Ep. 157: "Truth & Reconciliation"
this episode of roderick on the line is sponsored by cards against humanity this month they asked paul and storm to help me say hi to john hello hey john hi merlin how's it going
Oh, complicated.
Oh, no.
What happened?
Well, complicated isn't always bad.
No, no.
What went well?
Well, I wouldn't say it was going well.
It's raining today in Seattle, and that is a good feeling.
That just feels right.
So I'm pleased about that.
But then everything else is just a shit show.
Really?
Well, no.
No.
Come on.
No, Gus?
You kidding me?
You know what?
A guy like me has seen a shit show or two.
Am I right?
That's right.
This isn't your first shit show.
No.
You know what's funny is school just ended, so begins a summer of camps for my kid.
And I don't know what we were thinking, but right now she's at track camp.
So she's at an outdoor stadium on a day when it started raining.
Should be a lot of wet track.
Track camp?
What is her event?
Yeah.
Oh, you know, I think it's going to be sitting and pouting probably.
The 10K sit and pout.
I was super good at that event.
You know, luckily, though, she's at an age where as long as somebody that she knows will be there, you know, that age, like where you're like, oh, I can put up with anything if my friend's going to be there.
Yeah, I figured out that my best event in cross country was manager.
Oh, manager.
That's the euphemistic manager.
You're the guy who picks stuff up.
I wasn't even really very good at that.
I was really good at standing somewhere on the race course.
And when my friends ran by going, pick it up.
Good effort.
Oh, that's good.
You're coaching training, and you're there to give people notes on their form?
I didn't know enough about any of the sport to be able to comment on their form.
I could just say, you know, pick it up and power through.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I just wanted friends.
Yeah.
And I was bad at making friends and having friends and also bad at running or cross-country skiing.
Listen, I hope you don't mind if I just give you a note, you know, as a manager here.
Have you tried running faster?
the thing is they could all run faster than me so there was no reason any of them would listen to you know what it was was my the girl that I liked ran cross country oh man and so I just wanted to be around her and so I ran cross country but you know I had this habit of like
Stopping in the middle of the race and like climbing a tree to retrieve a bird's nest or just like often losing the course because I was all alone losing the path and then either running twice as far as everyone else or like running onto a dip, running like across a golf course.
You were more creative about it.
yeah i was not i was not uh i was not purposeful so in the end it was agreed sort of mutually agreed by everybody that if i was going to stick around that i should probably just be the assistant manager and uh and that worked great for me i mean i'm as you know i am made to assist and manage
So there's something I don't know.
I in retrospect that I find so frustrating.
It seems like there's an elephant in the room, at least when we were coming up, that there's a little athlete inside of each person that just needs to be yelled out.
You know, my dad certainly followed that prescription.
BMOC.
Yeah.
my dad would stand on the side of the court basketball court when I was in fifth grade fifth now picture a fifth grader fifth grade my dad is there at the games and he's screaming at the ref you're missing a good game here ref that was a foul that was a foul ref you know and it was just like
I would have rather been anywhere.
I read an article about this a couple of weeks ago, and I saw so much of myself in this article, and I think it might have been written by like a veteran coach.
But the person was like, you know what you should do at your kids' events?
Just sit there.
You don't need to yell anything at anybody.
You don't even really need to yell at them.
And the thing is, you're embarrassing everyone.
You're making everybody look so bad.
Nobody thinks you look cool when you yell encouragement at your kid or insults.
Well, there's a picture of my dad taken in probably 1928 or
maybe 29 and he's standing on a beach in those kind of ankle high leather boots that you needed a special tool to lace I'm not sure I don't know that much about early 20th century footwear but he's got boxing gloves on and he's standing on the beach in like full on come at me
What is he, like five?
No, he's nine.
Full on, you know, like come at me boxing pose.
And the prospect, I mean, the last time, I'd like to know the last time in America a nine-year-old was given boxing lessons.
Like I'm sure that it still happens.
I'm sure there are nine, there are definitely tons and tons and tons of nine-year-olds taking Taekwondo.
But I think there are a lot fewer nine-year-olds lacing up in boxing gloves and just having a go at each other than there were in 1929.
So I forgive my dad for all of that stuff because he couldn't possibly know that yelling at the ref wasn't helping.
He imagined that yelling at the ref was as integral a part of the game as any of the shooting or coaching.
And it's why my dad – and I'm not kidding.
So when I was a kid, of course, nobody ever – nobody knew what to do with dads like that or everybody just assumed it made sense just like smoking on airplanes.
But by the time my dad was a grandfather to my older brother's and sister's kids, he actually was banned from attending his grandson's soccer games.
You're kidding.
For yelling at the coach.
And he was incredulous.
And he thought it was a conspiracy of like...
These new parents who didn't understand how, you know, this new generation by which he meant the baby boomers who had gone soft and didn't know, you know, and were like getting their wooded feelings hurt because he's standing on the sidelines at a seven-year-old soccer game like yelling, yelling foul or, you know, just yelling at the coach.
yelling at the opposite coach and and uh he you know there wasn't a he wasn't uh he wasn't mean about it or angry he was just that was the that's what you did it's how you played games i think it's i think it's i think you're right i think it's a generational thing yeah so i never i mean when i was 10 i would have i i was mortified but
And when I got to be 20, I yelled at him about it a lot.
But by the time I was 30, I was like, oh, right.
When he was nine, people were punching him in the face.
And his father would sometimes put him in an ice-cold bathtub, a bathtub full of ice water, to toughen his spirit.
Oh, my God.
So I can't be mad at him.
But boy, did I not want him yelling at my stupid basketball games, about which I cared not.
Whether we won or lost, I was just like your daughter.
I just was there because I wanted to be with my friends.
And honestly, running up and down and throwing balls at each other was the worst possible thing.
solution to the friend how to be with friends problem there are simpler ways that don't require shorts you know so many but i but uh after our last episode i was reflecting on this a lot like what did what did i want to do what would i have been pleased to do ah
I've been thinking about it, too.
I don't know what I would have been pleased to do.
Would you have known, to use a sports analogy, would you have known if the right pitch was coming to you?
Would you even know if it was something?
When you were at that age where they were calling you an asshole in school, would you even have known?
This week went really well because these three things happened to put me on my path.
Yeah, right.
I mean, chess club?
No.
Lord of the Rings club?
Not even, really.
It's called a guild, John.
It's a guild.
I'm sorry.
I was in the Lord of the Rings guild, and we had very passionate feelings about the Dune guild that sat on the other side of French class.
Always with the spice.
But we did not.
But that didn't give me that much relief.
If I reflect back...
into my daydreams in seventh grade what i was really hoping was that the soviet union would invade you could you would finally be called into action all of your expertise on on airplanes and military procedures you would be you would be it would be a little bit like ender's game like you would be a savant they would be like we don't even need to train this kid he is ready he's got his he literally has his own flight suit yeah do you remember do you
We are underused.
That's my best impression of his singing.
We are underused.
He sounds like you're in a really weird church.
Being a pavement fan in the 90s was being in a weird church.
But, uh...
The first time I heard that song, I burst into tears.
Oh, God.
The idea that we are underused and the implication that you will never find a use for yourself, really, a proper full use of yourself.
Honey, I'm a prize and you're a catch and we're a perfect match.
Like two bitter strangers.
Jesus, that still gives me shivers.
Right?
I mean, he was firing on all cylinders at that point.
What we took away from that at the time was that we're losers or whatever.
But somehow, when I see people in the world who are perfectly utilized...
Oh, yes.
It's I'm very seldom impressed either by the person or by the use that they have found for themselves.
Right.
Or the use.
It's like I remember being insanely jealous of a kid from Japan who was younger than me, who had the highest IQ in the world.
And I remember thinking, like, there's got to be some kind of jam up here.
Like, how did this guy get the high IQ?
You're always the same thing as anything involving, again, stage parents.
We're like, does that kid really want to be out there tap dancing right now?
Well, and that's the thing.
Where is that kid who had the highest IQ in 1982?
I'm going to find out.
Where is he now?
Right?
I mean, this is what's so wonderful about knowing Ken Jennings because Ken is one of these people that performed on a worldwide stage in a way equivalent to Marilyn Voss Savant.
Right.
Where it's just like, oh, look at this.
He is literally the smartest guy in the world because he won this game 70 plus times.
And then you meet him and you're like, he is genuinely like super bright and super good.
He seems fast.
He's very fast.
And the thing that you would never suspect about him, even though he is a total nerd...
is that he has a knowledge like yours, like a knowledge across every – you cannot make an inside indie rock reference that he won't get.
No kidding.
Now that surprises me.
It's amazing, right?
And you cannot make like an inside reference really to very much that Ken won't –
uh not just get but also like turn into a pun and so frustrating and that was the thing when i first met sean nelson the same experience of just like oh he gets everything
and it's great but you know but then being friends with him you realize like and and being the smartest being the world's smartest boy and not being in the smashing pumpkins ken jennings wow nice pull is now trying to his name is william he's making ken is making a living writing books and books of trivia and and and funny books and so forth but like there wasn't he was not uh
They didn't put him up on a litter and carry him up and Princess Leia gave him a medal and then his problems were solved, right?
He is still underutilized.
Right.
And it's fascinating to think.
