Ep. 163: "The Maisie Glotz File"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's good.
I'm just sitting here looking at my Skype account here, and it seems like squirting.flirts3 has tried to connect with me.
Oh, he's a nice guy.
You should totally accept it.
Squirting.flirts3.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Squirting.flirts3.
Three, yeah.
No, no.
Squirting.flirts9 is a real regular guy.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure whether... So Skype offers me... He's got just an egg avatar, but Skype says I can block him, decline the connection, or accept it.
What are you leaning toward?
I mean, block and decline are both just I'm kind of having a hard time deciding between the two, except feels a little bit close.
I don't I feel like he wants to connect with me.
A lot of people want to connect with me.
I don't accept all of those offers.
But I'm not sure I want to block him.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of provocative to block.
Yeah, right.
It seems like I know something about this person from their name Squirting Flirts 3.
Yeah.
I know enough to block them.
You think maybe he had a grandfather and a father that began the tradition?
You're talking about the flirtses?
Yeah, like squirting flirts senior, squirting flirts junior.
That sounds like a terrible comic book.
I think I'm going to decline him and let's just get this off the table.
You know, Merlin, it may surprise you to know that there are a lot of people who are very invested in conventional narratives.
There are a lot of people who are very invested in conventional narratives.
That's what makes them conventional narratives.
Oh, yeah.
See, it's all the investment of all those people.
I'm a little bit of drift here.
Can you give me some help?
Well.
I mean, just a clue.
You know.
You open with squirting flirts.
Yeah.
Three.
Yeah.
So you're talking about in like a literary tradition or like understanding how the world works?
Yeah, I feel like conventional narratives in terms of understanding how the world works, in terms of applying our muscle, our human muscle, to making the world better, conventional narratives tend to dominate over, say, alternate, alternative narratives.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's all.
That's all I'm saying.
Point goes to John.
Right?
I mean, it's not a tennis match.
Give me an example of an unconventional narrative.
Unconventional narratives.
You mean like where the story – people are looking for certain kinds of templates for how things go with good guys and bad guys and happy endings and comebacks and stuff?
Yeah, yeah.
I think the one that gets me more often than not is the cult of expertise.
We've talked about this.
The idea in American life that there are experts –
And those experts have special knowledge by virtue of their expertise, their education, and their experience.
And of course there are experts.
Of course there is specialized knowledge.
But we give experts...
The transference principle too often applies, right?
That because someone is an expert in mollusks, say, we assume that they are an expert in all the biological sciences or we assume that we allow them to speak on behalf of all French people.
Right.
Right.
Because they are an expert in mollusks, we presume that they can speak for French people and rather than find just a normal French person.
Or a couple of French people.
And maybe without even exactly checking their credentials as a mollusk expert.
Right.
And that's the other thing.
Like what does it take to be a mollusk expert?
Right.
Is there a lot of competition?
I mean I've seen a lot of people get through many, many years of college who are barely capable of remembering to breathe regularly.
I mean, they have to remind themselves, breathe in, breathe out.
But they have advanced degrees.
And I'm sure, I am absolutely certain,
looking at the demographics of our listeners, that they're out there somewhere right now is a mollusk expert listening to this book.
I hope they'll speak up.
Right?
And I bet you that they... I hope it wasn't your squirty flirt.
I think that... Because mollusks can squirt, I think.
No, that's right.
And what is a mollusk squirt called?
A flirts.
Oh, right.
That's from the French.
Yeah.
So maybe squirting flirts was trying... Maybe that's... I don't know.
Maybe this is a little time travel, a little rip in the time travel scheme.
where I was like, oh, I was talking to squirting flirts in the future, and now I'm back in the past, and he's here to kill Sarah Connor.
Come with me if you want to live.
Wait, are you French?
Maybe.
No time.
Must run.
I bet you that the mollusk expert that contacts us lives in Tasmania.
I think we still got pretty deep penetration with the Germans.
I think the Germans listen to podcasts.
I think they do, and I think that they like mollusks, and I don't know why the French get all the mollusk-eating credit.
The Germans, they have an oceanfront.
They have oceanfront property there.
They mostly use it to build V2 rockets, but...
I have found myself moving into – now that I do a podcast with John Sturcusa, my whole way of thinking about the world is becoming really interesting.
Is it true that he is argumentative?
No, I don't think so.
But I can't wait until you guys get together.
Oh my god.
I'm so looking forward to that.
But I don't know.
This is something that's kind of dogged me for a long time is all the various kinds of – whether you want to think of them as logical fallacies or cognitive biases.
But like all the things that we walk around automatically thinking and doing –
without ever really evaluating like whether they're true or like why we might be getting it wrong.
Because I think it has consequences, you know, it's ramifications.
You know, in the same way that our kind of poor thinking can lead us to feel anxious and depressed, I think poor thinking, whether that's as a person or a citizen or whatever.
Logical fallacies or what was the other one?
Cognitive disconnects.
Cognitive biases, yeah.
Cognitive biases.
And I mean you take something as – it's one of those things that's always hiding in plain sight and why I bring it up here.
It's something like the confirmation bias, which is the idea that you tend to seek out information –
seek out and then believe information that confirms what you believe rather than makes you doubt what you believe, which I think is there's probably a tribal impulse for like why we do that in a lot of ways.
There's a self-preservation aspect to that, whether that's preservation of life or self.
I think there's reasons.
I'm sorry to sound like a French philosopher, but like I've been thinking about this a lot because when you talk about like conventional and unconventional narratives, I think that's because or a reliance on experts and certainly there's the appeal to authority, all those different kinds of logical fallacies.
where like everything, all the pieces in our world stay fit together much easier if we can find the stories that keep telling us what we already think or tell us what we already believe or tell us what we already reckon.
And I mean, I know I'm far from the first person to bring this up, but once you start really thinking about those things, and you kind of have to think about those things because you're fighting inertia or momentum or velocity.
You've got to fight all of those narratives or counter those narratives every day.
Like, do you really want the weird rock and roll candidate?
Well, first of all, let's talk about whether I really am the weird rock and roll candidate.
But I don't know, because I'm starting to think more and more that a certain kind of self-doubt is a very healthy thing to have.
