Ep. 209: "Keep the Lines Right"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
Reap?
Hmm?
Was that a needle going across a record?
Reep?
Reep.
No, but speaking of records, today is the 10-year anniversary of the release of Putting the Days to Bed, the Long Winter's most recent album.
That's not possible.
10 years.
10 long years.
I just got an email about it.
I still think of that as your new record.
Yeah, I know it is the new record.
Technically.
Well, that was 10 years that went by pretty quick.
Yeah, 10 years, 10 years.
Well, you know, one of the reasons that went by so fast is that they invented Twitter somewhere in the middle there.
And then we were all just pastoralists before that, just wandering around our fields, tending our sheep.
And then we became digital, digitals.
At first, we just stopped tending the sheep as well.
Yeah, right.
The herd was still there.
The scented stationary paper.
The parlor.
The parlor.
Spent a lot of time in the parlor, yeah.
Tapping out my pipe onto my brass pipe stand.
Tap, tap, tap.
Brass pipe stand.
Put a little marker in my book and lay it down on the bedside table and then go upstairs to my Steam-operated computer and log on to Twitter once in a while.
Someone's hacked the forum again.
I would see my few friends there that I thought were amusing.
But then...
Wave after wave.
Zombies.
Yeah.
Blood.
I am not super awake yet.
No, me either.
This might be a fairly pastoral episode.
I am very much in the process of waking up.
This seems unusual that you would show up to the show in the same state that I'm usually in.
Yeah.
I've been listening to acapella music, which is, you know, it's calming me down.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe just a coincidence, but last night I worked pretty hard and have yet to succeed at getting my ringtone to be an acapella selection.
Oh, do you need any help with that?
I can help you with that.
Can you?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I don't know how to do it.
I have since downloaded two apps.
called ringtone apps.
Neither thing can help me.
I have to go back to the mainframe.
Oh, no, no, no.
I have to rewrite the encryption.
God, I'm in.
And I don't want to do any of those.
I hate computers, Merlin.
I'm very frustrated by them.
They're awful.
I don't talk about it, John, but I'm not such a fan myself.
They're really awful.
And so the last two or three days has been, it just seemed like there's been a real uptick in like everywhere you go on the internet now, they are rude.
Like everywhere you go, something pops up in front of you, you're expected to log in.
I went on to, and I did not mean to do this, but I went on to Pinterest on a phone, on a phone.
Are you thinking of refurbishing your mood board?
Somebody was saying like, I want a, what was it?
Oh, I was talking to somebody and they were interested in small house culture.
Are you hip to small house culture?
I think so.
I think, isn't there like, I think there's a TV show about it.
And it's a common, a regular feature on our local website, you know, the Chronicles website.
Because everything's horrible here.
And people are trying to live in like 300, places smaller than my office.
Families are living in, you know, like these little hipster cyber hovels.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which are like the appeal of them, I think, to people is that you can organize everything.
You can kern or knoll.
Oh, you got to knoll.
Yeah.
You got to have a knolling board for that.
I have a whole Pinterest page about my different knolling boards.
Do you?
Yeah.
It's actually the Swedish word for a buffet.
Why do people leave the K out of it?
I'm pretty sure it's canole.
Canole.
Canole.
But yeah, they like to.
It absolutely appeals to a certain sensibility.
You as a RV owner get this a little bit.
I have a friend who lives on a boat.
There's a certain, you know, your life has to change when you live on a boat.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, have you known people who live on boats?
It's a very different experience.
I have.
I've known people that lived on boats.
I went to a college with a guy who, when he graduated from college, he went and bought, instead of renting his first apartment, he bought a really dilapidated...
old, enormous motor yacht.
Like the kind of motor yacht that maybe FDR would have had a summit with Tojo on, although I don't think the two ever met.
You know, like a 1935 Chris Craft
49 foot all what all wood if he could afford that it would have to be in horrible condition it was in horrible condition because i mean as a kid to me uh you know there's a certain things that are like the canonical example of like fanciness like a mercedes-benz car baked alaska dessert 40 foot yacht oscars orcafeller
Yes.
Right?
An Oscar's oikofeller?
Wasn't that something that you only heard fancy people order?
That's right.
You get spinach and pearls.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Well, but two things you have to remember.
In 1991, like a 1936, a dilapidated 1936 motor yacht, 40-foot motor yacht, 49-foot, I think, super big,
Uh, that, you know, there was no, there was no culture like there is now where everything's expensive.
It was just like, oh, right.
People weren't as rude and the dollar was strong.
People weren't as rude as the dollar was strong.
But like in Seattle, you could buy in 1991, you could buy a house in the central district for like $60,000.
So now that house is worth $760,000.
So just apply retroactively that same inflation, deflation to motor yachts.
You get a 49-foot yacht for probably about $60.
I mean it was – I don't know how much you paid for it.
but it's handling fees it was cheap and also the other thing people forget about boats is that they are constantly changing hands because every spring somebody every spring you know a thousand people are like I want a boat and they buy a boat and then they realize it's an expensive leaky gross smelling hole in the water and
It's like investing in entropy.
Everything in your life is breaking a little bit all the time, but that's really accelerated on both.
Even if you are really, really good about everything and you polish the brass and you keep the lines right and everything.
Polish the brass, keep the lines right.
That's stuff that Master and Commander shouts at his mouth.
Over the sound of the waves.
That's right.
You want to have the... You get the sails up.
You get the mizzenmast bosund.
You get the whistleback.
Bosund the whistleback.
I can't whistle like I used to.
Really?
But, no, it's... I have had several people in my life who lived on boats.
The father of my primary lady friend in the 90s lived on a boat.
And it was really... It was quite interesting.
You know, in a way, it's a little bit like today, we've got these... I'm sorry, I'm still waking up.
We think about, okay, this trash goes in the trash, this trash goes in the recycling, this trash goes in the compost.
We have three different giant receptacles for that.
And on a boat, you've got about as much trash room as you do at a Hampton Inn.
Like, you can't have stuff.
You have to have, like, one of this thing that does lots of things.
You can't have your DVD collection and stuff like that.
No.
You have to have one tool.
Yeah.
One tool that's a screwdriver, a saw, a...
A bosun's mate.
You get a bosun mast.
But I guess what I'm trying to say is it is obviously hugely based on the amount of space you have, which is next to nothing.
That if you want to be able to move around at all, and then it's the accommodations and sacrifices.
Like, you have to have room for those tools.
Like, you don't get to have your stuffed animal collection or something like that.
Right.
Well, and I think the key, like my RV, for instance, I was driving around in it yesterday, and then I parked it in front of the house, and I'll drive around in it next weekend or two weekends from now.
You get in the RV when you feel like it, and you go putter around.
That's the beauty of the RV.
That's the beauty of it.
But when you have a boat...
If you leave it unattended for two weeks, maybe it sank.
Maybe it's full of water rats now.
Maybe, you know, like nature is more actively trying to kill a boat than any other thing.
I've been told by our mutual friend John Siracusa that the greatest enemy of a homeowner is moisture.
Hmm.
And if you think about that, your house is literally in water, you know, and it's not nice water.
Usually it's, it's water.
