Ep. 289: “Car Stars”
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Super dupes.
Computers!
Computers!
Oh, they do so much for us.
They really do.
Are you having computer troubles this morning?
I wouldn't say troubles.
Well...
Oh, nobody knows the troubles I've seen.
Nobody knows but Skye.
I started the day watching some videos on YouTube of jumbo jets trying to land in really severe crosswinds.
Oh, wow.
Super exciting.
Did they mostly make it?
No, a lot of them aborted their landing, went around.
Abort, abort, abort.
That's right.
Go around, go around.
Golf Niner Niner.
There were children on board.
There was a terrible thing.
I don't know how I discovered it, but there's...
There's a series of videos from aircraft carriers of ramp strikes, they call them.
Ramp strikes.
What is that?
Well, that's where an airplane is coming in.
You know, there's a whole job on an aircraft carrier, just a guy that's like a pilot who is watching the landings, and he's talking to the pilots, and he's like, pull up.
A little bit less.
Okay, a little bit more.
Whoa, a little bit less.
You know, like he walks them right in.
It's like a...
Landing control officer or something like that.
And there's all these videos.
And they're terrible videos because they're taken at night in a storm or whatever.
But the guy's like, oh, you're too low.
Oh, you're low, low, low, low.
And then the plane just crashes right into the back of the aircraft.
No, no, like crashy crashes?
Crashes.
Just big fireballs and everything.
Oh, shit.
I don't know why you would sit and watch those things if you weren't just...
I don't know.
I don't know what your problem would be if you were watching this.
That seems like you could be helping out instead of shooting a YouTube video.
Yeah.
You could have a broom, you know?
There are a lot of people on an aircraft carrier.
That's true.
I'm sure they all have individual jobs.
You know what?
This shows how little I understand about the command and control structure.
Bet on me.
Well, no.
I think, you know, it's easy to think like, oh, you know, that guy that's making the video could be out there.
Yeah, right.
With waving a broom.
I mean, you're not out there.
No, no.
You're not the first responder on the thin blue line.
You take a lot for granted.
Yeah.
Now, I thought they had a big hook.
Don't they deploy a hook?
Well, yeah, but if the plane is like... So what I... I mean, let's... Let's speculate.
Let's not say that I've done this, but I've done a fair amount of research on it.
You should get on Twitter.
Yeah.
You see, my father.
Here's what a lot of people don't understand about Palestine.
That's right.
And ice skating.
Actually, my dad was a naval aviator and he subscribed to the magazine of the Association of Naval Aviation.
Nailed the landing?
What's it called?
It's called Wings, I think.
With an S?
With an S, not a Z. If it was a Z, they would have barbecue sauce.
Right, there's sunglasses on the back of your head.
And after he passed away, the subscription to this magazine, which I think he paid for probably for one year in 1980...
Just just transferred over to me.
It was it's my legacy.
Basically, it's it's it's the it's my primary inheritance.
It doesn't count as stealing valor because it was ordered by a legitimate veteran.
That's right.
And it still has his name on it.
But it comes to my house.
I don't I don't I don't.
It's one of those things where I don't think you could cancel it.
Oh, it's like you can't be an ex-Marine.
Right.
And you can't stop getting the magazine of the naval aviation.
But so, you know, every week.
So anyway, everybody that has anything to do with this magazine is a former or current naval aviator.
And they have all that.
Everybody wants their, you know, an article about what they do in the Navy.
So there's the, you know, there's the.
People that fly VIPs around and they're the sub hunters and they're the fighter pilots and, you know, all the different all the different groups.
So I've been reading this magazine for decades back when my dad got it.
I read it.
I feel like I'm pretty well qualified as a naval aviator based on this magazine.
Yeah, you've you've absorbed a lot.
I have.
And really, over time, you're not one of these Johnny-come-latelys that went to, like, quote-unquote official school for a few months.
You've been following this for most of your adult life.
Yeah, those kids that go to, like, pilot school or whatever.
How long are they in there?
Six months?
I doubt it.
I doubt it's that long.
I've been reading this thing 25 years.
How hard is it really?
I mean, you got to be in shape.
You got to be a certain height.
Yep.
I think you have to be, you have to have like guts and determination.
Determination.
You probably shouldn't be drunk at the time.
Right.
Good eyesight is a thing they want.
Yeah, but planes take off and land all the time.
It's the safest way to travel.
Thank you.
That's right.
Planes are taking off and landing right now.
If you make somebody like a captain of a bathtub, that's going to take a lot longer because a lot of people die in a bathtub or within five miles of their house.
Think about how hard it is to skateboard.
It's really hard to skateboard.
Cut that in half and you could be a naval aviator.
Naval skateboarder.
Those are big ships.
They do have tail hooks and they have wires.
That's it.
Wires that go across the deck of the ship and there are multiple ones.
But if you miss them, which is easy to do,
You have to go around.
That's what pilots say when they abort a landing.
They go around.
Go around.
They throw the throttle down.
The engines go.
And they take off.
They basically either keep going or they'll actually touch the deck and then decide, nope.
And so they gun it.
And they go around.
But these ramp strikes are ones where they come in too low.
And so they just miss the.
They missed the runway entirely and they just slam into the back of the ship.
Boy, real talk.
I mean, this shows you how little I understand about aviation.
That seems like that should be a semi-solved problem with the technology part at this point.
Are there still people manually, as you say, like manually talking them in on visual?
Absolutely.
Because the problem is that the ship is moving.
And it's not just moving forward fast because they go fast when they're landing because they want to create a headwind.
So the boat turns into the wind and then it's going pretty fast.
But the boat is also going up and down on the waves.
Oh, of course.
Of course.
You got the water.
Right.
And it's rocking side to side.
Oh.
And then you're coming in in your aircraft.
You got yaw.
You got pitch.
Pitch.
Yeah.
and then also most of these things like it's hard to do on a calm day in the sun but most of these videos are made like at night in a storm where they you know they're trying to get pilots to be able to do this at any time of the day or night but so you're in a storm the boat's bobbing up and down it's at night and yeah they don't have like autopilot that can just put them on the ground they're they're you know they're flying by the seat of their pants and
and uh you get get a wrong wind or you're you know i don't know what there are a lot of a lot of bad things that could happen not as many bad things as on a skateboard but right well i mean those are different conditions i checked on the internet and you have you have yaw you got pitch and you got roll yeah yaw pitch roll those in the three uh all three of the dimensions wah wah relative to what the center of gravity
So if you have a plane, you need to know the center of gravity.
Yeah.
Imagine there's a little rod going through it side to side and a little rod going through it front to back.
It's more like a gyroscope, really.
Yeah.
Where those two rods connect in the center of the plane.
Okay.
Three rods.
Yeah.
And then the rod up and down.
Right.
That's your center of gravity.
And the plane is going wah, wah, wah, wah all the way on this.
Yeah.
Right.
Like a gyroscope.
Okay.
You know, there are gyroscopes in everything.
Oh, believe me, I know.
This is what a lot of people don't know.
I think I got my second gyroscope in a video game.
My first gyroscope was one that had a little string, and you'd pull it, and it would spin around.
Sure.
But they have gyroscopic-type devices, I think, today.
I think there are gyroscopes all around us at all times.
I don't know if I like that.
Was your father a member of the Tailhook Association?
No.
Okay.
I'm just learning about the Tailhook Association.
The Tailhook Association has some bad history.
Well, that's the thing.
Problematic.
If you search for Tailhook, you get a different thing.
But you go to tailhook.net.
Tailhook Association is an independent—boy, these people love their adjectives—is an independent, fraternal, nonprofit organization internationally recognized as the premier supporter of the aircraft carrier and other sea-based aviation.
Right.
Right.
Their purposes are to foster, encourage, develop, study, and support the aircraft carrier, sea-based aircraft, both fixed and rotary wing, and air crews of the United States of America.
And finally, to educate and inform the public in the appropriate role of the aircraft carrier and carrier aviation in the nation's defense system.