What if you wound him up?
What if DARPA came and gave Ken Jennings an office?
You know, God.
I'm so sympathetic because this is going to be – it makes me sound like such a loser because I am a loser.
But, you know, it's like that feeling when you're younger and you're like, there's got to be something that I would be so great at.
Like I know – like you look at somebody who's like, okay, you're tall.
You can run fast.
and you don't freak out on a team.
Well, obviously, you're going to be a basketball player.
There's such a path for you if you choose to take it.
You may not choose to take it, but there is a job that anybody with this kind of freakish combination of skills could have.
And I'm like, I've got so many freakish combinations of skills, I've just never found the CIA job for me.
But I know it's got to be out there.
I'm an analyst for something.
I just don't know what yet.
Well, so two things.
I was reading in the newspaper today an article about General Wesley Clark
And he was the general of the army and then ran for president in 2004 or, you know, like tried to get the Democratic nomination and lost.
And since that time, he has been basically he will join the board of directors of any penny stock company.
If you pay him enough.
And so he's got some record where he was, he's been on the board of 18 companies and 16 of them have gone bankrupt.
Uh, and, and it's just like, really?
Like he was valedictorian at West point.
Um,
And a Rhodes Scholar and a four-star general.
And this gave me a cold chill to realize that at 60 years old, he was like, well, maybe I'll just be a fraud now for a while and make some money.
He could be on the board of a place called Grilled Cheese Truck.
Grilled cheese truck.
Thank you.
We'd love it if you joined us with the investment, the silver-haired Clark, 70, says in a promotional video for a company called the Grilled Cheese Truck.
He's pictured standing in front of a statue of a bald eagle in a replica of the Oval Office.
We're going to be one of the fastest-growing young companies in America.
It's losing money.
Hasn't signed any veterans as franchisees.
Oh, my God.
There he is.
I mean, you know, literally almost a retired director of the CIA.
It's almost your dream job.
He could be your dream cautionary tale.
Yeah, exactly.
Hydroponic lettuce, John.
A lot of money in hydroponic lettuce.
So tell you what, that is a booming industry.
People like fresh food, Merlin.
Yeah.
You know what?
It's getting harder and harder.
You can't get enough fresh food in this country.
But the thing that occurred to me the other day, we have now crossed 150 episodes of our program.
And it's not fair to say that the program has become self-aware because it was always pretty self-aware.
It's not artificially intelligent.
It's naturally intelligent.
But two things occurred to me.
One...
I believe we've crossed a threshold where it is plausible that someone will be listening to this program after you and I have died.
Oh, dude.
A little early for that.
Well, but this is what I'm saying.
We have a legacy, whether we like it or not.
It probably will not be my grandkids because they are not going to give a shit.
But somebody – They'll be listening to space podcasts.
That's right.
They'll be – you know what?
They'll probably be listening to banjo music.
It would have come back around.
But some researcher, some college nerd, somebody at the – because even though it feels to us like there are millions and millions of podcasts, too many podcasts.
In fact, it's still very early –
We are one of the early ones that have achieved a lot of episodes.
So imagining that and imagining that, in fact, this conversation that we're having right now will one day be listened to by someone after we're dead and they will think to themselves, that is me that they're talking about.
Me, future person, gave me pause.
But then I realized that we, early podcasters, are ideal candidates for colonization by AI developers.
Because if you are developing an artificial intelligence and you want that AI to be some interactive and human.
Oh, you got to feed it lots of existing information to have a kind of bone up on the culture.
Exactly.
I get you.
I get you.
A lot of broadcasters.
157 is a lot of episodes, John.
That's a lot for an AI to gobble down.
Well, the thing is AI, you know, using Planck's theorem.
Yes.
Yes, right?
And Bernoulli's principle.
And AI will be able to just download that stuff just straight through.
Well, Ultron got everything in like 10 seconds.
See, exactly.
So, you know, a lot of broadcasters out there have a lot more hours of talking on the air than we do.
But most of that is asking interview questions or, I mean, Garrison Killier is just reading some bullshit stories about fake people.
So podcasters who are talking about – talking to one another about each other and themselves are this like very ripe data set.
In so many ways because you get – obviously you get – let's be honest.
This is a nutritionally rich program.
Yeah.
There's a lot of food for thought here, but there's also you're going to learn about cadences.
You're going to learn about all kinds of stuff about sentence structure.
You're going to learn where phrases like that everybody's using, like thought technology, like where that started.
That's right.
And exactly.
So thought technology, come on.
That's going to be the I mean, think about the company that that is called thought technology registered trademark.
You and I should.
Yes.
Well, anyway, we'll talk to the lawyers after we get our grilled cheese truck off the ground.
Hydroponic grilled cheese startup technology registered trademark.
But yeah, exactly.
Like like we because we have never had a guest on this program.
what is the primary way that two people interact, right?
It's conversation and the, and the cadences, the back and forth, the fact that, you know, knowing when to, when to zig and when to zag.
So like all of a sudden I got this weird feeling that it might not just be that someone in the future is listening to our podcast after we're dead, but in fact that we may become prototype AI personalities, right?
the front faces.
Because once you've developed that technology and it's working, you're going to be starved for enough data to construct a full personality.
And you're never going to have enough of them.
You're never going to – Because you don't want them to all be – you don't want to feed them all encyclopedias.
They're not going to be the same.
You're going to want – obviously, most people are going to want Scarlett Johansson.
But there are going to be people who want an AI friend who is a middle-aged – Candidate for city council.
A middle-aged guy who's just trying to figure stuff out.
So you're saying it could even be 15, 20 years, you might be somebody's Samsung phone.
Right.
At least.
I mean, it's a start.
Yeah, right.
And the big question is, will we have any control over that?
Or will it just be one day?
They pitch my voice up two clicks, and they put a flanger on you.
And they're like, no, no, no.
That's got nothing to do with those guys.
That's an AI we've been working on.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
It's a Banksy kind of thing.
You take it, you turn it, you make it a little bit different, and now it's transformative art.
Right.
You take it, you turn it.
That's a thought tech.
You know what?
That's the motto of thought technology, Inc.
You take it, you turn it.
Taken and turned.
Boy, suddenly this feels like a lot more responsibility.
I feel like, I mean, I want to be myself because I want my AI to be cohesive, but I feel like maybe I should go easy on the dick jokes.
Well, but that may be the thing.
You're scrolling through a list of 10,000 possible AI friends, and it's like middle-aged guy, middle-aged guy, middle-aged guy.
Oh, middle-aged guy with some dick jokes.
That seems like a good friend for me.
I could put a flanger on that.
Middle-aged guy from Ohio, spent a lot of time in Florida, makes some dick jokes.
Sometimes hard to parse exactly what he means.
I'm going to try it.
I'm going to try it on.
Click.
It's possible.
The problem of self-awareness, both that our podcast has become self-aware and also that you and I have too much self-awareness, is that especially in my current pursuits,
Self-awareness, we've talked about this for years, is a major disadvantage.
I think the number one reason that Hitler was so successful is he had no self-awareness.
And it was only that he – and then it ended up being his downfall, his lack of self-awareness.
But for 10 years there, it really served him well.
I was talking to my daughter about this yesterday.
You were talking to your daughter yesterday about Hitler's self-awareness?
Well, yeah, pretty much.
I was just talking about like, you know, you mean, I mean, I'm sorry.
This is just a fact.
But I mean, you know, you know, think how much better he would have done.
This is a whole other show.
So I shouldn't even introduce this.
But think how much better that guy would have done if he hadn't tried to go into Russia.
Think how different that game would have been.
He could have held his own pretty damn good against everybody if he'd been a little more self-aware and said, you know what?
This is good for now.
Let's rest for a couple years.
Let's build things up a little bit.
But wasn't that a huge problem?
Was that he was like, oh, I'll just waltz in there.
Just send some dudes over there.
I'll walk into the tundra and it'll all be good.
If he had stopped in Czechoslovakia, we'd be living in a different world.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, it's terrible to say it.
It's terrible to say, like, you know, all these people want to go back in time and kill Hitler.
It's a very small minority of people that want to go back in time and advise him to just be satisfied with Prague.
Should never have invaded Poland.
And then Russia.
Come on.
The other thing, what you're saying, though, in talking about your current pursuits, it's it's interesting to think about somebody who is really good at sounding informal and off the cuff and not unselfaware, but not sounding because here's OK.
What's the worst?
The worst is that you start thinking about what you're going to say.
You think about it too much and you think about how it's going to sound.
And now you sound like a weasel.
You have to be – it seems to me like you have to be able to – whether it's just your bullet points or whatever.
But with growing sophistication as a candidate, it seems like you've got to get fast at sounding natural without sounding like you're trying to sound natural.
Well, yeah.
And the problem is that I already sound natural.
But that isn't really what people want.
They want you to sound natural.
Yeah.
But not really.
This is why stand-up comedy is so daunting to me.
Stand-up comedy is something I enjoy a lot when it's done well, but I find it really scary.
Because if you think about what's involved in coming up with those bits and refining them and listening to the tapes and getting to where, you know, whatever, where Louis C.K.
can come out...
And make a joke that sounds like he just said something accidentally and then make a joke about how he said it accidentally.
But that's all part of the bit.
