Ep. 553: "The Behold Swish"
Hello?
Okay.
No, you go.
Okay.
I think... I think that...
I think the time has come for us to develop some kind of an in-band signal.
Who, you and me?
Yeah.
I mean, is that okay?
In-band signal.
We need a plastic of potatoes.
So, like, you come up, and you always come up, as you know, you're muted.
Okay.
Right.
And then there's a variety of different kinds of noises I make when I first turn on a microphone that I'd be happy to share with you right now.
Yeah, what are some of those?
Okay.
The one that I use the most is, gosh, what do I say?
I think I say, something like that.
Or something like that.
But then with you, when you first show up, I just want to hail you in band.
Because in-band, I learned this term from John Syracuse.
So if there's metadata or control information inside the signal, that's in-band.
If it's outside the signal, like us in a text message, that's different.
I'm trying to give you an in-band message that will not interfere with the natural dynamics of our program that have developed over these years.
So sometimes I see you and he'll come up and I see my little blue guy and I see you don't have an icon I can send you a blue guy if you want one, but it's me Should I get an icon?
Yes.
What does it say?
What am I?
Does it just say John Roderick?
I'll send it to you, but what I'll do is I'll do this I'll make this nice.
I'll just go Just to like let you know that yeah, I am here But then to me and we've never talked about this If there's one thing you know about this show.
Yeah
It's whatever's in it is in it.
And that means in band.
And so to me, when I go, that's your, that's your, you can take a minute, make sure you got your coffee, everything set up.
And then you would say, what do you say?
What's your first line?
You say, hello is your line, right?
Hello.
Right.
And then I say, I say, hi, John, in a jovial way.
And then sometimes you respond a little bit like a Muppet, which I like.
Hey, Merlin.
Telephone, telephone.
Wait a minute.
Now I'm on create your avatar and under settings, but it says sign in now to use avatars in your meeting.
But how could I be more signed in than this?
Well, again, I don't want to mention his name twice, but we've had an argument, me and the other guy, about icon versus avatar.
Now, I don't want you to have to go to somewhere to generate like an AI avatar, which I just realized sounds a lot like abattoir.
Abattoir.
Yeah.
It does.
Abattoir, avatar, icon, by icon.
I've never looked at this.
I've never looked at this.
Just tell me when we join you.
Where are you?
Oh, wait.
It says here, John Roderick raised hand.
John Roderick raised hand.
I'll send you that too.
I didn't send you the first one because I was busy talking to you.
Here you go.
Are you going to answer me here or what?
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
No, I'm going to lower my hand.
Oh, so wait, hang on.
Okay.
Well, you're in.
Okay.
Now I'm going to send you a ta-da.
Oh, look at that.
You made something.
It looks kind of like a handwich, like a Disney World handwich.
There was a while there in LA where it seemed like everybody was eating those pokey rolls, like a hand-rolled...
Fish, fish roll.
Fish roll, hand roll, pokey.
You're not in the text chat yet.
I'm going to say any hot chicks in here.
I've used that joke before.
I've used that joke before with you and Jason, but any hot chicks in here?
Oh, there it is.
And you can raise your hand.
Where do you do that?
There's text format.
You can send an emoji.
I can send you heart eyes emoji.
There's an option here for AI companion.
Ask admin to enable AI companion.
I can do that.
Use AI companion to ask questions, catch up on meetings and more.
Okay.
Now it says here, John Roderick, one word is requesting meeting questions and I'm going to, I'm going to enable it.
Okay.
Now I will ask any hot chicks in here, and we'll see what AI says.
Not much has happened since AI Companion was turned on.
Try again in a few minutes.
You know what that is?
It's called the knowledge cutoff.
It has no way of knowing whether there were hot chicks in our chat room.
Just to be clear, our chat room is me and you.
You don't even have an icon or an avatar, as John says.
Right.
I don't even see that.
All I see is that you gave me one of the emoticons that has two hearts for eyes.
I did do that.
Any hot chicks in here, heart eyes emoticon.
Does that mean I love you?
I think it means my face loves you.
My face loves you, John.
But, you know, the thing is, and again, this is where we get into metonymy and synecdoche and whatever's in the show, is that, you know, it's like Gogol's the nose.
You know what I'm talking about?
Or Emile Zola.
Gogol's the nose or Emile Zola in the way that he treats the crowd as kind of like a group consciousness.
Yeah.
Emile Zola.
Yeah, the group consciousness of the crowd.
So, I don't know if there's any hot chicks.
Did you think?
Okay, so where are you in creating a... You know what?
Let's do this.
Let it begin with me.
Okay.
We'll start the show in a minute.
I'll make a sound in a while.
But for now, let me join you because you know what I'll do?
I'll replace my blue man.
Oh, my God.
Thank you so much.
In, as they say on MSNBC, real time.
All right.
Yeah.
Now that's a word, you know, you know who caused a lot of- You know, your blue man has scared me this entire time.
No, it hasn't.
Very scary.
It's very scary.
You love graphic novels.
No, but I said to you from the very beginning, I was like, ah.
Yeah, but I don't know if I can trust that.
Yeah, I don't know if that's- Your man is scary.
Okay.
Okay.
But like, what was my point?
It was about Emile Zin-Law?
You were about to do something.
You were about to do something in real time.
Well, they say this on, you know who caused a lot of problems for us, and I still believe this is Richard Nixon.
He only ever really did one thing wrong.
He only ever did one thing wrong, which is that he, to my knowledge, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Now, a lot of people, you forget the Milhouse.
That's very important.
Don't leave out the Milhouse.
No, I'm always on the Milhouse.
Whoa.
I think he just made a whiteboard.
Did you make a whiteboard?
I made a whiteboard.
I don't know what it is, but what is it?
We call it a Caucasian board.
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roderick on the line and all the great shows wait it says it wants to sign in now and it wants to record this computer screen and it's got all it's i'm getting you know what you know what this is this is not this is not fruitful but i like what we've done here uh what i was gonna what was i talking about emil's law no you were talking about richard milhouse i think the only thing he had richard milhouse nixon the only everything he's a quaker he's from this says that one person is following me now following you in what sense well in this whiteboard
It says, let the collaboration begin.
Let the collaboration.
Okay.
I'm writing that down because that sounds great.
And then it says, stop.
Okay.
Let one person who's following you stop.
Is it possible that I'm that person, John?
Oh.
Yeah.
You know, I get messages in WhatsApp all the time.
Okay.
When I was in Lebanon, the guy that was driving me around was like, you got to get WhatsApp.
That's how I communicate with you.
I've made it this far without WhatsApp.
And he was like, no, no, no.
You don't want to do that.
I did it.
I got it.
And now I get messages in it all the time from people all around the world.
And you don't even know where it's from.
You don't know who they are.
You don't have any way to change it.
Is that right?
Well, sort of.
I mean, I guess I could just delete it.
I'm drawing on your whiteboard.
I hope that's okay.
Oh, I see it.
It looks like one of those Wojaks.
Are you drawing me a Wojak?
I don't know.
Maybe it's Skibbity.
Can I collaborate?
No.
Well, yeah, let me just finish the first part.
My friend Michael Ferguson, whom you've met, my dear friend Michael Ferguson, invented this character, and he used to draw it on things.
You know, like when you're in college and you have a literal whiteboard outside your room?
Yeah.
You know, and people could leave you messages and stuff?
Like people used to do blackboards, excuse me, African-American boards, that kind of thing?
Sure.
Sure, sure.
I remember.
When you're John, when Michael would stop by my room sometimes, he would just draw this face, and that would be a way, it's like a hobo code amongst friends.
He was from Melbourne.
Yeah.
And so this is a character whose name is John Smellyface.
John Smellyface.
Yeah.
And one time he did a poster for our band for the Foeves.
And he did it on that paper where you tear the sides off, you know, like frilly underwear.
And it said the Foeves.
I got a copy here somewhere.
It says the Foeves.
And then it says John has a smelly, smelly face.
He's iconic.
I made his head a little flat.
It shouldn't be that.
That's neurodiverse.
Here's the problem.
I can't see the top of his face.
Whoa, did you draw a pair in hands?
I draw a hand holding a pair up.
I can tell it's a pair.
And I can almost tell it's a hand.
Well, sort of.
Is that a French cuffs, John?
Can I add French cuffs?
French cuffs, yeah.
Well, he's got a cuffs.
He doesn't have a... But my one person is following you pop-up is in the middle of the face of Smelly Jack.
Okay.
I think we've licensed John Smellyface, and now what is he?
Jack Smellyhead?