It's water that basically you're sitting in a big piece of wood in water.
So that just, just to start, let alone keeping the brass shiny, you know, got to keep the brass shiny, keep the, keep the, what is it?
Keep the lines, keep the lines right.
Yeah.
You got to keep the lines right.
I have always, that feels momentous to me.
Keep the lines right.
Keep the lines right.
I mean, that seems like something you should have on a t-shirt.
Keep the lines right.
Keep the lines right.
Well, it might be something I start shouting at.
Polish the brass and keep the lines right.
Keep the lines right.
Is that a Star Trek sound or is that a ship sound that I just made?
What you just made was the Star Trek door opening sound.
But you're thinking of...
Is that a bosun mizzle?
It's a bosun mizzle.
It's a bosun mizzle.
Tom Waits should do more songs about ships.
A bosun mizzle is the fastest one now.
Keep the lines right, the brass shiny.
That's what they're there for.
Shine the brass and keep the lines right.
That's not how the Decembrists sound.
Oh, sorry.
Oh, December.
Yeah.
I believe that would go a little something like this.
Is he called his own lyrics in his Twitter bio?
I don't know.
I haven't looked at Colin's Twitter bio in a while.
Okay.
I, you know, nothing would surprise me.
Boy, we really are in a very, very subdued.
Have you had coffee?
No.
I had two coffees.
I had two coffees and some pharmacist over-the-counter pharmacist.
It used to be we would tend our herd.
Yeah, right.
My friend has recently reintroduced me to sinus medicine.
So that gives me a little energy, but it hasn't really kicked in yet.
Be careful of that.
I was listening to acapella music.
It really threw me off.
I used to sit at my mainframe computer and do my tweets.
Sit there in the cold room.
Sit up there at the desk.
Make sure the lines are right.
I would log on.
What?
We call it handshaking.
What is that?
Handshaking?
Handshaking, yeah.
It's when the modems are talking to each other and working some things out.
And then the website, I would go to the website of Twitter.
And start to load, you get a coffee, come back 20 minutes later.
And then I'd go on there and I'd read all the tweets that had been tweeted the following day.
All 20 of them.
And I would go, ha ha!
Oh, that person is amusing.
Oh, their run went quite well.
And then I would say.
That Thai food sounds quite toothsome.
I would put my hands together and I'd rub them.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Crack my knuckles.
Put the fingertips to the keyboard and say, what witticisms are you supposed to do?
today oh those were the halcyon days tweeting but then like all drugs my teeth fell out yeah
my cheeks sunk my seeks chunk your seeks chunk you're living on a boat can't keep the lines right all of a sudden everything smells like mold and my my greatest enemy is moisture i like i like the smell of your rv my family does not i like it i didn't notice it my family did but i like the smell it smells like the 70s you're talking about the motor oil and the the nascent it's got it's got a it's got a kind of enduring moist uh aspect
yeah i mean i guess every single kind of well this is the thing about small houses yeah right my friend was saying small houses are what uh this is like this is the future and um and so they were looking at like these little uh cute cute little cedar shingled little homes and i was like well why not get a why not get a
An Airstream.
Don't get a Gulfstream.
Those are very costly.
That's like having a boat.
It's a sky boat.
Sky boat.
But if you get an Airstream.
But for what it's worth, the guy who lived on a boat in the 90s.
Now was on an airplane?
No, he sold Gulfstreams.
That was his job.
He was a Gulfstream salesman.
Really?
David Geffen, Dr. Bill Cosby, he sold Gulfstreams to people.
Wait a minute.
You're telling me that Bill Cosby owned his own Gulfstream?
Yeah.
So I don't want to say too much, but he did pre-owned Gulfstream sales.
Oh, nice.
So if you're looking to get into a Gulfstream 4, Gulfstream 5 comes out, you want a 4, what's it going to take to put you in a Gulfstream today?
Right.
Sure.
He's a broker.
He brokers Gulfstreams.
Keeps the lines right.
I know a guy, a pretty good friend in college, whose job is to design custom interiors for Boeing business jets.
My brother-in-law specializes in, turns out, electronics for boats.
He's a nautical electronics expert.
Wow.
So if you want, like, because, you know, it's not just your DVD player and stuff.
He does that.
He does the sound, but he does all of the stuff that makes the boat run.
The radars and stuff.
You got the sonars, you got the radars, bonars.
You know, my sister dated a guy for a long time who was a boat electrician.
I bet that's hard.
That's what Sam does, yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah, you're right.
You got to work in confined spaces, little teeny.
But you get to just, it's like writing checks.
Yeah.
Because those boat folks, they're used to people, you know, giving them the mizzenmast.
They're used to everything costing more.
It's like staying at a resort when you live on a boat.
Just in the sense that, you know, you're not going to have as much selection and it's going to cost a lot and they just laugh at you.
My mom used to, because my dad had a boat, right, when my mom and dad were married.
Oh, that makes sense.
She used to say that if you needed a part, you could go to the hardware store and get the part, or you could go to the boat hardware store and pay 50 times more for the same part.
But it came in a package that said, for boats.
And when she was pregnant with me, she said, David...
you need to get rid of this boat.
Because it was all he did, right?
Because he raced it.
He was a sailboat racer.
Every weekend and every sunny day he was out, you know, winter, summer, out racing his sailboat against other sailboats around.
You know, when you look out at the beautiful water and you see this flotilla of
fast-moving sailboats.
Like, he just loved that, just loved to be in the mix.
And he tried to get the entire family to be his crew, but as time went on, he didn't...
His older kids didn't like to be captained, if you know what I'm saying.
And my mom didn't prefer to be part of a sailboat crew either.
She likes getting up early, but she doesn't seem like she particularly relishes agreeing to take orders from people.
Well, and also the saltwater spray and the yo-ho-ho.
That's all.
You've got to have that spirit, right?
And my mom would have preferred, infinitely preferred, to have been reading the French lieutenant's woman on the dock and watch the sailboat go by.
That's kind of hot.
She's probably wearing, at that point in time, 1960s.
She's got big sunglasses on.
She's got her hair in a kerchief.
And she's probably wearing three-quarter length white capri pants.
Oh, man.
And she's watching the sailboat go by.
That's fine with her.
Dad's out there with a jaunty cap.
But then when she got pregnant, she said, you got to get rid of this boat.
This boat is A, a hole in the water where you shovel money.
And B, it takes all your time.
And, you know, it's not something really we share in as a couple.
Ditch the boat.
We got a kid on the way.
And my dad sold the boat and immediately bought an airplane.
Oh, dear.
Which is, you know, in his style.
So I grew up with the airplane.
I never had any.
I don't have any sailing experience.
Let me run a concept test on you because I don't know much about things, but it feels like you've got mostly, you know, you think about Maslow's hierarchy of airplanes.
You start out with like, okay, you have to have a place to live.
It's nice to have a place to live, a secure place to live.
So like in time, you may get like a vacation rental or you may get a cabin.
Maybe you get maybe you get a like one of the strap on trailers that you put on the back of your truck so you can drive around.
But it feels like there are these levels to this where, you know, maybe it could be your model trains.
I don't know.
But it feels like you move up this ladder.
