Jamiracoy plane.
And he's probably on a gold cell phone.
And he's probably talking to a graffiti artist about putting up a piece on the wall of his concrete loft style piece.
office space down in the Mission in San Francisco.
I'm presuming this guy lives in San Francisco.
Sure.
I think I take that as read.
I would like for you potentially to write the song about this, but I think I'd really like the late Harry Chapin to write.
Yes.
With a little twist at the end.
See, he is not an uncomfortable lyricist.
He would dive right in.
He knows how to tug at your heartstrings.
It would be like an O. Henry component to it.
They'd realize that they were like, I don't know, maybe they're twins separated at birth.
The graffiti guy and the playing guy.
Oh, hello.
See, there's a twist.
There's a twist to it.
I just got chills.
The cat's in the cradle and he's got his spray paint can and the little boy blue in his... Tag on the door.
When you're coming home.
When you're coming home, Jamiroquai.
The reason that I was so enthralled by Long Day's Journey Into Night was that, you know, that play came out in the early 40s.
Really?
But it takes place earlier, right?
yeah it takes place like it's eugene o'neill's childhood right right right but you know it was like it was that it was that really fruitful period of americans like letters uh oh yeah middle in the middle of the century the modern age man that's right and and that so when i think about that like
My dad was 21, let's say.
My uncle Jack was 17.
And that play landed.
And both of those guys, my dad and his brother, both told me many times that that play described their family and described their household.
Yeah.
in a way that no other worked before or since.
And they both identified so strongly with it.
And I feel like my Uncle Jack has been trying to write his version of A Long Day's Journey Into Night his whole life.
He sends me drafts of plays that he has been working on about his childhood.
He's in his late 80s now.
Oh, God, that's so sad.
Well, because those guys were trying to make sense of the world they grew up in.
And this was a...
one of those great moments where a work of art landed and it helped.
It helped my, you know, it helped my dad.
It becomes a little like a catharsis because, I mean, in like a classical sense where this is an instrument for, I mean, I think anytime you have something that comes along that puts a name or a story onto something you didn't think had a name or a story where you go, oh, wow, I really see myself in this.
And you, you know what I mean?
Catharsis.
Yeah, and I feel like they felt really alone and isolated growing up in the sense that they were living in a middle-class community where their friends didn't have these problems.
That's a little bit of everybody's problem, right?
You never know what is happening behind closed doors in your friends' houses.
But here they saw their story writ large, and I think it changed them both.
And so when I was 21 and trying to understand my own life, I read that play and cast my father and my uncle in it, and it helped me.
It's like a work of art that...
That has kind of started to be threaded into my family's sense of itself.
And so I'm always, you know, I recognize it as more than just a, like a seminal work.
It's, you know, there's a personal element to it because my...
grandfather wasn't able to write his own story, and my dad never wrote that story, and my uncle has tried.
We lean on artists for so much, and they do so much, and it's never a thing that you can properly...
put a price on it.
That's a cliché to say, but it's something I'm thinking about all the time.
We have gone so far in that direction of trying to figure out, well, what's the value?
of Angry Birds.
The value of Angry Birds is... How many people downloaded it?
How many people buy it?
Yeah.
And that is reckoned to be over a billion dollars.
And the value of Eugene O'Neill...
Or the value of Mick Jagger even, you know, is reckoned to be, I mean Mick Jagger is one of the richest rock stars in Britain with a network worth of $200 million or something.
which is one-fifth of the value of Angry Birds.
I don't even care if your numbers are right.
That's such a great statistic.
I'm going to use that.
It takes all five members of the Rolling Stones to equal Angry Birds.
They still don't reach it.
The other guys, I mean, I think Keith Richards is worth less because he had to spend all that money getting his blood replaced multiple times.
And then the other guys get a day rate.
Yeah, they're just on salary.
But the collected work of Eugene O'Neill has a value in our culture of, I can only imagine, a couple million dollars, a few million dollars, a handful of millions of dollars spread over all his inheritors.
Yeah.
And so that's hard for me as I go out into the city and say, yes, we need to build transit.
Absolutely, we need to build affordable housing.
Absolutely, we need to provide clean water and work for an equitable city.
But how do you also put a value on
On the intangible things that make a place special and that make us want to stay alive and that make us want to, you know, that help us live in love and live.
And without being able to attach a value to it, how can you advocate for it?
How can you put it up against something else that is clamoring for those same resources?
Even if those resources are just let's leave this space alone or let's leave these people alone.
It's a real tangle and a lot of people would say – Just to clarify, do you feel like you get implicit pushback because you don't have like an economic white paper on the value of artists, you know, 2001 to 2011 or something?
Well, and the thing is you could make – I mean there are lots of people who want to make the argument that like artists bring it.
They stick out their Clinton thumb and start wagging it and say Clinton – I'm sorry, not Clinton.
But artists have brought in over $274.6 million into Seattle's economy since March of 2011.
That's like going into a – that's showing up at a gunfight with a knife.
That's not going to – that argument is not going to fly.
Well, no, the argument, I mean, I feel like that argument does fly because people love to hear numbers.
Okay.
And they nod and they go, oh, yes, it is.
It's an industry equivalent to the industry of chroming hubcaps and pipe and bumpers.
But you can package it.
The numbers are what enables it to be packaged into something that can be easily explained and understood.
Right, right.
But...
But what you're talking about there is the last artist, right?
The people that made stuff that generated money and we recognize their value and we go, oh, the last artists made $250 million for Seattle.
That's what we do support them.
But I'm always talking about the next artists have made nothing.
And you can't – they've made no money for you yet and you can't gauge their value by their potential money.
Some of the best artists never make any money and we only recognize their value later.
But you can't go into Seattle Public Schools and say – and think of arts education as job training.
Right?
Which is how a lot of people think about it.
Yeah, when that resource constraint starts to really tighten, it's not a happy thing, but a somewhat natural thing to go, well, you know, we got these tests.
And there's not a test on, you know, Brock and Picasso.
There is a test on this specific set of mathematics.
Jobs, jobs, jobs.
Well, and what's crazy is, for me...
Like the idea of teaching math because it will get you a good job is, I think, like a disgusting undervaluing of the importance of learning math.
Yeah.
Well, when that becomes – I mean when that becomes the criteria, which it is a lot of the time, setting apart the testing stuff, when you start getting into the like whether this gets you a job thing, you start to really sour a lot of what makes education good in the first place.
And I'm not just saying that as a liberal arts fruit.
But just even any of the intrinsic reasons why you might want to be a more rounded, educated, and exposed to the world person starts to fall away if that's your bar.
Well, and you think about what is math?
I mean, the... It's a trade.
You know, it's a trade.
Computer maths are.
Computer maths are a trade, yeah.
But math, I mean, the many atheists listening to our program who live in Brandenburg or somewhere...
around Lake Balaton in Hungary.
I know that they're out there.
I can see the fedoras from here.
They're going to object to this.
But, you know, math is the language of God, right?
You look over God's shoulder for a moment.
And by God, do you mean Richard Dawkins?
And by God, I mean all of the uncaused causes, all of the random... All the first movers, all the great first movers.
All the negative numbers.
And so, you know...
it is both a human thought technology, math, I mean, negative numbers, right?