What did you call him?
All I can do is push stop.
Oh, Jack Smellyface.
Okay.
Isn't that what you said?
Well, I mean, Jack is short for John, although some people nowadays do name their children.
Jack, full on Jack, full on Jack.
That's crazy to me.
I'm going to give him a Zippy the Pinhead hair.
Oh, I like that.
Oh, you know what else we could do?
This is really... You know what?
I'll put this in the show notes so other people can see it.
Okay.
You could do a little Akbar and Jeff.
Give him a fez.
A little Akbar.
You ready to start?
Sure, sure, sure.
Hang on.
Ready?
Ready.
Hi, Merlin.
Hello?
Jesus fucking Christ.
Are you ready?
Okay.
No, listen.
We've got latency.
It's very hot here.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Berlin.
Hi, Berlin.
I would like to visit the moon, but I don't think I'd want to live there.
That sounds a little bit like Carl Sagan.
To make an Apple Play from scratch, first you must invent the universe.
Billions and billions of births.
Oh, boy, that'd be his wet dream, wouldn't it?
Billions and billions of Berts?
Well, you know, maybe two Berts.
Two Berts.
You ever play that when you were a kid?
What about a Q-Bert?
Oh, no, I'll take a smelly jack and I'll put a little Q-Bert horn on him.
What about that?
Oh, he's got a horn nose.
You could do it right on where his ersatz mouth is right now.
I should screen crap as well.
I can.
I don't know if we get history on this.
Hey, John, it's Monday morning here in California, and I don't like to make a big deal about it, but we're here.
i agree that we're here and i agree not to make a big deal of it because because why because we don't do that we don't make it we don't make a big deal out of stuff no life's too short to make a big deal out of stuff it's a little too short i went on a i went on a road trip uh this this last um this last weekend uh-huh and it was one of these like don't make a big deal out of stuff road trips
Oh, one of those don't over-engineer this dad kind of things?
Well, it was, so my mom turned 90.
Oh, man.
And she said for her birthday, what she wanted was to drive around the Olympic Peninsula.
Was to watch grown men fight shirtless to the death.
And who am I to turn her down?
Yeah.
She said she wanted to see a rainforest.
Rise, rise, rise.
There was no fighting, but there was just rainforests.
We were going to spend three days looking at rainforests.
In your state?
Yeah, here in Washington State, we have one of the last surviving rainforests, temperate rainforests here.
Big trees.
We have like eight of the biggest trees ever.
of their kind, the biggest Sitka spruce, the biggest Douglas fir, all these big trees.
And so mom, Susan, my daughter, my daughter's mother slash partner and I all drove around the state for three days.
and as you know this is a group i have now dubbed the small council that's right and your phalanx of of of assigned females at birth my job my job was to not take sides with anyone my job was to not make a big deal out of anything can i can i ask why is it to keep it a special day for your mom or just because you're rehearsing not being in the way
I'm just, now I'm learning.
I'm learning.
This was not a job that anybody told me.
It sounds like something a turtle might whisper to you.
Like a turt.
You get a turt whisper.
Yeah.
It's just like, don't take sides with anything.
Just all you are is you're just driving.
And you're the one that doesn't say anything.
Eventually you won't even see sides.
Unless you're directly addressed.
And if you are directly addressed in the context of trying to pull you into something where you take a side.
A lot of that stuff starts out seeming germane.
Like it was something that would need your input.
But a real pro eventually learns how few things they actually need to be involved with.
That's right.
And I was just wax on, wax off.
Yes.
Wax on, wax off.
And so by the end of the three days, I had even less to say than when I started.
It's amazing.
The less you say, the less you need to say.
Who could have anticipated that?
You begin somebody like myself who talks constantly, and then you end up at the end of the journey, which I'm sure was entirely successful from STEM to Stern.
The end of the event, you go, huh.
Maybe I just learned something about life and myself, if I'm being honest.
You know, I have no opinion in the matter.
Whoa.
It's still happening.
You're still turning over there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm fine with that.
I'm fine with the whole thing.
Paul, get over there behind the tree.
You know what?
There's a tree over there.
There's a tree over there.
I got no dog in the race of which tree we go to first or if we don't even see that tree.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
So...
Yeah, pretty good.
I'm sorry, did you say three days?
Did you come home each night or did you stay someplace else?
Did you sleep in the forest?
If I could ask.
Oh, well, you know, the Olympic Peninsula is very large.
So the first night we slept in Port Townsend.
And the second night... You still got apartheid there?
No, that's the other one.
Okay.
No, that's Robert Townsend, who was in.
He did the first movie on credit cards.
Yeah, what a great movie.
Yeah.
No, and then we stayed at Claylock Lodge, which is a lodge perched on the edge of the earth.
And you look out and the first thing you can see the lights of Japan.
What?
Hang on, don't palen me.
No way.
They're right over the horizon.
You can see them.
They're doing so much with electronics now.
They can take the smallest little circuits.
It's the same reason you can enjoy AM radio now when you're walking around.
That goes into the lights.
It's the same technology that was used in the Great Gatsby.
That's why you can see that green light from so far away.
That's right.
It's a very literate show, if you think about it.
You know, Emil Zola using the crowd as a stand-in for all... It's either a synecdoche or a metonymy, and I refuse to learn which.
Apparently... Those settling claws across the seafloor.
That's right.
Do I dare to eat a peach?
Fuck you.
Hi, T.S.
Eliot for Carl's Jr.
One of the nice things about the Washington coast is that every single glass buoy that was ever made in Japan was cut loose in a storm and they all floated over to Grays Harbor County, Washington.
Because that's the way the tide goes.
If you get something in Grays County, you know it came from Nippon.
I realized one thing about myself, which is that if I lived there,
every time already be home every time some chucky doll watched up on the shore from some shipping container that you'd be out there maybe not with a metal detector maybe with your jingle stick you just be turning stuff over and have this giant i'd probably have a pirate ship made out of garfield phones
It's called the SS Mondays.
I would be so happy.
And of course, everybody that drove by would think it was a junk pile.
But I would know that it was really a treasure hoard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think you would do that.
It's like Lex Luthor says, you know, some people can see the secrets of the world in a candy wrapper.
And you're like that with your jingle stick.
And you don't need their approval, if I could say.
You know what?
Although, although, it's a big world.
Yeah.
And you know what I don't want?
Their disapproval.
I wouldn't want to paint it.
I don't want their approval, but I don't want their disapproval.
You just don't want any arruval.
Like, keep your arruvals.
I don't care what the prefix is.
I don't want your approval.
I don't want your disapproval.
I don't want your non-approval.
I don't want your...
No rubles.
And so part of that is if I didn't want to interrupt you, but you had just said what you learned, one of the things you learned from this trip was like how to stay out of it and not get involved.
It seems to me that it's only now in the safety of this environment that you will even admit that you learned something about yourself because I'll bet you didn't even say anything on the ride home.
Oh, I said something.
You know, the thing is, I'm trying to learn to say anodyne things.
There is no such thing.
Everything is everything.
Look over here.
Everything means everything.
Every statement has to be responded to in some kind of a hot way.
What do you know about them apples is kind of my... You know, Chick-fil-A hates trans people.
Okay, where do you guys want to go?
You know, the wonderful thing about rural Washington and Oregon... Great jurors.
Is that it's equal parts.
I know.
I'm going to stop now.
I like talking.
I genuinely like talking.
I know you do.
We've been on a good run for two years.
You think we're hitting the bottom of it now?
I show up every day thinking this might be the last time.
Not you.
Well, sure.
In the morning, sure.
You wake up, you hit the alarm, and you're like, this could be it.
Moments snap together like magnets, you know?
I know.
Okay.
Okay.
but in in in the rural of america uh there are hippies and there are rednecks and that's really a lot of people don't know this a lot of people don't know this really this is what people don't understand about oregon and to be honest in a macrocosm it's what they don't understand about california yeah well i think it's also true of missouri i think it might even be true of oklahoma
There are hippies and there are rednecks.
And the problem is you can't always tell which is which by looking at it.
Look at that Merle Haggard song, which I think a lot of people continue to misunderstand.
Go on.
I think his first song, if there's a song people know by Merle Haggard, it's probably a song called Okie from Muskogee.
which is like not smoking marijuana we don't smoke marijuana in muskogee now i think it's sort of like short people if you'll forgive my saying by randy newman where i don't think people really understand what the song is about they get upset about him saying short people well when he's what he's doing is he's brilliantly making fun of their fingers and their little toes in america
In America, you get a booster seat for your dad because it's so little.
