Ep. 158: "My Citadel Is Irrelevant"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Burland.
How's it going?
Good.
Good, although I just looked down and noticed that I have a schmutz on my pants.
Oh, no way.
Yeah, I got all the way down here, sat down, feeling good, feeling strong, and then schmutz on the pants.
Aw, cry me, Pete.
You know, so you're at your office studio HQ now?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
You should probably get, this happens to lots of rich, famous guys, you should get a rack.
clothes that you can have around.
I don't know if you have a closet there, but I'm thinking you need to start having a couple shirts a day and maybe some schmooze-free pants at the office.
I don't have a closet, but I do have clothes here left over from the time period when I imagined that I would start a thriving eBay company where the thing that the eBay company sold was my old clothes.
So I have a bunch of stuff I have.
I am looking right now at I think a tangerine colored linen sport coat and a pair of heavy wool hunting pants that it would have to be 20 below zero and you would have to be spending a night outside to wear.
That's what that's what my eye.
Oh, no, there's a corduroy vest.
so so i corduroy vest i could dress myself i could wear a uh john roderick per city council t-shirt uh the hunting pants it's just that you'd look like ignatius riley exactly like ignatius riley oh my valve oh my pyloric valve oh so anyway that's where i'm at i mean i can't talk about like
Talk about needing to be ironed.
I need to be ironed and spot-pressed and spot-dabbed.
You know, the thing is, this eBay thing has been a presence in your life on and off, it sounds like, for the last few years.
It comes in, it goes out.
You think about finding things on eBay, you think about putting things on eBay.
I'm still very interested in an idea from a few years ago about you curating some kind of museum of your life.
But, like, it's amazing because, like, you go to the store and you see all those tiny little clothes that won't fit you.
It's, like, somewhere out there.
I don't want to say it's a doppelganger, but it would be great if you could find, like, a few guys.
Let's call them bears.
If you could find a few guys like you that have your interests where you could, like, do things like swap clothes.
Because part of it is that you're a tall guy.
Like, you're a big fella.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
If you were, like, you know, if you were, like, a little guy.
you could probably swap clothes with more other guys.
But, like, you need to find, there should be some kind of a matching service for people based on interest and, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?
You know?
Shape.
Yeah, shape, right.
I mean, I think that there are enough, just based on the touring that I've done and the traveling and the number of people that come up to me in airports and other places and say, Mr. Roderick.
Ha, ha, ha.
I am guessing that there are a large number of people who are interested in the things that I make who also are my size and shape.
And so the interest in having the eBay store was mostly to just take these clothes and deliver them to a group that was standing there with a big catcher's mitt already just waiting for the used hunting pants, thinking to themselves, I want used hunting pants and can't find them anywhere.
and John Roderick has some, and he's my size, and we share an aesthetic.
You know what?
It's not bespoke.
It's me-spoke.
I think that's your eBay store.
Me-spoke.
That's nice, me-spoke.
It's sort of like a dating service, but for shape-based pairings based on interest.
Well, but you know, there's something to this that gets at the heart of something else, as all things on our program do.
Mm-hmm.
Where...
Your natural inclination when you think about like I would like to curate a store of my former belongings is to – your inclination is to look at that desire or that impulse and say that is narcissistic.
To reduce it to its basis like you are an egotist.
I'm talking now to the imaginary me.
You are an egotist, and this is narcissism in its most reduced form.
You actually want to take your things and put them up on the internet as though they are valuable.
But the desire to have a curated life is one thing, but the desire to have a curated history is
of your, of your life and of yourself is a different impulse.
And I, and I tangle with it all the time, you know, like for years, I, I,
I was so pleased when I found my father's clothes from the 60s and 50s.
And I found them in the 80s.
A long time after my dad had stopped being interested in them, he couldn't wear them anymore.
And he was not like a trendy guy, but they were dated suits, you know.
And I found these things and the only reason they were there and the only reason that they – and I mean they were the sourdough starter mix of my whole fashion sense.
My dad's 50s suits hanging in his closet.
And so my whole life I've imagined that because I had that experience, I was aware of it and I was saving things in order that my future child –
son or daughter, would discover this starter kit again, this sourdough, and that it would be useful to them.
But I don't know how much me discovering that, how much of the fact that my dad just absently left that stuff around because he never got around to throwing it away,
How much of that... But I mean, I was aware of my dad's history.
I put on those clothes conscious of the fact that these were the suits he wore during the Kennedy administration.
Totally, totally.
I wasn't blind to that.
But he didn't keep them for me.
He just kept them because.
And so I've been keeping stuff my whole life, thinking that one day I would see... It would regenerate that excitement and that...
Putting on your dad's clothes, you know, like the Spoon Song, your dad's fitted shirt.
Gosh, this has really got me thinking.
There's so many different levels to this.
I mean, you know, the anecdote I have to share is, you know, my dad died when I was really young.
And I discovered over time like little caches of his clothes.
And he was a little taller than me and a little skinnier than me.
But, I mean, I still have a jacket of his from the early 70s that I wear.
Increasingly less, because I do want to keep it.
But, like, you're on to something so super interesting.
And I don't mean to make this all intellectual, because there's something very emotional to what you're describing.
But, like, when you first – I made the crack of, ha-ha, like, you know, what are you going to do?
Like, Miranda July kind of project where you open a shop and it's all your own clothes.
And it would be like a cute little, like, Portlandia sketch.
But, like, that's – the thing is, though, there's such a distinction between, like, how you would choose to frame that to the public.
Like the way you would frame that to the public, and I'm taking this kind of seriously because what is art anyway?
You know, art in a lot of ways, it has to be kind of narcissistic.
It has to be, I saw a funny Venn diagram on Tumblr the other day where somebody was saying like, you know, the nexus of total narcissism and complete self-doubt is where you find art.
Yes, it's kind of true.
But like, there's one way of saying like, okay, here's all these objects from my life that I'm putting a frame around in order to highlight how pointless and ephemeral they are.
And there's another way of saying, well, I'm putting a kind of frame around it to show like how important it was or how emblematic it was, how this is this strange connective tissue between generations.
That like, you know, in the same way, it's considered very normal to say like, oh, you know, I love the Beatles because my parents love the Beatles.
It's another kind of thing to go like, who knows what kind of sensibilities I develop based on wearing the suit, you know, and how much like I, you know, you know, it's just the whole aspect of like a little kid.
Like you never know what your little kid wants a question answered about.
And like finding like a cigar box full of old stuff is like so many answers to questions you didn't know existed.
Yeah, absolutely.
There are lots of people who would be interested in seeing the original handwritten lyrics to Scared Straight.
There are a lot of fans that like that song.
When they become aware that there is a paper that has the original handwritten lyrics to that song that I was scribbling out as I was writing it in the studio...
There are plenty of people that go, oh, I would be interested in seeing that.
And then there's a much smaller group of people that would say, I would be interested in owning that.
When you think about the original handwritten lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone, there are millions of people who would be interested in seeing it and probably many tens of thousands who would bid on it if it came up for auction.
It's a much smaller group of people that care about Scared Straight.
But for me...
The handwritten lyrics of Like a Rolling Stone are interesting to look at, but I would be much more interested in the shirt that Dylan was wearing when he wrote it.
And Dylan probably doesn't remember the shirt he was wearing and doesn't ever didn't think that way.
And he's so like not peculiarly, but so uniquely wired to find something like that, like kind of repulsive.
You remember A.J.
Weberman, the guy that used to go through his trash and write about it?
Bob Dylan in particular is particularly wired to go like, I'm not even sure why you care about this song, let alone my shirt, but whatever.
He would burn it all, or at least he would burn it as theater.
Just so you can't have it.
Yeah, right.
And the big question of Dylanologists is like, yes, he finds it repulsive, but also that is his persona.
Like he's enacting...
finding that repulsive, too, at the same time.
Okay.
But maybe.
Yeah, no, no, I think you're right.
I mean, God, the criminology around that guy is just nauseating.
