Ep. 219: "It's an Off Day"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
Oh.
What'd that mean?
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
I, um, last night I was laying in bed.
I went to bed early.
10 p.m.
I was in bed.
Covers up under my nose.
Hmm.
And I started to play my little game on my phone.
My little phone game.
Your phone game, yeah.
It's a game I've had for a long time.
It's a little bit of a, it's like a gym game.
You know the ones.
You move, I haven't played these, but they're very popular.
You can move some fruit or some jewels.
Yeah.
And do you try to line them up?
You move them?
Yeah, you line them up.
I was on an airplane one time, a long time ago, flying a great distance, and I looked over at some passenger sitting on the aisle seat, you know, one or two rows up, and he was playing a
A gem game.
He was lining up gems.
And I said, well, that seems like a fun diversion.
So I acquired the gem game.
I've been lining up gems for some time now.
But there were several, as you know, on some of these games, there were several other options for gameplay.
with me so far i think so i mean so yeah yeah yeah i mean you so is this kind of thing where you get an eel and it gives you more mario coins or something no no no you log you log upon okay the game and it says do you want to play the uh the standard
game or do you want to play octopus party or do you want to play uh do you want to play say um gem delight or the gnomes in the mine do they describe how that makes the game differ john no no they don't they just say there's an octopus party over there you should check it out that's right they leave it to you and so you know since i'm a traditionalist i never chose octopus party
What does that have to do with gems?
Right.
What does that have to do with lining up gems?
But a few days ago, I went to, I was looking at my gem game and I said, maybe a little variation in the gem game.
Maybe I will try.
Octopus Party.
And in this case, I picked Gnome Mine, which made sense.
Mining Gems.
is the premise, I think.
Where do the gems come from that you're lining up?
It stands to reason.
Yeah, why is the game not called Rotterdam Jeweler?
Right?
If they had Rotterdam Jeweler, I would have played it a long time ago.
Encouraging you to explore beyond the superficial level of the gem lining, let's think about where this comes from.
Yeah, thank you.
Put a historical spin on it, and I think a lot of us out here playing our gem games
would say, right, I will do Rotterdam Jewelry.
I will do De Beers Vice President.
Mm-hmm.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, Guyana Chucker.
You could get Ruby Digger.
Yeah, right.
But something that connects you, really gets your hands back into the Earth.
Yeah, get one time.
Let's be honest, even if it's a Middle Earth.
It should be a Middle Earth.
That's one of the key sources of gems.
Yeah.
Middle Earth.
Mines of Moria.
Anyway, so this game has got these things.
It's like an octopus cart.
I don't want that.
But I do go to a gnome mine.
And it's a variation on the game that's very appealing.
It's set to a timer instead of to some other level of achievement or kind of achievement.
And so now I have a renewed interest in it.
Anyway, I went to bed at 10.
I started playing Gnome Mine.
At 1.30, my Fitbit, which I have programmed to think that it knows me.
I told my Fitbit I like to go to bed at 2 in the morning.
At 1.30 in the morning, the Fitbit said, time to get ready to go to bed.
And I said, tut tut, you Fitbit.
You're not my nanny.
I'm way ahead of you.
I'm already in bed.
I'm in bed.
That's right.
I'm ready for bed.
I'm in bed.
I'm just diverting myself and my attention a little bit before I go to sleep by lining up some gems.
When I finally have had enough lining up gems, it is 530 in the morning.
From 10 p.m.
till 5.30 in the morning, I lined up gems fruitlessly for no betterment of myself or mankind.
Hmm.
Seven and a half hours.
I could have flown to Dubai.
Oh, John.
Not literally.
Not from here.
It's a much longer flight.
But I could have not only flown to Honolulu but taken a cab to the airport, had a refreshing nap.
You could have some shave ice.
I could have had a shave ice.
I could be sitting under the banyan tree.
At the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, listening to some luau music.
Really puts it in context.
You know, in the time that I'd been stacking gems, so many things could have happened.
I could have worked a full day at work, you know, assuming that I'm going to slack off the first and last 15 minutes of a full day of work.
Yeah.
So I'm embarrassed.
Yeah.
I wouldn't be as embarrassed as I am now having just told it to everyone.
But I'm also exhausted from lack of sleep.
I have things to do today.
So you can see my conundra.
Oh, it's a variety of conundra.
It's a basket of conundra.
Ugh.
I'm so sorry, John.
Do you have any insight into this condition?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
I do.
I do.
Yeah, I think sometimes I think of it as the way when you're trying to catch a fish, you want to get the hook in.
You know what I mean?
You could be futzing around and throwing your line and basting your hook, but sometimes the hook gets in.
And in this case, I think we don't always realize when the hook is in.
And even when it is in, there's still some kind of different part of your brain that's saying, hey, this is important fishing you're doing here.
Yeah, you want to get the hook in.
Right.
Okay, I'm with you.
Yeah.
So which am I?
Am I the fish?
Is the game the fish?
The hook is getting in which?
Which one is the fish and which is the fish?
Oh, that's a really good – that's Spinoza?
I don't know what that would be.
That's a really good question.
Barkley?
That's a very good question, John.
Now, it seems like you – when we think about your basket of conundra, you've got – on the one hand, you seem like something –
Something was pleasing to you or satisfying about this game, and everything seemed copacetic for a while.
Right.
So sometimes when I think about these things for myself, and I just want to say, you know what?
I'm going to share your shame.
I'm going to unburden you by saying I do this kind of bullshit all the time.
I have an awareness of when it began, and then I'm covered with shame when it ends.
But I'm sometimes very sketchy on what happened in between, apart from the fact my phone is now at 3% and I'm exhausted.
Right.
And I just I'll cut this out.
I do not want to talk about the election, but I don't want to talk about the election.
But I really don't want to talk about the election.
But I have been a nervous wreck for the past.
I'm no Max Temkin, but I am a nervous wreck about this.
And I have been reloading web pages to this.
Oh, no.
You know me, right?
Yeah.
Is that a thing that I do?
I'm the original guy who removed the tab full of news bookmarks.
I invented that.
I invented not caring about the news.
No, you don't do that.
You don't reload the news.
And I'm sitting there with the 538 and the polls only and how many paths to victory and I fucking hate myself.
No, don't do it.
It just keeps happening.
And then at the same time,
You know, I'm going to go all the way down to the bottom of the gnomes.
Here's my problem.
I can feel that I'm getting better at threes after like two years, but my score is not getting any higher.
Oh, you're on the plateau.
You're on the plateau, and one day you're going to have a leap.
You're going to just leap ahead.
You're going to make 70,000 points.
One day.
I honestly, I don't know what's going to happen at this point.
I'm at sixes and sevens with threes.
Yeah.
Here's my tragedy.
And for some newer listeners, they don't remember the many conversations we've had about the great phone game threes.
But I have introduced my daughter to threes.
Oh, no kidding.
And it's one of the very few video games she's ever seen.
And she really is fascinated.
And very proud of her accomplishments.
It isn't clear yet whether she 100% understands the difference between scoring 2,500 and 600.
She seems equally proud of both accomplishments.
I actually would love to talk about this.
I would love to talk about a child strategy for not only winning a child strategy for playing threes because it's very difficult for me to watch.
My daughter seems to think it's all about how quickly she can move.
She says, if I just keep going up left, up left, up left, I get a really good score.
And I said, I'm, you know, I'm not really sure.
And yet her scores are almost as good as mine.
Yeah, that's I think that's a good strategy.
She's not overthinking it.
You've heard of the version of playing threes where the goal is to get the smallest score?
Oh, I don't know if that's a thing, but I'm pretty good at that.
I got a 400 the other day.
It is a version of that game.
You know, it's competitive with your friends.
Like, all right, everybody try and get the lowest score on threes, go.
Yeah, like, you know, you don't know from shame.
Yeah, yeah.
So let me ask you this.
As you were refreshing 538, did you take some time to obsess over Hurricane Matthew?
No, it was just getting in my way.
Oh, wow.
It was just getting in my way on the Google News.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I learned from you a long time ago that following the news is a fool's errand.
And that any news worth knowing can wait until the Weekly Digest.
You feel like you really learned that from me?
Yeah.
Oh, my gosh, John.
That makes me feel so good.
Yeah.
No, I'd say it's a great strategy for living in the world.
I want to bask in this for a minute because, I mean, thank you.
I'm humbled by that because I think of you as a learned man.
You dribble it out in dribs and drabs.
You don't have to let people know.
You know what?
You're like Milton Berle.
I'll take out just enough to beat you.
You know what I mean?
Hello, showgirls.
But I think of you as a learned man, but I also know that we share fishhooks.
Yeah, well, but I was on the news cycle for many years and also making the classic error of thinking that being up to the minute was your responsibility as a citizen.
