Ep. 441: "The Blessing of the White Dog"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Oh, hello, Merlin.
Oh, oh, is this a good time?
Oh, oh, hi.
Oh, hi.
How's it going?
Oh, hey.
Hey, good to hear from you.
Oh, it's nice to stop by.
I like to stick my head over the fence every once in a while and just, you know, check in.
I know you do.
You're a good neighbor.
And I thank you for picking up our mail while we were gone.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
I sifted through a lot of it.
I sorted a lot of it for you.
Thank you.
We sort our mail a different way, but I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Well, you know, I think organization, you can find it at any price.
And when a friend is there and like goes through your house and tries on some of your clothes and then does kind of a fancy German dance in them, you know, I feel like that's a way of long distance bonding.
Speaking of fancy German dances, today was the big Apple announcement.
I know you have a lot of other Apple podcasts like MacBook Weekly and MacTalk.org.
MacBook Weekly.
You know what?
That's pretty good.
I'm going to use that.
Yeah, I do have a lot.
I got to feed that beast, baby.
I got to jam that.
That Macintosh content down there gullets.
I know, but so I don't want you to burn any of that top, top content on this show.
Yeah.
But just briefly, did they do it?
Did they solve the problem?
Did they give you the thing that... Oh, yeah.
I mean, is the new thing going to be the thing that makes it all worthwhile?
You know, I don't even, I don't have anything particularly funny to say about this.
They are releasing a MacBook pro that takes care.
Yeah.
Um, it's really good.
And it fixes a lot of the shit that's been driving people crazy about, uh, a lot of Apple's laptops for a while.
It's been a little bit of a drag to get there, but they, they basically every nerd's wishlist was, was granted.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Every nerd.
Well, I mean, one does not speak of in that particular.
No, there's always, there's going to be a, amongst the murder of nerds, there's going to be somebody who's not happy, but got rid of the touch bar, which nobody liked.
Oh, nobody liked it.
Brought back MagSafe for the power, which is nice.
It's crazy fast.
It's got a great chip.
It's got a beautiful screen.
Uh, what are the other things?
Just a whole bunch of stuff.
It's, uh,
It's a, you know, Merlin Mann.
What is my other podcast again?
MacBook Weekly?
Yeah, MacBook Weekly.
Merlin Mann, you know, longtime co-host of MacBook Weekly, says two enthusiastic thumbs up.
Oh, that's so exciting.
I can't wait to consume this new Macintosh product.
Yeah, they just keep putting stuff out, don't they?
Yeah, they do.
And I've got a lot of problems that I need solved.
And it always seems like the new technology is going to be the thing that's going to rush in there and make it easier.
Do you want to put me on that?
Do you want to get me on your tech and get me working?
I'll come in.
We'll do some screen sharing.
I could come in, do a webinar with you.
Would that be helpful?
That would be so, so helpful.
Thank you.
And I've also wanted to change all my light bulbs to ones that I could control from my phone.
Well, see, Matt Howie tried that, and look what happened to him.
We can talk about that later.
I saw a Matt Howie sighting out in the wild.
I was down in Portland, and somebody said, oh, my wife has a friend in common.
And I was like, oh, yeah?
Who's that?
Well, I think my wife's wife does a thing with...
With the wife of somebody whose wife is friends with Matt Howey's wife.
And I was like, what?
That's a very strange exchange, John.
What are the chances?
Were you as confused by that as I was?
No, you know, when you've known Matt Howey as long as I have, you know he's going to come.
you know he gets around he's like as i say like a bad penny it's always turning up you're gonna be somewhere and the manhole cover is gonna go up a little bit and there he's gonna be peeping out hey hey try it i had a i had a gentleman cable
I had a gentleman's phone call with Matt Howie just last week.
Oh, well, nice.
Yeah, I must have talked about you.
Well, speaking of me picking up your mail, I figured at this point you would be, well, let me see if I can pull out some of my GRE words.
Debt or in jail?
Debt or in jail.
I was going to try and work in atavism.
Feral.
Last time that we talked a while back, you were fixing to go on a journey, and that's why I was picking up your mail.
in a couple states away but are you back from your atavistic feral journey yeah so so i mean you don't talk about it we can cut all this out it's my show i know i know i'll just you know i'll lay it out for you and if you think it's worth it if you think it's a good show then we can put it on i honestly don't care i i will i will talk i know i will talk about i will talk about uh anything
You seem like you're in a good mood.
Let me put my cards on the table.
Here they are.
My cards on the table are these.
You sound like you're in good spirits and you don't sound like you're in an emergency room or inpatient facility.
Good.
So I'm going to call win and win on whatever happened.
Just this morning, I looked at a bruise on my leg and I was like,
wow, the injury was on the other side of my thigh.
And for the bruise to have gone all the way through and come out on that side of my thigh, that's... That's one magic bruise.
That bruise, it hit so hard.
Yeah, back into the left.
The bruising blood...
Just kept going.
It was easier to get to the other side of the leg.
You want to watch for that blood lividity pattern.
If I learned anything from watching a lot of crime shows, and also you can sometimes tell, well, too soon, you know, choking causes what they call petechial hemorrhaging.
So how are your eyes?
Are your eyes all red?
Have you been choked in a way you didn't want?
So far my eyes are okay.
You know, choking is one of those things that, you know, you really need double, triple consent.
Oh, I'm not here to choke shame.
Yeah.
No, but in this case, cards on the table, you sound good.
Like, however, it went also, you know, my, my daughter was ice skating the other day and she ate it really hard and she, she may have a matching bruise.
You guys should do, she'd text each other.
Yeah, I hit it hard.
I'm not sure your daughter and I are quite yet in the, like, share bruises text thread.
I've got a few people that I share bruises with.
If you exchange butt photos with my daughter, does that count as social media?
Are we bound by the COPPA rules of the late 90s, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
If I gave you...
implied permission to text butts to my daughter where would that put you i mean is it a here's a question is it a two-party consent state if you know what i mean yes i do and for me right now though i mean you know no no no no no no uh but for me right now trying to figure out what social media is what constitutes it now in this day and age because you know
Yeah, you turn left, you turn right.
Somebody on the motorcycle trip, they're all very avid social media posters, or at least a couple of them have Instagram accounts where they're riding motorcycles over fallen logs, and they're balancing a hand-thrown pizza on top of their nose.
Is that going to TikTok, John?
Where are they putting that?
No, I think it's Instagram still.
Instagram, nice.
There's a little bit of a, there's an age peel off there where TikTok, I don't think, made the corner.
That's a little motorcycle reference there.
TikTok didn't make the corner.
Off into the bushes.
I like that you're picking up jargon.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
I'm going to write that down.
I'm writing this down.
I'm writing down social media.
So I appeared in some other people's social media accounts this week, and then the people on their social media accounts were commenting, oh, look, it's John Roderick.
He is an adventure motorcyclist.
Who knew?
I thought he wasn't on social media, they say.
It's not people that were on social media.
They're not following these motorcycle guys because of me.
Know what I'm saying?
They're on there for motorcycles.
And then they're like, hey, wait a minute.
No way.
And so a whole social media thing is happening.
Is that a scallop?
Involving me.
And I'm not even on social media.
But am I?
I am.
You are technically.
But how?
But how much?
But where?
Did they have my consent?
Implicitly.
Implicitly when I did not sign the non-existent agreement.
It's fine, though.
I like that there are still people in the world that I don't see with my own eyes.
Not that much I don't.
You know, I might be talking out of school here.
I think I'm not because this was in a private but open Slack channel.
I think I need to get this right because it's almost as confusing as your Matt Howard's friend of a wife story.
But I think somebody Matt knows also knows Motorcycle Boy.
Do you know about this?
I bet that's true.
Go on.
Well, I mean, it's not really going to propel the story forward, except to say I got a nice note from a friend of the show, Matt Howey.
He was stuck outside waiting for his garage door to open.
And he says to me, he says that apparently there's a connection here somewhere.
I'll go look it up.
I don't read things very carefully.
But anyway, it's another Matt.