And how do you do that without sounding like you're reading off a sheet?
Like that takes a tremendous amount of self-awareness.
But the more you do it, the less you hope you sound like you're self-aware that you're doing a bit that you wrote.
Well, and this is back to the underused question.
Like none of that appeals to me.
Yeah.
I don't know whether the fact that – I don't know whether – and I suspect that this is true.
When you talk to stand-up comics, like Paul F. Tompkins and I had kind of a fight one time.
Not a fight, but like a –
It wasn't like friendly sparring.
If you guys had a real fight, I don't think we'd have Paul F. Tompkins around anymore.
No, no, no.
You know, Paul's a big guy.
You know he and I are the same.
Compared to what?
He fits in your pocket.
He's a big guy compared to, say, the, like, Fievel, the mouse.
Oh, that's true.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
But I think what he was trying to say in our, like –
minor disagreement was that he didn't like that either.
You know, that, that being a standup comic is not dependent on liking it.
Uh, you do it anyway, right?
It's a craft.
Yeah.
And this is the thing about everything, right?
You don't, it's very, it's like if you are seven and a half feet tall and, um, and have big lungs and a big heart, um,
You have a job waiting for you in basketball, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you like it.
And I wonder how many of us have spent our lives being confused that we don't seem to like basketball.
the things that we're either natural at or the things that we're pushed into I think it's huge and then you know when you think about people that are a success at stuff I think it's probably a small proportion of them that genuinely would say like from the moment I started I knew that you know not just that I knew that I wanted it but that I liked it you know I wanted to be a stand up comic I knew that I wanted to
But the prospect of listening to myself
be a bad stand-up comic on a tape in order to get better at being a stand-up comic, you might as well just pour salt in my eyes.
Yeah.
Part of it also is that, you know, there's – I think that people concatenate too many different aspects of a career or whatever you can call it, job and interest and evocation.
I always think it's important to distinguish between things like what it is you want to do, what it is you want to be,
uh what it is you like doing like how do you like spending your time and what do you like having made and i don't think there's that many people where all of those always line up all the time and that's what throws people off where they let's say you wanted to be i mean there's probably a lot of stand-up comics that originally wanted to be a basketball player right but like you don't have the height you don't have the hands you don't have the lungs you don't you know but you find that there's this thing that you kind of can do or you find yourself sort of falling into i think that's true for so many jobs yeah
But, you know, I think the thing a lot of people overlook is what you're describing, which is, like, being a stand-up comedian is not just being funny and getting girls on the road.
It's a lot of, like you say, listening to yourself be a not very good stand-up comic on the road to being less bad, which is just intolerable.
I mean, you know, it's weird, though.
Like, you and me...
Like, I don't get stage fright exactly.
I like being in front of people.
I like doing stuff.
I feel like I really thrive, you know, when I'm doing whatever in front of people.
But what a weirdly unnatural thing to do.
But, like, it works.
Like, it makes sense.
Like, I really like doing it.
But, you know, I don't know.
I don't know.
I think you're on to something, though, in terms of the being underused.
Because if you want something that's way out of reach,
That you never even attempted to do.
Now I'm getting into another show here.
But like if you're doing this thing that's way out of reach and not even close to anything you've ever done or made before and you don't understand enough about the process to know whether you're on the right path or making the right mistakes even.
It's like how would you even know?
That's just a recipe for disaster.
I remember the first time I was introduced to Richard Feynman.
The physicist?
The physicist.
The first time?
I remember the first time.
Oh, you mean his work?
I remember my first time.
Yeah, no, I was never personally introduced to him, but introduced to him as a character.
Introduced to his writing.
And he was very adept at presenting himself as someone who was kind of fully realized.
And there was obviously something crazy about him.
But his self-presentation...
of somebody who not only is a Nobel prize winning physics genius, but also a safe cracker and a, and a, you know, a competitive archer and a ladies man and a, you know, and a, and a break dancer and, uh, and a Finnish carpenter, you know, he, and you meet, you meet people like that who, um, who have a lot of pride in themselves and, and, and are very accomplished without, without question.
Um,
I remember reading his books at an impressionable age and feeling like, you know, that that was the standard, even as I recognized that was the standard of, of like human realization, like personal realization.
Well, at the same time, also realizing that probably I would not enjoy, uh, him as a personal friend or, you know, that over time he would be wearing and, uh,
and that there was something false also about his, um,
Self-promotion, I guess.
And then later on, there was a guy I knew who was like a punk rock house squatting gutter punk guy that was a friend of mine.
And he and I were party buddies.
Back when party, right in that period where party stopped meaning fun time.
You know what I mean?
Where it's like, yeah, we're going to a party.
Oh, boy, it's a party.
And then it's like, no, we're partying.
Like when partying became a verb.
Yeah, right.
It is not.
We are not.
This isn't fun anymore.
This is like serious business.
And at a certain point, you know, I didn't see him for a couple of weeks.
And then he shows up and his head is shaved and he's wearing like all natural fiber clothes and he looks very serene.
And I was like, Hey man, what the, you know, like what's up?
And he's like, I decided that my life was on the wrong path and I am going to, um, I'm going to, to bet, um,
And I'm going to pursue the, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to get on the right path.
And by, by which he meant like going to go in the whole hog, Tibetan Buddhism.
Whoa.
And I was like, what does that mean?
You don't want to, um, like go get baked and play video games.
And he was like, I do not.
And he kind of like sailed out of my life on a, you know, on a kind of magic carpet of, uh,
of like whatever stacked up flip flops or however it is you make that journey.
But before he made that change, I knew him to be like one of those like hippie punks,
who was really super righteous about things, but also was maybe the most misogynist person you'd ever met.
Oh yeah, that's a type.
You know the type?
I know the type.
Where it's like, you are super duper righteous, but you are such a dick to your girlfriend and to every woman I know that there is something very broken in you, and I do not believe, I do not believe.
And he sailed out of my life, I've never seen him again, but presumably...
You could have also followed that path to self-actualization.
And he might have even addressed the bad dog inside of him.
But I'm sitting here now and I find it very difficult to look in the mirror and address myself like, hello, I am looking at you now and we are trying to decide what to do with ourselves and what to do in life.
Like I'm checking in.
I'm checking in with you.
You, I'm looking at you and you are me.
It's like you talking to the you the world sees?
Well, no, I mean, like trying to talk to, trying to get out of the place where I'm talking to myself inside my head.
All right.
Oh, that's hard.
That's harder than it sounds.
Right.
And then actually recognize that I'm talking to, you know, a living being who is halfway through the normal lifespan and
And he's trying to do good and trying to do good at a multitude of levels, trying to do good for other people, trying to do good for myself, trying to do good for the people that love me, trying to, you know, be a good neighbor, trying to be a good driver, trying to, you know, like all these things.
And it's very easy to sit for hours and hours and hours talking to myself inside my, you know, my little Plato's cave, right?
but to really just stand in front of a mirror and say, you know, like all of this, all of these multitudes of worlds are happening just inside me and I am alone in this room.
And now I am really trying to actually like have some sympathy for this person I recognize in this reflection.
Oh, it's excruciating.
And I feel like right now I need it.
I feel very alone right now in my campaign.
Once you have enjoined this world, there isn't any... I can't take a break.
You know what I mean?
I can't go back to my normal life for a couple of days.
Well, from a practical standpoint, you're kind of deep in the slog at this point, right?
Deep in the slog.
And a lot of people that are helping me...
It's very easy for people to be like, well, the candidates just got to go do the things.
So anyway, I'm going to go back to my life for a while.
And if he needs me, he'll reach out.
Or a lot of people helping the campaign, but it can't be a full-time job for them.
And it's very easy for three or four days to go by where...
where every one of the 20 people that has pledged to help me kind of feels like the other 19 are probably picking up the slack while they go do a thing or where they have to do their normal job or they go tend to their family.
And in fact, all 20 of them are doing something else.
And three or four days go by and I'm just, you know, I have all these little events I have to do that stack up six a day.
But then I get, you know, no one is minding the store of that realm of the imagination, right?
No one is minding the store of that place where I wanted to run a campaign that was very different.
And I'm just trying to leave this appointment that ends at 2 and make it to that appointment that ends at 2.45.
And...
And you end up being the one reliable person on the one-man team.
I'm the only person that has to do everything or that has to be at everything, and that makes sense.
But I'm not used to...
reaching out to people at a personal, emotional level, even when nothing is at stake or even at the best of circumstances.
It's very hard for me to say to the three people who love me the most, can I have a hug?
And so exceptionally difficult to recognize that I am...
emotionally taxed and confused and, you know, and struggling to keep,
the things that matter to me in focus as my daily routine turns into this cycle of things that don't especially matter to me, but need to get done.
Right.
And it's, and so, so I need to, I need to be able to look into the, that mirror and say like, hello, we are,
You and I, me, and then this reflection of me, that's the only way I know to confront myself in this different way.
You know, like I'm on your team at least.
Like there's one person in the room, but I am on your team.
And the reflection in the mirror just wants to get away.
It doesn't want to be talked to that way.
And it just wants to – its eyes alight on the first shiny thing in the room that it can go to and start to play with.
Like, oh, shit, there's a pair of scissors.
You know I haven't sharpened those scissors in a while.