Yeah, right.
When you think about him, Dylan constructing his personality out of Lego blocks, and at which point he grabbed the block that was like, kill your idols, and set it there as one of the foundational ones, you know, who knows.
But...
There's something about me that I remember pretty much like I know the shirt I was wearing.
And there's maybe only a handful of people that are interested in that connection.
Like that's the shirt that...
that I was wearing at that point, and I got that shirt from my dad, and that's the shirt I was wearing when I wrote Scared Straight, and that through line is, you know, maybe will never be interesting to my kids or my grandkids, but it is interesting to somebody, and that connection is,
is interesting to me.
And I don't know, and I can't separate out.
I think I've got it.
I think I've got it.
And this is the ineffable part.
We joke forever about the dumb stuff we say for our kids that they won't want.
Because again, the part that's so interesting is you know what you care about.
And you know what you found interesting.
But that's what you found interesting about that particular person.
Or obviously the clothes have become kind of a touchstone for you.
But I guess what I'm saying is there's no way to know what your kid's going to care about.
The idea of saving a shirt for somebody is pretty weird.
To anybody who's not into it in the same way as you.
Do you know what I mean?
But there's still this part of me that's like, this is not narcissistic, but there's a part that goes like, I know that if I try to save everything, I'm going to be a garbage man.
I'm not going to be a curator.
I'm not going to be a collector.
I'm going to be a kind of emotionally damaged hoarder.
Like I don't know what special things to keep.
But the idea of this particular thing going into the trash because any other normal person would look at 15 items in a room.
It's like the end of Indiana Jones and the third Indiana Jones movie where you've got to pick out the right holy grail.
Which one of these is the real grail?
Yeah, which cup would the carpenter?
Yeah, exactly.
That's the Carpenter's Cup.
That's such a great line.
But, you know, nobody could look at all of these shirts and go, oh, obviously this is the important one.
You know what I mean?
It is completely intrinsic in some ways.
There's nothing extrinsic where somebody could go, well, that's the nicest one.
That's the one in the best condition, right?
That grail thing is going to really weigh on me now.
Because it's like, of all of these dumb...
hardback books.
Who's to know which one of these is the one that made a huge difference?
They're all just a big pile of paper.
How's anybody going to care about that the same way that I did?
So how do you make those decisions?
It's hard to know what to keep on that rack.
It's hard to know.
First of all, I'm not sure who would ever want a corduroy vest in your size, but I guess you did at some point.
Can you pull off a vest?
Thank you.
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Okay, the internet just went away, and now we're back.
I don't know how long we were both each just talking there.
I'm pretty sure I'd like to thank Comcast for all their support.
I'm pretty sure that I was talking for a full minute and a half.
I was talking for at least two minutes.
Yeah.
And then I was like, Merlin, you haven't said any, you haven't grunted.
And nothing.
I was afraid the last phrase out of my mouth was, can you pull off a vest?
Can you pull off a vest?
And then there was silence and I couldn't reconnect and I thought I offended you.
You know, it's a good question.
I have several vests.
But I have never, I don't, I can't think of a time I ever walked out of the house wearing only a vest.
It's, you know, it seems like it's kind of up there with the cowboy hat and the leather pants.
In the like, wow, you know, if you can do it, good on you.
Yeah, right.
That's right.
You have to be, I think you have to be a thin guy.
I think all of those things, it helps if you're a lanky cowboy type.
Yeah.
If you're wearing, if you're a heavyset guy, then your vest is, I think, properly a waistcoat.
Hmm.
But you know what I was talking about that whole time was that I have sitting on a shelf in my living room.
I have a broken speedometer.
A broken speedometer from an automobile?
A broken speedometer from the motorcycle that I crashed in a Kansas field in 1986.
And I was so devastated because this motorcycle represented basically my only asset in the world.
It was only a $500 motorcycle, a 1981 Honda CB650.
And I wrecked it in this field, and it was a total wreck.
But I had a friend come put it in the back of his pickup truck and drive it to Denver.
And I took it to a place called Denver Used Motorcycle Parts or Dump.
And I was like, you got to give me some money for this bike.
It's the only thing I own in the world.
I don't have anything else.
And the guy was like, it's an 81 Honda.
It's not worth any money.
I was like, come on, something, anything.
And the guy was like, 20 bucks.
And I was like – this was the first time in my life I had ever – well, obviously the first time I had ever crashed a motorcycle in a Kansas field and I didn't know how to deal with it.
Every boy has his first time.
Yeah.
And so the guy wrenches off the broken speedometer, which is broken and still stuck at 80 miles.
It's like broken like cracked.
And he goes, here's a souvenir.
Yeah.
and i still have it still is it still stuck at 80 miles per hour still stuck at 80 miles an hour and i and you know and it's like what good is that to anybody you know what what possible good is that well okay but this okay so picking up on the thread and
You know, goddamn Comcast.
We were really getting somewhere with that.
Comcast.
I think there's lots of little things I feel like you can tease out, little distinctions that to me are very important.
I mean, there's the things that we save and we know why and we know it's for ourselves and that's okay.
And there's the things we save and we're not really even sure why.
And we think it might be for us.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I think there's all kinds of different levels to this.
There's some stuff people save.
Think about the classic sort of medals and trophies kind of thing where it's about like you save that because you want to be able to show to people that you got wounded in World War II or what have you.
Somebody handed me a Facebook challenge coin the other day.
They stuck out their hand, and I was like, oh, nice to meet you.
And he was like, Mr. Rudderick.
And I shake his hand, and then I feel this thing between us, and I'm like, oh, God, what the fuck?
And then I'm like, oh, it's a challenge coin.
And I'm looking at the guy, and I'm trying to think, what challenge coin could this guy possibly be handing me?
It's going to be amazing, whatever it is, and it's a Facebook challenge coin.
No, it's tracking your movement.
And he had a look on his face that was just Cheshire Cat, you know, like, you're going to like this.
Oh, boy.
Facebook challenge coin.
And so the thing that I... Anyway, the thing I found interesting about what we were getting at is this... You know, are those distinctions?
Like, why am I saving this?
Am I saving this for me to remember?
Am I saving it for someone else to remember?
Am I saving this because I think it's going to be useful in a way that I understand?
Could this be useful in a way that I don't understand?
You know, because I think there's a continuum here.
Or a spectrum, if you like.
Where on the one end, like, if the only... You know, the...
Like, you know, I don't want to be morose, but like, you know, a deceased child's blanket, like that might be something that you would want to keep.
Like you get that.
But over here, you're like, you know, I can't keep all of the blankets I've ever had.
Right.
And like there's like there's there is a continuum like there's this emotional continuum between like, you know, somebody who's incredibly emotionally healthy and has understands why they're doing this down to all the other end where you're like, you know, it's like hoarding.
Yeah, I don't feel it is a sign.
I do not feel that my keeping things is a sign of emotional health.
Let's be quite frank about that, right?
Can you say that across the board?
Are there some things where it totally makes sense?
Don't you imagine that the most emotionally healthy dude right now is sitting somewhere in Big Sur and all he has in his – the only thing he has on is a vest.
Yeah.
And some board shorts.
And his minimalist desk.
And he's just like, whatever, man.
Don't hang on to stuff, man.
And then I'm sitting here in my hunting pants with a broken speedometer from an 81 Honda.
I think he sounds healthier than me.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, you know, I guess so.
Or some people are more emotionally raw or emotionally available or unavailable than others.
But I mean I see it, you know, like in my family.
Like my wife is –
I don't even think of myself as being that into the objects that I save.
I could just have whole boxes of stuff flood.
I would be okay.
I would go, oh, that's a bummer.
Maybe that's partly because I know that I'm raw enough that if I really thought about it, I'd be sad forever.
But I remember one day, one day I was about to take out the trash in the kitchen and I looked in the trash.
I just have to tell you, my wife is, she loves throwing things away.
Even, you know, like I'm a purge guy.
Sometimes I really want to purge.