Tiny fingers in America.
No, but that's the thing.
You know, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And this is why I don't make certain jokes.
Because certain jokes are meant to be quite subtle, but on the face of it are unsubtle.
And then frat boys laugh at it.
And now you got the wrong friends.
That's the problem.
The subtle jokes that seem unsubtle and then the frat boys laugh at them.
And then when we say we got no soup, you've been on the Pacific Rim.
You've had more Pacific rims than I've had hot meals.
Well, I'll tell you what, though.
Yeah.
But yeah, so we were out on the out on the coast.
And of course, everybody in my family likes to talk about all the things.
Politics the people you see all the booze the Chucky doll intentionally unanodyne things And trying to guess not trying to guess as a game But as someone would cross our our transom
someone in the car would say, I wonder if they're voting for Trump.
I do this all the time.
I just yell at my family and get so mad.
I just see somebody on TV and I go, Trump voter.
I do it all the time.
But in rural America, that person could be wearing a triple extra large tie-dye t-shirt and have really long hair and a long beard.
Yeah, in 1986, that would have given, well, 66, 76, 86, 96.
Each time that would have given you potentially a different set of signals and informations.
Or as Marlo would say, it would have given different signals.
It would have given signals.
Transitively.
Yeah, it would have given, that person's giving, no, giving, yeah, they're giving.
Well, I have a suggestion how you can make that worse.
Suggest to Marlo that she starts saying, that's the give.
Oh, that's the give.
Isn't that horrible?
What if I said the give is?
What's your give here?
Oh, what's the give?
It's like when people say what's the ask because it takes too long to say request.
Right.
I love what's the give.
What's the give?
What's the give?
There's seven takeaways.
I like it.
Sorry, go ahead.
There's seven takeaways, but you've got to get all seven out of them.
That's right.
You've got to catch them all.
And you can't, you're right, though.
There was a thing just last night, there's a reporter I like for CNN, a guy from the Emerald Isle, actually, Donio Sullivan.
Donio Sullivan.
And he does these wonderful, like, he goes and talks to the chuds in their natural element.
And the thing last night on CNN was about people, including like recent, fairly recent Bernie bros in the last direction, who are now kind of almost indistinguishable from like normal... Trumpy bros.
Yeah, yeah.
Red hat chuds.
Yeah.
But I mean, in some ways, it's not surprising.
There's a very strong sort of revolutionary throw the bums out, as we used to say, feeling to those things.
But you're right.
Just because it looks like somebody who...
I don't know who owns a dispensary doesn't mean it's not somebody who's going to be in a MAGA boat parade.
You don't know.
They love boat parades.
Well, and also, you know, as my sister has, because my sister is Wu, right?
Yes.
And she's over, and depending on what you, what conversational topic you bring up.
Does she still surprise you sometimes with what she brings, the things to which she brings Wu?
No.
I just wonder, like in a different party, at a different party where everybody is sitting crisscross applesauce on floating carpets, what exactly would come out of her mouth?
Because she definitely...
You know, don't get her started on her star chart or whatever.
She'll jump to, she might be the sort of person who like jumps two steps ahead on something where you're like, whoa, how did we get to, how did we get to, I'm a Pisces?
Sometimes, sometimes, yeah.
But she has some associates in her radical breathing communities and in her various...
uh what would you call it uh presence processes uh people that have radical breathing communities is a really funny job uh some people who have gone are you new is this your first time it's your first time at the group forget everything you ever knew about breathing they've literally everything this doesn't involve your lungs in a virtual it's your third eye
You know, they're no longer, they, they, they become anti-vax is one thing that happens.
And then on the other side of the anti-vax circle, then they start, uh, believing in pizza gate, you know, it's, it comes all the way around and.
That's the funny part is it used to be, it used to be, I feel like liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call it, like tinglings on our side that had crazy conspiracy theories.
It's only really in the last 20, 15, 20 years that the other side got quite so nutty and kind of took it over.
They were always weird about the Jews, you know, they were.
Oh, and that's true.
You also have, you have the trilateral commission, you got John Birch, but you know, in terms of like.
But this whole business of like people, like democratic politicians sucking the blood out of babies.
uh where those two groups come together it's because you have to kill it while it's you get the best um wait i know the name of this it's called codachrome something like that it's the stuff that you get out of a kid that's what hillary when hillary clinton kills your baby you have to kill it when it's really scared because then you get the best codachrome out of it you're not telling me anything i don't know because i've been a liberal a long time i hope to shout i know bud i mean i'm drinking it out of the skull of my enemy
I mean, and I learned all about that from the, you know, from the fear and loathing in Las Vegas, because those guys were drinking Kodachrome all day.
That's how they made all that money gambling.
But so for me, I feel like, uh, being out there, it's not just as easy as like, oh, it's a, it's a, there's a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, a little voice inside my head said, you know, don't say anything.
If Susan starts talking about Virgos.
Yeah.
But, uh, it's, it's something else.
It's like, um, it's, uh, uh, the, the, the, the, the,
What am I trying to say?
In the forest, in the rainforest, where the trees are big.
Yeah.
Yeah, one thing in common.
They're just asking, well, no, I was going to say, like, it's that phrase that has now become, I think, at least a punchline for me and my friends.
Oh, I'm just asking the question.
Oh, I'm just asking the question.
Which is, like, you know, it's a pretty popular thing to say on the right.
And, like, I'm really, I don't want to continue to amplify nor be to death the thing that has claimed to have happened in Springfield, Ohio.
But a lot of those really come down to, like, you know, like, again, I saw an interview with, oh, that woman who used to be at Vice, and now she's at CNN, interviewing some chuds at a MAGA boat parade, and was actually like, no, look, I can take out my phone and Google this.
And the top search result is that this thing didn't happen.
Yeah.
And they're like, hey, don't tell me.
I can do my own research, but I'm just asking the question.
And who knows?
Maybe the search results are, even if you don't go all the way to, you know, Cafe Nutso, there's still a lot of stuff in between where you're like, oh, yeah, well, that's just because you're a liberal and that's how you search Google.
Okay.
I mean, I used to do a podcast with a guy until pretty recently who would just ask the question sometimes.
And if I would say, well, actually, that's not true.
Somebody who would have, let's say, some kind of concerns about things.
Yeah, he would have concerns.
Have a concern that he'd share with you, yeah.
And we'd kind of chuckle as though he either knew...
or maybe was laughing at me.
I could never tell.
Like, maybe he knew he was being a goofball, or maybe he was laughing at me for being a goofball.
Totally, totally unrelated to that, because I don't know what you're talking about, but totally unrelated to that.
Sometimes you'll encounter people in life where either somebody's doing something as a bit, and it makes no sense to you that they keep doing it as a bit, or another possibility, just one, but another possibility is it's not a bit, and they don't know it, and neither one of them makes you feel great.
It's weird when I'm just doing a bit.
I mean, there have always been people that are like, I'm just doing a bit when they get caught.
Oh, I was just kidding.
I was just kidding that we all hate so much.
Well, it's because liberals don't understand sarcasm.
That's what J.D.
Vance said.
Well, yeah, liberals can't meme also.
But but the I'm just doing a bit and then I'm gonna as soon as you like step back I'm gonna go back into maybe I'm not doing a bit and Then we're just like or like the Donald Trump jr.
Thing where you're like ha ha I said a thing and now you're triggered and you're like you're fully six and a half years old
That's its own game.
I'm sorry.
You saw a guy in a shirt.
I apologize.
No, that's what's wonderful for me is that I'm not triggered anymore.
I'm not triggering anybody as far as I know.
Would you say you're untriggerable in some ways?
I'm just driving.
I'm just driving.
I'm looking out the windows.
I like that you didn't actually assert anything there, which is exactly the role that I would like you to have.
It's like, no, I'm not even going to answer that question.
I've returned.
I don't know.
Frankly, I don't know.
You only know as I drive.
You know, we spent two days looking for the biggest tree in the world.
And then at one point I said, I'm going to pull over here and we're going to get off.
We're going to get out of the car.
I'm not saying this as any kind of like patriarchal authority figure or anything.
I'm just saying because we're a driver announcing stops.
Yeah.
And we don't have phone service.
So somebody has it for a minute and they're like, yo, that's the MacArthur tree is just 700 miles that way.
And oh no, this tree, we just went past it.
Or maybe you don't want to see the second largest ball of string in the world.
And I said, I'm just going to pull over here and we're just going to walk into the forest here on this little goat trail that I see here on the side of the road, just to do a little forest bathing.
We're not looking for anything.
