Ep. 161: "It's Ramifications!"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you going?
I'm going.
I'm going, man.
Big weekend.
Merlin, man.
Oh, John Roderick.
Oh, a patriotic version.
Yeah, it was a big weekend.
A big, nice, big, long, hot weekend.
Oh, is it hot up there right now?
It's very hot up here.
Can you just set some kind of record for most days above 80?
Yeah, we're headed to a record of most days above 90 now.
That's our target.
Yeah, it hasn't rained in a long, long time.
The sociopaths love it, of course, because they're lizard people and they lay out on their hot rocks.
Yeah.
Yeah, they get to live this little fantasy of pretending they live somewhere else.
I live somewhere different with sun.
Yeah, they absorb the life-giving rays of the sun, and the rest of us are just cowering.
Something has dawned on me slowly, I think I may have picked up slightly from you, is that when you think about the problems that different places have...
You know, whether that's, you know, when it rains in Atlanta, it rains in San Francisco, when it snows, you know, someplace where it doesn't snow.
And everybody laughs, they point and laugh.
But, you know, the problem is that, you know, you have your community set up a certain way, your city, if you like, to accommodate what happens over 80% of the time.
Mm hmm.
Right.
And I don't know.
I feel like I have a more subtle understanding of these things because I get now I get that that, you know, yet it's still kind of silly that literally no one in Florida can drive.
But but, you know, if you if you're not used to a certain kind of traffic and event happens, it's a very infrastructural issue in some ways.
You can't suddenly ramp up to everybody having air conditioning because it's hot for four days.
That's right.
And no one here has air conditioning.
It's always been a point of personal pride for Seattleites.
No air conditioning, no umbrellas.
Those are our two big, you know, system-wide decisions that everyone makes.
No umbrellas, no air conditioning.
And...
And now the no air conditioning thing is kind of starting to be a little bit of a problem for people.
You can't go two weeks with no break in the sun in July and just sit in front of your box fan and be like, yeah, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
I don't need an umbrella either.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and I mean, there's health issues.
I mean, it seems like, I feel like this happens in Chicago a lot when there's heat waves.
You know, ramifications for people like, you know, old people who live alone and don't have air conditioning or something like that.
There's real, there's stakes to it.
You know what?
You just hit on it, Merlin.
It's ramifications.
That's what we're talking about.
Really?
It's all about ramifications?
You know what?
It's ramifications, and this is a thing that people don't get.
We don't talk about ramifications enough.
I'm going to write that down.
But this is about ramifications.
And so many things are, you know what I mean?
So many things are about ramifications.
That's a really good point, John.
Yeah.
Because I think as principled people with a lot of fancy ideas, we have a lot of nouns in our head about how the world works.
But when it comes down to it, the real problem, it's ramifications.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At the end of the day.
The more you say it, the more it really resonates with me.
Ramifications.
It's ramifications.
And you know, it's starting to really sink in with me too.
Just say it a few times.
Say it soft and it's almost like praying.
You really start to see the ramifications of it.
Yeah, you know, it's true.
It's true.
Because, you know, the thing is, I don't know, I think a lot about these things.
Yeah, I know you do.
As one does.
Actually, I mentioned this recently somewhere else.
I've talked about this with you, even with parenting style or any of the ways you conduct your life.
I used to think that I had a set of principles or values or any of these other lists of nouns that white men like to talk about.
I used to think that I had these things, and then I willfully, mindfully, and in a very muscular and masculine way applied those to life.
Yeah.
And I've started to realize that that list is easy to overlook when things are going the way that I want.
It's when things don't go the way that I want, right?
That's when I start wanting to start grabbing my big bag of nouns and slapping it onto things and going, that's why this is wrong.
When really I have to realize it's ramifications.
It's ramifications.
Do you know what I mean, though?
I do.
People, you know, it's always the kind of like...
I don't know, I guess a form of personal NIMBY, where you're always pointing at other people who are doing it wrong.
One does that.
And it's like, you just assume you're doing it right because you've got this bag of nouns.
Yeah, I have more than ever before am convinced that I do not have special knowledge and I am not doing it right.
Really?
I really feel that when, I mean, if you have time to sit and think and stew and steam and various other ways of mentally cooking yourself, you can really dig yourself in on how correct your idea about something is.
And then you might suddenly, one might suddenly be exposed to several dozen people who not only disagree with how you steamed and stewed, but like they can actively demonstrably show you how full of shit you are in a way that is incredibly humbling.
Well, there are two things in my immediate life here where I feel like I do have some special knowledge right now.
Okay.
One of them, and this may be a foreign world to you.
I'll write it down.
But when I was first introduced to Facebook...
The first thing that I felt about it was that it was a terrible name, Facebook.
You know, a lot of people don't like the word moist.
I don't like the word face.
Succulent.
There's nothing about the word face that I like.
And face, do you remember on Golden Pond when they described kissing as sucking face?
Do you remember that?
Ugh.
okay yeah okay you add you add suck to face and it really brings out the nastiness of face as a teenager old people suck in face well see it wasn't the it was the it was the you know the one of the one of the plot points of on golden pond was what jane fonda's son her obnoxious little blonde son or was he yeah there was a young person in that film
I haven't seen it in a long time.
But I do remember the term sucking face ruined not only the movie for me, but I think that entire year of my life.
So when Facebook first came out, I was like, it's just like sucking face.
It's Facebook.
A rock face, I like.
A rock face, I can get into.
That's more dignified.
But a human face?
Or even a little animal face.
Oh, my God.
I went into this having no problem with face.
Yeah.
It's ramifications.
Now I'm thinking about face.
Well, so, yeah, and that's the thing.
Like, you're thinking about face.
You took out, you're not even using, like, it's just face now, right?
I mean, you're just saying, it's like the way they talk about police in The Wire.
You don't even say the police anymore.
You just say, like, it doesn't have an article.
You just say face.
Just say police.
Right.
And so Facebook, anyway, when it first came on, I had spent so much time worrying about who I was friending on MySpace that when Facebook came, I was just like, screw it.
I'm just going to friend everybody.
Everybody that wants to be my friend can be my friend because I don't care.
I'm not here to curate anything.
I'm not trying to create a special place for my people.
My people aren't on here at all.
So the people that are on my Facebook page are just whoever.
And so a long time ago or some amount of time ago, I arrived at the 5,000 friend mark.
which is the most you can have.
Oh, there's a limit?
You can only have 5,000 friends because somewhere within Facebook, they imagine...
They imagine their product has a correct use.
Absolutely.
That's super interesting.
They do.
That's why they're so tied to the whole real name thing.
Yeah.
Because they're saying if this is real John Roddick, there's no way an actual person has actual 5,000 friends setting aside the fact that you can go and like Coca-Cola on Facebook.
Right.
That's exactly right.
So they have an idea about the correct way to use their product.
And 5,000 friends, they determine, is the most that a normal human being could have.
It's obviously way more than a normal human being could have, but still not as many as, I mean, if you want to be my friend past 5,000, then you're my fan, right?
But over the years, I have accepted a lot of friend requests from like, as I say, from whoever.
So record labels have friended me and a guy that owns a Pontiac dealership and there's a lot of stuff on there that I don't care about.
Not my people.
Did you say Pontiac dealership?
Pontiac dealership.
But, so I was like, oh, this is, you know, this is a bummer because people keep friending me every day and I can't, I cannot conclude the transaction with them.
You're all out of the Bitcoin of human kindness.
That's right.
I cannot hand them my, like, my ace of spades and
and say, you know, first airborne was here.
Right.
I cannot touch them with my virtual fingertip.
