Ep. 228: "Hidey Santa"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Well, it's a little complicated.
Oh, dear.
I'm switching headphones.
You sound like you're in a different room.
Yeah, I'm always in a different room.
Stand by.
Here goes the headphone switch.
Ready?
Okay.
I can't hear you now because I'm switching.
John is switching his headphones.
Oh, here we go.
Oh, you can hear him unfolding.
I'm back.
John is switching his headphones.
Are you there?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, you sound good.
Can you hear me?
Merlin?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Oh, now I can hear you.
Oh, okay.
I'm having a problem, a technological problem.
It's complicated, huh?
Are you on borrowed equipment?
What it is is it's a headphone jack.
It's malfunctioning.
Oh, no.
Yeah, and so I'm hearing you in mono now.
Oh, just in one ear?
Just in one ear, yeah.
Oh, that must be maddening.
Well, it's not good.
That's not good.
That's not how I normally hear Merlin, man.
It's what it feels like to be Brian Wilson.
This is exactly what it feels like to be Brian.
I feel like right now I'm in, I filled my living room with sand and it's full of cat shit.
Oh man.
Yeah.
So it's almost a form of a virtual reality or as they say, augmented reality.
This is kind of a, it's a, uh, it's an airsats, uh, Brian, uh, Wilson emulator.
Yeah.
It's, uh, it's like D augmented reality or dogmented reality.
I'm broadcasting to you live from Venice, California.
Oh, there you are.
Can you see the beach?
Uh, no, no, I can't see the beach.
I can see Russia from here, but not the beach.
Yeah.
Uh, that's one thing about Alaskans that a lot of people don't know.
It isn't that Alaska is close to Russia.
It's just that all Alaskans can see Russia from wherever they are.
Is that now is how's that fall in the nature versus nurture?
Is that just something that's is something that like in the water or do you think it's something genetic?
It's really more Heisenbergian.
Oh, sure.
You're not sure why it happens.
Well, no, that Russia is there by virtue of our observation rather than there being a Russia, really, necessarily.
It's a kind of a quantum observation.
There it is.
That's right.
That's right.
I observe Russia and then spookily at a distance, other Alaskans also observe Russia.
And if everybody in Alaska lined up at the same time, you know, who knows?
It would be like Hands Across America, but for vision or politics.
I was watching, you know, they got Bob Ross on Netflix.
No.
Yeah, yeah.
They got like a full season of Bob Ross on there.
I never thought of his program as happening in seasons.
He's a very interesting guy.
I don't know if you've ever watched his old show on PBS, but it's strangely relaxing and kind of fascinating to watch.
I don't see how you could be an American person and not have watched that show.
Because it's not just mesmerizing over time.
It's like instantly mesmerizing.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, what do you say about Bob Ross?
I mean, obviously, it was kind of a bit.
It was one of those things like the Star Hustler or something where people knew about it and it was funny and you make fun of it.
But when you actually watch the show, it's pretty amazing.
I feel like you have a lot to say about Bob Ross.
Maybe more than most.
Well, you know, I went to Wikipedia while I was watching it.
Ah.
But the reason I mention it here, you know, it is on Netflix if you ever get a TV.
But the other thing is that he has said numerous times, and this makes sense to me, that a lot of his inspiration was very inspired technically by this one fella who sort of popularized the wet-on-wet painting technique.
They eventually had a big fracture in their relationship.
That's very sad.
But the fact that he paints the way that he does and the kinds of things that he does is owing to the fact that he was stationed in Alaska.
Oh, no kidding.
When he was in the service.
He was like a sergeant guy in, I want to say like supply or something like that.
But that's when he took up painting to augment his income.
He would make these paintings and sell them.
And that Alaskan influence is still there.
So maybe that has something to do with nurture.
I don't know if his vision is any different.
He uses the wet-on-wet technique.
The wet-on-wet technique.
Yeah, that's what enables the whole thing.
Wet-on-wet.
Now, I don't know a lot about this, but it's my understanding that typically when you're oil painting, you get your canvas, you get your gesso, you let that dry, you stretch your canvas, you've got it all ready to go.
And you start painting in layers, and I think you ordinarily wait...
for one layer to dry before you put any more on.
And what Bob Ross does, based on this technique of this guy named Alexander, not to be confused with the Alexander technique, he has a whole wet canvas, and then he uses the wet paint.
And you know what?
Bob Ross, he doesn't call it a mistake.
He calls it a happy accident.
A happy, happy cloud.
Happy tree.
He has squirrels on his show sometimes.
My experience, this is one of the things growing up, I guess I didn't think about it until I was out of Alaska.
It's one of those Heisenbergian things where you can't see it until you take yourself out of it.
It's like...
It's like a Schrodinger box.
Right.
You can't tell if Heisenberg is in the box.
Exactly.
You heard it.
So I moved away from Alaska, and then I realized that all art in Alaska, or the vast majority of art in Alaska, is kitsch.
All Alaska landscape painting is...
It's all done in this style where there's the northern lights and there's a snowy, it's nighttime and there's a log cache and maybe, you know, definitely some happy trees, definitely maybe some unhappy trees.
But every Alaskan in the state has a painting of Alaska or multiple paintings of Alaska in their home.
And they're all done in a very similar style.
A lot of them are actually painted on gold pans, which is a thing that in some ways, you know what a gold pan looks like.
Like a Sutter's Creek pan that you use for painting gold.
Yeah, a Sutter's Creek pan, right.
So gold pans are a canvas in Alaskan culture.
upon which all manner of dreams are projected.
But if you go into someone's home in Alaska and they are middle class, there's a very good chance that they will have a gold pan mounted on the wall that has a painting on it.
And these paintings vary in size.
Primarily.
And if you go into a really nice house in Alaska, maybe one that is really nicely decorated in every other way, somewhere you will find a gold pan, somewhere prominently, a gold pan painted with a scene of the northern lights and a little cash and some snow.
And even the finest Alaskan painting, the Jacob Lawrences of Alaska, these paintings that now sell for
tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, are also landscape paintings, and they don't necessarily have the Northern Lights in them.
I think maybe the very highest echelon of Alaskan painting, you are allowed to not include the Northern Lights.
And this is kind of true of all Alaskan culture, right?
Like the songs that come out of Alaska...
including my cousin's albums, they feature Alaska quite prominently.
And the writing that comes out of Alaska is largely centered on Alaska or takes place in Alaska.
It's that encompassment of
of Alaska, which produces Alaskana.
And Alaskana is the primary form of cultural production of Alaska.
And so now that I know Bob Ross learned that in Alaska, so much makes sense.
You know, the kind of like
The reproducibleness of it, the way that those landscapes kind of come together.
His, and now I'm thinking about them, you know, sort of located on a giant gold pan.
And it all comes together.
All he needs is a little bit of Northern Lights.
Well, let me share.
These paintings are not cheap.
The gold pan paintings, some of them are.
I want to share something with you that will probably not surprise you.
When I went and searched on the internet for gold pan paintings, it auto-completed with Bob Ross.
What?
Gold pan paintings.
I am looking right now at some of the many Bob Ross original gold pan paintings, including one of a mountain and a cabin and the Northern Lights.
You're kidding me.
I am not even kidding you.
We have arrived at some kind of singularity.
My gosh, there's a lot of sirens going by.
I hope everything's okay.
Yeah, I've noticed that too.
Do you think...
What?
The sand is encroaching?
What do I think?
Well, it's pretty cold today.
Those sound a little bit like police sirens to me.
I'm not sure if there's a difference.
But, you know, as you know, you see me demonstrate, I can tell the different kinds of delivery services by the sound of the truck.
I can't hear many things, but I'm usually pretty good at identifying vehicles.
You do that with planes.
You can do that with planes.
I can get pretty close.
I can try with an airplane to know what I'm hearing.
Yeah, there's a very distinctive cadence to a U.S.
Postal Service truck.
Is that right?
That's different from UPS or any other?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
FedEx trucks sound more expensive.
The Postal Service ones have a very distinctive kind of disappointed sound.
They sound tired.
What are the ones that sound like, rumble, rumble, rumble, eek, kuh, kuh?
Which ones are those?