But
I have more of a Pony Express feeling about the news now.
It doesn't need to get to you faster than if it came by a stagecoach.
Right?
Right.
I think so.
You're using that kind of as an analogy.
Well, I mean, here's the thing.
You don't need to be.
There's a certain kind of sport.
Oh, God, I hate myself.
There's a certain kind of sport in watching Twitter while the debate is going on.
yeah there is because it feels like you have to i made my poor daughter watch a 90 minute flaming shit show about pussy grabbing last night because i was like this is important oh my goodness yeah no yeah it's so deeply it's so deeply unimportant i i i've gone on record as saying the last debate of any kind i watched was uh was lloyd benson versus uh dan quayle and uh
And that was during the sport debate years where you sit with your friends and you throw beer on each other as you jump up and go, whoa!
And we were there.
It's almost like watching basketball with white people.
Yeah.
We were there when Lloyd Benson said, you're no Jack Kennedy.
And it felt like – watching in real time felt like I had seen the Berlin Wall come down because for the rest of my life I was going to be in situations where someone would say –
usually me, would say, you're no Jack Kennedy.
Is this your first day?
Is this your first day?
Oh, my goodness.
I should have said that to him.
You, sir, are no Jack Kennedy.
But no one gets that reference anymore except other olds.
But through this election cycle, I know that nothing is going to turn on a dime anymore.
I do not need to know the ins and outs, the ups and downs.
And if you did know the – yes, to your point, if you did know the ins and outs, like what would that change in what you do in the world?
It doesn't change anything.
And full disclosure, I did not watch the – or listen to the pussy grabbing video incident because guess what?
I knew exactly what it sounded like.
It actually is worse when you listen to it.
But even so, like that, I don't need it in my head.
You know, like the worst part about watching the news right now is anytime you dig at all into the war in Syria, you turn a corner, which, you know, you're following the war in Syria and you feel it's your responsibility to bear witness, at least, as much as like
Our government isn't really performing its duties.
Worldwide, nobody's doing anything because nobody knows what to do except the Russians who feel like what they should do is kill people.
They got focus, though.
You got to really hand it to them.
Well, they got all these guns and bombs, and they're not using them enough.
I wish we would learn from that.
We got all these nuclear weapons.
Why don't we use them?
Why don't we use them?
They're just sitting there.
We paid for them.
They're bought and paid for.
That's very provocational, what you just said.
Jesus Christ.
If you were running for president, I think that would end up in the newspaper.
Would you consider that to be disqualifying, John?
Who knows anymore?
Oh, my face hurts.
But if you're following the war in Syria, it doesn't take long for you to turn a corner or open a door and you're staring at pictures of dead babies.
It's like there are so many children being killed in that war that – and then that's not stuff you get out of your mind.
And the question is am I bearing witness to this in a way that's useful to humanity and
Is it my obligation to see a certain number of dead children every day or two in order to perform my duties as a world citizen or not?
Because that's very damaging.
It's psychically damaging.
And there's, I'm sure, plenty of arguments that it's much more damaging to be in Syria and have your children killed in a smart bomb or a dumb bomb.
Yeah.
But what am I contributing?
What am I contributing?
And anyway, I'm mostly off of the news treadmill.
I lean in periodically.
I'm like a black lab.
I lean my head out the window.
I stick my tongue out.
I taste the particulate.
I taste the microscopic urine particulate of 400 raccoons that my sensitive tongue reads that urine particulate and knows something about the forest and about the, and about the world at large.
But then I pull my dumb dog head back in the car and I, and I, and I use my tongue to, to feel the particulate of the air conditioning and
And I weigh those two universes and it's like, I'm in the car for the most part.
And then you lick your cell phone for seven hours.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Lining them up.
Lining them up and knocking them down.
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
And the thing is at the end of every one of these games, what I want is for exactly that bell sound to happen and then a little piece of kibble comes down into a bowl, right?
Just a little clink.
Like if a dog –
didn't have the kibble, he would stop licking the phone.
But that's what a dog is meant to do.
Do you think people go to Las Vegas to make money?
I don't think so.
I think in some part of their lizard brain, they think, oh boy.
I've played a lot of video blackjack.
If I show up in Las Vegas, there's a pretty good chance I'm going to walk away a million.
I'm sure that happens, but I think it's just the gambling.
People like the gambling.
And the thing is, John, there's scholarship.
There's Medium posts about this, about how they make the games to break your brain a little bit.
They understand the one-armed bandit aspect of your vidya games.
Yeah.
They do it.
They do it on purpose.
You remember we interviewed that horrible man.
Remember that man who made that game threes and we talked to him?
He seemed like a nice guy, but you could tell he was actually a monster.
Well, and he was doing that thing where he was like, I don't even know how to ever do it.
My scores are...
I know if I pull this down, I got two in the middle that can't move.
And if I pull down, I know that fucking red two is going to go in the upper left.
I not only don't need it and don't want it, but now it creates a problem for me.
He made that on purpose.
He knows where to make the red fall to make me get a 400.
Shame on you, Asher.
Shame on you.
You're up at 34,000 points.
And then all of a sudden, hey, what a surprise.
You get six red tiles in a row.
I keep thinking I got it beat.
Six red tiles.
And you're like, you know what?
I was fine.
I was fine.
I had this game under control.
I was marching to 60,000.
It's like Ricky Jay walks in and he goes, I'll let you cut the deck.
Yeah.
I'm like, okay.
No, no, I won't even touch the cards.
I won't even touch the cards.
You cut the deck and you deal.
Let's play three more hands.
Okay.
It's got to be at my side at some point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You loan me your NASCAR car.
And then, no, tell you what.
You give me a shitty NASCAR car.
You get in yours.
And if you can beat me in three laps, I'll give you $10,000.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I wish that that was a metaphor for something, but it's not.
It's actually a daydream I had yesterday.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
It sounds like you might need to work on your sleep hygiene a little bit.
People keep saying sleep hygiene, and it's – you know how some people react to the sound of the word moist?
Oh, yeah, sure.
They don't like the word moist.
Yeah.
I feel like hygiene is in there for me.
I don't want to hear the word hygiene.
You think it's problematic?
I just don't like it.
Problematic.
Hygiene.
Problematic is my new moist.
Hygiene is something that a junior high gym teacher says to you as a way of – Not saying VD.
Yeah, or making you get in the shower when you don't want to.
Yeah.
So yesterday I'm walking – this may be a sleep problem, but I'm walking along.
And here's the daydream that comes into my head.
I, in late middle age – no, I guess I'm in central middle age, right?
Wow.
I'm in late middle age.
Come on.
You won't know when it happens.
I'm walking along.
I feel like I will know.
I feel like I'll know because all of a sudden I'll start peeing like a chronic alcoholic.
Yeah.
No, I didn't pee myself.
I just forgot to pull my sweatpants down.
That's not technically peeing yourself.
I knew I was standing at the toilet.
I just overlooked the sweatpants.
Turlet is how you start pronouncing it.
I'll be standing at a urinal in an airport.
Stifle.
And I'll be there for 40 minutes.
That's how I'll know I'm in late middle age.
Standing in an airport restroom just like, I'm almost done.
I'm older than Carol O'Connor was when he started All in the Family.
Oh, my God.
You want to feel old?
You want to feel old?
Only millennials will understand.
It's the same distance between now and the first Beatles album and the distance between the first Beatles album and the birth of Ragtime.
Oh, my God.
It's the difference now between the Burr-Hamilton duel, same amount as since Synchronicity came out.
And this is the kid from Nevermind.
Wow.
Didn't the kid from Nevermind play the love interest girl on Wonder Years?
No, no.
I think you're thinking of the guy in the play that lives in Dead Kennedys.
Oh.
No, wait.
That's courtship of Eddie's father.
What am I thinking of?
Anyway, here's my daydream.
Okay.
I'm walking along, and this conversation pops into my head.
Okay.
Suddenly, I'm standing at a NASCAR track.
on an off day, and here is the manager.
I'm talking to the manager.
I'm assuming there is a manager character in NASCAR.
I'm talking to the manager of a very successful NASCAR team.
I don't know anything about NASCAR.
All of your assumptions feel valid at this point.
I think there's teams, there must be managers, and there's probably off days.
This all checks out.
Okay, good, good.
Because I'm making this up as I go, and I have no idea why I'm doing it.
But I say to this manager, I waltz up.
Let's say I get in through the fence because it's an off day.
I waltz up.
He's there.
Maybe he's wiping his hands on a rag.
But he's the manager, so he's wearing a collared shirt.
And I say, listen, I seem a little bit old, I know.
But I'm the world's greatest race car driver.
You ever see the movie The Natural?
That's me.
I'm Roy Hobbs of driving NASCAR cars.
Hmm.
And the manager says, we get guys like you in here all the time.