You can't palm them your challenge coin.
I cannot show them my face and take their face into my collection of faces, into my book of faces, if you will.
And yet, here's what I've discovered.
Are you ready?
Yeah.
Every day, some one to four people...
disappear from my Facebook friend list.
Every day I am allotted between two and five new opportunities to friend people or to accept friend requests.
And I don't know where the three to five people, two to five people a day go.
They just decide, I've had enough.
Or they're in their own Facebooks really managing their account.
And they decide, you know, John Roderick, he's just not, I don't know, he's just not working for me anymore.
Whatever it is.
But so every day I get the gratifying feeling of just the, and I always go to the top of the line.
I always go to the head of the queue.
And I let two to five people, two to five more people in.
You unclasp the velvet rope.
That's right.
And I say, draw it aside.
Please bring your face to my book.
Yeah.
And so today it was Jen Lewis and it was, who is this person?
Is that the Rilo Kiley person?
No, I think we were already friends.
And then this next person has an avatar that is a furry.
It's a furry raccoon.
It's a furry face friend.
A furry friend.
So that's exciting.
So that's one thing.
Number one, bad name, 5,000 friend limit.
5,000 friend limit.
They have a sense of justice here.
And then the other thing I know I'm doing right is
So I was walking along and I saw an orange handle on the ground.
And what kind of handle, you might ask?
It's like a broom handle, but it's only about 16, 18 inches long.
Let's say 18, well, let's say not quite two feet.
Sort of like the cap on a push broom?
It's a push broom-like handle.
It is threaded on one end.
And it's meant, I think, to go into a squeegee, right?
It's like a window washer tool.
It's unused.
It's not like, well, no, no, it's been used.
It's bright orange.
And I saw it on the ground and it appealed to me.
I picked it up and I've been carrying it around.
And, you know, it's exactly the right heft that you can kind of spin it between your fingers.
You know, it's like, it's big.
It's a stick, right?
You could whack somebody with it.
But it also, you can twirl it in your hand.
That's a very satisfying circumference.
And it's, you know, it's got broom handle weight.
And I could, you know, as I was sitting here right before you called and I was just kind of, here, I'll give you a little sound effect.
I was just whacking my leg with it.
Interesting.
So it stands in for it's not a walking stick.
It's not a riding crop.
It's not a baton.
It's certainly not a baseball bat.
It's not one of those giant sticks you use to hit your tire, but you're actually using it to beat up people at truck stops.
But this fits into it.
It is a nice place in your life.
You saw it, you were attracted to it, and you just knew that it would have the hand weight and feel that you were looking for.
Exactly.
It does all of the things.
It scratches the itch of every single one of those things that you just described.
The tire thumper, the riding crop, the walking stick, the baton, right?
I mean, you could extend it to lots of things, sort of like a scepter.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
A wand?
And the orange color, I think if it had been blue, maybe I would have left it on the ground.
But the orange color was very intriguing to me.
And so now I have a thing, right?
I have found, at least in this context, I have found a small duck.
It is this stick, and it's giving my fingers something to do.
It's just dangerous enough that I'm almost certain to whack myself with it wrongly at some point, which gives my possession of it a little bit of an edge.
It provides you with a certain amount of alertness.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
It's keeping me in the game, keeping my head in the game.
So I feel like in that respect, I have sort of aced it today.
It's very close in color, but different in color to my bell.
So I've got kind of an orange theme.
I don't know.
I just feel like that, this little guy.
Oh, the other thing I did was I put my water bottle in the refrigerator last night, and now my water bottle is gone.
I got tired of drinking hot water.
So there are a few things I know.
I'm not going to kid around here and say that I don't know anything.
I do know a few things.
Those small victories can be very important.
I really, I really, I really believe that.
I think you start out every day on the bubble, maybe at best.
And I think, you know, sometimes something comes along and you just say, hey, this is the direction you need to go.
What does that phrase mean, on the bubble?
I think it has to do, I think of it as being like a level, a carpenter's level.
Oh, yeah.
Where when it's, you know, across something that is exactly horizontal, the little bubble in the green liquid is exactly in the right place.
You're on the bubble.
I don't know.
I don't know.
That's what I think of anyway.
But, you know, just meaning that it could go either way.
Yeah.
Boy, I wonder.
I think sometimes...
Well, you know, a lot of our podcast, yours and mine, one of the major themes has been, what are we doing?
What are we meant to do?
And what are we actually doing?
And...
And I feel like I'm just trying to get on the bubble.
I'm just trying to get that bubble somewhere.
I went hiking yesterday with my family.
We hiked up to a mountain lake.
And we were some of the only people there.
There was some kind of dead critter.
It was truly mountainous.
And the ladies in my party all jumped in this freezing mountain lake.
And I kind of took my shoes off and waded into my knees, which was, that was the, that was right where I was comfortable.
It was very, it was cold mountain lake and I was, you know, I was, I was being watchful.
I was, I didn't want to jump in the lake.
I wanted to kind of keep one, not a foot on the shore, but I wanted to be ready to, you know, you don't know what's going to happen up there in a mountain lake.
We heard coyotes.
And, you know, and I was there and I was like, okay, am I, is this,
This was absolutely where I was meant to be right now, right?
I am exactly where I need to be right now.
And...
And I feel like if you can even get that once a day, like this is exactly where I am meant to be right now.
Like you're triumphing a little bit at least.
Oh, totally.
Oh, no, I 100% agree.
When was the last time that you felt like that you were exactly where you...
We're meant to be.
Well, this is going to be a false positive because I rarely get it because I'm broken inside.
And now I can't stop thinking about the motherfucking Kool-Aid man coming through my wall all the time.
Oh, yeah.
Because there's something about the analogy of the anxiety Kool-Aid man that has now kind of taken over as a controlling metaphor for my mental landscape.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, this happens rarely enough that I really notice it.
We, as I mentioned, I think offline, we went away for the weekend to visit family.
So the family, you know, our in-laws that we visit pretty often, they've recently moved like much further away than where they were before.
They're out like east of Sacramento now.
Yeah.
In an area that I would almost describe as like the suburban country.
Like I don't know a lot about California, but there are these areas where not much happens for a while.
And then you get into this area that's like a weird combination of like gated communities, but also like fairly wild.
I think it's the kind of places that tend to go up like tinder during a wildfire.
Like you're out in the middle of, you know, like they have a creek behind their house and with crawdads in it.
And we go and we draw the crawdads and it's really fun.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
You draw the crawdads?
My daughter is kind of a – what's less than amateur?
A terrible naturalist.
She likes looking at things and holding them and collecting the golf balls that people have hit into the creek.
So many golf balls and part of nature.
And they've got crawdads, which is kind of cool.
They're like tiny lobsters.
When you said draw the crawdads, I thought that that was a southern way of describing catching them.
But you're literally drawing them with pen and paper.
Sketching them.
Drawing the crawdads sounds like a terrible guy to my voices record.
Oh, we were out there drawing the crawdads.
I drew up 45 of them.
I sketched a mudflap.
Found me a butt skipper.
Mudflap.
Mudflap.
Now that's a gross word.
That goes on the list with face mudflap.
The word flap is so gross.
Well, I may not have ever told you this story, but I was sitting on the side of the road one time.
with a with an older guy and uh we're just sort of shooting the shit i was there with a friend and he was there with a friend the older guy was there with a friend and uh a really nice cadillac drove by and the old man said that's a nice car and i said that's not really my style
I like it a little bit grittier than, you know, that's all dandied up.
And he said, oh, you're one of them mud ducks.
Yeah.
Mud ducks.
That sounds like a sexy thing.
A mud duck.