Right.
It might start with something fairly modest.
It could start with a rowboat for all I know.
But it seems like if you've got the money, most men will go up this ladder of going to second car, camper, boat, boat that you can stay on until eventually they get the airplane, if they can.
Right.
Well, I think airplane is a special kind of person.
So there are right now, like I have plenty of friends who, and in fact, some people who listen to this very podcast, who are still in their youth, if you will, who are already on the airplane track.
You're saying even today, despite the hipster cyber hovels, there are millenniums that are on the airplane track.
There are millenniums who the airplane is – it was always the airplane and it will always be the airplane.
That feels like something from our generation.
Well, except – so I never fully understood –
Like I grew up flying planes.
I was very immersed in Alaska airplane culture, but I never fully understood it because I inherited the desire to sit on the dock reading The French Lieutenant's Woman with my hair in a kerchief, right?
Like I would prefer to be reading a book to almost any kind of like sport, right?
let's say and i like to travel and i like to adventure and i like to get in trouble and i like to do stuff but if it's something like hey we're going to spend 45 minutes trying to get this motor started so that we can drive this motorized thing over that dune and then we're going to come back over the dune faster and try and jump it six inches in the air
My feeling about it is always like, well, yeah, that sounds fun.
I hope you get the motor started.
When you do, maybe I'll take a turn.
But if it was up to me, I would leave the thing unstarted.
And why don't we all sit here on this dune and read?
You know, it's just a difference in, I guess, a difference in what you consider sporting maybe or maybe they don't like to read.
But whatever it is,
You know, my dad and I would go flying because he loved to fly.
And he would get in that plane, he'd read his checklists, and we'd walk around, we'd take the chucks out, and we'd pick the poke, and we'd pull all the little flags that say, do not remove until it's time to fly, but you must remove it if you do want to fly.
All the little, you know.
And then I'd sit and read the checklist out loud.
Yeah.
yeah you know carburetor heat and he would say on i would say 10 degrees of flaps and he would say 10 degrees flaps you know it was like oh see i like that part i put the book down for a minute if i got to yell things back and forth like that oh it's super fun super fun but but uh but you know of my own accord i would just sort of never embark on once i'm there yes absolutely like here we go
But I would never embark upon all the lead up to it.
And that's why me buying an RV was kind of a surprise because it was like now I got a thing that now that I got a thing and basically I should have a checklist and somebody should be yelling it at me.
Why did I do this?
But so he loved, he loved all of that.
And the fly, and then the flying and, and frankly, the flying, here's what the flying is.
and you look out the window but oh he was just in you know he was loved it and and and i would say let's you know let's get let's really get down you know 500 feet off the ground and let's like let's fly through a barn and he would say no that's dangerous i'm very comfortable up here at 3500 feet and i'd be like oh that's no that's no adventure this is just we're just like puttering along
He's like, yeah, we're puttering along.
Pretty soon we'll, we'll land somewhere.
I mean, I, you know, like he really loved it.
And I think that that is a thing that a certain type of person just wants, loves, you know, and they, they, they get their license, then they, then they
lease planes or they rent them first and then they lease their own and then after a while they save up their money and they buy a 1954 Cessna 152 then they get their own plane and then they move up the Maslow's hierarchy of planes where it's like now I want a Super Cub or now I want a
172 now i gotta get a 185 see that once you're at that point i think that i can just say for myself that applies to lots of different things whether like you start out buying this one comic book and then you want the trade paper back then with the collected version or like i've seen it with people with things like you know remote control devices or people who say oh i'll just i'll get this one little you know hundred dollar drone off of amazon and then they're they're all in
But this is true of everything, right?
How many drones are there right now that are sitting at the bottom of someone's closet and will never be flown again?
Right now?
Yeah.
Over 5,000.
You think as few as 5,000?
I think it's like a Thighmaster.
Yeah, right.
You get it and then you don't use it for a couple weekends and then you forget about it.
Every time I see a drone, I'm like, God, I want one of those drones.
But if I had one of those drones, I'd end up in the top of a closet.
I don't have enough use for it.
And watching it go up and come back down isn't that interesting.
What is a trade paperback?
I first heard that term, I think the general term for it is when you go to a bookstore, you've got the hardcover books, and then you've got, what's the word, perfect bound?
Like when you've got the square spine on something, and the less expensive version?
Yeah.
So trade paperbacks in comics or TPBs, sometimes called graphic novels if it's all one story, is when you collect four or more issues of a run in this one edition.
And if you're like me and you're kind of a cheapskate, you could do what's called trade waiting, which means you wait until the trade paperback comes out.
There's another term.
There's the term for... Then there's the really cheap, pulpy ones.
So you got hardbacks, you got trade paperbacks, and you get the really pulpy ones you get at the checkout ad.
You know what I mean?
I think there might be at least three levels.
Um...
I'm just remembering there was a time when people treated their computers like highly customizable, upgradable, pour all your money into having your computer be super fast and super smokin' and cool and rad.
Do people still do that?
Yeah.
It's actually had kind of a renaissance.
It used to be that... It used to kind of be the case with Macs, but it's, I think, always been the case with PCs, that you can do all kinds of stuff to it, and you can, in fact, make one yourself.
It's something our friend Dan Benjamin used to do for a living, is you can make them from scratch and sell them.
And then, at a certain point, I think that became something mostly people who were really into video games did, because you could get a super tricked-out one.
And I remember for a time, you could get funny cases, make it look steampunk or whatever, and
And now today, with the ridiculous stagnation in Apple's hardware releases, people are returning to something called making a Hackintosh, which is when you get parts and you make your own Macintosh.
Because you can't do serious Oculus Rift-style VR.
You can't do super high-end video games.
So people are resorting to making their own Macs at this point.
But to answer your question, it's been a big deal for a long time, back from the days where you'd get a computer kit and make it at home, through the PC days, 80s and 90s.
And now today I think it's seeing kind of a renaissance, especially among Linux and Windows people.
Wow, that was really well articulated.
Thank you.
What a good answer to that question.
I guess I'm waking up a little bit, getting the lines right.
So can you go, because it seems to me like if you walk into any kind of Apple-based enterprise, like the store or the website,
There's not a lot of, you know, they control those environments so that it's not like you can go out the back door and say, oh, I'm just going to sit in the backyard for a while.
Like everything you do, somebody is grabbing you by the hand and saying, don't you mean over here?
It feels like everyone is on stage at an Apple store.
Yeah.
If you go to a Fry's and just start wandering around in the transistor aisle, it's like whatever.
It's like a big radio shot.
But at Apple, it feels like you're like at a performance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I don't see anywhere in there where there is a, there is a carefully like, um, vacuum sealed bag with like customizable Apple parts, like build your own.
Right.
It seems very much like, here you go.
Like, and then you get the headphone and then you get the, you know, then you get the doily and then you go to checkout.
Yeah.
Um, so where would you, if you were going to hackintosh a thing, where would you get these hackintosh parts?
Yeah.
I don't know a lot about it.
I know it's kind of a hobbyist sort of thing, unless you are like a real, if you're a computer engineering type, it's less difficult, but it's a lot of like following diagrams and buying certain parts.