It's a thought technology, but also it is an uncovering.
It is a discovery of a thing.
It is a discovery of a first principle.
And to equate that with like,
to equate learning that with like developing some skills that are really going to help you later in life, as opposed to like, should we not all be thinking about this all the time?
Should not math and higher math and the implications of math not be on our minds all the time?
Because they, they should be, we should be looking at everything through a lens of math and
Because it is the only reason that the things we've built are standing and it's the – as far as I can tell, the only coherent like fabric to explain any – It's kind of what almost everything comes down to.
Math, right.
And it's beautiful poetry and –
And at the level of molecular biology or particle physics or, you know, like it all is this unified theory that we've been struggling to find or struggling to reconcile with gravity.
And that should be at a certain level like our temple.
We should go to that level.
All of us every week or every day and say, wow, we've really, you know, we've really figured out a lot in recent memory.
Just in the last hundred.
And also refigured things out.
That's the other just that's the neat thing about science that we're always trying to say, like, did I get that right?
Yeah.
Let's let's keep checking that.
Right.
And so then you go into the schools and you imagine like all the constraints on people, even ones who feel that poetry and go into teaching full of that, that poetry.
Yeah.
And then, you know, requiring them to govern or to teach in prose.
And little by little, you just drain that poetry out of all those experiences and kids are sitting there and they're just like, I'm in prison.
And
And it's almost unavoidable and the pressures from parents like, is he going to make it?
Is she going to be a good human?
Is she going to get through to the other side and be one of the good humans?
Well, can I jump in?
Yeah.
I think there's a couple of things on the table here that are really interesting.
I grew up in Cincinnati where we had a really good public school system.
And yes, I'm sorry, there is about to be a little bit of bagging on Florida coming in a minute.
I apologize in advance.
Let me just ask before you get started.
Yes, please.
Did you ever, I mean, and I think I know the answer, but did you carry a giant comb with the handle sticking out of your back pocket?
Yeah, a goodie comb?
Did you carry a goodie comb?
A goodie brand comb?
Sure I did.
I'm not a monster.
All right.
No, especially, well, here's the thing.
I'm glad you asked this question, John.
When I was younger, at home, a family would have a large goodie comb, something on the order of maybe six to eight inches.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And then there was a new thought technology in the early 80s where they made them small.
You could put in your pocket and that would stick out of your right back pocket of your of your Levi's corduroys.
Your right back pocket.
Let me I cannot be more clear.
Goody comb, right back pocket, tines facing in, facing toward your seam.
I have precisely the exact same mental picture.
You never have it in your left pocket and you never have the tines facing out.
No, come on.
Oh, my God.
Where did that memory come from?
And the problem is I never had a goody comb.
And I remember – Oh, we aspired to have a goody comb.
I did.
I aspired to have a goody comb.
And the problem was I guess I couldn't keep from losing things or my mom never recognized these.
This is why we can't have nice combs.
Right.
My mom would buy me one of those combs that you would find in a men's room.
Oh, the ones that would break?
Well, yeah, in a jar of light blue disinfectant.
So, you know, I'm not going to carry one of those around.
We used to carry a comb.
We used to carry a comb around.
Can you believe that?
Yeah, big comb with the handle sticking out.
Big comb.
So on the one hand, the Cincinnati school system was terrific.
I mean, you know, maybe this might have just been the time and the place, but whatever.
In any case, all I can say is that making the jump to then going to public school in Florida was a very different thing.
And I've said this numerous times in the past, and I don't mean to be disparaging because it's hard to do things, but...
We had this thing called vocational wheel.
I don't know if you had anything like this.
I don't think we did.
I loved it.
I love it so far.
Okay, well, this is, you know, as you like to say, the Suncoast of Florida in 19... So I didn't go to 7th grade in public schools.
But those who did go to 7th grade, in the junior high school, so at 7th and 9th grade, you have all these vocational tracks.
You can take a health class.
You can take marketing classes.
Uh, you can take, um, graphic arts or as they called it, drafting back then.
Uh, you could take wood shop, you could take metal shop and so on and so forth.
And those were really like, like you, by eighth grade, when I went there, you had to take at least one of these trade classes.
Now the year that I missed the year before every seventh grader in, at least in Pasco County had to go through something called vocational wheel, which is where you spent two weeks in each of the vocational classes.
Oh.
Which on the one hand is a pretty brilliant idea.
I like it.
Because it's nice to have exposure to all of those.
You make a lamp, you make a toolbox, you do all that stuff.
You know, you sell pencils at the school store, you learn to use a T-square, et cetera, et cetera.
On the face of it, very cool.
But I remember even then having the feeling that I later greatly expanded as I got older that you start – I think we all have that day.
It comes at different ages, but you start to realize, wow –
School's not just about teaching me math and English and science.
You know, when you're very young, maybe you figure out school's kind of about teaching me to be places on time and stand in line.
But by the time it gets really hairy, because by the time you get to junior high, before you really transition into the whole like, here's stuff you need to learn for college.
It's this weird period where almost everything you're exposed to in junior high is about following rules and not becoming a burden on society.
Yeah, I think that's kind of what it is.
And I think we don't we don't say that, although we kind of realize that, wow, places with good schools tends to have better results.
Isn't that a funny coincidence?
But I just remember feeling at the time that like in that instance, you know, and this is even still when we had music classes, this isn't even still when we had art classes, which now are kind of like little side things in our public school.
It's not like a main thing.
You don't get you don't get P.E.
math or excuse me, you don't get P.E.
art and music every day.
It's something you go and do like an assembly.
Anyhow, that was one thing that really struck me.
And so, I mean, not that that's a bad thing put in a different way.
I just remember feeling like it was like a stall.
It felt Stalinist in the sense of like everybody.
You remember when we were kids and you'd say like, well, you know, in the Soviet Union, you get a test when you're 12 years old and that decides what you do for the rest of your life.
Right.
And I kind of remember feeling like, well, the tacit message here is like all the suburban kids that can pull it off and make it into pre-algebra and algebra, like we know they're going to be pretty okay.
We know what track they're on.
What about these other kids?
They're not coming in as much.
Like they need to learn how to make a toolbox.
Mm-hmm.
A pencil holder.
A pencil holder, yeah.
So anyway, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but that was a thought that occurred to me.
But the larger point I want to get at, though, part two is – and I'm going to play the race card a little bit.
When we talk about things like is this a community that is friendly to art and artists?
Is this a community where there's enough –
There's enough room in the lower middle class for people to come in here without having a typical career-based full-time job and do interesting things.
You know, how do you put a value on that?
Well, you're struggling with that.
Here's the thing, though.
How do you put a value on diversity?
And I mean every kind of diversity, right?
I think the first kind of diversity is are you around people that are not your same race and gender?
But are you around people that are of differing economic classes and backgrounds, have more locked in or less locked in futures?
Right.
Do you know what I mean?
And I guess I feel like in the same way, maybe as the artist issue, there's this deeper issue of, well, we don't really notice diversity until it's gone or until it's quote unquote like under control.