Some guy driving a Ford Taurus on the back roads of West Virginia.
You think you're a hot race car driver and you want to come in here and BS.
So get out of here, kid.
And I say, that's what I figured you'd say.
And here's my wager.
And then I pull out a stack, two stacks of $20,000.
You had that with you when you snuck through the fence?
Yeah, this is just, you know, I'm like, I'm not here.
That's table stakes in a NASCAR dare.
Well, but this is, you know, it's an off day.
Sure.
So I'm not standing here like, I'm certainly not in a boiler suit with my name over the pocket.
But I'm also, you know, I'm not in a three-piece suit either.
But I look like, you know, I came correct, right?
Maybe you see a little flash of Steve McQueen Rolex.
But you're feeling like this is a hustle.
He sees guys like this every day that think they haven't wrecked yet and therefore they're Jackie Stewart.
You come along, you slip in through the fence because it's an off day.
You pull out $40,000?
Yeah.
Let's say two stacks.
Two stacks of $20,000.
He's not made of stone.
No, he's a you know, however much he's getting paid, how much do you have to be paid to not to not blink your eyes at 40,000 in cash?
Are you single or divorced?
I'm going to assume if you're a NASCAR manager, you've been divorced once.
Okay.
Unclear whether you've married again.
You would need to be making $6 to $13 million a year to turn down that kind of money.
$40,000.
$40,000 cash.
He doesn't know what it's for.
I haven't bribed him.
This is a simple plan money.
This is money in a duffel that's in a tree.
But it's, you know, 40 grand.
You can hold that in your hand.
That's what I'm saying.
But I'm just waving it.
And I say, here's the wager.
If this is so easy, easy bet.
Well, why don't we talk a little turkey?
Yeah, why don't we double it?
So I say, get your youngest, hottest, maverick driver out here.
At which point in the daydream...
Who saunters into the frame but young maverick driver with a sneer, with a hateful sneer.
Is he cocky, John?
He's so cocky.
He's a thin little guy and he's full of like piss and vinegar.
And he walks over and says, what's going on, boss?
And the manager goes, shush, shush, shush.
Let the guy finish.
And I say, get your cocky driver over here.
He can take his car.
You loan me whatever other car you got lying around.
It doesn't even have to be that hot.
Whatever you got.
This one you're working on right here.
Now, if your kid can beat me in one lap, so we go out one lap, he's ahead of me, I quit.
I quit the game forever.
And I give him 10 grand and I give you 10 grand.
Right?
But if I'm in the lead...
At one lap.
Then I'll give the kid a second lap.
To catch me.
Wow.
Huh?
Is this a good wager?
This is.
So.
How do you turn a bet like that down?
Right?
If I'm ahead at the end of the second lap.
No, no, wait.
If he beats me at the second lap.
I give him 20 grand and you 20 grand.
But if I'm ahead.
I'll give the kid a third lap.
to catch me.
But if at the end of the third lap, I'm ahead, neither of you get anything and
You let me drive for you in the next major NASCAR race.
Oh, Gemini.
As your driver.
Yes.
Of the hot car.
You're not even asking for the pink slip.
You're just saying, give me the chance.
Saying, give me a chance, mister.
This is how I'm going to prove it.
You've got nothing to lose.
You've got nothing to lose.
Except maybe this $200,000 car gets wrecked.
Right.
Okay, so if I wreck the car in the first lap...
Then you guys – What's somebody writing all this down?
You guys each get $10,000.
What if he's leading when you wreck the car?
Does that change it?
If I wreck the car, no matter which place I'm in, no matter whether I'm first or second, I'm out.
I'm not going to say let's do over.
Give me a different car.
i didn't i was ahead give me a different car let me do this again all right bad on me bring another car around so it's not it's not a you know it's not a risk-free wager for him he's risking this but he also stands to make you're not playing for pogs i mean this is serious shit
This is about your new career, and you're going to prove it.
And you know what?
I can already tell.
By the end of this, you guys are going to be buddies solving crimes in a van.
See what I'm saying?
I see how this turns out.
He's going to admire my moxie, and he's going to end up probably firing the cocky kid.
He's going to give the cocky kid his walking papers because a guy that came along that understands him a little bit better even, you know, like a fellow American, knows how to drive this goddamn race car.
Now, this...
Daydream proceeds from the natural daydream, the daydream of being the natural, which I have all the time, which is to walk out onto the baseball field and say, have your best pitcher throw 10 pitches at me if I don't knock every one of them out of the park.
then I'll walk out of here with my tail between my legs.
If I do, then you'll make me designated hitter for the Mariners.
Okay.
The American League team?
I don't remember.
Okay.
They're the Seattle team.
They're named after people that go to sea.
Okay.
oh okay yeah so they probably got a designated hitter sure oh yeah you gotta have a designated hitter oh yeah we do we have designated do we i don't know you know you could also just you could be a pinch hitter you could be a power hitter you could be somebody with slugging percentage the point is put john behind the fucking wheel let him show you what he's got let me show you what i can do that kid doesn't know from moxie well the thing is if the kid is playing the game right right he's gonna let me lead him at the first lap
Because I just promised him double money at the second.
Oh, it's a double reverse hustle.
That's how a hustle works.
Right.
So he's like, I got this.
I got this.
I'm going to let him.
And the manager might even be colluding with him like, hey, kid, let him just nose you at the end of the first lap and then dust him.
And we'll both walk out of here with 20 grand each.
I guess this guy thinks he's watched some bootlegger movies.
Yeah.
And, you know, let's let's just for the sake of argument, say he's not going to spin out and kill himself.
This seems like a good 15 minutes we're going to spend here.
Well, and then I came home and I realized that that had taken up an hour of my day.
You know, I've got seven hours invested, seven and a half hours invested in lining up gems.
I got an hour of the day.
becoming a great NASCAR driver.
But, you know, don't feel bad about that.
You need to work out those rules.
I mean, for the sake of the bet and the sake of the story, you want to make sure those rules really work.
I would not just go slip through the fence on an off day without knowing what the rules are going to be.
You've got to get the hook in.
That's exactly right.
You've got to set it up, get the hook, because the manager's like, I see a million of you guys.
How did you get through the fence?
And I'm going to say, well, I have a certain carriage that
Where when I walk through a gap in the fence and the young person who's charged with keeping people out looks over, I look like –
There's just something about me that 60 percent of the time those young people who are working in the security capacity figure I belong there.
Right.
And that's what's called privilege.
Yeah.
I've seen it.
You're good at that.
You walk into it.
Wherever you go, you walk in like you own the place.
That's right.
And particularly walking into a NASCAR on an off day.
Especially on an off day.
Yeah.
I'm going to waltz in there and the young security guard is going to be like, he seems like don't, you know, because within NASCAR, I'm sure there are some characters.
That if you say, excuse me, sir, can I see some ID?
You're going to get a mouthful of fingers.
Give me your badge.
Right?
You know who I am?
I'm Lee Unser Jr.
I'm Max NASCAR.
It's named after me.
My grandpa invented cars.
Yeah.
I'm the last bootlegger.
I'm still running shine.
I don't sneak through the fence.
I built the fence.
Yeah, that's right.
I was running shine while you were still waxing your toenails.
That's right.
We were running molasses out of Canada.
Huh?
Huh?
Yes.
Did I ever tell you about the fact that- I like it when you don't sleep.
Did I ever tell you about the fact during Prohibition, my great uncle Al, Alfred Ruffner Rochester, took my dad to Canada.
So my dad was born in 21.
So he took my dad to Canada as a boy and filled his knickers with whiskey.
Like flasks?
Like pints?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right?
So, you know, knickers work.
A knicker.
Yeah, I know a knicker.
It's like a child jodper.
Yeah, you got a tall sock.
And then the knicker starts underneath the knee.
And then it's a big baggy pant.
And uncle Al filled dad's knickers with whiskey bottles.
And I think they were wrapped in rags so they didn't clink.
Smart.
And then he walked him back over the border here at the peace arch.
And dad told that story his whole life.
Your dad was a whiskey mule.
He was a little bit of a – he was a bootlegger even before he could play the harmonica.
Did he take the bet?
Who?
Oh, the NASCAR guy?
Oh, yes, he did.
How do you turn that bet down?
That's a lot of money, John.
The thing is maybe the manager, maybe the team that I approached was a little bit of an underdog team, right?
They've got this cocky driver, but they just can't get it dialed in.
So this guy's willing to take a risk.
I'm not going up to Skull Bandit car.
No.
I'm going up to the car.
I'm not going up to the one that's sponsored by Cast Royal.
Oh, this is going to be more like Slice or Scott brand toilet wipes.
It's going to be a lesser brand.
Yeah, right.
I'm going up to the car and the hood of their car is like wet wipes.
I'm saying to the manager.