I think it's an excuse to drink.
It is an excuse to drink, and the problem the Tailhook Association had a while back was that they were a little rapey.
Yes, yes.
But you know what they do?
They do something smart that I think we should discuss this offline, but something we should consider, which is they have an educational foundation that
And they give scholarships.
Now, I also learned that this is how you get cover with that stupid White House Correspondents Dinner is blah, blah, blah, something, something.
They give away some scholarships.
The scholarships they give away are like a rounding error compared to what they pay for for tablecloths at that place.
Of course.
But you get a lot of cover from that because, hey, it's sort of like we say, oh, you buy this yogurt and a portion of the profits go to something.
Yeah, that's right.
The pink-topped yogurt, a portion of the profits go to breast cancer research.
That's right.
To stop it, though.
They don't want to encourage it.
No, they're not researching it to improve it.
They've drawn a line in the sand, a red line, as you say.
They've said, look, there's enough of the breast cancer.
We want to work on moving that the other way.
They want to move the needle, as they say.
But all I'm saying is if we offered a scholarship for something related to our show, if we offered a scholarship...
and maybe gave a portion of the profits to some kind of make-believe charity, I think we would get a lot of cover.
We'd probably get a lot less hostile email from people.
You know, that's a great idea.
We already talked about the fact that this is educational.
It's an educational show.
And education...
covers a multitude of sins.
Sing it, sister.
And I really feel like when Tailhook says, when any of these Navy or Marine or Army or Air Force organizations talk about how they're educating the public, what that really, I think what it boils down to is that they are just constantly lobbying for money and they want, and every sort of educate the public initiative is really just
So it's just encouraging the public to vote for senators that will vote for the military.
An extreme, understand, listen to my mouth words, listeners, an extreme, extreme example of that might be the NRA.
I'm not saying tailhook is the NRA, nor is nor is the super train fund.
That's a whole different holding on subsidiary of Roderick on the line.
Super different.
LLC.
uh registered in delaware but we um oh boy they got a lot here okay um uh but but that's the thing is like my dad was like a total totally normal gun guy who hunted and was in our nra i've told you this before but two organizations my dad was in that seemed like a relic of another time was the nra of the 1960s yes and and stuff like ducks unlimited which is it's kind of paradoxical but ducks unlimited was a conservation group it was about saying look if we kill all the ducks there's not going to be any more ducks to kill
Yeah, let's conserve these ducks.
It's a real nuanced view if you think about it.
To kill these ducks.
Consider the passenger pigeon.
It's a very, very sad case.
The passenger pigeon, like the bison, was something that was... There were so many of these in America, and then people just shot them, shot as many as they could for fun.
They darkened the skies.
Yes.
And then now they no longer darken the skies.
I still have a very specific recollection of being at the Cincinnati Zoo when I was about eight or nine years old.
And they had a little plaque and a black and white photo of the last passenger pigeon ever.
The last passenger, it makes me sad to think about it right now.
The last passenger pigeon ever, supposedly, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
And they used to be everywhere.
No, really?
It was alive at the Cincinnati Zoo?
No.
They didn't have the internet then, so, I mean, it might have been something where they had to compare and notice with other zoos to find out who's died first.
Yeah.
But that's the thing, and now it's different.
Now, back then, don't email me, but my understanding was the NRA used to be more about stuff like gun safety, because everybody had a gun to, like, you know, scare away deer and stuff.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The deer used to plague the people of the American Midwest.
Are you kidding me?
No, they would come.
They'd get into your corn.
Zombie deer, first of all, would come and, you know, like...
I hear that scraping sound.
Outside.
You know, that's the thing.
In the Midwest, when the sun went down, you had to pull the barricades.
Literally.
Okay.
Well, then maybe another direction, though, is what if we decided to become crooked?
And what if, what if, I mean, this is, I'm not saying we would.
Well, I mean, just in the sense that, what if we initially got a tailhook-style scholarship, a White House Correspondents Dinner-style donation scheme in place, and eventually we became lobbyists?
Not lobbyists, but influencers, like you would on Instagram.
Sure, like lobbying for Supertrain.
Now we're environmental.
I was thinking of a thing yesterday that just felt like so out of our wheelhouse, and I can't believe that
I can't believe we haven't talked about this before, and I can't believe that nobody talks about this.
But you know what?
This is the place to talk about it, which is...
We used to talk all the time about how frustrating it was that other people couldn't drive.
This used to be a very solutions-based program back before you and I got old and spent a lot of time talking about our medication.
It's always been a very philosophical podcast, but I think we had more specific measures in mind.
in the early days you'll remember the first or second episode of the show was about encouraging people how to get around in public i mean it's been there from the beginning of the program yes yep and i still i shout it at my little girl on on the regular keep moving get out of the way well now that mine is pushing the cart i gotta really remind her like you are in a position of power my dear yes yes out of the way out of the way
there are no passive participants on roads or at the supermarket everybody everybody is involved it's like a living ecosystem that is precisely what is behind my latest initiative okay i'm listening which is i think we need to make it harder to get a driver's license not easier harder
There are too many.
So Seattle, for instance, and I think San Francisco is like this, too, but cities everywhere are trying to encourage people to take public transportation because there are too many cars.
And so there are all these initiatives.
Get people get people in public transportation.
And what they're doing in Seattle is they're just making it really hard to be in a car.
They're taking all the two-lane roads and turning them, or they're taking four-lane roads and turning them into two-lane roads everywhere you go because they're trying to make it better for bikes.
They're trying to make it better for pedestrians.
And their attitude, whenever you say like, well, this is going to make it really traffic jammy here, which it already is, the city says, well, don't take your car.
That's their solution to all the traffic issues.
And, you know, as a good urbanist, I believe in that generally and I believe in it specifically.
But also, it's a little bit like, I mean, what the city is saying is— But you're also a motorist.
Well, yeah.
I live in a place where— But you also enjoy automobiles.
I do.
I do.
But, you know, I can put my, like, enjoyment of automobiles out of the equation.
I can buy myself a little MG and go drive around the twisty roads of the mountains and get that yaya out.
Mm-hmm.
But I also live in a place where if I took public transit into the city, it would take an hour and 20 minutes.
And anyway, but then I realized there are just a lot of the problems on the roads are exacerbated by the fact that there are a lot of people on the roads who don't know how to drive very well.
And I think in the old days, this was presented in large measure as kind of a class issue.
If you were poor and had to get to work and lived in the outskirts of town where you were forced to go by property values problems, you needed a car to get to work.
And you could drive some car that you're kind of keeping on the road, but make it into town to go to work.
And if you were to say, now it's going to be difficult, it's going to be harder for people to get driver's licenses.
What you'd be doing is creating...
a whole class of people that couldn't get around, right?
Like old people and so forth that needed to get to the doctor.
In my dad's case, he needed to get to the car mechanic.
It's hard to get to the plane mechanic unless you've got a plane.
It really is.
Oh my God, I've been going through boxes of my dad's papers.
I want to talk to you about this.
But anyway, I just started to feel like if the city really wants to get people off the roads, out of their cars,
The city and I share a goal.
I want to get people out of their cars, too.
And, you know, we're and so we talk all the time about like we need to start making it harder to, you know, like you need to be licensed to have a gun.
Right.
This is the thing you and I have talked about.
My grandfather was a was a gun owner and a gun nut.
Let's call him.
You come from gun people.
Yep.
Uh, and now it's just obvious, like we, and we've talked about it, like it's, you have to get a license to drive a car.
You should have to get a license to, to, to have a gun because you should have some training, right?
You should go have to prove that you are not bad at shooting guns.
But as I was thinking about that, I was like, well, if we're going to have people that have guns have to have
Training and driver's licenses.
We're not doing very good at having people be trained to drive cars because I see people all the time driving cars badly.
People just stop sometimes.
They'll just stop somewhere.
They just stop.
We ran into this this weekend.
I had a big family trip out of town and we would encounter people that would just stop.