My wife just like day to day, she loves throwing things away or recycling, but you know, getting useless things out of her life.
And I look in there.
And there's a pair of shoes in there.
And I was like, and my heart sank.
And I picked up this old, gross pair of her shoes and held them up in the air.
And I was like, what are you doing?
She said, this is disgusting.
I haven't worn them in years.
I said, these are the shoes you were wearing when I met you.
I might as well have said, like, this is the turd I made the morning after we met.
Why not throw away your wedding dress?
Yeah.
you bitch but like they were exactly what she they were like old shoes she did not want to wear anymore they were out of fashion they were they were dirty old gross shoes and she threw them away but like my my first reaction of course because you know i'm so good at instantly making it about me even when it comes to garbage yeah
But it's funny, though, because like sometimes my daughter and I will go like to get our scooters.
You know, we'll notice we'll walk by the trash and we'll go like we'll both like discover things in the trash and be like, hey, you threw away this popsicle stick.
And then she'll go.
She threw away my popsicle stick.
Well, now let me ask you, I know there's a term for this or a word for it even.
I'm not sure what it is, but when I was a kid, if I took a banana off a bunch of bananas –
There was a part of me that felt sorry for the other bananas because I had chosen the one banana and I felt like I had to comfort the remaining bananas that it wasn't about them anymore.
It was just that I picked this one banana.
You know what I mean?
Like I feel so much emotion and always have from the time I was a little kid about inanimate objects.
Oh, my God.
Yes.
And, you know, reduced to tears.
Feeling sorry for a chair with a broken leg or – I mean I remember I used to have a flag that – like one of those orange safety flags that they attached to the back of my bike.
So you could see me around corners.
Yeah, that was like a big pennant.
A big pennant, right.
A big orange pennant on a little or a flexible pole on the back of my bike.
And somehow I crashed the bike and my pennant ripped.
And I was inconsolable.
Not because the pennant was less useful but because I felt sorry for the pennant.
And I've carried that into adulthood in a way that I don't now apologize to things that I use.
I don't feel like broken things.
I don't cry for broken things the same way.
But objects do have...
Like they have an emotional valence.
They do, yes.
And it's very hard for me to, in a way, like throw things away that have served me well, I guess, because I want to honor their service.
I know.
I hate to admit it, but I'm not nearly as much that way as I used to be, but I was so that way.
And I think it's because I am and always have been a little broken inside.
And so, I mean, like, here's the thing.
Again, back to the continuum.
I don't think there's that many examples of this.
You can come up with examples of this that almost anybody, you know, crying that your wife threw out an old pair of shoes, not crying, but like going like, hey, that's pretty weird.
So the shoes end up in the garbage?
Oh, yeah, totally.
Yeah.
I mean, what do you...
How many pairs of shoes will we save?
This becomes a question.
Like what and how do we honor them?
How do we honor the shoes she doesn't want?
It's weird.
But no, but like, for example, like there's all the obvious kinds of things.
Like, you know, I used to have a lot of attachment to stuffed animals.
We're at plushes as they're now called.
My kid loves them now.
I think she got it.
I love my stuffed animals when I was a kid until I was like pretty old.
And so stuff like seeing a stuffed animal on the street still makes me melancholy.
I think that's a pretty clear one, right?
No matter how many pork chops you jam in your mouth hole every month, watching the first few minutes of Babe will tug on your heartstrings.
And you go, oh my God, I'm totally eating a pig.
There's all kinds of things where things you generally think of as an inert object, you suddenly can feel very emotional about for all kinds of reasons.
But maybe you're right.
Maybe it does come down to being a little bit...
broken inside in some ways.
I used to feel really bad.
I feel positive we've had this conversation before.
But I used to feel bad.
I used to feel bad for my clothes.
I used to feel like if I didn't wear them often enough or I didn't want my socks to be separated and I didn't want my shirts to get their feelings hurt.
I felt that very strongly.
Absolutely.
And there is something...
I got a Valentine one time in about third grade and the Valentine, I may have talked about this a long time ago with you, but the Valentine was of a little girl and she was crying and she was holding a flower and she'd obviously been playing the, uh, he loves me, he loves me not game, uh, plucking the petals off the flower.
Um,
And she had plucked the petals down to the last petal.
There was one petal remaining on her flower.
And it was clear from the narrative, the unwritten narrative of the Valentine, that she had arrived at the last petal, that the petal was he loves me not, and she could not pluck it.
and was crying, holding the flower, imagining that she could go back in time, imagining another world, an alternate reality, where the last petal was that he loves me.
And Valentine was this little cartoon of a girl crying, and it said, I will be so lonely if you...
aren't my Valentine or something like that.
And all of this was, it wasn't explicit.
It was just in the drawing.
And as a third grader, I could, I understood the story that it was, that was being told.
And this Valentine destroyed me.
And I, and, and I, I openly cried and,
at receiving.
And I don't remember who it was from.
Oh, my God.
But it was just, you know, it was one of those things like everybody in the class has to give everybody a valentine situations.
But here this thing popped up.
It was a piece of paper somebody bought at a store.
Yeah.
It popped up in a stack of valentines.
And it was so fraught and
And I felt so acutely for this little cartoon girl that she had started off probably plucking these petals full of excitement and hope and fun.
Like, he loves me.
He loves me not.
He loves me.
And then it started to get darker as she was running out of petals.
Oh, no.
And she got down to that last petal and she couldn't pluck it.
And I wanted...
I wanted to do anything in the world to change this girl's life, to change the story, to change the reality, to put an extra petal on that fucking flower.
And I would sit – so I kept this valentine and I tucked it away and I would take it out sometimes and look at it like it was pornography because it could put me in this place of like –
emotional just absolute rawness you never that didn't diminish over time it still had that power and i would i would draw it sometimes i would sit and and and either trace it or actually do drawings of it on a separate piece of paper i guess trying to unlock it trying to unlock the story or or change it in some way
And so I think that I still have the Valentine.
I think I may even still have some of the drawings I did of the Valentine.
Oh, my God.
And still sitting and thinking about it right now, I can picture everything about it.
And I still feel for that little girl.
And what's crazy is that I've only just started –
Exposing my daughter to To media that is complicated
Up until now, all of her books and all of the stuff that she's been exposed to is pretty much on the level of that.
Unambiguous kid stuff.
Yeah, it's just like little apple boy puts the letter A on his apple basket.
Bunny eats his good supper.
That's right.
Little apple boy never complains about going to bed.
Bunny's so big.
But I've started introducing her to, you know, we watch Dumbo.
Yeah.
And I had forgotten.
I was like, Dumbo, the flying elephant.
And we sat down and started watching Dumbo.
And I'm like, Dumbo, he's a funny little... He's a funny elephant.
He just needs self-confidence.
Yeah, with the flappy ears.
He's got the flower.
And then the trunk comes out.
Dumbo is like, basically, it is full of... I mean, it's...
It's basically the story of Precious, whatever that movie was from a couple of years ago.
Oh, yeah, with the name of the person in it.
Yeah.
Based on Sapphire or something.
Yeah, that's right.
It's, you know, like Dumbo is born.
Everyone rejects him because of his birth defect.
And his mother, in trying to defend him, is taken away by the authorities and put her in an insane asylum.
Yeah.
Dumbo is rejected by the tribe and his only friend is a wisecracking mouse.
He's surrounded by evil clowns.
He's forced into being a freak in a sideshow.
A professional freak.
And only...
Only in the last minute of the film is there any redemption, and it is when he discovers he can fly.
Oh, and then there are the tribe of racist crows.
The crows themselves aren't racist, but their portrayal is racist.
And so I'm watching this movie, and she is just – she's like –
yelling at the screen like no you can't take you can't take dumbo's mom and she's just like so her emotional response to this stuff is like
so intense and i'm sitting there and i'm like i do i right right do i turn this off because you don't want to you don't i mean the thing is though you every kid sits with that and they turn out mostly okay but like you you just hate seeing your kid like now you're sitting there you you put your child in this situation i exposed her to this monstrosity i mentioned i mentioned babe we made it about three minutes into babe and then she started sitting upright now i know what that means when she was little she would always say this is boring
This is boring.