Well, and self-doubt is precisely the thing that we do not have culturally a way to apprise or rate.
Like self-doubt, in politics, there is no room for self-doubt.
And the more successful...
the bigger the race and the more successful the realm of politicians you get into, the more all of their self-doubt is... All of their expressed self-doubt is couched in the sort of... Like, here is the self-effacement part of the program where it turns out at the end that self-effacement is actually a charming... You know, a charming strength that the candidate has.
There's no...
There's no opportunity for someone running for public office to genuinely say, not only do I not know, but I may be wrong.
Right.
Oh, man, that sounds like trouble.
Yeah, right.
And so you put somebody up on a lectern and they say, well, not only do I not know about that, but I have some feelings about it and I may be wrong.
Right.
You sound like an ignorant dummy.
You sound like somebody who doesn't know about something, and it's surprising that you would even admit it, that shows that you're not particularly bright.
Yeah, and then your opponent stands up and says, I know about this, and I am definitely not wrong, and everybody applauds.
And in every other aspect of life, and particularly the way that we're trending, we want people to be able to say, I mean, this is kind of the whole question about the way that we are
sort of lecturing ourselves now and and and really pointedly engaging people when they speak ignorantly or or insensitively and saying like no you know not acceptable you have to you have to wonder are we do we genuinely
Hope that they change or are we just trying to destroy people that disagree with us?
And I believe we actually hope that they can change.
But that then requires of us that we accept it when people say, I was wrong.
I was wrong and I've thought about it and I've talked to a lot of people.
I've read some things.
I realized I was wrong.
It's hard for me to make this change and I'm trying to make this change.
And so we have to allow for that.
We have to accept it.
And too often you get people that – I feel like we have this bicameral tendency to say, you're wrong and you need to learn.
Right?
And the person goes, well, you're right, and I'm trying to learn.
And then we say, nobody can change.
Well, I would expect you to say that.
Yeah.
You can't really change.
And so what it turns out is that we're not trying to educate people or make the world better.
We're just trying to identify heretics.
That's partly what makes that statement, which may be true.
It may be a true statement sometimes, but it really makes me bristle when people say whether it's something about raising awareness or it's about education.
I feel like the second one in particular is a real code word.
It might even be a kind of dog whistle, which is that more people need to think like I do.
Is what that really means.
Because I don't think and you're kind of getting at one of the bias problems, which is that when we go out there and want to educate the world, we're really I mean, how much are we learning three new things for everything that we teach somebody else?
Oh, yeah.
Because we're sure interested in getting everybody else fixed.
But like we're so certain about that need for that education that we may be closing out a lot of information that could educate us.
It's true.
And one of the things over the years that has characterized me is the fact that I speak very emphatically.
When I say something, I say it in a tone of voice and with a phraseology that suggests that I'm very confident about what I'm saying.
And as listeners to our program know, I say things confidently and then I say other things confidently.
And that confidence is a tone and it's also probably a defense mechanism that I learned as a kid to –
you know, to masquerade as confidence or whatever.
And it also stems from, like, I'm thinking across a lot of terrain.
But I'm also wrong.
I'm often wrong.
I'm deeply, profoundly wrong.
And a lot of that emphatic speaking is really a projection of the fact that the voices in my head or, you know, my relationship with myself...
is extremely self-critical.
So there's a chorus of voices saying, you are wrong all the time to me.
And when I say something out loud, that seems like I'm pretty, you know, I'm definitive.
Like you've always thought that and always will and everybody should agree is the implication.
Yeah.
But in fact, you know, I'm just trying to shout down all the different people, all the different me's who are saying,
you should go back, you should crawl back into the hole that you came out of.
And so, but you know, to, to be in your forties and to continue to be flexible and continue to say like, I, I know more now than I did even a year ago about so many things.
And some of those things really challenged stuff I had thought for decades.
Um, but yeah,
Just because those things were challenging doesn't mean I stuck my head in the ground and now I've changed the way I think about stuff.
But to go up and stand in public and say that when you're next to people who are
who are saying, I've always felt this way, I always will feel this way, this is the only way to feel, which is kind of what we ask of candidates.
You have one minute to speak.
Shower us with confidence and make us feel like you are deeply capable and full of expertise.
So the conventional narrative of who we want to lead us is that we want
You know, we want leaders without doubt.
Right.
But in every other aspect of life, we recognize that people without doubt are dangerous.
People without doubt are unhealthy.
Both they are personally unhealthy and they're unhealthy for us.
Like never follow a leader that doesn't express doubt seems to be something we should teach ourselves and teach our kids.
Right.
Because I'm trying to think of the implications of that, and I can't get away from the personal aspect of this, which is that we feel like everybody else should be endlessly flexible about learning the things that we're inflexible about, I think on a personal level.
And so the problem is, though, if you had a candidate or a public figure or somebody who was – there aren't that many people in a position of power –
who are doing what you're saying, because they may like that personally in somebody who they're correcting, but they wouldn't want that in a leader.
You know, you wouldn't want that because pretty soon you go straight from, I'm trying to keep an open mind and learn to, you know, evolve and adapt.
You go straight from that to like, well, you're a flip-flopper.
Yeah, a flip-flopper or somebody without those true convictions.
You're still developing.
You're not ready to be a leader yet because you're still figuring all this out.
You're still figuring it out.
That's right.
And get back to us when you have it all figured out.
That's exactly right.
And the idea that we –
the idea that there is such a thing, right?
I mean, there absolutely are experts about mollusks who just get it.
They just, not only have they studied all the, the mollusking, uh, valves, all the, all the valves, they know all by valves, you got your other valves, but they also get them.
You know what I mean?
Like they feel they, they, uh, they have a, they were just made to know about mollusks.
And they, you know, they rise to the top of their field, but they have a very, very constrained realm of knowledge, right?
They know about a thing.
They know about this thing.
And that's also true...
That's also true in the realms of public policy and law.
And, you know, there are people that are just expert tort lawyers and there are people that are expert transportation engineers.
And we talked about this when I went on that USO tour where you get these lieutenant colonels that are just experts and
in being a lieutenant colonel in the U.S.