We're not, there's no tree we're searching for.
We're just going to go into the forest a little, just a little bit.
We're not, it's not, nobody has to put on special shoes.
And we walked into the forest and for a hundred feet in, you're in the absolute most beautiful forest.
There's Douglas firs all around us that are 15 feet around.
I'm always struck by how, even if you just go to like, not just, it's a beautiful place, but if you go to Muir Woods or like wherever, Muir Woods, you pull off a highway, you get to a parking lot.
And then within like a couple of minutes, I'm always struck by the sort of the silence or if you like the stillness of it, it's so quiet and
And you know what I mean?
In those kinds of places, whether that's Redwoods or Douglas Furs or whatever, there's something really just inspiring.
There's something really moving about just being in that area amongst all those giant things.
It's absolutely centering.
Yeah.
The other day I picked up my kidlet at the school.
And she's in a phase right now where she wants to go home.
I think I'm still in that phase too.
I know, I know.
A lot of us.
Even when I'm home, I want to go home.
And I said, what do you want to do?
She'd say, can we go home?
And if we were, the only place I think she wouldn't say that is Disneyland for the first two days.
And on the third day, she'd say, I'd like to go home.
And so I pick her up at school and she says, I want to go home.
And I say, well, we have other things to do.
It's still the middle of the day.
And
Going home isn't really on the table.
And no, she just acts like it's the worst thing that ever happened to her.
And I go, I know.
I'm guessing she's allowed to look at a device, right?
She has a device at home.
Oh, so you're giving your daughter the old school car ride experience.
I'm giving car ride.
You're giving car ride warts and all.
And so I'm saying, well, I got things to do.
Like, I know you need to get home, but I am the one charged with picking you up from school.
And I'm in no hurry to go home.
And so between the two of us, we need to come to a compromise.
And the compromise is that we're going to do what I'm going to do.
And she goes, oh, I'm just, you know, you're just murdering me.
Shoulders slump, big sigh.
I don't like to use this word very much, but it sounds to me like you're literally killing her.
I have started taking off my hat and handing it to her and saying, if you want to sigh, go ahead and sigh into the sigh hat.
And then I'll put it back on my head and I'll keep the sighs there.
It's sure for Cyrus.
I'll feel the sighs.
I'll feel them on top of my head.
It's not like I'm not hearing your sighs.
Just sigh into the hat.
Well, the hat hurt him and the hat's mine.
So by the transitive property, you know.
And so we're driving down the road and there's a there's like one of those nice butcher shops like a like a standalone special butcher shop.
And I said, you know, part of this year has been that you're going to be not just making your own lunch in the sense of making a peanut butter sandwich and putting some goldfish in a box, but making a lunch where you cook something, you cook something, you add it to something else you cooked.
You're like trying to make food.
Can I add a light seasonal sauce to the side of that observation?
Yes, please.
And I think this becomes important.
And it's difficult to say or explain because it sounds... But like when you say to somebody, like, you're going to be making your own lunch.
Like, well, okay, so what I don't want you to assume is that I am going to buy all this stuff, lay all this stuff out, do all the mise en place of creating a situation in which you're, quote, into making your own lunch.
Well, I think one part of that...
I'm guessing, at least for me, this was one, is that I want to also just start getting the idea across that you need to do more thinking ahead about things and you need to make decisions and slight, just little bits.
I wouldn't put it this way, but I can now because my kid's better than this than I am now.
But you need to make like little kind of micro decisions before the decision has to have been made.
Like...
You know, if it's a classic sitcom thing, if it's Monday at 8 a.m., I cannot help you go make a tripartite science project about the mitochondria being the engine of the cell.
That's not going to happen right now.
That's a you problem from before.
You don't yell, but you know what I mean?
Isn't that part of it, though, also is like, hey, maybe you don't have to go to the store and buy all this stuff, but you need a plan for lunch.
It's an ongoing thing.
Are there not so many pieces to that that are more than just making a sandwich?
Yes.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Right.
And what I was saying as we were driving by here and she was like sighing into the side hat, I said, we could go home right now.
But what we're going to do is we're going to go to this butcher shop and we're going to learn about different cuts of meat.
And she's like, I hate you so, so much.
and i said happy birthday mom i know i know you do sweetie and there's and i have a different hat for you to say how much you hate me into and i'll put it on on special occasion so we go into the butcher shop and she is just oh she she just she looks like a gumdrop she's so folded over with just the weight of the world and there's a woman behind the counter who says hi and i say hi we're here to learn about meat
And, you know, because I'm my father's son, I do exactly what he would have done, which is I turn to her and I do the like presentation arm.
And I say, the behold swish, behold swish.
And I say, she's making her own lunches.
My dad would have done it.
Exactly that.
Except he would have said.
he's in eighth grade and he's making his own lunches and teach him about summer sausage tight as a brisket and so oh and she's just like so ashamed but the fact that it's a woman behind the counter a lady butcher as my dad would have said
is makes it a little bit it's different for for the kid because she's like uh she can't she wouldn't it's not just the the deep shame of me talking to some guy with like 42 inch guns or whatever the hell they have
And so the woman says, what do you like?
And she starts cutting little pieces of different things.
Oh, come on.
Try this.
Oh my God.
She should get a MacArthur grant.
Oh my God.
And as soon as the little one tastes some thin sliced marinated roast beef, something, something.
Oh, my God.
All of a sudden she's lit up and she and the woman are talking about different things and she's like, well, can I try that?
Well, what is sun-dried tomato doing on chicken?
At this point, have you stepped backwards and out of the way?
Oh, my God.
I'm overlooking at the buffalo tails.
Yes.
I'm not involved at all.
I'm just wandering around.
And they're in this like little...
Like, try this, try that.
And I swear to you, I'm watching it go down.
The woman gave us $75 worth of free meat.
Just like, try this.
I made this jerky myself.
And I say to her at one point, I'm like, I'm going to want six pounds of pork shoulder chopped up for chili verde.
She goes, okay, got it.
And by the time we walk out of there, I've got two big bags of all this crazy stuff that the little one picked out.
And
Then she's just chatty Kathy all the way home.
And later on, she later on in the week, she said something like, oh, everything has gone wrong.
This is the worst.
Like everything in my life is terrible.
It's just the one.
He did that feeling terrible drag after another.
And I was like, really?
Everything is terrible.
Like everything.
And she said, well, the best thing that happened to me this week was the going to the butcher shop with you said, well, that's, that was the best thing that happened to me this week too.
And trying to just... I mean, I wanted to take the Psy hat.
I wanted to go out to the truck, get the Psy hat, and bring it in and say, look at all the Psy's that you put into the Psy hat before we went to the butcher.
You've internalized turt wisdom.
You know it's not your circus, not your monkeys, right?
No.
And the last thing I'm ever going to do ever again is say anything along the lines of, well, remember when we... I mean, anything that even...
It even gets within a mile of feeling like an I told you so.
This is a cliche not only in my home, but in my other shows.
Hey, do you remember?
Remember we try this?
No, I won't try this.
You remember there was a time when you didn't like chocolate and you didn't like Toy Story.
You probably don't remember that, but there was a time when you didn't want to watch Toy Story, and there was a time when you didn't want to try chocolate.
And now, of course, my kid is applying to colleges, so it's been a while, right?
But how do you say it?
You don't.
it don't you let them put it in out of out of out of grief or guilt well and also i don't even know if she remembers a time before she went into the butcher shop right she's just like she's really had two lives i've always loved uh chicken breast roasted in sun-dried tomatoes yeah i'm like well well you know what you did you you let that be her thing
which I don't know the name for this thought technology yet, but that's something I have struggled with for a long time, and I think I've gotten better at it, but it's still out there, which is, like, as somebody who thinks I have good taste and I love my actual human kid more than anything in the world, not because it's my kid, but because it's a legitimately good kid, but, like, it's so difficult to take myself out of it, back to your original topic, but, like, I don't need to be involved with this, and if I get involved with it, then it...
I think as your kid is working at becoming independent from you, you, one, me, I keep trying, I have over time, tried to keep making that our thing, which ultimately makes it my thing, and then kind of makes it less of their thing.
And if you have to remind the kid about why they feel that way, that's a pretty good signal that it's actually a your thing.
There's a lot there.
There's a lot to that.
No, I'm going to put that poorly.
No, there's a lot to it.
My kid likes X-Men on his own now.
He doesn't need me to remind him, to send him the photo gnawing on a book when he was a baby that says X-Men on it.
He knows.
He doesn't need that.
We can take that as read, as they say.
