Ep. 243: "Hoeing My Till"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
It's been a long time.
It's been a long time.
You sound good.
Oh, hey, that's nice.
Thank you.
You sound good, too.
Thank you.
Do I sound like I have a new power supply on my computer?
I can feel the clean power.
300 watts.
I can feel it.
It's like an SVT.
Just putting that clean thump.
So that's a power supply inside the computer, or are you talking about the outboard power supply?
No, it's a classic.
I had classic symptoms of a classic problem, and it was classically not hard to fix.
Oh, that's classic.
I mentioned this in some other places, but this is worth mentioning because I think this is the kind of thing that probably, well, I feel like I know drives you crazy.
Here's how this evidences.
Two Tuesday nights ago, I'm just doing my thing on my computer.
As you do.
As you do, and it goes away.
Well, as though basically some imp or sprite had just disconnected the power, like pulled it out of the outlet.
It goes away.
And I think, huh, huh.
That's not optimal.
And so I bring it back up.
I think, you know, probably a one-time thing.
I won't go through this whole thing, but it's one of those kinds of problems that's difficult.
It's difficult to reproduce because the nature of the problem evidences itself in fairly random things.
So then step two of that is I start doing the troubleshooting, which is, you know, it involves a lot of incantations and chicken bones.
And then you just wait.
But there's a peculiar kind of purgatory to being nearly certain...
that the tool that you're using is going to break at any second.
You have a very different view of how you use that device when you know that it could go any second.
Oh, yeah.
But, I mean, you've had this probably.
You wonder, is the power going to go out?
Is my phone battery going to die?
But in this case, it's even worse because I'm like, okay, well, I know I need to leave this running and test this thing, but I want to do stuff still.
I'm in the early stages of grieving where I haven't gotten my mind right.
Yeah, you haven't gotten your mind right.
That's a terrible feeling.
And so I'm just sitting there waiting, and then it goes, bloop.
And I go, okay.
Got to get a fresh set of chicken bones.
Yeah.
I used to have a...
I used to have a delay pedal that would just sometimes go into demo mode.
Huh?
Like you're over at the store and you want to show off what the thing can do?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The the the the mode that I'm not even sure why it's built into the thing.
You should just if you're a company like that, you should just build one that's a demo and give it to Guitar Center and it can sit and demo.
But all of them had built into it this like sort of cycle through everything it does.
So that I guess you could sit at Guitar Center and just turn on this feature and play... You had the user strum.
Yeah, and then here it goes through its thing.
But it would go into it just sort of randomly.
And it happened one night.
We were playing with the Decembrists in Boston.
And it was...
Right when the Decembrists were getting big, and it was kind of right when the Long Winters were getting big, and it was a big show, and it was one of those shows that hadn't expected to sell out.
Oh, like Buzz had accumulated while you were doing it?
Yeah, we were out.
The early shows on that tour were not very well attended, and by the middle of the tour, the shows were sold out, and by the end of the tour, the shows were getting moved to a bigger venue, kind of what you always hope for.
And so it's Boston and there's, you know, it's oversold right there.
Kids kind of hanging on the walls.
And halfway through our set, my delay pedal goes into demo mode.
Oh, my God.
And when it went into demo mode, the normal way that you turned it off no longer worked.
You couldn't just...
It's like the delay pedal's on.
You click the switch.
It goes off.
But when it's in demo mode, no.
There is no switch to click off because it's cycling through every, and so it just has to do its thing.
It just has to run its course.
Oh, my God.
And so I sat there through an entire song and just, you know, and it's a delay pedal, right?
So it's like, here's what it can do.
Bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow.
while you're trying to play uh rock and roll power chords yeah and i'm playing you know stupid or whatever and uh and it was really it was really fun it was fun for me that was back at a time when i had a real sense of humor about things
You know what?
You'd use it.
You'd yes and it.
I really, I was just sitting there thinking to myself, if I could be on the shop floor of line six right now and grab the foreman and just like ghost of Christmas past.
This used to be equipment that you could save your life.
You'd be hanging from a thread.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, you need those things to be tough.
I've had a lot of pedals over the years.
Well, first of all, there's just always the thing of like, it's at least back in my time, this might have changed.
It was always difficult to know without tasting your nine volt, like exactly how much juice you had left.
yeah you gotta taste that nine volt yeah right am i right up here um but like you know you uh if you're in the middle of some raging solo and suddenly the signal gets real quiet and then just goes away or something like that that's that would be the worst also i had a lot i think you know you know how it is with stomp boxes you get them and you just use them forever and they get treated terribly and clunked around there are a couple that had a i remember in particular it was my
It wasn't an Ibanez.
It was the Boss Distortion Plus Feedback pedal, that orange pedal that I used for lots of stuff.
It was a pretty shitty sound, but I thought it was fun.
Yeah, it was a bad pedal.
But it was fun to see what it would come up with, what feedback to make, given what you were doing.
It would be so random and weird.
But that had a loose quarter inch, I want to say, on the input jack.
And sometimes it would just revert to a clean signal.
It would just go, oh, I need to reset myself.
Boop.
now you're cat stevens not very rock and roll uh you know it's frustrating when you can't depend on things it is well in fact right now i'm trying to send some um i'm trying to send some texts from my laptop to people i'm trying to say look i can't make it to lunch today yeah and uh
uh the machine has decided that i can no longer send text because my password has changed what and my password has changed because sometimes sometime recently
It forced me to change my password because of something.
You know, there was some reason that it needed something different.
It needed something to be different.
All right.
Because I plugged in my iPad, which I hadn't used in a while because I wanted to start using it as a drum machine.
I thought that was a good idea.
So I plugged my iPad in.
It told me that it needed to have a new operating system.
I tried to ignore it.
It said that you want me to try tonight.
Did I want that's right.
Did I want to sync my iTunes with it?
I said no.
It said or then it said, you know, all this stuff.
And I finally surrendered.
I was like, all right.
OK, fine.
I'll fine.
Like I've sworn I will never do this, but this time will be different, won't it?
Apple.
This time will be different.
This time you'll do, it'll be logical, it'll be natural.
You won't ask me to upgrade a thing if that upgrade will brick the thing.
You would know, internally you would know that it couldn't handle it and you wouldn't ask.
So I'm going to trust you.
And so I went on and it gave me some cryptic message like there can only be one iTunes account.
Would you like them?
Would you like this to be that or or?
And if you say no, I know you don't hit the wrong thing because the the consequences are unknown.
And so that's right.
The consequences are unknown.
That's precisely right.
It's not that you know them because the language is very cryptic.
Sometimes it's a huge deal.
I mean, there's one you probably got in the last couple of years, which was something along the lines of after you updated iOS, it said something like, do you want to switch over to cloud drive or something like that?
And normally a person would go, oh, of course I want to switch over to Cloud Drive or whatever the F it's called.
But the thing is, what it didn't tell you was that that was an iOS-only feature.
It was not available on your Mac.
And the way that all your cloud stuff worked would change fundamentally, and you might not be able to get to some of it until the operating system on your computer was updated.
But you know what?
That doesn't fit in a pop-up message.
Yeah.