But I can tell you dimes to donuts that moving to this town as a white guy in an Asian neighborhood in 1999, there were a lot more black people.
living in the entire bay area i mean there's still black people in oakland but now you know less because it's getting it's getting more expensive too but like the the diversity is the people with the money can afford to come in okay i'm gonna be kind of simple for a minute but the people who could afford to come in push out the other people and now it is white people pushing out white people like it's it's becoming and you know any any of the any of the whether you're a person of color or not but it is the app class who's moving in let's make no mistake about it
It's people in finance and people in venture-funded companies and big corporations.
But it is certainly not becoming more interesting.
And it's certainly not becoming more diverse.
And it's certainly – it's a lot of people who are doing things like making the house that somebody else gets thrown out of turns into a condo.
And now the restaurants and the bars around there get moved out because they're making too much noise.
And so I don't have a unified field theory here, but like in the same way, I've seen this with work I've done in the past.
There was a time when the value of user experience was thought of as just, you know, spray on usability.
You just go in and make some changes, blah, blah.
You guys go do your coloring.
And now you realize, you don't understand this, the difference between a good experience with an airline and a bad experience with an airline, even just based on their website, will completely change your feeling about the company.
Mm-hmm.
You're feeling if you are an artist and a person of color and you come into a town, you're going to know in 10 minutes how welcome you are there and whether that's a place where you can make a life.
So I don't know how you quantify that except by saying having some kind of diversity as much as the economy and the people can bear makes it a better place.
Well, the tendency on the West Coast, and I think this is the tendency increasingly everywhere, is to practice liberalism.
in a very sort of, well, to practice lip service liberalism, right?
And what that ends up looking like is that diversity is welcomed as long as it's within the confines of bourgeois values and culture, right?
So we welcome all people into our bourgeois envelope of values.
What we do not,
understand how to do is to provide opportunities for people who are not trying to, who, you know, who aren't trying to move into a bourgeois state, but who are literally struggling to survive and,
Or literally struggling to just, you know, to remain, right?
Just to remain in place and not be displaced from their own homes and communities.
And so Seattle has a great record of...
diversity in government, diversity in public hiring.
We have tried and tried and tried to live up to our own standards.
But we still don't understand how important it is that neighborhoods remain intact or that for a young white artist living on Capitol Hill, the experience is incredibly different than that of a young black artist living in the Central District.
And that feeling of great work comes from being backed into a corner, but there's a certain point where you're backed into the corner and
And either under threat of violence or just – you can't – like there is no corner for you because it's – you're backed into an oven.
I think that distinction is utterly lost on some people, that there is a distinction between having a place where you can struggle to make rent and still make it and a place where the typical rent is five times what anybody could ever scrape together.
Yeah, really big difference.
And just, you know, I think a lot of a lot of white kids who are making art and music like schlep around in the town and they, you know, and they they walk from dark doorway to dark doorway and they feel like they are living a rough and and living a dangerous downtown life.
And that informs their art and character.
But when the police slowly cruise by and.
And look them up and down and they stand there in their dark doorway and they go, oh man, the fucking cops just scoped me.
Fuck those guys.
The difference is that they kept, the cops kept driving.
They scoped them and they gave them a dirty look.
These scumbags.
But they kept driving.
And the young white artist feels like, oh, you know, the grit of the city is really informing my views.
And I'm going to take that back to the art that I'm making that basically co-ops the history of jazz.
Yeah.
And hip hop.
And I'm going to and that's going to be some meaty, you know, gnarly shit.
Well, the, you know, the young black guy in the same exact situation who is probably actively trying to stay out of dark doorways.
the cops roll by and turn on their flashers and pull over and ask for his ID and where does he live and what's he doing out.
And that little bit of difference is a thing that you hear reported over and over and yet it's impossible to know how that changes your feeling.
When you are backed into a corner in your own art making, when you're poor and are struggling and saying to yourself, can I even be an artist?
Can I even make this stuff?
I need to do it, but I also have to survive.
And that decision making and that what ends up happening is that you do have an increasingly bourgeois art culture where the people who are able to make it through are the ones that in that moment can call their folks and say, can you cover my rent this month?
And that's not a slight on anybody.
It's just that so many people have to drop out at that moment.
And they're not making things then and they are embittered and rightfully so.
And having that conversation with the city at large, particularly in a world where people want to say, look, the market is the market.
It's just what it is.
It's not a, there's no malice attached to it.
It's just a natural system.
That's so privileged.
Well, and in a way, like, I mean, I hear that from all walks of life.
The idea that we have set in motion a system which is organic.
Right.
That the market is just humans and in a way it's just a language we've given ourselves to express our natural desire to trade or whatever.
And so this rampant – and with no awareness or less awareness of the fact that the market is rigged every step of the way.
That's what I mean when I say privileged.
I didn't mean to use the code word.
But I'm becoming more, I guess, sensitive in some ways to that in myself and seeing it in others.
But in the case of somebody who's that economically privileged, folks with a lot of money, the biggest problem they face is losing some of their lot of money.
So in a down economy where things go wrong – so in an up economy, they get to go, hey, yay market, right?
And you get to say, well, of course, this is the market.
Yay market because I'm just benefiting from this completely natural thing because we can all agree on cheese.
This is what the market is.
The market is that I get lots of money because things are going great, right?
And then when things go less great, they still can find a way to get by.
And that's not because they're brilliant.
It's because they have lots of money and connections.
But that is – even though that is the elephant in the room, you sound like a conspiratorial nut when you try to point that out to somebody.
Because everybody thinks their life is hard, and it is.
Everybody's life is hard in its way, right?
And we don't be –
inhumane about it but it is it's a little disingenuous to call it just the market when there's all kinds of things like you might be getting subsidies or tax credits or all these different kinds of ways that you can you can game the system and then still call it the market well it's it's not it's not that's not the market i mean the market is you go down and try to find fresh food in your neighborhood where there's no groceries that's what the market is the market is you go to 7-eleven and buy a brown banana for two dollars that's the market brown banana that was a great movie
Is that the one with Chloe Sevigny?
Cholea Sevigny.
Did you ever see that scene?
I never did.
It's hard to watch.
I wasn't interested.
Not my stuff.
What's really curious to me lately, the last week or two has been really hard for me.
I've had a lot of anxiety, a feeling that I'm behind the eight ball and running to catch up.
And
And maybe coincidentally, a lot of the people that were my real brain trust all took vacations all at once.
And so I recognized how important it is for me to sit, just sit with friends and talk about what's going on when things are really going on.
And I was feeling very alone and, and I was, I'm going through this process of fulfilling the, you know, checking off the boxes that a candidate for a public office has to, has to do, you know, fulfill these, these obligations.
And I,
It's been an incredible learning experience because we talk about, you and I, we talk about conspiracy a lot or the sense that a lot of people have that the system's rigged or gamed or that there is malice.
But the reality that, like, given human nature, how relatively few things ever even could be a conspiracy.
And what ends up happening, so what I've been going through is every...
I don't mean to say going through like it's, you know, like I have, like I'm going through chemo, but like every legislative district in the city has its own democratic system.
party organization.
And those party organizations have, you know, there's a chairperson, a secretary, a sergeant at arms.
There are rank and file of different
you know, LDOs and all these different jobs that people have.
And it's a form of organization, a voluntary organization that people love to do, right?
These groups are exactly like
a lot of people I met in rock and roll who love to talk about the liner notes on records.
They're like wonks.
They're wonks, right?