And the particularly difficult with Mac stuff is, or Apple stuff is that...
There's all kinds of things that can change in the software that they probably will deliberately try to change to keep that from being a thing.
Over the years with Apple, there's been this move to become more operationally efficient and be able to get...
make a lot of their own parts or have their parts made for them, and then to put them into a body that's increasingly lighter and thinner, where it's gotten very, very difficult to service your own Mac, let alone alter it.
So in some cases, you can't even change the RAM in it.
I've had this very same experience with myself.
I keep trying to put all of my hardware into a faster and lighter body.
Yes.
But then it becomes increasingly difficult to service.
And then the analogy breaks down around the RAM.
Yeah, sure.
A little thicker in the middle.
But, you know...
Worked up until then.
How's your bandwidth?
Getting good bandwidth?
Pretty good bandwidth, although people around me have started to say that I am not remembering everything.
Oh, boy.
This has been a tough year for me.
I am starting to actually really, really notice some problems that make me a little fearful.
Are you using the right octane of gas?
No.
Put that low-grade gas in there.
There's a lot of water in that gas.
Well, I noticed for a while when I would hear myself speaking on podcasts, I noticed something.
We've talked about this, but something that I do occasionally, which is I say something, and I unintentionally say the opposite of what I meant to say.
Hmm.
like like i'm just kind of i'm used to being quick on my feet and fast tongue and so i could i feel like i could fly through this array of 50 different options and go ah just spin the wheel and land on this one thing and now i get that wrong a lot i just say the wrong thing oh dear you know i might say thomas man when i mean john locke there's lots of ways in which i can get a little confused but now also i noticed that i feel almost like i have an aphasia like the words that come out of my mouth are like you know may i mambo dog face to the banana patch
I don't think it's huge.
It's mostly in the morning.
It's mostly when I'm waking up.
But it is, as we say in the computer industry, it is a known issue.
Known issues.
It's a known issue.
I, uh, yeah, you know, I got a lot going on and it requires that I'd be really, you know, really sharp all the time.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I just, I have to be really, really sharp because just doing all the things you need to do for your enterprise.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All my enterprises are all, you know, they all require that I really, really be on top of the game, you know, from dawn to dusk.
You're doing things operationally.
You got, I got meetings to go to.
Yeah.
You got to keep the lines right.
Well, you got to keep the lines right, right?
I mean, you know, a lot of people are feeding their families.
And when you start talking about... You feel the weight of that responsibility.
You do.
You start thinking about people feeding their family.
Yeah.
Right?
And then you say... They don't tell you that.
They don't tell you that in business school.
Can I afford...
To let those lines go slack for one minute, given all the people that are trying to feed their families.
So I can't afford to have a decrease in bandwidth.
I can't afford to mistake Thomas Mann for Jeremiah Locke.
Right.
When you're working at that level and you confuse a Robert man with a Zebediah lock.
Or a Robert Burns.
Or a Robert Burns.
Maybe start talking like Robert Burns in the morning a little bit.
No, the thing is when you're operating at the scale, you are in many ways much like a Walmart where things that you change, alter, or get wrong at that scale have an impact on.
A butterfly flaps its wings, Merlin.
Yeah, and pretty soon the price of Sprite goes through the roof because you're not paying attention.
You weren't keeping the lines right.
It's butterflies all the way down.
Butterflies.
You know, we've talked about this quite a bit, that obviously I never believed that I was mortal or even fallible.
And now, over the course of obviously many decades, you learn.
You look across between Baltimore and the Pope.
Yeah, basically, right?
Like an infallible, immortal being.
I'm sort of like Blue Penis Man.
Oh, yeah, right.
Except he doesn't, you know, he's got, from what I can understand, has a moral, there's a little, it feels like there are some chinks in his moral armor.
Easy.
A little bit ping pong.
Yeah, yeah.
Also, he forgets stuff like that Laurie needs to breathe on Mars.
See, that's easy to forget because you're consumed with other things because a lot of people need to feed their families.
Yeah, I think ever since he became Blue Penis Man, he's had, I'm trying to avoid using some delicate medical terms, but he has a certain distance from the feelings and needs of others.
I see, I see.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
He's a little spectral.
I feel like Billy Crudup.
for a brief period was he was going to be my actor do you ever get that feeling where you're like that guy that's my first of all i'm amazing i'm amazed that you could see i just uh i'm amazed that you could pull that that quickly that he was blue penis man in the movie he was also in uh he was an almost famous right that's kind of what he's known for he was an almost famous but he was also in jesus's son i love his voice a great movie oh jesus's son that's billy crud up
Yes.
You're right.
That's totally him.
And so Billy Crudup, extremely handsome.
There are times in your life when you feel like this could be my actor.
This is my actor.
I had that feeling about Ed Burns.
Is that his name?
Who's the guy in the Fight Club movie?
Edward Burns?
Edward Scissorhands.
Edward Ruddyface.
Roderick Kipling.
Runnymede.
Right.
Brad Delp.
He was that guy.
Do you remember the first time that he appeared on the scene?
American History X guy.
Well, the thing is, he had like two giant, very different movies come out.
It felt like the same day.
What were those?
Well, I remember he was in Everyone Says I Love You.
He was in Everyone Says I Love You, the Woody Allen movie.
And then he was also in, I want to say Fight Club, I think was 98.
But like he seems like he's one of those like a Kevin Spacey where it seems like he just suddenly came out of nowhere.
He was everywhere within like a year.
He was recognized immediately as a very good actor.
He was versatile.
He was committed.
Versatile and committed.
The first time I saw him was he played the attorney in The People vs. Larry Flint.
Oh, of course.
He was also in that, uh, no spoilers movie.
Uh, he was in the, uh, one with the, uh, with the Buddhist guy from Pretty Woman.
Oh, come on.
He was in the, uh, defense for the history.
No, he was in with, uh, with, uh, with, uh, Richard Gere.
Remember?
And there was a change him up in that one.
Is it who's aware?
You, you remember the one he's the guy in jail and Richard Gere's defending him.
It's a witness for the prosecution.
Oh, I never saw that either.
Uh,
Edward Norton.
Edward Norton.
Edward Burns is the guy in those other movies.
Norton.
Norton.
To the moon, Alice.
So he was also, yeah, I thought that's my guy.
That's my actor.
Edward Norton.
Norton.
Norton.
Norton.
And Billy Crudup could have been that.
I mean, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio was never my actor.
Yeah.
Let's just come right out and say it.
You know, if you were eight years younger, it could be a maybe.
You're a little too old to have much respect for him, especially when he was younger and he had that hair.
Good hair.
Nice hair.
And I thought he did a very good job in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
Oh, yeah.
But I did not like any of the subsequent things.
That's a good movie.
I don't mind Leonardo DiCaprio movies.
He's never going to be my guy.
We should figure out where he's going with the facial hair.
I find it troubling because every time I see him, I think he seems like he's forever in facial hair transition.
And I don't think that's an enduring look for an adult man.
He still seems like a teenager to me, even though I know he's in his 40s.
He seems to me.
He feels like a townie to me.
He feels like somebody that went to a school that used to be prestigious, finished without much, you know, acclimation and then kind of just hung around for a while.