Yeah.
I mean, they're just not thinking about the roll, the pitch, or the yaw.
They're just sitting there and just kind of staring out the window.
And it's like, that's not a place for a car to stop.
No, the blinker on, and then they turn the opposite direction.
They're just like... They're doing something with the phone, with the GPS.
Yeah.
So I realized, like, my dad... This is a thing that was a surprise to me as my dad got older.
Because as he got older, he crossed a threshold where I was like... He's not the...
he's not doing the best job anymore on the road in particular, but the car is central to his identity and he lives kind of in the suburbs.
So, you know, for a couple of years, I, I took a posture of like, let it ride because he was still, if I had tried to do something about it, he would have
He would have gone into full war with me.
Point of information.
I only know this because of my grandmother.
She'd had a couple collisions, but it was mostly that we were discovering lots of scrapes and nicks, and especially stuff like bangs in the front and back fender that indicated some weird judgment.
Did you see evidence that concerned you, or was it just his general state?
The evidence that concerned me was when I got in the car...
There were some there were bad
problems in the steering and in the axles that indicated to me that he had gone over curbs at speed.
Not like at 50 miles an hour, but as he's going around a roundabout or something.
He thought he was in reverse but was in drive and maybe went over like a parking barrier thing.
The parking space dingus.
Yeah, the dingus.
I think it was more that as he went around a corner, he just went over the corner of the sidewalk.
You know, like he went.
He did like a leisurely tight right.
Yeah.
And he did that a couple of few times so that when I was in his car, I was like, hey, the steering is not really very good.
You know, like you've been to tie bar or something here.
And I had to take the car and then he would take it into his guy.
I found a receipt in his papers that he'd gotten into a wreck.
Right.
And it was a thing where he turned across five lanes of traffic and he thought that it was all clear.
And then the fifth lane, miraculously, there was a car somehow appeared out of nowhere.
And he got this Chrysler LHS of his or LHX.
He got it repaired and this was a 97 Chrysler.
He got it repaired and this mechanic, this mechanic that he went to visit all the time.
Charged the insurance company $9,000 to repair this car that was worth $9,000.
I can't believe the insurance company didn't declare it a wreck.
Different times.
But this guy, this is the thing about that guy and my dad going to see him.
I think it was a scam.
He was scamming my dad and he was scamming the insurance companies and
The whole idea like, oh, you know, Dave's my pal.
He comes by and we hang out.
You know, that's what my dad loved that.
This is like a whole casserole of elder problems.
Yeah, that's right.
Oh, my God.
My grandmother did that.
My grandmother, somebody called and said that they were Christians.
They called her on the phone.
They sussed out that she liked Christians.
They talked about Christian stuff.
And my mom discovered that she had mortgaged her house in order to have it painted.
Because they were Christians.
Really?
They had her number.
Yeah.
That doesn't seem very Christian.
You know, it doesn't.
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But what I kept waiting for during that period where I was like – where I was kicking the can down the road was I kept waiting for the state –
And by that, I mean the larger state apparatus, not just the state of Washington, but the state, the deep state, the dark state.
Oh, yeah.
The like the intellectual dark web.
Yeah.
Well, somebody mentioned that to me the other day, and I don't know what that is.
I'd like you to explain what the international dark web is.
I'll put a fork in it.
But but I kept waiting for somebody at the city or state or county level to say, hey,
We're not going to renew your driver's license because you're 85.
And at 85, we kick into a higher level of testing because... Just like when you're young, there's a higher level of testing.
Yeah.
Like you got to have somebody with you when you're 15.
Exactly.
And you have to demonstrate a couple of different times and ways that you're not...
uh, going to crash that you're responsible.
You have to come in and take the test and not be all gacked out and not like freak out when you do the driving test.
Right.
Right.
And you have to be able to show that you can turn your head around so that you can put it into reverse.
And a lot of these other things that, you know, are just sort of, yeah, it's just technical stuff about like driving.
Um, and I just figured like of court, because you, you want to believe, you want to believe that, uh, that,
that there's a plan, right?
You want to believe that somewhere out there there's a plan.
And I believed that this would happen, that at 85 years old, some other thing would kick in.
Well, that thing doesn't exist.
It doesn't kick in.
If you are 99 years old, you can toddle out and get in your car and drive it all the way across America if you want.
And no one's ever going to say, hey, was this a good plan?
Is this a good idea?
Can you still do this?
And it's just not in the purview.
And I think a large part of it is this is the type of political thing that nobody wants to – no politician is ever going to say, let me take your driver's license away.
Well, guess who votes?
Vote now.
But you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, right.
Olds.
Olds vote.
Olds vote.
So I waited for this for a while.
Like somebody else in authority is going to say –
You can't have your driver's license.
Well, no.
Every time, you know, I mean, how often is your driver's license renewed?
Every 10 years?
Kind of automatically?
Usually you can just mail a thing and they give you a sticker.
Yeah.
And that was what was happening with him.
And I realized no one else was going to do it.
Obviously, none of my brothers or sisters who are useless were going to ever do it.
And so eventually I had to say, like, I'm taking your keys.
And that precipitated this battle with him.
Obviously, we've talked about that.
But as I'm driving around, I'm realizing like, oh, there are a lot of people that do not know, like there are very specific rules to driving in the city that are different from driving in the county.
Or on a highway.
Or on a highway.
And the thing about Seattle is it's built very poorly.
It was built very poorly by Jesus originally.
It has been built very poorly by every subsequent group of people that came along.
And part of it is that it's an isthmus city, just as San Francisco is a peninsular city.
And so you're limited.
It's not a city that's out like Chicago that just stretches to infinity.
You're limited.
There's water around it on all sides, and you can't just do what you're going to do.
And when they slammed the freeway through the center of town here, they built it in such a way that there are like eight different places on
where people are merging from the right and they have to go all the way across eight lanes of traffic to get off on the left.
Like the exit that they want.
They just came on on the right and the exit they want is two miles up the road on the left.
So they have to put their blinker on.
That's murder.
I don't even need to see an infographic to know how hard that would be on traffic.
Eight lanes.
And the thing is, that would be hard.
That would even be hard with self-driving cars.
It's disruptive.
It's crazy.
And there are eight separate instances of that in both directions on the freeway.
That's mental.
And then there are the ones where the cars come in from the left and they have to go eight lanes all the way across to exit on the right.
And it's all happening in a very short space.
So, you know, it's like within four miles, there are eight of these.
And so traffic is just, it's just, it's just jammed up.
Even if it was, even if everybody was Michael Schumacher, it's, it's just a built in jam up.
But then you get the people.
Is that a director?
No, he was a race car driver.
Oh, I'm thinking of Joel Schumacher, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know anything about his driving.
That's his brother.
Okay.
I'm assuming.
How many Schumachers can there be?
I don't know.
They make shoes.
If he said something like Emerson and Fittipaldi, I might have known.
Jackie Chan?
Who's the Scottish guy that drives?
What's his name?
Jackie Chan.
The guy with the long hair and the Scottish accent.
Jackie Chandler.
Okay.
Chandler Bing.
And who was the other guy you said?
Yeah, the first guy.
Yeah, Joel and Ethan Schumacher.
They made all those movies about Batman.
Sardonic heist movies.
Sardonic heist movies, right.
Who's the guy that makes the robot movies with Rob Corddry?
What's that guy's name?
That's not Joel Silver.
Joel Silver?
Benjamin Franklin Pierce.
Who am I thinking of?
Did you say Franklin Pierce?
I said Benjamin Franklin Pierce.
Oh, okay.
Hot Guy's not in.
Hot Guy is not in the current Avengers movie.
No spoilers.
Hot Guy?
Hot...
That would be a great superhero.
Can we pivot to this being the only thing we do on the show?
Why is there not a hot guy?
But it's true.
I've seen this.
I've seen this.
So you've got... Let's be honest.
What is the work of the freeway?
Let's talk about something important.