Well, and so what happened was I put this thing on which had You know 800 songs on it and it spent an hour Churning I was like, huh, that's interesting and then when it came back up all my music was gone and
Because it had synced to the iTunes on my computer that had come with a free Michael Franty CD and that U2 album.
Oh no, this is bad.
All that's on my iPad now is nothing.
And put a new iOS on there that has now turned it into a thing where if you touch something on the screen, it thinks about it for a while.
It goes and makes a pot of coffee and it comes back and it decides whether or not it's going to follow through on your thing.
We are currently evaluating your request.
Yeah, and half of the apps crash the thing now.
I mean, it was like the thing was better...
The iPad was more useful when I was using it as a hot, like a trivet.
Yeah, sure.
You put a pan on there.
Yeah, than it is now.
That'll work with any OS.
It just makes me want to kill.
I will help you with some troubleshooting that might be useful.
It seems like it's done, right?
The music's gone.
What is the troubleshooting?
Like the music, they just, they evaporated it.
Well, there's lots of stuff I want to save for after we're done recording, but there's some security hygiene you should do at your earliest opportunity.
That's one thing.
But, you know, it might be confused about if you have more than one Apple ID.
This is a very confusing matter.
this did not used to be such a confusing matter.
Lots of people, when they signed up for Apple stuff at the time, it required an Apple ID, got a new Apple ID.
That could be .me, .mac, .icloud.
It could be Gmail.
It could be whatever you signed up with.
It's very confusing.
And a lot of people don't know that they have more than one Apple ID where the username and the password match.
And so if you enter in the wrong one, very confusing things happen because you're basically asking for an entire different set of files.
So was that stuff that you had synced directly to the iPad with iTunes previously, like with a tethered connection?
Here's the problem.
For many, many years, I had that desktop that I've used over the years to record our program.
And that was my main computer.
And that's the thing that I synced my phone to and that I synced my iPad to.
Then I bought a laptop.
When I arrived with the laptop it We were past the we were past the border into the clued The clued and and so the new laptop was like hello Welcome to computing.
It says though.
You've never heard of a computer before so would you like me to it looks like you're trying to compose a message Would you like to walk through how the the miracle of in of the cloud?
And I was like, yeah, I just, I got, believe me, I've used a computer before.
Thank you.
Let me just get to where I was.
Yeah.
And they're like, oh, well, you know, you can keep all your music in the cloud.
And I was like, I don't think I can.
I mean, over the years, I've already had this problem where they're like, oh, this you don't you know, this song that you've been listening to for five years.
Now you don't have access to it because at some point in 1999, somebody gave this to you.
Right.
And it was fine for a long time.
But now it's not fine anymore.
Right.
And it's a grapes-a-rap type situation, where it really sounds great until you get there, and then you're like, oh shit, this is not going to work at all for what I'm trying to accomplish.
And now, of course, it does stuff like in the last few years, last two, three years, it started doing stuff like where Apple will, for the first time ever, incorrectly guess what your music is, and then now the metadata is like, now this is associated with some obscure Led Zeppelin live album, and you're like, no, that's not what this is.
And then you lose stuff.
Consequently, you lose stuff.
Because when the metadata is wrong, now there's a very good chance things will just get lost because it's not what it looks like.
It looks like garbage now.
I have no idea how to get the... I mean, because on my desktop, I have 50,000 songs.
I have all the music that I've had over my whole computer life.
I have no idea how to get those into the cloud, and I don't want to know.
Because every time I log on now, the cloud tells me that I don't have enough storage.
So I know I don't have enough storage for 50,000 songs.
Because all I have on there is like a copy of the book that I'm writing, and...
uh what like two i don't know i don't even know what i have on there it's nothing to i have i they they gave me like five megabytes of space oh this is yes that is this is a huge deal this is a even the nerds are like this is the most unconscionable hardware thing they had was still selling 16 gig
which is ridiculous.
You can't even update the iOS in most cases.
But yeah, the parsimonious amounts of data, it's gotten better, but it's still pretty costly for what you get and will not accommodate even basic stuff.
Yeah.
All by way of saying, on my laptop, I've just said, okay, I don't need music on there.
I don't know how to get it from my desktop.
Yeah.
And I just don't care.
But when I synced my phone, I finally was like, well, I got to sync my phone to my new computer.
I can't keep syncing it to this computer from 2004.
Yeah.
Well, it wiped all the music off my phone.
Oh, Jimmy.
Because it's, you know what I mean?
Because it's not on the new one.
It's not on the new one.
Yeah.
And I'm like, and all I want is there for there to be a box that says, would you like the iTunes that's on your phone to be the master or the one that's on the computer to be the master?
Right.
But it doesn't allow for that.
And so all the music's off my phone.
Well, then I had it on my iPad, which I was using to control the Sonos.
Right.
Until I just did this thing.
I made this mistake again.
I forgot to never upgrade.
I forgot to never, never trust their box.
Always say cancel.
If you push cancel and it's like Yelp, if it says, would you like to use the app?
Yes.
Or cancel.
And you cancel.
Then you go away.
You don't get to use it.
Yelp.
You have to use the app if you're looking at it on your phone.
Right.
Unless you delete the app.
Oh, I don't even know.
Do I have the app?
Probably.
That's the same with YouTube.
If you've got YouTube on your phone, it'll always use that, and it's a pretty crappy app.
So I never use Yelp because apparently I downloaded the app one time.
I never want to use the app if they ask me.
I just want to look at the thing because it's right there.
I can see it.
I just want to click on it and look at it.
I don't want an extra step.
to go look at their app and watch it boot up and presumably take me to iTunes.
So I'm always like, no, I don't care.
I don't want to use Yelp.
I do not want to use it.
Not only do I not want to use it, I want to say the word Yelp with spit coming out of the corners of my mouth every time I say it.
Like, oh, is it on Yelp?
Anyway, so I cooked up my iPad and then all my music's gone from there.
So the only place any of that stuff lives anymore is my desktop, which...
I'm terrified of disturbing.
I'm terrified of waking it up from its nap anymore because it contains multitudes.
And every other way that Apple has to force me to either buy all that stuff again or go the rest of my life only listening to Michael Franty and Spearhead...
Apple's trying to do it, and they're trying to do it by way of these cryptic little pop-ups that it's like, would you like to make a decision right now?
I don't think it's that willfully difficult.
It feels that way sometimes.
But, you know, there is...
This is not a particularly interesting topic.
No, it's not.
But, you know, it is there.
I want to say I hear your frustration because there's all kinds of stuff that's super frustrating.
You know, one of those things is it did feel like for a pretty long time, Apple, there are two things at least that Apple got pretty well, which was that things always did seem to be kind of getting better.
Things did get more reliable.
And there were improvements and one accepted them gladly.
Because they did improve the devices, the software, the services, whatever.
But the second part is that it also kind of felt like you got used to Apple being a good shepherd, being a good guide, being a good sherpa, being a good rabbi.
Yeah, a good friend.
You could just hit that update button if you're about to get on a plane and know that, yeah, there's a pretty good chance it's not just going to really screw up.
Yeah.
This is the most horrible general kind of comment, but I think in both cases, the feeling as a typical garden variety user is that neither of those things is the case anymore, and both trends are going the other way.