And then my friend seized upon it and still to this day calls me mud duck.
Oh, gee.
See, that's how it starts.
Just like snot boogie.
Anyway, so you're out there in Grass Valley, California.
Yep, Grass Valley, Greg.
We're way the heck out in the middle of the north.
And believe me, I have so many things to tell you about this weekend.
But, you know, in retrospect, there was just – this is really dumb and personal, but my daughter loves going to the family's new house.
They have a hammock in the backyard.
And we were just laying there kind of perpendicular in the hammock, kind of just cuddling and being silly.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, it isn't like – I think, you know –
We need to disabuse ourselves of the weird, I don't know, Norman Rockwell 50s idea about how families actually spend time together.
A lot of it's excruciating.
It is actually extremely rare to have the moments that are depicted in things like Coca-Cola commercials.
But when it does happen and you're not trying to create a Coca-Cola moment, it's actually really nice.
So we were just laying there and there's a thing we do where we take a sound and then we try to figure out all the words that you could go through the alphabet and how many words you can make out of that sound and maybe that becomes a song.
And we were just sitting there, and I was like, you know, this is actually really nice.
And then she went inside to play on the iPad.
But it was nice.
But I find those moments very rare, maybe partly because of the Kool-Aid man.
Mm-hmm.
But it does happen.
It does happen.
But see, now I had numerous things because I, you know, numerous times with the family where I felt like I was not participating as much as I should.
Like in your case, you go in up to your, you know, calves.
I finally at length put on my swimsuit and got in the pool with everybody.
But I don't love that.
You know, John, everybody's got tattoos now.
Oh, yes, I do.
I see.
This is the thing.
I live in a bubble.
And then I go out to the to the suburban country land.
And, like, I mean, like, like there's there is not a clean ankle in that county.
There's some kind of some kind of shitty insignia affixed to every leg where they live.
And boy, people buy clothes to show it off.
And like, you know, God love you.
I'm glad you're having the life you want.
But it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.
And I mean, everybody, you know, and I think sometimes like moms and dads get sympathy tattoos because their kids have already gotten in way over their head in their in the tattoos in their 20s.
And I think they get like a sympathy tattoo.
Maybe get a memorial tattoo.
You get a Tweety Bird.
You get some kind of like a really poorly drawn trouble clef.
uh-huh i've seen i've seen so many insignias oh oh my goodness but no i'm not always participating as much as i should you know i go through my moods but yeah oh yeah oh i know i know no i'm i'm pretty i'm usually a pretty jolly guy but you know sometimes it's just like hey kool-aid hey kool-aid oh yeah yeah
Crash a bang a boomer with a big bright smile.
You're never going to retire.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I had that conversation yesterday.
Oh, God, please no.
Trigger warning.
Come on.
I said, listen, the only real wealth is property.
I heard those words come out of my mouth.
The only real wealth is property.
And the people I was talking to were all like... You sound like James Earl Jones in Conan.
What is good?
One person kind of looked out the window.
The other person started twirling their hair.
And I was like, no, listen.
Was it a non sequitur?
A little bit.
A little bit.
Puffing on your meerschaum or your calabash.
And you go, the only real wealth is property.
I think I looked up from a newspaper.
Yeah.
Were you scratching yourself at the same time?
Only real wealth.
You know what?
Here's something I want my daughter to know.
Gather round.
The only real wealth is property.
Only real wealth.
That's true.
Yeah.
Never going to retire.
Oh, Jesus.
And can only be comfortable with other people in brief moments.
I used to think we were really different.
Yeah.
Oh, you and me or us and the world?
Well, I knew you and I were corner cases.
But I used to think of us as being very, very different.
And now I think we might share a Kool-Aid man.
Kool-Aid man is a service.
One of my quotes from yesterday, we were hiking.
It was truly a mountain hike.
And my little girl has gone on some – she's gone on some forced marches with us before.
And the –
You know, and my long term goal, which was to get her to think that hiking in the mountains is normal.
is starting to take effect, right?
She no longer complains.
She knows better.
She assumes that we're going to do it.
And it was quite a long hike.
It was a few miles up and a few miles down.
Oh, my goodness.
On her little legs?
Yeah, up to the mountains.
But what I started to notice was she is a narrator, right?
She is narrating all the time.
And when she's narrating, she'll get up into a word storm and forget where she is, forget what she's doing.
But she's on a mountain trail.
So she would then immediately slip and fall.
She fell at one point yesterday face first in a stream.
Oh, no.
She didn't know.
She was just and tripped and plop, right?
Like face in a stream.
And that was a surprise that it was really actually quite priceless.
Oh, no.
She wasn't horribly injured.
No.
I mean, she was.
I mean, we were hiking in the mountains.
We were all injured by the end.
But at a certain point, I became a dad.
Right.
And I started to say.
Less talking, more walking.
And then I heard myself say it again.
And then I was like, it's my mantra.
It's my dad mantra for the day.
And every time I would say it, she would stop and she would think about it for a while and she would walk and she would walk without falling.
And then after a while, you know, and there were a couple of addenda to the rules, right?
If you have a question about anything, you can always ask a question.
Are you allowed to pause and stop walking?
You can pause and stop walking and look at stuff.
I could see a lot of potential abuse.
Right.
There's a certain amount of that.
But we play a game where it's like, who's the locomotive?
Who's the hopper car?
And who's the caboose?
So if you stop and want to look at something, then we'll all stop and look.
But if you're lagging and you're the caboose...
you know, remember, you are four years old and this is a mountain forest.
So you don't want to lag too far behind because the coyotes will get you.
We should start a collection of dad quotes.
I had one.
I like the description of this as being something you find yourself saying.
Yeah.
No one wakes up wanting to say...
I say certain things, but one finds oneself saying things that you may sound like your parents, one's own parents, or you may sound like a whole new kind of awful parent.
Yeah, I never in my life thought I would ever say, less talking, more walking.
How about this one?
Well, you're just going to have to cry in the car.
Ha ha ha!
Um, which, which is, which is a version of less talking, more walking, which is like, and then I screwed up any attempt I might make to take the lessons I've learned from my child's wonderful school to say something like, Hey, you know, it's okay to feel sad.
It's okay to have emotions.
It's okay to cry, but you know what?
You're just going to cry in the car.
We don't have time to cry here.
No, listen.
I have said that very soon.
That's awful.
Why did he say that?
You know what?
Save your feelings.
Hold them in.
When we get into our safe bubble, you can let them out.
We got to go.
We got a three-hour drive.
You have to grind the car.
Listen, grab your bag.
Yeah, so I've been coping pretty well lately by, you know, this is another thing that you and I talk about a lot, and I don't think we've ever put a name to it, but I'm starting to think of it as reverse-engineered Buddhism.
Oh, that's pretty good.
Right?
Where you're not going into it Buddhistically, but you arrive at it.
You arrive at Buddhism by another path.
Oh, that's good.
And I'm finding that in my life, that it's actually very effective, you know, to...
And sometimes it involves some swears, right?
I think of actual Buddhism as never involving any swears.
See, that's bad marketing.
Right?
That's the thing they don't tell you.
This is what those Wall Street fat cats don't want you to know, that if you're meditating, it can be one of the most uncomfortable experiences in your entire life.
Not just on your legs and your behind, but you're just supposed to sit there and take it as your mind goes through everything that's wrong.
Oh, so many swears.
That's the thing.
So many swears.
It's like that argument you and I had so many years ago where I was like, Christians shouldn't smoke pot.
It's the same.
It's like Buddhists shouldn't swear.
But of course, when you're meditating, your mind is full of swears.