That means, like, this is horrifying me.
Please take it off.
And she started to kind of look down a little bit, and I could tell we were about 30 seconds from tears.
And I was like, what am I doing?
What have I done?
And so she feels it too, huh?
She feels stuff.
Super hard.
And the thing is, I was talking to my mom about it, and Dumbo came out in 1941?
Yeah, it's early 40s, I think.
40?
41?
And my mom...
was six years old in 1940, six or seven years old.
She was like, oh, I remember going to see Dumbo in the theater when it came out.
And I was like, wow, how did you feel about it?
And she said, oh, I mean, it was a kid's movie like all those movies.
And as I started to unpack it, I realized that the experiences that Dumbo was having
in comparison to the experiences my mom was actually having in her own real life, Dumbo was some lighthearted shit to her.
My mom was actually an orphan laboring
On a farm.
Right.
And Dumbo was at least – Not like a fun farm.
Not a fun farm.
It's more like when you say farm, people are going to go – like turkey and straw kind of thing.
And it's like, no, really, more like – think coal miners but with land.
Right.
A farm where there was an outhouse and where – Grinding pots.
The way you dried your clothes in winter was that you hung them up outside.
They froze and then you beat them with a rod until the ice broke off of them.
And that was how that and then took them inside and ironed them dry.
So my mom was like, oh, you know, Dumbo shrugged it off.
And I was like, oh, my God.
So, of course, I didn't turn it off.
And I, you know, and I held my little girl and said, you know, like and talk to her about it.
You know, I didn't like say it's OK.
It's OK.
I said, yeah, Dumbo's mom is really in trouble.
She was trying to help him, wasn't she?
And, you know, and we walk we talked our way through the movie.
And I was like, oh, Jesus, that was emotionally fraught for me.
Oh, yeah.
I think it would have been if I had just watched it by myself, realizing what a terrible time Dumbo had.
And I'm not sure when I watched it in 1972 whether –
I mean it was – Dumbo had a worse time than I did but not by much.
Well, to me, Dumbo and Bambi are like near the top of the list of like – they're canonical.
I mean in terms of like Disney hates parents and consequently kind of hates kids.
Like we are going to make you feel so low.
And here's the thing with these Disney movies.
This is the thing to keep in mind is like you're talking about like people of a certain generation think, oh, Disney movies.
They're like these fun things and there's lots of wackadoodle animals singing songs and stuff like that.
i've been thinking about this a lot lately is the what is it that really sticks with you about a movie and the thing is some people might really they might remember like mary poppins for let's go fly a kite i remember it for the woman feeding the birds oh yeah and it's very scary it's so depressing and like in like in in these cases these movies we're talking about like it may have robin hood and like putting children in jail it's like how do you explain to a little kid why these children are in jail
well yeah and this the prince is corrupt and he's a lion man and it's like but what you really remember like there are these just the i think the impact that sticks with at least me and a lot of people i know was the incredibly intensely sad stuff and then in fact when you want to have this kind of tacked on happy ending it kind of makes it worse because you're like oh like there's this thing i don't understand i'm kind of pushing this bruise now about how sad this made me and all this all this uh kind of you know
baggy pants humor at the end is not making me feel better.
It feels really false.
It feels really fake.
And the emotional impact you're trying to create is like, everything turns out great, the parents are back, yay, or whatever.
It's like it's so, it not only doesn't offset how sad you were at the end of the first or second act, but
But like how – you know what I'm saying?
It kind of makes it worse.
Like you're trying to like make me happy now when I know the profundity of that sadness that I felt is so much more important than seeing the end, a Technicolor production or whatever.
Yeah, the end of Dumbo, I'm not sure I ever – I mean I haven't watched it obviously.
I cannot tell you how Dumbo ends.
I do not remember.
Well, he – I mean that's the thing.
He flies.
And then he's the star.
And the last scene of the movie is that Dumbo has his own –
Super cool art deco styled train car that tacked onto the end of the train.
It's very modern.
And there's a balcony where his mother is sitting watching him fly high above the train.
I think maybe the crows are there and they're all friends.
But the thing is like watching it now, I did very much have the experience of thinking Dumbo's mother is never going to live that down.
She's never going to feel safe again.
Never again.
I mean if Terry Gilliam made an honest version of that, it would all turn out to have been a dream while Dumbo was being tortured and was like dehydrated and he's imagining it would be like flying with Jill through the air in Brazil.
No, that didn't really happen.
You're just sitting there getting tortured by the guy from Monty Python.
It's all good.
Yeah, it was it was I mean, it was the end of innocence.
But when you go back to the beginning of Dumbo, when Dumbo's mother is waiting, I mean.
Dumbo's mother is waiting for the stork to deliver her baby, and everyone else in the circus has already had a baby.
And Dumbo's mother and the stork, like, was late or was a stumble bum.
What they chose to pull punches about is so bananas.
Like, we don't want to talk about coitus, but the fact that she might be barren and she's incredibly lonely is front and center.
Yeah, and all the other elephants, all of whom I might add have mid-Atlantic accents.
they'll speak like this yes they do wow oh she's she'll be a terrible mother bob's your uncle and um they're all like already at the start of the movie you can tell that dumbo's mother is a an outcast b um maybe a little slow
And none of the other sort of clicky elephants like her at all.
They're mocking her before the baby even arrives.
Oh, God.
And so it's a, there's no, there's no happy ending to that movie.
Like even if Dumbo is, I mean, part of it is the American ending, right?
Where Dumbo gets rich and that is the triumph.
Right.
That, that now they have their own rail car, but they're still in the freaking circus.
They're not back in the, they're not back in the Savannah.
Dumbo and his mother didn't free themselves.
They're still, they're still in chains.
Right.
i you know i don't know i i feel like i'm gonna my little girl and i are gonna sit and we're gonna digest dumbo for a while but but i but seeing her emotional reaction to you know that thing that you're describing where she sits up straight all of a sudden and and is trying to avert her eyes and you go
I'm not just going to keep broadcasting happy fluff to her.
Right.
But if she shares my emotional nature, like there are so many more landmines in the world than for a normal person.
And I just want to say, like, I'm glad that a kid can still have feelings.
I mean, in a way, wouldn't it be even weirder if they were sitting there and, like, laughing at Dumbo or had no feeling?
Like, that means that she's not dead inside, you know?
And that makes me happy.
But I totally get what you're saying, where it's – that is a minefield.
Yeah.
And, you know –
There's a part of my life that I absolutely would not trade.
The degree to which I see the world through emotions, even though I think...
Over the years, I have been accused by a lot of people of being cold or of being, you know, emotionally distant from them in particular, emotionally distant from other people.
And yet, like, I walked through a world that is...
You know, not just a rainbow of emotions, but also like into the infrared and x-ray of emotion, right?
Like I'm seeing emotions in things that do not have emotions and I'm having an emotional response to things that do not require one.
And you have an emotional response that's maybe, I'll say inappropriate, but is out of line with what a typical person would have about something.
And what I've always imagined is that it's a kind of dimensional perception or something.
I'm seeing another overlay.
It's not a seeing thing.
I am experiencing another overlay.
Almost like somebody who could imagine, somebody who sees themselves as a medium or a psychic.
Honestly, somebody who feels like, you know what?
I knew this was going to happen.
I had a strong vision of exactly what happened before it happened.
Yeah, right.
You can see something that other people don't see.
I was at a party this weekend and we were telling ghost stories and somebody was like, do you believe in ghosts, John?
And I was like, well...
I do not believe in ghosts.
However, I have been terrorized by ghosts.
And so in being terrorized by them, I absolutely believe in them, but I do not believe in them.
God, that's so great.
And they were like, well, what do you mean?
And I was like, well, for instance, I do not believe in God, and yet I do not know whether or not I believe in God.