It's also anytime, I feel like anytime I try to find some, I don't want to make it sound dire, but anytime you want to find some relief from how you feel, especially relief about how you feel about who you are, there are these different roads that you can take, including things like talking in the mirror or any example of something like that.
The trouble is if you don't do that when things are going okay or when things are going well,
it can make it feel a little chancy to do that when you're not feeling well.
It seems like, you know, the thing is, it's easy to, like, I have an interest in things like mindfulness and things like that.
It's easy to get, easy, it's attractive to think a lot about mindfulness when things are going poorly.
It's not as attractive to think about it when things are going well.
Because if things are going well, well, that's the entire point of the mindfulness problem.
is that you're not noticing the little barometric changes throughout your life and throughout even a given day.
And so right when you're at the point where you go, this guy needs a pep talk or whatever, you look and you go, wow, who's that old failure?
Yeah, too late now.
Well, and the thing is, it's way harder for me because I have tried numerous times in my life when I've done something well.
to go into the bathroom.
You've always said you feel like you're not good at not even resting on your laurels.
You have trouble even enjoying a moment of nominal victory.
Even a moment.
You walk off the stage at a triumphant performance and I just started using the second person rather than the first.
You walk off the stage and it's like, no, there have been moments in my life when I have walked off the stage or have walked out of the
interview or out of the test or whatever and walked immediately into the bathroom and stood there and looked at myself in the mirror and said you did a good job that was good you did good there
And the reflection in the mirror squirms uncomfortably and wants to get out of that situation even more than when, you know, because I think the impulse is the same to say like, you know, you're okay.
You did good.
Like I see you.
I'm acknowledging that you did well and I just don't, I don't know how to receive it.
I don't want to hear it.
And so, yeah, the, the number of opportunities are,
on the campaign trail to walk out of a thing and say like, wow, that was a lot better than I expected.
That went really well.
Um, that, that happens every day too.
But the nature of campaigning is always like, what was the last good thing you did?
Um,
And if it was longer ago than 30 minutes, it's in the past.
And so I'm already pretty bad at stacking up accomplishments and saying like, I'm doing well.
I'm a good person.
And in this world where it's just like – I walk out of an interview with some democratic organization.
I went to an interview the other day with the King County Democrats, which is a board of directors of about 20 people from every legislative district in King County.
So this is like above the courting various district groups.
Yeah, this is now – It's the big show.
It's the big show, but it's also –
like when a voter is reading their voter guide and it says endorsed by the 32nd district democrats the 43rd district democrats the king county democrats i don't know how a voter parses that or or measures it or you know it matters to people that are members of those groups but those are
And I don't even know how much.
But like I went to this meeting and it was a great meeting.
Everybody really responded well to me.
I felt at home and on top of the –
like a water ski boat that's up on step i was just like i had gotten above the waves and was just skirting across the surface of the lake and and people were nodding emphatically and it was a great conversation whether or not they endorsed my endorsed me i have no idea but left that meeting went immediately to another meeting where i just felt completely out of my body and trying to give a speech to a room full of people that
that I couldn't gauge and they weren't really looking at me.
They were all playing with their salads.
And, you know, when I get home that evening, like, what am I, what am I thinking about?
I'm definitely not sitting and going like, well, you did great at the King County Democrats.
I'm just thinking like, there's nothing worse than standing than giving a speech that you don't quite, that you don't quite nail and,
in front of a room full of people that are playing with their salads.
And you're just like, why would I even go to an event like that?
But the thing is, you never know.
Walking in the door, I don't know enough about any of these organizations to know which ones are going to be great and which ones are going to be bad.
You have to take all of those, I mean, not to put pressure, you already know this, but you have to take each one of those
more seriously than the last because you never know it's like it's almost like when you're starting out performing and doing gigs like even though you you have five shows in a row where it's the bartender and a friend like you never know if this could be the show where somebody in the audience is a booker or somebody who writes for the local paper you've got to be playing to the last row regardless of how you feel because you don't even you don't even know how important it could be but you always have to treat it that seriously right
And it's precisely analogous because when you are young, you really, and when I was starting out in music, I really felt like every show I had to take that seriously because you never knew which one was going to have Jonathan Poneman there.
And then one day I played a show and Jonathan Poneman was there.
And he came up to me after the show and offered me a recording contract.
And it felt like one of those, it felt like being discovered at the malt shop.
And yet I never did sign that record contract and I never did that.
And I know a lot of people that did sign a record contract that was offered to them by Jonathan Poneman.
And most of those people, it didn't, you know, didn't change the fact that they are now working somewhere else.
But, you know, there are those.
So over time in rock and roll, you learn that the idea that
Something life-changing is going to happen at any one particular show is a fallacy and that really it's all the shows together, all the great shows because it's sort of –
it's sort of a counterpart to the argument against the great man theory of history where it's really not about Napoleon.
It's about the, the forces that are, you know, the forces that work to create Napoleon and the human forces working all the time.
And Napoleon is kind of irrelevant compared to the passage of time.
And I don't agree with that critique of history, but in my own experience, like I,
I was on my way to South Africa in 1998.
I was given the opportunity to go study at the University of Cape Town and to write a book about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that I was studying at the time.
And I was going to go with my mentor, Jim Klaus.
And it was going to be this profoundly life-changing academic trip.
And in the three or four months leading up to leaving for Cape Town where I had all my ducks in a row and Jim had kind of tasked me with this thing that I was going to write – the book I was going to try and write was going to be a book about these American students trying to understand and perceive the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and what it meant –
And then my band, the Western State Hurricanes, got invited to South by Southwest.
And going to South by Southwest was— That was such a big deal back then.
Such a lofty dream.
That was like a height of the year.
I remember around the same time in Tallahassee, especially in the mid-'90s, it was like that was—you talk about the big game.
If you got invited to go to South by Southwest, that was like a benediction.
You were going to the show.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
This was, this was your, I mean, it was in some ways it was almost like the, like your Ed Sullivan show where like it may not, you know, being invited is big enough, but it could be potentially career changing.
Yeah.
And you had to make that decision.
Yeah.
Wow.
And I, and I went to, I went to Jim and I was like, I got invited to go to South by Southwest with my band.
You know, I've been in bands now for, for six years and,
and this band is finally taking off and this is one of these once in a lifetime chances.
And he was like, well, you know, Cape Town will always be there.
I'll always be there for you.
You know, I make, make the decision you need to make.
You can go to Cape Town and come back and,
you know, do your band or you can go do your band and then we'll go to Cape Town later.
And I went to my bandmates and I described the situation and two of the three bandmates, one of my bandmates said, you should go to Cape Town.
You know, South by Southwest will always be there.
We'll be there for you when you get back.
The other two guys said, this is our one chance.
I think by process of elimination, you just clarified the supportive member.
Right?
Right?
Remember who the supportive member was, and I remember.
The other two guys were like, this is our one chance, and if you go to Cape Town, we're leaving the band.
Oh, shit.
And so, you know, I agonized over it and I decided, you know, the academic path will be there for me.
I have to pursue this opportunity.
You know, you don't get asked to go up to the majors.
an infinite number of times.
It's so much less, it's so much less abstract.
I mean, especially maybe at that age, it's like, this is not abstract at all.
Like the going, going to South Africa, not, not that there's any, I mean, obviously that's huge, but it's a little bit more abstract.
And the idea of your band, like, this is the moment, like if you pass up that opportunity for your band, it's going to seem bananas to just throw that away is how it probably felt.
Yeah.
Right.
And I, so I went to South by Southwest.
It was an in,
It was interesting.
It was the first of nine consecutive South by Southwest I attended.
And, um, but immediately upon returning from that South by Southwest, the two guys that said that, uh, that they, you know, that this was our big shot both quit the band and I never did go to South Africa and I never did.
As you probably know, I did not write a book about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.
And so that feeling like this was the moment.
I went to nine more South by Southwest or I went to eight more South by Southwest.
And every one of them felt like it could be the moment and none of them were.
And I think maybe if I were in Band of Horses, there would have been a show that you could point to that was like that was the moment where it all started to go.
But the fact is that Band of Horses,
If it hadn't been that show, it would have been the next show because Ben is a great songwriter and they were going to make that sound.
It wasn't that they got discovered.
It was that they were good enough that they made it all the way.
And so anyway, it feels like that in running for office too, that every one of these events –
As you walk into it, you feel like, oh my God, the former governor could be here and this could be the moment that it all turns.
But the fact is, no, you just have to go to all of them.
And if you're going to catch on with people and if they're going to like you, no one meeting is the moment.
It's the composite of having performed all these tasks and having spoken all these times.
That either reveals you to be the one that people are looking for or reveals you to not be that one.
You just blew a huge hole in one of the great myths in a way that I've never thought of quite this clearly.
I think we've talked about this here, but you always think about all the times you're waiting to arrive, right?
I know we've talked about this.
Like, you know, someday I will arrive and you'll know that you've arrived.
And of course, anybody who ever has arrived starts to really realize that you never really arrive.
As you famously said in one of our first interviews, even Bono has a boss.
Like there's always somebody above your station that you're trying to, if not impress, at least please.
But like the...
it's almost like the opposite of arriving.