That sounds to me like a garbage truck.
Oh, that might be what I'm thinking of.
Boy, our garbage truck.
I don't mean to change the topic.
Very leisurely.
Very leisurely garbage person.
They really, really take their time.
My garbage truck, because I live in a crosshatch neighborhood that has some...
Some streets are dead ends, cul-de-sacs.
The garbage men, and they're always men, they come through the neighborhood in a very curious pattern.
Where instead of going down the streets that are blocked off, they...
They turn their trucks and then back down the streets that are blocked off.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Every time.
Yeah.
That's their routine.
They pull a little T maneuver and then they back all the way down the long block to the end and then are able to drive forward out of there.
But what that means is that half the time they're in my neighborhood by volume, they are going beep.
Of course.
Fully half the time.
Or maybe even more than half the time because you have to account for the time that they're pulling the T maneuver.
And they come service my neighborhood at the crack of dawn.
I am the first neighborhood in town to get their garbage picked up on Fridays.
And so it's a real symphony.
of beeps plus rattles and squeaky brakes and big diesel motors or whatever those are now.
Diesel combined with compressed air combined with corn syrup and whatever those motors are running on.
And also their route, I've tried to map it, as you do,
You try to map the garbage trucks as they go through.
Well, I think when you reach a certain... We've talked about route talk or route talk, as you say.
And I think as you reach a certain age in life, you become very interested in how people are compelled or choose to route their vehicles.
I think it's a very interesting topic.
And then once you start noticing a pattern, you can't help but notice.
Right.
And the way the garbage trucks...
Empty a neighborhood of the neighborhood's garbage and then move on.
You know, that's a system.
That's part of a larger system.
And so I became curious as to whether...
It was systematized across the whole city or whether each – whether the managers of each garbage – Right.
It's like Anna Karenina.
Every neighborhood is de-garbaged in a different way.
That's right.
It makes sense.
But maybe not.
Okay.
Maybe it's institutional, a top-down system, or maybe garbage managers like, listen, my own neighborhood, I know better than anyone –
And in our neighborhood, in Sector 14, we back down every cul-de-sac.
And the guy that's running Sector 12 is like, that's ridiculous.
Who knows?
I'm not privy.
When I was running for city council, one of the questions I asked my team was, once I'm in city council, because I presumed I would be.
Sure.
Do I have the authority?
Do I have the ability to go down to the sanitation department and get a report and say, I'd like a report.
I'd like to sit here in a room with you guys and get a report from everybody about what's going on.
A kind of debriefing.
Yeah.
And they looked at each of my team sort of looked at each other and slowly nodded and said, you would be able to do that.
I think you would scare a lot of people.
They wouldn't know why you were there.
And I said, oh, I'll explain why I'm there.
I just want to go around to the city, all the agencies that are performing all these marvelous tasks.
I want to get a report.
You know, I'm not going to tell them how to do their jobs.
No, you seek first to understand.
Yeah, it's like Don Schaffner's food safety podcast.
Right.
I've got a lot of questions about how the plan is run here.
And people who think about how they do their job all day long are usually very keen to tell you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I couldn't wait.
But now, as a layperson, as just a common member of the city community, I don't feel like I have...
Because the thing is, I don't want to just go, like, wait in the lobby with my hat in my hand for some press secretary to come out and say, what can we do for you now?
We're constantly reexamining our processes to find efficiencies.
Yeah.
I didn't say, I just want to sit in a room with all the district managers and hear how the...
garbage shoes, and they'd just be like, listen, we're very busy here.
But if I showed up as a city councilman with my little entourage, imagine the PowerPoint that I would get to see.
And it probably would scare people.
That's not what they want.
That's not what they get.
Most city council people, and by most I mean all, have not been to the sanitation department, probably.
Although, who knows?
But, yeah, so I'm very curious about it.
And once I started watching what they were doing, it's quite an elaborate pas de deux.
It's a little bit of a Swan Lake that's happening.
And garbage trucks, it seems to me, are running a lot of redundant trips down the street.
You know what I mean?
Like, garbage truck comes...
First appears in the neighborhood, goes past my house, kind of at a good clip.
Okay.
It's going somewhere.
It's going somewhere.
Yeah.
Then I hear it beeping somewhere in the neighborhood.
And then another garbage truck goes by, again, at a pretty good clip on a different street.
It's not the same garbage truck.
It's a different one on a neighboring street.
So I hear him go by.
And then I hear him beeping and I hear mine beeping.
And then one of them goes by my house again in the opposite direction, still not making any attempt to stop and pick up garbage.
And I'm watching these things go by and I'm like, I would think that there would be a route through this neighborhood that would just sort of be like an S and one garbage truck would just go S around and
and pick up all garbage.
I wouldn't think it would require two garbage trucks making multiple passes
Before they arrive at their station.
This is all residential.
This is all residential.
Presumably, everybody has mostly the same trash containers.
They're all identical.
Okay.
All right.
This is good.
This is a mystery.
This is the kind of thing, you know, once you get this on your mind, it's hard to get it off.
Right.
So, you know, and I'm not usually up at...
Six or seven to be out like chasing them around with a with a clipboard They'd love that, but you know like hold on just a second here one of the greatest experiences I ever had Was right when I moved into my house I'd cleaned out all this garbage from the from the house and had produced
a stack of like 30 black garbage bags.
It was just a mountain of garbage bags out in front of my house.
And I'd gone onto the city, uh, websites and, and read all the information about it.
And city has very clear, uh, rules about overages.
They said you get two garbage bags as part of your weekly thing.
And then each additional garbage bag is, uh,
$80.
Quick question, point of information.
So do you have cans for those, or are they actually just bags on the curb?
These are bags on the curb.
I did not have 30 garbage cans.
I had them stacked up in a pyramid.
And I was very anxious because that was the only place I could put these bags.
The garbage man was about to arrive, stare at this mountain of bags, and start counting up in increments of 80 how much I was going to own.
Yeah, that seems like resort prices.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, they got a plan.
This is all part of the system.
They've determined the price of extra bags...
based on an algorithm that I would be able to understand if I had won my race for city council.
But I don't understand presently.
And I didn't understand then.
It wasn't exactly $80.
It was a lot of money.
To take all these 30 bags, it was going to be a lot of money.
It would have been cheaper to have a hauler person come out.
Right.
But I had just cleaned the place out.
This was all very fresh.
And so I made a point...
to be standing next to my mountain of garbage bags at 7 o'clock in the morning.
Were you in a robe?
I had even dressed.
Okay.
This is going to be a meeting you're taking.
Yeah, I wanted to make a good presentation.
I wanted my garbage person to like me.
Yeah, I understand.
Nick Harmer, the bass player of the Death Cab for Cuties, had worked as a garbage man in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood a long time ago as a young man.
Before he was in a rock band.
And he'd given me a lot of garbage man inside knowledge.
Oh, I love stuff like this.
Yes, he told me all about being a garbage man.
He told a story about an old garbage man on his route in Tacoma who had a very, very large collection only of discarded Polaroid sex pictures.
People would take their...
picture of their girlfriend or their wife, and then for whatever reason would throw the pictures away.
And garbage men, I don't understand.
They move pretty fast, but somehow they're also...
Visually sorting garbage.
They're probably a lot like crows.
I mean, just in the sense that they have a very... Experience has given them a very attenuated eye toward a variety of kinds of things that they might want to know about in the trash.
I believe that, too.
And I think...
I would love to be a garbage man for that reason, but I think it only really becomes meaningful if you've been a garbage man for 20 years.
Yeah, expertise.
So according to Nick, this guy carried his collection in the garbage truck, and he had multiple photo albums.
Just full of these Polaroids.
I think you told me about this.
Yeah.
And I feel like, because I have another friend who collects Polaroids that were taken in prisons in the 70s.
And his collection of prison Polaroids is really beautiful.
And he says that online there are people who are like,
also collecting Polaroids of prison life in the 70s, and that he often gets into bidding wars with these people and loses.
To have an original copy.
Well, that's the thing.
It's a Polaroid, right?
This is the direct connection to the event.
And so I'm guessing that the community of people who are interested in a giant collection of, like, homemade...