And so I cannot say that I do not believe in God.
But I don't believe in God, but I do very much believe in God.
I mean, how much clearer could I be?
And that is, it's perfectly consistent from within, right?
But like not only impossible to explain, but also like why would I bother?
What am I trying to communicate?
Like sometimes I will come downstairs ashen faced because all my pillows turned to owls.
It doesn't mean that I believe that my or anyone else's pillows have turned to owls.
If you believed it, it would be more plausible.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
That's what people aren't getting.
That's the thing about reality is it doesn't need you to believe in it.
If you know or feel that something is happening, knowing that it's not real makes it worse, not better.
Let me put it differently.
Knowing that it doesn't line up with your quote-unquote beliefs.
Right.
That makes it so much weirder.
And that's where things like – I mean like I don't believe in – I've stopped believing a long time ago in like all kinds of superstitions.
But like when something incredibly coincidental happens, it really freaks me out now because I'm like how did that happen?
Like did I have some role in making that happen with my mind?
Like that's so – and of course I don't believe in it.
But how do I –
What do I say?
I guess I could sit there and like have some skeptic, you know, James Randi person explain to me like how actually likely that was to happen.
But it doesn't stop giving me the creeps.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we still have those experiences.
I mean, everybody does all the time where you wake up in the morning and the first thing that happens when you open your eyes is that you see the biography of Winston Churchill on the bookshelf and then you open your computer and the top of your Twitter feed is somebody saying something about Winston Churchill and then you overhear someone standing at a bus stop
mention Winston Churchill and you're like, what is going on?
What is this?
What am I meant to understand?
Or like you say a phrase at the exact moment someone on the radio is saying it.
And you go, what's the takeaway here?
And the takeaway is... This better be meaningful.
The takeaway is nothing.
Exactly.
But at the same time, it's impossible not to...
I cannot live in that world of, like, proud skeptics and proud atheists and proud, you know, that whole world where you are willingly— People who proudly announce, here's the thing I've decided I don't have to think about anymore.
Yeah, right.
You are willingly putting on blinders.
Exactly.
And saying, I refuse to see these things.
It's not that I refuse to see them as supernatural.
I just refuse to see them.
Because to say that there's a rational explanation for them is also to say that I refuse to see them.
That works so well until you're about 19 or 20.
But if you're in your 60s and doing that, that's not sexy.
Not sexy.
That's exactly right.
So, I mean, those happen all the time.
Yeah.
But again, I cannot say that the world of emotion that I perceive or the world of emotion that I apply or the world of emotion that is realer to me than the world, than the world of bricks and mortar, I cannot say that I take anything from that, that that exists anymore.
outside of myself or even that it exists within me or that it means anything.
But, you know, like my good friend Mike Squires used to say to me, he would grab me by the shoulders and he'd say, John, emotions are real.
And I would go, you know, take your hands off me, you boor.
And he would say, no, I want you to hear me.
Listen, emotions are real.
And I would go, God damn it, stop it.
Stop fucking with me.
And he would say, I'm not fucking with you.
I'm trying to get you to understand that they are real.
They are real.
And over time, I understood what he was trying to say, that they are real.
And that's a thing that in trying to conduct...
In trying to conduct an adult day and fielding all the things that come throughout an adult day and recognizing that emotions are real, that they are not just a – that they are not a byproduct.
They are not steam –
Yeah, it's not – because I think I get what you're saying vis-a-vis, Mike.
It's like it isn't that emotions are some kind of unexpected psychic dander.
There is actually something there that is, as you say, real.
It's more than just –
some kind of little passing synaptic goof.
But there's something enduring and just as real as quote-unquote reality.
Yeah, they're not a reaction that you can either choose to have or not.
You know, that whole business of like, well, sorry, if you're upset about it, that says more about you than it does about you.
An emotion is different than an opinion.
Right.
An emotion is very different than an opinion and an emotion is, I mean, you know, in running this campaign for office, the truest thing about it is that it has delivered me into an emotional place that I have not been in in decades and an emotional place that's very discomforting.
And in the times when I try to suppress that emotion,
And say, listen, all you have to do is get these papers out, give these speeches, fulfill the duties of the candidate.
And the emotional response to this is like nobody's interested, right?
Nobody is interested in your emotional response to transit.
They want the policy response exclusively.
Right?
let alone is anyone interested in your emotional response to the experience of running a campaign.
But in fact, that is the whole question for me as a candidate and as an office holder.
The question is not at all, can I handle the policy?
And that is the question.
That is how it's framed specifically.
when I confront the world.
Like, can he handle the policy?
Is he going to be able to figure out this policy world?
It's a pretty complicated world, this world of policy.
Is he going to be able to figure it out?
And it's like, fuck you.
It is not a complicated... I mean, it is complicated in the sense that there is so much...
And so much to know.
But that is not the complicated part.
The complicated part is how do you invest policy with meaning?
How do you recruit people to understand that policy affects real action in the world?
How do you enlist them even if they feel like it's against their best interest, their personal best interest?
Those are all emotional interests.
duties.
The policy itself is, you know, it's just a set of encyclopedias.
And I have read multiple sets of encyclopedias.
I can read another.
But for me personally, like the question is, can you emotionally survive this?
Is this emotionally fulfilling?
And
And the fact that it is trouble, the fact that it feels dangerous and that emotionally you are upset all the time now is not necessarily evidence that you're not suited for this or that this isn't good and great.
It's just that I've...
And just as I have entered a realm where there's a lot of reading to do, there's also a lot of emotional study to do.
Does that surprise you?
I mean, not surprised, but is there more of that than you expected?
Well, yeah, because that's the whole realm that no one ever talks about.
There are 50 books like How to Run a Successful Campaign.
There are no books online.
titled How to Emotionally Survive a Campaign.
And yet it is just as real, if not realer.
And for me, a lot of the decisions I've made over the last 15 years, I have probably made at an intellectual level in order to protect my emotional well-being.
And so I live in a world where
Where I am defending my emotional citadel.
by making decisions so that the emotional citadel is never breached and i don't think that's very that that's not necessarily healthy i sit in that citadel and i am um you know and i feel safe but am i not i mean it may not be optimal or or like the most healthy thing but it's certainly understandable
It's understandable, but now I have chosen a world in which I am not in my – like my citadel is relevant.
I'm not there anymore.
I had to leave it to come down here.
And now the outward challenge is can you fill out all these forms?
Here you have applied for a job that requires that you fill out 400,000 forms.
Can you do it?
Go.
And then there are a bunch of people watching you and going, is he going to fill out – can he figure out how to fill out these forms?
It's pretty hard.
And it's just – it's not hard.
It's just work.
But the question of are you – can you emotionally –
survive not just the filling out of the forms but the people watching and commenting and waking up at 5 a.m.
That's the real stuff of this.
But I have no safe harbor even to talk about it or there's no one to compare notes with except a very few other people.
And honestly, like every day, the question is never like, can I get in the car and make it to this meeting with the firefighters union by 1.30?
I mean, obviously I can.
And can I sit in the room and answer the firefighters' questions to their satisfaction?
Yes, of course.
But when I walk out of there, do I want to curl into a ball?
Yes, I do.
Why?
Why do I want to curl into a ball?
What happened...
What about this makes me want to curl into a ball?
And is that a thing that will – I mean that's definitely a thing I need to address in advance of becoming a public servant, right?
And when you are –
When you are a rock musician and you get done playing a two-hour show and you go back into your dressing room and curl into a ball, everybody recognizes you have just given a tremendous amount of energy and emotion to a room full of people.
And that emotion and energy is what people go to see rock concerts for.
They give you a special room where you can go be by yourself.
That's right.
And the audience walks out into the night and they feel charged up in part because they have...
Because you have projected your emotion onto them.
They have vampired you a little bit.
Right, right, sure.
And then you are, you know, kind of a husk and you have to replenish.
And no one – I mean there are definitely people that come up to me right after a show and are like, what's the matter with you?