You are so full of swears.
And that's how you feel like, oh, I'm not doing this right.
Oh, God, you're good, John.
Wow, dang.
But in fact, it's all swears.
It swears all the way down.
How did you – so, you know, how did you reverse engineer this?
What's the thing – if I could ask if you want to say – what's the thing that occurs to you?
Go, hmm, here's a thing I could try.
Here's a thought technology I could experiment with.
Well, so –
So running this campaign for public office has been extremely difficult and emotionally difficult and practically difficult, energetically difficult.
And so the difficulty breeds...
in me at least, like, and I think in, I think in most candidates, like I was talking the other day to a very successful local politician, um, who is like sort of everybody, everybody admires.
And he turned to his wife and said, you know, cause I was talking about the, the, the trials of the campaign.
He turned to his wife and he said, remember my first campaign?
And she said, Oh yeah.
And he said, I had a,
A total nervous breakdown.
I thought I was going to end up in a rubber room.
Wow.
And I think that that is true of everyone.
That's one of the things that people don't – it's so easy to look at political candidates and think, oh, they're ego-driven.
It's all for glory.
It's all for their – they just like to hear the sound of their own voice.
All this kind of stuff that we put on political candidates.
Yeah.
And there's no way to know, even as a total political voyeur and tourist, as I feel like I've been my whole life watching candidates and watching the process, there's just no way to know how exposed you are, how vulnerable you are, and how much the process of running for office is to just put yourself over and over in front of people who are communicating to you
In every way that the best you can do is to be the best that you're going to get from them is that they're going to give you a face like they're sucking on a lemon.
Right.
Like every day you're just you wake up in the morning.
You're like, I'm going to have to go out and I'm going to meet 600 people today and they're all going to give me a lemon face.
And then at the end of the day, maybe I'll remember to eat.
So the idea that it is self-aggrandizing or that you do it and it's just like strokes the whole time is so far off.
And there's so much easier ways to do that.
Oh, right.
Now just go on Facebook and put a bunch of selfies on there and talk about your surgery.
Yeah.
You're already like getting so many more ego strokes than even the president of the United States, right?
I mean it's just like running for office is so hard.
And there have been multiple, multiple times where I've just – kind of like my friend, the successful politician –
where I don't feel like I'm going to end up in a rubber room, but you get that very human cornered feeling.
Everywhere I look, there is something bad about to happen.
And none of it is going to register as bad to people outside.
I marched in the pride parade.
And everybody around me and everybody that saw me and took a picture of me is like,
Wow, that must have been amazing.
You're marching in the pride parade.
But from my perspective, I'm marching as a political candidate in the pride parade.
And so the joy that people are expressing is not directed at me.
I am being a political candidate.
I am arriving in a situation where people are expressing joy.
Grab it.
You're more like a witness to joy.
Yeah, right.
Or like, I am here is the best that you can be.
Now, if I had an enormous feathered headdress and was wearing a G-string...
I would be like, I am giving back the joy that you are sending.
I am here.
This parade is an expression of my liberation.
There are so many people in that parade that are truly expressing something.
real and powerful and i am saying i would like to be your elected representative oh yeah like kind of like almost like a form of tourism and and so and i don't and i think most most candidates are most candidates are either not sensitive i think i think ultimately to be a successful political candidate you cannot be sensitive you can't have spent your whole professional career trying to be emotionally raw which is what i have done
And now you are emotionally raw.
You're an adult who is still emotionally raw, which is a rare enough thing in and of itself.
And then you're putting yourself into a situation where people are like just squeezing lemons in your eyes all day.
So I think people are marching in this parade and they are not conscious of the fact that they are or if they are conscious of it, it's not connected to their emotions that they are kind of carpetbagging.
Almost any situation you're in as a candidate, you are carpetbagging unless it is an event that you have set up yourself for people to come yell at you about streetcars.
But so I'm arriving at this backdoor Buddhism because –
Literally, it's the only – I mean, it's not a stratagem I'm employing.
It is a last resort of how am I going to make it to the end of today?
And then I find myself like trying to just be present and trying to recognize the –
And all these notions that I've learned or heard in other ways, other different kinds of practice, and I'm actually – it's the only thing that will get me to the end of the day.
And that's really –
That's where you get to the kind of the mathematics of the soul, right?
Where you just find the core principles that are true across all religions.
You find the core principles that are the equations that the spirit is written in.
Because you get to a place where you're just – you are in the particle accelerator of the –
of the spirit and it just breaks it down to, to, um, those, you know, the, the elements, I guess.
Hmm.
So there's an element of any port in a storm.
Um, well, or, you know, it's, it's funny because you, I mean, there are aspects of what I'm doing where I have never cared so much about,
about a thing I'm doing.
Maybe making records, you care so deeply about it, but the thing about making a record is you're caring about each
aspect of it it's very hard to care about the record while you're making it because what you're what you really care about is this bass part you're working on right now and if you manage to care deeply about this bass part and that tambourine part
and you never waltz in the studio and go, ah, this tambourine part doesn't matter, just bang, bang, bang.
But you go in every time and go like, I've got to get this tambourine part right.
This is going to be the thing that really lifts this tune.
So you're caring very deeply about the parts, but you're never aware of like, I care about this record.
You don't think that way.
If you're too much, I say this from some experience, if you're too much in that position, you're probably not making the record.
That's right.
There's something, actually, and it's funny because I heard an interview this morning on Sound Opinions.
They were talking to, I want to say the band Torres, but this woman, Mackenzie something in this band.
Is that where I was listening to this?
Anyway, at some point recently, I heard an interview with somebody where they were talking about how dealing with...
I think I'm really mangling this.
But somebody talking about how there's something really comforting about actually being in the studio and recording.
And as high pressure as that is, that's a really kind of knowable sort of high pressure.
Because you really are deep in the implementation details and doing of things.
It's like when you're outside of that rare environment.
The same way I feel about recording the show or being on stage, I find it relaxing to do this.
This is not the part that I find difficult at all.
I love doing this.
It's everything else that's difficult.
Because that's when you have to think about what should you be doing that you're not doing.
And you don't have to think, I mean, you do that to an extent, but if you're really absorbed in what you're doing in the studio, and you're just thinking about a bass line or a tambourine, that's really freeing.
Yeah.
And that is the opposite of what it is like, at least for me, in running a campaign.
Because each individual event in the campaign, none of them, very few of them, at least thus far, have
um are are moments where it's like i really have to get this base part right you know each each one of them at least for and i think there are candidates who every every time they appear in front of the like concerned shoppers of america they want to you know they want to give their stump speech a little bit better and tailor it to the concerned shoppers uh
But for me, each one of those events is just like, oh, there's nothing I want to do less than go talk to the concerned shoppers of America.
And it's not because I'm not interested in hearing what the concerned shoppers are concerned about.
It is that every one of these things is a kind of theater, and they are not really telling me what they're concerned about.
There's very little real communication happening.
If any real communication does happen in these events, it is by accident.
And yet – so every one of the building block events is kind of really hard, much, much harder than what you get out of it.
You know what I mean?
Well, it's almost – what do they call it in sports?
Is it like the compulsories?
Or like anything where like you – or a time trial kind of thing where you have to compete in order to be allowed to compete.
Right, right.
And it's exactly right.
And so in one way, obviously, that is very similar to a primary.
You're competing before you're allowed to compete.
But the other part of it is that, and I might be over-dramatizing this a little bit, but it seems to me like every event you go to, what you're trying to avoid saying, it sounds like, is that these can't all be the most important high-stakes thing in the world, or you'd perish.