Because a Polaroid is not a very good picture, particularly a Polaroid taken in a house at night.
Every Polaroid is very intimate.
Right.
And so it's very intimate.
It's unusual.
All these pictures are from Tacoma.
There are a lot of probably through threads, a lot of...
a lot of red garter belts.
I mean, I don't know exactly what all was in this, but it was a collection he was very proud of.
It made me think a lot about Garbage Men and what they're doing.
Nick Harmer said a great thing to do on a hot summer day is to fill the top of your garbage can with ice and put a six-pack of beer, of good beer, in a little ice, like a little ice nest, inside the garbage can.
So when the guy lifts the lid off,
here's this little icy beer moment in their day.
And that's the consumer that's left that for the garbage person.
Yeah.
As a, as a, as a token, it's like leaving some, some beads and shiny glass for the crows.
Okay.
And so one day on the hot summer day, I was out monkeying around in my yard and I remembered this conversation and, uh, a,
I, again, I was up early and so I was like, what a good idea.
And I had some beer in my house that someone had left.
I ran in, I got some ice, made a little ice nest in top of my garbage can and put a six pack of beer in there.
And I was so, I was so proud of this little beer gift.
And so naturally when I heard the garbage cans rattling and beeping in my neighborhood, I ran and I hid behind a bush and
You're like Santa.
Yeah, a little bit like Santa.
I'm like Heidi Santa.
And I'm hiding in a bush and I'm waiting.
And the garbage trucks are going by and rattling and beeping.
And it was very frustrating because I was like, come on, you guys.
They had to do their thing all around my neighborhood.
And finally, the garbage truck comes.
And the guy lifts the lid off the can.
And he stops and looks at the ice nest and the beer.
And then he carefully takes the six-pack of beer, puts it on the ground, empties the garbage can, puts the garbage can back, and then they drive off.
And the beer is just left sitting on the sidewalk.
Do you think he thought it was a test?
No, I think he just didn't want any beer.
But I've thought about this a lot.
Is he not allowed to take the beer?
Sure.
Are he and his partner in recovery?
Are they Mormons?
Did he consider this to be some kind of an insult?
Maybe he did think it was a test.
It seems like if you're going to test a garbage man,
you wouldn't go to the trouble of making an ice nest.
Maybe garbage man culture in Tacoma is really lax and fun and partying, and garbage men in Seattle are very serious.
I didn't know, but I had done this thing, and it had been rejected.
It had been kicked back out.
Because it feels like a gesture.
Maybe they misinterpreted it.
I cannot know.
And I can't know without having gone as a city councilman and gotten a full report from the entire government.
That's really washing over me at this point, John.
There's so many reasons to be disappointed or frustrated that your run didn't go the way we wanted.
But I'm just thinking, I mean, like in Florida, we had Governor Bob Graham, who was famous for always going out.
And it was a regular thing he did as governor where he would go out and work for part of a day at all different kinds of jobs.
That seems like that would have been right up your alley.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I would have done ride alongs with everybody.
Yeah.
The linemen and the sewer people.
And so I, you know, kind of desultorily walked out, you know, flopped out into the yard and picked up my unwanted beer and took it back and put it in my pantry because I don't want it either.
Oh, that's the other thing.
Maybe they just didn't like Tecate.
Oh, sure.
All right.
Who knows?
There's no way for you to know.
I'll never know.
No.
But anyway, this one day, very early on at my house, I'm standing out there.
The garbage truck comes around.
I'm basically standing there waiting in a suit with a bouquet of flowers.
The guy pulls up, gets out.
He recognizes that I'm there to talk to him.
Because I'm standing next to a mountain of 30 garbage bags.
And he says, what do we got here?
And I said, well, I have 30 garbage bags and I wanted to talk to you about them.
And he looked at them and he looked at me.
And he said, give me 20 bucks.
Whoa.
I was like, really?
He said, 40 bucks.
And I said, sold.
I don't want to keep talking this up.
And I took 40 bucks out of my wallet and I gave it to him.
And the two of us threw 30 garbage bags in the back of his truck, shook hands, and off he went.
Win-win.
Everybody wins.
He gets 40 bucks.
The garbage goes away.
It was going to end up in the same place anyway.
Yep.
And I didn't pay $80 a bag or whatever the city asked for.
So there is enough autonomy.
There's enough, like, opportunity for somebody to make a little, you know, to wet their beak a little.
Sure.
While the garbage all goes down the stream.
So I learned a lot that day.
And I don't think it was the same...
If he had jumped out of the truck on Beer Nest Day, I would have recognized the guy because he's seared into my memory as one of the people I'm most grateful to.
Yeah, of course.
And grateful for.
It wasn't that guy.
It was a different person that didn't want my beer.
Mm-hmm.
My late grandparents didn't travel a lot.
They mainly got traveled to by us.
But on the occasions that my grandfather, the rare occasions, my grandfather and my grandmother would stay in a hotel, a motel, my grandfather had a system that he thought was pretty bulletproof.
Did it include putting the TV remote in a plastic bag?
No, this is before remotes.
But, you know, I can't even think about it.
He would very mindfully put a quarter on the floor in plain sight.
I see.
And if that quarter was gone, he knew that place was crooked because they stole his quarter.
That was his quarter in the coal mine.
Uh-huh.
This is kind of like...
In my experience, putting a walkie-talkie in the middle of the floor.
That's right.
It's an invitation to adventure.
But I think we all have little systems like that.
But when something like that happens, and you've done that spy stuff, you can put a piece of paper in the door.
And if it's on the floor, you know somebody's opened this thing.
There's all that kind of spy stuff you read in books.
But I'm not sure if that's such an efficient method for determining the trustworthiness of a lodger.
Pretty sure it's not.
Yeah, because they just might not see it.
But on the other hand, and this could be something like The Sting, this could be a long con, but when he would come back to his room after going to the beach or Bob Knapp's or what have you, if that quarter was on the counter in clear sight, I think that made him really happy.
I bet it did.
Or if somebody had picked it up from where it was and put it...
put it somewhere else, a place of prominence, like, I found your quarter.
That's what I'm saying.
That's what I'm saying.
That was a good sign for him.
I'm sure I've told you about the $100 bill under the... the American $100 bill under the tablecloth in Cuba story.
I don't remember it if you did.
I had another friend who was a journalist... Is this one of those things like you put money in the kid's Bible and say, remember to read your Bible every day?
No, it was one of those things where the Cuban Secret Service...
The Cuban Spetsnaz would put a hundred dollar bill under the tablecloth of someone's home, an American hundred.
And so in the course of them cleaning their house, they would find this American hundred inexplicably in the middle of their home.
And they knew not to take it.
Because it was a test.
It was a sign.
That's a lot of money.
Yeah, in Cuba 20 years ago was a life-changing amount of money, at least briefly.
But it was just like...
We are, you know, we're in your home and not only are we in your home, but fuck you.
Oh my gosh.
Like we can, we can, we're in your home and we are so in your home that we can leave this here.
And know that you won't touch it.
Know that you can't touch it.
That's horrible.
Yeah.
You would put your tablecloth back down and walk around knowing that there was this enormous amount of money under the tablecloth.
And you would just leave it there until it was then gone.
Well, that's complicated.
But now they're in your head a little bit.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
the cuban secret service of all the secret services they did quite a bit less of the you know standing out in gorky park with a with a small uh like file folder that they're gonna not a file folder but you know they're they weren't the cuban secret service wasn't rolling up uh microfiche and sticking it in cigarette filters they were mostly a um
They were doing most of their work within Cuba, and they were really inside people's heads.
That sounds a little bit more like... I mean, I know the Stasi had their very technical things that they did, but that sounds like one of those...
You know, in a sort of a totalitarian regime, especially if you don't have the money, you want people to be policing themselves and you spend a little bit to put the fear into them and then you don't have to do it yourself.
Right.
Right.
Well, and this friend now, I don't I I've started to worry because I don't.
I never wanted to be one of those middle-aged people that was repeating themselves all the time.
And ever since I started taking my bipolar medicine, it has been reported to me that my memory has suffered a little bit.
No kidding?
Yeah.
And you don't remember it being that way before?
Well, it certainly wasn't.