I see.
He's a townie.
I get what you're saying.
He's a rich townie.
Primal Fear.
Oh.
Primal Fear.
1996.
No, I never saw that.
I would note that Edward Norton was in no movies in 1997.
Well, and so this is my question about Billy Crudup.
What happened to Billy Crudup?
I thought he was going to be the biggest star in the world.
Yeah, he had a lot of gravitas.
What's he doing now?
Why the hell is Matthew McConaughey winning all these Oscars while Billy Crudup is what?
Mowing the lawns?
Oh, he was also in Big Fish.
Look at that.
Yeah, that's pretty weird.
I'm looking at this.
It feels like these days everybody becomes a voice actor.
Whenever you're wondering what someone's doing, they're probably a voice actor now.
Or Christian?
Oh.
Voice acting or like a Christian spanker?
I did this little TV production the other day where I spent two days making these videos for the Visit Seattle group where I had a talk show set on the back of a flatbed truck and we drove around and on the top of the talk show set... Was Jason Finn involved in this?
Well, I invited him onto the stage.
I saw a photo of you guys talking on the stage.
Up on top above the, so the stage set was a desk and a couch and some potted ferns or potted plants on a flatbed truck.
And then over the top of it were in giant sort of old fashioned lights, not neon lights, but like lettered lights that have light bulbs in them.
Oh, like you'd have a single one in a coffee shop in Portland.
Yeah, that's right.
Like the letter K is above the coffee shop from from Kurt's coffee or something.
But now it's just like, hey, we're cool.
But this was the whole top of this thing was like it said hashtag.
Hey, Seattle across the top of the truck.
And there was a lot, you know, there was a lot about the whole project that's that scared me a little bit.
Like this is, you know, maybe is this corny or maybe is this going to be fun or is it like one of those corny things that's going to be fun?
But it was, you know, it was fun.
We drove around town and we parked in front of the Space Needle.
And then I had these Letterman-like viewer mail cards where I would read them and say, hashtag, hey, Seattle.
how do I find the best, which is the best men's room in the Space Needle?
And then I would use my own knowledge and say, you know, funny, none of the restrooms at the Space Needle are of the caliber that a gentleman is going to require.
Turns out.
But the restrooms at the, you know, the EMP are cleaned every 15 minutes.
So just hop on over to the EMP and
You know, this type of thing where I'm giving advice to people who are coming to the city.
Okay.
Were there people following you from place to place because they had questions?
uh there was uh there was less of that but I did have guests come up and at one point Jason Finn was one of the guests because I kept getting these questions like what's the best distillery in town where do I go to drink Washington wines how what kind of brew pub should I and I'm just like I don't have any answers to these my answer is fuck you go to AA or or even if I'm even if I'm not being like flip my answer is I don't know I honestly don't care
If you really come into Seattle and you want to know what the distilleries are, I presume you can find that on the internet.
But okay, I'll try and get an answer.
That probably doesn't sound that good coming off the back of a truck.
Well, and it's not really like what you do if you're like doing tourist videos.
Like, oh, you want Washington wines?
Yeah, there are 75 resources for that.
Let me Google that for you.
Yeah, let me Google it for you.
But so I kept getting these questions.
So I was like, you know what?
I'm going to get my pal Jason Finn up here because he's going to even if he doesn't know, he's going to talk like he knows.
And he got up and he was like, I don't know anything about the brew pubs anymore.
That's something I knew 25 years ago.
And I'm like, don't worry.
about it so we talked about some brew pubs that we knew about and um yeah it was great and you know i actually at one point had tim burgess my opponent from the um from my race for seattle city council oh the current sitting city councilman tim burgess he got up at one point and we he's also the singer for the charlatans right that's tim burgess uk okay oh good point all right
We so we you know we traded we traded the dozens a little bit and we we had some fun It was nice to see Tim Burgess again, but all by way of saying that I was as in all film shoots the amount of time that you're up doing your on-camera stuff is Dwarfed by the amount of time you spend sitting around in a trailer with a bunch of it's it's the loadout all over again That's right.
You're back watching Richard Richard Pryor on the video
Yeah, so I'm talking to the makeup lady and I'm talking to the wardrobe lady and I'm talking to the lady who is the second assistant camera person and I'm talking to the grip and the other grip and the key grip.
Dolly boy.
And in talking about all these things, right, everybody, it's just like rock and roll.
You get a bunch of rock and roll people in there and right away you're telling stories like, oh, yeah, did I ever tell you about the time that I met the guy from Third Eye Blind in the restroom at the center house and la, la, la, la.
And everybody's like, no way, I've got a story about that guy or I've got a story about another guy.
And pretty soon you're just, it's the whole nature of the entertainment business.
I don't know if this is true in other industries.
Oh, yeah.
If software people get together, they're just like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
No, they got their own hen house.
Right.
So it's the hen house.
I peed next to Mark Wahlberg not too long ago.
No.
He's a little guy.
He's smaller than you'd guess.
He's not tall.
I think all TV actors are small, or movie actors.
What's the head size?
This is why you should probably be on TV.
Get off that truck, get on TV.
You have a very, very prominent head.
Big head, small body is the TV.
You're halfway there.
Yeah, that's right.
There's no small part of me.
They're only small actors.
But you can always tell an actor is small because when they have the romantic scene, they're like three inches taller than the lead actress.
Yeah.
And, of course, as we know, you cannot be a lead actress if you are taller than 4'11", right?
Or something.
Brienne of Tarth.
right oh man of torth she's very she's she's over six feet tall yeah she's she's tall she's also the stormtrooper who was the one uh oh she's the she's the she's the lady stormtrooper yeah yeah yeah interesting i love her who's the actress who played the press secretary in the west wing uh allison janney allison jan i watched a movie with her last night she's very tall i like her as an actor i'll also at this point recommend the movie spy
uh was that the the hilarious one well here's the thing i tried watch so we watched so i went and saw ghostbusters for the second time yesterday equally great the second time and i thought you know what i should give this spy movie a third spin because i only i didn't i couldn't make it out of the first act because i thought it was okay but it gets the one starring the star of the ghost yeah this is a suki from gilmore girls and so but it gets so good it gets so good i went to see spy
Oh.
When it first came out, because you may know this about me.
Yeah.
Anything that has the word spy in it.
Oh, sure.
You know, it's right there on the tin.
Yeah.
If you opened a distillery.
I didn't mean to take you off your truck.
Sorry about that.
No, it's all right.
But if you opened a distillery in Seattle and you called it spy, I would go in there and I'd drink all the booze.
I'd fall right off the wagon.
Attaboy.
Go ahead and cut that ribbon.
It says spy.
Yeah.
Maybe there's some spy stuff.
Yeah.
So I went to see the movie Spy.
Yeah.
And I laughed and laughed.
Oh, so funny.
I thought it was hilarious.
That guy, Paul Feig gets this cast of people, some of the same featured people you saw in The Incredible Bridesmaids.
He's got this cast of characters who can do straight in a way that's like, Rose Byrne is a treasure.
She's so freaking funny.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, and the actress for whom this movie is a star vehicle... Melissa McCarthy.