But you also have to take each one of those seriously, because while there's not...
an eternal like huge amount of long-term gain from really hitting it out of the park there are there are potentially huge ramifications if it goes terribly wrong so it's one of those there's this it's like the worst kind of existential compressor limiter we're like no matter how great it gets you're okay you're good now these these 300 shoppers might consider you but if you say something wrong or you fart or something like that like it could go it could be potentially catastrophic because now there's now there's really some news to report on
Yeah, and every single moment is an opportunity for somebody to stand up and say, when did you stop beating your wife?
Right.
And you're just like, ugh, God, it's always – every morning waking up and looking at the internet, it's just like, is today the day that the internet –
I mean, there's one guy in my race that wants to win badly enough that he is willing to attack me personally.
So if it gets too desperate, he's more than willing to go negative.
Yeah, he's demonstrated it already a couple of times.
And the attacks have been sort of ineffective because he's just – but he really is –
He really wants it.
And what I have learned, the way I have learned to survive this is to arrive at a place where, and it's really funny because as I say, I have never cared so much about the overall project.
I've never cared so much about the thing I'm doing.
but I have also had to learn to say like ultimately I'm fine with any result.
I'm fine with either result.
Like if I win, that is cause for celebration.
If I do not win, that is also fine.
Or that is also like even a –
it is a, it will be a profound lesson and experience.
And I don't mean personally, like I'm not talking about this, like what a journey.
Right.
But like, I will, I already know so much more than I ever knew.
And that knowledge is going to be useful to me down the road.
And I,
And I know I want to, I know that helping other people, helping my fellows is one of my core principles.
And now I know how to do that better.
But ultimately, if I focus on winning, if that is the goal, then there are so many opportunities every day to do something in order to win.
that is against my beliefs.
And so I cannot focus on winning because I see what it does to people.
And there are hundreds and hundreds of people who want to facilitate you making the wrong choice in order to win, right?
That's the whole consultant game.
It's just like, oh, you want to win?
I'll tell you how to win.
You unscrew your opponent's brake lines.
There's always another devil to appear on your shoulder.
Yeah.
And so you cannot think about winning.
And if you're not thinking about winning, then you have to arrive at a place where winning doesn't matter, where winning isn't the goal.
The goal is something else.
And the goal is not to keep your personal integrity intact because I already had my personal integrity intact before I started running the race.
This isn't some thing where it's like, I need to find my integrity.
I had it.
So the goal has to be something else.
And if it isn't winning and if it isn't staying honest, no matter what the cost or what the result...
That is this arrival in a place of acceptance where I'm still working hard and striving every day to do the best job I can with the constant friend, with the constant companion being the knowledge that I'm not willing to do anything to win.
And, you know, by anything, I mean, I'm not willing to do like, you know, yeah, I understand what you mean.
Yeah.
And that that that's the only thing that gives me comfort.
Right.
I mean, I will be I will like the anxiety will well up in me.
To the point where I feel like I have never felt so bad.
It's just a terrible... Anxiety is a terrible, terrible feeling.
And it rises up and I feel so, so, so bad...
And then I just say, you know, I am not trying to I'm not trying to win.
I'm trying to do something else.
And, you know, I'm trying to help.
And and that's that's getting me down the road.
You know, I talked to my mom the other day and she said I was looking for sympathy.
First mistake.
And she said, you've had worse months than this.
I was like, mom, that is not helpful.
I need support.
She was like, oh, that is support.
You've had worse months than this.
You've survived worse than this.
So survive it.
Wow.
No quarters.
No quarter.
I was like, she's right.
I have had worse months than this.
And I have survived them.
And that is good advice.
And that is a way of, but you know, that's very different than like, you've got to win.
Yeah.
Man, I'm sorry that this is as hard as it is.
I know.
You knew going into this.
I've had worse months than this.
Yeah.
Yay.
Isn't there also a practical side to this, though, where – I don't know.
When you think about being –
this is not just a true of a candidate, but true of anybody.
Like if you're desperate to have something and it's starting to seem less and less likely that you're going to be able to get it, there's a constant and growing temptation to do or attempt more radical things in order to get that thing.
Yeah.
And this is what I worry about from my opponents.
Right.
Well, here's what I think about though also is that, you know,
It's almost like I'm trying to imagine like somebody who thinks they can defend themselves by doing some kind of like Daniel karate kick and mainly just blowing out their pants and landing on their face.
It's like you one might try the most radical thing in the world and it just makes things worse.
And when you're getting advice from the outside, from people who are like, go do this and go do that, it must be hard to know.
I mean, obviously there must be some things that come along where you go, no, I'm never going to do that.
There's no way.
But there's other kinds of things.
Like you've talked about the siren song of getting involved in a certain kind of negativity where you respond to what other people have said to show how you would do that differently or whatever, where you basically jump into somebody's at responses publicly to start going in and wrassling around to show how you're different or to like sort of monetize the schadenfreude of somebody else's bad day.
Which is alluring, but does that actually help is the problem.
And I think one of the worst and most anxiety-producing things is as you feel like you're not getting closer to what it is that you want, you consider more and more crazy things in order to get there.
Isn't that part of the problem?
And now in your case, now you feel like you're somewhat at risk because somebody else might be in that position.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, somebody else is really in that position.
And, you know, and I can hear the mantra that other people say to themselves, which is, you know, particularly when it gets down to the wire, when they say, you know, when you look back on this, are you going to feel like you did everything that you could have done?
Do you want to look back at this and feel like you didn't pull out all the stops?
Yeah.
And what that I think for a lot of people means as you near the finish line is if there's somebody running abreast of you or running a little bit ahead of you, you trip them.
Instead of
running your own campaign as well as you can, and may the best man win.
And in American politics, and politics I guess everywhere, it's this healthy dose of like, here's my platform, here's my campaign, and also...
Did you ever really look at the other guy?
Did you ever really notice how... Did you ever really notice how his nose is a little crooked?
Like, there's that...
that aspect where it's presented as a fair comparison.
You should look at the two of us and pick the best one.
But all this swift boating, all this extra information about the other person that isn't true.
They're just throwing handfuls of sand.
Yeah.
And it speaks to...
It speaks to the fact that – yeah, here's an interesting insight I had recently, which is that I have quite a few friends in Seattle who are old friends, friends more than 20 years, who are active in the political chatter –
They'll never run for office themselves, but they're chatterers.
They're on the internet.
They're public figures.
They're well-known as members of a kind of –
Yeah, right.
Intelligencia?
The nattering nabobs.
And although these friends of mine are liberals in every way, they're on the wrong side of a couple of issues.
They were both on the wrong side of $15 an hour.
minimum wage because they are small business owners and they didn't think about it they thought about it from the terms of their own bottom line rather than from the long term you know not just long term benefit of everybody but also like they did not sense which way the political winds were blowing and they came out vocally against $15 an hour at a time and I think they both thought that they were trying to be reasonable small business people
But they made public pronouncements and then defended their public pronouncements long after it was clear that the public wanted $15 an hour and that $15 an hour was going to be good and that they should mea culpa or they should shut up or they should think about it and change their minds.
Well, so young political operatives of which there are an astonishingly large number, right?
Like there are so many people in their mid-20s in the political game.
Um, and quite a few of them have come up to me and said with a, with a, like a sneer, like a sneer and a, and a, and a, and a smirk, an ugly smirk have said, we're very concerned about your relationship with these two guys.
And my first response was like, what do you mean?
I've known those guys for 25 years.
They're like my pals.
Um,
Well, yeah, but they're on the wrong side of history.
They're on the wrong side of politics.
And I go, oh, yeah, right.