I had a mind like a steel trap before.
Sure.
Pretty sure.
I mean, we did a couple hundred programs where I repeated a couple of stories, but generally I had a sense of what...
whether a story had been told before or not.
Well, you're co-hosting with the wrong fella there.
I mean, because I do find your stories very interesting.
And I will often say to you, I try to cue you, as we say in the business, if it is an anecdote that I remember very clearly.
But, you know, you don't listen to the show.
So, you know, how would you know?
But lately I have felt like there have been a couple of instances where we talked merrily about a thing.
And then the response on the Internet was,
I've heard that story before, and then, of course, our Captain Marm says, well, that appeared in episode 80, in episode 140, you know, like a little bit of feeling like, oh, gee, I told that story.
Yeah, it feels good.
I think we should probably assume everybody's heard every episode.
Yeah.
My favorites of those are when somebody says, you know, John told that story before, and then when he told the story again, Merlin said exactly the same thing after, which honestly does not surprise me at all.
Yeah.
Well, and I'm proud of the fact that in most cases, no one says that story was a lot different the second time.
Oh, see, that's good.
So at least you're still in something like stage one.
Yeah.
You're not doing a full-on David where the story changes a lot as it gets retold.
Well, or just told over and over as though, you know, told as though we've never heard that he was in World War II.
Yeah, right.
But, you know, part of that is to confirm to people that some of the fantastical stories are actually...
true, it would be impossible to remember a lie.
I feel like that needles you a little bit, that there still are the occasional listeners who think that your stories may be partly or fully fictional.
That they are just stories.
I feel like that gets under your skin a little bit.
That always drives me crazy.
This isn't like one of those
one of those podcasts where people are talking about supernatural towns.
This is a, this is a like a, this is a true, true stories podcast, true tales from the, from the wild West.
But this, this friend who went to Cuba who experienced this story of the hundred dollar bill, he was telling that as a prelude to his story, which was that he was out in the far country and in a group of people and he, uh,
At their request, you know, do you have any kids?
Yes, I do.
Here's a picture of my daughter.
He pulled a picture of his daughter out of his wallet.
He started passing it around.
The picture of his daughter went around this room and then never came back to him.
Oh, wow.
And as it was time to leave, he said, hey, who's got that picture?
And everyone was like, I don't have it.
I don't have it.
And it was a finite number of people in the room.
It wasn't a big event.
It was 15, 20 people there.
That's nasty.
Yeah, he was like, no, seriously, it's time for me to go.
Where's my picture?
And everybody feigned, you know, complete ignorance.
We don't know.
I don't know.
Nobody was the last person to have seen the photo.
And, you know, in his escorts, who he presumed were...
Also, secret agents or something were like, time to go, time to go.
And so he was hustled into his van and taken off and never, you know, and the picture was gone.
And he was, you know, he was hurt and insulted because everybody had been so friendly.
Yeah, and a little vulnerable.
I mean, that's weird.
Well, six months later, he's back in America.
And in his apartment...
One day, the photograph appears.
Oh, come on.
He tells the story as though... That seems like a lot of work.
The God's honest truth.
It does seem like a lot of work.
It seems like a lot of work to accomplish a very inscrutable goal.
Or, you know, like, obviously what they're saying is don't fuck with the Cubans.
But he's not.
He's back in Seattle.
He's not fucking with the Cubans.
They may be saying, don't, you know, be careful what you publish.
Be careful what you say about Cuba.
Whoa.
Journalist.
Got it.
But, you know, super spooky.
Spooky action at a distance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Literally.
And that, you know, when he told that story, it was a little chilling.
Yeah.
And, you know, he was a pretty trustworthy source and claimed that this, you know, absolutely, that was the one picture.
He would remember it.
There was no way it could have appeared by accident or happenstance.
It was that same picture, you know.
finger grubby with multiple fingers yeah and it's not like it's not like the garbage men who are keeping a polaroid album like somebody had to get that put it into a file folder with that guy's name and be able to call it up at a point later on i mean that's that's that's an information that's a that's a knowledge management issue also i mean that there's a lot going on there a lot of moving parts that had to be a room somewhere with his name on it and i think one of the other messages was all the people in the room who were like oh show us a picture of your daughter
They were all normal citizens.
They weren't spies.
They were just normal people.
But someone in advance of his trip there had gone around and said, he's going to be here and you know what we expect or something.
I mean, it was a casual enough exchange that it made it feel like someone was improvising.
And it was, oh, you know, here comes the picture.
I'm going to grab this picture.
And everyone in the room is going to deny any knowledge of it.
Right.
Like, it's just very deep and very dark.
A lot of confidence expressed there.
Confidence that control is total.
Right.
So, you know, that's really something.
That is a kind of...
psychological control over the environment, a kind of gaslighting that I really aspire to.
I know.
I know.
I was thinking the same thing.
If you really wanted to mess with somebody.
But here's the thing, and this is where it falls apart for me.
You might have the wiring for this, but I don't.
I'm thinking about these stories you're describing, things that have come out over the years about the odd things that... On the one hand, the odd missions, successful or abortive, that you hear about.
And just the tangle of seemingly complex methods that are used to do something that seems very, very strange and then cover up the fact that it happened.
Because like they're always saying, you want to cover up the mission, but what's that term they always use?
You want to also protect your methods.
Obviously, you don't want people to know if you've got a double agent somewhere.
I don't know if that's the term, but you don't want to know if there's somebody on the inside doing that.
But I...
It just seems like you would have to be wired a real weird certain way in order to be able to pull that off and to think that it's effective.
It's one thing to be an agent of chaos.
I understand if you're in some kind of crazy black ops operation, part of your job is to just make Castro think he's crazy, probably.
But, like, you know, it seems like if you're expending resources and potentially, you know, every decision you make, you've got to think about what you're risking or potentially sacrificing.
And, you know, I'm trying to avoid talking about the Republican candidate here.
But, like, unless you're really sure what it is that your particular gambit is in service of, you know, like, why would you risk it?
Right.
But if you're running the Cuban Secret Service or whatever the Cuban version of the CIA is, I guess you just got a long leash.
I can't imagine.
Well, because it begs the question, does Cuba have a secret office of agents in Seattle, Washington?
If so, why?
And if not, did they fly an agent here to perform this weird...
Like, we are watching you, we're in your apartment mission.
Or was there a Cuban secret agent who was in Seattle for other business?
And they gave him this thing and they said, oh, and by the way, on Friday afternoon when you're done with your other secret business, run by this guy's house, break in and put that picture there just because we've got it back here at the home office.
We're still fucking with him.
Like how did that?
How do you pick that day?
Yeah.
And how did it how did it of all the things to do?
How did that make it to the top of anyone's pile?
And I see where they could conceivably be, you know, have that, because it's clearly a threat, right?
I could see where they would feel like they needed to make that threat.
And it's a little bit about the Ceausescu apples in the pine trees, where within a totalitarian closed circle, they become so detached from reality that
that completely insignificant things like that take on an added importance to them because they don't, you know, and I think at the time Cuba was still closed to Americans largely.
And so my friend was one of the few American journalists who had, who were in Cuba in an authorized way.
And maybe they had the mental bandwidth to do this kind of thing to the 50%
American journalists that had come to Cuba that year, you know, maybe it was a manageable number and they felt like if you get the opportunity to, to put a hundred dollar bill under their tablecloth at some point, just to let them know that, that Cuba is watching and it's with, because within totalitarian, uh, like thought loops, uh,
Who knows?
Who knows what they have the bandwidth for?
It may be a jobs program.
Oh, like a WPA for spying.
Yeah, right.
I mean, like in China, there are army people everywhere.
They're directing traffic.
They're standing around in front of buildings.
They're opening doors for people.
They're out changing tires on the highway.
There's army everywhere.
And when you think about it, the people's
the people's Republic has the largest army in the world.
And what are those people doing all day?
You know, they can't just be on maneuvers.
Right.
And so it is a jobs program.
The, they just, there's a, uh, they have a million man army and 900,000 of them are out directing traffic.
So, uh, or, or more, right.
I mean, they are, they're just sort of, uh, they're omnipresent and,
But they're also doing stuff that needs getting done.