The work of the freeway, the work of the highway, is the whole notion of it is that you provide mostly long...
stretches where people can go at like an above normal speed and not be interrupted except by the occasional need to do a little bit of this or that with a minimum of dinka dinka dinka.
That's the that's the current one.
But, you know, the original purpose of the highway was to get everybody out of town in the event of a nuclear war.
It's like the Internet, but for cars.
That's right.
Get out.
Get in.
Get out.
John, was it a DARPA project?
No, it's Mimi Eisenhower, right?
No, she's the one that cleaned up the highways.
Well, when Eisenhower invaded Germany, as the commander in chief, he was like, look at these autobahns.
Autobahns.
And he was like, this is incredible.
These guys, they drive all over.
Octoliber, he said.
He said Octoliber.
And then he was instead of also recognizing like, wow, look at this incredibly effective train network that Europe has.
Oh, boy.
He said, look at this.
Never get on an Eastbound train.
Look at this.
Oh, my gosh.
That's right.
Downtown Train.
Who is that?
Is that Tom Waits or Rod Stewart?
Who is that?
Rod Stewart covering Tom Waits.
Okay.
All right.
And what about Bruce Springsteen covered Jersey Girl?
That's a Tom Waits song.
Well, the thing about it is Tom Waits covering Bruce Springsteen covering Rob Stewart.
He covered Rob Stewart?
He did.
Is he related to Emerson Fittipaldi?
The famous race car driver Rob Stewart.
Rob Stewart.
He had that brother Jackie that was in all those fighting movies.
Jackie Stewart.
Right.
Jackie Stewart.
Jackie Stewart.
He used to be in television ads.
We saw him all the time.
Change your feet.
Do you remember when race car drivers were like people that were selling Pepsi Cola?
Oh, do I?
A, yes, and B, my cousins who were both, especially my cousin David, my cousin David and my Uncle Bill were both great at building models.
Everybody should have a cousin David and an Uncle Bill.
I know, I know, I know, and they would make these gorgeous, and I remember he had, I'll see if I can find the set, he had a Jackie Stewart car, and I believe it came with a scale-sized Jackie Stewart, and I think he might have even had the cool donagle cap.
Huh.
Am I remembering the right Jackie?
Is he the guy?
Yeah, no, that's the one.
That's the one.
And that's not Emerson Fittipaldi.
No, Jackie Stewart also carried a shillelagh everywhere he went.
Oh, he's after me, track record.
The famous Scottish stick.
It's called a shillelagh.
Oh, is that right?
From Scotland, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
okay but anyway so eisenhower was like look at these big roads he brought it back to america you know what's good for general motors is good for america that's right that was calvin coolidge and uh out it goes out we build the roads building the roads my mom talks about it because by the time they got because seattle's at the end of the road let's be honest if you're building the road
It doesn't start in Seattle.
It ends there.
It starts in Ohio or in, you know, New York, Western New York or something.
You know, that's where you start building a road.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yes.
The last section of the interstate to be completed was this stretch of I-90 through the mountains of Idaho that there was still... You'd be driving on I-90...
And then in the middle of Idaho, in this little silver mining, that northern Idaho panhandle is like old silver mines.
There are mines all over the place.
And there used to be big smokestacks and big fallen apart old silver mines.
They tore a lot of them down.
But when I was in college, they were still all there.
And you'd be driving along on I-90 and all of a sudden the road would start to change and then there'd be a stoplight.
And it was the last stoplight on any interstate was in this little valley.
And I swear to you, the town was called like Silverton, Idaho or something.
And you'd drive through this little – you'd stop at the stoplight.
It was a one-stoplight town.
You'd wait for it to turn green.
And then you would start driving.
You'd get on the other side of the town, pass the drugstore and the barbershop, and then, whoa, you're back on the freeway again and drive all the way to Boston.
And they couldn't do they couldn't do anything about it because it was this tiny little narrow little river valley.
They couldn't put the road anywhere else.
And in order to build a freeway through here, you'd have to just destroy the whole town.
And the town was like, don't destroy us.
Ronald Reagan wanted to do that to San Francisco.
destroy the entire town well yes i mean i think he would want that yeah he was more of a more of a northern read the true northern california fan i think he liked the very north part in the very south part he didn't like the middle part there was a plan in the reagan years we've talked about this there's an amazing map of what the um i guess the federal highway people wanted to do which is to just basically like now where van ness avenue is they wanted that to be an actual literal literal highway there's a plan for that in seattle too there was a in fact right right down the street from my house there's
There's actually a bridge that they built.
I think you would describe it as a bridge to nowhere.
It goes from nothing to nothing.
And they built it as a highway overpass for a highway that never got built.
Interesting.
Well, you're getting at something also that I don't know.
So I have not boned up on the history of highways in America.
But my sense is you used to have something called a freeway.
You got the red highways, you got the blue highways, but you had highways and freeways that would be like state operations or regional operations, but they weren't designed from the ground up to be something like a Route 66, right?
Or maybe you better put like an I-75 or something.
There were American highways that went all the way across, like US-40 is a great highway, and a lot of it still exists.
US-40 goes from Oregon all the way across Kansas.
I mean, US-40 is...
That's also known as the Main Street of America.
Yeah.
Does it go to San Francisco?
Original Termini, I believe, if I'm just from memory, I believe it was one of the first U.S.
highways created, I want to say in 1926.
Oh, good man.
It's original Termini, which is definitely a word I'm going to start using.
It's original Termini.
We're in San Francisco, California, and Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Yes, yes.
Shit dog, 2,285.745.
So U.S.
40 is still there for long, long stretches.
Look at that.
And it's like Route 66.
You find all the old motels and little towns.
It's such a great thing.
It really is.
And U.S.
99 used to go up and down the West Coast.
And that was largely, for great stretches of it, paved over by I-5.
So the interstates came in.
Does our I-5, is that your I-5?
Do you get the same I-5?
Yeah.
We were on I-5 just the other day.
You guys call it the five?
No, no, no, no.
That's L.A.
That's L.A.
They call it the whatever.
You call something the 580 here.
You're going to hear about it.
It's 280.
It's just 280.
Don't call it.
It's 101.
Don't call it the 101.
Don't do that.
If you say the five in Seattle, they will ride you out of town on a rail, and there's literally a rail we built just for that.
It's a purpose-built rail for driving people out of town, for adding an unnecessary fucking article to a road.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I took the 405.
Really?
Is that what you did?
Well, see, because he was trying to be LA.
He was affecting Los Angeleno.
He wouldn't say that now.
No.
I mean, I think they have to say it in concert, but...
For legal reasons.
Otherwise they lose the copyright.
I used to, when I would go to L.A., I would often from the stage say things referencing death cabs like L.A.
period.
I'd be like, you know, the thing is like.
And I would I'd quote some some Death Cab lyric and then I'd be like, and here's how the long winters feel about L.A.
Kind of me and trying to make a contrast.
And then some some fan came up to me and was like, you say something like that every time you play.
And I was like, oh, maybe you go to too many rock shows.
People are listening.
You need to hit the books.
People are watching.
I'm going to stop now.
I have to come up with some new.
It wasn't like I was saying the same thing.
It was just like my banter was too much in the fan.
This is before the Internet.
I know.
But even now, I mean, when we're on the Internet, people are constantly telling us when we've told a story before.
Yeah.
It's like, well, you know, if we only told the stories we hadn't told, we'd run out of stories, wouldn't we?
You can't create enough stories or songs fast enough.
I mean, you've got to be able to go back.
You've got to be able to go back and, you know, do like a painted black.
So it's something people are going to enjoy.
Right.
Well, who knows?
I mean, we keep generating stories.
I think we do.
Yeah.
I had to yell at somebody on Facebook the other day.
Good.
Somebody, you know, decided that they were going to give me some political instructions.
Here comes the content cops.
Some political instruction about it.
Meaner, meaner.
Were you concern trolled, John?
Yeah, well, somebody told me what I needed to do.