This is my dressing room.
Go out of here.
But the same is true in so many walks of life and we don't recognize that you're drawing down.
And if your reservoir doesn't have a chance to fill back up, you're just drawing.
I put emotion back into my reservoir and it immediately is used.
But that reads as, to you and to others, that reads as, oh, I'm feeling tired?
I think that tired is the first thing.
I don't think other people register at all because I manage to, you know, you raise your eyebrows up, you put on a capable smile, and you say, I am here and I am ready to do the thing.
And people say, like, maybe he looks tired or...
But thus far in the campaign, there's never come a time where I was driving to an event and I just pulled over and said, I can't do it.
There's never been one.
And I'm sure in every politician's life, there is a moment where they're about to walk into a gymnasium and they just say, I cannot.
And you just hope that you don't.
you don't say I cannot after you're already standing on the stage.
Right.
But, but, but I think my, like in my own emotional world, I do first feel it as being exhausted.
And, and then the sort of like attendant feeling of anxious, but anxious, like if you are exhausted and anxious,
and your energy is going into anxiety, that can – That's a horrible feeling.
It's terrible.
I fight that.
I fight that constantly and I hate it.
And it's funny.
I've mentioned this to several friends and I've been really astonished at the number of people that I perceive to be calm and collected.
who have said to me, like a good friend of mine who seems like just the coolest dude.
He's so cool.
He's just a cool cat.
He is a booking agent here in town.
He and I have kind of been estranged for a couple of years.
But he's like, I consider him like a close friend still.
And I was talking to him about the campaign and I was like, I don't understand it.
I just am anxious all the time about this.
And it doesn't preclude me from doing good.
I just don't know how to bear this feeling.
And he said, you know, you just described how I feel every single day.
How I felt every day for as long as I can remember.
And I didn't know where to put that information.
I was like, what, you?
I just assumed that it's just all water off a duck's back with you.
He's like, no.
I mean, constant feeling that I am just one person
one mistake away from total annihilation.
I think it's so much more common than I realized, and I think it's more common than most people are aware of.
Not that that necessarily makes it better.
I think it makes it less worse to know that you're not the only one.
I mean, I feel like I spend...
most of my day vibrating very quickly and just slightly out of alignment with the vibrations of the rest of the universe, where it feels like a rattle.
I feel like I'm just rattling in the universe a lot of the time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and I never used to feel like that.
I mean for me to be at risk of – If I felt like that, I wasn't aware of it for sure.
If you used to feel that way?
No.
I mean like I look back and I think about – I think I used to have much more of like garden variety.
Like I'm scared this thing will happen and I think about it a lot versus like that gets located more physically in my body now than it used to.
People talk about the differences between like things like anxiety, fear, worry.
Very interesting topics to me, kind of obsessively interesting topics to me.
But the way you locate that physically in your body can be very different from one thing to the next.
The feeling of like standing on the glass floor of the Eiffel Tower and looking down and feeling like your pants are falling off, like that kind of like your gut sinking feeling, that's a kind of a fearful kind of thing versus the like, oh my God, vibrating feeling of like what is happening all the time.
Yeah.
I didn't used to feel it.
What I now feel is I wake up in the morning and already I am struggling to catch my breath.
And I'm just all day long.
I'm just like, just struggling to catch my breath.
Like I have a little, like I have an, I'm having a mild asthma attack.
Yeah.
And I never used to have that feeling at all.
Or I mean, just, just it basically, it was the feeling that I had an hour before I went on stage.
Yeah.
More like a butterflies in your stomach kind of thing?
Yeah, I've described this before, right?
When somebody says, hey, we want you to play a show, I always say, great!
And then immediately start to pretend that I didn't say that.
And a month or two go by and they send me emails like, that show's coming up, and I'm like, ah, just delete.
But as the show starts to loom,
I start to wish that I had not agreed to do it.
Even if I know it's going to be a great show, even if it's like the beginning of a tour, I start to think like, why did I say that I would do this?
And as the show gets closer, I start to feel like I really hope that there's a storm.
And I hope there's a storm and the show is canceled.
I totally know that feeling.
Yeah.
And then the night of the show, I'm like, what if the wheel came off of my car and I had a mild accident where no one was hurt, but enough of an accident that I...
had a plausible reason for not a lot of people think that's what dylan's motorcycle accident was he just like laid it down and said sorry oh yeah i mean now we're back to aj weberman and the and the dylanologists but a lot of people think that like he was he really had just kind of reached the end of it and that he you know kind of took a dive and was not hurt nearly as bad but like just needed that time to like just not have to deal
Yeah, I have no doubt about it.
And I've told you about, right, the one time that that did happen when I'd put together a show with Dave Bazan and Kathleen Edwards and my friend Laura Meyeratkin, and we had booked the triple door in Seattle, and we had all learned each other's songs, and we were going to get up on stage, and we were going to play four of Kathleen's songs.
Oh, I saw that video.
Is that where Scott Simpson made the video you guys rehearsing?
Yeah, Scott.
Oh, my God, that was exquisite.
So we had this...
We had this show that we had worked out and it was all just this imagination of like, what if Dave and Kathleen and I and Laura all just...
We're a band and we did four or five songs of each other's tunes and, and, and it was a crazy idea.
But once, once we got in the room, there was real energy and we, and the song sounded incredible that way.
And we went, we were, it was a summer weekend and we were sitting in my house and,
with the windows open and the doors open, just playing our music.
And it was one of those sort of pure musician experiences where you're just like, I don't want this to end.
I mean, this is hard.
It's hard to learn this music, but it's the best kind of hard.
And then we went down to the triple door.
There was a line of people out the door to see the show.
We rehearsed on stage.
We ran through four or five songs.
It was like, and they sounded incredible.
And this was exactly the room for it.
And we were just looking at each other like, it's going to be a magical night.
This is already a magic night.
And then it started to rain in the theater.
And we're standing on stage and we're playing.
What?
We're playing a song still.
We're in the middle of the song and throughout the theater, it's just rain and not a light rain, but like storm rain.
And we're, we're, we continue the song and we're all looking out at the seats as they get drenched and it's so surreal and
that we don't stop playing.
And all of a sudden, the staff of the restaurant is screaming and running around and we're still playing and thinking like, this is weird.
And we get to the end of the tune and we stare out at the theater, which is now a scene of complete devastation.
And I'm standing on stage still thinking like, well, we better get this cleaned up.
I mean, there's like four inches of water on everything.
And it dawns on us suddenly that like it's over.
What had happened was the restaurant upstairs, somehow the drain had plugged.
And all of the...
drainage water from a night of, from a, from a big dinner service, all of the gray water, uh, from the dishwasher and the kitchen had pooled in the floor.
you know, underneath their floor, but above our ceiling until it was, you know, eight inches of dirty water.
And then it just all at once just fell, just soaked through the, soaked through the material of the ceiling and then just storm.
It was surreal.
And it came down not as falling ceiling, but as rain, dirty rain.
And, uh,
And we were playing the last song before doors were opening, right?
If it had taken a half an hour longer, that dirty rain would have fallen on a full house.
And the line of the crowd down the street.
And what had happened was I had probably two hours before would have been so glad if
To imagine that happening, right?
Because of that pre-show anxiety.
But I had crossed the threshold and was into the show, like doors are in five.
And all of us on stage had crossed that threshold.
We were over the hump and were in show mode.
And it was so incredible the experience of that show being canceled right in front of us.
And we had all put our energy on the table.
And I'd never had that experience before where the energy was out.
It was on the table and it was ready to go.
And then there was nowhere to put it.
And we, and none of us had had, had that experience before.
And we were, we were sitting backstage in a complete daze.
Like our, our whole show energy was out of us, but had not gone anywhere and was not being reciprocated or, you know, there was nowhere for it to, to, to live.
And it, it was seriously like, like we had survived, like we'd all been struck by lightning.
Um,
And none of us could talk.
It was very confusing.
Our feelings were outside of our body already.