And maybe that's true of the Cuban Secret Service.
Maybe they're actually out, like sneaking around, turning off people's drippy water faucets.
I heard a term one time, and there's a self-help book about this called, I think it's called Pranoia.
And it's about the idea of this notional idea of something that's the opposite of paranoia.
So paranoia is the idea that forces are out to get you to cause usually bad things for you.
And paranoia is this kind of, you know, admittedly sort of hippie idea, like what if the world is conspiring to make your life great?
I'm not saying it's, but I'm saying it would be kind of fun, you know, if you had the resources to do something more like that.
It would be nice to have a secret government agency that just did nice things for you.
Maybe they put a nickel into your parking meter or something like that.
Maybe they trim your hedge in a way that would be very... And maybe in a way you hadn't even thought of.
A way that would be very complimentary.
Just ways that could improve your life.
That would be a good resource.
You come home and some kind of...
CIA Edward Scissorhands had created a topiary dinosaur in your front yard.
Absolutely.
That would also communicate to you that the government had amazing powers and that they were watching you at all times.
Yeah, but if you're going to be creepy about it, why not make it nice for people?
Yeah.
So you know you've got a kid with a dairy allergy.
You arrive home, and in the oven there's a nice dairy-free, like a tuna casserole, but it didn't use any dairy.
Something like that, where they could use the information they have about you in a nice way.
Why don't we have more of that?
What's so hard about that?
What if you had a smoke detector that had been beeping for a year and a half, but it was way, way up in a vaulted ceiling, and you didn't have a ladder, and you couldn't get there, and you couldn't even remember why you thought it was a good idea to put a smoke detector there.
And it had driven you all crazy.
And then one day you came home and it wasn't beeping anymore.
But you looked up and saw the light on and you realized someone had changed the batteries.
It had to be somebody.
It had to be somebody.
It would be inside your head.
You would be like, what is what is going on?
What is reality?
Oh, gosh.
But it was also a very nice gesture.
Kind of a proactive, positive gaslighting.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that, again, seems to fall under the rubric of Elon Musk.
Where's Elon Musk in this?
He's got a lot of projects.
I was at a cocktail party last night.
Elon Musk came up.
I said, yeah, Elon Musk is kind of a muse for me.
I think about him as a sort of the idea of the platonic idea of the modern tech billionaire.
And went around the room and everybody at the cocktail party agreed that Elon Musk was doing amazing things.
And then
one of the people at the cocktail party expressed a contraview, which was that he was a sinister figure and that there was this Elon Musk worship happening in the, in, and this, the, the person saying this was a,
It was a San Francisco person.
Okay.
Somebody who's kind of an insider.
A little bit of an insider.
Just being in San Francisco in the tech world, they're feeling a little bit inside.
They'd been to a cocktail party.
Elon Musk was there, as have you.
And then everybody in the room kind of had to defend their admiration for Elon Musk a little bit.
You know, to say like, oh, no, it only takes one.
Yeah, right.
Wait a minute.
Well, you know, this is what I was saying.
And then it was my turn.
And I said, you know, I'm not saying Elon himself, but more, yeah, right, the platonic idea, like, or ideal.
Like, there are so many billionaires who are not building their own vaguely sinister space exploration programs, who are not planning to build a hyperspace train that goes from L.A.
to San Francisco.
But...
Those billionaires are boring.
Why are those billionaires not doing that?
If I were a billionaire, I would be doing some crazy shit like that.
And of course it would look sinister.
I mean, if I were a billionaire and I was hiring a secret army to go around and change everybody's, the batteries in everyone's smoke detector,
People would say, what the fuck is this guy doing?
Right.
I think he would do solar probably.
Solar, right.
He'd change it all.
It would be a solar smoke detector.
But, you know, I got off of the airplane a couple of days ago and I turned my Uber app on.
And every time I do, I'm like, I hate this company.
But, you know, but also they do a much better job than anyone else.
Yeah.
Every time I think I'm going to protest Uber and I call a yellow cab, I have an experience that sends me screaming back to Uber.
And I know that we have a small contingent of London taxi drivers that listen to our program.
Oh, is that Kanish?
Is that his name?
Yeah, that any time I talk disparagingly about Uber,
about the hack community, the London Taxi Drivers Union of podcast listeners responds very aggressively to say Uber is a bad thing.
I think that's understandable.
It is, but London cab drivers are a professional guild that are an utterly different class of people that have to pass rigorous exams and they have a lot of institutional pride.
That is not true of yellow cab drivers in Seattle and L.A.
Right.
So I pull out my Uber app.
I'm walking through the airport at a good clip here.
And then the app reports to me with a pop-up screen.
We would like access to your location prior to us picking you up and after us picking you up.
We would like access.
We would like unlimited access to your location.
At our discretion.
So right now we're claiming that we're going to look at your location up to five minutes after we drop you off to see where you're actually going.
So we know whether we're doing a good enough job of getting you there or not.
But that's at our discretion because what we're really asking for is permanent.
We want you to go into the app and give us permanent location option.
Okay.
And then they say click yes or no or click yes or not now, I guess.
Something like that that suggests that this is optional for you.
And so I was, of course, was like, no, not now.
Give me the most no answer that I can give.
And still be able to get a ride.
Right.
Because that's the thing.
You have something you need to do.
Because I'm like, you're already biting into my time of my normal plan to have the driver waiting for me when I walk out the door.
And so then the app says, oh, OK, if you don't want to let us use our location services, which we've never had to do before, we now require that you manually type in the address of your destination.
We're no longer going to give you the functionality of the way the app used to store where you regularly went.
Obviously, their hands are tied.
Yeah, their hands are tied.
And now you need to take out a quill pen and write down the address where you're going and send it, you know, send a scented letter by carrier hawk.
And I'm like, listen, I'm two minutes from the door now.
You've taken seven minutes of my precious time with this horse shit.
And it's because you're another one of these tech companies that's decided that all information should belong to you.
In fact, maybe the whole idea of Uber has been a ruse just to eventually get us all into a position where you can collect our locations.
constantly be be uh apprised of our locations that's a very interesting idea you sons of bitches no and so now what if i mean what if i mean you know the uber of five years ago you wouldn't assume that you'd say okay this is obviously a replacement for taxis that's what this is but they do a lot of stuff that makes you wonder what they're really up to and it doesn't seem like they're not sure it seems like they have some idea what they're trying to do just we don't we don't know what that is
Yeah, it seems like unlike a lot of companies who hire lawyers to make sure that the company is in compliance with the law, some of these tech companies hire lawyers with the full knowledge that they intend to break the law and that their lawyers are trying to help them break the law in the most efficient way possible, knowing that they're going to be sued, covering their tracks.
The lawyers are in service of
Not of like protecting the law or the consumer, but but of protecting the company.
I mean, I guess that's been true of oil company lawyers and tobacco lawyers.
But but there's something a little bit different about like we'd like continuous access to your location.
And it suggests that there's a minority report future.
Where Uber is selling that information so that when you walk through a mall, the billboards can address you by name.
Yeah.
But anyway, so now I've stopped, right?
I'm no longer moving through the airport.
Oh, now your workflow is totally disrupted.
Right.
I had to stop.
I had to put on the brakes, dig my heels in.
Beep, beep, beep.
Now I'm standing there thinking about what I am going to do.
You're backing into a cul-de-sac at this point.
I am.
I am trying to figure out, am I going to submit to this indignity in order to use this thing that I have found to be more functional than other systems?
Or am I going to make a Pyrrhic stand...
Am I Sisyphus here?
Am I the one that is going to insist on a body pat down going through TSA rather than go through their particle accelerator?
And I'm like, okay, Uber.
You know, I do that thing that we all do when another eel attaches itself to us.
Okay, Uber.
And I go in, I turn on my location services, and then the app is happy.
Everybody's back to normal.
Okay, great.
Okay.
and then all of a sudden it doesn't recognize the credit information that i put in so now i'm stopped again what to go through this thing basically just to restart the app and then it then it remembers my credit card okay so a little bit of a hundred dollar bill under the tablecloth thing where it said you know remember when you initially click no well we're going to forget your credit card for a couple of minutes
Oh, that'll teach you.