If you do run some kind of an update, especially on iOS, it is, like we've said, it's very unclear sometimes what's going to happen after you do this.
And that makes people resistant.
The last thing you want is to have people resistant to updating the operating system.
But, you know, hand in hand with that is that second part, which is like, now I'm scared you use my desktop because I don't want to do anything that makes it eat all of my MP3s because it has a different account associated with it.
Like, what stuff is mine that I get to keep forever?
You know, I don't think they're trying to make you buy it again.
I just think sometimes they're pretty tone deaf.
Yeah.
stuff stops you know what i mean that's not a salutary sign and you would notice that if it's working properly until just one day it doesn't and i don't think they're very responsible sometimes about communicating that with people well it's interesting and we've talked about the tech world for for a long time for the decades and decades we've been doing this program absolutely it's one of our one of our first topics was technology decades ago that's right that's right about technology and ecosystems you know
If you go on to LinkedIn, you'll see the technology is one of my core competencies.
Yeah, I think I endorsed you for that or whatever.
Yeah, thumbs ups.
But not very long ago, you and I had a brief conversation where I was saying I used to love TweetBot.
And Tweetbot was this great program.
I used it a lot.
And then it just started to be less and less functional.
It couldn't do certain things.
It wouldn't let me see embedded content.
It just sort of started to fall apart.
And I kept using it wondering what was going on and it felt like there were a few times over the years where lonely sandwich would put up an app or Some friend of yours would put up an app and I would get it and I would use it until it stopped
being functional and i would ask you and they were like oh yeah they'd stopped using that or you know there was that one right you know they just stopped updating it it was it turned into it happens it happens sometimes stuff just goes away but like you wouldn't expect like if you had a favorite like kitchen knife you wouldn't expect it to just stop working one day if it became dull you would notice that and then deal with that by a new one but there's no you don't get a pop-up on kitchen knives that like oh by the way this is no longer supported
Right.
And so I figured that was what was going on with TweetBot.
Well, so I got to a point where it just wasn't functional anymore.
And I was sad, but I went over and started using the Twitter app, which was awful.
People have strong feelings about Twitter clients.
It's a very personal relationship.
But I put this out there on the web, and I got a ton of people saying, well, why don't you use TweetBot?
And I was like, well, I did.
I thought it was DOA, so I wrote you.
And said, what the WTF?
And you said, oh, you need to get the new... It seems like a simple answer, but it's actually... The closer we get to explaining what's actually happening, it requires like a whiteboard and a chalk talk to explain why your TweetBite is not working.
Yeah, you were like, oh, you have to go in and pay for the update.
That's the way that people that make small apps that aren't like massive, that's how they...
fund it, you have to go buy an upgrade.
That's how they get paid, is how I would put it.
It's not like they're putting out a tin cup.
This is what these people do for a living.
The only way they can make money is to sell you a new version or have in-app purchases.
Yes, that is how you explained it to me at the time.
However, that was not clear to me as a layperson because I'm not reading Macworld or whatever.
And so how was I to know that?
There was never in Tweetbot a thing that popped up and said, buy the upgrade because we need to get paid because this is what we do for a living.
Or there was never a pop-up on your phone that said, oh, by the way, the ecosystem you think you're used to has quietly changed in the last two years.
Here's some bullet points from Apple explaining exactly how the 70% take versus 30% like, oh, here's what all that means.
No, it's all, it's a black art to even understand everything.
why things happen.
How come all of a sudden almost everything is free, but I have to pay for the good stuff?
Well, sit down.
Have a sandwich.
This is going to take a while to explain.
And I was thrilled to buy this $4.99 drum machine app for my iPad because it was one of these moments.
I've been down to the music store a few times like, which one of these Roland 808s is the right vintage drum machine for me?
And I'm talking to the tech dudes.
Like, if I get this, will I?
And they're kind of all looking at me like, I don't know how that works, man.
I just do it all on the computer.
I'm like, you don't know how this classic drum machine works?
And they're like, no, we just have that here for the nerds like you.
Like the graybeards that want to come in and fondle some things from their childhood.
We don't know how it works.
It's not a thing that we would ever use.
Look at me.
I'm two live crew.
I'm dropping crazy 808 beats.
Whatever this 808 does there's thing on my phone that does it ten times better So it's just like get with the times and so I was like But I found this this cool drum machine simple to use and it's on the iPad and it costs six bucks or something And I was like that's six bucks that I'm happy to spend it happy better to spend that and then 1500 bucks on a on You know MC blowfishes fucking 808 state
So I get it, but I have to get my whole system in line, and now I'm fucked.
Now I paid $5 for the drum machine, and it has to think about every beat.
And I don't know if you can speak to this, but I certainly can.
You do not want to think about every beat.
You want those beats to flow.
You know what I mean?
You know what?
That's good.
That one's going in the e-book.
You don't want to have to think about every beat.
You don't.
You don't.
Well, thank you so much for tuning into Tech World.
I'm John Sarkoza, and this is another episode of Why Computers Are Amazing.
Amazing.
It's fun to sit in the Apple Store and listen to all the other conversations.
It's so...
I have a little initiative.
I guess everybody does this.
If there's a thing that you feel like you're super interested in or know a lot about, you kind of want to do these blind questions of people.
I have a friend who works on the Star Wars movies, and somebody was mentioning, his checkout person was mentioning...
Rogue One, and he was, without revealing that he had worked on some of the shots, was asking, like, what did you think about Grand Moff Tarkin?
And what did you think about the characters?
And I do a similar thing, where, like, if I see somebody wearing Apple AirPods, I'll always ask them, hey, out of curiosity, do you use Double Tap for Siri, or do you use Double Tap for Play Pause?
You know, like, you want to go out and kind of ask around and learn these kinds of things.
You do that because you have some...
You had some vested interest in that?
I just try – I try to get a gauge.
I do a little bit of Thomas Friedman work, right?
I like to just – without being too much of a nerd, you know, like if you're in a ride-hailing car, like there's a good chance that person's got some personal technology.
They have to have that in there.
And that's an interesting time to like notice like which phone they've got, how they're using it, how many do they have.
Right, right.
Or I go and I pick up lunch for the family, and I notice that the burger place we go to has an array of seven different, not just iPads, but Samsungs.
They have an array of, they've got this whole area.
It looks like, you know, Charles from the Rens, you ever look at his pedal board?
It looks like that, except it's all tablets to take orders, you know?
In different formats?
Yeah, yeah, from like, this is caviar, this is, you know, Spoonful, this is Knife Edge, or whatever.
Oh.
I don't know.
I just always think that it's interesting to just kind of like get a gauge about how other people are thinking about and using technology.
And the Apple store is super interesting for that.
Let me ask you this.
Yes, you there.
This sounds like something that the old Merlin man would do, back when he was Merlin man, and was a technology pundit.
Yeah, I was a seasoned technologist, yeah.
Yeah, now it seems like you're just a layperson, just a farmer.
You're just Farmer Merle.
Just as God made me, sir.
And you're out, you know, you're just out hoeing your row.
Hoeing my till.
Why exactly?
Is this just like a...
a distracted interest, or are you still... Are you like the Brad Pitt character in the mortgage movie?