Somebody had a problem with your tone?
They told me what I needed to do.
Oh, that's nice.
That's a thing.
And hero.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
And hero, huh?
Hey, I don't look at it, but I know about it.
I don't look at the site.
I know.
I know.
Alas.
Open letter to Roderick on the line.
Alas.
For so long I've enjoyed your program.
But alas.
I've sent you two images.
I don't want to take you off your story.
But I just would like you to at least acknowledge two images I've sent to you.
The Jackie Stewart picture is very good.
Do you understand what that picture is, John?
He's in front of his little Formula One car there.
In his jumpsuit.
Hang on.
That's the highest quality image I can find.
John, that's a model.
No, really?
That's what Cousin Davey made.
Oh, this is a model.
That's a fucking model.
That's not really Jackie Stewart.
That's his.
It's a tiny Jackie Stewart.
It's a wee Jackie Stewart.
It's a wee Jackie Stewart.
Did he?
Hi, he's wee.
That's a turd.
He's a little man with his blue card, the elf.
He actually made this exact model.
Do you recognize it from the time?
I'm pretty sure I do.
I tried to find other references.
But what's cool is, of course, eBay has all of this stuff.
But they've got Command Shift T. They've got some good ones.
If you search for Jackie Stewart Car Model Vroom.
How about Car Model Vroom is the name of the company.
And they get a whole bunch of these for celebrity race boys.
Oh, you could see what it looked like when it was unpainted.
Oh, my God.
This is so cool.
You used to see, you know, car racing being a being like a I don't know whether I don't think it's like a bigger deal.
There are plenty of people in the world that still really care about car racing.
It was more like car racing and tennis.
I feel like our two things, maybe ice skating are things where there used to be more legit, like not just during events, not just during the Olympics or during a road race.
But you like you would know you would know an Emerson Fittipaldi.
That was just something that came up.
They were stars.
They were stars.
They were car stars.
But what's cool about this is that the livery, I guess, of that car.
Livery refers to the signage of the car.
Signage of the car, the colors and scheme of it.
It's celebrating the French oil company Elf.
Is that what that is?
I thought it was Ronnie James Dio.
Dio is also an elf.
Okay.
And he's also an oil company.
He was also in a band called Elf.
Oh, that's right.
He was in a band called Elf.
He was because of his stature.
It was not meant in an unkind way.
It should have been called Orc because he was a little broad for an elf.
You're right.
Oh, my goodness.
Knowing what I know now, I would say he's more like a halfling.
Yeah, he's not really an elf.
I finally learned what a halfling was.
You had to have known what a halfling was.
But I didn't realize the tricky nature of a halfling.
Do you know what a halfling is?
Oh, I do.
It's a hobbit.
But you can't say hobbit.
Right.
Because then you couldn't.
Right.
Well, I think it's still governed by.
We don't call them hobbits anymore.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
By J.K.
Rowling's estate.
It's all covered.
So it's not a it's not a social justice issue.
It's.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I mean, like we don't.
I do.
You.
OK.
All right.
Oh, no.
But I think it's that we don't say halfling.
Now we do say hobbit.
That's the preferred.
It's like saying mudblood.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
But it's like Band-Aid.
And I think probably J.R.R.
Tolkien.
You mean the charity event?
Yeah, they were, well, the charity event, Tolkien.
Tolkien.
Tolkien.
Tolkien.
Right.
They were probably incredibly litigious in their time, right?
Just suing people right and left.
That's that famous time that Tolkien sued Led Zeppelin for like $600 million.
Shut your mouth because of Led Zeppelin III and IV?
yeah because of all hobbits all over that shit yeah there's hobbits up and down my daughter had her first we had a very long trip and she had her first stairway to heaven the other day no yeah and i knew every word what did she think every intonation of course you did oh my god it's just a spring clean for the may queen and was she impressed or not at all she was on the ipad the whole time and i'm even doing the drum part at the end
Which is perfect.
Okay, first of all, I listen to Stairway to Heaven to the extent possible exactly once per year, which is how often I feel you should listen to Stairway to Heaven.
Every time you go to a guitar center once a year?
No, but like usually I try to do it like when I know I'm going to have 10 minutes somewhere and I've got headphones on and I'll go turn it on and I'll listen to it.
And I'm always buoyed.
I'm buoyed.
The drums on the end of that song are so goddamn good.
Because as busy as they are, and as kind of shuffly as they are, they are so restrained.
But they're echoing what Paige is doing, was trying to do with the guitar.
But you get that... And he's kind of miming all of that a little bit on the toms.
It's so restrained.
They say that it's a folk song...
until the drums come in it's a traditional folk song until the drums come in and then it becomes a rock and roll song interesting it's all things to all people uh because uh because page is using these alternate tunings and he's doing his whole like ye olde like uh pointy toed shoe yes like leaping around in the forest kind of page thing who's the band they nicked it from uh taurus
Taurus with Spirit.
Spirit by Taurus.
Taurus is the song.
Taurus by Spirit.
Spirit was the band.
Did a song called Taurus.
Taurus by Spirit is actually a kind of air freshener.
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slash super train our thanks to squarespace for supporting roderick online and all the great shows i took you off your game uh i wanted you to see jackie uh jackie chan with his elf car right but the thing the thing about the american highway yes
is that they were designed at a time before now.
They were designed at and for a time before now.
Before now.
Okay.
And because they're built now already...
We can't rebuild them to be better.
You'd have to either replace them or make something different because they're already built.
Yeah, and any time they close the freeway, even to like... You can't retcon.
You can't retcon a freeway.
You can't.
And as we know from science, you add lanes to a freeway or change nothing.
And the thing is, everything adapts because it's an ecosystem.
It never makes it actually better.
No, it makes it worse every time.
More traffic every time you add an extra.
Turns out...
Yeah.
And the thing is, if you even close a lane of the freeway just to repaint the stripes,
It causes a traffic jam that lasts for a century, right?
I mean, it just goes away.
I feel like I saw a CGP Grey video about this where, like, okay, so you do a thing, you shut it down for a while, people start taking a different way, and it actually improves the traffic in some way.
And then when it does reopen, it's good for a while, but then lots of other people discover that it's fast, and suddenly the express lane isn't so fast anymore.
It's a human thing, and it's a highway and human issue.
It's a human highway issue.
And I spend a lot of time sitting in Seattle, sometimes in traffic and sometimes just sitting in a lawn chair on top of my RV, which I parked out by the airport.
It's got a tarp over it, right?
And then I sit on it on a lawn chair, and then I put a tarp over me.
LAUGHTER
But I think about it.
I can see it so clearly.
It's a different colored tarp.
Yeah.
But it's got a John shape under it.
Well, and it makes me invisible to satellites.
Traffic cameras can't see you?
No.
Nobody can steal your thoughts?
I think about how I would design the freeways if I had like... Do you wave to people as the... No, you don't wave to them.
See, you'll see a hand moving underneath the tarp.
No, I don't want them to see you, no.
Well, kids live here.
I have my jingle stick there next to me, so I'm keeping the tarp off of my hair.
Okay, all right.
okay that's smart it's an ad hoc rv tent yeah you make a little tent up there a little tent it gets a it gets a little perspirey on the hottest yeah i imagine with all the exhaling it must get a little close yeah but you're used to that with that rv i vent it okay all right but so i have a big plan of how i would design the freeways if i were going to do it now differently but here's the problem
if you follow it down any one of the little many rabbit holes you realize there's no good way to do it like i i'm like oh well i would just change this and then you say oh well but that would start this chain reaction yes yes you realize there isn't there just isn't a good way i mean unless you had the money
to dig a megatunnel right uh which they didn't then in which we don't there's no decision in any of this stuff that doesn't have at least two to seven knock-on effects it's why i think the entire avengers movie was flawed from a from a premise from the beginning premise of that movie the whole plan behind that movie movie drives me crazy and the same is true with traffic people want to change one thing because of knock-on effects and like really think it through really think it through
And that's what Elon Musk wants to do, right?