Right?
A little bit of that.
And so it's like, so by then, by the time the app actually remembers your credit card and works, I'm fucking grateful.
I'm like, thank you, Uber app.
Don't leave me stranded here.
And then they're like, and the driver will be there in 16 minutes.
The longest I've ever, 16 minutes at LAX.
Oh, interesting.
Right?
Just a double little like kick in the drawers.
And then final indignity.
Driver arrives.
First time in many, many years getting a car from LAX.
Driver didn't speak English at all.
He was Armenian or something.
And I asked him a question and he gave me an answer that was not an answer to the question I asked.
Not even in the ballpark.
And then I realized he didn't.
He answered the question that way because those were the English words he knew.
So at this point, pro-noia is not on your mind.
No, no.
I'm feeling like they are, you know, at that point when I click no, I got shunted over onto the couch in the good fraternity at Animal House.
Yep.
And they were like, let's send him the Armenian driver and forget his credit card for a minute.
So anyway, then I'm in the car and I'm fuming, as you do.
And I said, what would happen if I, now I'm in the car, what would happen if I turned my location services off again?
Okay.
What are they going to do about it?
What are they going to do?
I'm already in the car.
Yeah, you already gave me the Armenian driver.
Yep.
And so I did.
And we puttered along on our way to my eventual location.
And then as I neared the location, I was watching his screen.
And I noticed the screen was not being continually updated.
And the blue line directing him just continued off into space.
And he was going to keep driving.
And because he didn't speak English, I wasn't able to express all the nuances of this situation.
Oh, suggesting that they were using the location on your phone to guide his GPS?
Yeah.
Oh, geez.
And so as we got nearer to my location, I said, pull over right here.
You can just drop me off right here.
And I've tried this with Uber drivers in the past, and they're like, no, sir.
One guy said, I have too much pride in my job to just drop you off near your location.
You should have taken that into account.
I insist, sir, that I take you directly to your house.
Yeah.
And at the time I was like, this is a tremendous inconvenience because if you drop me off here, I can jump over this fence, cut through this alleyway and be where I'm headed in town.
three minutes especially once you're in traffic somewhere like if you're getting dropped off at a hotel in a busy town and you're like you know two left turns from where you need to be it's faster to just walk and this was the thing he was like i gotta go up here around the block around the other block and then it's gotta go over here but he's like i insist and at the time i thought oh this is just some some guy that's got the wrong idea of where to put his pride in his job but now i'm
Maybe Uber was saying take people as close to the door of where they're going as you can.
Because it's all part of the system.
Yeah, because we want to know exactly.
It's about the data.
It's not about the ride.
We're not trying to earn money here.
We're losing money on the ride.
Oh, brother.
We just want to get inside your bed.
We just want to put a $100 bill under your tablecloth.
Oh.
And so I yelled at this guy, pull over, stop right here.
And for once in this experience, the language gulf worked to my advantage because he just didn't want to have to parse anything more complicated than that.
And he was like, okay, right here, okay, and pulled over.
Nobody wants an angry yelling Yeti in their car.
No, not at all, particularly one where the location services on his phone are turned off.
Who knows where he's going?
Who knows what kind of secret spy I am?
And so off he drove, and now I am going to be calling an Uber today, but I don't know.
I'm going to turn those location services on immediately before calling up the app.
Is the app going to remember?
Is Uber going to remember?
Interesting.
I want to hear how this goes.
Are they going to punish me?
I don't know either.
So, I mean, to whatever degree we can game the system still,
To whatever degree gaming the system is still an optional, built-in option, I think we all should.
Not just with Uber, but with everything.
We should be constantly turning on and turning off our location services only as needed.
We should be deleting cookies.
Oh, listen to you.
You've become kind of an advocate.
Well, now I'm starting to be a little bit of like an internet paranoic, a little bit of a put the remote control in the plastic bag type.
Yes.
Where, you know, I don't know where that remote control has been, and I'm going to assume it's been in the worst possible place.
I don't know why Instagram needs my location, but I'm going to presume that they don't.
Yeah, you get the fear a little bit.
Well, you know, in my case, like, I don't feel it as fear as much as I just feel like, fuck you.
Because these companies are trying to profit.
from gathering this information but whoever the the uber ceo is i just don't like him i i already know i don't like him because he's not he's not he doesn't have a space program oh you know what i'm saying yes yes yes if this if the uber ceo was worth a shit i would know about him already because he would be making solar-powered airplanes
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And so I don't want him to profit from knowing where, you know, like exactly which door in the hotel in the movie help I'm walking through.
Like...
I want him to have to work a little bit harder because I don't think he's using his money in a creative way.
Well, yeah, I mean, one thing about this is that you think about the way most historically the way most products it feels like the way most products get developed is to say, is there somewhere out there?
Is there something out there where there's an opportunity that meets a few criteria?
The criteria of, is there, I guess the sweet spot would be, sorry, I'm just thinking out loud here, but is there a sweet spot where there is a need on the one hand, so number one, there's a need for something that is number two, not currently being serviced.
Number three, four people who will pay, ideally pay a lot for it, and I guess maybe importantly, but where we have unique sources to create a barrier to entry.
So you watch the Shark Tank, and they're going to say, hey, look, if your job is like, they had somebody on recently who sends your kid letters from Santa, and it's like, well, that's...
Not, you know, you can't protect that idea and like anybody could do that.
But like in that case, you're looking.
So I guess I'm trying to say is so historically you say, well, you know, in the case of Uber, that makes a lot of sense because and, you know, I realize this is not a particularly sympathetic point of view, but just to underscore what you said, you know, getting taxis in San Francisco.
has for years been not just a source of frustration, but like it's a joke.
It's a joke how impossible it is to get a taxi unless it happens to be going by.
Because historically the way it would work is you'd call a taxi dispatcher who represents one or more of these independent companies and they send a little ping, one ping only.
And so a guy says, hey, do you want to drive four miles across town to go pick up this person and take them wherever?
And they might say yes.
But the thing is, if half a block later they pick up another fare, you're out of luck.
They may not report that they've done that.
And so it would frequently take us one to infinite hours to get a taxi.
There's a lot of date nights where we sat on the front steps paying for a babysitter while we couldn't get a taxi for one to three hours.
So you're kidding me.
No, that I mean, like, you know, we live out in the boonies as far as San Francisco is concerned.
So unless you got somebody who was coming back from the airport or already happened to be out in our neighborhood.
Anyway, I'm trying to say is that that you understand that and you go like, OK, well, there's this company that does this thing.
Initially, it's going to be mostly limousine type things.
That's what it was at first.
And then we went to private cars, which seemed a little bit weird.
But all through that, you could still, regardless of what you thought of the company, you could look at it and go, this makes sense.
This is a classic model of disruption in some ways.
Anyway, skipping over some of the weirdness and unpleasantries, but then you eventually get to where now the app wants to follow where you are.
And you're like, well, how does that play in...
to the narrative on the one hand it's sensible because why because you know well this used to be about replacing taxis now we're doing something different which is like we want to figure out what patterns of movement are let's even say at a very high level we want high we want to have a high level of understanding that that in this city at this time of day people from this neighborhood tend to go from a residence to a certain kind of business if
You know what I mean?
If they've got data that shows certain kinds of things about that, you can allocate resources.
That's a classic example of how you would use that data.
Sure.
But then you can't help but think, but yeah, do they need my data?
And why do you need it five minutes after?
And it's like, what is the play for a company that is doing that?
And in the same way that Facebook...
I don't know.
I'm sorry.
I'm being a pundit.
But I do think it's an intriguing thought experiment to wonder, like, what is the big play here?
Well, because we've all seen that we're talking to our friends via email.
Saying like, well, when are we going to get together for eggs?
Like we have a standing egg breakfast.
Me and my friends, the Young Dads Club.
We get together.
We all get eggs.
When are we getting eggs, you guys?
I don't know.
Let's get some eggs.
Yeah, let's, you know, when's our egg experience?
And then the next time you log in to anything...
Over on the side, there's an advertisement that says, want some eggs?
Like eggs?
Come to Bill's Eggville.
And you're like, that is creeping the shit out.