You know what it is?
The sewer lid popped up.
The manhole cover, as you say.
There he was.
And there he is.
He was like, I've got, you know, I'm taking the golden hand.
I'm giving it to Stan.
We're going to put it in the van.
Ooh.
Ooh.
Oh, so you, um, so what we, so you have a friend, uh, motorcycle boy.
So let me tell you, so there are several motorcycle fellows and, um, and they all have, they all have different, uh, online handles.
They all have different skill sets.
They're all different, uh, you know, actually different people.
If you, if you, if you were walking down the aisle in a supermarket and you saw one and then you saw another, you would differentiate them.
Okay.
You'd say, Hmm, that guy's got a mustache.
This guy doesn't.
Huh.
But so the plan of this motorcycle trip, this is now the third week-long backcountry motorcycle adventure to the wilds of Oregon that I have taken in the last five years.
And all of them sort of initially spearheaded by a friend of the show, Ben King, architect Ben King from Portland, Oregon.
all of them largely hosted by motorcycle impresario Gregor Holenda, who is a famous... That's the one.
That's Motorcycle Boy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He is a famous internet celebrity in his own right because he makes fancy motorcycle gigas,
Um, and, uh, you know, it does various, uh, internet.
He's a, you know, his wife is an internet tastemaker in the Portland food scene.
He's a, you know, he's like kind of a big deal.
It's like, it's, you know, it's all a big deal.
The whole thing, every single bit of this Merlin is a big deal.
It's a big operation.
Is it Gregor?
No, not Gregor.
Holinda.
What's this guy's name?
Holinda.
Gregor.
Holinda.
Oh, I think I'm looking at his internet website.
There it is.
It's probably right there.
It's got motorcycles on it.
Um, it does.
From what I can tell, though, it is not by Squarespace.
Oh, wait a minute.
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So, anyway, wow, he takes photographs.
He does.
Oh, this is the other thing.
This is the other thing.
They are all professional photographers.
Oh.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
And so they're also always documenting, they're documenting it in a...
In a kind of social media way, but they're also documenting it in an old school way, like photographer way, like we're photographers.
These are really, these are good photographs, like taken by a good person with a good camera who knows how to do good editing.
See, and I think what separates a lot of what they do is that they do...
They do good pictures.
So you've got the thing.
It's like, oh, we did a thing and it's crazy.
Look at us jump a stump or whatever.
We're balancing a pizza on our nose.
Stump jump.
But then they have good pictures of it.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
I don't like to use this word too much, but it strikes me that that is synergy.
That is some synergy.
It is.
And they play.
They know about the synergy.
They play on it.
And these guys are not playing.
He also makes YouTube videos.
Look at that.
And he's a machinist.
He's got a machine shop.
So he's got a whole world of fans on the internet who are primarily fans of his shop.
So he's on there solving problems.
This is the thing about guys with a shop.
They're solving problems.
Adam Savage has gotten a lot of mileage out of having those robots and stuff.
And we...
We talked a lot about Adam Savage on this trip because a lot of the people on the trip are admirers of him and his ability to solve problems with machines.
But, you know, they've got, he's got a lathe, he's got another lathe, he's got a third lathe.
That's a lot of lathes.
He's got so many lathes.
And so he's got fans who are like, I love his machine shop videos.
I love his, I mean, my daughter and I sat
And I watched him just lathing some stuff and it got her excited about lathes.
So we spent a whole afternoon just watching videos of different kinds of lathes, like wood lathes, metal lathes.
You got lathes that are lathing plastic.
Can you imagine trying to lathe?
I mean, I'm sure lathes have in some form.
And this is the thing, like, let's say you want to make a chess piece.
You use a lathe, excepting the top of the bishop.
You would be, if you want to make you a pawn, that's what you use a lathe for, right?
Spins things, and then there's little knives that cut off parts of it at a time, and you shave away everything that's not a pawn, right?
Yeah, you shave away.
Yeah, that's, you got it, you got it.
Okay.
Well, it must have been really hard to do when you had to do that with a flip pedal.
Having the raw spinning power of three electric lathes, that must give you a lot of possibilities.
Well, and what's interesting, too, about this gang is that they are not adverse to modern technology, right?
They want the one.
They want the garment that wicks away perspiration.
They want the laser.
They want the...
They want the drone that follows you by remote control.
They want the tech, but they also want the classic thing to a certain extent.
They want the old lathe that was in the old factory that was getting torn down.
They want the old thing that's made out of metal instead of the new one.
So it's a nice blend.
The first time I met Gregor, he was dressed head to toe in some technologically fabric.
Where I was like, wait a minute.
You can make out the figure of your friend Gregor, but because of the technologically, he presented himself as somebody who maybe just from just slightly in the future.
Well, yeah, it was just like, beep, boop, beep, boop.
Why do all these fabrics have logos on them?
None of it seems to be made out of things in nature.
This woman's wife calls it technical garment.
It's a technical garment.
And he had all these technical garments on, and I naturally didn't trust him because it's like...
where's your where's your wool where show me one cotton thing on you right now and he was like cotton like a waxy pants you like a waxy pant so so initially i was like he's a little too far forward if you know what i mean little too his nose is just a little too far into the future for me but then later on i realized oh no he's making he's like spot welding bmw boxer motors from the 1960s and trying to turn them into a hovercraft
And I'm like, all right, well, that's different too.
I mean, I, you know, so the, so the technologic key and the, and the classic go hand in hand.
And then the third, so the third number one, uh, you know, like, uh, person on this tour that's been there every year is a guy named Scott rounds, who is a flat track motorcycle racer from Vermont.
Who's like, you know, he's a little laconic.
He doesn't talk a lot.
He doesn't have a ton of, you know, he's not going to like discuss his marriage with you or anything, but he's a very, uh,
He's just a super personable guy.
The kind of person when you meet him, you're like, oh, I wish that there was, I wish that I had made choices in my own life where I could, uh, be like, I could have ever met somebody like Scott.
I get, I get that feeling about three times a month, three times a month.
I wish I had known somebody, uh,
I could have been a better person if I'd known a Gregor or a laconic, kind of a cowboy type you're describing.
I mean, they're all cowboys, every one of them.
You know, I'll sit at the campfire and I'll say, so who in this campfire has ever had a bad dream?
And they all just stare at their little tin of coffee and
It's like, no one's ever had a bad dream?
Getting the energy and enthusiasm to book a medical appointment.
Come on, guys.
Show of hands.
One guy's like, I don't know.
I had a bad day once.
Like, is that current?
You're like, God damn it.
No.
But Scott is, you know, Scott started, at one point, we pulled a motorcycle out of the truck that was like this tiny little beat up truck.
honda from the 80s and i'm like wow it's such a beautiful little motorcycle and he's like yeah i got it as a birthday present when i was 10 this is how i learned to ride well like wow my daughter is my daughter is 10 and she can't work a doorknob he's like yeah you know the first time i wheeled over a cop car or fix a motorcycle yeah just crazy
Anyway, so, so the three dudes, Ben can kind of fix anything and loves to solve problems.
Gregor is like the, the, you know, the big personality he's running this operation and he's, and he's trying to turn it into a motorcycle tour enterprise.
And so he's always, you know, he, he basically creates problems for Ben to fix later.
Like Gregor's breaking motorcycles and spend for us on fire.
And then Ben is kind of methodically coming along behind.
Oh, so is Ben sort of like Scotty and Gregor's a little bit like Kirk?
Hmm.
Because, I mean, like, if you've got the right team, or maybe it's more like the A team, but, like, an element of a good super team is you do kind of create, I don't want to say necessarily create problems for each other, but you're challenging one another with what you could do as a group by problematizing the situation.
It's true, except with the one thing that differentiates that is that no one...
It's a very egalitarian group.
No one seems to hold any particular rank over anyone else.
Like you, you do not give Ben King an order.
You do not even, you do not even strongly suggest that Ben.
You get a pack of fives for that, huh?
Well, everybody just kind of stands there.
And then, then the problem is solved.
And you're like, wow, when did that happen?