They're sponsored by Safeway and Walgreens generic brands.
Taco Bell KFC.
No, that's a big brand.
Yeah, they run a big team.
But no, so I go up to Wet Wives guy and I'm like, you want to go to the show?
Like, you've been in this game a long time, too.
Like, you're Kevin Costner here.
Right.
And I'm telling you, you're sitting here trying to get the meat to throw a heater.
That's right.
You're Tim Robbins?
Wait, no, wait.
The kid is Tim Robbins.
Yeah, the kid is Tim Robbins.
I'm the Costner of this story.
Oh, I see.
They just don't know.
You're the unknown Costner.
Yeah.
You're just the guy who snuck in through the fence on an off day.
Knocking through the fence.
There's a Susan Sarandon with some heart-shaped sunglasses out in the outfield trying to score the game.
Scoring the game, yep.
Scoring the NASCAR.
She's scoring the NASCAR.
How many left turns did they make?
Yep.
A lot.
Four again.
And so this guy's got some skin in the game, right?
This may be his last year.
If he doesn't win a NASCAR race, he's going to lose the team.
He's going to lose the team because the unscrupulous owners are counting on him losing.
Right.
So maybe it's like the producers.
Maybe they're looking for this thing to, as they say, crash and burn.
The only way they're going to make their money back, the only way they're going to avoid fraud is if the toilet wipes team goes tits up.
Yeah, they got the wet wipes sponsorship as a form of public shaming of this old –
You know, like downtrodden, brown shoe wearing, cigar chomping manager.
That's the manager.
OK.
Yeah.
Does he actually turn out to have a heart of gold?
Am I jumping ahead too far?
What I'm assuming is that he was partnered with this callow young driver because the callow young driver was forced upon him somehow.
Either maybe somebody I might just be stealing the plot of the Pixar movie Cars.
But I think maybe at some point there was there was a death or a danger.
That guy could have prevented it.
I see.
But now everything's on the line.
The Scots toilet wipes people are on the horn.
Yeah.
You know, there's a shadow over him.
There's a shadow over him.
And I'm the Cinderella story that's going to come and redeem all of the past failures.
His and mine.
Tears in his eyes, I guess.
So the problem is – the other day on Twitter, I asked a question.
I said – I just sent it out there to the legions and I said, do you live primarily in the real world or do you live primarily in your imagination?
I bet I know how people answered.
Well, no.
That's the thing.
I thought I would too.
But the initial answers had a surprising number of people that were like the real world.
Like there's a reason.
Yeah.
There's a reason.
It's the real world.
That's what they want you to think.
I live in – I'm living in the real world.
And then there were some that I found very curious which was I try to live in the real world.
Like living in my imagination has not benefited me.
I work to stay in the world.
And I was like, huh, isn't that interesting?
Like I'm impressed by this –
Because of course there were people that were like imagination and most of the people that live in their imagination, just one word answers, right?
Imagination, imagination, imagination, because they're assuming I'm going to use my imagination to know what the hell they're doing in their imaginative way or they don't want it revealed.
But, uh, I had all these real world people and I was like, yes, wow.
I didn't, I didn't expect it.
Right.
But then later on, I think the imagination, people started to wake up later in the day.
Yeah, typical.
Right?
In the late afternoon, they were like, me, me, me, me.
And it ended up being, I think, the imaginations won it.
But which would you say?
Imagination.
Yeah.
Because I would like to say that I live in the real world, but no.
The vast amount of information processing I do is about nothing in particular.
I said to somebody the other day who was – because somebody in the real world came up to me at a cocktail party and said, I've heard your program.
Yeah.
And I said, Hmm, does that mean you've listened to only one episode?
And then they were abashed and they said, well, I've only just discovered it and I've started listening to it.
And I said, oh, and then, uh, this person's spouse came over and she did not listen to the program.
And she said, tell me about this program.
And I'm like, well, let me put it this way.
I think that you have to be very smart to appreciate what my cohost says.
You have to be very smart to follow what he is saying.
Whereas with me, you do not have to be smart to follow what I'm saying.
You just have to keep an open mind.
And she said, huh, that's an interesting description of a relationship.
And I said, that's all I'm going to say.
Now I'm going to go have my fourth cupcake at this party.
Just a little bit of context.
What to listen for.
That's right.
That's right.
People talk about stuff.
But it's always like, what's it about?
Not with this show, with everything.
Everybody's like, what's it about?
I'm like, you know what?
I care fuck all about the topic of almost anything, and I'm much more interested in the people that are doing it.
So how do you describe, oh, here, step one, go get interested in other people.
They're kind of hard to like.
Now go listen to 219 episodes.
You really got to start at the beginning.
It should only take you like a year to decide if you like it.
And, you know, there's ones you're going to hate.
So that's a good thing.
I said you really got to start at the start.
You really got to catch them all.
And no, what I always say to somebody who's interested in – who is pretending to be interested in the podcast at a cocktail party is you really have to listen to at least two episodes.
Pick them at random.
You may come up snake eyes.
You may pick two episodes that both drive you bananas.
But really there's something in it for everyone.
And, yeah, most people that I meet at cocktail parties are, you know, they're polite.
How are the cupcakes?
Phenomenal.
I love a cupcake.
So what was crazy about the cupcakes, and do not let the co-host of our other programs, you know the one I'm talking about, hear me say this.
But the hostess of the party said, I made the frosting with marshmallow fluff.
And I was immediately repulsed.
Right.
Because I now have a psychological block about marshmallow.
It'd be like somebody like saying I made this with blood plasma.
Yeah, exactly.
That's interesting.
I totally don't want to eat that.
Yeah.
Do you like do you like black pudding?
Well, that's what I made the frosting out of.
And so they were small cupcakes, and I said, just out of politeness, I'll eat this cupcake.
I'll make the sacrifice.
You don't want to hurt the hostess's feelings at a place like that.
Right.
It's a birthday party.
Yeah, it's unseemly.
I ate one, and you know the problem with most cakes is the frosting, the quality of the frosting.
Most cakes are the same.
It's the frosting that's good or bad.
And if you buy a cake at the grocery store,
The frosting is made out of like five pound bag of government sugar.
And like palm oil.
Yeah, right.
It's like you take the first bite and then you go like this.
Yeah, right.
Bacon fat and a bag of sugar.
But this marshmallow fluff frosting was exactly the frosting of yours.
The best frosting that you could have asked for.
Butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter.
Yeah.
And there was none of that like, oh, this one's made with sour cream.
No, thank you.
This one's made with yogurt.
No, thank you.
This one.
No, I don't want butter.
I don't I don't want I don't want sour butter in it.
I don't want sage in it.
Like, go screw yourselves, modern people.
Stop being clever with food.
Stop it.
So I ate four of these cupcakes and it was all – because the birthday party was for a child and the child was four, I was restrained from stealing more than four cupcakes, like wrapping them in a towel and taking them out to the car.
But I didn't – but it was – I had to show quite a measure of restraint and
Um, because they were great and they, they, they made me, they, they, they somewhat mitigated the shame I felt at standing at a child's birthday party and talking about my own podcast to people I'd never met before.
Boy, I really don't like doing that.
And you know, they started it.
I've listened to your podcast.
Well, I mean – And you know the man who said it, it turned out his job, Merlin, his professional job is to score a baseball team, score baseball games.
He's Susan Sarandon.
But except he wasn't wearing heart-shaped sunglasses or a sundress.
But he's writing down the Ks and the threes, the twos and the what's not.
Yeah, he's sitting up in the booth and he's like, you know, we decide – we make decisions.
I mean the ump decides a lot of things.
But we make decisions how –
Certain things are going to get scored and it goes into the historical record and people that are vying for the batting championship have to deal with the results as we see them.
We are scoring the game for posterity.
It's a game of numbers, John.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right.
He said as much.
And I was thrilled to meet someone who was – I mean this was an inside baseball conversation.
Wow.
He's inside baseball.
I love meeting people who do things that I don't and do odd things and I have so many questions.
Because I'm betting there's a lot of politics in that.
You talk about inside baseball.
I mean they're deciding how something – if I'm understanding what you're saying, it's deciding like what goes on the congressional record as regards baseball.
And like I bet there's some pretty –
especially toward the end of the season i bet that's a pretty politically charged job well it turns out all of it is i watched a baseball game the other day from behind home plate because i had a fancy friend who had fancy behind home plate tickets where you're not only watching the baseball game but if you want you can have like baby back ribs and chocolate cake brought to you oh my goodness you know it's like fancy people stuff
And I'm watching the game and I'm with true baseball aficionados.
And at one point – so we're right behind the plate.
So we have this unique view.
And my friend leans over and he says, the ump is not having it.
And I say, what do you mean the ump is not having it?
And he says, the pitcher is pitching inside and the ump isn't calling it strikes because the ump is sending the message to the pitcher that he wants to see a baseball game.