He wants to make tunnels.
I mean, he wants to make tubes.
Oh, right.
I'm sorry.
There is a distinction.
I mean, he wants to make tubes, right?
But they don't have to be tunnels.
When you're up there with your tarps and you're thinking about it, what would you do differently?
If you had a time machine or, I don't know, a budget, what would you do differently with Seattle's highways?
well so there's a couple of things okay and this is i think maybe maybe this is true of other cities to a lesser or greater degree but when the express lanes were built they were built with the idea of getting people out of town and to their suburban homes as fast as they can and then in the morning get them into town and
without, you know, the bothersome traffic that's coming on and going off at local exits.
And it seems to me what we need now through cities are express lanes that expressly do not stop in downtown.
So that there would be lanes for all the people who are on one end of a city who just want to get to the other side of the city.
They don't want to get off downtown, but the freeway goes through the city.
Almost like a turnpike in some ways.
Well, it would be just like, it would be just a slot because a lot of, because they tried to solve this with roads that, you know, the freeway ring roads that kind of went around the outside of the city, all the 405s, for instance, or all the, you know, the roads that weren't the main road, they were the road that circumvented the downtown.
But now those freeways are jammed up with all the people who are living out
I mean, those all became big developed areas.
And now you can't go around the city because those freeways are going through their own little cities now.
And what you want, you got all these trucks, you got all these people that come to the edge of a city.
And all they want to do is get to the other side.
And they tighten their seatbelts down and they're like, here we go.
I got to deal with all these ding-a-lings now.
People coming in and going off, people taking their kids back and forth to soccer practice, all the little bakery delivery trucks, you know, the farm fresh eggs.
Yes.
I got, you know, I got little old ladies.
I got people that drive every day, but they only drive two miles.
They do it every day, two miles.
Mm-hmm.
And I just want to get from here to Vancouver.
You know, I just I'm on my way somewhere.
I got stuff to do out in the out in the other on the other side of town.
And if there was just a separate road that you could kind of get on at any point, but once you were on it, you couldn't get off.
That's why I say turnpike.
I don't mean the payment nature of a turnpike, but just more in the sense of like an express bus in San Francisco.
The idea is it makes a lot fewer stops because most of the people getting on here are going to roughly here.
They'll come to the express because they all want to get off roughly there.
And there aren't going to need to be stops in between.
And if you take out, you know, 60, 80% of those stops, the whole thing's going to move a lot faster.
Well, but here's the problem.
When these freeways were built, the going to there that everybody wanted to do was precisely to the center of town.
And not, you know, like there are very few expressways, turnpikes that don't like terminate or deliver one unto the
first and broad, or whatever it is in your town.
I say first and broad.
There isn't even a first and broad.
I guess there is, but it's not what you would think it is here.
But there's probably non-Euclidean cities.
Yeah, for sure there are.
So that's one thing I would do.
One time when I was running for city council, actually, I got a phone call from Duff McKagan, who was a supporter of my campaign, and he said, man, here's what we need for
And I was like, I am all ears.
If I'm going to change my campaign to suit anybody's personal needs, it's definitely going to be Duff McKagan.
I'm going to put that in my campaign literature.
And he said, we need special lanes on the freeway just for trucks.
Oh, interesting.
Unfortunately, the city council doesn't have authority over the freeway lanes.
Yeah.
But I got what he was saying.
And this is basically the same idea.
Like trucks are the ones that are just going through town that are taking farm fresh eggs somewhere else.
They need their own lane.
That's one thing I would do.
Okay.
That makes sense.
That makes sense.
But also maybe I think I would, you know, you could, when you do a driver's license test, you could put a little extra rating on a driver's license that says this person is rated to go on the freeway.
Some people, we already have a thing where they could make a judgment that you're not allowed to drive at night.
Not allowed to drive at night, right?
Or you have to have corrective lenses.
So you're saying there's not only the sort of like grading down, but there's a grading up where like maybe you get super driver status.
Sure.
Driving on the freeway is a whole different set of skills than just puttering around from the old folks home down to the supermarket.
Interesting.
And maybe there should be, you know, tiers of roads.
I think when we get into self-driving car times, which we're sort of on our way to,
there are definitely going to be roads.
If self-driving cars are going to work worth a shit, there are going to be roads where you can't be a person driving.
I mean, based on my limited understanding of self-driving cars, that is where you will see a gain, is when you have solely self-driving cars.
Yeah.
And that's not going to be for a while.
But and I think what they will first do is have have certain areas of cities.
It'll be like the opposite of that.
It'll be like there'll be like you'll be limited to like this one little area where everything is extremely well defined.
Right.
And for and for those of us that are driving our MGs on the twisty roads out in the mountains.
Yeah.
You know, there are going to be roads for that, too.
It's like, okay, this is like pleasure driving road.
Until they pass the motor law.
Then you've got to take your red barchetta out on the weekends.
Well, I think what you do, you take the red barchetta, you get that at the deli, first of all.
Do you slice it thin when you get it?
My red barchetta?
When you get red barchetta, do you like it sliced deli thin?
Merlin, I just bought a meat slicer.
Shut your mouth.
It just showed up.
It just showed up in the mail.
Like a full-on, like what, with an engine?
Yeah.
Or is it like a mandolin?
No, no, no, like a deli, like the kind with the motor and a spinning blade.
Your life just changed.
Well, it did.
I was like... You can get farm-fresh eggs, you can get large blocks of meat, and you can make it exactly the way you want.
You can keep it wrapped up.
You can even get a case.
It could be like your own little personal deli.
See, I made a... So I made some roast beefs, some roast buffs, some Shia roast buffs.
Should I have a little beef?
And and I and I was cutting them into roast beef sandwiches.
And, you know, I like a very thinly sliced rare roast beef.
Oh, same way to fly.
But I was slicing it with a with a sharp knife.
And I'm sitting there and I'm like slicing this really thin roast beef, trying to make it really thin.
You can't do that with a knife, really.
But I was doing it, and after I made the amount of one roast beef sandwich, my hands were killing me.
Because, you know, you're just like working this knife through this roast beef.
And I was like, this, you know, yeah, what am I, an animal?
This cannot stand.
And so I went online, and I was like, how much is a meat slicer?
And it turned out that the company Williams Sonoma, which is a very expensive...
to buy fancy things if you're going to a like a bridal shower or something had a Mother's Day sale on meat slicers and the highest rated public, you know, like publicly available.
We're talking about like Pro-Am style meat slicer was on sale free shipping from William Sonoba for less than the cost of, say, four roast beef sandwiches.
See, that amortizes nicely.
It really did.
And I was like, so I, so I, I ordered one and I immediately went to the super fancy grocery store that talk about, talk about keep moving and get out of the way.
The fancier the grocery store, the more people need to keep moving and get out of the way.
They are so oblivious in those places.
And maybe it's because they're, they're, they're like astonished at the $50 Brussels sprouts, but they don't want to look astonished because they want to feel like,
Oh, sure.
Of course.
I'm paying this because every one of these Brussels sprouts had a name.
And the child of the farmer put little baby bonnets on them while they were growing up.
That's why it's named Philip.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's why it costs $50.
They're trying to look like that's cool or normal.
But so I went into the deli and I was like, give me your finest roast boof.
I'm sorry, it isn't roast yet.
Give me your finest raw buff, which I will roast.
To be like buffois.
Buffois.
Buffois and after.
And I will roast it.
Yellow card for that one.
Sorry.
Here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to rub it in salt and pepper.
Okay.
I'm going to buy, and they, oh, you're going to, so I'm walking around this fancy store, and I bought baby onions, and I bought little, I even bought little potatoes, little tiny potatoes.
Love little potatoes.
Well, no, wait, that's not for you, though.
That's for your guests.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The thing is, in a stew, in a, in a, in like a, oh, because I bought a, I bought a slicing boof.
If it's, if it's a, if it's a boof haute.
That you're making for everybody.