And Ben said, well, I couldn't sleep.
So I got up in the night and I rebuilt your motorcycle.
It's like, wow.
Okay.
How did you do that?
I was just tossing and turning.
He's like, well, you know, I took some rocks and I smelted them in my pocket smelter that I brought.
We got Ben, we got Gregor, and who's the third leader?
So Scott, and then Scott.
Also, you would never get, it's not like you would give an order to Scott, right?
Nobody gives orders.
Nobody takes orders.
Nobody's in charge.
But Scott is somebody that can kind of ride any motorcycle, sort of solve any problem that involves kinetic energy.
Who's Murdoch?
How do we get from here to there?
How do we get over this?
And then all of a sudden you look over and Scott's on the other side already.
And you go, how did he get over there?
Yeah.
Sort of like, well, he rode a raccoon.
I don't know.
There's only one way you could.
Fuck you.
That would be so cute.
You know, don't take a drink.
I would love that.
Is it a normal size raccoon?
Well, you know, oh, so this is, so this factors in somewhat.
What you have on these motorcycle trips is a large group of people, a diverse group of people, but the diversity kind of, they're all guys.
So there you got a 50% diversity lack.
So far, they've been, you know, I think the group is willing to expand its horizons.
Anybody is welcome.
But so far, all these test rides, you know, it's all been all sort of motorcycle boys.
And then one of the kind of defining characteristics is that everyone is normal-sized, right?
Like, how tall are you?
You're five foot?
Five nine and change.
Five nine and change, right?
And so everybody- I'm very close to, I feel short, but that's on me.
I think I'm pretty close to what was a normal-sized person, at least in the 70s.
I'm not Dutch or something.
I'm not big like Dutch.
You're not big like Dutch, no.
You're a regular and- I'm a normal-sized guy, mostly, yeah.
And most people on these motorcycle trips are...
Between regular and slightly shy of regular.
Just shy of regular.
I think it helps if you're a motorcycle person, like being a fighter pilot or any kind of other high-performance individual that's going to experience a lot of G-forces.
You don't want your limbs to be too far from the center.
You need that center of gravity working.
You don't want your head so far from your spleen that the head gets lost out there in the clouds.
You want everything in a compact package.
My spleen goes, not me, not me.
And so they can ride these motorcycles with their center of gravity, their sense of balance, the way motorcycles are designed.
They're all these, they just sort of, there's a symbiosis.
Like it came up a lot of times on this trip, the idea when I was learning guitar, that there were these guitars that just seemed unplayable.
And you pick it up and you'd be like, I can't, there's nobody could play this guitar.
And then a good guitar player comes along, picks it up and starts making music on it.
Yeah.
And you're like, I can't even get my fingers to push the strings down on the frets.
Those kind of people can just pick up a Chapman stick and start playing a song.
I was talking to my kid about this.
So I've got her playing with my fancy camera.
We've been going out and doing little nighttime photography trips.
And I deliberately, long story short, I set this up to be one of the most straightforward settings, but still very challenging.
Because we're shooting at 1.4, we're shooting at night.
She's learning.
Above all else, you have to just stand...
so still and then hold a breath and you're not going to press.
You're going to squeeze, you squeeze.
And then we got back and she was really frustrated with how blurry all the photos were.
And I was like, no, no, no, you're, you're getting it.
Like these don't cost anything to take.
But then I said, and then the next day she starts shooting stuff in the house, dead sharp, sharp as a tack.
And she's so thrilled.
And I said, this is why you should learn to play guitar on a shitty guitar so that you get good and
hopefully without developing bad habits, but then when you play a real guitar, Jiminy Christmas.
Well, and that, but there's the other problem, which is if the guitar is too hard to play when you first pick it up, you're never going to get past it.
You're never going to want to be a guitar player.
Yeah, you're right.
Because it's too hard to play.
And so there's this special kind of place in learning anything where the tool has to be good enough that it's exciting and that you want to do it and you feel like you can.
And then at a certain point in your experience of learning and growing, then you can go back.
I mean, I can play any guitar now.
And I can play a lot of guitars that you look at and go, that's a piece of trash.
No one should have guitars that are set up to be played with a slide, you know, and you can pick it up.
And if you, if you played guitar for years and years, you just, you know, you find a way to make music on.
Well, these guys are like this with motorcycles.
Okay.
Any motorcycle you put in, um, in their hands and they go, and immediately they're off climbing trees with them.
And it's very, it's very natural to them.
It's native.
They say, you know, and so they're giving, they've been giving me a lot of coaching over the last three years of being out in the forest with these motorcycles.
I'm not a, I didn't grow up.
Nobody gave me a dirt bike when I was 10.
You're not a native cycler.
No.
I mean, they gave me a set of encyclopedias.
I can barely drive that even now.
But, but so they are, they are doing this stuff on motorcycles.
And, and for a long time, it felt like,
That experience you have sometimes when you're talking to somebody and somebody that can do a standing back flip and you're like, wow, you can do a standing back flip.
And they go, yeah, it's easy.
You just do that.
And they explain how to do it.
And it's like, well, you explaining how to do a standing back flip to me.
isn't going to help me do a standing backflip.
I already would have to be so far, so different and so far close, so much closer to you.
It developed a completely different sense of feel.
I used to, back in my productivity days, I used to like the metaphor of what I call the old butcher, like the old guy at the butcher shop.
And it could be a gal, but it's a guy.
Um, who can just grab a pile of roast beef and know that it's exactly one and a quarter pounds.
And you'd be like, well, how do you know how to do that?
Well, I've been a butcher for 40 years.
Like, I know what roast beef feels like.
Right?
Same here.
You put this thing between your legs and this one's going papa, papa, papa.
You say, oh, this raccoon's not ready to climb a tree yet, but it might be soon.
Like, you get that, you get that steel horse going.
And like, I bet you there's a sense of feel that is very difficult to describe, let alone teach.
Yeah.
But the problem is that from within them, within the body of somebody that knows how to ride motorcycles this well, they're so good and natural at it that they've sort of lost the memory of the 10% that's furthest away from them, which is somebody that is on a motorcycle and can ride it, looks like they're riding it, but...
But isn't yet to the, you know, isn't yet into a place where going around a curve feels as natural as it does, you know, as it does to me moving a stump in a creek bed, for instance.
Or me taking a pretty tight turn on my Segway.
Like I've learned how to adjust my balance.
That's the kind of thing you can't teach.
It's the kind of thing you can't teach.
And we see it a lot on these trips because we're out on logging roads way up in the mountains.
And you're on these dirt roads that are just basically just clinging to the sides of cliffs of mountains where the only reason a road got built there was that people wanted the timber that was growing up there
And they, the only way they could get it out is by carving a road.
And yet the roads have, have symmetry.
They have constant, you know, the, the radiuses of the turns are, are, um, cause you're talking about, is this like the kind of thing I would have seen in the credits to, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be dim or funny, but like in the, in like, uh, I want to say like Northern exposure or, uh, Twin Peaks.
Is it that kind of like long ass long?
I mean, there are, there are long ass logs on like a long truck, right?
Yes, yes.
And I think we've discussed it on the show before that the craziest people in the universe are logging truck drivers.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And if you ever are- I thought it was roofers.
I would have guessed roofers.
No, not roofers.
I mean, they're nuts.
But roofers are all on crank, whereas loggers didn't used to be, at least.
Okay.
And logging truck drivers, I think, are on crank these days.
But if you're on the road at any point in time and you see a truck that's hauling logs, if you see a cab will repeat with a reefer on and a jimmy hauling hogs,
Oh, you're talking about 11 long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus you're talking about?
If you see any of those people, but particularly a logging truck, just stay away from the- Is there a funny CB name for a logging truck?
What do you call that?
Let's see.
Yes.
Well, no, you're just hauling your- Log hauls.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's see.
What's the lyrics?
There's got to be a funny name though, like Bear in the Air is a police helicopter.
There's got to be- Yeah.
I've got my CB mug over here that's got all the CB terms written on it, but I don't see anything for logging truck.