Melissa McCarthy.
I fell in love with her immediately.
I thought that she was both hilarious and also great.
And I said, this movie, everything about this movie is dumb and this should be a dumb movie.
But it is not a dumb movie because it is totally carried by this...
tremendous actor and also uh like all the things that are all the things that are just on the cusp of being really corny and bad are on the right side of that cusp so it's like aha that's pretty close to bad but it's actually great like peter serafinowitz uh whom i adore as this like just this side of straight up sexual assault but so so funny in that role yeah great great bit parts
Well, so I was... And Spy.
So you were there.
You came for the Spy and you stayed for the Suki.
I came for the Spy.
I stayed for the Suki.
I don't know what the second half of that means.
You should watch Gilmore Girls.
It's really good.
You know, I had a song on Gilmore Girls.
You've told me that, yeah.
I don't know.
I can't... What is it?
Probably Fire Island.
I'm pretty much a pushover or something.
Well, what about the... Is that the bump, bump, bump, bump song?
I went... I was at a party two days ago.
the guy who owns the guitar store that I used to work at many years ago.
He's that style of rock and roll where he still has a really big pompadour.
He sells very high-end guitars now.
That's cool.
And he said, I haven't seen you guys play in a long time.
And I was like, well, yeah, Longwinters haven't played in a long time.
He said, the last time I went to see you play, I really felt like, I mean, I don't say this very often, but I really felt like there was kind of a Dave Matthews vibe going on.
Oh, man.
And I was like, what?
And he said, I mean, and then he kind of said over his shoulder kind of as a side.
I mean, that's not really my thing, but I really liked you.
I was like, okay, you're wrong.
And then you're second wrong.
And then you threw a little insult in there.
And yeah, thanks.
That's thanks for the non compliment.
And he's a good pal.
What was he trying to communicate with that?
There's a thing about rock and roll, and I think that he was – he's always been rock.
Like in the 80s, he was in a lot of hair metal bands, hair rock and roll bands.
But then he made the transition when he got into selling guitars to realizing that what was cool was garage rock.
And Garage Rock is very seldom going to ever sell any records or anybody is going to care about it.
But it's also always going to be super cool.
It's got its cult.
It's got a cult, right?
And the Strokes were basically Garage Rock who became a fairly big band for a while.
But even they were just a big indie band.
The Strokes were never like a huge pop band.
He's garage rock is what's cool, you know, dang, dang, dang, dang.
And what he was saying, I think, is that he detected that element in The Long Winters that is a little bit, that there's a tiny, tiny, tiny element of white dude groove in there just in the sense that all of our pick strokes are not down strokes, right?
Guitar, garage rock is just ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching.
And every once in a blue moon, the long winters will go dang, dang, dang, dang, dang, or whatever.
I don't disagree with that point, but boy, you could have picked a better band.
So he throws Dave Matthews at it.
It's like you could say 40 million bands.
That's the nuclear option.
Yeah.
Including like Jimi Hendrix or whatever.
I mean, there's, there's so many, so many ways that you could have said that.
And so I'm not sure whether he wanted to a little bit cut me off at the knees or,
There's also an element where I feel like at the moment when he was at the show, I did one particular thing that he thought, huh, Dave Matthews-y.
And he planted a flag in his mind and then that was the last – and the flag was the only thing that he remembers, right?
He like watered the –
watered the ground.
What happens though?
You imprint on things.
Like, you know, I've told you before the first time I heard more than shapes.
First time I heard shapes, it reminded me of haircut 100.
Which makes almost no sense.
I'm sure it wasn't intended.
But to this day, I still hear a little bit of Love Plus One.
And I can't even tell you exactly what it is.
But now that came out, I think, about 23 years ago.
And it still sounds like Haircut 100 to me.
Yeah, that's fine.
Because I imprinted on that.
But it was one of those like, well, that conversation's over.
I guess I'm going to wander back over to the barbecue because there's nowhere I can go.
That's them fighting words.
And he was like and I think he recognized, you know, he tried to laugh it off like her.
But but the damage was done.
But, you know, he's a guy in his 50s and we're you know, we've been friends for years.
Sure.
It's not a problem.
But the point, whoa, that's very unusual that I lose a point.
Maybe I'm losing my memory.
Oh, no.
So I was talking to my makeup lady.
Right.
We're back on the truck now.
Yeah.
on my tv show and she and we started like a lot of production people in the northwest want to talk about a twin peaks because a lot of them worked on twin peaks and b they want to talk about um the uh tv show baked alaska the the one where the northern exposure northern exposure thank you and because they all worked on northern exposure the ones that have been around for a long time
That took place in Alaska, but it was Alaska, right?
It was supposed to be in Alaska, but it was filmed in Seattle.
Oh, okay.
And in fact, when it was on the air, there was a radio show in Anchorage, a call-in radio show that would happen every Friday morning after Northern Exposure aired, which I guess was on Thursday night.
And people would call in and they would all talk about all the inaccuracies of the program.
Oh, boy.
They would say, like, there was a red-throated warbler in the show.
And Alaska is outside of the range of the red-throated warbler.
And people would say, like, that's not the kind of grass that would be growing in Homer or whatever.
And just like, oh, my God, people.
not the kind of grass that would be growing in homer yeah people would say that type of thing like that would never happen in alaska that you know that guy would have been thrown in the in the water uh but they were so i of course was like you worked on northern exposure and my makeup lady was like yeah i was i worked on the show from the beginning the entire run and i said okay let's let's get to the bottom of this was john corbett nice yes john corbett was really nice okay
That's good.
That's good news.
I remember at the time, John Corbett was kind of hanging around the grunge scene a little bit.
Like he kind of was part owner of a club or something.
He'd come down.
He wanted to be in the scene.
And I remember a lot of the grungy assholes
would be like, Hollywood guy, what the fuck, you know?
But it turns out John Corbett was really nice, according to the makeup lady, and I think she would know.
What about Janine Turner?
Well, this is the thing, right?
Because I had a little thing for her.
Just edging around.
Yeah, you don't want to go straight to Janine Turner.
I don't want to talk about Janine Turner first.
You want to walk around and say, like, well, what about this person?
What about that?
What about Holly VanCour?
What was he like?
Yeah, what about this time?
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
yeah he was a guy in war games anyway what's up and everybody's like yeah and she's just said after one after the other like uh oh they're just wonderful just a just the most wonderful cast the wonderfulest uh crew everything about the show was wonderful and i then i was like well what about janine turner
I'm like, I know this.
I know this already.
I know this already.
But I want to hear her say it.
You've heard things?
Oh.
For a long, long time.
Even when they were filming the show, people would come in, sit at the bar, and I'd be wiping a glass with a towel.
And I'd say, what can I get you, partner?
And they'd say, give me a double.
And I'd say, hard day.
And they'd say, ugh.
Working on Northern Exposure.
And I'd go, tell me more.
How's that Bill Corbett?
And they'd say, oh, he's a nice guy.
What's so, you know, then I'd put the double in front of him and they'd just shoot it down.
And then they'd say, that's Janine Turner.
I'd go, I'd lean in.
Yeah?
Yeah.
I'm here for you, partner, because I had a real thing for her.