Yeah.
You're kind of keeping your hand in the game?
I'm one of the Christian Bale.
Oh, the Christian Bale.
I'm the Christian Bale.
I got some speed metal in a confusing eye.
LAUGHTER
because i like sitting on the bus and listening to people talk i do too i just like observing people in the wild not not not in a snarky like i want to put your picture on the internet with your raven kind of way but like in like oh you know that's just that is super interesting watching even how the lady my uh my genius at the apple uh bar like how i don't know if they even say genius or apple bar anymore but the woman who helped me uh get my computer repaired like watching how she interacts like how she does stuff on the phone it's it's not out of a vocational need
Really?
Although this stuff does come up on, you know, I don't know.
I don't know how you define what it is that I'm doing these days, but like it does come up.
I end up talking to several shows where like I have three different shows where stuff about Apple will come up, even though it's not the primary topic.
But it's mostly just my own interest, like talking to my friends, watching what they're doing.
But, you know, it's I don't know.
I'm not sure of the point I'm trying to make, except that there is such an interesting and confusing range of people's reckons about technology that you really get to overhear as they consumer-splain it to the person at the Genius Bar.
And, you know, let's be honest, not every genius is a genius.
You get real differing results.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Not all geniuses.
Pounce sign.
Hold the phone.
Yeah.
You're going to make this about Bernie Bros, John?
Is this about Bernie Bros?
No.
My computer is not working right now.
And the thing is that having done this with the iPad, now my laptop and my whole system doesn't work, right?
Because I had to do all these things in order to upgrade.
I had to change passwords.
And then by changing passwords, I reset settings accidentally, not on purpose.
And it wasn't that I did it.
It was that the computer did it without asking, right?
So now my message app...
won't let me send messages and i keep sending it and then google just sent me an email saying an unsec an insecure app just tried to log on to your google account and that and i'm just in the laptop sending messages via the message app like i didn't have anything to do with google on this but but it's going through some you know yeah it's going through the the
the passages of my mind or whatever.
And so anyway, so here I am.
I got three messages I need to send.
I need to send them.
Can't send them.
I don't know what the problem is.
I'm putting in the right password.
See, I'm trying not to talk about this on the program because we should talk about this offline.
You're worried that somebody listening to the program is going to immediately use their superior hacking qualities to hack into my system.
I'm worried that's already happened.
And somebody's... Oh, I see.
You should never need to change your password to do an update.
Oh, no.
I don't think I had to do that.
It was that...
Well, I mean, honestly, I have no idea, right?
The thing to do to figure this out is to take your known good Apple name, and I'm trying to look you up here, look whatever you're using for your, come on, contact card.
Yeah, you should go and see if you can log in.
You go to iCloud.com and see if you can log in with what you know to be the correct credentials.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, anyway.
Which you should do soon.
Thanks for coming.
Let's make a part of the program.
Thanks for coming to Mac.com show.
I'm your host, Tony Visconti.
You are sequestered from so much of my world, probably by design.
You can't even imagine the feedback that I get from people about what I should be helping you with.
It's very frustrating to people that I'm not constantly going in and correcting anything that's even slightly wrong, even if it's a bit.
But also, if you have the slightest technical problem, the entire internet is very frustrated with me that I don't fly to SEA, Viva Seattle, Tacoma, Viva SeaTac, and personally go and help you with whatever you're misunderstanding.
I get feedback.
I get feedback about this.
Yeah, I'm frustrated with it too.
Why the hell aren't you doing that?
I know.
You know what?
This is part of Jared Kushner's portfolio.
Why don't you fly up here and fix this message app right now?
Oh, you know what it is?
It's this second device authentication that I agreed to.
That I agreed to, which means that now I can't do anything without also finding my phone and typing in.
You might have locked your car keys into a second set of car keys.
I did.
We'll get you squared away.
Wait a minute.
What was that that just happened?
What happened, John?
It said, you need to put this code into your other machine.
And I said, okay.
And then I dismissed it because I didn't know where it wanted me to put it.
And I was like... But you got it.
You found your car keys inside the car keys.
You're going to make it.
I'm going to try it right now.
Hang on.
Okay, here we go.
This is such good radio.
This is good.
I got the numbers in.
Verifying trust this browser, it asks me.
Do I trust the browser?
What is that?
What is that?
The browser is Safari, right?
I think it got hacked.
I got a virus.
I got hacked with the virus.
You done dude it.
You done dude it.
Okay.
All right.
Typing.
Oh, wait a minute.
My iCloud storage is almost full.
Oh, really?
Photos, videos, documents, and data will no longer be updated.
But I can learn more.
Let's see what it says.
Oh, God.
I've managed my iCloud storage.
I can increase my storage to 50 gigabytes.
Who would ever need that many gigabytes for 99 cents U.S.
dollars a month?
Yeah.
Go for the terabyte.
Go for the terabyte.
I'm not going to put another eel on my bottom.
You know what it is?
It's like the Cosa Nostra, right?
They stop by your cheese shop and they go, you got a real nice cheese shop here.
It'd be a shame if anything happened to your Camembert.
It's like that, except in this case, they're putting the arm on you with attention.
Where it's like every morning, it's going to go, you know what?
And you're just like...
Well, I mean, in the time... Okay, here's the great thing.
In the time that it took me to write the person I was trying to... So there's a mayoral race in Seattle this season.
And my good friend, former mayor Mike McGinn, has thrown his hat back in the race to run against his arch nemesis and current mayor...
Ed Murray.
Has he had a dust-up?
Ed Murray is in the newspapers a lot recently.
I feel like I've been hearing... I'm not trying to be provocative, but I feel like I've heard some things.
He has... He is in the midst of a scandal.
Okay.
Which he says is like dirty tricks, right?
Well...
I mean, I don't have any problem just outlying the facts of the case, which are that, you know, Ed Murray is gay.
He was a volunteer and like an activist, a community activist in Portland in the 80s.
Okay.
And he was in his 30s in the late 1980s, and he worked with, you know, at-risk youth.
For many years, accusations have dogged him that he, in the process of mentoring street kids, groomed and...
helped a couple of them in the sense that he let them live at his house.
Then there were accusations at the time that he was sexually abusing them.
Was this like a whisper in the press, or was this kind of a public thing?
No.
He wasn't, I don't think, prominent enough then...
that it would have been a whisper in the press.
No, a kid actually went to the cops.
Oh, okay.
In the eighties.
Yikes.
And in the eighties, it was a scene where, you know, here was this upstanding sort of guy in his thirties who was working with at risk youth versus a 15 year old drug addict street kid.
And so the cops just, you know, brushed it under the table, right?
They just like,
They didn't pursue it.
So now, right at the start of this election season, a handful of
who were teenagers in the 80s have come forward and said, this happened to me.
And they all have a lot of supportive or supporting evidence.
You know, they all remember a certain sort of aspect of his penis.
It had a bump on it.
And one of the guys remembers Ed's phone number by heart, you know, from the late 80s.
And it was a, you know, it is precisely a, my own private Idaho scenario in some ways, right?
These guys were, these teens were street kids and drug kids and they were hustlers and they freely admit that they were hustlers.
But this was a different scene with Ed, right?