And I'm trying to see if I can detect with my eyes that they might be on crank, but they've got to navigate some crazy-ass roads.
But those roads, keep in mind that a long-ass truck is going to be on it, but I'm guessing there's not a huge amount of wiggle room.
Well, and these roads, there's nobody on because the logs are gone and nobody else would be on them besides adventure motorcycle riders because it's not like this road is the quickest way from here to there.
It's not like this road is easy for even a truck to go on.
A lot of them...
I have a lot of them fall apart halfway up and it's too late to turn back type of thing.
But what's interesting about the roads is after you've driven so many of them, you realize these roads were not built by the Army Corps of Engineers.
It's doubtful that these roads were even built by somebody with a pro tracker at a certain point on this trip.
I was talking to, because one of the guys on the trip this time is a civil engineer, like a mechanical engineer that works at an apple harvesting company.
That's so cool.
And he handles all their physical stuff.
It's one thing to say you want to grow and be a teacher, nurse, or cop.
How do you, this must have been such an interesting path.
I'm not trying to take you off, but that sounds like a learned person.
Absolutely.
Well, everybody on this group has got very interesting backstories, but he at some point said, oh, all of these, because I was remarking on the fact that, because on a motorcycle, what you want to do is you kind of go into a turn, you set a turn, and then you hope that the turn carries you through the corner.
You don't want halfway through the corner to have to adjust the nature of your turn.
You don't want to have to put on the brakes.
You don't want to have to increase your angle.
Ideally, right?
Especially if you're on gravel or wet gravel and it's on the edge of a cliff.
You want to go into a turn and you really, really hope that you can just pull that turn off because if you make adjustments.
That must feel so good when you nail it.
It's wonderful.
It's wonderful.
Yeah.
But you do it and you start to have an appreciation of these roads.
Where did these roads come from?
They're just up here in the middle of nowhere and they go and somehow they're holding season after season, snow and rain and wind.
And my motorcycle friends, you know, at one of these stops where, because they're very, all of them are very laconic.
They just kind of would, they just look down into their coffee cup and they go, well, bike's riding good.
I bet a couple of them say, yep.
They do.
They say, yep.
And so I'm standing there at the junction and I'm like, who were the men that built these roads?
And what was the air that they breathed?
And so somebody said, well, these roads were built by an old man with a bulldozer.
Or no, I'm sorry.
The actual quote was, these roads were built by an old man with a dozer.
And I was like, an old man with a dozer?
Man with a dozer.
And they're like, yeah, the reason these roads are so good is that there are old men with dozers who have built so many roads that they look at the land and they just doze it until it's a road.
And they don't pull out the, they don't have, they don't have a map.
They don't have a, they don't have
instruments they're not they're not doing it in any way other than this butcher that picks up start with a plat book civil engineering gps sky view they go with the dozer and make road where road needs being made if you've got a timber company i'm guessing what you have first is you send some fellas out there with the big boots and they march around and they look up at the trees and they go these seem like good trees let's get these trees
And there are people down in the office who are securing the rights to those trees by manipulating the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S.
government and doing deals.
You know, they're making deals.
But those guys go out.
And then what's the next thing?
I mean, the next thing is we got to go in and put some roads in here to get the people up there to cut these trees down and take them out.
Oh my God, you got to build the road before you build the road.
The old guy with the dozer is right up there at the very beginning of this process, has to be.
And so all these dozer roads and we're up there riding kind of, you know, around these corners pretty fast.
You really don't want the road to give way.
You don't want the corners to be crazy.
And it's a, in Oregon and in Washington and in California, these roads just, cause there's so many, you know, millions of acres of just undeveloped land in the West.
That's just like, well, I mean, you can't even really graze cows up here or goats.
All it is is trees and it's high up.
And what you can grow is motorcycle tours.
So back to the start.
I'm down in Portland.
I'm getting ready for this motorcycle tour.
We talked about it last week.
And I was anxious, Merlin.
I was scared.
It was raining.
It was cold.
I hadn't been on a motorcycle in two years.
Oh God.
I hadn't been sleeping.
I was, you know, I had this sleep deficit that was months old.
I was, you know, groggy.
Every muscle in my body hurts just when I like...
I'm sitting on the couch and I'm like, I should go to the bathroom.
Just being, just being.
I have to go to the potty, but it hurts so much to get from here and there.
It hurts.
It hurts to put my book down, you know?
Maybe you should have, maybe you should have your, uh, your daughter's mother, uh, fix it.
Harness to you when you want to have your reading time.
Well, you know, she, earlier this summer, she was like, we're going to play tennis.
And so we went out and, you know, I grew up playing tennis.
I gave myself tennis elbow, like the third weekend.
It's still plaguing me now.
Gotcha.
So that's totally understandable.
I mean, like, even if you, I'm not casting an aspersion, but I think we do share a certain amount of like self doubt in life or worry about how we'll perform in life.
If you've got that on top of the, like, if you've got, you've got your legit, according to Hoyle, I feel shitty about myself.
And then on top of that, you got the, I don't know, man, it's been a while since I tried to do a wet turn.
That's gotta be an anxiety producer.
Yeah.
Well, that and also the last time we got back from the motorcycle trip, I very definitely had a feeling like, okay, I survived that.
That was the second one.
We got caught in a snowstorm.
I went a whole week without really crashing, but there were lots of scary times.
I've done it now a couple of times.
I shouldn't do it again.
I'm 50 years old.
I shouldn't be trying to learn anything.
Adventure motorcycling.
There are other things I should be focusing on.
And I said that to myself when I got done with the last trip.
And that seemed to be, and that carried over to starting this next one.
Like, what am I doing?
And a lot of people that heard our episode last week sent me messages like, if I were you, I'm not the boss of you, but if I were you, I wouldn't do it.
And too, too, too, too risky to, um, you know, risk reward.
Right.
And I was, I mean, let's, let's say the thing, I bet you one of the things is I bet, I mean, I'm just going to guess, I'm going to put myself, if it were me on this trip, I would be thinking to myself, let's see, what are our main characters?
Our dramatis persona.
We got, we got Scott, Ben and Gregor plus whomever else.
You got these, uh, you know, these pipe thumping pros from Dover.
They're not going to be the one who falls off, gets near deadly road rash, and then has to be medevaced out.
It's not going to be one of them.
If you get that turn wrong because you're wet turn, that's, it sucks and you're going to be hurt, but also you're going to fuck up the trip for everybody, right?
Well, but here's the wonderful thing about adventure.
Slow them down, right?
The wonderful thing about adventure motorcycling is that any one of those ding-dongs could have been the one that got hurt and got medevaced out at any time.
Okay, good, good, good.
Because everybody's riding at the level of their, you know, right at the edge of the level of their incompetence.
It's like working in a dot-com.
Yeah.
Right.
It's like being in the U.S.
government.
Everybody here is operating.
Operating.
Everybody here is charged with doing something two and a half levels above anything they've ever succeeded at before.
But that makes sense.
You're going to push yourself a little bit.
You're going to push yourself.
And you're going to try some things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you can't be timid because then you fall off the motorcycle, right?
Exactly.
Right.
You have to be brave enough to, you can't choke in the middle of any of this because choking is just as bad as crashing.
And Scott and Gregor are going around these logging road turns in full slots, kicking up big rooster tails of mud and, you know, and spit in things where they can't see around the corner.
Like, what the hell?
There could be a Sasquatch.
There could be a chicken in the road.
I mean, there aren't, you know, there aren't.
Everybody makes it, right?
But your mind's going to wonder.
He's got to get to the other side.
And this has been well-dozered, but I don't want to die killing a chicken.
The thing is, the other side here, there's nothing for a chicken.
There's nothing for a chicken anywhere up above 4,000 feet.
So you reject the premise of the joke.
Sorry, I have to start all over.
We'll take the chicken joke out.
Okay, listen.
There's a river.
You got a boat.
You got a chicken.
You got a bag of grain.
And you got a guy named Gregor.
And you got to get him across.
And a rabbi and a minister.
And when there's one parachute, and then you got this guy over here, he says, we got no... Okay, sorry.