And so there are so many more people
who like to talk about records than there are people who make records.
Right.
And, and as a music maker, I never fully understood the, the, the record store Maven.
Right.
I, and I know a lot of musicians who are also record store mavens, but for the most part, like the people who sit and collect records, who consume music in that way, but who think about like who the original bass player was, what the studio, you know, like who, what the B side was, uh, what label it was on all that collecting and churning of information, catalog, cataloging, librarian, uh,
that librarian impulse that we have in rock and roll.
And there are people like that in the nerd world, there are the tech world, there are people like sports is the ultimate expression of it.
But I mean, even when I was a little kid, I was more into things like statistics and the baseball cards and the averages and the on-base percentages and stuff than I was into actually watching a game.
Same with D&D.
There's people who are just into the culture and wonkery of it.
And so there's a huge...
community of people in politics who have that same impulse that same desire to get together and then and the language that they get to use is robert's rules of order which feels very um you know which is official feeling and powerful and they have jobs and the democratic party is a is actually the
one of two parties in America that ever has power.
So they feel empowered, right?
They're part of a big operation.
And so people run for office and they need to go around and meet these Democratic district organizations, talk to them and earn their endorsement.
And you see this go down, right?
Nobody has all the time in the world.
And they have the time maybe to read your thing, but they don't really have the time to sit with you for half an hour and talk to you.
And so what they do is invite all the candidates to come in.
Each person gets to speak for one minute.
And then the group of people who have come to this meeting vote on them.
Wow.
It's that simple.
Yeah.
Horse flesh.
And so part of running for office is you have to be able to go into a room and in one minute –
Lay out your plan for governance for an entire city.
Oh, man.
You get a whole minute.
You get a minute.
And then based on that and whatever research the people in the room have done independently, then they decide to endorse you or not.
And that endorsement is either valuable or not depending on how many of them you can rack up.
And whether or not you're running as an insider or an outsider, you know, but the candidates, I mean, nobody has time to sit and talk to the candidates for 30 minutes, but the candidates have to run all around town and all basically together in a pack.
I see the people I'm running against now every day and we're all standing there giving our one minute speech.
And we're not really inclined to be chummy with each other.
We are competing.
But really, we're the only other people that know what this feels like.
So you stand there and you look at your opponent.
I mean, I look at them with sympathy in my eyes.
And just go like, how are you holding up?
You know, is everything fine?
And they kind of just give me the like uncomfortable, like, oh, hello, weird handshake.
And I'm like, seriously, though, I mean, this is really hard.
And they're like, yeah.
And then they get up and make the Clinton thumb and give the speech.
And, uh, and I give this, I give my, you know, I can't, I'm very, uh, I'm still disinclined.
Still working on them.
Still disinclined to give a one minute.
Learning the chorus.
Yeah.
And, and, and I watch it and I think from the outside, uh,
This seems like a conspiracy, right?
You have to do these things.
These people are all insiders.
The logic of it from outside the system is they're just voting for their friends.
No new blood can ever get through here.
This is how we think of the political system, right?
Yeah.
But from inside it, I see what a hodgepodge of accident it is.
And how these meetings are kind of like a vestigial version of the town meetings of old New England.
And the people there are really proud of participating in the democratic process.
And the degree to which this isn't very democratic at all,
And that ultimately the decision is being made by a vote of 25 people, whether or not to endorse one of these candidates.
And 25 people or however many voting, not to be too dismissive, but really based on who presents well given the context.
Right.
I mean, I know that's a microcosm of a much bigger dog and pony show, but really to decide that based on, I mean, is it really just that appearance?
There's no like white paper or anything like that?
You just go in and like how they like the horse flesh after 60 seconds.
They can go online and do as much research as they want, but that's not, it does not appear to me.
Some of the people know, but some of them are just, this is their moment.
And that moment, that one minute of you speaking to them is more than most voters.
know about candidates, right?
Most voters do not even see a minute of them.
And so it does not, like so many things in public life, it doesn't feel like a conspiracy once you're there.
But the end result of it
looks like the product of a conspiracy because the only people that really can make it all the way through this hazing and make it, you know, and, and go through all of these things and do this effectively are people who are either very practiced in the art of it or who have a lot of preexisting relationships with those 25 people in the room because they are longtime Democratic Party operatives themselves.
Or people who have enough money that they can bypass that process entirely and appeal directly to the people with like, I'll buy the world a Coke.
Vote for me.
And it's fascinating to see, like, I wouldn't even describe the process as broken.
It's just built out of, it's like all those buildings in Greece where
People in 400 AD were like, we need to build a house.
Let's go take some of those rocks from the foundation of that old building.
And they rebuilt a house out of blocks from the Parthenon.
And then that house burned down and somebody said, let's take those old burned rocks and build a fence out of them.
And pretty soon, you know, somebody added onto the fence and it became a little bit of a castle.
And then they put a steeple on it and called it a church.
And it's like, now we walk in and it's a cell phone store on the outskirts of Athens.
And you're like, wow, this cell phone store is really interesting.
And at the bottom, there are blocks from the Parthenon.
And being part of that process is thrilling and interesting, but it's like it is really impenetrable and has been exhausting and also is like it's causing my stomach to churn all the time because that reformer in me
And I listen to people all around me say, like, we need reform.
But they don't even appear to recognize, like, reform?
How would you even begin?
Like, all of the people in these meetings are, like, they really are doing, they are participating with good, with the best intentions.
And it's so crazy how...
large groups of people all working with the best intentions can produce results that are so far from what we would imagine were, um, were our best effort, I guess is the, is what is what becomes like so clear and why, I mean, every single person I've met on the campaign trail, I haven't met a single contemptible person.
They are all, they're all really interested and really trying to make a difference.
Um,
And they have varying ideas and ideologies, but they're all people of goodwill from across the whole spectrum of people.
And yet they are complicit every day in these small incremental compromises that are not compromises of like, well, that's a good idea and that's a good idea.
Let's compromise.
They're compromises of like, well, what can we get done in a minute?
and you know and what and you know and we've got four more of these to do today so you know that kind of stuff where you're just like well we're building this is we're actually building a civilization out of these parts out of these one minute increments and that's hard to explain in a minute
It's very hard to explain in a minute.
I think I probably just took at least four, maybe six.
Well, that's what this is for.
This is your venue for that.
But, you know, it's funny because I think of the way, what it's like to be a candidate, right?
And it seems like a big part of it is, you know, people are going to expect, as I've always guessed anyway all along, is that like the sort of customer's always right approach of like, you got to listen and, you know, so forth.
And they...
And something I think you and I share is that sometimes we reject the argument somebody wants to have because we can't agree on the terms of the argument.
I can't argue with that about that because you're trying to rig this.
And in order for me to have this argument with you, we would first have to have a pre-argument where I tell you why I disagree on the terms of what you're saying.
And I might be able to propose a better argument for me to have.
for us to have do you know what i mean i think that's that must be incredibly frustrating because i i feel i do that all the time where i'll say hey wait a minute you won't have an argument about this thing uh that doesn't make any sense we we've got to have a better argument than this like let's let's have let's have it let's have an honest normal discussion about something but it cannot be i guess i'm trying to say is if people come to you and they present you with some kind of half banana balls idea about like how the world is you know how do you respond to that without sounding like you're pushing back
Yeah.