It's like there are, you, you grow up feeling like there's a handful of chances that you might get to really make something happen in a way that is, you know, I think the subtext is that it's something that won't undo.
Like when I get this break, then it's just going to be a rocket to the top.
When the truth is that like those chances may come along, but alongside each of those chances are like 10,000 opportunities for everything to unravel and
And like you, you, those are the ones in some ways, it sounds so depressing, but I think it's kind of true.
Like you're really facing the 10,000 times.
Every time you walk out there, you're facing the beginning of an unraveling in some ways.
That's, that's the reality of it.
It's like, you know, the arrival doesn't stick.
Well, right.
And it just leads to more expectations.
So many – there are so many events on the – in the two months I've been actively campaigning for office.
So many events where I walked out of a thing and I was like, if the election were held today and it were only – and it only involved the 45 people in that room –
I would, you know, I would win this office and the 45 people in that room are, you know, they, they are important people in the process, but the election isn't today.
It doesn't involve just those 45 people and no one can anoint you to,
You can be appointed to public office, which is a crazy thing.
But for the most part, if you want to be like a legitimate elected person, there's no shortcut.
Because the election is just – it's just one day and you do everything you can up until that day.
And then – I mean think about the elections we've watched as passive viewers or even engaged viewers where it's like – I mean the last election between Romney and Obama, even though it turned out to be a total –
like going into that day.
Sure.
I mean, even in that week, it did not look like it.
Didn't look like it and didn't feel like it.
And a lot of pundits were calling it the other way, like until Obama's name was written in their blood on the wall.
And you just go, wow, like it's just never a thing you can sew up.
if it's at all competitive.
I mean, there are races all the time where it's just sewed up from the beginning.
There's never a challenge, but...
For me, in this race, there's nothing guaranteed about it.
And people say all the time to me when I'm out in the world, they're like, well, you've raised a lot of money.
It's a sure thing that you're getting through the primary.
And it's like, I don't think it's a sure thing.
And the danger of it is that that feeling in other people where they say, oh, you've raised a lot of money, it's also a way for them to say like, well, I support you, but you don't need my active help.
because it seems like things are going great for you.
And it's like from where I stand, that is not how it feels.
And that contributes to this feeling of loneliness because a lot of my people, a lot of my natural supporters, they think things are going great.
When I run into them on the street, they're like, it sounds amazing.
I saw your name in the newspaper.
Things are going amazing.
And I just feel like
completely abandoned in some ways because people are like, Oh, things are going good.
I can go back and do, I can go back to my life.
And it's almost like, um, you kind of got at this once when a few episodes ago when you were talking about going in and visiting with the district Democrats and like you were, you would kind of start to commiserate with other candidates.
It's almost like those are the only people that you can really, really talk to about this would be your competitors.
Yeah.
They are.
They are.
It's like getting divorced and having it be the loneliest year of your life, and the only person you could hope could even understand what you're going through is the person who's divorcing you.
Yeah, right.
Well, and so in that, there is a lot of fellow feeling between people running for office, but...
But it couldn't be more exaggerated how little I resemble them in some ways.
Really still?
I mean, you feel that way.
Yeah, because they all – I mean, if you go – I did this the other day.
I went and went to the Wikipedia page for the Washington State Legislature.
And I just started reading the biographies of all the current people in the legislature, just getting a picture of them.
And I mean, the stock biography is graduated with a degree in political science, went immediately to work,
at a nonprofit, became the director of that nonprofit, then became the executive director of a different nonprofit, then worked for a while as a
on the campaign of a candidate who either won office at which point they became that candidate's legislative aide or that candidate lost and they went back to the world of non-profits and then they did and at no point does it ever feel cynical right every one of those jobs and that pursuit of a career path like all those jobs are fantastic and people are doing them I think genuinely like
motivated by a desire to help.
And those nonprofits are across a wide spectrum, like helping the homeless, houses for humanity, medical care, you know, across the spectrum of like concerned nonprofits
Concerned citizen.
And then at a certain point from their position at one of these places, then they first run for office.
At which point it becomes clear that it's been a path.
It's a career path.
They've been working toward that, like doing the work of getting to that point for years.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I cannot know – I don't know enough of them really, really personally to know how many of them at 18 years old said, one day I'm going to be a representative.
And the path to that is this.
I mean if you graduate with a degree in political science –
you are, you have some awareness of what you're doing.
Right.
And so, you know, graduate with a degree in political science and immediately join the nonprofit world.
Like you're conscious of those steps, but I can't know how much
each one of these people individually is pursuing this over the course of time, and this is how you get there.
But in meeting them on the campaign trail, I don't feel... Let's just say that this group of people is not characterized by their ribald sense of humor, nor by their worldliness, really.
They're capable of talking about
all of what are agreed are the challenges facing our city today.
But they're not capable of talking about it outside of what the agreed upon corral of issues is or corral of notions.
I had a sitting city councilman who is a likable person say to me the other day, he was like, you know, the thing about you is
He said, I hope this isn't unsolicited advice.
And I was like, are you kidding me?
Consider it solicited.
I'm soliciting it.
What?
And he's like, the thing is, nobody knows what you're going to do.
Like this opponent of yours, like I may disagree with him, but I know when he gets the job, I know what he's going to do.
This guy, I know what he's going to do.
This woman, I know what she's going to do.
And nobody knows what you're going to do.
So how can we choose you?
And I said, I mean, my sense is that 95% of the things that come across a city council person's desk were completely unforeseen.
that 5% of the things you know are going to happen, but there's a police scandal or suddenly shell oil brings a drilling rig into the harbor or there's an economic crisis or a snowstorm.
So much of the job is reacting to things that nobody anticipated.
I would imagine that
that nobody knows what anybody's going to do.
And he said, yeah, that's right.
But the only way we know how to choose is if you have demonstrated like consistency in what you are going to do.
And then from that, we extrapolate.
what you would do in unforeseen circumstances.
And I'm like, that is a really... I see, I see what you're saying, but it seems like a really bad...
Because what it doesn't do is account for a person's flexibility or morality or curiosity.
All a voting record is a measurable...
set of data that you can put up against your voting record and see what the differences are and know and be able to put a points rating on, is this guy more liberal than me, less liberal than me?
Is he...
Well, and given that it covers things that happened in the past, it's not even that useful for what somebody's going to do next.
It's more useful for saying like – I think it's more useful as a negative than as a positive voting record, right?
Because you can say, well, I don't like the way this person voted on all of these things.
Because even if you do like the way this person voted on most of these things, that's no indication of what they're going to do next.
Yeah, and I understand that picking somebody for public office based on –
You know, I think about Ross Perot.
And when Ross Perot first entered that race in 88, he was a guy that a lot of us naturally would have not had anything to do with because he was a Texas oil guy and an outspoken, you know, it seemed like he had pearl-handled revolvers and was a, you know, a...
A real rogue.
It's so funny at first how much he appealed to people for being down to earth and just so obviously sensible.
Like, remember, like, because on the one hand, you go, well, this is a guy who's like made.
I mean, you know, and it's at that time when there's still that emerging idea of like, this is obviously somebody we can trust because this guy built a business.
But also he's such a straight shooter at the beginning.
At the beginning.
It was before he was all like a nutty ball salad.
Like everybody thought this guy is the straightest of shooters.
You know where you stand with Ross Perot.
Yeah.
And for myself as a radical at the time, Ross Perot appealed to me because it felt like the other candidates in the race were just the same old, same old.
And here's this guy who's going to – for better or for worse –
be a real human being and then it turned out that Ross Perot was you know he was not able to maintain that
And he lost us all, right?
I mean, I really felt like he could have won that presidency if he had just stayed the course.
But he lost all of his, whatever, people like me that supported him.
Well, it's like the more that he talked by the end, the more that he talked, the more you could say, yeah, well, that guy is a straight shooter, but he's a straight shooter about a lot of wackadoodle.
Because he would speak so freely in a way that was very...
very attractive at first, but by the end, he just sounded like he didn't have any filter and was maybe, maybe, you know, needed some kind of medication.
Yeah.
Do you remember?
I mean, am I wrong?
I remember, maybe I'm remembering Saturday Night Live bits, but I just, I feel like, you know, he started out seeming like this, like so many, quote unquote, outsider candidates.
They start out really seeming like the answer because they're not talking like everybody else.
But then by the end, the fact that they're not talking like everybody else in the long run really makes them stick out.
Yeah, and that is what I am trying to – what I'm facing personally is like I'm the outsider candidate and the question is can I as an outsider candidate –
Make a convincing portrayal of an insider candidate and not in the process lose something crucial about myself.
Right.
And not just lose the perception of it, but actually lose something in the process.
You know, not something irrevocable because I don't think...
I don't think that my integrity is something that is, you know, is so, well, I don't think it's malleable in that way.
But, you know, when I entered this race, I said, listen, I'm not going to run negative.
I just want to run on the strength of ideas.
Yeah.
And I've described before that I was under a lot of pressure from people in my campaign who knew better to attack my opponent.
And I had a lot of anxiety about it.
And I ultimately said, no, I'm not going to.
I just want to run on ideas.
And they all kind of shrugged and said, okay, well, let's just run on ideas then.
But attacking was what they knew how to do and what they wanted to do.
And so when I said, I'm just going to run on ideas, they were like, great.