So the night before, I'm sitting in Portland.
I'm sitting at Ben King's architecture offices there at STEM Architecture.
And I'm saying to myself, as I try and sleep on this...
bear cot that's got a Pendleton blanket on it that apparently had a sheet under it, but I didn't notice there was a sheet.
So I just slept on top of this Pendleton blanket trying to sleep and failing.
I said, it's pouring down rain.
I'm 53 years old.
Everybody that listens to the podcast that is over on my Patreon site is writing me, telling me not to do it.
What am I doing?
And I had that moment where I was like, maybe I should, I've only ever had one premonition where I woke up in the morning and said, today's the day that I die.
And it was in, it was on my walk across Europe.
It was in the Carpathian Mountains and I woke up and I was just like, I, today I die.
I die today.
Just a feeling, a feeling of like a kind of, not just idle wondering, but a feeling of near certainty about.
Absolute certainty.
Like I'm going into these untracked mountains.
I have no idea how I'm going to get up the other side and somewhere along the way I'm going to fall to my death.
And I spent the whole day with a kind of
Just sort of matter-of-fact contemplation of the fact that I'd woken up that day convinced I was going to die, and I was, of course, going to try not to die, but also there was an inevitability about it that turning around wasn't going to affect.
And in the course of that day, it was not necessarily a day that I couldn't have died multiple times.
It was a crazy, crazy, crazy day.
And each time that it looked like I was going to die, I didn't.
Like I put my foot out into the abyss and there was a rock there and the foot held and the rock held.
And by the end of the day, I was like, I was supposed to die today and didn't.
Wow.
What a day.
That's in contrast to a few of these days where at the beginning of the day, I said, I should call today off.
And not a usual one, like I'm going to stay in bed.
But like a, this is a big day.
It's all happening today.
It all hinges on today.
And I should get out of this.
I got to get out of this.
You know, the first anxiety attack I ever remember happening was I was sitting in row...
2040 on a Lufthansa 747 that was flying from Seattle to Frankfurt.
And it was completely full.
And this was back in the day where I was like, wow, I could save $20 if I was on a middle seat by the toilets?
I want to save $20.
And I was sitting next to this girl that was coming down off of some drug and was like fritzing and like spazzing and sweating and
And I'm way in the back of the plane on the taxiway and I start to freak.
And I, at that point I'd never freaked on a plane before.
Yeah.
And, and I'm like, I'm freaking now.
Like this isn't, I got to get off.
Apparently airplanes are pretty common for that.
There's a really good book I read about anxiety last year.
And he talks in particular about one of his patients.
I don't want to trigger anybody here, but.
who was on a flight, and she went from that, you know what I mean?
There's that junction, if you're having the wrong day, you make that leap from, huh, to, oh, I'm going to have a heart attack and die, and it's going to be really embarrassing, and people will try to help me, but they won't be able to help me.
And looking down this fart tube full of long pigs, all I can think about is that this will, as Don McLean said, be the day that I die.
And like a certainty that you feel on the most physical level, I think that's pretty normal.
And in a middle seat, John, gross.
Well, and the thing about airplanes and the thing about this event, it was one of those that kind of...
Without going too deep into this, it kind of taught me about the relativity of mental illness in the sense that an airplane is an extremely stressful environment for everyone.
And we pretend it isn't because we need it.
We need to get from here to there in this airplane.
And so there are people, myself included, who will sit in my own comfortable house.
And the fact that there's somebody using a leaf blower five blocks over, there are times in my life where I'll sit on my couch and go, this is intolerable.
I can't live another minute.
But I will get on an airplane, which sounds like someone is pointing a shop vac at my face for seven hours, and I'll endure it.
Because I need it.
And I'm claustrophobic and I don't want to be around people.
I don't want to be stuck in a place.
You don't want to see people putting their feet up on the bulkhead.
I can be made claustrophobic by just somebody walking across the sidewalk in front of me, but I will get in a tube and be pushed up against people I would not choose.
I've never met.
You cannot choose who you sit next to on a plane.
It's a perfectly democratic environment for the most part.
And so each one of these things, and I know there are people that, I mean, I sat next to Jesse Sykes one time on an airplane where she literally cried for five hours because she couldn't be on the plane.
Poor kid.
But she was on the plane and did it, right?
She survived it because she needed to.
The courage they say is having the fear and doing it anyway.
Right.
And so the, the, the airplane is the thing that, that relativizes these phobias and these anxieties we have because under any other circumstances, even one of the conditions of being on an airplane could be found utterly intolerable.
But most of us find a way to suffer six to 10 hours to fly, you know, anywhere interesting and
in an environment where there are six to ten of these factors cranked
And somehow we master them.
And I sat in the back of that Lufthansa and I was like, the problem with this is if I pull the bell, if I go up and pull the bell, this is my stop.
The orange button with the lady and address on it?
Yeah.
There are.
Oh, you're saying, you're saying like, you say, oh, no, call it off.
I'm out of here.
I'm out.
Yeah.
There are 600 people on this 747 that are ready to take off.
And who, whatever, uh, whatever flight attendant comes running back to deal with me is not going to be impressed that I went off this plane.
They're going to say, what's the matter?
And I'm going to say, I just have to get off.
And they're going to go, look, I've seen this before and they're going to give me a lollipop, but they, but in order for me to actually get off this plane, it would require me creating an incident that may, that meant that I went to jail.
And, and if I went to jail and was in the newspaper.
And so I've got to get my shit together in a way that, that other anxiety attacks I've had where there were not those conditions.
I wasn't, I didn't, there was not a thing that said, you need to get your shit together because the chain of events that you're going to, you know, like the chain of events, if you're sitting in your house in the middle of the night, having an anxiety attack are just that it gets worse and worse.
Right.
But on an airplane, you better get your shit together because there's no path to you other than, there's no path other than get your shit together.
And that is what, you know, that's what makes those environments so fucking, so fucking, woo!
Yeah, right.
But so I'm sitting in Ben King's apartment and I'm like, I'm ready to stop.
I'm ready to call this off.
And it's not quite like being in the back of a Lufthansa.
But the chain of events that that would, you know, it's just like, well, now everything changes, right?
The motorcycle trip, they're all out front going, and I'm going, should a 53-year-old be on a motorcycle trip?
You know, it's like not the time for this.
And Ben is a laconic cowboy, and he's no stranger to anxiety, but he says, well...
You know, once you're on the motorcycle, then it'll feel differently.
And if you still don't want to do it, then you can stop.
And once we're 50 miles up the road, if you don't want to do it, you can turn around.
There are way worse ways he could handle that.
Yeah, and that's just... That's really, that's super reasonable.
Because if you come back at that with, no, seriously, it's all I can do not to just vomit, cry, and be in a ball right now.
But he's giving you the opportunity to say, hey, look, you know,
Well, let's see if you can just, I don't know, I hate to use phrases like tough it out.
But like once you get on the road, you get those jitters might go away and you can always change your mind later.
Yeah.
And then he does the thing that he's so good at, which is he comes over and he says, well, there's two pairs of gloves you can use.
These are these.
And now you've got a problem to solve.
You don't ask your kid whether they want to go to bed.
You ask your kid which jammies they want.
Which jammies do you want, right?
And that's what he says to me.
Which jammies do you want?
And I go, I don't know.
Maybe these.
And he's got me in motion.
I get on the motorcycle.
I'm terrified.
And we get on the wet...
Roads of Portland and every, you know, you know, I love Portland.
It's a wonderful town, but everybody in that town is a fucking idiot.
And that's one of the things that makes it such a great town.
Cause if you put 300,000 idiots in a town, you know, it can't help, but be interesting and fun.
Interesting things will happen, just as the law of large numbers or large numbers of idiots in any case.
Yeah, they're really bad drivers.
They're really bad.
I mean, I guess they make good beer and the food is pretty emotional.
Aren't people pretty emotional there?
Oh, now they are.
They didn't used to be.
They used to be more laconic, right?
It was just all strip clubs and keeping opinions to yourself, right?