Stipulated, right?
We can skip over that whole part.
And the thing is, that kid...
who's now the co-president, I don't know why they need two presidents, co-president of the D&D Club and DMing his first campaign from scratch, writing a campaign from scratch.
Oh, wow, exciting.
So this is the first time I'm aware of that he went to the game store without me.
And then I didn't cry, but I did look at pictures of us in stores for half an hour.
Oh, in that tweet.
But, well, it's his thing, though, right?
Yeah, right.
Sure.
On his own.
Yeah.
Don't you think that's part of it, though, is, like, once you handed it off to the lady butcher, like, now that gets to be more of her thing.
Yeah, that's between them.
But the other thing I'm trying to do is take myself out of a different chain, which is on Thursday when we left on the trip, I said, you've got a bunch of homework, right?
Because eighth grade, they're just throwing homework at them as part of like a trial by fire.
Like, guess what?
Now, homework all the time.
And I'm like, you got a bunch of homework, I bet.
She's like, yeah, I do.
I'm like, and it's going to be due on Monday.
Yeah.
And we're on a road trip for the whole weekend.
Oh, I see.
And so this is kind of unintentionally adjacent to the, you're going to make your own lunch.
I'm just sending a little bit of like the lightest morning shot that, hey, are you remembering that that's happening?
Are you thinking ahead, executive function kind of thing?
And we left on the road trip.
I picked her up at school.
And her bag was already packed in the back.
Like we left from her school.
So she's got all her homework stuff and she's got her school clothes on when we leave, right?
And so I say, now, there's Thursday night, there's Friday night, there's Saturday night, and there's Sunday night.
And your homework can get done a couple of different ways.
We can work on it tonight.
Um, we can work on it a little bit, but tomorrow, but the thing is all these days are full.
So all of that low key bugging that you're doing is mostly, at least in my heart is a way of saying, Hey, just so you know, we still have options.
We have paths to 270 here.
Like there's lots of different ways this can go well, but as time passes, we get fewer options, fewer paths.
And then eventually there's really not much of a path except crying.
And we don't want that.
So I said two things.
I was like, I'm not going to talk about this all weekend.
So here we are.
We're at the start.
You can plan this out however you like.
But I'm going to tell you one thing, which is that Sunday night, when I am driving us back from Grays Harbor County to Seattle, in what I can only presume is going to be rain tomorrow.
And a bunch of dumb ass drivers in Olympia who don't know how to get out of the left lane.
What I'm not, what I just me personally am not going to do is entertain your panic about your homework at 9 PM on Sunday night.
I'm not going to factor it in to my decisions as I, as the driver and pilot.
So you can do whatever you want with your time between now and then, but there's going to be a four hour period of,
where you are going to be saying, we need to get home.
I need to do my homework.
I, my ears will be deaf to you because I'm going to have my own things.
I'm going to be needing to cover because I'm going to want to see the biggest fern in Grays Harbor County with that last 20 minutes, that last 20 minutes belongs to me.
It's when I get to say, I want to, I want to stop at Chick-fil-A because they, uh, uh,
They hate ferns or whatever it is.
I'm going to make some dumb ass choices in that 20 minutes.
And I'm telling you about it four days from now or four days before.
And sure enough, Sunday at three o'clock, she looks at the clock and she goes, it's three hours till home.
If we don't leave now, we're not going to get home until 8 p.m.
And I said, why do we need to get home?
Is it because some, is there some reason?
Do we have to feed the cat?
She's like, I have all this homework.
I was like, I,
talking to the homework hat my friend because i laid this out and i'm not saying i told you so i'm just saying this these are my needs i have very few needs but my needs were not to drive home in a stress uh cloud and i'm not going to so you can sit in the back and
stress in a little bubble and at that point we're outside the truck and we're and she's oh she's storming her shoulders are all shrunk up and she said something like you fucking and i said excuse me excuse me and all the other ladies scattered like they all they all got into the truck and the doors all went
Because they knew that, like, that was new.
She'd never done anything like that.
Yeah, a new container at this point has been decanted.
And I said...
let's let's just take let's just take our little time with this what was that say what was that exactly yeah i feel like i and just in your in your explanation of that i felt like i heard a little bit of a consonant sound i don't love yeah like and then we just we sat on the back bumper of the car and we were there for 15 minutes you know just like
Really?
Oh, man.
There's just no.
And once again, I just want to say happy birthday, Marcia.
Happy birthday.
Happy birthday, Mom.
But, you know, there's no universe in which between now and when you're 27, you're going to say, fuck you, to me like that.
My kid has, well, it doesn't need clearance for me, but, like, has clearance for that word.
But, like, I really would greatly prefer it not be used as an adjective, gerund.
adverb or even noun for anything related to me in particular right now for sure for sure and and you know and she's just she's right at that point where she's testing stuff out right just shooting these little flare guns out over the ocean and wondering whether anybody's gonna see her but she knows that she's seen
But we got home at the hour that I, when I had seen every fern I needed to see, we got home in a state of calm.
There was still time to do things.
And I even signed some permission slips.
Like, it all worked out.
Oh, you found time for all that?
You found time because you allocated your time well and used executive function.
Which we know you're great at.
I struggled so much with all of this when I was her age.
Just struggled so much.
I struggle with it through college, all of it.
I struggle with it now.
I was late for everything, and because I was smarter than the average bear, I could go, yeah, and I didn't even try.
Well, that's nothing to be proud of, dude.
That's nothing to be fucking proud of.
me talking to me here that's nothing to be proud of but like if you told me four days from now i had an assignment due i wouldn't start working on it even now until 15 minutes before that's just a question of honor but that's right i didn't even try oh my god look at you and i still got an a ta-da
But with her, I'm just like, look, I mean, I get it.
If you want to wait until the last minute, that's fine.
But I'm not going to live in stress.
That's the thing.
That's the difference.
I don't care.
If you want to live in stress, these are your choices.
That isn't, I think, definitely her circus and her monkeys.
Yeah.
Here's the secret.
Live in stress wildly.
oh my god you changed the blue man and it's you you're so pretty do you like it handsome man what's when's that from it's from you hear that a lot you hear how handsome you were a lot no i don't thank you those aren't the glasses that i gave you because that was those glasses have been going for decades not that i'm angry she threw them out because you know when you're when people have been over for thanksgiving you find a pair of prescription eyeglasses you throw them away
Yeah, you throw them away.
That's from September 6th.
Oh, wait, gosh, this is last year, September 12th.
I can get a more recent one if you prefer.
No, no, no, this is nice.
You've got one of those faces.
You've got a face that just, God loves you.
Yeah, I've got a face that looks like it could open a can, but not a can of anything useful.
Not even what baths.
Or beans.
You know when you look at a sepia-toned photograph and you're like, people don't look like that anymore.
But you have a face that could be in any photograph throughout time.
You think so?
You think I could be at like Appomattox Court House?
I do think so.
I think you could be, if you looked at the Night Watch by Rembrandt, I bet you could find you in it somewhere back there wearing a big velvet hat.
Where's Waldo?
I think you've got an eternal human face that hasn't been... That sounds like a Tarkovsky movie, and I'm into it.
I know.
Eternal human face.
It's hard, though, and it's, you know, I've...
I've always felt, I've come to believe, and I've said this in my document, that failure in life is important, but it doesn't always have to be deadly or expensive.
There's ways you can create environments in which people can quote unquote fail.
But like, it's a bummer that we've come to look at the word fail as being synonymous with end of days or like end of reputation or, you know, fail videos even.
Like sometimes failing just means, like, can I just tell you, like I...
In the case of what you described earlier in another time I would have I would have knowing what I know now I would not only say I'm gonna help you executive plan your week of lunch and I'm gonna use that as an opportunity to constantly poke you and Show you how many things you haven't already thought of because I'm really good at that It's one of the few things I'm good at is as a retired project manager is realizing potentials for risk in some cases and
And so, like, you know, it ends up making you kind of preternaturally pessimistic, just not about people necessarily, but about people and the world.
And so I would have gone through a whole thing and say, well, you know, you tell me, what's the next step?
And to be like full on, like, Western Mr. Miyagi, where I'd be like the bad boss who's like –
Well, that's going to be interesting for you to be able to shoot that round because you haven't put the powder in yet or whatever, like all that kind of stuff, right?
But like that, the problem is like, so on the one hand, A, I do think you need to create an environment where they can fail completely on their own and learn what they want from it rather than you, one, create a father, creating a test for them that they're going to fail, Kobayashi Maru, because it's like, well, until you failed a few times and didn't die, you don't realize that failure does not mean death.