He was like, I mean, one of the kids adopted Ed's last name as his.
You know, he was borderline adopting them.
Oh, this sounds very complicated.
Yeah.
And doing all that stuff, you know, giving them money, taking them to the doctor, promoting them, saying, you know, go to college.
He was acting as a father figure in a lot of ways.
And they, you know, and all these kids say, you know, that in a way they loved him and in some ways really loved him.
But he also was, you know, they kind of weren't.
They didn't want to have his penis in them.
And that was sort of what he would – that was his game, I guess.
This is the accusation.
I have no knowledge one way or the other, obviously.
And complicating matters further, the people that are pushing this lawsuit –
It's a law firm and kind of a group that is a very conservative Christian group that is pushing a very strong agenda.
And they've come at Ed a few different ways.
They're the type of group that does this sort of thing to other politicians.
One of the guys in the newspaper article about these accusers, one of the guys had taken masking tape.
and written on the front of his blue t-shirt, written, Jesus saves in masking tape across the shirt for the photo shoot, because he forgot to wear his Jesus saves shirt.
So that is, you know, the leftists, right, are very suspicious of that whole thing.
And so...
We're off to the races, right?
The mayor's office denies everything.
They went to the doc.
They went to had some doctor examine him and say, there's no bump on his penis, even though it's sort of one of those things where it's like, really, there's like four guys that all say the same thing.
And so it's like, it's very, it's very complicated.
And so
complicated also, because if you're running against him, that's not the way you'd want to win.
Well, it isn't except that, you know, like, this will bring a lot of crazies into the race, but the thing about McGinn is that he is against Ed Murray.
Profoundly.
And McGinn doesn't care.
McGinn will never mention this.
This isn't on his radar at all.
He...
He's against Ed's personality.
He's against his policies.
He's been sitting on the sidelines for the last four years, just chomping at it.
He really helped my city council campaign, and it was in that time that I realized that he's a player.
He wants in.
And so...
This was just a lot of the reason that McGinn wouldn't have run against Ed, and I'm sure he's been thinking about it the entire time, is Ed's a very good politician, too, and had shored up support from a lot of different quadrants.
And a lot of that support in politics, I learned in running, is – I mean, everybody's very half-hearted.
They're like, well, we don't like this about –
We don't like this or that about this person, but he's our best shot.
So we're throwing everything behind him because there's no there's no half endorsement in politics.
Nobody goes like, well, we sort of like both people.
But, you know, I mean, the only people that do that are the stranger, right, who who endorsed my opponent by saying this guy is kind of a creepy serial killer, but he knows policy.
John Roderick is a really fun, rakish, exciting guy that we like a lot, but he just hasn't been in the game long enough.
And that's an endorsement that helps nobody or satisfies nobody.
Right.
It's just like, thanks.
Thanks.
But most, like the unions, everybody else... It would be like a restaurant review where they can't personally find anything to like on the menu, but they can give you reasons not to order two different things.
It's like, well, okay, so should I just avoid the restaurant altogether?
Right.
That's not really super actionable unless I just decide not to vote.
Yeah, or you just go... I mean, I guess they're open about...
lesser of two evils, but 99% of the people don't read even that deep into it.
They just pull the cheat sheet out and check the box that they tell them to check.
But in this case, the question of whether or not Mike McGinn would run against Ed Murray was always a question of how vulnerable is Ed.
And Ed is a very good politician, and so he had shored up support from all of the groups, all of the
All of the people that you need.
So he seemed less vulnerable, not invulnerable ever, right?
But he seemed like if all the powers that be were going to get behind him, he's a much more difficult person to run against.
This unfortunate controversy, and I don't mean it just that it's unfortunate for Ed, it's unfortunate for all involved.
And presuming, I think, that you kind of can presume that there's truth to these accusations because it just doesn't seem unlikely.
The points you get to, and I don't know anything about this, I'm not trying to speculate, but there are those kinds of things that you run into where you're like, there's so many different pieces, even small pieces, coming from so many different places.
It isn't like a, well, one idiot says Iraq has WMDs.
It isn't even anything like that.
It's more like there's so much little bits of chatter and smoke from so many different places.
It almost seems...
In retrospect, with cases like that, it seems like there's probably something going on.
Well, and also, and this is the problem... That makes it hard to shake, for sure.
If you talk to anyone who was a gay teenager in the 1980s, there was a culture then.
And there was a culture that just had a very different idea of what...
The age, the appropriate age of consent was.
And in a lot of these Western states, like the age of consent in Oregon has been 18 for a long time.
But across America, there are states where the age of consent was 12 until not that long ago.
Really?
In Ohio.
For heterosexual business.
Right.
Yeah, because homosexual business was against the law no matter how old you were.
There was no age of consent for it, right?
It could not be.
It was illegal by definition.
But the age of consent for heterosexual sex, I mean, it still varies state to state.
And there are states where it's 14 years old still.
Yeah, really?
Yeah, there are a lot of states where it's 16.
Yeah.
Like the number of states that it was 18 were definitely in the minority for a long time.
I think that's not true now.
But so this idea that we have that 18 years old is the age of consent or even 16 is the age of consent isn't necessary.
That is an idea that has been evolving over time.
In the 80s in Oregon, on the streets of Portland, and I was on the streets of Portland in the 80s, and it was a dark and lawless place.
Did you meet Flea?
Flea wasn't there, no, but I did meet Keanu.
We went for a motorcycle ride.
But all of the American streets, the gay communities were not...
able to be out and proud.
They had their own sort of system, their own law.
And a lot of, you know, if you talk to Dan Savage about his own experiences or anybody my age who was gay in the 80s, their experiences are incredibly varied.
And a lot of them had mentors who were older men.
That sort of brought them into the life, showed them the way.
And that's a thing that in a heterosexual context, it's always a little bit creepy, the idea of a mentor, right?
Or like an older man that's going to show a young woman how...
Anytime I just was hearing about these problems that you see or know, I think University of California is changing as of this week, I think, changing the structure for how things like, especially things with faculty get reported and tracked down.
You know what I mean?
I think that's something where anytime there's a power differential, there's going to be questions, right?
I mean, anytime that there is one person has...
you know this is so true for sexual harassment that anytime there's a power differential like the way that every aspect of how that gets treated is different it's one thing for it to be your 18 year old neighbor and another thing for it to be like a 40 year old powerful man you know who has who has a reputation and who has the ability to affect anyway it's just it's it's difficult not to look weird
Even that is a recent or an evolving idea, right?
We see that power now as a thing that – that power differential as a thing that is – that we pour a lot of energy into seeing it as exploitative.
But that wasn't the case in the –
70s, right?
Or in the 90s, even.
Over time, right?
In terms of a mutual consent, mostly relationship?
Yeah, just in that... But it wasn't unusual.
I had several instructors in college who dated students who were in the class with me.
That used to be a pretty normal thing.
My guidance counselor...
At the University of Washington, when I was 22 and she was 38.
I remember this.
Seduced me.
And...
and had control over my transcripts and what, because I was transferring to the university, um, she was the person determining what my credits were going to be.
Like I was coming from a school that had a semester system.