The thing, it was a lot of lumberjacks that paid for a house for their mother to live.
You know, it was a town and there were punk rockers and they were hippies and they got along pretty well.
And now who knows what's there.
It's everybody's, you know, it's like the same $50 people are, you know, making dream catchers and fucking homemade sausage.
But they can't drive, and I'm in the road.
Same $20 bill, it just keeps getting passed around.
I'm just like, you know, and the $20 bill smells so much like patchouli now.
You can't get it off your skin.
Oh, no, that's a shame.
But we get off, and we get off onto the road, and everybody's a good motorcyclist, and I'm just there like, and we go over Mount Hood, and the snow starts again.
I'm like, it's snowing.
Of course it's snowing.
And then I remember I forgot my medication.
And I have to stop at a pharmacy in Madras and get some millennial pharmacist who thinks that she makes a phone call one time and nobody answers and her job is done for the day.
And I'm like, you know what?
Nobody answers.
It's because the people at the other end are doing something.
And you call them back.
You call them until they answer.
And she's like, you know, nobody ever...
I never got a bad grade in school, so nobody ever told me that I have to try twice.
And then I stood there in front of her and called.
My mom still does that.
If my mom has to deal with any bureaucracy, she acts like it's 1971.
She calls and leaves a very long, polite message, and then nothing.
She just waits for weeks and weeks and weeks.
She's sweet.
Because there's a 35-year-old on the other end that listens to one-third of the message and goes, too long, didn't read.
They had too much work to do before you ever made a phone call.
And so I sit there right in front of this gal and I call until the person at the other end answers.
And I'm like, Hey, in this case, like getting approval for an emergency prescription.
Oh, well, you know, I've got, I could make it, I could text on my phone right now.
And it would probably, if I had the right text information, it could change the direction of a satellite orbiting the earth from my phone.
But a pharmacist has to fax.
of a prescription from one pharmacy to the next and that can take between an hour and 15 days and it has to happen via fax because as you know faxes are much more official absolutely and so it's considered a legal instrument it's a legal instrument so i get a different pharmacist on the phone and they say we're very busy here
And I say, you know, look, I know COVID and times are tough all over.
It's really hard to get microchips now.
And that is, that's stirring up the supply chain.
But what I'm doing is I'm at a pharmacy in Madras and this pharmacist doesn't have enough to do.
She's surfing the internet.
All she needs is you to fax my prescription and
And the pharmacist on the other end is like, well, I got a bunch of old ladies here trying to get their Metamucil prescription updated.
And I'm like, look, I know it's times are tough all over.
You know, like Donald Trump was president for four years.
We survived.
Just take three minutes.
And they're like, I'll see what I can do.
I'll try and get it done by the end of the day.
Click.
And my motorcycle buddies are out in the parking lot and they're like, well, we got to get to the campsite.
And I'm like, you guys go on ahead.
I'll catch you.
I'm not even sure.
I should probably just turn back and go home.
This is, this is God saying today's the day that you die.
Even if you don't feel it.
I finally, at one point I called my mom and I said, can you walk down to the pharmacy, get in line behind all the other old ladies.
And when it's your turn up to the window,
Can you say, I would like to use my turn to get you to go over to the fax machine and fax my son in Madras, Oregon.
Your mother offers herself as tribute.
And she was like, hmm, I think I could do that.
You know, it's only five minutes to the pharmacy.
Eventually, the pharmacist in Oregon faxed the thing to the pharmacist in Madras.
Nobody, there's no blood on the floor.
Everybody got what they needed.
I was a little late getting to the campground.
And by the time I got to the campground, I was in the rhythm.
The motorcycle felt natural again.
I was riding it on dirt roads.
I was riding it on dirt roads in the night.
These are things that in past motorcycle trips had been terrifying, and now they were only mildly terrifying.
And over the course of the next eight days, we got more and more into these radical environments.
We're sleeping out, lightened fires.
We're in little forest cabins.
We're staying in those hotels that are on the side of the road that are like, hotel built in 1860, plumbing last maintained in 1874.
You know, the rooms, it's like that hotel that you stayed in in Portland where it's like, not only is there no TV, you couldn't get a TV into this space.
The door is too small.
We feel like the doors really are a terrible downside of late capitalism.
We went down to the Alvord Desert.
This is the same day.
It's day one, but you've been like, well, this is after sunset.
You're going somewhere for the night.
Oh, it was one thing after another.
That first day, three of the motorcycles broke, but somehow Ben King managed to fix one of them.
Then he fixed another one, and then the third one.
It turned out that it was a problem that...
was only obvious to Ben King.
One of those things where he, the motorcycle was 50 miles away and Ben just sort of diagnosed it.
And all of it, you know, these guys never take credit for how smart they are, right?
They just say, he's like, hmm, well, maybe it was the, maybe it was the petcock.
Did it occur to you it was the petcock?
And the other guy goes.
That never would have occurred to me.
Huh.
And he's like, the thing is, the bike's got two petcocks.
So you thought, you thought the one petcock was open and it was, but it was the other petcock that was closed.
Yeah.
And he just, he thinks it up.
Right.
And so the other guys are like, Hmm.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
And all of a sudden, all of the things, all the crazy things, the motorcycle was doing that were like, well, that means that, you know, that the rings are bad or that it's thrown up, uh,
um turbo can you throw a rod is that something i suppose you could no but all of a sudden it's not the turbo encabulator it's just that there was a petcock under the seat that was off and okay and so and nobody you know there's there's like a little bit of a high five like oh yeah nice job but it's all understood that it's just in the service of the larger these guys are getting blue ribbons and they're like not even making a big deal about it
No, there's just one blue ribbon that keeps getting passed around.
It's like the $20.
Yes.
Except it's just like, well, you solve that problem and I'll solve the next problem.
Except for your version of that is I was able to get my mom, got me my prescription and I didn't fall down, go boo.
Well, yeah.
And I'm just like, you know, and I'm there with my Napoleon hat on and my big epaulets.
And it's like, you know, what am I contributing?
You guys never really look at your hands.
Every 20 minutes, I say something kind of mildly humorous and everybody chuckles.
And that's my job in this seven-man crew.
But over the course of the week, I got better and better at motorcycling.
And I realized an important thing, which was that all these motorcycles...
are set up, and this seems small, but they're all set up for someone who is 5'7 1⁄2 and weighs 170 pounds.
Hmm.
And I am 6'3 and weigh 245 pounds.
Hmm.
And because everyone else on the trip is five foot seven and a half and weighs 170 pounds, it just seems to them, it's like every guitar is built for Angus Young.
And then every once in a while you get a Zach Wild.
And Zach Wild and Angus Young are playing the same guitars.
But it is a very, you know, Jimi Hendrix has very big hands.
And a Stratocaster in Jimi Hendrix's hands is a different instrument than a Stratocaster in mine or in a small-handed man.
And these motorcycles are just, they're all wonderful motorcycles.
They're just not set up for me.
And none of the other dudes would really notice it.
Because they're all set up for them.
You know, they get on it and like, let me test it out.
No, seems to work fine.
And then I get on it and it's like you put a praying mantis on a little bicycle designed for an ant circus.
And the praying mantis is like, it doesn't work.
And then an ant gets on it and is like, works fine.
Yeah.
And so for the last three years, I've been on these logging roads and everybody's kind of zipping around them.
And on one side, you fall to eternity.
You fall down into the John Day River and it takes you out to the Columbia.
And then they find you in the Pacific somewhere floating around with a bunch of Nike tennis shoes.
Or you stay on the road somehow.
And I've managed to stay on the road on these motorcycles where I'm not on them properly.
My center of gravity is almost impossible to find because the handlebars are here and they need to be here.
The foot pegs are there and they need to be over here.
And it's a problem.
Like, I'm coasting here.
Everybody else is on their own motorcycle.
Right?
And Ben King is letting me ride the motorcycle of his father, set up for his father, who is a leprechaun.
Like Ben King's father literally has a pot of gold and lives at the end of a rainbow.