I mean, I totally disagree with them, and I disagreed with them at the time, and any right-thinking person disagrees with them.
But they're like damaged goods now?
Well, but they're still my friends.
Right, yeah.
And the ugly smirk...
was a way of communicating that within the political class, it matters less what you say than who your friends are.
Because among those people, it's considered a more reliable indicator of what you're going to do
who your friends and associates are than what you say.
Again, you're back to that issue.
At least we know what to expect from this guy.
That's right.
And so what I derive from that is that the premise of the political class is that you are lying when you say things and that what is true is who you break bread with.
And that was a shock to me, right?
Because I break bread with everybody.
But like the who you break bread with, that becomes kind of a dog whistle where like if you want to really know what this person is up to, look who they're hanging out with.
That's telegraphing a lot more to people than what you say.
It's a kind of cynicism to say like, well, we know everybody says what needs to be said that day, but let's look over time at who they spend their time with.
Yeah, let's look at who their donors are.
Let's look at who speaks on their behalf on Facebook.
That's how you judge where a person stands.
And I guess for most people who are running for office –
They've been thinking about this their whole adult lives, right?
That they have always made sure that their friends are the right kind of friends.
Or they only associate with people within a narrow band on the political spectrum and in the work that we do.
But somebody like me who spent his whole career and his whole life like...
sitting down at a table with everybody and a lot of them i a lot of them are people that i love that i think are reprehensible uh the idea that you know that um
that my friendship with them would somehow, uh, compromise my, my ability to, to stand up to them and to everybody and say, no, here's the right course.
Clearly like this is the, like my friends are over here yelling, but my friends are ding-a-lings.
Here's the, here's the politically like correct, um, decision.
Um,
And that is foreign or I guess – Definitely like nontraditional.
And very suspicious to these people who think that the language is a certain way.
And what has been astonishing or startling to me is that the idea that the candidate is lying –
is presupposed by these political operatives who are in some ways self-appointed and in some ways see themselves as the gatekeepers of the operation, the system.
But also the only way that one could assume or infer that everybody else is a liar is to first understand and believe and accept that one is a liar.
That is right.
That is exactly right.
So it's my same beef with hypocrisy, that the people who are most obsessed with hypocrisy tend to either be active hypocrites or people who just sit around waiting to be shown as a hypocrite.
Yeah.
It takes a certain nose.
Like it takes one to know one kind of thing.
Like you're always sniffing around to be able to expose somebody who has the same flaws and vulnerabilities that you know you have.
And these are the people leaning in, whispering advice to me, conspiratorial, like –
Um, these are the people who see themselves as the, in a lot of ways, like they present themselves as the beacons of integrity.
They know the, they know the, the, the right decision and, and they are judging whether the candidates live up to this expectation.
But then they reveal that they are liars because they presume everyone else is a liar.
And then you realize like, oh, wow, it is, um,
It's very hard to enter into this world and not agree to be a liar.
And not agree to...
not agree to presume that the other guy is lying.
Not agree to presume that who your friends are says more about how you're going to vote than what you say.
And ultimately, not agree that...
Having an answer to everything is better than being willing to consider all the arguments.
And so there's a month left before the primary.
And every day I have to wake up and reaffirm these things.
And reaffirming them is...
Reaffirming them is what allows me to get out of bed and go through the process.
And it's so divorced from winning.
from trying to win, from doing whatever it takes to win, that I feel like I'm running a race, but somehow I'm on the – the other candidates are running on the track and I'm up in the stands running around –
Or like they're on the road and you're in the dirt.
Sort of.
Yeah, right.
Or I'm like running through the trees or I'm swinging through the trees or I'm flying overhead in a dirigible that I made myself.
Yeah, it's like if your Mario Kart goes on the rough part of the track, it's not going to go as fast.
So I don't know.
And I keep saying to the people closest to me, like in a month, I will either have made it through the primary, at which point I will have won an election, a kind of an election.
I will have won my first public vote.
And that will confirm that the public doesn't play by the same rules as the political class.
And that I was able to reach the public and that ultimately the rules of the political class apply only if you allow them to.
Or I will lose in the primary at which point it proves that the political class knows how the game is played and that is how the game is played and the public does not.
The public makes choices based on the political class and then that will be very instructive and very profound.
Kind of back to the old thing, though, where you don't allow yourself to celebrate victories for more than a couple minutes.
It's like you've already kind of denied yourself the joy of winning this if it happens.
Well, I did say if I won that I was going to buy myself a pair of shoes.
If I make it through the primary, I'm going to get a pair of shoes.
My mom used to do that with me cleaning my room and getting a Batman costume.
Is it working?
Are you feeling like you're motivated?
Did you cut something out of a catalog and put it up?
How many Batman costumes did you end up with?
Never got it.
Couldn't keep my room clean.
Oh, really?
Oh, I see.
So it was a sliding scale.
I can still see it.
I can still see it in my head.
We had a piece of a poster board.
We cut it out, and I think there was some checking off of boxes.
This is the perfect kind of textbook way to encourage a hopelessly...
messy and careless child to get good at it.
You could cut it out of the Sears catalog.
It was exactly the branded Batman costume that I wanted.
And I really, really wanted it, but apparently not enough that I would clean my room.
And how many times did you have to clean your room, do you think?
If you look back...
How long would you have needed to keep your room clean?
Well, in my head, it was a month, but it was probably more like a week straight or something.
It's just that I never hit those goals ever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did I ever tell you the story about the time that my mom told me to clean my room and I put all my toys in the closet and shut the door?
I can guess how that turned out.
Have I told you the story?
You might have.
Tell it again.
Yeah.
And then she came in and she looked around.
She was like, oh, good job.
And then she opened the closet and saw all the toys in there and she jumped in the closet and jumped up and down.
Oh, right.
I do remember this.
Oh, my God.
Tiny little pieces.
She's not a large woman.
That must have taken a lot of jumping.
Well, you know, kids' toys, right?
I mean, back in the day.
Yeah, that's true.
Oh, my gosh.
That's the worst.
Motivation's hard, John.
It's ramifications.
It's ramifications.
Motivation is difficult.
It's difficult for me to figure out.
It's difficult for me to provide.
Everybody gets motivated by such different things.
What are you motivated by?
Fear.
No, honestly.
As far as the motivations— I think fear is—I think that's— Oh, yeah.
No, no.
But it's also clarity.
It takes a certain amount of clarity.
It depends.
When I think of the stuff that I like that I'm doing or do well, it's just like there is something nice.
Like today, we have a podcast.
We will record this.
I will edit this.
I will put it together.
That's a good feeling for me.
I like that.
I feel very motivated to do that particular kind of work.
Because I do actually really enjoy it.
As far as motivation, it's hard because motivation is such a slippery word because it encompasses so many different kinds of things that aren't really motivating, right?
It's more like what are you running away from rather than like what are you running toward?
So I don't know.
It's funny though because I do feel like, you know, one way that I am a simple –
uh, and, and fault tolerant person is that I do my best when I'm feeling good about what I'm doing.
And when I feel like, you know, I'm succeeding and things like that, you know, if I'm, there are other people who love being down in the count.
They love, you know, that feeling of like, oh, I can power through this.
And, you know, I'm good at that sometimes.
I don't know.
It's hard to know.
I, this is, uh, this is, this is a good question.
What motivates you?
You're not supposed to exhale when you ask that.
You know, what motivates me, I mean, that's what's so wonderful about having done this podcast now for 150 plus episodes, is that it's one of those rare things that is...
its own reward and what has always motivated me is the is the hope that i would discover a life which was its own reward and the feeling that the expectation that that that life should be its own reward um and that's why i
why I've had such a complicated relationship with work my whole life because I watched the adults in my life really practice the belief that work was this thing that you did in order to provide work.
provide opportunities for pleasure or relaxation later.