Air Force.
You know so much more.
I mean, as a kid, you could identify planes by their shape in the sky.
You know more about ships and planes than probably 90% of Americans, but you know way less about the specifics than any of the people on that base.
Right.
Way, way, way less about certain –
I walked into those bases and I was like, so, you know, is that an M60?
And everybody laughed.
We haven't used those in 30 years.
Yeah, that's right.
I was just like, oh, shit.
But, you know, but what happens is that you take that lieutenant colonel in the U.S.
Air Force who knows absolutely everything about being a lieutenant colonel in the U.S.
Air Force and you put him up against, and then he decides to run for the U.S.
House of Representatives.
And he's running against somebody who,
you know, isn't even an artist, but let's just say is somebody who's run a series of, you know, a series of successful businesses, is a, you know, is a cross country bicycle racer and, you know, and a father of four and
and a member of the Kiwanis Club, and the lieutenant colonel just looks more impressive.
He just looks and seems more capable because he's achieved this status and this expertise.
But in fact, he just knows how to run things within that very constrained world.
And the generalist, the person that is...
you know, the woman that came up and put herself through law school and then decided not to be a lawyer, but instead, uh, decided to be a chef.
And then she worked as a chef for a while and then she bought a hotel and then she decided, you know, she sold the hotel and, and decided to run for Congress.
And it's like, that is the person that interests me.
Like, like she's the one that I would want as our elected representative.
Because the lieutenant colonel is going to get into the U.S.
Congress and he's going to succeed insofar as the Congress runs like the Air Force.
And then he's going to try to modify the Congress to be more like the Air Force.
Because that's the thing he knows how to run.
Because that's the thing.
And within the context of becoming a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, it's the rare individual, and I know a couple of them,
who remained intellectually flexible there, but like the air force or the prosecutor's office or the, I mean, even, even the Sierra club, like they have institutional issues.
and if you spend your whole career in those places, you're discouraged from remaining flexible.
You're encouraged to harden around those core values that make people seem really principled even.
They start to bleed over into the areas of
of like ethics where it seems like, well, that person's incredibly ethical.
They have never deviated from the, from the, from the party line of, of the organization that they represent.
And so, so we, we know we can trust them.
And I, I find somebody who has done 25 different things and kind of, and some of them were failures, um,
I intrinsically trust a person like that more because they just bring actual...
I guess it's back to the breadth versus depth question, but we don't have a way in our culture to measure breadth of experience with a similar yardstick as depth of experience.
You can't put the two side by side and do an accurate comparison.
Yeah.
And again, I'll take the personal angle on this and state the obvious, which is that I think what we – as people – something that concerns us as people is – like you and I are talking about how we would like to think that a certain amount of self-doubt is very healthy because that means – it doesn't mean that you don't believe in things.
It means you're open to the idea that even your own perceptions could be wrong sometimes.
Yeah.
And that you can't trust your own intellect in an unchanged state to always be correct.
That sounds like something that a reasoned intellectual adult person would happily do as part of having a life of the mind in some ways.
But the truth is that most of us are embarrassed about being wrong and we are fearful of being seen being wrong.
And this could – you could talk about candidates and leaders, but we could also just talk about our parents.
We don't want our parents to be wrong or to be unsure or to be emotional or to be in flux.
I remember my mom getting a new haircut and me crying for two days.
And so when you look at a leader, part of being a leader is having that kind of resolution to what you say where it doesn't brook any self-doubt.
Right.
They have to say something that sounds like it'll be true forever and could be carved in stone on a monument.
Yeah.
And I'm starting to have some new insight.
And I think it's I think a real insight that this is actually a white male problem.
I mean, honestly, the way that we are taught to think and the way that we talk recapitulates this problem.
And it's one of the reasons that more diversity in public office is just intrinsically healthy because not all cultures have that.
you know, that massive dependence on authority, authoritative voice.
There's a lot, you know, I've been going around to community meetings for the last several months and sitting in the room and on a folding chair and kind of just listening to the way different communities in Seattle talk to each other.
And it's weird because sometimes being the only white guy in the room
there is a little bit of the Heisenberg... Yeah, even your presence there changes the discourse.
Yeah, it just changes it a little bit, but I guess probably a lot initially, but then as everybody gets comfortable with me being there or they realize that I'm not a white demon and the conversation starts to heat up or it starts to move around the room in an electrical way,
I realize that other communities just don't talk the same way.
that each other do or that are certainly like the normal room full of Seattle white people talk.
And there's a lot more opportunity for people to say in real time, say like, you know what?
You just convinced me I was wrong.
And nobody like leans over and puts a hand on their shoulder and goes, right on, man.
It's just accepted.
It's part of the conversational flow.
So, yeah, I think one of the solutions to this problem is greater diversity of thinking.
But I feel like the white male problem has infected American cultural life in a way that's going to be hard to rattle out in the next couple of years.
But I'm definitely –
I was surprised and continue to be surprised at how much institutional hostility there was directed at the idea that a generalist had value relative to...
The words that keep coming up are like pragmatism and incrementalism almost.
I mean I don't think they would use those words to describe themselves but the people – it's real politic.
the idea that things need to get done a certain way.
They can't, nothing can happen fast.
It all has to, you know, it all has to proceed according to this pace and that somebody from outside doesn't just can't understand and is actually dangerous.
You know, the, the idea that you turn somebody loose in city hall in their, uh, in their like floppy juggalo clown hat, uh,
to run down the hall and say, like, free money for everybody.
Everybody to legislate?
Yeah, and it would just be like they'd have to take the new council person down in the basement and hit them with rubber truncheons until they pulled a Clarence Thomas and just sat on the bench for the next 25 years without saying anything.
Listen, just vote.
The Italian guy sitting next to you, just vote with him.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but I think there's something comforting about the, the, the lies agreed to, you know, that we never have to like state that we agree.
Like you think about the, the two, I feel like, I don't know if this is still true today cause I haven't been to many job interviews, but you know,
The two kind of canonical questions that always get asked in a job interview.
There's the one that – where you say to somebody, well, what would you say is your biggest net positive?
Or what's the thing you think you could really bring to our team?