You're not going to mind if there's a little potato in there.
I don't mind it.
And so I bought a second bouff that was like a bourguignon bouff.
And I'm going to put in some kind of cooking dish.
I'm going to cover it with all these vegetables.
And I'm going to cook it.
A little bit of red wine?
some red wine i'm going to cook it for hours and then it's going to just you know it's going to be in there you're living the dream kind of big time have you used it yet is this going to be your is this going to be your test flight with the slicer no so it's just it's sitting in the living room it just showed up just sitting in the living room and so i and i got a uh i got a and i yesterday i took a boof and i salted and peppered it i rolled it around and i put it in the uh i put it in the fridge to sit overnight just to sit overnight and it's uh in all of its like spices
So I'm going to do it today.
I'm so excited for you.
Now I want a boof.
That's such a good idea.
And if this is the wrong time of year to have a boof, right?
I should be doing this in...
Uh, you have to do like a month with an R. I think they're, I think they're in season, but you want it to be a, uh, you want to like, this is comfort food stuff.
Yes.
And a lot of people don't sit and eat a hearty stew in June.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But they're wrong.
I think they're wrong.
But imagine, imagine being up there on your RV with a tarp over you and you're just enjoying a thinly sliced sandwich.
And I've got, I've got just that wooden spoon, like the helicopter pilot in, uh, in, um, in road warrior.
Oh, okay.
He's got that wooden spoon that is tucked into his pants.
Just the one wooden spoon.
Just one wooden spoon.
It's all a man who eats.
It's going to be so tender.
Can you imagine how tender it'll be?
Well, that's my hope.
But the problem is I always screw it up.
You say this.
You're so hard on yourself about the cooking.
I screw up the books.
You should be harder on yourself about putting near bad meat in the freezer.
That's my most concerning topic.
Oh, you're afraid that putting it in the freezer doesn't... I worry about it.
I worry you're going to poison Ken Jennings.
It doesn't reset the beef?
I asked a microbiologist about it, and he says it does not reset.
It doesn't reset.
So the almost bad beef goes into the freezer, and it's still almost bad.
But if it's frozen, it can't be getting worse.
That was my theory.
You take it out and look at it, and if it seems fine, you could make it, you know, you could donate it, maybe.
Well, the thing is, I don't think they want donated almost bad food.
Donated, frozen, almost bad meat?
You don't think there's a demand for that?
You go to the Goodwill?
Put that in every slot?
Every year the post office does a thing where they're like, put a bunch of canned food out for the post office because we do a drive and we're going to give it all to...
And so I always fill up a bag with a bunch of clam chowder that expired in 2014.
And I'm sure they're like poor people love cream corn.
Yeah, I don't know.
We can do I don't know if we can do this, but I hate the idea that they're throwing it away.
I pulled a I pulled a thing out of the shelf the other day that was from 2014 or 15.
And my mom was like, you can't eat that.
Have you checked your spices recently?
Oh, they're all from the 60s.
Oh, my goodness.
You talk about time going by.
Jeez Louise.
I mean, off by two years.
I feel like I just got this garlic powder.
How even did this go away in 2016?
It doesn't seem right.
If you really get in there, especially the ones that are cakey, check the cakey ones.
A lot of the cakey ones expired.
I buy my spices at estate sales.
I mean, they literally are all owned by Julia Child.
All right, we got to keep going.
Did you get the other image I sent?
Oh, let me see here.
Oh, the one of Jackie Stewart that was not painted?
No, no, no, no.
Two above.
The green flyer.
Oh, the parallel parking lessons.
PDX Parkers.
Parallel parking lessons, $25.
Learn to confidently parallel park your car in 30 minutes or less or your money back.
Now, my favorite part of this is it says gift certificates available.
So this is a service in Portland.
Hey, mom.
Apparently a woman named Jessica will teach you how to park.
And if you don't learn, in half an hour she'll give you your money back.
But I love the idea of gift certificates.
Can you, like, imagine how, what, would that be a very Bellingham move?
If you just started buying parking gift certificates and sending them to people?
Oh, it's the most awful passive way of saying you shouldn't drive anymore.
What?
It's because I love you.
I know.
The thing is, I don't mind.
I just want you to be safe.
I don't mind people that don't know how to parallel park because what happens is you, you know, you like shark them.
You get behind them.
Oh, but they spook real easy too.
They spook so easily and they, they give it a try and they, they fail.
And then their friend gets out and the friend can't help them.
That's not helping.
Yeah, they pull out and then they go back.
That's like having somebody help you thread a needle.
Like having a second person will not make you better at it.
Well, who's watching you try and thread a needle and telling you what you should do.
No, no, no.
Put it in the hole instead.
Instead, do the hole.
They try a third time and they fail.
And then they then like shame face.
If they have any shame at that point, they will drive away and give the space to somebody who knows how to park there.
And that is me.
I'm sitting behind him and, you know, half the time you put your money on black here and you lose because they get it in and they get it in.
What if you were to hold up a card like an Olympic judge?
Oh, just be like two points or...
Oh, God.
So I discourage people from knowing how to parallel park.
It's three moves.
Technically, it's two moves.
It's two smooth moves.
There's a third pre-move, but then there's two moves.
There's two moves to parallel park.
There's one trick involving your rearview mirror and a fender.
That's all you need to know.
Cut harder than you think.
Cut back harder than you think.
If you don't fit, leave.
But never for a minute imagine that a 16-point gesture is ever going to get you into that parking space.
At that point, you don't deserve that space.
You need to leave.
That's right.
You go up, and then you cut, and then you cut.
You go zinc, and then you go zoop zoop.
Yep, it should be a zoop zoop.
Zoop zoop.
It's not a zoop, it's a zoop.
I found a box of my dad's papers yesterday, because I'm cleaning stuff up.
And I'm thinking, what...
What am I doing with these?
What am I doing with my dad's papers?
How long am I going to carry these forward in my life?
You feel like you need a plan.
And I've been carrying them.
I've been carrying them ever since.
I mean, he died over 10 years ago.
What?
And I've had them.
Yeah.
Are you shitting me?
I don't know.
11 years ago.
Oh, my God, John.
I would have said three.
I know.
Holy shit.
I was hanging out with him at the Death Cab show not that long ago.
I know.
It wasn't that long ago, except it was over 10 years ago.
And so I'm looking through his paper, and I've got boxes and boxes of his papers, because he, like me, kept a bunch of stuff.
He's a saver.
Yep.
And so I'm looking through his papers, and I come to this box, and it's got...
It's got his a bunch of bills, all of his all of his canceled checks, all of his mortgage papers, all of his.
But it's also got all this stuff.
He was he was an arbitrator his whole life.
And so the American Arbitration Association would call him sometimes and say, we got a problem that, you know, the the union over here and then this guy over here.
And we need somebody to get in here and solve this.
And my dad would like take him on, take him on a case by case basis as he got older.
And there are some transcripts of arbitrations that are fun to read because, I mean, they're not fun.
Like people are like, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But then there'll be a line where my dad is like, well, that's not what you said a minute ago.
And you can just hear his tone of voice as he's like, so, but that's fun for nobody but me.
Seems like you'd have to be a good reader and a sharp listener.
Yes.
Right.
And the thing is, he he loved that work.
And I think he was really good at it because it's just you.
Everybody's impacted in their view.
They can't like look outside.
They wouldn't be coming to see him.
So he goes into this.
I'm imagining he goes into that knowing there's going to be some shenanigans because otherwise it would never have risen to the level where they need a lawyer to adjudicate.
I mean, there was a crazy one I was reading where this is just a sign of the times.
But sometime in the mid 70s, there was a teacher who was pregnant and was pregnant.
going on maternity leave.
But the school district was like, well, I mean, not she was just asking to be allowed to go on unpaid leave for her.
Just basically asking that they hold her job for her.
Yeah, for her.
And the and the and they were saying, well, her contract stipulates that she needs to use all of her
whatever Christmas vacation, or there was, there was some bunch of, uh, shenanigans about them, even just letting her go have a baby.