She ticks all of your boxes.
Yeah, she does.
She's a very John Roderick type of person, including the clear high-maintenance-ness that just exudes right out of her.
But so I've heard this for years, and now here's her makeup lady.
So I'm like...
Lay it on me.
Oh, awful.
Just all the stories, all the terrible stories that you hear about terrible actors doing things where they, they hold up the whole filming because they don't like the nail nail polish.
You know, a lot of like doing things on purpose that cause all the tech staff to have to stay another four hours and
Because of something, you know, like spill a can of paint on the set, kick it over because you're mad, whatever.
Just awful, awful, awful, awful.
Allegedly.
Just, well, yeah, right.
Allegedly.
Except then my makeup lady says, have you seen what she's been doing lately?
And I was, I said, no, I haven't really followed her career.
Maybe I should Google her.
Like I did, um, I did, uh, who did I Google not very long ago?
Mary Lou Henner.
Oh, Mary Lou Henner.
It's like, oh, I was so in love with Mary Lou.
Wasn't she into colon cleansing?
Yeah.
And then I Googled her and it was, and she had this pretty booming business of like, I don't know, swallowing copper pennies in order to get your colon to, you know, believe in raw.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
Well, there's all kinds of toxins in there.
Yeah, yeah, and the penny will leach the toxins out because of free radicals.
She's helping you keep the lines right.
What happens is one electron causes metastasis.
Oh, they call it one-hit theory.
It's the one-hit theory.
It all takes exposure to that one electron.
Just a northern exposure to that one electron.
And then you poop super hard, and you get a bicycle inner tube that comes out.
You can do it with coffee, too.
You can do a coffee enema.
What happens is that the penny makes an amalgam with all of the mercury.
Oh, you're saying it's science.
It's science.
Oh, it's chemistry.
It's physics.
It's, uh, it's Newman, Newmanastics, Newmanastics.
It's, uh, it's alchemistics, alchemistics.
Remember our crumbs brother used to swallow string and poop it.
uh that's one of my favorite movies and yeah right you could i saw him when my first trip to san francisco i was walking down the street and i did a like a quadruple take no max right he was out in the world oh yeah he would sit with his little baking bowl and i was like that's totally our crime i think it's max no max is the other brother but that's totally his brother did you ever know anybody that could snort a piece of uh spaghetti and then pull it out the back of their mouth
No, I've heard that that's a thing that can happen.
I've seen it.
I've seen it.
Okay, you're saying it's not like the popcorn box.
This is like a thing.
No, no, no.
I had a really good friend that could snort a piece of spaghetti and then reach into the back of his throat and find the other end and pull it out and then floss his brain with a long piece of saucepaghetti, which was amazing.
the absolute top bar trick i ever saw and frankly merlin i tried it many times i would take a piece of spaghetti i would try and snort it into my nose because i really wanted to have the ability to do this i could do the chevy the the chevy chase uh cigarette uh inside the mouth flip oh your mouth is big enough for that
Yeah, I'd flip a cigarette in there and then blow smoke out of the filter, and then I could flip it back around outside.
Oh, it was a very cool trick.
People don't have the same respect today for those kinds of tricks.
Bar tricks, right?
I've recently started doing nasal irrigation, so I can just tell you that when you do the sinus irrigation, it comes out the other nostril and it comes out of your mouth.
So I believe there's a spaghetti pathway.
For sure there was.
And it's just enough.
Spaghetti is just soft enough, I think, that if you break it in there, it's going to find its way to your tummy.
Yeah, but to do the trick, you have to keep it a little bit al dente.
You get like a number two.
Well, not a noodle.
You'd get like a thin or a full spaghetti.
You wouldn't want to do like a linguine.
No, you wouldn't want a linguine and you wouldn't want it to be too soft.
But you seem like the type of guy that used to have a lot of Zippo tricks.
Did you have Zippo tricks?
I had some Zippo tricks.
We mentioned this a bit.
I had a few things I could do.
I was very lonely.
Lonely is the wrong word.
Lonesome.
I was kind of a lonesome latchkey.
And...
and i would practice things a lot uh i could do i made up lots of skills for myself and then i would practice them for weeks knife throwing oh yeah oh knife throwing oh throwing all things uh yeah oh yeah yeah but i would also i would come up with games of like could i bank this ball off of these two walls the same way three times oh merlin that is some lonely kid stuff i had so i had games that were designed for one lonely child but you never worked on close-up magic
No.
Ricky Jay was a lonely kid and he just had shoveled cards.
But then he found a problem.
You know what happened?
Shoveled cards for 45 years and now he's on HBO.
And now he can't get rid of them.
How did I?
What?
But so apparently Janine Garofalo or whatever.
Allegedly.
Also true of Janine Garofalo.
Oh, I hear things about her.
See, I don't want to just make this sound like we're just bagging on women.
There's lots of terrible men.
I don't want to leave that impression.
Leonardo DiCaprio.
You think he's high maintenance?
Probably.
He keeps dating really young models from Sweden.
Oh, that's not a good look.
But apparently Janine...
is a rabid right-wing uh janine turner janine turner no who had briefly a radio show where she was like a shouty uh like trumpista oh no
She appeared with Sarah Palin many times.
She campaigned for Sarah Palin.
Yeah.
Dye her hair blonde, according to my makeup lady.
Oh.
And was like shouty Sarah Palin shouter.
And I can only guess is like thrilled about Trump.
And so like I think she was always like that and now has become, you know, more and more like that.
She's a rancher.
She has longhorn cattle.
Oh, yeah.
She has been engaged to Alec Baldwin, and she has dated Troy Aikman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Sylvester Stallone.
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
So my makeup lady says.
Allegedly, allegedly.
Terrible gossip.
But she said she always wanted to have a baby with a sports person.
Oh.
That's what my makeup lady said.
You think that's eugenics, John?
Wanted to have a baby with a sports person.
Eugenics how?
Eugenics.
Well, I mean, we all kind of like are raised, our generation, like most before us were raised to think about like, what, like the stock of like, you know, you got to marry well, you got to marry like a good person, right?
You think she was trying to make like an Uber baby?
Maybe so.
I mean, you know, there's nobody that wants to argue.
Was she just down to clown with athletes or was she looking for something more long term with like she wanted an offspring that could throw a spiral?
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, when you think about athletes and the lives that they lead and particularly like successful ones and the sort of what seems to be like the relationship between athletes and their wives, you know, I'm talking about male athletes and their wives typically, you know, it all kind of falls into a pattern like the baseball stadium where they have the wives section and kind of pans over there and you're like, oh, I see.
It's a kind of baseball wife job almost.
Yeah.
I don't, none of it, I don't know anything about it.
I don't look at it and see anything that resembles anything that I know.
So I have to just put it into a category of like, I don't know what it's like to be a baseball player.
I don't know what it's like to be married to a baseball player.
And I really don't know what it's like to be a retired baseball player who's living in a house in Florida, has to be.
And it's got a really big atrium or like you walk into the entrance hall and it's
really tall there's a staircase that kind of curves around and there's maybe a table with some sort of statue oh yeah I could see that in the entrance foyer yeah in the foyer and it's not quite a statue of a of a guy of like Hercules or Atlas holding the world and the world has neon sign on it that says the world is yours it's not quite that but
You probably have a study with your awards in it.