Or even if somebody as good-hearted is saying, like, we need reform.
And you're like, okay, well, give me an idea what reform looks like.
Right.
And everybody has a different sense of what the problem is.
I mean, we're having this huge argument in the city right now about rent control.
And there are people of very goodwill who really want to help people who believe that rent control is like a two-word solution to a...
Because rent control.
Because rent control.
A two-word solution to a huge and far-reaching spider web of a condition even.
Not even a problem, a condition that produces innumerable problems.
And they stand up and say rent control and people applaud.
Yeah.
And you go, okay, well, and what you find on the campaign trail as you're going along and you hear people applaud as he says, he or she says rent control over and over.
And I see other candidates start to get to the end of their speech and say, oh, and also rent control in the hopes that they can get an applause.
And then that starts to feel like, wow, there's a broad movement for this.
And there isn't really.
No one's taking the time to really think about it.
I mean, the people who are promoting it have thought about it.
They, in my opinion, haven't thought about a lot of other things, but they've thought about that.
And, I mean, it's like when I was 24, I remember feeling like, well, if...
If no one had ID, then we wouldn't even need IDs or whatever, right?
It's like the solution to the problem is always so simple until you look at the effects of it.
And the incumbent in my race is he is saying in every instance, it's too complicated to explain right now.
And so he's doing a very bad job of communicating to people that it's complicated because he's doing that condescending thing of people who do see how complicated it is.
Right.
But they don't find a way to say like –
Here are the top – here's the idea, right?
And I think because the tendency in this game is to say like – is to speak in bullet points.
So it's like one, two, three, four, five.
Here are the five things.
And that's not an effective way of communicating the idea.
And an effective way to do it is actually with metaphor.
It's much easier to say like –
Well, how do I explain what being in politics is like?
It's like playing fantasy football.
In a way, you're dealing with people who have never played or probably never played professional football, but who are experts at the game of numbers football.
Right.
Wow.
Wow.
OK, that is pretty good.
Right.
And that is that's a metaphor to explain what I could have tried.
I could have struggled and failed to explain about politics using five actual facts about it.
And that's true in civic life too.
People are like trying to explain things using statistics and actual facts about things that are actually pretty apprehendable by normal people if you just say, you know what this is like?
This is like a basketball game where everybody is on a unicycle.
And people go, oh, I can picture that.
It is kind of like that.
Yeah, it's a basketball game where everybody is on a unicycle and most of them don't know how to ride a unicycle.
So, and I think the best people in public life have that ability.
And it isn't wrong or untrustworthy to use metaphor to explain things.
It is, you know, and you hear it all the time.
Campaign in poetry, govern in prose.
But I feel like you need to.
That's good.
I like that.
Right?
But I feel like you also can govern in poetry a little bit.
And part of that is the outreach.
You have to sit in the meeting and listen to all the data and synthesize it and make decisions.
But then when you take that back out to the people and say, here's what we decided, that's another opportunity.
You're not campaigning then, but you are speaking in poetry to people.
And I think there would be a lot more – people would feel there was more transparency in government and they would feel like it was less conspiratorial if they weren't buried under statistics when really statistics are bad at explaining things.
Well, and statistics can also just become a different kind of analogy in some ways.
I mean, you can bang the facts to look like anything you want, depending on what data set you show or how you show it.
It's just that it feels real.
It feels like real arithmetic when you're using numbers.
Yeah.
For some reason, I don't know why I keep laughing.
I keep thinking of so much of what you talk about.
I don't know if you ever were a Simpsons fan, but the episode kind of based on the music man where the guy comes to town and wants to sell Springfield a monorail.
And his entry is he walks into the room and he goes, you know, a town with money is like a mule with a spinning wheel.
No one knows how he got it and dang if he knows how to use it.
You're right.
Yes, I guess.
Shut up and take my money.
I think about junior high all the time.
Me too.
And I know we both do.
And I know that there's a big part of our listenership that agrees with us in principle that junior high should be reformed.
But I think about walking into junior high
And you know, at that age I was kind of shaped like a dim sum.
and sorry it took a minute for that to sink in like a pork bun i was shaped a little bit like a shumai i had a i had a kind of a frilly edge and then the you know then i was big meaty big porky center i was porky like a little porky on the outside and porky a small garbage can shaped pork bun
fork pocket uh and but i but i was also i was entering puberty right so all of a sudden i was producing all this dander and like uh eczema and emotionally i was still a child but i was having feelings and
that i had never had before so here i am a little i'm a little i'm a little dumpling i'm a little shoe my in my school and and uh and like my body is just extruding things that i don't want in it uh basically just essential oils just pouring out of me and i'm having all these intense feelings
About everything.
Sure.
A lot of feelings.
A lot of feelings.
Yeah, a lot of feelings.
And the other kids in the school are all going through this stuff at different rates.
Some of the guys in the school were already men who could grow mustaches and had muscles.
And some of them were like me, just like pupa.
And then, you know, like the teenage girls also on a wide spectrum of where they were on their transition to adulthood and how cruel they were prepared to be to each other and to me.
And what happened in the school portion was on the first day of my honors English class, the teacher said,
In grade school, you are allowed to write in pencil.
But now you're in junior high and we are preparing you for high school, which is a big deal.
And so in preparation for high school, you now have to write all your papers in pen.
And if you write a paper and pencil, you will get an F. Wow.
And this was at the beginning.
This was, in fact, I think my first year of junior high was also the first year coincided with the first year of erasable pens.
Oh, yeah.
I remember the big erasable pen.
Eraser Mate, right?
Wasn't that what it was called?
Right.
I do remember it was real, like, kind of spoogy, like greasy kind of.
Gummy ink.
Gummy ink, yeah.
That you could erase.
It was erasable pens, but they were not inexpensive.
And I had a really hard time keeping...
even one writing implement on my person right i just i would get done writing a thing and i would put the pen down and i would forget to pick it up or i don't know where i don't know how i lost so many pens and so many pencils so i was never able to even i i didn't feel like i even had control over my possession of any kind of implement
But I could not get my head around writing my reports in pen.
I don't even... I'm trying to think back.
Why do you think?
Partly it felt just like a punitive rule.
Like it was arbitrary.
Just an arbitrary rule.
Partly because when I was...
when I would get an idea and I wanted to write something, I would grab the thing that was nearest me and I had a lot of pencils and very few pens.
I don't know, honestly, why, but I kept writing reports, sometimes two, three-page reports because you're in seventh grade now.
You have to write, you know, if you're going to write a report on World War II, it's got to be three pages long.
And I would write them in pencil and I would hand them and get an F. And I got Fs until the school...
agreed that I didn't belong in honors English.
And nobody was reading my papers.
The teacher was just giving me an F because I had failed to follow the rule.
And my personal experience of walking around the school is that I'm also being taunted and tormented and being forced to take showers with other boys.
And I have strong feelings for
everybody and they are you know and they have all the equally strong feelings for me mostly that i am uh that i am a danderer covered homunculus and yet the adults in that situation wanted me to write in pen and i either couldn't or refused to and got f's until they sent me down and
they sent me down to regular English, the class that you're describing where it's like, well, some of these kids in this school, the ones in honors English are going to go on to college.