Because a lot of what makes people procrastinate, a lot of what makes people resistant to change, what makes them bad at all those things, is they've unintentionally strengthened this muscle of procrastination.
Because they're so scared of what could go wrong, they put it off forever.
But the failing in an easier environment, if you get to fail in a bouncy castle, it's a lot easier than taking a selfie in the Grand Canyon, right?
But then they have to draw their own lessons from that, and they will learn different things in a different order, at least, than what we learned.
And I think one thing that hangs us up as people who want our parents is trying to, like, make people learn things we learned in the order we did.
And even before you get to the order we did, learning things we did, is that really what you want in a young person today?
You really want them to go through what you went through?
And, like, so they won't be a legitimate teen or a legitimate adolescent or a legitimate adult if they haven't suffered in the same order that you did?
That is, that's, that's a terrifying idea that I think is considered a best practice of child rearing for a lot of people.
I tried to teach her how to get two packs of matches out of a cigarette machine the other day, and I couldn't find a cigarette machine anywhere.
And that was one of my core skills.
What's the trick?
I know how to get, well, usually you get one freebie, right?
You get one freebie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now, you know, they tried that thing for a while where you had to put a nickel in to get ice at a hotel room, you know, because they didn't want people throwing ice in the hallways.
That's freakingomics.
But there's not even nickels anymore.
When was the last time you saw a nickel?
Oh, my God.
I hope they take the pennies with them.
Well, she said the other day, I was like, how was your—because now I say when I pick her up, how was your lunch?
Like, what happened with your lunch?
You fucking idiot.
And she said—
Hey, good lunch.
It looks like you maybe perhaps forgot the sauce like I warned you about.
Yeah.
Did you put the chicken in like I said?
No, I said, how was your lunch?
And she said, well, I put in peas.
And I said, what peas?
What kind of peas?
She said, canned peas.
I put peas in my lunch, but the pea...
The pea sauce, the pea water leaked out and got on everything.
Lesson learned.
It was pea water on everything.
Lesson learned.
And I was like, huh, pea water on everything.
And yet you survived.
You survived.
And I said, well, did you put it in a thing, like a sealed thing?
And she said, that's the thing I did.
But the pea water got out.
And, you know, and then I just sort of stare out the window, and she stares out the window, and we're both like, hmm, the pee water got out.
And also, that is also, in my case, that is not the time, certainly, to say I told you so.
It's not the time to say anything.
There are people in this world, some of whom I do podcasts with, who will do anything in the world to tell the person that you screwed up because you did pee wrong.
You did wrong peas, you got pee water.
And I...
at this point in my life, if there's any lesson that somebody wanted from me, and believe me, there's not, it's that you will survive stuff like pee water and you will learn from it and you're fine.
But you know what makes it terrible is if your dad goes, God, you're a piece of shit for screwing up peas.
No.
Because I need to teach you a lesson because that's my job is to make you feel bad about things where I tricked you into failing at something.
Like, what are you, is this a fucking kill bill?
Like, what are you doing?
You got to climb the mountain and get your ass kicked for several years before you're allowed to go avenge your death?
I'm still not sure exactly which of the many lessons she learned.
Next time she does it, will she drain the water out of peas?
Maybe you don't need to know.
Because maybe it's not your journey.
Well, that's the thing.
It's not.
I'm curious whether she ate or didn't.
And if all the food was contaminated with pea water and she didn't eat at all, then she learned a lesson, which is that you can get through a whole day without eating if you have to.
Can I give you a secret side door lesson?
If you leave it completely to your kid, sort of like the way you and I feel about kids choosing their own clothes, you leave it to them, and then you don't tell them how it went.
What about that?
What if there were results to things, quote unquote results to things, that were neither good nor bad, but what if there actually weren't results?
What if you just wore clothes and you had a day?
Like what if we took all, well, what if we took all of this valence out of like, well, I guess I got to go home and find out if dad likes how I did peas and shirts.
And you're like, what if you got completely out of that business?
Well, I'll tell you one thing, kid makes their own lunch.
They're going to be much more tolerant about what's in that lunch.
It's unless you've created an environment where you're the lunchmeister and you have to sign off.
Like if you're the lunchmeister and you got to sign the clipboard before they put it in a bag, guess what?
You're going to get blamed because now you're the, you're a bad boss.
But in the same way that your kid is more likely to try laminated onion chicken because the lady butcher gave it to her, I think you're also much more likely to realize you can say, hey, I made a lunch and it sucked.
Tomorrow's Tuesday.
Let's try again.
You know the one of the big ones we were down at we were down at a place called Ruby Beach a beautiful beach we went there to watch the sunset and The little ones out on the beach and it's one of these wonderful Northwest beaches where it's just like black sand and the when the tide is even when the tide is in black sand beaches are underrated That's they're so great the basalt
I mean, I was raised around Clearwater Beach, which was at the time considered the most beautiful beach in the world with the nicest sand.
Nicest, as they would say in the age of Robert Moses, the nicest bathing beach, like a place to go to the beach beach.
But then like you go to places like in England or in, well, England, you know, they got problems with the weather there.
But where you see your turts out there on the Big Island or wherever.
That's nice.
Yeah, that's right.
It's gorgeous.
Would you say it's balsamic?
Well these beaches, you know, what's the stuff that makes hexagons in Ireland?
What's that stuff?
Maybe it's Baltic Not sure 100% not sure but we're down on this I think you mean Balkans the Balkans
We're down on this beautiful beach, and she says, and the sun's going down, and she says, I want to take off my shoes and run around with sand.
And I said, well, I think that that is a great idea.
And she said, but my feet are going to be all wet and covered with sand.
And I said, yes.
And she said, but I really want to do it.
Yeah, you know what?
Feet dry.
And I said, well, we're here at Ruby Beach.
It's sunset.
It's the last day of summer.
If you're asking whether I think it's a good idea to take your shoes off and run in the sand, I do.
But you have identified the issue, which is that your feet will be covered with sand and they'll be wet.
And she...
In my opinion, you have correctly predicted one of the likely outcomes of this.
These are the things.
And she said, well, I'm going to do it.
And I was like, you have 100% have my support.
Was there any dissent on this?
Well, no one else was around.
Okay.
No one else was around.
So there was no, if she had consulted with any other parties, I think she would have been warned.
This is why you don't ask permissions for things, because when you ask permission, it makes it seem like something that needs permission.
Yeah.
And so, and she was not, she was not asking permission.
She was consulting me.
Right.
But if she had said that to anybody else, it would have been like, Oh, it's okay.
You're feeding me cold.
You get a small friendly list of things you must make sure not to do right now.
That's right.
Right.
So she kind of like, well, make sure you put your shoes together.
Hey, you know that trick where you put your wallet and your keys inside your shoe and like do that over here.
And like there's all these things you could say, but none of that is you don't really.
I didn't learn this until recently.
You don't really need to do any of that.
And having done that, we'll do nothing to protect that child.
They have to go do things.
So she took her... But here's the thing.
She took her shoes... Because she wasn't around the other... The other folks were off looking at crabs or whatever.
She's running around.
She takes her shoes off.
She's running around.
She's having a great time.
She's in the surf.
She's...
And then so then I wander off and I'm looking at pelicans or whatever it is dads do.
The beak holds more than the belly can.
Look at those pelicans.
What are they eating?
Dive bombers.
What does a pelican eat?
Shot a pelican to the side.
This guy with my sidearm.
Then it's dark, and her mother comes over and goes, I'm going to go up to the car and get her flip-flops, or get her Crocs.
And I said, what are you, what?
She said, well, her feet are wet, so I'm going to go up to the, well, the car is up a bluff.
It's a hell of a climb back to the car.
Just to state the obvious, at no point did the bather ask her mother to bring her footwear.
Unclear, because I wasn't there when that all went down.
Okay.
But I, and this is, I'm part of this new policy where I'm friends.
You're part of the same hypocrisy I am, Senator.
But I'm friends to all.
I say no, I'm against no plan, I'm for no plan.
I'm just like the man.
It's harder than it sounds.
If you all go out in your life, I'm speaking to you, the listener here, you go out in your life and you try to start practicing that, you say it out loud, maybe to yourself during the day, you'll discover that that is a hugely powerful thought technology that is not as easy as that sounds.
Wow.
What John just described of like, say it again.
You have no what?
What did you say?
You have no, you don't have a thing one way or the other.
You're the absence of lethal affirmation.
You're not asserting anything.
No, I am for no plan.
I am against no plan.