And my dad was like arbitrating the case.
And he, he came down obviously on the side of the woman and saying, saying like you guys are, you are indicating your responsibility here to be human beings.
This was the school district of Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1970s.
Uh, but
What I discovered, so the legend of my dad was that he was constantly in Dutch to people.
His bills were always sort of unpaid.
Things were always going to collections because my dad didn't want to deal with it.
He would just put it on the dining room table and hope that it went away or just didn't.
He needed an assistant or a secretary to do all this work for him.
And so this is, you know, and this is partly the legend that comes from my mom talking about like how my dad was, couldn't get his bills paid or whatever.
Well, I find this box.
It turns out my dad, it wasn't that he couldn't get his bills paid.
It was literally that he was constantly challenging bills.
Somebody would, like an insurance company would send him a bill and he would
Then stapled to it, there would be a letter.
Dear sirs, reading your contract, I find it hard to believe that you would send this bill at this time under these conditions.
And then there would be a letter saying, so therefore, and it's never snide.
It was always very businesslike.
And at the end, he would say, and therefore, I challenge this bill, yours sincerely, and
David Roderick.
And then there would be a letter from them saying, well, our position on this hasn't changed.
Here's why we're sending you this bill.
And this is why.
And then my dad would write back and say, thank you very much for your letter of November 14th.
I continue to stipulate that.
And so he would be
And I can't picture my dad because this is not something that his secretary at work was doing.
These are all in his voice.
Yeah.
And he's sitting.
And I think they were maybe typed by his secretary because he wasn't he couldn't type, I don't think.
And they're all typed.
So he's dictating these or something.
But.
Very definitely.
He's challenging.
And a lot of these are like a bill for $40.
Man, that's a tough cookie.
He is challenging bills right and left.
And these companies are like, well, we're going to send it to collections.
And he's like, if you send it to collections, then you're at risk of being inviolate.
I never heard him in any of them actually threaten to sue.
but it changed my whole idea of like what he was doing with his time.
Like he was fucking challenging just his, like his regular bills from the mortgage company.
Well, sometimes, I mean, there are a couple of letters from, from like vice presidents of banks where they say, you're absolutely right.
We're sorry.
Um,
You know, it was a it's the result of a clerical error or something.
But I think for the most part, he just had a very developed sense of justice, just like my sister does, just like my daughter does.
It's like a sense of justice.
Now, I don't have it.
You know, I'm basically an implicit demand to show your work.
Yeah.
And also like your contract leaves or, you know, the terms of this contract leave enough wiggle room in here that I'm going to make a case for the for the take the hot take here to be the broadest.
application of this and rather than the narrowest application of it and so he's you know he was all the time like well you know as a result of like there was something he was trying at one point and i saved these papers he was trying to get the insurance company to pay for the two of us he and i
for him and me, he was trying to get our family counseling paid for.
And you remember our family counseling basically was all of us, all four of us, and then my sister left, and then my mom left, and then my dad left, and then it was me.
Right, right, right.
It was like a kind of therapeutic musical chairs.
Yeah.
And right in this time, and so he sends a letter to the insurance, because the insurance company says, well,
We're, you know, we're not covering family counseling because it's not a medical emergency.
And my dad said, listen, I had a heart attack in 1974 or something like that.
And my job is very stressful.
But also my son, my child's son, my teenage son is very stressful.
And this is all in a letter that he's writing to the insurance company.
You are kidding me.
No.
And he's like not being able to deal.
And it's absolutely in his language, right?
He says, my teenage son is not very productive.
And his lack of productivity started to create a rage in me.
That is impacting my ability to do my work and it's making me a bad father.
So therefore we are going to family counseling in order to deal with this issue.
And so it is a medical emergency because it's a work related.
It is impacting my work.
And it's something outside of my control.
It's just exactly the same as if I had my arm cut off in a saw.
Obviously.
And the insurance company is like, we don't see it that way.
We're not going to cover this treatment.
And this is at a time when you could go to the, you know, like an hour at the psychologist was $60.
Mm-hmm.
But and he pressed he pressed it.
He was like and he's writing these letters like, you know, I don't know if you've ever had a 13 year old boy who was not productive.
You are kidding.
But and and but all done very, you know, in in legal language.
And I'm not sure that I ever saw a paper where it was resolved.
I don't think I ever saw a bill that he actually ended up paying, and I never saw the insurance company send a letter where they were like, you win?
And I feel like this may be a thing that he was still fighting with them until the day he died.
My terrible son.
My terrible son is a medical problem.
My son is a medical problem.
He's causing medical problems for me.
Have you never had a medical son?
Have you never had a son who was so unproductive?
I can tell just from your tone that you've never had a son like this.
Yeah.
You would understand.
You would know.
It's like people who think they understand what a migraine is.
Brother, you don't know what a migraine is.
You don't know what it's like to have a medicinal son.
Just the idea that... And this was true when I was a kid.
My lack of productivity...
Was such an issue because, you know, at 12 years old, 13 years old, I produced nothing.
I produced nothing of anything.
Like I was just like absolutely.
I just all I produced was like.
The sound, the smell of a teenager walking through the room.
Like other than that, I had no other contribution and it used to just drive him up a tree.
Like he at least wanted me to produce some home runs or produce some homework or produce something.
But there was no, there was no, uh, John work product.
You didn't end up producing, not only nothing useful, he felt like you weren't really even producing anything.
I was producing zero.
You were consuming food, exuding smells, and not really bringing anything to the table.
Right.
Do you think he really felt that way?
Yes.
But so much so that he felt like it was that he needed workman's compensation.
For my terrible, terrible son.
I'm laughing, John, but that's, you know, I'm not sure that is really about you.
That sounds like a man who doesn't want to pay for something.
Well, no, it was a collision of errors.
Could it be a form of metatherapy that he gets to talk about it in that way?
I think so.
And nobody's allowed to strictly call bullshit on him?
I think that if he had said those things in the psychiatrist's office, that she would have said, well, but if he says it in a letter to his insurance company, that person's just going to be like, I'm not sure that that has anything to do with how this contract is worded.
But it really, you know, he and I were a collision of of generations like he was born in the 20s.
And, you know, I think he started working when he was 14 and going to school and playing baseball and basketball and football.
And and at 14, I was.
Walking around the backyard going, pew, pew, pew, pew.
You know, like a bee would fly by and I'd pull out a finger gun and be like, pew, pew.
Take that, Darth Vader.
And so he was like this, you know, what is happening here?
Yeah.
And and I was particularly bad in terms of just just I was like I was like one of those cats that just goes completely limp and you can pick it up at it and it just appears to be made out of beans.
I was like that just completely made out of beans.
And and he just did he was beside himself.
And I think it was because he had all that that misplaced ambition for me to be all the things that he felt like he hadn't achieved.
Right.
Even starting to work at 14, he had failed to achieve all these things that he had aspirations for me to do.
And I was just a sack of beans that was like Dark Vader.
It's hard to watch other people.
doing a thing you did that you wish you hadn't done or not doing anything you wish you had.
That's hard.
Yeah.
I think it's one of the advantages I have knowing that my little girl is kind of not like me very much.
I mean, she has a lot of personality traits that are like me, but she's not like me in that way.
So all of the things that she's doing that I would, that if it were like me, I would be like, Oh honey, let me save you the trouble.
of fighting the entire world for 35 years and just tell you that the world, you know, like you're not going to beat it.
She's not fighting the world.
So, so the mistakes that I see her make, I'm like, Oh, that's interesting.
Tell me more about that.
You know, I don't, I don't have that.
Um, I'm not doing the thing my dad did, which is like leap in there.
Right.
We'll leap in there with my wooden spoon and my design for a new freeway system and my jingle stick and say, stop.
Maybe I'll get it right.
Maybe I'll be the perfect father.
I think you will.
I think you will.
We'll see.
Good luck with the roast beef.