I was joining a school that had a quarter system and it was sort of up to her discretion whether or not a semester credit was
was written down as a credit for a quarter or a credit for two quarters almost every college regardless of how good the college is is if you transfer in they will find a way to shave credit no matter where you went and she found a way to not shave those credits wow um she found a way because she had the she had the the number two pencil
That some of my higher level classes that were a semester long got turned into two quarters worth of credit because we were sleeping together.
And that wasn't...
That wasn't lost on me.
Not that I was doing it like – Not with malice, a forethought.
It wasn't like you said, oh, I'm going to go have this relationship in order to get more credits.
No, I had no idea that such a relationship was possible until I was in it.
But it became very weird later when I kind of... I broke up with her, for lack of a better term, and she called my house, my mom's house, saying, Hi, this is John's guidance counselor.
I'm really worried about him.
Do you have any information about... You know, like it was... There was an incredible power differential, and she was...
In the end, I think a very nice person who was in her own life kind of going through a period, going through a midlife crisis maybe even.
And I always have seemed older than I was or more mature than I was.
But it wasn't just that I was 22.
I was pretty inexperienced.
I was not a 22-year-old who had had...
10 long-term relationships with girls my own age, you know, I was still pretty new.
I didn't lose my virginity until I was 20.
And I had, you know, and then that next couple of years from 20 to 22 were not particularly fruitful years in terms of getting to know ladies and how to behave, how to behave myself.
Yeah.
And she did teach me, right?
She taught me things that I didn't know about... Things that I didn't... That it hadn't occurred to me to know, you know?
Yeah.
Like, it wasn't just... She wasn't exploiting me, or, I mean, I didn't feel like... I guess I felt like that at the time, but I didn't feel like... You know, it's not like I was...
I wasn't afraid of anything.
I'm not I'm not exactly I haven't really thought about it in a long time and tried to process it in a modern context, because at the time it just felt like and, you know, and if you say to your friends like, oh, yeah, they're like, whoa.
Right.
Because it's a because it's a the nature of a younger man, older woman relationship is that.
people don't have sympathy for that right they were talking about that this week on double x gab fest they were talking about the whole thing of like um just that that weird imbalance between where like if you see an older predatory man with a younger woman i mean you know a child or a you know teenager you everybody looks at that and goes ew but like there is still this narrative of when it's an older
potentially predatory, uh, woman or sometimes who's, who's, who's using their power willfully in this case.
Um, maybe like everybody goes, yeah, all right.
Like, it's like, you know, yeah.
But in that case, like you were an adult, you weren't a minor at the time, but there's still that power delta.
I mean, and I but I was a minor in my mind, you know, I was still a child.
But there was when we when she and I would go shopping, this was always very interesting because when I would talk to my friends and even my even my my girlfriends, like my younger woman friends.
Yeah, it was always regarded as that this was evidence that I was a big wheel, right?
That I was sleeping with this older woman that was in a position of power.
And she was a lawyer, too.
I mean, she had left her career in order to work at the university for some reason.
I don't know, maybe.
Hmm.
Maybe it was because she was... Kind of interesting when you look back on it.
Has she ever been in the clergy?
Yeah, exactly.
But when we would go to the grocery store together, other...
middle-aged women would glare at her.
And so much so that I noticed it.
And I mentioned it to her one time because we were waiting in line, you know, we were checking out, we had bought some ingredients for, she was going to make me something she called green pizza.
And we were sitting there and the woman checking us out at the grocery store was just kind of giving her a lot of vibe.
And
And there were a couple of encounters where we were walking down the aisle and putting stuff in the shopping cart.
And it was clear that we were there as a romantic couple and not as – she wasn't my mom.
Right.
And, you know, and she just got the stink eye.
And I mentioned it to her and she was like, oh, yeah, well.
She sort of blew it off as though it was, you know – she wasn't surprised.
And it –
It did surprise me and still kind of surprises me because I'm not sure what I'm not sure what that means within the within the culture of middle aged women.
Like what why you would be mad at someone who had a young boyfriend?
What exactly what exact crime you're committing without getting any too specific?
Because who knows?
But I mean, the basic one is, oh, I know what you're up to.
right yeah and everybody might have different reasons why it bothers them that she's up to that but i mean that's a common thing is like oh you're not fooling anybody yeah and and and it feels a little bit like the like monty python housewives like like pearl clutching but um
All of that is sort of beside the point, or at least tangential to the point.
The point is that all you had to do, it seems so simple, was to send a text to the mayoral candidate.
Is that how it started?
Popping the stack, John.
So he and I, Mike McGinn, who has declared that he's running for the mayorality, the only reason he's chosen to do it is that
He saw a political advantage, right?
There was a moment where Ed's newfound vulnerability was going to cause enough of the unions that had thrown their support behind him to waver and to be unsure.
that there was an opportunity for Mike to get in.
Mike wouldn't care if it was just that Ed had stubbed his toe.
An opening is an opening.
Yeah, and Mike's going to do a better job and he's going to be better for the city is why he's running, right?
That's his justification.
So anyway, he and I were supposed to meet for lunch.
today.
But the problem was, and this is the problem, I never put things into my calendar, right?
I have made three separate lunch dates for today at noon.
And I didn't realize it.
I didn't realize I had done it.
I was like, everybody that talked to me last week and was like, we should get lunch next week.
I was like, what about Monday?
And each person was like, let me get back to you.
And when they got back to me and were like, yes, let's do Monday at 1230.
Let's do Monday at 1230.
I was like, great.
And last night I was like sitting and stewing.
And I was like, wait a minute.
Do I have something to do tomorrow?
I looked at my calendar.
There wasn't anything there.
And I
And then I was like, I think I'm having lunch with the mayor.
And then I thought, wait a minute, aren't I also having lunch with Brian and Scott?
I wonder if there's anybody else that I'm having lunch with.
And then I did.
I said, is there anybody?
I just feel like, and then I was like, oh shit, I'm having lunch with Kate.
And I felt like such a dunce.
Mm-hmm.
I hate that feeling.
I hate that feeling.
It's like, I like to say, an unforced error.
Like, oh, Jiminy, what am I doing here?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, what are they?
Three different people, and all of these are important lunches, right?
I want to have lunch with Kate.
I want to have lunch with Mike.
I want to have lunch with Brian and Scott.
Can you get a big table at Olive Garden and consolidate them?
This is what I thought for a minute.
But every one of those conversations, all three of them are supposed to be confidential, right?
I don't know.
See?
This is how it worked out.
This is the universe telling you.
You guys should be working together, all one big team.
So all morning I've been sending, you know, trying to send this message like, hey, I got to reschedule.
Hey, I got to reschedule.
I...
Just got a text on my phone from Brian and Scott saying get this.
This is these two these two fucking guys.
It's 1110 a.m.
They're like we're here at the restaurant get here when you can.
Oh Jiminy.
Seriously you guys you're gonna sit there for an hour.
So I'm gonna show up at or an hour and a half.
I'm gonna show up at 1230 and you're gonna you know and the check's gonna be on the table and you have a thumb of coffee left in the cup.
So so what I just did
As Brian and Scott sent me that, saying that they're already there.
That indicates to me that I am not taking that lunch date seriously anymore.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Because I'm going to go there, right?