And I said, the ump can send a message to the pitcher saying he wants to see a baseball game.
Wow.
And he was like, yeah, you know, sometimes, sometimes throwing inside, trying to, you know, trying to brush the batter back.
Like, yeah, sure.
That's part of the baseball game, but you can't just sit there and do it all day.
The ump's not going to, the ump's going to start not calling him strikes because he wants to see that pitcher put it over the plate.
And I was like, the ump is that involved in the game?
Like, whoa.
And then at a certain point, the opposing pitcher beamed our guy.
A little bit of chin music.
Uh-huh.
And my friends were like, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
They said, watch.
In the next inning, we're going to bean their guy.
Yeah.
And I said, well, we bean a guy just because they beaned a guy?
Quid pro quo, Clarice.
That's right.
Don't let them get away being a guy.
You got to bean their guy and then you empty the benches.
I've heard it said by baseball players.
I did watch a documentary about the history of the fastball.
And I believe that is considered a strategic thing to do, not simply an emotional, irrational thing to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, you got to, you got to do it, do it on behalf of your team.
And also my friends were saying it's going to happen here.
They were looking at the lineup and they were like, that guy's going to get peamed.
And then that guy stood up to the plate and I said, you're telling me he knows he's about to get beat.
And they said, yeah.
And then something went awry.
He was in the, he was in the, the box, the warmup box.
The on deck circle.
He was on the, in the on deck circle swinging his bat with a, with like a heavy donut on it.
And then the guy right in front of him, the one who wasn't going to get beamed, he clocked the ball somewhere.
And now the Mariners no longer had the option of... Because that would have put the guy on second.
Yeah, right.
So they had to revise their plan.
And by the end of the game, they hadn't beamed this guy.
They hadn't beamed anybody.
And it felt like...
That was something in the to-do list that might have to carry on.
Interesting.
So if you can't beam back a guy by the end of the game, it all resets.
You can't hold a grudge.
You can't say, well, next time we're in Pittsburgh, you're going to get hit in the head.
Well, I know that the adage is what?
There's no quibbling in baseball or there's no Quidditch in baseball?
Yeah, there's no Quidditch in baseball.
That was Yogi Berra.
Right.
There's no Quidditch in baseball, but I don't remember ever reading a thing that said there are no grudges in baseball.
Oh, I see.
I think baseball is full of grudges.
I think it's half made of grudges.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's like you can't have the wall without the mortar and the brick.
Exactly.
It's spackled with grudges.
Something about the Blue Jays.
The Blue Jays have some hot rod hitter who's a little bit long in the tooth, but he's putting the balls over the fence.
And there was something when a guy from the Texas Rangers came and punched him in the nose about something that happened the year before.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
On the field.
You've got to have something going on to get punched on the field.
I don't know that much about baseball.
I couldn't tell you what the infield fly rule was.
I don't even know what the outfield fly rule.
But this guy does.
He's scoring the freaking game.
For those of you listening who don't know what that means, it means they sit with a pencil and a piece of paper and everything that happens on the baseball field, they write it down and adjudicate in the moment.
There's like graphical notation.
Well, some of them are easy.
Like you can say like a K is a strikeout.
And like if it's a ball that somebody catches, you throw somebody out first.
Like every player on the team has a number, right?
Right.
One is pitcher, two is a catcher, three is first base, et cetera.
I used to do it.
It was the only way I could find baseball interesting was to keep scoring.
Wait a minute.
You scored baseball games?
I mean just for fun, yeah.
I missed out on so much as an American kid.
Really?
Partly by living in Alaska and partly by not reading superhero comics and partly by not understanding sports.
Yeah.
The three things.
It was a trifecta.
Living in Alaska puts you in a certain kind of daylight –
Not reading superhero comics makes you feel, I guess, not understand the full scope of human possibility, including mutants.
But also you you you it sounds like you I don't even know how to describe this without sounding like I'm putting a value statement on it.
But it sounds like you did not have a lot of like close friends.
Then and now.
Yeah, I don't either.
Right.
When you're 12 years old, like reading Joseph Conrad doesn't make you other friends very quickly.
You should be reading superhero comics and also sports.
I would stand and watch the sports or – you know, I wouldn't watch the sports.
I would watch the kids watch the sports and just feel like –
I mean, I loved baseball as a kid, but as I stand here today, and I know this is either a hateable or fashionable thing to say, but I just don't get it.
I mean, I kind of get it.
I get it in the most intellectual, abstract way, but it's completely baffling to me how many of my friends are super into sports.
And I'm not saying that to be a dick.
I mean, I can watch a baseball game.
Like if our sports team is in the playoffs or whatever, we'll watch and it's fun.
But like it's – and really I honestly don't mean this as like a criticism.
It's just honestly baffling to me.
In the same way maybe that some people go, how can you be that into music?
Or how could you be that into politics or that into crafting for that matter?
But like the genuine over – I get the crafting thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, we should come back to like string art owls, right?
Well, the thing about felt is it feels so nice.
It is now.
So soft.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but the genuine, obviously very clear emotional tumult that I see in my friends who follow baseball.
When I was getting the free baby back ribs and chocolate cake brought to me, I understood why you would love baseball.
Oh, I wasn't going to say anything.
And then when I realized that the ump was like, nope, some umps might call that a strike.
I might have called that a strike at a different point in the game.
But right now I'd like to see some baseball, sir.
He wasn't having it.
Yeah.
And the baseball pitcher and the baseball catcher are kind of looking up at him like, seriously?
But they're looking at each other and they're like, well, he wants to see some baseball, so let's give him some baseball.
Put that next ball right over the middle.
So I had no idea all that was going on because I don't think that that's going on in soccer.
But maybe, maybe the refs out there on the field are that involved in the game.
Like they're determining the, I guess basketball refs are all the time involved.
Determining the fate of the game.
That's another documentary I watched about a basketball referee who was betting on games that he was adjudicating.
It was very, very interesting.
Sneakerama.
A sports documentary can be a good documentary.
There's a lot of very good sports documentaries on the Netflix.
I don't know if you ever got another password for Netflix, but there's a lot of very good documentaries on there.
Agreed.
That whole 30 for 30.
Fantastic.
There's like four of those that are amongst the best documentaries I've ever seen.
Yep.
Yep.
I enjoy them very much.
The one on the Chicago Bears was really good.
Like the 85 Chicago Bears was like surprisingly engrossing to me.
Or the Mannings, the Eli Manning and the Peyton Manning and the other Mannings.
I need to learn about the Mannings's.
The Mannings's are – they're a sports dynasty.
They all seem like very nice people.
And who can fault a Manning, I guess, that's right on their family crest.
Yeah.
Who can fault a Manning?
But let me ask you, this may be another question to put to Twitter.
Okay.
Do you have a lot of close friends?
Right.
Do I mean, do you have food?
Because for the last several months, I've been my life has been in a certain amount of embroilment.
I've been, you know, I've been in the process of that one very short sentence.
I saw you walk through such a fucking hedge maze.
When you are embroiled, it is sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes you say, whew, boy, today was a rough go.
Just because the waters were tumultuous.
Yep.
Right?
It's not – the boat is sound.
The wind is in my sails.
But the – there were seven-foot waves, let's call them.
There were swells out on the sea.
I rounded Nia Bay out of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and I realized – Is this a December song, John?
I realized the sea was there to kill me.
And so I've said on many occasions in the last several months, boy, I would just like someone to talk to.
And I pulled up my address book, which has literally thousands of names in it because I'm a social person.
I know a lot of people.
And I started scrolling.
And I came to a name and I said, I could probably talk to that person.
But then I kind of played the conversation out a little bit and I was like, well, they're probably going to start – it's going to start feeling like they're busy.
Right.
When, when you're, when you're like, Hey, you got a second to talk?
And they're like, yeah, sure.
What do you got?
And then you say, well, yeah, I'm on the high seas right now.
And then you start to feel like they are busier than they let on at first.
Like, you know, actually I just had a minute and there's a pot on the stove and tonight's the night I washed my hair.
So I'm scrolling down and I'm like, I'm playing this conversation out and I'm going, I'm going, I'm going.
And I'm like, wow, not a single person of all my good friends.
Can I just unburden myself of these matters?
And I know that other people, even people very close to me, have no trouble sharing their whole kit and caboodle with not just one but a whole handful of friends, maybe half a dozen to a dozen friends.
It's like a normal thing.
Yeah.
You would just call it unburden yourself.
Yeah.
I've got a really bad toothache and something – I think a bug crawled inside my penis and I just needed to talk to somebody.
Absolutely.
And if I had a bug in my penis, I would be reticent to bring that up even to a good pal.
Because it's not a thing that I would probably share with them and they would just be in that like tut tut, cluck cluck posture.