And the person – so then there's the pantomime where they have to go, hmm –
That's a poser.
Let me really think about that for a minute because, of course, everybody knows they're going to get asked that question in a job interview.
And you say, well, whatever.
You say something like, well, you know, I do work really hard, but I'm also really diligent and I'm a good listener.
And you say all these things that you know they want to hear.
And they go, hmm, that's really interesting.
Good listener.
Let me – here's a second question.
Let me shake it up a little bit.
What would you say is your biggest negative that you'd really like to work on?
Well, I have to tell you, sir, I was not prepared for that question today.
That's a poser.
Let me think about it for a minute.
I guess I'd say, if anything, sometimes I probably work too hard.
Oh, that is hard.
That's a super interesting answer.
I appreciate your candor in sharing that with us today.
And the thing is, like, everybody knows those questions are going to get asked.
Everybody knows.
I mean, that like what what the fuck do you think that person is going to say?
Well, I didn't want you to find out that, like, I got let go from my last three jobs because I keep masturbating into the coffee pot.
I'd say that's probably in at the end of the day, my biggest net negative is I come in coffee.
And they go, well, that's super interesting.
Thank you.
No, you've got to say something because if you said something, if you actually said, well, sometimes my social anxiety is so crippling that it's very difficult for me to even make it to work.
And I don't answer the phone for a week sometimes.
Like that's probably true.
It's probably a negative and it's honest.
But now not only are you not going to get that job, but you are the biggest weirdo and loser because you actually answered the question.
But I mean, isn't that kind of similar to what happens if somebody, you know, I mean, when people ask you these kinds of questions, I don't know.
For some reason, do you ever see Raising Arizona?
What do you think?
What kind of a question is that?
I may actually drop in the audio here, but there's the scene where he is at length finally in front of the parole board again.
And the one guy goes.
They got a name for people like you, High.
That name is called recidivism.
Repeat, old Fender.
Not a pretty name, is it, High?
No, sir.
That's one bonehead name, but that ain't me anymore.
You're not just telling us what we want to hear.
No, sir.
No way.
Because we just want to hear the truth.
Well, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear.
Boy, didn't we just tell you not to do that?
Yes, sir.
okay then and that's like isn't that it because like you know what what can you actually say in a situation like that because you're you're damned if you anything yeah not unless round is funny it was a rocky place where my scene could find no purchase uh uh tell me merlin what is the last job interview you went to
The last job interview that I went to for a position at a company.
Describe it.
Use only single words.
There was a time when Merlin Mann slicked his hair down, put his tie on.
I did.
I would put Dippity-Doo in.
I'd make it slick.
I'd look like Gordon Gekko.
Carried your little binder.
My valise.
And your valise.
My day timer.
You sat on a chair in a lobby.
With my legs swinging.
Until somebody came out and said, Merlin Mann?
Mr. Mann, the white men will see you now.
That's me.
That's me.
What was it?
Let's see.
The last real job that I had that was close to a real job.
My last actual real according to Hoyle job that I got was in 1999 and it was a breeze.
It was kind of a breeze because I had gotten – a friend of mine had basically got me this interview.
They knew that it was a really good fit for what these guys needed and I met with the head engineer who ended up being one of my favorite bosses of all time.
Yeah.
And that went pretty well.
But that was super unusual.
Most of my job interviews, the ones that I can remember, were just awful.
Just awful.
Because, I don't know, I feel like with the people that I know and the companies that I work with, there's been a huge trend, especially in this age of computer maths.
There's a lot more interest in really putting effort into recruiting and to find the right person for the company.
And without getting into too much detail, I think there's been a real revolution in thinking about how you hire to get the culture you want.
Right.
Whereas most of the jobs for the kinds of positions I was at was more like, well, this person left.
Now we need a new person.
And somebody would be sitting there and flipping through papers on their desk while you're trying to make a pitch.
And you send out resumes and you go through all that donkey drill.
But I've had some of those that were just – I'll never forget going in and trying to get a job at the Tallahassee Democrat, the paper, and doing some web stuff there.
And I just remember I was sent into the person's office to like wait for them to come in.
And it was just – it was so dismal.
It was like something out of Brazil.
And on the top of one of their file cabinets – I'll never forget this image.
They had a burgundy –
sort of garnet and gold style FSU colors hat.
They had a baseball cap that said coach on it.
Coach.
And all I had to do was look at that.
And I felt like I could already see the offsite meeting where all the managers got hats that said coach because everything's going to be different now, you know, and like real paradigmatically different.
And it was, it was, it was a shit show.
It was, it was a terrible, terrible interview.
And of course I spoke my mind.
I said what I really thought about things and I didn't end up getting the job.
Well,
Well, I guess I am telling you what you want to hear then.
Okay, then.
What we want to do is charge companies $15 for a website.
You would do that for $10 an hour.
When can you start?
Where do I begin?
Where do I even begin?
Why are you charging them $15?
Either the grand sum of $15 or why are you charging only $15?
Like what could anybody possibly get out of anything for that amount of money?
And why do you want to hire a web designer for that?
Why don't you just hire a monkey with a paintbrush?
Anyway, now what about you?
So the last real job, I know you had the job at the newsstand.
I did for a long time.
See, this is also the changing, you know, the way we work, changing so much.
The move away from what I've called Richard Scarry jobs to like, you know, knowledge worker jobs where a lot of us are working freelance or contract or temporarily or something.
I don't know that many people that have had the same job for five years.
It just doesn't happen anymore.
Working at the newsstand was absolutely a Richard Scarry job.
It's like, you know.
You get a hat, you get a tool.
Yeah.
Here's the grocer and here's the painter and here's the newspaper guy.
You stop in and you buy some bubble gum and you get a newspaper.
And that world just feels completely gone.
I mean, I guess there are still florists.
But we have a lot of children's books that are in German because of who we are.
And so many of the German children's books are in that Richard Scary vein of just – because there's so much of Germany that really prides itself on that still, right?
The little town and there's the chocolatier and there's the pretzel guy and the man with the hammer and the blue hat.
Right.
that comes and hammers things for you.
Das Hammermeister.
Das Hammermeister.