Like, I was not on Facebook liking eggs.
I was in a private email conversation with my friends about going to get eggs.
And your algorithm has mistaken what we were saying.
We were just using eggs as shorthand for breakfast.
That's a pretty – I mean it's creepy and it's a pretty blunt instrument.
Yeah, right.
So Uber – I agree with you that –
Their premise is at this super high level, we are making models of of human movement to the point that we can see that all of human life is just a giant anthill.
And it's like the city, any city that has changeable express lanes.
Oh, my God.
The garbage truck is out front.
Oh, my God.
Hello, garbage truck.
And he has squeaky hydraulic brakes.
See, they were listening to the show.
They're probably listening.
That's probably why the Skype dropped out earlier.
They're probably listening in and finding out if you were talking about garbage.
And that garbage truck was a clean air vehicle, so it was running on lilac fumes.
But, yeah, right.
Any city that has changeable express lanes, where the express lane is heading one way in the morning and then it is heading the other way in the afternoon.
Mm-hmm.
I have read in my research about city systems, I have read multiple times people riding into the city saying, look, I know that express lanes are moving out of the city in the afternoon and into the city in the morning.
But...
on the night of the big, big football game when there's also a big, big baseball game.
Oh, it hadn't accounted for something slightly anomalous.
Right.
Why don't you acknowledge that at that point in time, because the football and baseball traffic is backed up all the way to the bridge, why didn't you acknowledge this difference and change on that particular day the direction of the traffic?
And the city replies, even accounting for the large, large number of sports people that are coming to the city, still there is more traffic headed out of the city than there is coming in.
Turns out...
And so it would make no sense to change the express lanes because in the afternoons, that's the direction people are moving.
A lot more people than the paltry 100,000 people that are all converging on this sports game at the same time.
Okay.
All right.
And so that's an example of obviously the city has been spending a lot of time collecting that information and they know who's moving where and what they're doing.
And they're making this kind of decision with a lot of confidence.
And when I read that, which was a couple of years ago,
It made me really, really want to go to that room in the city where they're all sitting at a giant map, sitting in a dark room, listening to the whopper go, whop, whop, whop, whop, whop, whop, as it calculates every car on the road and all the crazy traffic signals that are doing things that you do not.
You cannot understand why you talk about Heisenberg.
I mean, we think about like, you know, for example, if you've ever gone, not to interrupt, but like when you're going down like fell or was it oak?
Like if you're going down the panhandle, basically east or west, and those lights are timed a certain way.
You know what I'm saying?
But if you're changing the timing on a bunch of lights, that seems like, not quantum crazy, but there could be so many unintended consequences of trying to social engineer that and not getting it exactly right.
There's so many ways that could go wrong.
If there's an accident or something, and that unintentionally throws this off in a way that's not helpful at all.
Well, one of the most confusing things for me is, you know, I drive past Boeing...
airport, Boeing's own private airport in Seattle, multiple times a week.
And Boeing has its own traffic lights.
Private traffic lights?
Well, no.
What they've done is they're Boeing, right?
And so they have a lot of leverage.
And so what Boeing has done is they're on this strip.
There are a lot of factories where they're manufacturing and smoothing out the wrinkles on their Boeing aircraft.
Yeah.
And at some times of day, these factories disgorge thousands of engineers all at the same moment.
And if you've ever been somewhere where anything is disgorging thousands of engineers, and I know you have.
Oh, I've seen it.
That's a thing that needs its own traffic light.
And so there are about five locations on this long 10-mile road, that 10-mile mostly completely straight road, where there are traffic lights that make no sense at all unless...
You are someone who is in the parking lot of a factory who's just gotten off work and there are 4,000 other engineers all leaving at once.
And so here are these traffic lights.
And they offend me, of course, because there's no reason for that except to benefit this one situation that happens three times a day.
But insanely, these traffic lights also trigger...
At 2 o'clock in the morning.
Oh, that drives you crazy.
So you're driving down the street.
But it's bad with a stop sign, but with a light, that's pretty presumptuous.
Right?
And every time one of these lights goes off, it also then stays red for five or six minutes, as though a thousand engineers in their carefully maintained Chrysler K cars...
Um, as if they're just pouring out of this parking lot, but you're sitting there on a, you know, in a, in a giant four lane highway next to a, next to a, you know, uh, obviously a jewel in the crown level airport just sitting at this light, like a, like a total, well, like a cuck.
Let's be honest.
Yeah.
I wasn't going to say it.
Yeah.
Let's, let's, let's speak in, in new speak for a second and say what you really are.
And so for many years now, I will stop at that light just disgustedly.
But I'll look both ways and I'll make an independent decision that I'm not going to sit out here in the dark waiting for this fake traffic light.
And what I don't understand is how it is that this thing isn't programmed to stay green at all times until 4.45pm.
And 4.45 p.m.
And then you realize, oh, this is just a system of command and control.
They just want to stop you out here to see if they can.
They want to stop you out here just to remind you that you can't take the $100 bill.
That's not your $100 bill.
And it's another example of like...
You know what your traffic light means to me?
I'll stop.
I'll give it a courtesy stop.
I'm going to treat this stop sign like a yield sign.
Yeah.
Now, who knows if that's making it into my permanent file or not?
Yeah, no, no, I know.
The garbage man might be picking that up right now with the spooky action.
Right.
Any amount of this kind of civic disobedience may have repercussions.
I may not, you know, I may log on to Facebook and
And be reading, you know, reading my friend's accounts of their recent surgery.
And some banner ad will say, don't like stopping at stoplights?
Maybe you should try checking yourself before you wreck yourself.
Or maybe next time you stop at the light, you get an ad for eggs.
Right.
Yeah.
Like it just pops up on my phone.
Now, speaking of which, I don't usually look at the Internet while I'm talking to you because it takes my full concentration.
Yeah.
But because I'm getting on a plane this afternoon, I just checked my email real fast to make sure that they weren't telling me that they'd spilled a bunch of avgas on the tarmac.
And I get two emails back to back.
The first one is from Virgin America.
an airline that recently spilled a cup of coffee on me.
Oh, is it about how you can get extra reward points with Alaska Air?
It is.
Yeah, I just got the same one.
We have some exciting news about Virgin Airlines' integration with Alaska Airlines.
Starting today, Elevate members can now earn points when flying on Alaska.
Well, isn't that fascinating?
And then they have, in the email...
both my Elevate frequent flyer number and my Alaska frequent flyer number.
How about that?
So I'm like, look at that.
You guys are already, you're not making me go into the, you know, into your web service to try and figure this out.
You've got the stuff, you've got the data right here.
The very next email in my inbox is from Delta Airlines.
Delta says, and in big letters in the headline, our partnership with
with Alaska Airlines is ending.
Oh, boy.
Delta and Alaska together have reached a decision to end our partnership.
This is a positive milestone for both airlines as Alaska focuses on its merger with Virgin.
And Delta, this is the kicker line here, Delta focuses on expanding service from SeaTac, which is not coincidentally Alaska Airlines' hub.
Hmm.
So Delta and Alaska now are going to war with one another.
We've foreseen this for a couple of years.
Those of us who travel from SeaTac.
The writing's been on the wall.
Oh, has it?
Has it?
They got the bigger army diplomacy because they also got the United now, right?
Isn't United part of Delta?
Is that right?
Oh, is that?
Is that right?
Who is it?
No, that's not right.
United and who else?
Wasn't there some kind of big usurpation of one airline not too long ago?
Yeah, probably.
United, of course, is my sworn enemy.
I know.
I know.
Yeah.
But anyway, big, big, big news.
Right after each other.
One right after the other.
Yeah.
Now what am I going to do?
Now how am I going to manage my frequent flyer miles?
Our good friend Jason Finn has been trying to get me to be a gold member for a long time.
That's his nickname, of course, gold member.
And every attempt I make, I just get thwarted.
I get thwarted and thwarted.
Every time I look at that face on the tail, I always think it looks like Brezhnev.
Is it just me?
It is a little Brezhnev-y.
When I was a kid, the Alaska Airlines... Talk about the Alaska Airlines logo guy.
Yeah, the logo guy on the tail.