You got a photograph with Hank Aaron.
McMansion-y kind of thing.
Oh, yeah.
McMansions.
Three-car garage, probably.
Yeah, three, five cargo.
You know what you do?
You get a boat.
You get a fucking boat.
You get a boat.
Or in the case of John Travolta, you get your own 727 or 737, whatever.
Have you seen his house?
That seems very costly.
He bought a house...
And he bought one of those because there are housing developments for pilots.
We have one of these when I was in junior high.
There was an area where you could land your plane on this little strip and drive it down the road to your house where you would put it in your own plane garage.
That's right.
Hangar, I think they call it.
A plane garage.
Mm-hmm.
And so John Travolta has one of these massive compound where he can park his own like proper sized jet.
I don't know which model of Boeing jet he has, but it's a, let's see here.
I think I can Google that for you.
He, so, so from, from, from the air,
You just fly over and it's like a giant McMansion and he's got his plane parked out front, his jumbo jet.
It's not a jumbo, but it's like.
That's a consumer passenger jet.
It's a passenger.
It's meant to have probably over 200 people on it, right?
Oh, it's a 707.
So it's a vintage.
He's got a vintage jet.
And I bet that my pal, whose job it is to outfit super Boeing business jets with cool interiors with hot tubs and stuff, I bet he's done Travolta's jet and I bet it's very nice in there.
I have a friend whom you have met who has been a handler for visiting celebrities and luminaries.
And she has got some goddamn stories about John Travolta, none of which I will share on the air, except to say I bet a lot of interesting stuff happens on his plane.
I bet it does.
She had a lot of firsthand, super creepy Travolta information, allegedly.
Boy, I want to hear this offline.
I had a friend whose job it was to fill up
drew barrymore's ipod oh wow is that like a craigslist kind of thing how do you get how do you get a job like that well you know she was a music supervisor and uh you know and knew a lot about cool music and worked in bars and clubs and was a booker you know there's that there's that class of people in the rock business who have all been booking agents club uh club managers music supervisors inside
Without having one specific title, they know how things go.
They know how things work.
They know how to keep the lines right.
They know how things work, and then within that, they keep up.
When they were in college, it was real easy.
They were just part of the college radio station.
They brought bands to their school.
They were really, really into music, and you were this guy.
You just loved music, and you stayed on top.
But it definitely stopped.
And then at a certain point, it stops.
Probably about 10 years ago.
That's right.
You were very current.
I was just looking at my friend, Andy Baio.
Andy Baio used to have this website called upcoming.org where you could go and say what shows you were going to and stuff like that.
And it was a way to like a social media site for live events.
Like shows.
Oh, my God.
I can't believe how much stuff I used to do.
But I'm just saying like up until pretty much, well, you can guess when it ended.
You went to six shows a week.
I mean, I don't know if we went to one a week, but I think we would definitely go to five a month at least.
I mean, there were a lot of nights.
We were, you know, multiple nights a week.
You guys liked to party.
You stayed up right until the bar ended.
We would go rock and roll.
But yeah, but all I'm saying is like, I think what you're describing here is that at a point you can just atmospherically stay up to date.
just by being young but it is an effort to keep up after that you got to really want it you got to keep up and also like like a lot of things your knowledge has an expiration date right like like it used to you used to think this was the this was the mistake i used to make a lot which was that people will always want to know about your ability to detect a 1956 les paul that's exactly right
People are always going to care about first editions or they're always going to care about vintage glasses or they're always going to care about something that I care about.
And then you realize like, oh, everybody in 1994 really cared about vintage glasses because that was what we were doing.
But now Warby Parker makes any kind of glasses that you want.
They all look like vintage glasses and they're $100 each and go fuck yourself if you're –
Nobody cares that I'm walking around in a pair of 1959 Bauschenlons.
You seem like basically you have the status of like a beer can collector at this point.
Exactly.
You know that's garbage, right?
I got 40 cans of Billy beer and I paid $90,000 for him in 1986.
Never going to get him again.
People are like, what's Billy beer?
What do you mean what's Billy Baird's hardest beer to get?
Nobody cares, man.
So yeah, like that's – with music supervisors, if you stop for a second, you're completely irrelevant like three months later.
So there are Hollywood people who want to be – and I think Drew Barrymore is probably not one of these people now but she was 10 years ago –
But there are Hollywood people who are like, if I roll up on someplace and I hand my iPod over and say, play some random selections from this while I'm in the club, you want that music to be like right on the bleeding edge.
And if you're a Hollywood actor, you probably can't keep that current.
So you hire somebody to be your social media consultant.
Or I'm sorry, not your social media, but your culture.
This would be like your personal music supervisor.
Your supervisor.
They're probably also putting movies on there.
You know, Paul Allen has like six librarians.
What?
He has an entire library staff.
And I am actually pretty close to one of his librarians.
And she has been his librarian for over a decade.
Wow.
And she flies around the world so that it's like Paul is going to be at Lake Como on Tuesday.
She needs to fly there on Saturday and make sure that all of the media in his library at Lake Como is what he wants, what he's into right now.
I get it.
I get it.
So that when he gets there, but it also has to be somewhat comprehensive because
If he gets a wild hair and decides that he wants a future king, there better be a copy there.
There better be a copy there, right?
Exactly.
If he says, I want to hear Ray Charles play the Watusi, somebody better be able to get that to him right away.
So she's there in his house curating his collection, making sure his library, both digital and real world, are all sorted.
Mm hmm.
But and she's been doing this for over a decade, but she claims only to have met him personally like two times.
But she has a sense of his taste.
Yeah, she's his librarian or one of a very one of having not met him.
It wasn't like she hung out with him in college or something.
She just she just knows.
Yeah, she knows him.
She's part of his hive mind.
Paul Allen is at the center of it, and he has a thousand people around him that function as extensions of his mind and imagination.
But she's only met him in receiving lines, basically, where he walks through Vulcan and shakes everybody's hand.
But she's in his office...
30 minutes before he arrives like and she's not she's not the one that's like refreshing the white lilies she's up digitally you know she's like she's in the matrix seeing all the all the material and that's a crazy job you know and particularly since paul allen is renowned for firing everybody that's close to him
And she is like insulated by one level of person.
So Paul Allen's chief librarian, there have been 15 of them because he fires them.
But she's his media librarian or his – she's the one that actually is doing some librarian-ness.
She's not administering.
She is functioning as a librarian.
She's a practitioner.
She's not just implementing.
Yeah.
Yeah, so she's somewhat insulated because if he comes in and Once and Future King isn't there, he fires the administrator.
And she's just like...
I actually had it.
I had it here.
The administrator just told me not to, you know, not to put Zardoz on his iPad.
Can you imagine?
If you had to explain that, could you tell me a little bit why you left your last position?
Well, you know James Bond?
Zardoz on the octopus, which we were, you know, 60 miles up the Amazon making a Peter Gabriel record.
And he said, oh, I want to watch Zardoz.
Wasn't there.
No way to get it.
That was abrupt.