Kind of a Protestant work ethic idea.
Yeah, right.
There was no sense that work was its own reward, that life was its own reward.
Even though I'm sure that it was, I'm sure that the adults in my life when I was a kid were enjoying the challenges of work
And the teachers in my school were teaching us that we could go to work and enjoy it.
But I don't remember anyone in school saying...
You know, you're going to find a job that you're going to love.
Nobody would ever put that anywhere near the top of the list.
I think it was much more the way that people treated being married in another decade or century, which is like, well, you need to be able to get along with this person.
And if things work out well, you might be kind of in love for a long time.
But I mean, anybody sensible would say, well, you know, don't just marry the first person you have a crush on.
This is work, right, in that sense.
Sorry, go ahead.
I mean, in a way, we were the first generation that didn't marry the first person they had a crush on, right?
That was a new thought technology for us.
Even the baby boomers, they rebelled against it, but the way they were taught.
My mom found it doubly confounding, and now I see why.
My mom, being somebody who graduated from high school in 1952, I believe,
52, 56 maybe?
Yeah, probably 56.
But anyway, but she found two things that now I realize why she found this.
On the one hand, she thought it was so strange that I and all of my friends, everybody I knew, nobody I knew dated.
To me, there was no such thing as dating when I was in high school.
That seemed weird and slutty to me, that I would be somebody who would go out and like, even if it was just going to the skating rink, I did not know anybody who went on dates in the conventional sense.
You guys just all went out together as a gang.
Well, that could be it.
But the funny, this is the weird irony, is that for me, it was more like getting a girlfriend or somebody that's getting a boyfriend or whatever.
It was this constant yearning for stable monogamy when I was in high school, junior high, no dice there, but let's just say high school.
On the one hand, so much like serial monogamy –
where nobody would date, you would have a boyfriend or girlfriend, then you'd break up, and then in time, you'd have another boyfriend or girlfriend.
And the normal state was, you're either seeking that person for monogamy, or you're in the monogamous thing.
Not everybody, but I would say the vast majority of people I knew, that's what they wanted, that's what they sometimes got.
But at the same time, I had zero interest in getting married.
And I thought that was really weird.
I thought it was very strange.
So my mom thought it was strange that I wasn't like trying to, you know, meet more people, do different things, you know, be exposed, people from different places, maybe not from school.
No interest to me.
Like I wanted that girl in my class to like me and then be my girlfriend.
Whereas then, of course, like her generation, it was all about getting married.
And not that my mom was some kind of automaton or something, but I think that was really expected of people was that you're going to get married, you're going to have kids.
And just look at the questions that anybody under 30 gets asked.
Look at the cascade of questions.
And I really felt this in Florida big time.
I mean, at first, you know, do you have a girlfriend?
You get a girlfriend?
Oh, okay, are you going to get engaged?
Okay, are you going to get married?
Are you going to have a kid?
Are you going to have three more kids?
Nobody's ever satisfied with the progress on becoming the person they'd like you to be.
You're never far enough along.
So anyway, I'm just saying, I see my mom's point of view now, and I see the paradox of that, that craving all this monogamy at a time when I'm supposed to be exposed to all these different people.
And that continued then, after high school, but I never was into the idea of dating.
It seemed like a lot of overhead.
Oh, my God.
So what's your story?
But, for example, with your parents, if I could ask, where did your parents meet?
Oh, you know, my mom...
Was it in college?
No, no, no, no.
My dad was 14 years older than my mom.
No, my dad was already divorced from his first wife and he had three kids and was living in Seattle and was kind of a player here in the legal world, in the political world.
Sort of big man on campus, right?
And my mom had...
Graduated from Ohio State and was living in Columbus and, you know, and living a pretty high style Mad Men era life.
She worked at a television station.
She knew a lot of people in the arts world and, you know, and her boyfriend was Jewish.
And so she was part of a sort of Jewish community.
Subculture in Ohio, which is a huge, you know, huge subculture there of that's that's sort of the way she's always described it.
It's, you know, funner and more a little racier, a little more artistic than your normal Columbus crowd.
And they all drove foreign sports cars, which in the 50s were very exotic, you know, Morgans and Austin Healey's.
And that was kind of her scene.
And then she decided that she wanted to see the world and she loaded everything in her 53 Chevy.
And I'm not sure it's a 53 Chevy.
I have a picture of it on my mantle.
I'm pretty sure something like that.
And she headed west to and her first stop was Seattle because she was going to visit a friend.
And then she was going to head down to San Francisco and then all points beyond, right?
Then she was going to get on a ship and go to Japan and, you know, and around the world.
Sounds like up.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, like she, she, she was the first, she was the kind of the only person from her little group to get out of her small town.
And then she was leaving Columbus in the same way.
Like I'm going to go see the world.
I'm not going to be tied down to Ohio.
Yeah.
And she showed up in Seattle and her friend, she met up with her friend and her friend was dating a guy and that guy brought along his friend, my dad, as a blind date for this girl that was coming from Ohio.
And they started to date.
And my dad, I guess...
At a certain point, she became his legal secretary.
She was working for the Alaska Steamship Company for a while.
But they had like a courtship, late 50s style.
My dad had a Jaguar.
So it fit in with her foreign car culture.
And he was a lawyer and a politician.
And she described Seattle at the time in the late 50s as...
Pretty small town, and my dad knew everybody.
And he was one of these guys that, you know, you'd get on a boat, you'd get on a steamship, and dad would just sort of waltz into the bridge, introduce himself to the captain, and pretty soon, you know, my mom would be steering the boat.
Because, you know, dad just had that sort of... But like Ray Liotta, you know, walking into the club.
Yeah, exactly.
He just sort of...
You know, he waltzed around, but also he, my dad, you know, they would on weekends, they would go drive around the Northwest.
And so they, they saw all the, you know, Grand Coulee Dam and all these things as part of their courtship.
And he was drinking at the time.
I mean it was very – I told you I think that my mom tried to watch Mad Men and she couldn't watch it after a couple of episodes because all she could see was all the details that they'd gotten wrong.
Yeah.
That first two seasons of Mad Men was really the era, exactly the era when my mom and dad met and he was a successful lawyer and politician.
But he was already divorced and she was a very independent-minded woman.
She wasn't going to do what was expected of her.
And yet even so...
the social pressure of the 60s was still intact and it still put them together in a marriage where
even though my mom was effectively like a, like a, um, a mage level accountant, my father was in charge of the checkbook and my father was somebody that, you know, if you, if you, if you put them in a room and you said, here's a cupcake, but if you can wait for an hour, you get two cupcakes.
Um, you would open the door in 30 seconds and my dad would be covered in cupcake frosting and, and have stripped off all his clothes.
Um,
So there was no – so those – the social expectations, the gender roles, even though both of my folks were so independent-minded, they couldn't escape the gravity of –
those roles in that time and you know and as soon as the 70s arrived and there were social movements that allowed my mom to achieve escape velocity like she took that route as fast as she could and my dad was just enough older that he never really fully was able to to adapt
I get the feeling that this seems pretty broad, but I get the feeling that we can look at the photos and we can watch the movies.
But I think it's probably pretty hard to capture how we can take a drink, how much hegemony there was in the 50s, just how much people were not just expected to have a certain haircut or drink a certain drink or whatever.
But I think the part that gets left out is you get that pressure from everybody around you, but there's also constantly this clock ticking, like especially for a woman.