But I'm going to swing by.
Oh, you're going to swing by.
The swing by.
Like, we had a lunch date for 1230, not 411.
They're all ready.
They're going to have their own little date.
I don't know these men, but that's a little bit of a passive-aggressive move.
I'll say.
It puts you back on your heels unnecessarily.
So I'm going to swing by.
Let's just say I'm swing by now.
I sent a thing to Kate saying I was sorry.
Could we reschedule?
And then I asked the mayor if we could push it back till 2.
And the mayor just wrote back and said, yep.
Yep.
So, I'm on at two with the mayor, I canceled with Kate, I'm going to... So you're going to do your swing by first, and then you're going to go meet the mayor.
I'm going to go meet the mayor, and then, early dinner with Adam Savage, because I'm interviewing him tonight at the University of Washington.
Oh, no kidding.
And we're going to talk about what we're going to talk about.
Wait, wait, hang on, are you talking about Mythbusters guy?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like that guy.
He got brought to town by the University of Washington.
He's a very nice man.
Very nice man.
And they asked if I would be the moderator.
And I said, of course.
So that's my day to day is swing by.
Like.
Sorry I had to have to skip Kate.
Bounce over to the mayor at 2 and then early dinner with Adam at 5.
Boy, you had a hell of a day going on.
This is a good day.
This is exciting.
It's just another day in the life.
I woke up and I fell out of bed.
I didn't even drag a comb across my head.
Oh, you didn't even find your way upstairs and have a cup?
My cups are downstairs.
But then when you looked up?
Did you notice you were late?
I was late.
Wasn't I late to the show?
I was a few minutes late.
We both made coffee.
No harm, no foul.
USA, USA.
That's a good song.
It's a really good song.
It's a fine song.
It's a little overrated as a masterpiece, but it's a very good song.
The thing is that nobody had ever done it before, so you get a pass when nobody's ever done something before.
But it's another one where you give full points to George Martin.
George Martin gets full points for that.
But, you know, it's good.
It's good.
You know, it's no Andrew Burke could sing.
Yeah, the... Sorry, I didn't mean to take you off your lunch talk.
My brother Bart once said to me as I was complaining about revolution number nine.
Number nine?
My brother... Number nine?
Defended revolution number nine.
And did it as a groundbreaking watershed experimentation, a thing that changed the world.
You couldn't go back.
You couldn't put revolution number nine back in the bottle.
And I was unsophisticated at the time.
I was just a teenager.
And I was saying...
It's a huge chunk of an album that's already too long, and everyone in the world has only listened to it once or twice.
Like, it's not a song that you play.
The White Album or Revolution No.
9?
No, no, yeah.
I happen to adore that record, but no, you're right.
That's a skipper.
Yeah, you don't put that side of the album on.
Yeah, it's like that Butcher song on Odyssey and Oracle.
Like, every great album has a song everybody skips because it's too drecky and dumb.
Not every album, but a lot.
But my brother wouldn't hear it.
He would not hear it.
Nope.
Because it was the first.
And I feel like... Because it was the first, like, music concrete brought into rock?
Yeah, I mean, it was innovative in...
There were so many techniques that even in an avant-garde context hadn't been tried yet.
With multi-tracking, right?
I guess.
I don't care for it.
I don't think it's aged well.
No.
No, it hasn't.
And I think the orchestral swells of a day in the life are, you know, we're all used to them.
They are what they are.
And I think that that was a fine solution to that problem.
But you can tell by the way that they built it, right?
They had the one part.
They had the other part.
They didn't know what to do.
They counted off that area, right, on either side.
Yeah, right.
Leave space here for a thing.
Yeah.
We'll put something here.
Yeah.
And the solution was how they solved it, right?
That's what happened.
But I don't think that in a world of infinite possibility, I don't think that that was the best thing that could have gone in that pocket.
Let's just put it that way.
But nobody asked me.
Nobody wants to ghost of Christmas past me back to Abbey Road.
No.
to get my you know my thoughts on it like hey you guys before we do this the white album we're talking about the white album are you talking about the day in the life oh okay day in the life sergeant pepper right you know what's weird when i was going to sleep last night you're not gonna believe the song i had in my head uh she's leaving home for some reason was in my head
It's a great song.
It's a really good song.
It used to make me so sad when I was like 12 or 13.
It's like, oh, this must be what it's like when your child leaves home.
Must suck.
Yeah.
Me too.
And then I started thinking about how his wife's got a dressing gown, and I started to think as I was falling asleep, I was thinking how it sounds like English people have lots of different clothes for different modes that Americans just don't have.
Well, they have sleeping hats.
That's true.
Yeah.
Dressing gowns.
Night shirts.
Did you ever wear a nightshirt?
Yeah.
Not something I felt very comfortable about, but I'm usually like a pajamas or underwear man.
I got all sleep in sweatpants.
For a while, in the 1980s, during the...
I think what I'm going to call the initial prep revival, when Land's End first really was making a stab for the boat shoe market.
Oh, sure.
There was a point where I got an L.L.
Bean plaid flannel nightshirt.
Hmm.
And you know what I mean by night shirt, right?
It's knee length.
You look like one of the kids in Peter Pan.
You get like a long, long shirt.
Like almost like a tunic.
That's right.
And I was like, I'm going to...
I'm doing this.
I'm I'm I'm rocking the night shirt now.
And it was right when I had transitioned from tidy whitey underwear or Y fronts to boxer shorts.
And I felt like these were the items of sophisticated manhood.
Men did not wear white underwear.
They wore plaid boxers because that's because I don't know where I got that idea.
And night shirts is how we slept.
And I rocked this nightshirt for a while, but I'm an active sleeper, and I would get tangled up in this thing.
I would get tangled up in it like when you put four towels in a dryer.
It was up over my head.
You're a pretty athletic sleeper.
I jump around.
I bounce around when I'm sleeping.
And then one day I came home from school, and my nightshirt had been cut in half...
Because my sister decided that it was a cool punk rock layering element.
So you had a belt and you got a stew going there.
Well, except that she cut the bottom nine inches off because it didn't... Oh, more like a Madonna?
Like a midriff type situation?
Yeah.
Well, no, it wasn't that high, but she just decided that she had the power to take scissors to my stuff.
That's pretty brassy.
It was brassy.
And if I hadn't... If she hadn't...
I probably would have, the nightshirt would have gone down the river.
I would have never thought about it again.
If she'd said, can I have that even?
But the fact that she cut that thing means that I will never forget that nightshirt.
Right?
I'm still upset about it.
You're still stewing.
I'm still stewing.
I had a very interesting dreamscape last night.
Are you okay for time?
Yeah, I'm fine.
Don't worry about those guys.
I'm just going to swing by.
I had a very interesting.
So normally my when I lay in bed and I'm trying to go to sleep or if I wake up and I want to go back to sleep, I kind of have this dream landscape that I conjure.
That's that's full of adventure.
Right.
It's high adventure.
What what what drifts me off to sleep is that I'm, you know, I'm like part of a secret mission that's doing a halo jump into some kind of.
uh, you know, like jungle where we're going to take on some drug criminals or, you know, I'm like, I have, I, I, I sketch out a little adventure scenario and then I put myself sort of up there in this, in the, uh, like with my parachute on and my oxygen mask on and my teammates and we're like, let's go.