And then there's regular English where, you know, some of you may go to a college.
Um, and, uh, some of it's not remedial English where you, you know, you're never going to go to college, but you know, you're down here in the mix now with the, with the, the normals and good luck.
Um,
And I was so astonished and surprised no one had ever suggested that I would be a regular.
Right.
And I was backed into a corner and I worked and worked and worked that quarter and just set the curve in that class until the teacher of the normal English class went down to the principal and said, please take him out of my class.
It's just like he requires too much attention.
And so they took me out of that class.
There was nowhere else for me to go.
And so they put me back in honors and told that teacher to just deal with it.
And she dealt with it by giving me a D instead of an F.
Okay, so there you go.
It's all worked out.
So I gamed the system.
Now, if you can imagine, and I don't know how many people that listen to this podcast were also flops growing up, but if you can imagine the pressure on a 13-year-old or 12-year-old, like what a bunch of Fs on a report, Fs and Ds, feel like...
When you're also trying to not explode every day.
When you're basically like a water balloon filled with oil and covered with hair and skin flakes.
And you're already just barely keeping it together.
Just barely making it.
Yeah.
And what you want is just somebody to tell you you're okay and you're going to be okay.
And you don't need to learn.
You don't need to write a three-page report about World War II.
You don't need to learn.
You should basically just be, first of all, allowed to sleep till 11 in the morning.
And second of all, just like...
put into a soothing room with soft pillows and given music and film appreciation classes.
Those would be amazing junior high schools.
If you just went and took art appreciation classes for two years where you got to sit in a dark room and watch
watch good movies what if there was a role that was definitely not a teacher not exactly a guidance counselor but more like just like a neutral assessor with a little bit of empathy who would just kind of see like what you need now yeah almost like a like a junior high concierge like somebody who would just go you know what you need a couple weeks of sitting on a beanbag chair and just watching some movies
Yeah, right.
Or now it's time to cut trail.
You're ready.
How would you empower somebody to do that, right?
And knowing what the systems are like, how would you pick somebody that had that acumen, train them properly, convince the wider world and the school district that that person should have that kind of gatekeeping power?
Right, right, right.
And then have the facilities waiting to receive kids at different levels of development.
Right.
Oh, it's – and the thing is the other part of it is as much as we all try to be – what?
As much as we try to be like disinterested third parties in something, there's something very difficult about like not getting heavily involved in something where like you get a little bit of your dick in the door about something and you get – you know what I mean?
You start feeling really strongly about some issue.
Your feelings get hurt.
You don't like the way this kid is trying to make you look bad.
You'd have to have somebody who's like the ultimate super adult.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And they wouldn't be evaluated based on test scores.
It would have to be somebody who mostly got... You know what?
Maybe they get a bonus in 20 years if you're still alive.
And they'd be like a railroad roundhouse, right?
Where the train comes in and the roundhouse turns and very humanely...
putting people not not in you know not in the way that we do it now which is like well you're on the uh you're on the shop track right you're on the college track but rather like you need to listen to music right now and you need exercise
What a godsend that would be.
You need to dance.
Every day there's a moment with my daughter where I'm like, you know what you need to do right now is dance because you just need 20 minutes of dancing.
You just need to do that.
And she's just like, woo, dance, and just goes.
And it's like, thank God there is dancing.
Yeah, right.
And what kind of – and the thing is you couldn't build that –
You couldn't build that idea the way we typically build ideas, which is on the burned out blocks of the Parthenon.
You would have to build that idea from the vision backwards.
Oh, right.
See it and reverse engineer it.
Because I think that is the experience that kids have at expensive private schools because they have – there are –
there are people there who are being paid uh to take that kind of of um of like structuring gentle hand with their charges but like how would we how would we introduce that kind of thinking to the city at large and and
You know, up against all these people like, well, what kind of job training is that?
Oh, my God.
You think your job's hard now.
Can you imagine being that person who wants to introduce the junior high concierge?
Maybe they could be sponsored.
You know what?
We'll call it the LinkedIn concierge service.
Or maybe the Redfin student guidance program.
But, you know, there's just so much about education that is so...
It's like our road system, right?
The road system works a certain way.
We realize we need a wider road, so we made wider roads.
We made more of those roads.
We made overpasses and underpasses.
But we haven't really fundamentally rethought the road as a thing in a really long time.
We talked about this a lot.
That's kind of how I feel about schools.
I mean, thank God it's there.
And thank God for the teachers.
I feel like I always have to say that –
And the parents and the kids.
And it's a great thing.
But it's really it's time for a big refresh along the lines of the cutting trail program.
I mean, you know, instead of going like, well, should you have some interdiction with the police or should you have suspension or should we ignore it?
No, you go cut trail.
That's a thought technology because you're really thinking, look, we need to get outside of the system that we're in right now.
You need a czar or something to do that probably.
And that's what's crazy that we can't get people to agree on really simple incremental projects.
But I wonder...
I wonder if it's possible to have a kind of collective czar or a collective pharaoh where... A collective pharaoh.
A collective pharaoh where people are able to be inspired by a vision of the future in 20 years and put aside...
the normal bickering of like, well, where are the crosswalks going to be?
Well, how is that going to affect my sewer service?
And say like, can we all agree on a, you know, like, and I know it's really pie in the sky and that we try this all the time, but we're more and more capable all the time, too, of both like disseminating a vision more broadly than we've been able to in the past and collecting people's opinions in real time.
So we don't anymore have to say like, here's the big project that we envisioned.
Here is the bill that would enable it to pass.
And now let's put it to the voters and that'll be – and every once in a while we can robo-call them in advance of the –
And the people that have home phones that reply to polls will give us some sense of how people feel about this.
We have the technology now, or increasingly so, where we could reach a large population of people in real time and say, here's –
Here's the project.
Here's the modification of the project.
Here's, you know, here's the, the comment period is already closed, but here is the, you know, like, what do you think about this option versus this option and, and move people to choose a, to choose to make a big leap, right?
and then say, all right, we have chosen this and now reverse engineering how we're going to get this done is going to be a separate process and it's going to involve some big action.
But it's under the umbrella of this thing we've already approved.
And so we're not going to build this out of stacked BBs.
We're going to build this back from a thing that we've all agreed is what we want.
I think it's – boy, this has got to at some point be sort of a – I don't know, a part of any political strategy I guess is in how you phrase things or how you frame things.
And I'm interested in your idea of saying like in some ways – I guess I feel like if you're overly specific about pointing out what you're doing and the context, almost everybody is going to disagree with it.
Yeah.
you got here's here's here's the anti-patter here's the bad example okay you guys we love our educational system and we know how important that is but it's time for us to revolutionize it like if you put it that way people are gonna freak in some ways because or or even if you say things if you get super specific then you get the lobbies involved it needs to be something that's so along the lines of a super training type effort it would have to be something that's like so big that nobody would see it coming yeah
And don't call it schooled.
Call it something else.
Call it something else.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and, and you know, and I think, I mean, there are so many examples of how, there are so many examples of big projects that we have successfully built that we can use as, as guidelines that,
But the world has changed so much.
Everything's such an artifact of its time and context.
Yeah.
It's so, everybody, you know, people like me say, oh, we want to have the Tennessee Valley Authority again.