And I think it's easy to overlook when you say to people, oh, gosh, why did you do that?
And the thing that's I think sometimes difficult to articulate is the sense that you're not where you should be yet and it's starting to show.
And the more that it starts to show, the harder it is to get where you're supposed to be.
I know that's – I'm pretty sure that's true in venture capital projects.
And I think it's probably true for a lot of men and especially women in the 50s.
I mean, in my case, my mom had – long story short, it took a long time for her to have a kid.
It took her 10 years of trying.
And the idea of a woman of 30 having her first baby was like the craziest idea.
Not the craziest, but like it was definitely pretty out there to be at that advanced age and having her first child.
Which I think is indicative of the kind of pressure people felt.
Try as hard as you might.
You're swimming against the stream.
There's this constant pressure not only to be this way, but also the idea that, like, hey, these opportunities are not going to be there forever.
You better get yourself a new brassiere, put on some lipstick, and get out there.
I mean, I think about that every day.
I mean, I need to put on some lipstick and get out there because...
somebody said to me the other day and it was so arresting it was another one of these young political people and he was talking about
needing more diversity in the candidates.
And in that sense, I'm very lucky because I'm running in a race where it's just four white guys.
And so I am the diverse candidate.
But...
He was like, we need more gender diversity, more racial diversity.
And he kind of like gestured at me and said, and more age diversity.
Oh, my God.
It took me a second to realize that what he was saying was that I was –
the age of a typical candidate and what we needed was younger candidates and that man and that being 35 was preferable to being 45 because um because something because youth is the new youth is also a thing that is discriminated against
And I was like,
And it did.
It took me a second to realize that at 46 years old that I had crossed a threshold to people in their 20s where I was just an indeterminate age.
I was old.
That's such a good way to put it.
It's almost like with little kids where you've got kids that are younger, kids that are their age, big kids, old kids, adults, and old people.
It's like there's no difference between, say, 28 and 48.
Right.
Not really.
To a little kid, there's not.
To a 28-year-old...
A 28-year-old still imagines that they are an 18-year-old, but that 35 and older is just old.
And you always are pushing back that curtain a little bit.
But when you get to be 46 and you realize like, oh, when I read in the newspaper about somebody that's 50 years old, they're basically talking about the people that were seniors in high school when I was a freshman.
And...
And I'm closer to 60 than I am to 25.
And yeah, that is in some ways an accurate assessment.
And again, it's the funny business of the...
of the generations because my dad's generation, you became an adult when you were 18 and then you very, very definitely joined a pool of adulthood where there wasn't such a thing as young adults and
It was, you know, you could be just starting out.
But if you look at pictures of people in their 30s, in the 1930s, they are trying desperately to look old.
Right.
And it was really the baby boomers that were the first generation that made any distinction between being 30 and being 50.
Right.
Right.
They say that the whole concept of being a teenager was invented in something like colonial times.
But I think it really feels like, as an armchair observer, it really feels like the late 40s, early 50s are when that really caught on, partly because it was a market.
For an affluent society now, there was a new source of spending inside the family.
So you were catered to, and there were all kinds of things that were... And also at a time when you could then count on your kids being a little safer by participating in these certain kinds of activities, you didn't want them to go straight into the army.
You'd been in the army and you knew what that was like, that kind of stuff, right?
So in a hunter-gatherer society...
I am at the end of my usable life, my useful lifespan, right?
At 46 years old, I am no longer able to, I've spent a lot of time, oh, this is a crazy thing to get into right now, but I've spent a lot of time in the last few days crouching,
in the dirt looking out over a mountain valley and imagining myself not in prehistoric times but imagining myself now but as a subsistence hunter and i have my i have my ladies with me on the trail and i am you know and i'm needing to
keep this tribe going, you know, defended against wild animals, other humans, find food and, you know, working together as a tribe, but with the knowledge that one of us is four years old and realizing that at 46 years old, I am less useful to this tribe than I would have been at 26 years old and
And if this tribe were a little bit bigger, if there were 10 of us or 15 of us, that would be much better.
But I would still be – I wouldn't be – I'm not so old that I would be slowing us down.
But I would not be with a spear out –
at the leading edge, either against a bear or another tribe, you know, I would, I would have, I'd have, I have a lot more strategy.
I have a lot more plan, but I'm a lot less, you know, my knees are bad.
Right.
Right.
And so that awareness of like the, the, the tipping point at in the mid forties where your eyes go bad, your, your joints go bad and you're like, Oh shit.
If I, if we were on the Savannah, uh,
I'm kind of – I'm a drag.
I would basically be used to bait traps.
So that knowledge but also in the context of us kind of being the first or second generation, really the first generation that was raised all along with the idea that there wasn't just a static adulthood –
But that you weren't supposed to trust anybody under 30 and then 40 was the new 30 and then 45 is the new 35.
We're the first people that have ever talked like that and it's crazy and it reflects how desperately we don't know how to –
We took away graceful adulthood and replaced it with this consumerist, striving, youth-obsessed, desperate feeling all the time.
And now kind of we're the test case again, this dumb Generation X that nobody likes that it turned out was a lot smaller than we thought and less influential than we thought.
And we're out here kind of baking in the hot sun and
trying to figure out, like, how do you be 45?
Like, the yuppies did it in the grossest way possible.
They were terrible in their 40s.
And we're the next, you know, the next ones to come along.
When you think about my dad's generation, by the time they were in their 40s, they were, I mean, they had done so much, they'd wrought so much devastation, but they weren't thinking about their age in the same way.
And
And they were shocked when their children said, don't trust anyone over 30.
You know, they were horrified.
And now, you know, here I am way, way, way over 30.
Hanging out with the wrong people.
Hanging out with the wrong people.
When they build the AI of you and me from this podcast, they are going to be such boring, crotchety guys.
Saggy pants.
Yeah.
I disagree.
I think the AI that they come up with, if they are not just, see, I think if I may say, I think you might have a failure of imagination here.
We're not talking about robots that think and talk like us.
Real AI would be able to take the stuff that we're not articulating well and make it a lot smarter.
And they would be able to draw connections.
Like we're pretty good at certain parts of this, but we really need a super smart robot that will be able to go and like connect all the dots.
Think what you could do with something like that.
I love that you pronounce it robot.
It's a new thing I'm doing.
I think it's so good.
And it really is.
It isn't a robot that we're building.
It's a robot.
And that's what I, I don't, I do not want a robot.
I do want a robot.
Oh man.
Like a, like a cling clang, like actually like with like a body made of tin and stuff.
I'd be so much more into that.
With a little funnel for a hat.
I don't want, I don't want like a, like a real doll that walks, not interested.
Like I'm not interested in the real doll thing at all.
Like the dead rubber girl, but like to have an actual, like not even fifties, like forties, maybe thirties idea of a robot.
That's the robot for me.
He actually says clink clank when he walks around.
Clink clank.
Come on, clink clank.
I feel like my desire to not be around other people...
That much really extends to robots.
Yeah, but you could tell them that and it wouldn't hurt their feelings.
Well, but that's the thing.
Because of the anthropomorphizing that I do, it isn't the robot's feelings that I'd be worried about.
It's my own transference of feeling into the robot.
That's the Yakov Smirnoff problem.
That's exactly right.
Right.
So just having it in the house, even if it was turned off.
I would feel social pressure to turn it on and interact with it.
If you have bad feelings, if you have ill feelings or guilty feelings about your clothing, imagine a computer that walks.
That's going to be rough.
Imagine how bad I would feel.
That's why I have never turned on Siri.
Oh, really?
Because I do not want to have an interaction with a thing where I could disappoint it.
It's ramifications.