But I said to mom, mother, her mother, daughter, mother, partner, mother.
I said, darling.
go make your own way to the car and do not worry about the child.
Um, do not get her Crocs, but instead go bravely forth, minding your own stores and,
You sound like they're the Old Testament.
Do you mean to?
Because you really do kind of sound like one of those middle books.
Not like a Joshua, Judges, Ruth type thing, but like you might be one of those Hosea type things.
Yeah, right.
Zebekah.
You sound like Zebekah.
Zebekah.
And so the daughter's mother's last partner has now, she gets a look of calm because she has been relieved of a responsibility that she took upon herself and now had given herself- She got to have that moment of clarity all on her own.
And I said, you are relieved of this.
This is- Makes you feel a little lighter.
Yeah.
This belongeth not to you.
No.
Oh, God.
There's a reason you're studying in Sunday schools.
Goeth up the bluff.
Worry not about thine crocs and thy chattel.
Carry not thine flip-flops back down to thine brethren.
And it was good.
So the ladies wander, you know, you see them wander off into the friscalating dusk light.
And they're, you know.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Cormac McCarthy.
And the waist opposite.
Bye.
Bye.
So the little, the little wet footed one looks up and realizes that she has not been rescued by her mother as she, as she so fervently that she, you know, she set the wheels in motion of being rescued by someone because when it was time to put the shoes back on, she did not come to me for consultation.
She went over.
Oh, that's interesting.
That's very interesting.
And not, not for lack of trust, but for like how this fits into the plan.
This is the plan.
Yeah.
Somebody's going to go get my flip flops and it isn't going to be dad.
So awesome if it was the lady butcher.
So then she and I are alone on the beach and she has wet, cold feet.
Staring at the sea, staring at the sand.
Covered with black sand.
And dad is there going, well, what do we do now?
Pretty good trip.
Yeah, it's pretty nice out here.
And she's like, what?
You're just sitting there eating all of her meats.
And she said, well, you know, there's rocks.
And I said, you know, these are some of the flattest, softest rocks I've ever seen.
These aren't hard rocks.
These are river rocks.
These are ocean rocks.
Every one of these, every rock on this beach is the best skipping rock I ever saw.
I mean, it's like walking across a pillowed blanket.
Which is not a thing.
I mean, I guess it's a blanket with pillowing.
Well, I think it could be embroidered.
And she starts going across these soft rocks.
Is the concern here she's going to cut her feet on the black rocks?
There's not a thing you could cut.
I mean, it's not a clear water beach where you just got to run fast because it's hot.
There's a concern here of like, well, you step on a liberal crab or something.
No, the concerns are that the child would be uncomfortable in the slightest once in her life.
I know you worry constantly about other people's temporary discomfort.
The concern is, but she will be not as happy as she could be.
And because part of my role is to stop that from happening.
Yeah.
I'm not saying that's not me.
I mean, I believe me.
I mean, when you get the towel ready for when they get out of the pool, like whatever it is, or in my case, having a glass of water ready for everybody before dinner.
Like this is a thing dads do.
But for me, it's just this beautiful, like, in the space of an hour.
And you can see the ending.
We are seeing the full cycle of life.
You can see the ending, or like the conclusion, rather, of this chapter.
You can see it's in sight.
This is like the end of a video game where you can finally go to sleep.
You've ended this part of the video game, and you can feel it winding down.
It's the autumnal denouement, where you know that now, oh my God, it's all in sight.
We're about to land this bird.
I can really feel that, like...
this thought technology will have resulted in something that wasn't bad.
And what I'm saying is not, well, when you took your shoes off, you should have known.
I'm not saying like, because I didn't tell her anything when she asked if she could take her shoes off.
I just said, that sounds really like a fun thing.
I warned you she'd be irrationally fearful of things you don't control.
but here i am it's so it's such a beautiful cycle of life it's like you took your shoes off and ran on the beach and it was the greatest thing that ever happened and now you have wet feet and they're covered with sand and here we are it's you and me again on the same beach it's like a bergman movie but one hour later yes and so what happens next
No, I'm on the edge of my seat.
I feel like you're dragging it out a little bit.
I want to know what happens next.
And I'm fine with either way.
I don't have a dog in this fight.
And I don't have a circus or a monkey in this fight.
I just want to I'm curious how it because I feel like probably several people are going to learn versions of different lessons is what I feel like.
Well, so we actually sat on a log.
You don't get to pick your lessons.
You can pick your friends.
You pick your nose.
You can pick your seat.
But you don't get to pick your lessons in life.
You can write that down.
You can't pick your friend's seat.
That's right.
No.
Or your seat's nose.
So she sits on a log.
She's got her sandy feet.
They're wet.
She's got her socks in her pocket, but somehow they've gotten a little wet, too, running around in the wet.
She's got her socks in her pocket.
And I think I'm holding...
And she says, you know, her feet hurt when she's walking on the rocks, which I know isn't true, but her feet are feeling.
Her feet are feeling things, but those things are not hurt.
Sometimes she says, this is disgusting.
And I'm like, what this is, is something you don't.
Sometimes we narrate our future sadness.
Yeah.
But disgusting is a word that we reserve for worse things than this.
Like a cheese, like a toilet in a Moroccan train station in the south.
Like a toilet in a Moroccan train station in the north is not even disgusting.
It's in the south that they get bad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Disgusting has a threshold.
CBGB, CBGB toilet.
Yeah, and this chicken salad sandwich does not meet the requirements for disgusting.
It might not be the thing that you prefer, but I bet you'll be okay.
But don't use the word disgusting around me unless you want to hear a list of really disgusting things.
Because I've seen a few, and I don't even want to talk about it.
But so she's like, well, it hurts.
And I'm like, well, it feels what you're feeling is feeling.
You're feeling cold feet on cold rocks, cold feet.
You're the sky, not the weather.
These are the feelings.
These are not.
It's just it's just like Pima Chodron says, remember, you're the sky, not the weather.
The weather passes through you, but it doesn't define you.
That's right.
And the word owl has lost all meaning.
If ow is what we say in response to every feeling, then ow is just like saying um.
It means nothing anymore.
It doesn't motivate me.
It's like the way people from Ohio apologize.
Yeah, you do kind of mean it, but mostly it's just the thing you always say.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, you just say sorry.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, sorry.
But so she says, well, so my unhelpful suggestion is walk through the gravel.
like using it to scour the sand off your feet.
And she looks at me like, what Spanish Inquisition did you grow up in?
And I'm like, well, that was what I have taught myself.
You know, use the gravel to scour the sand.
It's kind of like the thing we hear as kids where you're like, oh, there's razor blades in the candy.
So you got to go to the emergency room and get your candy x-rayed.
Except in your case, you basically hand them a bucket full of razor blades and goes, there's a fun size snicker in there.
here's the thing you can find con gusto go nuts happy halloween and so then she says will you will you brush the sand off my feet and you know she's got their little they've been in the ocean her little feet they're not it's not like they've turned into muck they're just they've been in the ocean for for for 10 minutes but so she lifts up her little red feet with uh with sand on them and i start brushing the sand off but i'm giving him i'm giving the little i'm giving the feet little slaps
you know as i'm trying to get the sand off the feet right you can't just brush it you have to kind of whack the sand off whack and they're just they're just the tiniest this is where i go veer into bean dad but it's just the tiniest little wax but enough that she's like oh but it's a giggle ow yeah
And I said, well, you know, this is when someone else gets the sand off your feet, they use their own techniques.
And in my case, it's a little bit of a slap.
And she's like, get off.
And then she cleans her feet off and she puts her socks on and she puts her shoes on.
And off we go, holding hands up the trail.
And I had, oh, this is the modern technology.
I had already bleeped the lock on the truck and opened the trunk with my bleeper.
Okay, so the ladies had gotten to the top of the bluff and the truck was already open for them Because there should be no no existential French waiter when you want to be You don't need to know the guy's name stuff just gets taken care of it's just But also the Raiders not gonna eat it for you because then that wouldn't be food But then then the little one shows up
No one had to run.
No, no.
And the question, how are her feet?
What are her shoes?
What is the sogginess and sandiness level of things?
Now you go into the mode where you're like the, the like, like girls at their first or maybe girls at their second party in high school where you're like, are you okay?
Is everything okay?
Did you see Shauna's crying?
where you're like, now it's time for the fretful worrying over how the thing went just now, right?
And where we have to, like, in case you hadn't developed your own unnecessary emotions about this anodyne experience, let me give you lots of reasons to doubt yourself.
Are you sure you're okay?
Did a skink eat your toe?