Well, then you're the guy with the ideas.
So let's have them.
And I was also going to six events a day.
And so at the end of the day, there was an expectation that after giving six different speeches that I was going to go home and write 2,000 words on this world of ideas that I was promoting.
And when I wasn't able to do it, when I wasn't able to muster just the pure energy needed to spitball, there was a...
Like a deficit, a lack of just voice coming out, right?
People started to say, well, you guys haven't released any position papers.
You haven't taken a stand on anything.
And my team...
I don't think that they were punishing me, but they didn't know what to do.
I mean, they knew what to do.
They would write up a thing and say, my opponent is a baby killer and they wanted to swift boat.
Every day.
And that was what they understood.
And that's what everyone is doing.
And it's so – people will say they don't like negative campaigning.
But what negative campaigning does – it strikes me as somebody who doesn't like it but sees it – is that it gives you the constant opportunity to reframe the debate.
In a way that being positive doesn't because it makes you seem extremely realistic.
It makes you seem like you're speaking the truth to power and it gives you – constantly gives you the opportunity to show why this other person is a bad person without having to say anything at all.
And so it starts to rain after 20 days of no rain and the instinct –
of everybody is to is to say you know let's get a press release out I support the rain and more importantly my opponent is on the record three different times as saying that he wished it would stop raining my opponent has had very little to say about the rain this week in 1997 my opponent said that he was sick of the rain
Well, now, in the middle of this drought, who do you want?
A guy that's sick of rain, even when we don't have it, or a guy that loves the rain?
John Roderick, we just can't afford your rain thinking.
And so what happened in the last couple of weeks is a couple of different times,
I was sitting on a, you know, sitting in a chair with a laptop in my lap, trying frantically to just stay on top of emails or whatever.
And somebody came over and said, here's an opportunity.
to set out a press release.
In one case, one of my opponents and the other opponent were debating housing in the newspaper and I was left out of the conversation and everybody was in a panic.
The race is shaping up to be between these two other guys.
You're not even in the conversation.
And I was like, I'm not in the conversation.
I'm over here working on something else.
And they were like, you can't afford to not be in the conversation.
And so
you know, a couple of different times there.
Press releases have gone out from my campaign in a tone that, that I didn't like that, you know, that in the, in the, the context of the political world was mild stuff, but, but, you know, just addressed to some imaginary reader that,
who's like, where do these two guys stand?
Well, I just received a press release.
Apparently...
you know, this guy doesn't like the rain.
And, you know, and it left me feeling like a film, like there was a film on my tongue, you know, just kind of like, bleh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But in the, you know, but in the absence of me generating like candy cane lollipop position papers week after week, that was what came out.
And now I'm trying to,
Now I'm trying to draw a line in the sand about it and say, like, no, run on the strength of ideas or nothing.
And I need a shot of vitamin B12 or something, you know.
Right.
I need a hug.
I wish I could give you a hug.
But, you know, it makes me think a little bit.
I know this is kind of far out, but, you know, I think there's a good reason why most product lines –
will very explicitly provide three levels of service, you know, in the classic, almost like the three ways you can medal in the Olympics.
But, like, there's something... I mean, millions of people talked about this, but, like, I think there's a reason that that still exists, is it clearly frames...
Like how this how this product works and what it can mean to you and how it can be right for you, regardless of your needs or budget.
Right.
If you had 16 options, it would be really overwhelming.
If there was one option, it would seem inflexible.
But like that has become such a I know it's not the same as with candidates, but I'm just saying that's the kind of thing where that becomes a talk about a thought technology like that is an entire way of framing your the way that your product line works.
Which level of GM car are you going to get?
And when you get that GM car, what kind of upholstery?
And there's all these different ways to see yourself and your needs reflected in the product offering.
And it's like when you talk about a political race, the thing is it's really difficult to look at any one candidate personally.
on their own.
Because it is much more complicated.
It's so much easier for somebody who's going to write an article on that to be able to say, well, here's the person with the super clear position that everybody agrees with.
Like, yay!
You have to put people next to each other in order for it to be a campaign in some ways.
I mean, I'm not saying you have to, but it sounds like I could see the attraction of doing that because it gives you a lot more clarity, but then you become incrementally closer to being a pro wrestler the more you do that.
Yeah, and that is the, you know, that's... I mean, I hesitate to say that that's the challenge because there are so many challenges.
If only there were one.
Right.
If only I could just master one.
And honestly, like, I'm... At the end of every week, I look back and I say, boy, if I had known at the beginning of this week what I know now...
I would have done a lot better job this week.
And that's very unusual, right?
In the course of my normal life, if I ever applied that idea, it was always like, if I knew two years ago what I know now, I would have done a better job over the last two years.
But it's very seldom in life that you get into a situation where every day you get home and you go, well, I wish I knew at the beginning of today what I know now.
And then you go into the next day and it's like, well, what I learned yesterday didn't really apply today.
I learned a whole bunch of new stuff that I didn't know.
And I wonder if that isn't always – if that isn't going to be true of this whole race and that on the election day, I'm going to say if – like now I'm ready to run for office.
And other people have said that to me as part of a way of saying there's no bad way to run for office if this is what you want to do.
Because you run and you win, then you won.
You run and you lose and you know how to run.
None of it really is any...
None of it really points to teaching you how to govern.
And so – It sounds like horrible – I mean, it sounds like horrible preparation for how to govern.
It's terrible.
All the habits – not all the habits.
The habit of needing to show up on time and think fast and know how to attract and hire the right people is a skill that everybody could use forever.
But like so much of this down in the trenches stuff, it feels –
No offense to your occupation, but it sounds like you could become so small and venal if you really made that part of your life.
It must also be a personal struggle to not turn into something that you don't want to be.
It happens –
And I and I see it, you know, we from the outside, we look at the process and we see these political characters and we and they appear to be dripping with corruption because because their behavior is so is often so transparently in the service of of pretty narrow group of narrow group of people or a narrow group of expectations.
And that corruption just feels like it's so clear to most of us.
You're either corrupt before you run for office or running for office makes you corrupt.
And from inside, I see now that what it is is that if you come from this background, you know a limited number of people.
And yet you know a limited number of people who feel very much like they have their finger on the pulse of what's wrong.
If you spend 20 years working at a food bank and become the executive director of it, you have a real sense and not a wrong sense that you are clued in.
To what's going on in cities because you're dealing with the people who are feeling the brunt of it.
But really you don't know that many people and you really don't have a very broad picture of the world.
And then you get into office and you see the same faces over and over again.
And because raising money is such a big part of it, you end up going to fundraisers with the same people.
And you end up on the phone with the same people.
And if you don't have a broad picture of the city, it's very easy to feel like, or the country, right?
It's very easy to feel like that small group of people, which doesn't seem small.
It seems really big.
It's 500, 600 people that you interact with.
But that they represent the people.
When you know it so well, so inside and out, that within that given, you're an expert.
You know more about a handful of topics than easily 90% of the population, which is going to serve you well sometimes and really drive you crazy other times.
Let alone the things you don't know, let alone the things where somebody else knows 90% more than you.
But that's the thing.
Of those 500 people that you know,
Every single one of them considers themselves an expert in something.
So you're standing in the banquet hall at the Sheraton.
And a guy comes up from the Policeman's Benevolent Association and a guy comes up from the Builders group, the Builders Lobbying Group, not the Bilderberg Group.
Then the guy from the Bilderberg Group comes.
And then there's the nonprofit, the woman that chairs the Sierra Club.
And so every one of those people represents themselves as representing thousands of constituents.
Right.
And that's when it gets confusing because you do feel like you know everything.
You're there with the 500 people that know everything.
And that's when that corruption, what appears to the rest of us to be corruption,
Because it isn't corruption.
It's just that you are doing what your friends want you to.
You have these friends and they are asking you to do things and you can.
And you never hear from the other side.
You're not even aware it exists.
And so you're just helping your friends.
It doesn't feel corrupt to you.
especially when – I think this is so true and so painful and so unavoidable in so many places.
Like there's how you felt at one time and then there's how you increasingly or how you evolve in your thinking as you more and more realize how it really works is another way to think of it.
Where, you know, when you're a little kid, you pick baseball teams and politicians by their looks, right?
You're like, oh, I like this uniform or I like the way this person talks.
But, you know, I think –
part of the dawning series of realizations is, oh, now I see how this really works.
It really, I mean, to get this internship, it really would have helped for me to have done these other things, but also really knowing the right people would have made all the difference.
And that feels like corruption if you're on the outside.
It's just that how stuff really works can be so impossibly complicated unless you're already a domain expert.
And if you're already a domain expert, then you already know that it's really complicated and this is how it really works.
And then you go to the next level and go, oh, I see.
This is how this really works.
And even saying that phrase, it sounds like I'm talking about corruption and I'm not.
It's just that sometimes it is very complicated.
When one person who's an outsider on a topic has an idea in mind about how something should change, they usually see that as one or two little steps over a discrete amount of time that can make this thing happen.
And again, now I'm just going to have to guess because I'm not in Congress.
But I'm guessing if you're in Congress and even if you really want something done and think it's important and think it's a good thing to do and how many times is that really the case, you might have to realize, well, I'm going to have to make this seem like this guy, the senior staff member's idea.