Everything is going to be fine.
So I feel like I spare them and myself the uncomfortableness of it.
But I think what ultimately that means is I don't – I do not have what – a whole bunch of friends that I would think of as – and it ends up being like is it the friends that I don't have or is it within myself –
a um an incapacity i think that is a a very wise and salient question it's not that you don't have the friends it's like do you have the kinds of relationships where that's the kind of thing you feel okay about doing um you feel capable of doing
Right.
Isn't that part of it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, I have lots of people who, like, I'm sure I could call and say, like, you know, especially you call and say, like, I need help with a problem.
Right.
You could say, like, I can't figure out how to fix my Internet.
And you could call a friend for that kind of thing.
I've got a lot of friends for that.
But no, I think a lot of it is inside of us and our own expectations of, like, what's what's OK to do.
And it's.
Not nearly as much as I did, I will say, in college.
After college, there was a pretty steep drop-off in the number of good acquaintances to friends to close friends that I had.
College was peak friendship for me, I think.
For me, it was high school.
By the time I got to college, I was already surprised my freshman year in college at how my friends in college were like pals, but I wasn't...
clove and clove to them cleaved and um and my high school friends and i were very competitive with each other and so that closeness was also uh fraught with a lot of competition and a lot of like uh like dread right because your friends were the ones that knew your your darkest secrets and they were the ones that were also trying to like kick you in the knee
And that was the way that was high school for me.
And it felt very we felt we were very close.
We were a tight knit group who was trying to destroy itself and each other all the time.
I mean, that's a pretty normal thing.
Yeah.
And in college, it was just like, hey, let's go get some beer and, you know, do some stuff.
I was like, oh, huh.
I didn't realize that that experience wasn't going to be reduplicated in everything I did the rest of my life.
Neither did I. I took so much for granted on several fronts around that particular issue.
Around friendship, right.
Well, just the relative ease, especially maybe with the school that I went to, the fact that it was small.
But I mean, just the fact that you are, first of all, in proximity to many, many peers.
And the sorting hat has made it so that you're around peers who are probably kind of equivalent to you in a lot of ways, maybe even more so than high school.
You could be from the same neighborhood in high school, but I don't
i don't know there's a funny combination of like people who are like you and people who are not like you and you have to see them you have to go to the cafeteria you have to go to class you have to have a roommate in most cases and all of those things kind of make it non-optional to just sit in your room with your flight suit you've got to go out and you've got to be around and then in my case and this could be true lots of places but i mean i can't imagine going to someplace like fsu like you've got to join organizations because otherwise how do you meet the more people there are the less chance it is you'll make a friend
Whereas in my school, there were people that I was friends with orientation week that I became terrific friends with.
And then you grow with that.
But nobody tells you how much that just goes away.
And now you're playing softball with people from work.
And you say, what has my life become?
Hmm.
I don't even like wings that much.
Well, that's not true.
I do like wings.
The thing is now it's gone from Saved by the Bell to The Office or whatever.
You're on a different show now.
It ain't no Mary Tyler Moore.
Well, and I have the additional problem of wanting to talk about my feelings.
Which, I know, right?
No.
Like silence.
Oh, no, no, no.
Oh, I know.
I know.
But that was like an illustrative silence.
Not that you don't also like talking about your feelings.
I like talking about ideas.
And I like talking about things that we're all equally or somewhat equally excited to talk about something that's novel and different.
But most of the stuff that makes for easy social intercourse is utterly insufferable to me.
Yeah, and very little of it because I guess I like talking about my feelings because I'm looking for patterns and I want to solve for X and I want to – and I feel like feelings are – well, as my good friend Mike Squires used to say, John, feelings are real.
Feelings are real.
And feelings are real and so I'm using feelings as a way of sorting things.
And but in talking about your feelings, you're talking about things that are embarrassing almost immediately.
Right.
Like, boy, it feels unseemly to a lot of men to talk about something.
I don't say something real, but that's kind of what I mean to talk about something.
Talk about something that you have not already composed a complete and widely acceptable unified field theory about.
Yeah, sure.
And it happens all the time where I'm like, oh, boy, I feel like because I want to talk about feelings about my relationships with other guys.
Like, hey, I was feeling kind of a little bit like left out of that the other day and I sort of expected a phone call and didn't get it.
So I'm a little bit my nose is a little out of joint and just thought I should tell you.
Do you like it when people talk about that with you?
Yeah.
Yeah, because I'm like, wow.
Not necessarily like an angry thing, but maybe like a clarification thing.
Do you like when people bring you some things to sort of redress and mull over?
But it happens so rarely because it is embarrassing.
And also it requires that you be processing your own feelings in real time.
so that you know, oh, I have a problem here.
It's mostly my problem.
It's also hard to talk.
It's one of those things where there's so many things I wish we could talk about without all the emotional valence, and nothing has more emotional valence than talking about feelings.
So it's very, very difficult to talk about feelings as a thing without it becoming, this sounds really obvious, but I think it's not.
You can talk about all kinds of things intellectually, but it's difficult to talk about your feelings without talking about your feelings.
You can't talk about it as a thing without injecting this understandably irrational blind spot that you have in your heart.
And defensiveness is the immediate reaction for most people.
Right.
I, you know, hey, I wanted to talk to you about this.
I feel bad.
Well, that's not my problem.
And it's like, oh, I wasn't saying it was your problem.
I was saying it was my problem, but it involves you.
And I'm not asking for a solution.
I'm not asking.
I'm just – I feel like the solution is probably in me telling you it and then you telling me that that's either like reasonable or unreasonable.
And I was talking it out.
But in so many cases, the reaction is from people of all stripes like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Why are you coming to me with this?
Like what do you want from me?
And that and so it's only in your very most intimate relationships where you're forced to learn to talk about your feelings.
And even that is super difficult.
But like I have so many guy friends from long, long, long times.
And I'll say, oh, God, here's my feelings and my other feelings and my feelings.
And they listen politely.
And then.
You know, there's sort of that moment where you like, okay, tag.
Now you reciprocate.
And they go, well, everything's probably going to turn out okay.
Hey, did you ever notice that some, you know, some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers?
Right.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa.
I thought, you know, like I just gave you like all this interesting grist.
And they're like, yep, but I don't run a mill.
So you just gave me a big bag of grist and I don't know what to do with it.
I got no mill.
Yeah.
It's going in the barn, I guess.
I have nowhere to put this grist.
And also I think grist is not what you want in the mill.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
You're breaking my mill.
You know, I feel like my non-existent mill.
When winter comes, I might use this grist in the driveway.
Winter's coming.
You know, winter is coming.
So that always makes me feel ultimately like not that my friends are insufficient because it's almost universal among my friends.
But it makes me feel like I'm asking too much or I want something unreasonable.
And that kind of piles back on me like not only do I have these feelings, not only do I want to express these feelings to my people and have them reciprocate.
Uh, but that is an unreasonable desire, which again puts me in Dutch with the world.
So then I'm sitting and I'm like, what is there else to do but suck your thumb?
I mean, I suppose I could write a novel.
It seems like people write novels for that reason, maybe.
Yeah, but you're looking for something fairly specific.
I don't want to make this about gender, but I think this has something to do with gender and something to do with the time and the era.
But you're looking for something that would have fit much more comfortably into, I'm going to say, the early to mid-70s.
In a time when it was just kind of expected that you would talk a lot about lots of different kinds of things, things that could be awkward.
I watched a really good documentary, first part of a documentary, about basically the birth of the – starting in the 50s, anyway, of the various women's movements.
It was very interesting about all the different offshoots and the groups and who felt left out where.
But there's just this constant thread of talking about our life, talking about our life, lived experience –
And I think that was something that was considered very appropriate and important at a certain time in a way that it's not right now.
Well, I always felt that I think that you're absolutely right that there is something like gender encoded in it.
I always felt like the men of the 70s who were talking about their feelings were doing it as a form of warfare.
Well, that certainly is borne out by this documentary.
Yeah.
It's just kind of – it's inherent in it.
You see the hippie dads who are like, well, let's sit and talk about our feelings and what they mean is fuck you.
What they mean is I'm totally going to get laid for this.
Right.
I'm going to get laid or I'm going to come out the other side and we'll be proved right.
But like traditionally, all of my closest friends have been women.
And back before gender normative was a term –
Back when times were more primitive, I used to say that I felt like I had a female mind.
That my best friends were all women and I was more comfortable thinking in what I at the time would have called a womanly way.
about things i was processing things socially i was just to avoid to potentially avoid a minefield here and i don't mean to correct you but i think it's it's not we're saying in terms of of like uh what gear you got under your belt gender but in a more and thinking more like a yin and yang sort of way right yeah i mean i don't a more feminine more like open generative what is typically associated i don't is that fair to say
Sure.