And we jump.
And then it's sort of like jumping off into sleep.
Wow.
Uh, like I do a lot of that kind of, uh,
And I'm not sure how long those adventure scenarios carry over into my dreams, but that's kind of like how I head off to sleep.
And you would think they're very adventurous scenarios that it would get my heart beating and I wouldn't fall asleep.
Exactly.
It feels like the opposite of what you want.
I think about trying to get my heartbeat to lower.
No, no, no.
I'm always just like, all right, here we go.
Let's do this thing.
Or like heist scenarios, right?
Where I'm thinking like, and the heist scenario is always, maybe what puts me to sleep is not so much the stealing of the thing, but the fencing of the thing.
When I sit and think about, because I run heist scenarios periodically, I spend more time thinking about fencing the goods or laundering the money by 1,000%.
If your heist involves gold bullion, you've got some bars, how do you monetize that?
How do you monetize it?
If you're one of those guys that steals a pallet full of money in the back of a...
of a armored car.
And you make it.
Let's say you make it to Mexico or wherever you're going.
How do you launder that money?
That is what I really like to think about.
The heist itself, I figure, is fait accompli.
Sure.
We're going to go in, we're going to take the diamonds, we're going to get the money, the gold, whatever.
Well, it's like taking a poem one, two, three, where obviously success is not a guarantee, but the really interesting part, in some ways not really interesting, but the second interesting part is what happens after they're done and how they get caught.
The how they get caught part of the heist is always a fun part, too.
And that's the part of the high scenario that I never want to... I don't want to have underthought it, right?
I'm going to have a plan.
Too much of the upfront, like you get the English guy with the bomb in the briefcase, not enough of the back end, like how do we get to Guatemala or what have you.
That's right.
Like you find the guy with the big glasses who walks you through a back door and there's a passport waiting for you.
Anyway, last night, I'm thinking, you know, I'm laying in bed and I'm like...
Kind of flipping through my rolodex of heist stories and halo jumps and Just spontaneously, I don't know where this came from at all.
It was not intentional I'm lying there and all of a sudden I'm driving a bus in Ireland I'm on the wrong, you know, I'm on the left side of the street and I'm in Western Ireland and
sort of rural coastal Ireland, and I'm just driving a municipal bus.
Wow.
And I'm making all my stops and people are getting on.
People are riding my bus and they're getting off.
And I lay in bed and drove this bus around Western Ireland and
For it feels like all night.
Oh, my God.
You just kept doing your route.
Let people get on, people get off.
Just doing my route.
And there were people that got on and recognized that I was a new bus driver.
And there were some small villages where the road was very curvy going down a hill.
And I had to maneuver the bus through these narrow streets going down a very curvy switchback.
And I did that quite well.
I didn't have any snafus.
And so when I woke up this morning, I woke up kind of early and I had a little opportunity to go back to sleep for a while.
I call that bonus sleep.
A little bit of bonus sleep.
Yeah, a little bit of point after the touchdown type situation.
That's how it was.
And I immediately started driving my bus in Ireland again.
Well, back to work I go.
Yeah.
And I just couldn't be happier driving this bus.
And it's just like you would think.
You're driving along.
It's a little bit overcast.
The ocean's over there.
Little sort of stone villages facing the water.
And you pull up to the stop, and there's a lady with her hair and a handkerchief carrying two plastic grocery bags.
Sure.
And you stop, and she gets on.
Let her on the bus.
And she pays her fare, and she goes back, and then I close the door, and I drive on.
It's difficult to say, but was it a pleasant feeling?
Did you enjoy driving the bus?
It was wonderful.
It sounds nice.
It was really wonderful.
Once you really get to know your route, it's going to be nice.
You get to know the people a little bit.
It starts just feeling like you're in a groove.
That's what I'm hoping.
And I think that it's going to be unusual for them that an American is driving their bus.
I think that's going to be a novelty once we start chatting, once the word gets out.
that the new bus driver is American.
Oh, sure.
But I'm going to be fine with that.
I enjoy that kind of attention.
Sounds kind of like a set-up for a Bill Forsyth movie, like a fish out of water in the UK type movie.
John the bus driver.
John's sort of the bus driver, and I feel like I'm going to get to know everybody, and I'm going to learn their ups and downs.
People trust their bus driver.
Bus driver, he's a regular, he's like the mailman.
He's somebody you see all the time.
He's a trusted public servant.
Yeah, right.
You put your kid on the bus, he takes the kid to school, right?
That's right.
You feel confident that the bus is a safe place.
So that's my new thing, and I hope, I don't, this may be the beginning of a new chapter for me.
Which part?
The bus?
Well, first, dreaming about the bus.
That feels important.
Dreaming about driving the bus feels very important.
I'm going to look that up.
Driving bus dream.
And I think if it keeps going, I feel like, you know, this is the thing about halo jumps and heist scenarios.
They're not really...
I'm probably never going to do a halo jump, and I'm probably not ever going to steal a bunch of gold bars.
But I could.
I could drive a bus in Ireland.
According to dreamscloud.com, which I'm assuming knows everything about dreams, you got the dream of being on a bus may suggest you are going along with the crowd, not taking responsibility.
Dreaming of driving the bus may suggest you are the leader of your group and the dream is providing an opportunity to examine your leadership skills and where you're taking them.
Paying the fare may be a metaphor for the price you are paying, but you're not paying it for it.
You're driving the bus.
I'm driving it.
And what about Ireland?
Dreaming of Ireland.
Well, I don't know.
What does Dreaming of Ireland signify?
I mean, I'm sure somebody must have talked about it.
Dreaming of Ireland.
There's a lot of songs called Dreaming of Ireland.
Yeah.
No, I think it has to be meaningful.
I've decided it's meaningful.
Yeah, I think it is.
I think it is.
I mean, I'm always looking for that thing where I find my duck.
And maybe that's it.
Well, here's the nice thing about it.
It's not a halo jump, but here's the thing.
It's in a nice, somewhat pastoral, I don't want to be condescending, but it's probably in a somewhat pastoral, calm setting.
It represents a...
What do you call it?
Like, it's a job.
And not only is it a job where you have to be there on time, you've got to be places at the job on time.
It sounds like the ultimate grind.
But in fact, it's not.
It sounds like the soul wanting some kind of regularity that's comfortable, not just a grind.
Talk about a dream, buddy.
That's a dream.
If the sign says the bus has to be there at 1015, that's not a thing.
That's not a thing that's open to negotiation.
That's like your only thing.
She needs to get on your bus.
She does, right?
And the thing is, I think the thing about what I imagine about Western Ireland is that nobody there is striving.
Yeah.
Right.
Nobody's getting on that bus because they're going to the local community college to get a degree in computer science because they want to move to one Cupertino square.
They are, you know, they're doing their, they have some bucolic stuff.
errands uh they've got to move seeds oh you know what about the god is uh they got turf or uh mulches probably uh-huh pete old pete pete uh some somebody's got to get up and be your bus driver your bus driver name is old pete yeah scratchy old cheese
Top of the morning, Mrs. O'Malley.