Then there's this person over here who I'm going to have to groom for six months about this idea, right?
I mean it's rarely as simple as going over and –
Hey, I got an idea.
Let's do this thing for housing.
All right, I'm in.
Like, that's a good idea.
Let's do that.
Because there's so many different demands and so many – am I right?
I mean it seems like that once you start the dawning realization of how stuff really works, it never really ends.
There's more and more things to understand about how things really work.
Well, of course.
And that is what's so maddening about the process that we –
that we use to choose people.
Because the last thing I am learning on a daily basis, the last thing anyone wants to hear from a candidate is, you know, every single side of every single argument has some validity to it.
And so it isn't ever a question of finding out
The truth, it is always a question of figuring out a plan and a process and a method and working toward goals.
And you can't just, I mean, I had a strange conversation with a city council candidate the other day where he said, you know, he told a story that he had obviously rehearsed for The Stump.
But he also really meant it, which was that in his work, he had constantly come up against these big money people who were always doing things that really negatively affected the people that he served at his nonprofit.
And so he went and looked to see who these big money bad guys gave money to.
And when he realized that these guys were donating money to city council candidates, that was when he realized he needed to run for office because he needed to get in there and root out that corruption.
And it's like the most any city council candidate can receive from any donor is 700 bucks.
So it's not like these guys are buying people with money.
It's that they are in relationships with each other because they're big money developers and the other guys on the city council and they see each other at the ballroom at the Sheraton.
It's never just as simple as like this developer's $700 check turned this person that otherwise had integrity into like a slavish –
Gollum for him, you know?
But it feels like a conspiracy.
But it feels like a conspiracy.
And then you look at General Wesley Clark, who is shilling for a fucking grilled cheese truck franchise, and you go like, but these guys do, you know, like adults, and I'm feeling it too, get to a certain point in their life, and they're worried about money.
I met Chris Hansen the other day.
Who's the guy – he lives and works in San Francisco.
But he's the one that wants to build a sports arena for the Sonics and buy a basketball team and bring them back to Seattle.
What is his background?
He's a guy that's our age and he's a billionaire or hundreds of millionaires.
who got his money through finance, financial work, which I'm sure was very difficult, very hard work that produced hundreds of millions of dollars for this guy in his 40s.
and you know, from where he stands, like he was a kid and he was a fan of the Sonics and now he wants to buy a basketball team and bring it to the city.
And it feels like, and there are tens and tens of thousands of people in Seattle that really want this to happen.
And I met him and he's a super nice guy.
Uh, uh,
And he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
And there are people that are – and he has – he's a guy that walks into the room and all of the normal operators sidle up to him and shake his hand.
And you can see that nobody ever tells him any bad news.
He's a hedge fund manager.
Hedge fund manager, right.
Wow.
He can just tell by the way he talks and the way he carries himself that nobody tells him anything bad.
It's just like Paul Allen.
When you get to be that rich, it's not just that you surround yourself with people that give you good news, but nobody wants to give you bad news because there's always the possibility that
that um on your way to the bathroom you're going to drop a hundred thousand dollars or something you know like it's just this feeling that people have when they're around really rich people where it's like well i don't want to be the one to give this guy bad news what if he decides to suddenly start shooting money out of a t-shirt cannon i don't want to be the i don't want to be the one he hates and so you know he's just sort of he's wafting through life and i'm standing there feeling a little bit like uh
feeling what I think is a very common feeling at a certain age, which is like, is it, it's too late for me to make a hundred billion dollars in as a head fund manager.
Like it's too late to do that.
And the integrity that used to keep me so warm at night, uh, you know, that blanket is getting worn a little thin and
And yet it's like it's all I have against the night, right?
You can't start investing in or you can't get on the board of a grilled cheese franchise at this late hour because in the end, 150 years from now, somebody listening to
your podcast in the, in the basement of a library, listening to it on microfiche is going to know how the story turned out.
And you know, they're going to know whether or not you,
Whether or not you sold out, right?
And that's... I haven't used the phrase sold out in a fucking decade, but... What do you learn from somebody like that guy?
Which one?
Well, like, it seems like you're exposed to so many...
Interesting and different kinds of people that are outside of, you know, like when you would show up for meetings and stuff, you know, because of your civic interest, you're one kind of character with one kind of focus.
Like what kind of stuff do you learn meeting people like the Chris R. Hanson guy or like other people?
Are there bits that you must be just learning a lot all the time from seeing how people operate?
Isn't that kind of on your mind?
It must be on your mind.
Like how you conduct yourself, how you think.
I mean, do you feel like you're still evolving in that sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's deeply on my mind.
And this is why I'm standing in front of the mirror and saying like, these are not things that you normally have to do.
Like there is absolutely no opportunity for corruption anymore.
In my world that would, you know, where it would be where it's some kind of ab scam thing where some guy comes, some FBI agent from Mexico pretends to be an Arab and gives me a suitcase full of money.
The corruption opportunity is this tiny little incremental corruption that if you allow in, I think is radioactive.
And it's that little corruption of, well, I said I wasn't going to run negative, but everybody's telling me I have to.
And here's an opportunity to kick a guy.
And yeah, okay.
Yeah.
the little corruption of like well I'm meeting a group of African American business owners and so I'm going to tailor my speech to just be about issues that I know they care about and not be about the issues that
really motivating my campaign.
Not to say that those are different, but just that pandering that everybody expects.
When I went in to meet with the union people, like
one of them asked me if I was a member of a union.
And I actually have an application for the musicians' union.
But you're meeting them on their turf.
It's not like they're coming, you're meeting at Denny's or something.
You're going in, they must have every expectation that you're going to say all the right things.
Yeah, but this is the thing.
Six times a day, you meet six different groups of people.
Every one of them wants you to tell them what they want to hear.
And if you do...
Little by little, you are letting corruption in.
And that corruption becomes radioactive.
So when I met with the Chamber of Commerce, the opportunity to go in there and say, listen, I will do whatever you say.
That's a very powerful... Give them the business-friendly vibe.
Yeah, that's a very powerful impulse, right?
Because you want to please people, and they want you to try and please them, and they're powerful, and you want their help.
So to do what I did, which is to go in and say, listen, you're never going to endorse me, and that's fine, but if I'm on city council, we're going to have to find a way to work together, so...
Anyway, peace out.
And to say truthfully, you guys are one of the most liberal chambers of commerce in America, but...
Still, you're a Chamber of Commerce.
Yeah, right.
And if you are on the Seattle City Council and you believe that the Chamber of Commerce is your constituency, your entire constituency, then you're missing a big part of what your job is.
Yeah.
And it's almost like any group you meet with, I keep putting in these quotidian terms, but it's almost like, yeah, you could think of it in terms of like, what would they consider a big win?
But when I think about like how you can tell people are different, it comes down to like what they consider good news is one way to look at it, right?
And for them, good news in that case might be something as simple as, well, John Roddick is clearly here to play ball with us.
All we need to know to get started is that this guy's like amenable to not just working with us, but to potentially –
You know what I mean?
Their idea of good news would be somebody who throws all the right shapes about how that relationship is going to be in the future.
And to basically give the idea that whatever you guys want is going to probably mostly be okay.
What's crazy to me is that no one I have met, and the thing is I'm not really interacting with voters.
This whole process is just going to meetings with these labor groups, democratic groups, business groups, and not a single one of these groups, with the exception of the Sierra Club, is really very interested in someone from outside the system coming in with some fresh ideas.
That is not what anybody cares about.
And in 85% of those situations, including very liberal progressive groups, they do not want to hear that.
They want to hear that you're going to do what they want reliably.
Right.
Well, imagine if you worked at a Walmart and a job opened up for an assistant manager.
Like, would you want somebody in who's like fresh blood?
Like, no, you'd want somebody who's been an assistant manager at a successful Walmart.
Right.
You want somebody who's going to come in and already knows how the business operates and is already, you know, I don't say compromised, but is already familiar with, as we say, how it really works.
That is absolutely true.
And that is...
what is crazy because the perception of being on the Seattle city council is effectively that it is equivalent to being the assistant manager of a Walmart and that it has more or less the same skill sets.
And in going into the race and, uh,
and it's harder for me to maintain now, but I still do believe it, that that is a terrible way to elect somebody to public office, that the job is not at all like being an assistant manager of a Walmart.
And the fact that there's so much energy involved
devoted at the start of a campaign to winnowing out all the people who don't understand that all these groups do believe that that is what the job is.
That is a process that is...
That creates the political world that we see, that we loathe.
You do not want an assistant manager in this job.
You do want somebody that you don't know what they're going to do.
And the idea that...
that what you want in public office is somebody who is dependable and consistent is going to get you.
It's you're going to get the results that we so often see, which is that the laws are made by people with no imagination who have allegiance to the people that put them there.
And,
But running against that requires that you reach out to the voters.
And so far, and what makes me feel so lonely is that the process of running for office is actually...
is actually a process of courting all these groups of people who claim to be intermediaries between you and the voters.
And if you had a million dollars to run your own campaign, you could sidestep the whole process and just take out 50 TV commercials a day and just say, hello, voters!
And you could hire the Goodyear blimp to fly over the... Right, right.
And you get paper, paper the waterfront.