And I don't and I feel like I'm, you know, I'm I'm apologizing.
Yeah, I'm apologizing in advance by saying that this is that this description of my thinking was located in the past.
So I don't need any email.
But, you know, that in contrast to all of my male friends who just who just are glassy eyed.
When I try to talk to them about this stuff.
And the problem is that my, that my, uh, woman friends who we can sit and talk this way about all kinds of things.
They're not as receptive to me talking about my, uh, relationship issues now for whatever reason, because everyone is sort of, we're, we're older.
Everyone has partnered off.
It's a, it's a different world.
And there, I don't have that same kind of access to, you know, like a group of women that accept me as one of their own and that we can talk about stuff sort of freewheeling.
And there's always, you know, there's also, there's always energy and chemistry in those relationships where, where there are often feelings of like, well, we're really good friends, feelings from both directions.
Like we're really good friends.
We talk so well together.
eventually we're going to fall fall into a romantic relationship with one another.
But in the meantime, let's enjoy this, this like closeness that we feel.
And that's just not, that's, that's much less a part of my just daily world than it was 15 years ago.
And so I'm, you know, I, so there is something sort of tribal about it too, that I'm like one of the,
One of the males that got pushed out of the herd a little bit as the herd matured, you know, like just sort of an old
an old deer that like little by little, the social pressures of the deer herd were like, well, you go find your own turf.
You just stand here and watch your stories.
You know, like here's some salt.
You're a, you're a 24 point deer now and there's just not room for your antlers here.
Um,
And, uh, and yeah, it's making me, it's making me, uh, you know, like I'm just ripe.
I'm, I'm like, I'm in the crosshairs of every hunter in the County.
So, so that's, I guess why all the daydreaming, did you get a chance to get on the track?
In my daydream?
Yeah, I mean, so what happened?
I mean, if I could ask, you kind of left me hanging here.
Did he take the bet?
Sure he took the bet.
I beat the kid in three laps.
I pocketed the $40,000 again, like, with a swagger.
And in a little way, like, this $40,000 is still here in my pocket.
Like, when it comes time, when, in the race, the carburetor breaks...
And we're a scrappy little wet wipes team.
And the guys up in the head office are like rubbing their hands together going, ha, ha, ha.
We can't lose.
They're going to lose.
And by that, we cannot lose.
Then I pull the $40,000 out, throw it down on the table and say, get a new carburetor.
Ha.
You get no excuse.
Yeah.
Go over to the rich team.
And throw that 40 grand down and the slick back tear sleazeball who runs the rich team is going to take it – he's going to take it as a dare, a challenge to his own –
Uh, thing.
And he's going to say, you know what?
I'm going to sell you that carburetor because I feel like I'm still going to beat you.
I'm going to give you the part because I feel like, I feel like when I find, when I do beat you, it's going to quadruple your shame because I didn't keep the part from you, you know, but it's also a little sportsman like too.
It's in the spirit of sportsmanship.
So that 40 grand is going to come back into the story.
I didn't play the story out that far.
Well, I mean, don't get ahead of yourself.
When you're ready, you'll go to the next chapter.
Yeah.
So I got as far as climbing out of the NASCAR, and the whiny kid is like, well, it's not fair because he blanked and he blanked and he blanked.
Did he throw his helmet on the ground really hard?
He threw his helmet on the ground, and then the manager put his hand up in the kid's face, and he was like, you know, pack your bag.
Oh.
Right?
Yeah.
And then he's, cause he's looking at me.
He's like, what do you got?
How do you do it at your age?
Especially.
And I'm like, stamina is one of the things.
So at this point, you had you just made your point.
Do you slink off?
Not slink off.
You carry yourself like a gentleman.
Do you head out through the fence again?
No, no, no, no.
This is the beginning of a wonderful relationship.
Yeah, this is the beginning.
Beautiful, beautiful friendship, as they say.
Of a one year relationship.
Right.
Because I'm going to take this underdog team to the championship ring in one year.
And then I'm going to disappear again.
I'm going to walk out of the grandstand.
And somebody's going to go, hey, Ace.
And I'm going to turn around.
And they're going to say, it's probably Susan Sarandon.
Yeah, yeah.
She's going to say, we're going to see you next year.
And then I'm going to, like, I don't know, twirl my fedora or take my tie stick pin and toss it to her.
Yeah.
She holds up the scorecard and it's got a lipstick kiss on it.
Lipstick kiss on it, right.
Maybe I take a sawed-off shotgun out of my knickers, fire it into the ceiling.
Watch out for the whiskey.
Clank, clank, clank.
I don't know how the film ends.
There are a lot of possibilities.
Yeah, well, you know, we're just...
It's kind of spitballing.
Yeah, we're spitballing.
This is what it's like in the writer's room.
Oh, sure.
Of all these sitcoms that – you know, I follow so many people that work in sitcoms, writing and writing and writing.
And I saw a picture after the Emmys this year of someone I know taking a knee with about 30 other people, 30 other dopes, and they're all holding Emmys.
Yeah.
And the person I knew who was taking a knee –
I said she can't possibly have also won an Emmy for that show because I know what she does on it.
And please God.
Because it's not a good program?
I've never seen the program.
Okay.
But you can win Emmys for all kinds of stuff.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
And I'm thinking to myself, if you can just win an Emmy like all of these clowns.
Yeah.
I've made a terrible choice in life to not be in one of those rooms sitting there sharpening pencils or whatever, you know, or or you're talking about like a technical enemy or something.
Right.
I mean, why am I not sitting throwing cards into a hat or throwing cards through a pumpkin?
Yeah.
Or whatever.
Or throwing cards through a watermelon.
Or an old watermelon.
And in that room, when somebody waltzes in and says, you know what?
Everybody in this room won an Emmy.
Because it's not you specifically.
It's the room that won the Emmy.
Oh, I see.
Right?
The plural.
The plural you.
I'm never going to be in a room that wins an Emmy.
Oh, man.
I don't think.
You might surprise yourself.
You might surprise yourself.
See, I think I see you as maybe like you're a guest, you're like a guest star.
Yep.
Or it could be for like, I still think, I've said this to you for 10 years now, PBS documentary, I'm telling you.
You know all those people whose career in Hollywood doesn't start until they're sixth.
Yeah, you're like the Grandma Moses of Emmy Awards.
Yeah, right.
I'm going to have a career, whatever my current career is.
Sure.
And then at some point, I'm going to be sitting in a soda shoppy, having a malted, and somebody's going to waltz in and say, we're looking for the new Lebowski.
Yeah.
Or we want somebody to play the old trapper.
Or maybe Silicon Valley types have aged in the next 15 years.
And now instead of the trope being like 20-something callow striving Stanford grad.
Yeah.
The new trope is, oh, all those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are like thrashed in.
From years of drinking Soylent.
Oh, I see.
Their body's ravaged.
Yeah.
And now they look 60 when they're actually 40.
And because I have vitality.
Sure.
You got stamina.
I got stamina.
When I'm 60, I'm going to read as a thrashed 40-year-old.
I see.
You can play thrashed.
Yeah, absolutely.
I noticed the other day I was walking along.
And I was trying to imagine being cast in a film as the wise but stoned sort of sage friend of the protagonist.
Oh, interesting.
Right?
Slightly stoned because that's what makes his – it contextualizes the sageness.
Because you can't just have the friend of the protagonist just be a flat out sage.
Yeah.
There's got to be something, some chink in his armor that, uh, that makes you, that makes him relatable.
And so in this case it would be like, oh sure.
He's like some, he's a burnout.
And so I was walking along practicing my burnout eyes, but you know, the burnout eyes have to not be so burned out.
They're not like that guy, the white guy in all the Dave Chappelle skits who plays the stoner.
You have to have eyes that communicate, I smoked a lot of weed.
But maybe I don't smoke it anymore.
Or maybe now I'm just taking it in pill form.
And it's not hindering my ability to be smart and present.
But it has given me insight into the sea.
The sea writ large?
Yeah.
And so I was walking along.
I was practicing my stoner eyes, which I understood to be lidded, heavy lidded, but with eyebrows up.
Oh, I'm doing it now.
I see exactly what you mean.
So you make the lids of the eyes like kind of, but then eyebrows up because you're in it.
You're in the game.
You're not just like asleep.
Your eyebrows are up, but your lids are heavy.
And then kind of, you know, you're talking softly, but
It's not like stoner voice.
No, no, no.
Right?
You're talking, but you have a normal voice, but it's a little bit like softer, a little bit of vocal fry in there.
Do you speak elliptically and sometimes accidentally come upon something really brilliant, just kind of slides out and everybody in the room is floored?
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
That's why you're there.
That's the whole reason you got written into the plot.
So it's not exactly Shaggy.
It's not exactly Lebowski.