When I was a kid, the tail of Alaska Airlines planes had multiple figures on them.
There was a totem pole.
There was a little Eskimo girl.
There were a lot of things.
There wasn't one symbol.
And over time, they phased out all of them and made that one Eskimo guy the face of Alaska Airlines.
He's the Colonel Sanders guy.
The Colonel Sanders of Alaska Airlines.
Pardon me.
I see.
I'm looking at an old one.
Looks like they maybe had like a prospector looking guy on there.
A prospector, that's right.
He was one of them.
And somehow this guy became more and more stylized and more and more a cartoon.
Yeah.
Until now he's just, I think a lot of people who have never seen someone in an Eskimo parka might not even know what they're looking at.
I don't know if everyone looks at that picture and reads it as what it is.
Not at all.
Why is the face of this guy in this?
I don't even know if his little hood reads as fur.
It doesn't, but it's very, very high contrast.
So there's not a lot of detail to it.
It looks like he might be a fella named Oliver Amawak.
Oh, I bet.
That doesn't surprise me.
Looks like we got to maybe find the source photo here.
Well, I mean, Oliver is a name not unused in the native communities of Alaska.
Okay.
I've heard that before.
I had a friend named Oliver.
Okay.
Okay.
The story checks out.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I had a friend named Oliver who was a native Alaskan, is what I meant to say.
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
So there he is.
So, yeah, right.
He doesn't look... It's not clear that he's wearing a fur parka at all.
Right.
He just is a he's a smiling person.
It looks like an afro.
Right.
In a very strange head dress.
But that is that's his fur parka.
He looks more like he's got it looks like they put his face on Brad Delp's silhouette.
This is the singer from from Boston.
He's got a very you know what I mean?
A very prominent afro.
Right.
Well, let's hope he doesn't end up the way Brad Velp ended up.
Oh, no.
Did something happen?
You're not familiar with his... Oh, God.
Now I've got to look it up.
His tail.
I don't think I want to know.
He was a very tragic figure.
Oh, no, no, no.
Oh, no.
Okay.
Never mind.
Move on.
Oh, dear.
Very tragic figure.
And he committed suicide.
Okay.
All right.
And he left a...
He left a suicide note in French that said, I am a lonely soul.
The singer of Boston.
Our guy.
And what can you do?
I am a lonely soul.
Speaking of Bob Ross, I feel like I have very rarely heard you talk about participating in the visual arts industry.
So my question to you is, and if you told me this, you can tell me to refer somewhere else, but I don't remember you ever talking about an interest in visual arts, whether that's drawing or painting or what have you.
Have you ever done any visual things as something you spent some time on?
So when I was a kid, I thought that I would be a cartoonist.
Wow.
And I spent a lot of time drawing.
It was my number one activity.
It was what I did in school instead of pay attention.
Tanks, planes, cars, that kind of thing?
All of the above.
And then ultimately faces and figures.
And then I started drawing cartoons.
I never had a stock cast of people.
It was more like Bizarro by Pizarro.
Or I mean, it was it was a little not far sidey because the far side had a lot of reoccurring chickens and cows and stuff.
Absolutely.
It was just every one panel, man, a one panel.
And and it was always a couple of people interacting.
And I I drew a.
What I think were like proto pretty good comics.
So interesting.
And filled an entire one of those artists notebooks with these cartoons.
And, you know, the challenge, of course, was to come up with ideas.
And as I came up with funny ideas, I would draw them.
And then I would encounter drawing problems, as you do.
That's how every artist gets better.
You draw until you encounter a drawing problem.
And then you try and fix it, try and solve.
Solve for how to draw a hand.
Right.
Hands are hard right solve for how to draw a three-quarter view It's easy to draw cars, but even those you have to get better at a car You can't just draw a car from memory You have to go study a car because they don't look like you think they look yeah Anyway, so I filled up this notebook all the way through high school of all these hilarious What I thought were hilarious and which were pretty which sometimes approximated hilarious and
little one panel drawings and then at graduation i gave the book to my uh long time high school girlfriend and she wasn't my girlfriend at the time but i felt uh you know i felt a lasting lifelong bond with her and so i gave her my book of all my cartoons
And she was very appreciative of it because it had become, you know, it was like John's book of cartoons.
So she knew that it was a big deal.
Oh, yeah.
She'd watch me draw them.
I'd shown them all to her many times.
And she was a fan of them.
And then somehow, you know, I left Anchorage and I was hitchhiking around the country and I was keeping a journal.
And throughout that
Throughout my journal, there are also little caricatures and drawings.
As I'm trying to describe something I'm seeing, I would do a little sketch of it.
But that just sort of gradually went away.
And part of it was that I was not spending a lot of time sitting at a table where I could draw.
And it was hard to draw on buses.
And it was hard to, you know, to make the time to stop and do it because I was always in motion.
And I just lost the habit of sketching.
And a few years later, maybe 10 years after I graduated, I was with my high school girlfriend.
And I said to her, you know that book of comics?
She said, oh, yes.
And I said, I mean, you know, I gave that to you then and probably it's just in a box now or something.
And I wouldn't mind getting it back if you don't.
if you don't need it because i uh you know it would it would matter to me i'd like to see it i'd like to interact with it oh god and she said that book belongs to me you gave me that wait a minute and it is mine and i was like right i do remember i think i do remember this story i was like well all right
I guess, I don't suppose you would make me a copy of it.
And didn't this become grist for the idea that she maybe lost it and wasn't going to cop to it?
No, she gave every impression that she occasionally referred to it.
Did that happen with a different notebook?
Oh, yes.
Well, there were the journals that were just out and out stolen by another roommate as part of our... That's right.
It was in a box.
Yes.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I was conflating stories.
So she's got it, but she's not going to... That's weird.
She's got it and she's sitting on it.
And I don't know.
I can't imagine that she refers to it now.
But at that point, after I was out of high school 10 years, she was like, you're not getting back.
Screw you.
Like, well, all right.
So anyway, anyway, so I was I wanted to be a comic artist and I felt like comic strips.
Now, I don't mean.
comic books.
No, I understand.
I understand the difference.
But like comics, comic strips, one panel comics, New Yorker style comics were a very high art form, I felt.
And the truly great ones rose to the level of the truly great.
And I wanted to be one of those.
And my drawing skill topped out, at least for the little amount of work I put into it.
I got to a place where I could draw my thoughts, but not draw them beautifully.
But you see a lot of people working within that realm where the art is rough.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
That's one reason I think it's such an interesting medium.
Because...
And I think this is more true than ever now with the web is that you get to decide everything, especially with the one panel.
You get to decide everything about that.
You get to decide what it's about, what the role of...
of, of language and, um, and like how detailed is it going to be?
And you can have, you can create something that's like something you're capable of making and then sort of evolve with it.
Your skills can grow your, you know, whatever direction you want to take it.
It's such a, it's such a DIY art form in so many ways.
And you're right.
I mean, when it's done well, I had a friend whose dad was a cartoonist and believe it or not in Florida and had had stuff in playboy and a bunch of stuff.
And, um, I just think it's such an interesting, that's an interesting idea.
You get to control the entire stack.
Yeah, and it's like a short story.
You can communicate an awful lot, and that's what makes New Yorker cartoons so difficult for people, is that they often presume a body of knowledge going in.
The art and the one-liner are...
The art has enough visual clues in it that you know who these people are and where they're coming from and what their past experience is.
And that's how you interpret the line.
And if you can't know that, if you don't look at it and understand who an Upper West Side couple where he's a psychologist and she's an art director, if you don't know enough about being able to peer into their lives together to understand what, you know, to understand when he says...
There's not enough almond milk in the refrigerator, you know, to know what that means and why it's funny.
Right.
I've been noticing more and more in trying to occasionally eat vegetarian breakfasts that the only thing not made of almonds is the spoon.
Right.
Right?
Even the bowl is like hollowed out almonds.
Almonds?
So interesting.
So, and almonds serve partly also as like a source of protein.
Is that right?
Source of protein.
You can milk an almond, apparently.
Like free-range almonds.
You get out there, I guess, little tiny farmers.
I know how to make almond milk.
Take almonds, water, lemons.
Lemons!