I spent the whole weekend establishing credibility as someone that was like the wind.
There was never a time when it wasn't okay.
You know what John's like?
Fucking the wind, man.
He's like the wind.
There was no chance it was not going to be okay because not okay isn't even one of the words that we use.
Everything is okay.
It's all fine.
It's all in the show.
I just had this happen to me the other day in the weirdest way.
Because for the last two years, I've been sitting in this house going, this isn't where I'm meant to be.
I'm meant to be somewhere else.
I'm meant to be in an apartment.
I'm meant to be in the city.
I'm meant to be somewhere not in the suburbs, not in this suburban house.
Sounds like the only thing, like, your feeling has been, like, I don't need another thing.
You call it the farm.
Like, your old place with property and a pool full of lumber, if memory serves.
Yeah, that's right.
I have a really good short film of you mowing your lawn, if you'd like me to send it to you.
I would like that very much.
It's just you walking from frame left to frame right, just pushing along more.
And then there's like Scott Simpson smoking near a ladder, I think.
I've got a lot of good photos of your house.
These are good times.
Every photo I've got of Jonathan Colton, he looks sad and he's just closed his eyes.
Yeah, that's his brand.
But Kathleen looks great.
But in this case, I've been sitting here and I've been saying to myself in my own brain, you cannot sit in your lovely home, in your lovely life, where things are all going great.
Something's telling you this is not your place, right?
Not where you belong.
Yeah.
And to be saying this to yourself over and over again, this is, you made a mistake.
This isn't where you belong.
You can't go back in time.
You can't hate yourself for the mistake you made, but you can change your future.
You can sell this house and move into an apartment that has a brick wall and live somewhere where you can hear people shouting out the window at each other incomprehensibly.
And every once in a while you hear a fog horn.
You never hear about people in apartments suing each other.
So I've been late at night looking at the real estate sites and going like, okay, I know pretty much, Redfin is telling me I can sell my house for X and I don't want to spend that much money on a place downtown.
I just want a humble place, a little two bedroom apartment, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm going through and I'm like, well, that one's cute.
And I could live in that, couldn't I?
And I just put all the guitars up on the wall.
And I see one that I think is really nice and it would be affordable for me.
And I go.
And for the first time in all of this, I looked at the mortgage calculator.
I don't know the last time you went on a real estate site, but there's a little calculator that tells you, well, if you put 20% down at the current interest rates with the burp-a-derp-a-derp, here's how much you would pay for your mortgage.
And I looked at it and I said, well, that can't be right.
And I calculated it again.
And then I went to a different, because that one had some HOAs or something.
I went to a different thing that I was looking at that I thought was cute.
And I did the mortgage calculator.
And then I went to my own neighborhood and picked a much smaller house than mine and said, what if I just sold my house and bought this smaller house?
And I looked at the mortgage calculator.
And because of the change in rates.
Is that already affected in a mortgage calculator?
Yeah, it's all plugged in.
The 50 basis points, the half a percent thing.
Yeah, all that.
And apparently that is a big deal, right?
It's a big, big deal.
You've got a certain amount of equity in your house.
You sold your old house, you bought this house, you put money down.
I don't want to get into the details of this.
I put the equity from the old house in.
So you would take, if you sold this place you're in, you would take that money and put it into a different place as the down payment and whatever, paying off as much as you can.
Hopefully it hits 20%.
And you're looking at like, what's my, you're looking at the delta between what you pay now for the house you don't belong in versus what it would cost to be in the house that you could potentially belong in.
Exactly.
And just put them side by side, how do the numbers add up?
When I bought this house, the interest rates were at 2.75%.
And the interest rates, even now with the big, you know, half point cut are still like six and a half.
Oh, Jesus.
And the difference in mortgage payment.
I mean, looking at it, I suddenly became aware of like, how does anyone in the world afford to live in Seattle?
I don't understand how they do.
I see.
It's gone up a lot.
And realizing that if I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Seattle that on paper cost half as much as the house that I'm living in.
So let's say for the sake of argument, your house costs $1,000, and the ones you're looking at cost $500.
Yes.
Yes.
Like just keep this simple, but numbers we can understand.
So like you take money, you put it down.
So like you're making payments that are not currently fully killing you in the house that you're in.
You get this new place.
It's smaller.
There's less stuff.
There's less everything.
It might be half the price.
And so how does that compare in your monthly mortgage payment?
I would be paying in some cases three times, but in many cases, twice as much as I'm paying right now.
And that's with 20% down?
20% down.
That's crazy.
Because I've always heard people say it all goes to interest at first or whatever.
Yeah.
And some of these buildings have HOAs that I would be paying to live in an apartment.
But what I realized... Then I went crazy and was looking everywhere at every factor, right?
Every little slider, everything I could change.
and i realized i cannot move i could not move i could not nothing will make you love your house like realizing that huh and that's what happened yes after two and a half years you got a free gift of waking up every day and going oh please do not feel like you don't belong where you belong please find a way find a secret path where you can be content where you are please find peace in your heart do not spend do not waste your mid-50s grinding
On the problem of this, what is nothing?
Trying to find that Buddhism that, you know, that Dan is so eloquent about and just encompasses in his living, you know, that he tried to teach me that I just could never learn.
What kind of acceptance, you know?
Acceptance?
I read that fucking mortgage calculator on Redfin.
I'm imagining you just, like, going... Like, kind of like...
I woke up the next day.
What did I hit wrong here?
There's no way that's accurate, right?
Bluebirds were flying around my head with a little banner that said, welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.
I was so fucking happy.
That's a long banner for two birds.
It was.
No, there were like six birds.
There were probably corvids.
There was a little fawn.
Oh, I see.
They're organized.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They were helping each other.
And I said, I was like, I've never been happy before.
It was because... Isn't that funny?
Yeah.
It was just like I'm telling my kid all the time, like, there are known knowns that are unknown knowns.
Yeah.
And you got to save your strength and not fight against a thing that you can't win.
And in this one, I was like, oh shit, the insanity of the current economy has actually, in this one instance, freed me of all this anxiety about a thing that I was never gonna, I couldn't afford to move into a smaller place.
That's what's crazy.
That's insane.
Did you tell your kid about this?
Because maybe she's got a POV on that.
Maybe with the learnings and leavings that she's had from this special weekend, is there anything she could give to you to go, like, see, not told you so, because she's obviously above that.
But what do you think her observations of that would be?
This weekend she said a couple of things to me.
She said, Dad, I know that you and Nana care a lot about ferns.
And I hope you appreciate that I appreciate how much you care about ferns.
But you also must know there is nothing you can say or do that will...
that will get me to care about a fern and i was like yes that's some plain speaking i admire it i i do now understand it yeah is that gonna stop you from liking ferns i'm guessing no no no i'm gonna talk to her about ferns every day absolutely but then at midnight no not midnight she's in her room working on her homework after we get home and i get a text from from chad and chad says hey i've got um
I've got a suite at the ballpark tomorrow.
Showbox chat.
I've got a suite at the ballpark for the Green Day rancid Smashing Pumpkins concert tomorrow.
Do you want to go?
Because I've said to Chad over the years, like, look, if you've got two tickets and it's, and it's three hours till doors, uh, give me a call.
I'm always going to go to a show with no awareness of what it is.
It's just my, uh, throw tickets at me.
I don't care if I can't go, then I'll throw them in the garbage.
But if there's a seat, throw it at me.
So he's like, I'm going to be at this show.
You want to come?
And I said, yeah, sure.
Can I bring the kid?
And he was like, sure.
Great.
And so she comes out, having completed her homework, and I go, I'm taking you to Green Data.
And she shrugs and goes, can we bring a friend?
And I was like... You're already bringing your best friend, buddy.
Yeah, you're bringing... You're bringing the best friend you could imagine.
Somebody's going to tell you the bands that are better than whatever song is playing right now.
Hey, honey, when we get home, remind me to play the Buzzcocks.
Be like this band, but good.
You're going to pack a lunch is what we're going to do.
You're going to start right now.
Your homework is done.
Check it in.
Start working.
I'm packing a lunch.
You entitled little brat.
Go to bed.
Jesus Christ.
Won't you go to bed?
No, you've got a friend.
Yeah, that's right.
You've got a friend in me.
You've got a friend.
Also, it strikes me that you perhaps do not have time to listen to her whine about nothing and everything all at once, which is pocketbells canon, but I won't.
I've got so many hats around here, and they're so full.
They're overflowing.
They're really overflowing.
You've got so many sides.
I'll let you know how Green Day goes, though.