And so the next day, one of the people who had meant to come to the show contacted us and said, hey, I'm one of the directors of the Woodland Park Zoo.
Would you guys like to come feed the giraffes?
And we were like, yes, we would.
And so all of us together went to the zoo and spent a couple of hours inside the giraffe enclosure just hand-feeding giraffes.
And it was a brilliant...
insight that this person at the zoo somehow recognized either saw or just or we just got lucky or God was watching out or something but somehow going and having this singular experience hand feeding giraffes for a couple of hours was it allowed us to collect all that emotion back and you know and feel like it had been used or
it's very hard to explain but but I mean for a month afterward I think we all just sort of walked around in a in a very strange state not an unpleasant one but like a singular one where you're where you're ready you're you're all you're actually on stage ready to go and and the show is canceled emotions are real emotions are real holy shit that must have been so strange
Yeah, I still, you know, you can hear just in describing it that I go back into a place of like profound confusion about what, you know, I'm like, I'm feeling it again.
That feeling of just like, what does one do when there is no climax?
And
It's like you have the energy, and maybe I'm repeating what you said, but it's almost like there's no receptors.
There's no receptacles.
The energy just didn't exactly dissipate, but where did it go?
Because it's kind of still didn't really... It's kind of ruined emotion.
You load up the torpedo tubes, and then nothing.
You surface and go back home.
And it's just like...
Whoa.
Whoa.
There's a lot of danger.
It feels very dangerous to be like sailing into port with full torpedo tubes.
Right?
Yes.
I'm sorry.
This is such a wonderful topic and I'm hearing his dick jokes in my head.
But so as far as now today, are you – can you –
can you and do you choose to locate what this with any specificity, what those emotions are when you walk out from talking to the firefighters and you feel like, Oh boy, something's going on.
Like, is it, are you aware of like how that evidences in your feelings, thoughts, and maybe even physicality or, but can you locate what it is that you've, that's making you feel that way, what that feeling is?
Well, and this is the thing that this ultimately is, is the actual learning experience of this, um, uh,
of this undertaking.
The thing I have to learn is not what the state policy is on rent control.
Right.
Because that is just interesting and easy to learn and not emotional.
That is just policy.
But the thing I have to learn is what is going on and what is going on inside me and how can I turn that energy to be more useful to people and less, you know, like my anxiousness is a sign that I really think that this is important.
Absolutely.
Think about stage fright or whatever you want to call it, right?
Or those butterflies.
And I think we've talked about this, but if you didn't feel anything before you went on stage for two years, that should tell you something.
You're either not challenging yourself or you stop caring.
Yeah, right.
But how do I turn that energy so that I am a more effective public servant?
so that I am somebody who is more useful to people as an agent of getting things happening and making good policy, right?
And it isn't about my comfort in and of itself.
It is about my discomfort as another person
as another lever.
And, and so I'm, I'm very aware of it.
And, and, and I realized like when I, when I am asked to write policy about things that I feel like are out of my, um, out of my world of interest, um,
I don't really... Pardon me.
I don't really have a...
I don't have an emotional block about like reading about stuff I don't understand, asking people who know better about stuff who can explain what I don't understand to me.
Like that stuff is just – that's just exciting.
That's as you say.
I think you phrase it like that's the work.
That's the work.
That part is not that ambiguous.
There's a thing over here that has to be dealt with.
And then when you're done dealing with it, there's other things you deal with.
I think it's much more to do with the fact that I am a person who... I am a personality characterized by self-doubt.
And a certain amount of it is healthy self-doubt and a certain amount of it is unhealthy self-doubt and I'm always trying to move the needle back to healthy self-doubt.
But I am in a world where...
where you, the expectation is that you express no self doubt and, um, and the other candidates do not show very much self doubt.
I happen to know that the other people in my race do have considerable self doubt.
They are human beings and I, and I like them and there are there, you know, all three of the guys I'm running against do have like emotional lives.
Um,
But when I walk into the firefighters union this afternoon and they start talking to me about their pensions and I start answering questions about my feelings about the firefighters pensions and how important those are.
there is no room in that conversation for me, for my self doubt because they don't have time for it.
You know, they just want to hear whether or not I support their position.
And so being in, in those, in those rooms, um,
Because as a musician and as an artist and as somebody who was living in the world that I had made for myself, I brought that self-doubt with me everywhere.
And I used it as a – if I was in a conversation with somebody and they had no room for my self-doubt, I left that conversation.
And said, you are a monster.
I'm not here to – I'm not here to perform for you.
I think it's slightly different than the Welsh troll.
But I think the self-doubt can be a companion in some ways.
It keeps you kind of honest.
It keeps you –
Practical in some cases and maybe something that doesn't help you every single time.
But I mean, that becomes like a companion in some ways, an uneasy companion.
But I don't think that's a horrible thing.
But it's more normal when you're walking around being a musician.
You can't introduce that little friend to people at the firefighters union.
Yeah, and the thing is I can't live without it.
That is a part of my character, and it will, I think, make me a better public servant.
But I'm being asked to perform in a circus where –
that's not what people paid the ticket price for.
You don't sit in front of an executive board and say, you know, that question has plagued me.
And not because I worry about your pensions, but more because pensions are emblematic of a deeper question of
The role that the state plays in providing for, you know, and it's just they're already like, ding.
Right.
They're looking for their bell.
They're like, that's not what we're, we don't, you know, we didn't sign up for a class.
We signed up for a 30-minute interview with you where you tell us either what we want to hear or you can't.
Or give us an idea of what we have to fight.
Yeah, that's right.
And I've described this to you before, right?
That I've heard from several people that like people come up to me and say, I don't like your opponent, but I know where he stands.
And the fact that I know where he stands allows me to make plans.
Yeah.
And I have a $40 million hole in the ground downtown that I'm two days away from pouring concrete into.
And the fact that your opponent is either for or against it is less important to me than that I know exactly what he's going to do.
And so although I don't like him and I might like you, the fact that I don't know what you're going to do is scarier to me than that I do know that he is against me.
That is incredibly fascinating.
And I just go, because from where I stand, the first time somebody said that to me, they said, it's really kind of scary to us that we don't know what you're going to do.
And I was like, I know, right?
Yeah.
Isn't that great?
You're the agent of chaos.
And they're like, it is not at all great.
And I'm like, but you have a sense that I'm going to support.
It was an environmental group talking to me.
And I was like, you have a sense that I am like 1,000% an environmentalist.
And they were like, well, we do have a sense of it.
But they're not sure who you're going to deliver the bill to and how.
Yeah, they're like, we're very excited about it.
But your opponent has been a reliable and gray-colored vote on behalf of the basic environmental package.
He's not inspiring, but he is reliable.
And I'm like, but I mean, don't you want inspiring?
And they're like, well, what we want is reliably inspiring.
And I was – and facing that and being like, well, reliably inspiring, that's like – you're talking about lawful good.
But the way you describe it, the hole in the ground situation, you've described this before, but I really get it now.
I get it.
It's – in a way, you know what it reminds me of?
This is kind of obscure, but it's almost like –
Finding out what judge you've been assigned, like when you're on one side of the case or another, like you find out what judge has been assigned to your case.
And there may be some judges that are way more favorable to your particular point of view than others.
But like once you find out what that judge is, you have to craft a certain kind of offense or defense depending on who that person is.
Right.
So even if it's the hanging judge and you're the defense, at least now it's a knowable thing.
It seems like it may not be preferable, but I don't know if this is even the right analogy, but you wouldn't want some new cat coming in there who's a real free thinker.
You'd be like, well, I know I need to know how much is this case going to cost to defend?
Who do I have to bring in as expert witnesses?
Let me look at your track record and see how you tend to adjudicate these things given certain conditions.
Right.
Right.
That's much more desirable than going like, hey, here's somebody who really believes in justice.
You're like, OK, great.
Thanks.
Justice.
Great.
Well, and that's and the thing about a city council from the perspective of all these groups is what they're looking for is five out of nine votes.