Wouldn't it be great if we took all these people who can't get jobs and got them, and I'm not, again, I'm modernizing.
I'm not even saying, like, let's go ahead and build a dam.
I'm saying let's have them work even in some kind of an IT capacity or do something or, like, volunteer in a school.
Like, there's all these kinds of ways that you can do that, but, like, that's,
Some of those biggest projects came out of something that was really kind of a fluke that had ever happened at all.
Yeah.
You think about what – I mean in living memory, in my parents' lifetimes, the government –
went across the nation and basically built enormous dams in every conceivable river valley where they could get away with it.
And if you think about what it would take now for somebody to come along and say, this unspoiled valley that's full of little villages and stuff, we're going to build a dam at the end of it to capture water and create power.
It would be more than impossible.
And so...
So there was this window of time when it was technologically possible to build giant hydroelectric dams and still socially possible.
And we built a bunch of them.
And for us here in Seattle, like our electricity is cheap because of these giant dams that they built just in my father's lifetime.
That's so amazing.
And, you know,
And here we are, right?
I mean, we're making this podcast using that power in part.
And the interstate highways were built in our lifetimes.
all across the country based on the premise.
Now, we're not saying we didn't break a few eggs to get there.
Sure.
Maybe we... Maybe not every mom and pop motel made the cut.
We kind of tore down the centers of every major American city.
But look at the roads.
And, you know, to think about that, like after the war...
There was a sense that we had progress.
The big businesses, the oil companies and the automobile companies were like, roads!
And they did this fantastic job of convincing us that building roads was in the public's interest.
And they attached all this weird Cold War spookery to it.
And then just eminent domain, huge neighborhoods in the centers of all of the towns and built giant smoky, loud caverns, chasms.
And now here we are.
And every day I drive on it and everybody's, you know, we're driving on them.
Couldn't do it now.
Couldn't do it now, not in a million billion years.
But the next thing we need to build has to be on that same scale.
And it has to be better and cooler and conscious of the mistakes that were made and conscious of the fact that when they built the dams and they built the freeways, they also thought they were doing the best thing.
Well, yeah, and there's an urgency.
I mean, one of the things – I know we share a love of World War II, especially documentaries.
The part of those things that never stops blowing me away – there's several things that never stop blowing me away.
But one is the – how quickly every country, Germany, England, the United States, how quickly they were able to ramp up –
not just the military personnel, but the equipment.
Like how you could suddenly start building thousands and thousands of planes that quickly in the 1940s.
Doesn't it seem like that would be impossible today?
My dad did pilot training in a biplane.
You're kidding.
With fabric wings.
No, I mean the U.S.
Navy taught him to fly in a biplane.
And by the end of the war, which was 19, you know, in America, 1941 to 45, not even five.
I mean, not even four years, really.
Less than four years.
He went from training in a biplane to there being jet aircraft and atomic bombs.
And it's like, that was amazing, you guys.
Hey, wow.
Wow.
I guess when we really put our mind to it, we can do some stuff.
Gee, really nifty.
If we hadn't had that war, what would history have looked like in terms of technology?
And is it going to take another war or another Cold War to make us want to be innovative in an interesting way again?
I don't think so.
I hope we can do it without a war.
I think that we can do it with the pent-up energy we have and unleash it in ways that are positive and cool.
Speaking of positive.
May I turn this in a positive direction?
Where the hell did that bell come from?
I've never heard that bell before.
That's the political bell.
And it's time for us to turn to how is John's campaign going?
May I?
Can I pivot here?
Of course.
So feel free at this point to discuss anything you would like about the campaign.
A question that I have, probably a continuing question I will have.
is of course you're always welcome on your own program to talk about the travails i'd like to know what's going great and i'm always interested in what turn what is turning out better than you um expected or hoped is there like where are you going like wow these people are awesome like is there anything happening where you're particularly hopeful not just for your campaign but just for about about the city and how things operate are there things going on that you're particularly excited about right now that are going better than you might have anticipated
Well, so in the good news department, I have been endorsed by the Sierra Club, which is an enormous vote of confidence.
The Sierra Club had previously endorsed the incumbent, my opponent,
Tim Burgess multiple times, and they came to me and said, it's sort of in our charter that once we've endorsed somebody, we don't stop endorsing him.
That's not totally sensible.
That would seem weird, right?
We're not trying to be partisan.
We're trying to have people moving in the right direction.
But they, in fact, switched to their endorsement.
So that is a major deal.
And, you know, and I have been endorsed by several of these Democratic Party organizations and I'm going this week to meet with four more, give four more speeches for four more Democratic Party groups and then stand there in my flowered hat and hope that they hope that I'm the mule that they pick.
Hello.
Hello.
I'm a pretty mule.
And people are gathering behind the campaign.
Last night, I went to a very unusual show, which was Chris Novoselic interviewing Duff McKagan about his new book,
That's a very handsome photo.
It was an unusual show.
Duff Kagan's a good-looking guy.
He is very handsome.
He is fit.
He's fit.
And also, Chris is fit.
They're both very fit.
That guy is really tall.
He's very tall.
Is he like 6'7"?
He's really big.
He's big.
And they invited me up at the end of the show and both of them said, you know, this is a great opportunity to vote for one of us.
And we sat on the stage and talked about the Seattle City Council and they both said really kind words and encouraged people to vote.
And then Chris stood out and they both stood out and like –
signed autographs and took photos with people and about, you know, what seemed like 700 people lined up to get their pictures taken.
And, uh, Chris was wearing a vote Roderick sticker in every photo.
Wow.
Which is cool.
And, you know, and that was, I had a, I had a, I had a really emotional moment.
You know, I'm, I'm, we're backstage, the three of us and I'm sitting there talking about,
the when they first met back in the grunge times and I'm sitting there thinking like 25 years ago could I have imagined that I would be that that the three of us would be hanging out
hard all three be alive that would all three be alive and that we would be hanging out exaggerate it but you know and just making chit chat about stuff right and you know as we get up to go take this to the the uh the stage manager comes back and he's like you know you're on mike mccready just introduced you guys and the the crap you know uh mike came out and like gave a warm introduction and then
Was like, and here they are.
But we were all still upstairs talking about old times.
And so the stage manager's like, you know, you guys are on.
And Duff grabs Kristen and is just like, hey man, you know, I saw that Kurt Cobain documentary and I just wanted to say like.
And then there was another five minutes of three of us kind of standing in a little huddle.
Whoa.
Talking about, you know, and I've known Duff for a long time and I've known Chris for a while and, you know, and I admire them and love them both.
But like really human five minutes talking about really, really human stuff.
He was he was he was my favorite thing in that documentary.
Well, and he was great.
And really, he was really, you know, moved.
And in that moment, like moved to to describe his feelings about it.
And, you know, and thinking like.
If there's anybody in the world that can identify stuff and all the people that those guys knew that didn't make it and people that I knew, like our generation, a lot of us didn't make it, right?
And it was really, really heavy and also really, really beautiful and life-affirming.
Because these guys are heroes and 25 years ago I would have said like just legendary figures to me.
And yet like superhuman characters.
guys with like just really a lot of humanity and love and and and so in that moment you know it's just life affirming for me to remember that people are not statues of themselves there is it is possible to go through life and remain a fully functioning person who's trying to feel and
And entering into the political world, there's all this pressure to eliminate that from your vocabulary, to stick to the numbers and
So that was really validating and their support was validating.