Right.
But not having those resources...
You do count on the King County Democrats and you do count on the Chamber of Commerce to help you reach people.
And they have a vested interest in saying, as I've heard people say under their breath, it works to have a dumb candidate with a smart staff.
That works for us.
It's been proved over and over.
Dumb candidates, smart staff, that's a workable arrangement.
Smart candidate starts to get really problematic.
And the smarter they are, the worse it is for the system.
I was talking the other night with some people on Twitter about Roger Ebert and the way that Roger Ebert would review movies.
And I couldn't remember this exact phrase, but he said something really interesting a long time ago about, I feel like he said something along the lines of that, you know,
In addressing how – people would say to him, like, how could you give this really weird, schlocky horror movie three stars while you give this very serious historical documentary or whatever three stars?
You give this Pauly Shore movie three stars or whatever.
How could that even make any sense?
And he had a very articulate response to it.
There was something along the lines of that when he watches a movie –
One of the first things he looks at is whether they achieve their intentions.
The thing is, I'm not going to give this one star just because it's a schlocky horror movie.
I'll give this one star because it was an unsuccessful schlocky horror movie.
So I could never find that exact quote, but somebody did send me this one quote that I don't know why it feels germane here.
It's what Roger Ebert actually called Ebert's Law.
He said, it's not what the movie is about, but how it is about it.
which feels somehow weirdly germane here.
It isn't just that you come up with some list of things you've thought of to say that people will agree with.
It's a question of how you will govern.
It is different.
It sounds like a distinction without a difference, but the way that you are going to conduct yourself and the way you think about...
What new data?
And my God, we haven't even really talked that much about time.
How no matter what your ambitions are, like you're constantly, there's a clock ticking all the time for everything you want to do.
Like if you had unlimited time, you could pull off all kinds of stuff, but even the deals you can negotiate with people, the contracts that are involved in things, like all those things have dates on them and you're always dealing with multiples of them at the same time.
So regardless of how good your intentions are and how long your list of good ideas is, it really comes down to, doesn't it come down to like how you will govern, how you will think differently about this?
Well, and this is the rub, right?
Because it turns out that this is the system and actually it doesn't matter that I'm running.
It doesn't matter if I'm smart and running outside the system.
If I cannot master the system, then I have failed, right?
Categorically.
Well, not categorically.
There is a way to run for office where you are the principled character who has no intention of getting elected but is running just to raise awareness or running to just be on stage.
Change the agenda of what people talk about.
Yeah, right.
I mean you can do that.
But to run for office with the intention of winning –
You have to figure out a way to, and it isn't, you know, like this is the big question.
Can you figure out a way to play the game as it is actually played and also maintain not just the lion's share of your integrity?
and that's the, you know, that's the challenge.
Um, and I think I can, I just, you know, I need more help.
Right.
And I, and so, um, so that's my week right now, right?
I need to go out into my week and say to the people who are helping me, I need more help and I don't, I don't, uh, I'm not mad at anybody.
I don't blame anybody, but, but,
I can maintain my integrity, but if I do, I, I'm not going to get all these, I'm not going to get all these things done.
And if I get all these things done in order to maintain my integrity, I need, you know, I need, uh, I need more than a hug, right?
I need like, uh, I need people that believe in me that are, that are cheering, right?
Well, you know, not to make it too real, forgive me for popping this, but like, you know, this will go out today.
What would you, if it's a listener and they want to give you a hug or more, what would help right now?
Oh, uh...
The thing is like on Twitter, people give me a lot of support and people are very supportive of – I apologize if that was a dumb question.
No, no, no.
It's good.
I mean honestly, I'm struggling.
I raised a lot of money at first and everybody said, oh, he's raising a lot of money.
He's great.
And now I'm struggling to raise money and that looks bad.
Um, because it seems like my support has evaporated.
Um, and so anybody that wants to, you can go to, or any American rather that wants to, you can go to vote roderick.com and donate money to the campaign.
If they have some line around, um, that, that always helps.
Uh, but also like I need, I need research done.
Um, and, um,
you know, help like writing position papers.
And I know there are a lot of researchers and writers out there.
I just don't know how to tap them.
Right.
Without having a new job of interviewing people for a job.
Yeah.
Right.
And, and just, you know, there are, there are a lot of people, uh, who listen, who are like, I would love to write a, a transportation piece on gondolas.
And it's like, I actually need one of those.
Um, but yeah,
But like getting it all, understanding what I need written and how I need it written and how I need to then actually write it myself is, you know, it's a major energy issue.
it would take up all my energy if I weren't also going to six meetings a day.
Right, right, right.
There's no bottom.
Right.
So I know everybody wants to be engaged in it and I want that too.
And I think the biggest problem is I don't have a gatekeeper.
I do have a campaign manager who is scheduling me in these six meetings a day, but I don't have a creative...
Czar.
Somebody who's next to me and who is actually thinking about the positive aspect of the campaign.
You need an outboard brain.
I mean, somebody, not just a whiteboard, but somebody who can be there to be that other face in the mirror in some ways, right?
Somebody that you could talk to about these things, help you remember where that thread got dropped, how to pick it up, and then how to evolve as this stuff goes along.
Right.
That's not what a campaign manager does.
A campaign manager is more like functional campaign related getting elected stuff.
Exactly.
Get the stuff on the calendar, get the phone calls made.
And yeah, what I need, I need three me's, right?
I need a me that's like, you just go home and write
Write all your crazy shit down and edit it and get it so that it sounds reasonable.
Right.
I will be out going to these meetings and shaking people's hands and kissing babies.
And then the third me will be eating a sandwich in the bathtub and getting all the time he needs walking around the garden in a bathrobe swinging a scimitar.
Right.
And if the three of those three guys could, you know, could, could partner up.
The three wise men.
The three, the three wise men.
Right.
Because, you know, they're like definitely standards in my neighborhood have declined.
Although I have to say, did I tell you that Gary, I went out and yelled at Gary the other day.
I didn't want to bring it up because I know that's not really, I would love an update.
It sounds like you, you had to come to Jesus meeting with.
So it was a warm night.
Gary's standing outside of his van.
Yeah.
So first of all, the van is still there.
The van's still there.
Gary's standing outside of his van, two o'clock in the morning, yelling into his phone about how the country is an abomination.
Abomination.
No, that's pretty clever.
I didn't know he had it in him.
I'm not sure I'd heard that before.
That's pretty good.
And about the fourth or fifth time he says it.
Loud.
Loud.
i'm like i'm in bed and i'm like all right i've just i've had it and i got up and i put on my bathrobe and i stormed across the street and he's standing there in the dark behind the behind the laurel hedge yelling into his phone and i said god damn it gary and he's shocked and turns and i said
I am sick of it.
I'm sick of you.
I'm sick of you over here yelling in your phone.
I'm sick of you living in the front yard of my neighbor's house.
I'm sick of you drunk son of a bitch.
I got a little kid over here and you're out here yelling about Obama nation.
I am done.
I am done with you, Gary.
And Gary goes, and I said, Gary, you don't even know my name, do you?
You do not even know my name.
And he said, Jeff, I,
And I proceeded to read him the riot act for 20 minutes.
He picked the wrong week.
I just had, I just, I was done.
And I don't know what he did.
He picked the wrong, this was just the, this was the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.
And I, I dressed him up and down.
I said, Gary, you have met me 40 times.
And the reason you don't remember my name is that you're a goddamn alcoholic and
And if you don't figure out a way to quit drinking and get your shit together, you're going to spend the rest of your life living in this van.
And that is no way for a man to live.
I said, when's your birthday, Gary?
And he was like, 1968.
And I was like, I was born in 1968.
You and me, Gary, we're the same fucking age.
And I used to be a dumb alcoholic living in a van.
It wasn't even my van.
And I don't even want to know if this is your van.
You need to get, and he was like, I tried to quit drinking a thousand times.
And I was like, you know what?
Thousand and one, try it a thousand and one times, Gary, because two o'clock in the morning out here living in this van.
How long have you been living in this van?
How long have you been living in the front yard of my neighbor's house?
And I didn't, I never let him get a word in.
I just fucking unloaded.
And at the end I was holding him and
And petting his hair.
Whoa.
And saying, Gary, you can do it.
You can change your life.
You can get through this and get on.
Get on down the road.
You can get your kids back.
You just have to fucking take the first step.
And he's blubbering.
And I said, but in the meantime, Gary, fucking stop yelling about Obama in the middle of a goddamn night across the street from my house.
If you're going to live in your van, live in your fucking van with the door closed quietly.
So.
And then you saw him a few days later.
So six days later, he come.
I parked the car.
I get out of the car and he's standing there with his hat actually in his hands.
And he walks across the street and he goes, hey, John.
I'm like, hi, Gary.
And he goes, I remember your name.
I was like, I'm glad.
He said, the reason I called you Jeff was because my best friend's name is Jeff.
I was like, I'm not interested, Gary.
And he said, listen, ever since our talk three days ago, I haven't had a single drink.
What?
And I said, that was six days ago, Gary.
He's like, yeah, six days ago.
Anyway, I mean, when I drink, I'm an asshole.
And I was like, yes, Gary, you are an asshole when you drink.
But like me, you are also an asshole when you don't drink.