But the last job I interviewed for where I put on a tie, I went down to Seafirst Bank.
which Seafirst was then purchased by Bank of America and became one of the Bank of America, was absorbed, became part of that Borg.
But throughout my whole life as a kid and up until my mid-20s, Seafirst was like the big Seattle bank, Seafirst.
I mean, Washington Mutual was still a...
was still kind of a scrappy upstart bank.
Seafirst was where the old school kept their money, like National Bank of Alaska is in Alaska, for those Alaskans listening.
Anyway, I went to C first and I got a job in their claims.
What was it?
They had a lot of diversification as a bank and it was their loan department and people would
take loans out and present collateral for those loans.
So we had to have pictures of their boat, pictures of their property, pictures of their windmill or their owl farm or whatever it was that they were trying to get, that they were using as collateral to get a bigger loan to do something.
And I worked in that office and I went in and it was very much like
mid nineties kind of happy talk office interview.
And I really, I really had competing, uh, like competing pulls in me at that point in my life.
I, I was, you know, I was still struggling.
I was still drinking.
I was still living pretty rough in, uh,
in Seattle kind of, you know, living a pretty rough trade life at night.
And I felt like I needed to get straight.
I needed to go straight.
Yeah, you've talked about this before, where you went through a phase where you felt like, am I going to be this?
Like, what is my life?
It seems like you were sort of asking, like, so, you know, am I going to be this?
Am I going to be that?
You had that weird experience where you drank on the guy's boat?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this was a different bank, you know, and I felt like go straight, like go get a job in a bank.
Because they were kind of, in some of these places, you felt kind of tantalized with this whole like, okay, today's the day, make your decision.
Are you ready to go to the next level?
That's right, that's right.
I mean, if you start working at a bank and you have moxie, you can become one of the rich, right?
And that competing pull of like, do you live a life that is for you?
Do you live an ethical life?
Do you live a rewarding life or do you live a life where you are making money?
And if you're living a life where you're making money and you want to retain your humanity inside yourself somehow, then your outward life becomes a sort of suit of armor, an animated suit of armor that is out waging war, collecting treasure,
And then at a certain point you take off the suit of armor and then you have a pile of treasure and then you can do good in the world or then you can live freely.
Yeah.
And I was never able to sustain it.
But, you know, yeah, I went and sat in a job interview and told them that I was a diligent worker who believed in keeping things alphabetized.
I very, very, very much liked to collate things.
Yeah.
I'd say my biggest net negative.
It's going to be hard to get me to stop collating efficiently.
Yeah, you know, one of the things about me is I really like to go back into disorganized files and straighten them up.
When I have some free time, I don't like to think of it as free time.
I like to think of it as opportunities to go and get back into the files and really straighten them out.
And actually, that's not wrong.
I do like to sit and make sure that the blue copy is the third piece of paper in every file.
And if the blue copy ends up the fourth piece of paper in a file, I can feel it.
I can feel it across the office floor.
Yeah.
And I'll go find that file and I'll move that blue paper from fourth to third to get everything back straight with the world.
I mean, there's something very satisfying about that.
In the same way as tagging your MP3s or something, there's something very satisfying about having this known amount of work with some little physical actions.
That's very engaging stuff.
It is.
It is.
And to get all caught up and to have all the files.
And what's great about a job like that is you're sitting on your stool and some harried loan officer comes in with their tie askew and says, I can't find the Maisie Glotz file.
And I'm like, oh, can't find the Maisie Glatz file, huh?
Who was working on it?
He goes, I don't, you know, I don't know.
Brandon, I think, had it for a while.
And I'm like, follow me.
And then I would walk across the trading floor and all the typewriters were going and the phones were ringing.
And this sales guy or this loan officer behind me, he's getting paid more than I am.
He's older than I am, but he can't find the Maisie Glotz file.
And I would walk and we'd go through the elevators and around the corner.
And then there'd be a cart parked there.
next to the drinking fountain and I would go right to the cart and I would go right to the second level of it and I would pull the Maisie Glotz file and I'd be like, there it is.
With that kind of like, here you go.
Here you go, buddy.
Like you're a conjurer.
Yeah, like how hard was that?
And he's just like, incredible!
How did you know that was there?
How could you have found that?
Well, you know, you just gotta follow the trail, my friend.
You just gotta know the ins and outs.
Like I really liked that but I just – I couldn't keep on the wheel.
I couldn't keep on the treadmill.
Yeah.
And I wasn't going – from that job, I probably wasn't going to end up being president of the bank.
Yeah.
particularly since Sea First Cup.
You may remember Mr. Roderick was the one who found the Maisie Glotts file.
The Maisie Glotts file was how I got my start in this business.
Pointing cigars in the war room.
Now I'm CEO of Bank of America.
Have I ever told you the story about the Maisie Glotts file?
No one could find it.
And he had made more money than me, and I said, follow me.
We walked across the room and so forth.
There were phones ringing, and there were typewriters going.
I found it.
I knew exactly where it was.
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and now what now now you know now i can't i got my i got my phone so the other day i'm sitting around the house uh my kid comes over and starts talking about something or other and i said oh you know my dad was really uh expert at that and we talk about my dad a lot and she was like you know uh your dad and kind of looked thoughtfully and
And I was like, you know what?
We have not really sat down and looked at pictures of my dad in a while.
And that's not something I want to, you know, I don't want my dad to just kind of turn into a ghost in her mind, right?
So I went upstairs and I found a bin of my dad's photographs.
And I brought the bin down and I said, sit with me and we'll look at some pictures.
And even in doing that, realized that
The novelty of a box full of pictures, it had been long enough that this was a very new idea that I was going to open this box and it was going to be full of hard photographs.
Right.
Because usually when we look at pictures, we sit down and look at them on a device.
And so we start going through pictures and a couple of things became immediately clear.
As we've discussed before, my dad was the worst photographer that humankind had ever produced.
And he was an enthusiast.
He was an enthusiastic photographer and easily the worst photographer.
I mean, entire rolls of film where not a single photograph is not just in focus because none of them are in focus.
Yeah.
But so out of focus and so badly framed that it is unclear what my father was trying to photograph.