They're not, you know, they do.
The vast majority of these groups do not look at individual council people in places.
as much as they look at where that individual council person is going to fall in a, in a split decision.
And so everybody wants five reliable votes.
The environmentalists want five reliable votes.
The transit nerds want five reliable votes.
The cops want five reliable votes.
And so an election like this is it's for them.
It's much more of a scorecard and,
And they say, okay, we've got this person and this person.
They are – they're the incumbent.
They're doing well in the race and we know that they're a vote for us.
And now there's these other seats where it's unclear who's going to win and we need to know like –
whether the candidates are a vote for us or not.
And in my case, I'm running against the incumbent and everybody knows exactly where he fits into their scorecard.
Right.
And unfortunately for me,
Of everyone in the race, of all 65 people or whatever who are running for Seattle City Council right now, I am the one that is the most unknowable for everyone, for the cops and the environment.
Are you accounting for how high your profile is compared to the long tail candidates or are you saying just generally straight up like you're the most unknowable?
Yeah.
I'm the most unknowable, not only because I don't come from a siloed background.
People couldn't read your resume and guess exactly what you'll do.
Exactly.
And so I'm trying to populate my campaign with writing that lays it out.
But even that, I don't have a voting record, right?
It's very easy in a campaign to say, when elected, I will put a baby in every pot.
But unless you have voted for a baby in every pot five times or conversely voted to not put babies in pots, it's all just like – You're not going to be led around by a big pot.
Yeah.
That's right.
I'm not in service to big baby either.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Keep going.
Oh, my God.
We could stop there.
That's so good.
But I want to hear more.
Yeah.
So...
I'm imagining an actual large baby.
Where are you going to go on this vote, buddy?
Which way are you going to go?
Babies in pots or not?
Emotionally, because there are a lot of things at stake here.
Everybody who's running for office wants to be liked by everybody except for the people who are running for office specifically because they hate a certain kind of
civic leader the guy wears a boot on his head yeah like like unless you're like like the deliberate like outsider candidate or or no or a lot of the insiders are insiders but are like i am here to fight big developers
It's like, well, what does that mean?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Who are they?
But that's not politics to say, what does that mean?
Politics is to say, I'm here to fight big developers.
And then everybody in the room goes, yay, big developers are bad.
Here's the thing, though.
For the hole in the ground person, getting somebody in there who's incredibly incompetent that holds that point of view might actually be kind of good for them.
Absolutely.
I mean, am I being extreme?
Not at all.
You plan around that stuff.
It's the Supreme Court stuff.
You don't have to get a unanimous verdict.
you are trying to win.
And if you know that four people on the council are against you,
and you know that four are for you, then you can just focus your attention on the one, which feels very efficient to a lot of political operatives.
That's a super interesting way to look at it, like the swing vote.
Yeah.
We don't have to expend any energy on those four people that we know are against us.
And the fact that they are –
that one of them is really smart and one of them is really dumb.
One of them is Scalia and one of them is Thomas.
Well, then wait a minute.
So, but if somebody, let's say the evil John Roderick, somebody with a mustache comes in, the twirly mustache.
No, but like in that case, doesn't that kind of benefit the we don't know what they'll do person because now they can leverage that if they were that sort of person?
Well, yeah, except if they get the sense that that person is a person of principle.
Right.
If I were running for office and all of these groups smelled on me that I was someone who was corrupt, someone who was capable of being coerced or bought.
And this is why people say, we love a situation where it's a dumb candidate and a smart staff.
Right.
Because you can go talk to the staff and say, what do you guys want out of this?
Like, if you give us this and we give you that, how does that feel?
And the staff goes, oh, that benefits my career and I'm not the one out front who's going to get caught
uh with his hand in a bag so you know the staff makes the deal and then they say to the their candidate like here's what we should do on this and the candidate goes oh really great i get it he's got a big hair and he goes out and and people vote for his hair and uh and that's how politics goes but so these groups
If I were malleable and they didn't know what I was going to do, sure, they'd be like, great.
And there are people absolutely at every level of politics that walk into every room and say, what can I do for you?
Mm-hmm.
The problem is that they smell on me that I am not – that they don't know what I'm going to do and also they're not confident that they can reach me through the normal back doors.
I've had a few people in my life –
where I didn't realize until too late how important it was to them that I owed them a favor.
Oh, yes.
You ever meet people like this, and they're perpetually, they seem so nice and so dad-like in some ways.
But there are these people who want to make sure you owe them at least a couple favors all the time.
And sometimes they'll insert them, kind of like, oh, here's a thing I did for you.
And then it's like I'm imagining somebody playing pool and extending the cue and moving the little clicker down the string.
You must run into that.
There must be people who are just always like, I will always just keep doing these little things for people, and that will accumulate.
And eventually, on the day of my daughter's wedding, I will come to you and ask a favor of you.
That's right.
Is that how it works?
Put my boy back together.
Look what they did to my boy.
It's absolutely how it works.
And at every stage of the campaign, there have been moments, and I've, I think, described this before, but like the path to corruption is not a big bag of money.
It is a tiny little incremental failures to make, failures to stand up.
on your own principle and people come up to me every single day and there's nothing dishonest about it.
It is not, it is not a, it's not a process of organized deceit.
It is not a conspiracy.
It is just people saying, hi, I see you're running.
I like what I see.
I would like you, I'd like to give you an opportunity to
to be my friend.
And in exchange for that, I will do what I can to help you.
And it feels very natural.
It feels very human and humane.
And when you're on a campaign, you're struggling.
You want friends.
You want people to say, we are here to support you and we're not asking anything except a very small thing, which is just that you be our friend and remember this moment.
And you go, wow, that seems so easy.
They're going to support me.
And all I have to do is remember that they're my friend.
I will take that deal.
Thank you so much.
And you're just trying to put together enough friends to get into office.
But you realize that every one of those people is remembering that favor and that's their job to do.
And if you don't have a core, if your values aren't your own,
then in the course of a campaign, it only takes one campaign to get to the end and realize like, oh, I promised everybody.
I promised everything to everybody.
And now I'm in office and I'm excited about that.
And so each person who walks in here, I'm going to try and accommodate.
And not because I'm looking for the best solution that helps everybody.
Yeah.
But just because I've already given a little piece of myself to everybody.
And it's astonishing how easy it is to be corrupted.
And let alone when you get in there and somebody comes and says, remember when I...
Remember when we endorsed you and I got 70,000 members of my organization to come out and fight for you?
Like, you would not be here without me.
And that's hardball politics.
And, you know, it's what I love about the Sierra Club.
Like, they sat down with me and we talked and they were like, you know, why would we endorse you?
Like, we've endorsed your opponent in the last three elections.
Right.
And they don't like to change.
They don't like to change horses.
It would be a real violation of our policy.
And I was like, wouldn't you like to have somebody out there that really was like really on your team?
And they were like, you know what?
Yes, we would.
And they endorsed me and they have not – like they didn't ask me for anything then and they really have not made a big deal of it since.
They were just like, you know what?
He's our guy.
And now I run into them and they're just like – they seem happy to see me.
And there's no sense of – because I already was ahead of them on –
The Sierra Club is never going to come to me and say, we really need you to do this thing that you find distasteful.
I was just like, listen, you guys draft off of me on this because I got this part of it.
But there are so many issues where any reasonable person would kind of fall somewhere in the middle.
And it really is difficult to know where you land.
And that is normal and that should be part of good government.
That should be part of the discussion.
There's nine of us up here and seven of us think that this is kind of...
this is sort of a gimme, or there are seven of us up here that don't even understand the question, or there are six of us who feel like group A has a good point, but they're kind of overplaying their hand a little bit, and group B has a weaker point, but they're being kind of noble.
That stuff, that's people business, but there's no real place for that in a campaign.
in a campaign you are, you're for or against stuff.
Right.
And if you start to have nuance, it's just like, then they ring the bell.
It's like, your 30 seconds are up.
Thank you for your time.
Hmm.