So anyway, that was all really exciting.
But that's to say probably the unstated, that's not an opportunity that is going to come up that many times in a given 10-year period.
Well, right.
To be in that particular room in that particular way.
It seems like you're probably getting – it's going to be a little bit like reunion sometimes or just opportunities of different people being together in the same place.
That must be a great feeling.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
And to think that in 1991, Guns N' Roses and Nirvana were bitter enemies.
Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love got into a fistfight at the backstage at the MTV Music Video Awards because Axl Rose told Kurt to tell his bitch to shut up.
Yeah.
Welcome to the early 90s.
Welcome to the jungle, right?
And Nirvana was perceived to be the antidote to Guns N' Roses' rock and roll exes.
They were like the sex pistols to Guns N' Roses' queen, maybe.
Yeah, or Guns N' Roses' Zeppelin.
Yeah, right, right, right.
And so, you know, the time heals all wounds factor and also the like...
How dumb were we then factor all that stuff?
Really, really poignant and.
you know, that was a conversation that was only going to happen once and there was only one witness to it and it was me and I just felt fortunate and, you know, just like personally touched.
And that is happening a surprising amount because I went to that, you know, we have that shell oil drilling.
Oh, right, right, right.
And that was what people were paddling about?
That was what they're paddling about.
And Shell is kind of the only oil company that is still trying to drill in the Arctic Ocean.
And they've tried a few times and they've lost a lot of money trying.
It's very hard to do.
And this is their last chance, kind of.
They're not going to keep doing this indefinitely.
And they've towed this ocean-going oil derrick here, which was built in 1985 and has drilled all around the world.
And they're just waiting for the ice to clear up there to go up in July and try one more time.
And the city of Seattle has decided that this is where they're going to make their symbolic stand against it.
And all the usual suspects are saying like, well, union jobs or don't be naive.
Fossil fuels aren't, we're not ready to divest from fossil fuels.
And all the normal kind of business oriented, it's none of our business.
It's Alaska's problem, all this stuff.
And ultimately, the big criticism, like, it's just a symbolic gesture.
You guys don't have any, you know, there's nothing you can really do.
And yet, here was this huge gathering of people to say, no, don't, drilling in the Arctic is idiotic.
If you make one fuck up up there.
Mm-hmm.
Like the oil is, you know, it's frozen conditions, right?
If there's an oil spill up there, that oil is not going to organically degrade.
It's going to be, it's going to just be in that Arctic gyre going around the world and befouling Greenland and Iceland and Europe.
Norway, it's just going to spin around there for centuries.
Don't be idiots.
It's over.
The fossil fuel era is on the... I mean, it's not just waning.
Let's just start to say it's over.
Yeah.
We just don't realize it's over yet.
It's over.
It's done.
And...
It's going to take 15 or 20 years for us to roll out all the different solutions to the problems.
But it's done.
Just give it a rest.
And so, yes, it was a symbolic bunch of hippies in wet fleece in kayaks out there.
But then there was a big meeting where stage and speeches and stuff.
And there were all these Alaska natives who had come down from the North Slope.
These guys from Barrow and the whole community of people who had been active against ANWR and Arctic drilling for decades.
And it was really emotional for me to see that many Alaska Natives all in one place and speaking about their land and their feelings.
Because it was like a...
I haven't been back to Alaska in a couple of years.
And before that, it had been a long time since I'd been to an event like that.
And just the cadence of the way they speak and the songs and the places they were referencing, it was all really, really... That's nice.
It felt like family to me.
And I was so moved by the fact that that was a long journey and...
And a lot of the speakers were like, we've been protesting Arctic drilling since 1970 and this is the largest crowd we've ever seen.
Wow.
Talk about a difference.
Are you serious?
That's crazy.
We've been doing this for over 40 years and mostly to unreceptive audiences.
And now here, look at this.
Something really is moving.
And, you know, Obama just approved that Arctic drilling, you know, as in one of those inexplicable moves where you're just like, what are you what?
What are you doing, guy?
I thought we were I thought we were all speaking.
Weren't you the guy about we get a lot of those moments?
Weren't you the guy with global warming guy?
Weren't you that guy?
And that's where it does feel conspiratorial.
Like, oh, shit.
Like, did he get read into some Area 51 shit?
And now he's making these decisions and we're just not.
And I don't think that's true.
I think he's just, you know, I don't know what.
But the fact is, like, I was at this event that was a little bit hippy-dippy.
But when you really got into it, or when I really got into it, I was like, fuck, you guys, this is it.
Like,
This era, which we have been told our whole lives, since 1980, we've been saying one day we'll transition away from fossil fuels.
And we've been told over and over again, not possible, not possible, not yet, not yet.
Not this year.
Not yet, not yet.
And it just feels like, oh, there's more people on the now side now than there are on the not yet side.
And that's a big moment, a world historical moment.
And that feels amazing.
And just the fact that it no longer requires us
to have belief and faith that things can be different because the reality is already changing.
I would say that except a guy tweeted me from Seattle the other day quoting one of the lines in my political bio that say, you know, it's great to live in Seattle because we don't have to argue whether or not the polar ice caps are melting.
And the guy tweeted me and he was like, sounds like somebody needs to Google polar ice cap extent.
Yeah.
Now, wait a minute.
Is that the high end of the iceberg?
Do you think it's going to end up in aliens and chemtrails?
Well, so I was like, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to Google those exact words.
And I Googled the exact words.
And the first thing that came up was this scientific study with all the data about the shrinking ice caps.
and so i screen capped it and tweeted it to the guy and i was like you mean this first result of those words that you said and he tweeted me back and he was like well if you believe a bunch of data from a bunch of scientists yes but here's a dead spin article that unmasks the lie
And the Deadspin article was like, you know, actually on the north side of the Antarctic ice shelf, it has put on a bunch of ice in the last two years.
You know, the west north side of the Antarctic ice shelf has grown considerably in the last two years, apparently, according to this article.
But then as you read down the article, it says, but every other aspect of the Antarctic shelf is catastrophic, shrinking to the point of no return.
And of course, the Arctic is almost completely free of ice now.
John Roderick, fat cherry picker.
And so I wrote him again, knowing that I should not.
And I said, leave it.
I said, sir, did you even read to the end of the article that you're citing?
Mm-hmm.
And he wrote me back again, and he was like, you know, if you want to believe the climate, the big dollar climate lobby, and I was just like, my God, even in Seattle...
There are, I'm sure, tons of people sitting in the den of their split-level home, shaking their disembodied rubber hand at the damn...
scientists john your problem is partly you're mobbed up with big science you know all those the thing is all those you're in big truth if you if you go if you go look at the people who donate to my campaign you'll find a lot of scientists there a lot of bat ichthyologists and uh people studying the migratory uh patterns of the
Of the Monarch Butterfly.
So special interest groups.
You know what I'm saying?
And they are donating sometimes $25, $30, even $50 to my campaign.
And I am beholden to their interest, not to mention the computer maths people.
Oh, those guys.
Pfft.
Bunch of trade school dropouts.
Ugh.
So disappointed.
So disappointing.
I thought you were going to be different, man.