And for even for a lot of them, I was an eyewitness to the events and I cannot discern what is being displayed.
You can't even tell what he was going for?
I mean, it's like, okay, it's a soccer game.
There are players on the field.
None of them, even if it were in focus, none of them would be identifiable because you're shooting a soccer game with the lens that somebody at the camera shop talked you into buying.
Too slow to see anything?
Yeah, and it's just like – so basically there are just a lot of – it's like a mumbly peg.
You've taken a photograph of a mumbly peg game.
There's just a lot of like completely interchangeable children blops.
Yeah.
in a field of green or, you know, so often like my, my, I would be sitting next to my sister on a couch and my dad would try and take a picture of us both and he would just kind of cut, he would cut one half of each of our faces.
How's that possible?
Rather than say like, either you guys scoot together so I can get you both in the frame or I'm going to take a step back so that you're both in the frame.
That's a horrible photo.
He would just, he would focus the camera on the, on the, the couch in between us and,
And then a little bit of each of us would be caught in the shot.
And looking at these pictures, I'm trying to just get inside my dad's head.
He loved his camera.
He loved taking photographs.
And what's great about it is that he took so many that we still have the benefit of that sort of one in a hundred rule.
Where one in a hundred photographs, he accidentally – and I think – I swear to you, I swear to you, some of the best photographs, I think the camera went off accidentally, right?
He just – he was standing there and he just touched the button.
He was like, oh, damn it.
And those are the few that are A, in focus, B, interestingly framed –
But so many, so many, so many, so many photographs that even the baby looks at and just is like, what are we looking at?
Is that a train?
Is that a person?
Is it dishes in the sink?
I can't tell.
And I'm very reluctant to throw any of them away because even in a bunch of out-of-focus pictures of...
you know, of a, like of the tide coming in or whatever.
I, I still, I see the hand of my dad.
I feel him and I feel him in them.
And I'm just like, you know, these are, these, these mean something to me, but, but also I have a box of photos and,
And even though most of them will not mean anything to her, like it's a real thing.
They are things you can put your hands on.
And right now in my computer life, right, I have this computer I'm talking to you on, which was made in 1998.
I have not updated the operating system since 2001.
What?
No.
Oh.
We've talked about this Mac before, right?
Sorry.
Heart fluctuation.
It's a G3.
It's a G3 Macintosh.
But I feel very scared right now.
There are 10,000 photographs on this computer.
Okay.
that i don't i'm not confident i can put anywhere else like i don't know where to put them where they would be safe people say oh you know the hard drives die if i put them in the cloud i still am not confident that they're safe and then all of a sudden i'm incurring a 40 a month charge
I don't think I can put them on my laptop.
My phone is slowing down from being overburdened with accidental audio recordings that somehow keep migrating into my text field.
What is the advantage of that?
I don't understand.
Oh, like we accidentally hit the microphone?
Yeah, and all of a sudden you're sending a voice text?
That's a horrible feeling.
What is that feature?
Why would anybody use that?
If you want to leave somebody a phone message, you can still do that.
Why would you send a voice text?
It's personal.
Ugh.
Anyway, so there's that.
And so I have, what do I have here?
I have 18,800 photos.
Oh my goodness.
On my computer, which I feel every day is sending me very clear messages that like, I'm about to die.
I'm an old, old, old friend.
I have a 2.16 gigahertz Intel core.
And I want to go to sleep now.
I've earned my rest.
And I go, yes, yes, yes, that's fine.
I agree with you.
You should shuffle off this mortal coil.
You should go to live on a farm.
But please don't take my 18,800 photos with you.
And I fear.
I fear for the future.
I don't have a box full of photos.
I just have this thing.
Well, you know, it would not be a particularly interesting topic to go into detail here, but there are ways that we can help you with that.
I wish John Cercusa was here to tell me something.
Yeah.
I would be happy to help you with some of that, but I think there's a philosophical issue here in that – I mean part of it is also that you think about the old workflow that we went through in the past.
Workflow, that dumb term.
The thing that we used to do was –
Yeah, you told me about that.
It sucks.
That's a shame.
That's a good word.
Ping.
Ping me.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't say it now.
But, you know, it used to be pretty straightforward, which was that, you know, there was a cycle, you know, loop, basically, where you would drop off film to be processed.
Right.
You'd buy new film while you're there, because usually, in my case, at Eckert Drugs in Florida, you would get a discount when you bought film while you were having it processed.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Which made it, like it didn't mean that you would look at them all the time, but you did know where they were.
And not that this was any more secure.
I mean, my God, one hard copy of a photo and the negative in the same envelope, like how secure is that?
Yeah, it's true.
If your house caught on fire, it's all gone.
Or in my case, a leak in the basement took out like almost all my family photos.
It's a real bummer.
I have, like, one solid mushed together block of photo now.
It's too sad to even think about.
But there was something about that where, like, you did have a hard copy now.
You know, some of the snapshots from the 60s and 70s have not aged well.
They're real weird looking.
And what's weird is some of the stuff from the 70s and 80s is even worse with my Kodak disk camera.
But anyway...
Of course you had a disc camera.
I had a disc camera.
You were always an early adopter.
Later I got an elf.
But in that case, though, there's two parts to that.
The one is that you knew where the photos were.
They're in the photo box.
And the other one was at any point you could just kind of grab them and flip through them.
And that's something you do a couple times a year.
The thing is now I have, like any new parent, I took hundreds or thousands of photos of our kid and then just didn't look at them.
Oh, yeah.
It's really weird.
But then when I signed up, the funny thing is when I signed up for Google Photo, which is one option you might want to look at, it pushes all your photos up into the cloud.
But what's cool is it goes through and it looks at all your photos.
And first of all, it groups them in interesting ways.
It makes it all searchable.
So you could search for cake or guitar and it will actually find it because they're Google and they're amazing.
Oh.
It's really neat.
But then what also is cool is like it'll find if you did like, you know, you ever do like in the blast mode where you go and you'll take like 10 photos of something, it automatically makes animated GIFs out of those, which sounds silly, but there's something so cool about going like, you know, at the time I kicked myself for being such a dummy and taking 50 photos of a baby, but it turns it into an animated GIF.