And it's it's not quite Morgan Freeman.
No, no, no.
But he's like, I got this.
You know, I have this problem that is the artificial problem that is at the center of this film.
Sure.
We need that.
And and, you know, and like you're here because you because you're the protagonist's wise friend.
And but it's a but here's the here's the gag.
Right.
Here's how I win.
an award a big award yeah this is this is a serious film it's not a comedy it's not a stoner comedy oh the the the wise stoned friend is actually like the the uh the caddy or the limo driver right somebody in a in a drama you're the magical negro
Yeah, that's right.
There are real stakes here.
And I'm somewhat maybe mystical.
Am I really there?
Did I come through the cloud or not?
And this is the cloud.
And this is where – because it's a tech documentary.
Maybe I came through the cloud.
But so I have this wisdom.
But I'm also like – it's like a goodwill hunting situation.
where maybe there's an Oscar in it for me.
Oh, no.
Are you Robin Williams or Matt Damon?
I think in this scenario, I'm Robin Williams.
It's too late for me to be Matt Damon.
I had a window.
I had a window where I could have been Matt Damon, but I was doing other things.
Yeah, yeah.
But now I feel like I could be the Robin Williams in a film.
That could be very affecting, John.
Right?
I think I would enjoy that movie.
Are tears coming to your eyes right now a little bit?
I don't know.
I'm a little high right now.
Yeah.
Are you going to try and catch a nap today?
Well, I've got I've got one major dramatic thing going on in my life, which is that there are a couple of people.
Just one major one.
Just one.
OK.
All right.
Good.
Just one today.
Well, it's actually a two part problem.
There are two people, both of whom.
So actually, actually three people, but only two of them.
Okay, so there are three people.
Do you want this on the show?
Well, I'm adjudicating.
I hear you finding your way through the hedge maze again.
Yeah, here I am in the hedge maze.
I'm trying to find the way to say there are three people.
All three of whom are struggling with drugs and alcohol.
Oh, no.
That wasn't what I expected.
Yeah.
And three people struggling in very different ways.
Are you sponsor-ish for them or just a pal?
So they have all three of them reached out to me from their various quadrants of the world saying – and some of them are not in Seattle but are here in Seattle now.
And all three of them are like, I'm in this situation.
I don't know how to proceed.
And my traditional method of handling this situation is like, well, do you really want to do something about it or are you just bullshitting me?
Because I don't need more bullshit in my life.
And I was talking to a fourth friend, a woman with much experience in life.
And she said –
Like we were not talking about this situation while we were talking about something else.
And she said, I just feel like I need to be giving back all the time.
And I need to be practicing the humility of giving back without ranking my contribution or ranking the receiver of my contribution.
But just like here I am.
I'm a person in the world.
What can I do?
Well, just like doing it with a full heart.
Yeah.
You don't have to be somebody that I want something from or somebody important for me to help you.
And I'm not ticking this off.
I'm not putting this in a bank anywhere.
And so I took her advice to be a message from the great spirit.
And I realized, oh, I was kind of – I was not doing my work.
I was not doing my job for these three people.
Each in their own way.
They all came at once.
And I needed to –
be more selfless here and actually not say, are you serious about this?
Because I've got, uh, I've got jewels to stack.
Right.
But say like, what can I do?
I'll meet you for, I'll meet you for this.
I'll meet you for that.
And, uh, and so what I have, what I have orchestrated is that I'm going to meet one of the people and then he and I are going to go visit the second person.
So by that, the first person is going to be now also part of the operation to help the second person.
And helping the second person will help the first person.
Oh, my goodness.
And help me.
Yes.
So that's in my plan for the afternoon.
But I've only had –
uh three and a half hours of sleep you've been lining up jewels and i feel a little cookie wah wah and i'm not sure whether that makes me more helpful less helpful or just maybe i'm just maybe i'm the the person that's in the present here you're the one that's going to get help the most you never know maybe that's right maybe i'm the one living in the real world today and not my imagination so uh
But I really want to take a nap.
And I'm thinking, can I fit a nap into all of this?
I don't.
I don't.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I think a little shorty would help.
Even if it was a 20-minute nap, it might help.
How do you feel about an hour and a half long nap?
That's the perfect nap.
You think an hour and a half is not too much?
That's because it matches up with your rhythms.
You've got to find out what your specific rhythm is, but 90 minutes is about what the rhythm is.
You're saying get down.
You can get down.
Get down.
You can get funky.
Get funky.
And you can get back up.
Right.
Rhythm's going to get you.
And the other thing you could do is you could put your phone in another room in like airplane mode or something or turned off.
You plug it in.
Make sure you got phone power for the day and also you're not going to be lining up, Jules.
Let me ask you this.
Yeah.
Is that real anymore?
Is that a realistic expectation anymore?
Not in the phone nearby?
We fought our phones for a long time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It wasn't even much of a valiant fight.
Not many of us really put up a fight, but we fought.
Yeah, we made a game attempt at it.
We put it over there.
We shut it off.
We went out for the day without it.
Yeah.
But is it real anymore that we're – is that a game that we're even going to keep playing?
I don't know.
I turned a corner at some point in the last – definitely in the last year, probably in the last few months where I was like, well, this is just a thing now.
Like there's so much stuff I do –
I don't want to put it too strongly, but I really do feel like rely upon.
There's the one thing of like, I need to know if something happened in my little world that I have to take care of right now.
That's always been a thing.
But I could have a flip phone for that.
But honestly, for things like even if it's just stuff like, you know, paying for something with Apple Pay or for being able to look something up or whatever, I don't know.
I feel like for better or for worse, it's definitely gone from being something I make fun of everybody about to going like, well, this is kind of the new normal.
New norm.
I mean, you know, again, I'm not saying whether that's good or bad, but I'm saying it's not as weird as it used to be.
I just realized that if Google, if the Goog.
The Goog, yeah.
If the Goog had put out a phone that wasn't trying to be every phone for everybody, if it wasn't trying to be all things to all people, but if Google had put out a phone that just Googled.
Oh.
Think about that for a minute.
Google had put out a Google phone that phoned and Googled only.
And there was no other app.
It did perform no other function.
I get you.
But just to Goog.
It's almost like those emergency phones you can get, like for a kid or keep in your car, where it's got the really long life, but it's only meant to be used.
Like you're saying in this case, like if I really, really need to find Hamilton tickets, I do it right now.
Or if I need to find where the closest noodle place is.
Well, because I spend most of my time on my phone using the Goog to get around.
Sure.
And I don't need other stuff.
I really don't.
I don't need other stuff.
I can interact mostly with the world through Goog because I'm just trying to figure out when this building was built and
I'm trying to figure out what the infield fly rule is.
I'm trying to figure out who sank the Lusitania.
Somebody actually asked me the other day who I thought sunk the Maine.
We said it was the Spanish?
Well, no.
I mean, the conspiracy theorists say that we sank the Maine.
Oh, yeah.
Who do we say sank it, though?
Oh, the Spanish.
That's precipitated the Spanish-American War.
I am of the opinion that it was an accident.
but I couldn't believe that I was being entreated into the conversation who sank the main.
And I feel like that's the kind of thing.
I mean, I don't need Google to answer that question, but in the course of a day, there are just enough things that I need to resort to Google that, that not carrying my phone just doesn't feel smart because, because I used to sit and think like, well, I don't know how many, uh,
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
And I let that go.
There would be no way to find out.
But no way to find out.
It's just like, well, maybe when I get home, I can look in the encyclopedia if I care that much, but I don't.
But now if somebody says, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
I'm like, I'd sure like to know that now that you've brought it up and you Google it and the internet's never going to lie to you.
And then, you know, and then you go down the, you go through the rest of your life going, I, I, one time I did a little research on that.
I did a little research.
Have you tried it recently?
Because I kind of want to try it.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
I haven't.
I haven't Googled that recently.
See, it gives me a link to Wikipedia.
It doesn't really provide an answer.
Yeah.
Okay, let's say that.
Wikipedia phone.
Wikipedia phone.
You don't even need Google.
Google is just going to end up directing you to a Yelp review.
I'm going to say here, have an eel.
If I – that's right.
If I could – I think there are a lot of people who would just carry a Yelp phone and those would be people I would exclude from my life.
Oh, I would love some kind of a beacon to let me know when they're nearby.
Right?
Somebody with like a little Yelp symbol hovering over their head that you could just – as a Mario brother, you could just like blonk them and get the coin.
You could mushroom their coin?
Yeah.
A little tele-run engagement party.
But –
If I had just a wiki phone, Wikipedia phone that did nothing else.
Just wikied.
I think I would just carry that.
I think I would.
Well, wait a minute.
It would need a camera.
And then see the whole thing.
Then the wheels come off.
If your wiki phone has a camera, then it might as well be an iPhone.
Telephone.