And so I'm so glad to, you know, it's one of these, like, I'm so grateful to be invited and to be given this motorcycle to ride.
Yeah.
But it's kind of invisible to them or, and to Ben, that this is a thing that like the, the small things that we can do, the little shims that we can put in to make things bigger aren't enough.
I need a custom motorcycle.
I'm like Shaquille O'Neal.
I gotta have, I gotta have, uh, that guy that was married to America's sweetheart with that had tattoos on his knuckles.
I need him to make me a, uh, uh, like a motorcycle that's 10% bigger.
Hmm.
But I got to the end of this trip and I had done, I went across some line where I've done enough adventure motorcycling that instead of coming to the end of this trip and saying, I've done it now, I'm dumb to have even done this, I need out.
I can mark this off as a thing I did and I should go back to
aging gracefully and, and knitting and going to PTA meetings.
Now I'm like, what I want now is actually a motorcycle that fits me.
And I want to do this again and do it.
I want to do it now.
I want to get on these things and have them fit me properly and do the things that I know I can do because I get on the motorcycle and it's like, Oh shit, I can do this.
I actually know how to do this.
And the thing that makes it scary is that the tool doesn't belong to me.
It's not my tool.
I need my own tool now.
And I do feel the confidence that I'm not going to do anything like this.
You get on a motorcycle and you're just one drunk truck driver away from eternity.
Yeah, like even if you're the best.
You're the best.
Right.
You still, things are going to happen.
There's going to be stuff you cannot anticipate.
Even the best is sometimes there's going to be a old man with a dozer that made a shitty road one day and you're going to go straight off.
I wasn't going to say it.
Right.
Because how many old men with, I mean, they're not all geniuses.
There's got to be a man with a dozer that all the guys on the timber company are like, God, he should have retired.
Yeah, absolutely.
That guy should not be behind the wheel.
But you know, there's a chip shortage right now and we got to use this guy.
Chip shortage.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So, so, so, but I came back from the trip and it felt like something clicked at a certain point.
I was struggling, you know, the bike threw me off at one point and it bruised me kind of hard, but you know, that happened and I'm limping around.
And I'm like, I gotta, you know, what I should do is learn to play basketball.
And somebody says, you need to do yoga.
Like, stop pretending you don't need to do yoga.
It's the only thing.
It's a guy your age.
You don't need to.
I lost up the thread there.
Specifically with regard to motorcycle things or just in general?
In general.
Okay.
You don't need weight training.
Because you would benefit from either your motorcycle boy, your stuff would get better because of the balance and stuff.
But also this might improve your, what, your flexibility?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That kind of stuff.
Yeah.
You know, one of the things that had me scared was that, you know, that, that putting my book down and going to the potty, which now that I'm 53 years old, I need to do six to 16 times a day.
Yep.
Every time I put the book down, I was like, oh, I got to get the book over all the way to the coffee table.
You know, one of the, one of the guys was like, oh, you know, here's how you lace up your logging boots, logging boot style, which is this thing where you have these tall logging boots and you can, you can lace it up two at a time, logger, logger style.
And they were like, you know, here's logger style.
How do you, how do you not know this already?
And I started, I bent over to do logging style.
And I was like, the problem is you got to bend over and hold, you got to hold a bend.
And so it's another one of these, here's how you do a backflip.
Oh, there you go.
You know, where they're on a hundred CC motorcycle and they're climbing a tree and they put me on a Honda Goldwing from 1978 and said, follow me.
And so realizing like, I can't even get my boots laced without singing a song of mourn, like a mournful whale.
Yeah.
And, and, and they're like, you need to go.
Sounds like coyotes on the carcass of a dead horse.
And, and I realized, oh, I need to do yoga.
And I, and, and I got back from the motorcycle trip, you know, on the, on another channel, a friend of ours is helping me make sense of the notes of my book.
I interviewed my mom for the first episode of a podcast I'm going to do where my mom talks about being a woman computer programmer in the 60s.
I love that.
I've got all this stuff going on.
And there was just a clear headedness.
Because that's the other thing about motorcycles.
You can't get distracted.
Right.
by thinking about what you should have said to that guy that came into the newsstand in 1994.
Oh, I, I totally believe that total phrase gets overused, but I do like it situational awareness.
Like you can't, you can't sleep on that.
Yeah.
You got to focus.
I mean, just, just taking in all the Trump flags in Eastern Oregon takes up 40% of your brain.
Yeah.
Just taking in all the billboards that say the election.
We don't have any of that here.
We went up to wine country.
last weekend and uh for my wife's birthday and oh my god and i realize i live in such a goddamn bubble but like i'm like fully craning my neck around as we drive by i'm like really it's an actual flag you have a flag of donald trump yeah there was a great flag that was that was flying out in front of a house in one of these little oregon towns where everybody is you know everybody in the town is like
Well, we might secede from the union.
If you give us half a reason, it's like you're a hundred person town.
It's fucking Steens Mountain, Oregon is going to secede from the union.
I will personally come with an air.
I'll, I'll rent a Cessna one 50 and I'll drop a great truck out.
Help them move.
Fuck.
Yeah.
But there's a big flag flying.
That was like Trump lost.
Lol.
And it was just like Trump last law.
You know, I don't love that, that, that law, but I'm going to allow that.
That's pretty funny.
The law was really what that was.
Took a picture.
All these great photographers were like, let me check the F stop on this.
Cause I don't want to miss it.
But I do.
You're hearing in my voice, a certain kind of momentary feeling of, and hopefully it's not momentary feeling of energy.
Where I don't believe that adventure motorcycling is my calling, but I had a victory...
in a place where it was very easy for me to look at these trips and do the thing I usually do, which is anybody else would call this a victory.
It was an amazing eight-day trip into the wilderness on a giant off-road bike, and I survived it, and I had these great experiences around the campfire with all these guys and this wonderful cultural experience, but I could still pull...
defeat from the jaws of victory by saying, man, I was never comfortable on the bike.
I, you know, I was always sketchy and anxious and, but, but something happened on this trip where it really did feel like a, like a victory and it's positioned me.
I feel like come back and, and just look at everything with a, just,
Not a different perspective like I almost died and now life is precious in the Bible.
Nice pull.
Specifically, locate that for me if you can without crushing the bunny.
What was the, I mean, is it just a general sense of well-being that you pulled it off?
Is there a specific thing you could attach, a specific feeling or a specific moment where you look back and go, yeah, that went okay?
There was a nadir.
I was on... When you're waiting for your mommy to get you your drugs.
I was waiting for mommy to get me my drugs, and the millennial pharmacist wouldn't look up from her game solitaire.
No, it was deep into the trip.
We were deep into a canyon.
We were going down this rocky, sketchy road that was, again, carved onto the side of a cliff.
And I could not find my center of balance on the motorcycle.
And what that meant was...
Every time the front tire went into a hole, the bike pitched me forward, and my hand on the throttle turned the throttle off.
On a motorcycle, you push the throttle forward to go off, and you pull it back to go on.
So the bike would hit a bump, a hole.
I would get pitched forward, and I would turn the power off, which meant that the bike pitched nose forward even more.
And then it bounces back because it has an off-road suspension.
It throws me back.
And then my hand pulls the throttle on.
And the bike lurches forward.
And then I do not want the throttle on because I'm on a freaking sketchy cliff.
And so I turn the throttle off, pitching me forward again, repeating the process.
So the motorcycle is bucking and I'm trying so hard to, you know, to keep my balance back, to keep that, that, that steady symbiotic place.
And I'm just not able to get it.
And I'm on this cliff.
And it feels like all that's going to have to happen is that I rev that motor one time pointed in the wrong direction.
Because the motorcycle does all kinds of things.
You put the gas on, the motorcycle stands up and sits upright.
Well, if you're going around a corner, you don't want that.
You want to be leaned over.
All of a sudden, I'm going to give it power.
The bike's going to stand up.
I'm going to go straight off a cliff.
And I'm upset.
I'm furious at it because I know at this point it's because the motorcycle and I don't fit together.