Wait a minute, how do you go into blast mode?
oh um if you're on at least ios 8 i think when you hold down the button just keep holding the button down and a it'll take multiple photos for as long as you hold it uh be careful because your phone's pretty full but b then it will also help pick out what it thinks is the best photo which is pretty good at like really yeah it's in focus and yeah try it it works last mode yeah yeah but then but so what's but here's the second part that's neat is once it's in the google photo thing this is not a plug for them but uh it was google wait does google photo cost money
no so you don't trust it right no i i trust things that don't cost money i i don't cost money you can trust me um but what's neat is then so it chunks on all your photos you can upload them from your phone you can upload you could you could do it right now today and upload it like i have 26 gigs of photos and videos on my phone it's it's asinine
But then what I'm trying to get at at length is then what's really cool is you go into Google Photo and suddenly it's made movies, it's made animations, it's made little sets, and you get to re-experience all your photos in this thing.
So I'm great at taking pictures.
I'm not great at storing them and I'm not great at looking at them.
And that's kind of the important thing is remembering to look at them.
Now is Google Photo going to take your photos and use them in advertisements to your friends?
That is not the plan as I understand it.
What it will do is use it to contribute to their corpus of data about photo recognition stuff.
So that's why when you go into Google Photo, you go in and do a search for chair, and it finds everything with a chair in it.
Or you do a search for poster, and it finds posters.
It's totally bananas.
And it does facial recognition.
Because, I mean, that's just, you know, again, the corpus.
Corpus.
The corpus.
It's ramifications.
Right, ramifications.
We can help you with that.
We can help you with that.
But...
You know, photos, I mean, like music are changing so much.
I mean, the way people take so many photos, but I always wonder what they do with them.
Some people are great about it.
They're like old school and they're like printing things out and sending it to people or, you know, doing things like that.
I just have all these photos and I hardly ever look at them.
Okay, now let me walk you through this.
Yeah.
I have not updated my operating system.
And so the browsers are no longer supported.
So how do I go to Google Photos without updating my operating system?
See, this is the conundrum.
I do not want to – I'm afraid if I update the operating system, it will brick everything.
Well, we can talk about this, which, I mean, this is better for offline probably.
What?
Are you kidding me?
This isn't the most scintillating radio?
Welcome to live computer support from five years ago with John Roderick.
First, we're going to do something that's called a backup.
What?
No, that's so confusing.
I know it's confusing and it sounds scary, but it's not.
It doesn't actually do anything to your back and nothing goes up.
I try and read how to do a backup and they start talking about things that I don't understand.
And you end up just going and sorting things?
uh yeah and i end up like oh well maybe what i should whoa you had a guitar there too give me your e whoa all the way across the country
we can help you with that but you know oh everything comes at a psychic cost oh my god that you you just said it all the fuck
There's nothing that doesn't cost psychic.
The psychic cost of opening that bin and looking at out-of-focus pictures that my father took over the years and realizing that...
Just as if you are raised in a house where everybody smokes cigarettes, you do not know that a house full of cigarette smoke is unusual and bad until you get to be an adult and you look back and you're like, oh, my God, everyone in my house was smoking menthol cigarettes all day and night.
the my entire childhood and that's this is not true of me but i have i have friends there was always at least one person smoking there was a little bit of time when they had their last smoke in bed yes in bed snuffed it out and went to sleep where the smoke would just settle but other than that there was always someone smoking somewhere all the time yeah and you know i would go over to friends houses and walk in the door and it was just like oh my god i'm inside of a like a diseased lung
But they had no other reality.
And my reality growing up was that you were constantly being photographed
My dad and I went – this thing that you described, we went to the Photoshop where my dad knew all the people behind the counter.
He knew the owner.
He would hand over five rolls of film.
He would buy five rolls of film.
He would get the photos in the little envelopes from the people.
They would be like, oh, Dave Roderick.
And they'd go get all the pictures and bring them out.
And then we would go out into the car and we would look at the photographs.
And as a child.
Yes, absolutely.
As a child, I had no context to know that my dad was a bad photographer.
So my experience was you go out and sit in the car and sort through sometimes 80 photographs.
And then when that technology arrived where you could check a box and get doubles.
Yeah.
That was the 80s, man.
We always got double prints.
Yeah.
Somewhere in the 80s, the photo people realized like, hey, you know.
Sort of like the extra meat for a dollar of photography.
Exactly.
And then you can give the good ones to friends.
And my dad always got doubles.
Yeah.
And so we would sit and go through these pictures and it was just like, oh, well, it seems like maybe the camera fired while it was still in the bag on that one.
And then this shot out the window of a moving car of some bone poles and there's some, oh, here's one of a blurry dog.
that almost looks like a person over there but i had no i had no critical uh faculty to see like oh dad you're terrible at this stop or like take a class and so my reality was shaped by these photographs like i understood
I understood human experience to be something that now I realize it isn't right.
That this is, that there's, that you're enacting some, well, first of all, that it is incredibly hard to get a photograph.
And that, um, because dad, you know, dad didn't flip through these and be like, well, wasted another role.
Like, you know, that was his, that was his normal too.
It was his normal too.
And so, so, uh,
So I had – I mean I can't begin to describe how my own memories of things are shaped by having relived them through photographs of them that seem like they were taken by Mr. Magoo.
Like those – you know that way where you look at a photograph of something that happened a week ago and the photograph kind of solidifies the memory a little bit?
Like, oh, that's how it happened.
Yeah.
Everything you had there looked like the cover of a shoegaze album.
Yeah, right.
It's exactly right.
That's why I responded so well to My Bloody Valentine.
I was just like, what?
That's a guitar, I think.
That was a good one.
It's like right before my dad took any kind of pictures, he went and dipped the lens of his camera in the top of a birthday cake.
Yeah.
I think we're ready now.
Let's go.
I've got frosting all over the lens.
Let's go.
So that shaped my perception so profoundly.
And it turns out my sister is a brilliant photographer.
I have no idea...
she was in her 30s before she ever really picked up a camera and pointed it at anything.
And from the first time I saw a photograph by her, I was like, oh my God, you're a genius.
Like she's got an eye.
Because she and her friends went around the world together and they all were taking photographs of the same things.
And the other two were taking very, very good photographs of things.
But then my sister's photo of the exact same moment would just be framed in a way that
Both told the story and created emotional tension.
And, you know, it was just like, where did... I had no idea that that was lurking inside my little sister.
And I'm not a bad photographer.
But, like...
Oh, I wish I could sit my dad down and just go through these photographs.
But the thing was he was completely resistant to the idea that he wasn't great at everything.
So it was like, Dad, what were you going for here?
Oh, because he's a politician.
Yeah, that's right.
I don't know.
Maybe my finger slipped.
For 14 years?
I know.
You made me think when you had your –
your monologue a while back about how important it is to take and post selfies just because it's a good idea.
And I've been thinking about like the way photos have changed.
And like now I take photos of funny signs.
I take photos of things that I see that amuse me.
I have a handful of photos of my daughter doing things that are cute.
But you know what?
One that we don't do as much as we used to.
I mean, the group photo.
I miss the group photo.
Yeah.
You know, I think I want to really get a stake in the ground to get better at group photos.
Yeah, the group photo, because they're always... That's so important.
It's always a selfie, right?
Selfie group photo.
It's very seldom where somebody stands back and everybody's got red eye.
Yeah, right.
Everybody's holding up a plastic keg cup.
But I mean, you know, at family events and stuff like that, it's usually not the young person who thinks to go, okay, everybody, let's do a group photo because that's dorky.
Like, why would you do that?
But like, I'm so glad I've got some of those.
You know what I mean?
Me too.
There are a few parties, a few college parties where at the time, I remember looking at the group photo and being like, oh, you know, why did I think it was funny to stick a lit cigarette up my nose?
That's pretty funny.
It kind of ruins the photo.
I so wanted to be Chevy Chase in 1979.
I was just like, hey, cigarette in your ear.
Look at me.
Look at me.
But then now I look at that group photo, and there's 25 people in it, and I'm looking at all the people in the background, and I'm just like, oh, right, that girl.
She went on.
Oh, her sister died.
There's all those memories that the group photo allows.
As we were sitting here talking, I found a photograph of me and...
And a woman who lives in Barcelona who was like a big, like an enormous friend of the Long Winters, one of our great boosters and she was our tour manager, she was our pal.
And then right at the end, after, you know, after years of touring together and she came to Seattle and lived with me for a while and like she was really one of our number one rock friends.
We went to Barcelona sort of the last, maybe second to last or last trip to Spain that we did.
And we played a huge show.
It was like a festival in downtown Barcelona and there were two headliners.
And one was the Long Winters.
And the other was...
British band.
Not Babes in Toyland.
Was it Girls?
Girls?
Was it Girls in the group?
No, no Girls.
Just a bunch of old white guys.
English band.
English band.
Mumford and Son?
No, they're old.
Older.
Older than us.
And great.
One of the great pop bands.
Pure pop.
What pop?
Pure, pure guitar pop.
Posies?
No, that's an American band.
That's true.
English band.
I have a record of them playing in Spain, though.
But you know what I'm talking about.
And when I finally get to the name, it's going to be so embarrassing.
Oh, no, we're keeping all this in.
Older people.
Older, but not tons older.
Like popular in the 80s?
90s.
90s band as Bush.
Not Bush.
They're not grunge.
They were like guitar pop, Posey's style-ish, but better than the Posey's.
And I hate to say that out loud, but much better.
Whoa, wow.
And they have a name like Children in Schools.
Toyland, Children in Schools.
Not Fountains of Wayne, that's New Jersey.
New Jersey band.
Uh...
They were the Teenage Fan Club.
Holy shit, I love Teenage Fan Club.
I know you do, and I do too.
Teenage, it was always there.
So that'll give you a sense of how our career in Spain was going.
Did you open for Teenage Fan Club?
No, we didn't open for them.
They were the headliners on Friday night.
We were the headliners on Saturday night.
Wow, you used to be John Roderick.
It was big.
It was a big deal.
She wears denim wherever she goes.
At Teenage Fan Club, those guys really blew me away and always had.
They made my first favorite record of the 1990s.
Everything Flows.
Yeah, right.
It's one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
it's hard for me to say that i'm a super fan because i just took three minutes to remember their name but of all of the of all of the all the great bands all the great bands but but of all the bands of that style of that time like they really did destroy me and anyway so just i that's just name dropy to give you some sense of when i when we arrived in barcelona on that tour it was like are you kidding me like
the posters were all over the city and it was like teenage fan club, the long winters, like co-headlining this, this festival that was taking place on stages around the city.
And we were playing in the, like the Plaza mayor in the center, outdoors in the center of town, Saturday night and,
It was massive for me and great.
Dave Bazan was there and played on the same stage with us.
And we jumped out, I think, and played as his backing band for a little while.
I had really long hair at the time.
Maybe was missing a tooth.
But our good friend, the woman who had been with us through thick and thin...
At the end of the tour, which had been a couple of week tour, which she'd been with us for every night, she said, okay, well, your flight is tomorrow morning and I'll send you guys a check when it all shakes out.
And she never did.
Wow.
She absconded.
Ew.
Ultimately, it was a big bag of money.
And we went back and forth and it was I was so betrayed and I was just so devastated.
Like, but you're our friend.
You've been our friend.
She was like, oh, I just had some, you know, I'll get it to you.
Like there was a lot.
There was like nine months of sort of like, what's your bank account number?
I'll wire it tomorrow.
Right, right.
And I just found a picture of the two of us.
She and I like sitting, you know, she's kind of like leaning on me in a cafe somewhere in Valladolid.
And I felt very sentimental even as I'm sitting talking to you about Google Photos and I sent it to her.
I haven't communicated with her in several years.
Oh, that's nice.
Sent it to her sort of without comment.
Yeah.
So we'll see.
They call it a Spanish threat.
Send it to her wrapped in a newspaper.
Wrapped around a fish.
Wrapped around a bulletproof vest.
Wrapped around a Godfather 2 DVD.
We'll see what happens.
You know what?
Maybe she'll send me 10,000 euros.
Buenos dias.
I am from Castile.