And the other guys are like, come on, let's charge up this hill, you know, because they're all A, great at motorcycling and B, the motorcycles fit them.
And to use your words, that's their tool.
That's their tool.
So they can do amazing things, incredible things.
And I feel like the gimp.
I feel like the one that, as you said, I'm slowing them down.
I'm holding them back, but also I'm having a bad time and a scared time.
And I get to the bottom of this hill and I'm exhausted and I'm angry, but there's no one to be angry at.
I'm on a fucking free motorcycle trip and everything's being taken care of.
And when I cry, Ben King somehow wipes my tears away and I didn't even know he was there.
He wipes my tears away with a rag he invented that somehow crawls over and wipes my tears away and doesn't ask for credit.
My goodness.
I'm like, who am I supposed to be mad at?
I'm not mad at anybody.
I'm just mad.
I'm frustrated and mad.
And at one point, the engineer from the Apple Orchard says, hey, why don't you ride Scott's bike?
Because Scott's riding a dirt bike.
It's not an adventure bike.
It's just a straight up dirt bike.
And I said, I'm not good at this.
If I ride a dirt bike, I'm going to fly off the edge.
And he goes, just try it.
It's a smaller bike.
It's easier to ride.
And Scott's like, absolutely, ride my bike.
And I get on this little dirt bike, which is like something you'd give a 10 year old.
It's not.
It's like something that you would give a 25 year old who had ridden a motorcycle since they were 10.
And I'm like... And I'm like, this is insane.
I'm going to kill myself.
And they're like, just try it.
Because it's not as large and heavy duty?
It's not as large and heavy duty.
It's kind of... It's anxiously built.
It's built to go fast in the dirt.
It's built for people that are agile.
It's an agile motorcycle, but it's kind of...
It's hyperventilating.
You know, the big bikes are like... And you go over these big obstacles, and this little bike is like... It's much more of a dragonfly.
Well, I get on the bike, and off we go, and everybody's like... Around these obstacles.
And I'm kind of in the middle of the pack...
But the guys were right.
I'm a lot bigger on this bike and it feels like my Vespa.
It feels like the Vespa that I rode for decades.
Oh, interesting.
It's small and I know how to control it because I rode my Vespa in all conditions.
And so all of a sudden I'm on this little guy and I'm like, out of my way, you guys.
And I go around them.
And just tear off.
And on this thing, I can do no wrong.
It's not sized for me.
It's too small like everything else.
But the ratio of my size to the power of the machine.
Yeah, totally.
I told you, I've been, I mean, I wasn't gonna bring this up because it's incredibly not appropriate to what you're talking about.
But like, I've been testing out having a different electric kick scooter.
And it's on the one hand, it's incredibly more powerful than what I'm used to, but it's also very sensitive.
And like this kid, it's pretty, you can pretty quickly get to 16 miles an hour, like really fast with it, but it's really uncomfortable.
And like, you just, you know, like I say, bone rattling, you know, to ride on it.
It's not fun.
And I, I know that sounds like it's not at all relevant, but I get it.
I get it.
I'm going to, I'm not going to keep, uh,
basically leasing this thing because it's not fun.
I want my little mini bike.
I want to like feel like I've got this thing under me and I understand how it works.
And I don't want to have to like think all the time about whether, you know, I can't even, because it's got handles, right?
So like, how am I going to do like a turn signal?
And it's like, it's all just been so stressful and not fun.
And when I get up to 60 miles per hour with all the engines turned all the way on, I'm like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.
And it's like on my little cruddy one that goes way less than that speed, I can get my metaphorical hands around it.
And it's a ton more fun to actually move around on.
I think that that absolutely makes sense.
I mean, think about like a pool cue, right?
You think of a pool cue.
You can think of a fucking lawnmower.
There's all kinds of things where just getting the big one is not always going to be good.
You need the one that's going to work for you.
Think about bowling balls of all things.
Like you need the one that works for your body.
Exactly in every one of those cases, right?
I mean, they all, they assume that I'm a big guy and so I should have the big motorcycle.
And, you know, when you go horseback riding and the lady at the horseback riding place says, you weigh 245 pounds?
Well, there's not a horse here for you, except for Old Paint.
And Old Paint is a Clydesdale.
He's real sturdy-like.
He used to pull the beer wagon, and now he's out to pasture, but he might be able to hold you.
In that case, yeah, you need the big one, and Old Paint's going to go slow, and he's going to be ornery.
But in the case of a motorcycle, well, I got on this 500, and
And I kicked up a rooster tail like you wouldn't believe.
And I was gone.
I was gone.
I went over this mountain and down the other side.
And I was going around corners with the back tires kicking out, spitting up dirt.
And I knew exactly what I was doing.
And I just gave him more power.
I went through those six gears.
I went up and down.
I passed every old man with a dozer in the county.
Okay.
And I got to the end of the road, turned off the bike, took off my helmet and my jacket, went across the road and sat down on a rock and thought, what the fuck?
You know, my head was burning like the sun.
And then amazingly, over in the fields...
I see the head of a white dog poking over the, over the, uh, it had just been harvest time.
And so there were, it was a bunch of like harvested wheat.
Here's this white dog.
And then he disappears and then he shows up 20 feet closer to me.
And I'm like, oh, come here, boy.
It's like a white, um, what would it be?
Like a husky or a samoyed or something like that?
Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a cross between a, between a golden retriever and a husky or something like that.
You know, it's a friendly dog, white dog.
That sounds like a good boy.
Friendly face, very good boy.
And then he disappears again.
And then he shows up over to the left here.
He's, he's, uh, he's a little closer to me and he's watching me and then he disappears and he shows up over to the right.
And so I start to call to him, you know, hey, buddy, come here.
And he steps forward.
He's still across the street from me, or across the trail.
I'm like, come on over here.
And he kind of comes down.
He's got a friendly face, but he's very timid.
And I see he's got a collar on, but it's tattered.
It's like ragged.
And the dog is ragged.
And so I call him and he kind of, then he walks back and then he comes forward and then he comes forward a little more.
And I'm sitting there and I'm feeling like I understand everything now.
I understand motorcycles.
I understand what I'm doing out here.
I understand that it matters what size your bike is.
I want to live like this.
I want to be on a motorcycle where I'm the competent one and I'm the good one.
And not the one that's bringing up the rear, you know, bucking this giant bike, but like a guy on a stupid little motorcycle that's making a bunch of noise.
And the white dog agrees.
God, that must have been a great moment.
He comes halfway across the street.
And I get my, get down, I got my hand out and he gets his muzzle just, you know, he's smelling me and he's about, he's about, his nose about two feet from my hand.
And then in the distance, you hear, and it's the, it's Gregor.
who's finally caught up to me.
Gregor, the greatest motorcyclist alive, or, you know, Scott is, you know, the greatest motorcyclist alive, and Gregor is also... You're there just chilling with a dog.
I've been here for 20 minutes.
Whoa.
I made myself an ice cream sundae, and this dog and I are about to touch.
And then you hear Gregor.
And the noise of Gregor's motorcycle still weighs off.
The dog goes, fuck this, and turns and goes back into the bushes.
And Gregor rolls up and turns off his bike, and he goes, what happened to you?
I was hauling ass trying to catch you, and you were just gone.
And I was like, well, you know, this motorcycle is a real different thing, but look at the white dog.
And the white dog pops its head up, and so Gregor and I get down, and we're like, come here, puppy, come here.
And the dog comes out, and the dog's about to touch, you know, comes all the way across the street, now he's into it, and then
and it's scott coming around the corner on his motorcycle and eventually the whole gang gets there and the dog is freaked out by the noise and runs off that's a lot to ask of a dog just moseying around and he watches us from the bushes and i can't get him to come back out and i'm like well whatever that was whatever touching the white dog was i didn't do i didn't get the i didn't get the blessing of the white dog but boy i got close
Damn.
But I thought it had a good title and now I got to change it.
What's the name?
White dog?
Fuck.
Damn.
I was going to go with MacBook weekly, but now it seems a little self-involved.
Fuck you, man.
Let me spit coffee and give me a white dog.