Ep. 150: "Dog Beatles"
This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
This month, they asked Kirby Crackle to help me say hi to John.
Roderick on the Line, Line, Line, Line, Line, Line, Roderick on the Line, Line, Talk, John Roderick.
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hello, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, super good.
Super good.
Today is a momentous day.
It's Thomas Jefferson's birthday.
Oh, I did not know that.
I'm going to write that down.
Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson.
It's also our sesquicentennial episode.
What?
Which is a great word I wish everybody would learn and use.
We are seriously?
150 years ago, we put forth on this proposition.
A new empire.
A new empire.
War.
There are heroes on both sides.
My daughter knew we watched that the other night.
It was brutal.
Wow.
There are a lot of things.
Daughters are brutal.
Oh, my God.
We should still talk about that.
Setting Star Wars aside, congratulations on your sesquicentennial episode.
Thank you, Merlin.
Congratulations to you on your sesquicentennial episode.
It's an honor just to be nominated and to share that with Thomas Jefferson.
My goodness.
Wasn't he president at some point?
150 years ago.
150 years ago exactly.
On this date, Thomas Jefferson became president.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And he was responsible for the Northwest Passage, which was an amazing sort of contemporary hit top 40 band in the 70s that used to play at Stuart Anderson's Cattle Company.
And it wasn't too much later they came out with Johnson's Wax.
That's right.
So anyway, there you go.
A little history lesson for our listeners today.
Oh, my God.
We're helping so many people already.
150.
Who ever thought?
You know, when we started this, did you think we would get to 150 episodes?
John, I didn't think we'd get one.
Did you think that there would be people out there who had listened to all 150 episodes multiple times?
Well, I think that comes out to about 1,500 hours of listening time, not including the ones that we have not released.
You know what they say, 1,500 hours is what it takes to become an expert.
Turns out.
You know, Paul McCartney was the president for 150 years.
Is that right?
Yep, he was the king of Hamburg, and they offered him the kingship of Hamburg, and he said, oy, no, but I'll be your president.
And then he took some speed and Sutcliffe had like a brain hemorrhage.
Oh, Sutcliffe.
Sutcliffe, the fourth president, the posthumous president.
He was my favorite cartoon cat.
I loved his wry take on contemporary life.
Can you imagine that Paul didn't used to be the most handsome guy in the Beatles?
Well, you know, it depends on what you think is handsome.
Yes, it's a matter of taste, John.
So Stu Sutcliffe was very handsome in a kind of James Dean-y way.
Which is, I think, very much what they aspire to.
Yes.
Don't you think they all kind of want to look like Fonzie a little bit?
Yep, cool dudes, James Dean-y dudes.
But Paul had that, like, Kewpie doll face...
That if you look at young Paul, if you look at middle Paul, he's just so beautiful.
It's like if a Shih Tzu got alopecia.
You know, he's like a sweet hairless dog.
A sweet little hairless dog.
But, you know, I don't think of Shih Tzus as being black.
And I think of Paul as being like, he's a black-furred creature.
Oh, maybe some kind of like a rescue dog.
Yeah, he is a shaved...
like mushy face dog.
But I think he would have black fur and like, you know, creamy skin.
Okay.
I think, yeah, well, let's not work too ping pong.
I think he looks a little bit like a Chinese dog.
John looks much more like a Northern European kind of dog.
Or maybe he could be an Afghan.
I think John is an Afghan.
I think you're right.
I think he's a sleek and sort of aloof.
Oh, my God, John.
We're going to be so rich.
Dog beetles.
So George is sort of a terrier, like a...
Oh, that's good.
He's a digger.
He's a little bit of a digger, that's right.
Maybe not a ratter, but definitely somebody that goes down a hole.
Right, but he's one of those dogs that's surprisingly not yappy as a terrier.
No, he's a quiet, thoughtful terrier.
He's going down the hole, but he's not looking for rats or badgers.
He's looking for the llama.
Samsara.
So he's a llama terrier.
Okay, all right.
I'll buy that.
And finally...
Ringo.
Maybe.
See, the thing is, we want to make him look different enough.
So we have to incorporate the nose.
Sorry?
English Bulldog?
No, no.
Oh, that's good.
He has to have a droopy dog.
Maybe he's a Basset Hound.
That wouldn't account for the large nose.
Basset Hounds use their noses.
That's true.
And they keep a great beat.
I would say Ringo is a Basset Hound.
Okay.
We're going to make so much money from this.
I feel like we've done a lot of work already today, and we're just a few minutes in here.
I'm learning a lot about the entertainment business.
And the more that I learn about it, the more complicated I realize that it is.
Because as I think we've discussed a little bit in the past, it's like nobody wakes up thinking they want to be a publisher.
Everybody wants to be a writer.
You don't realize you've also got editors, you've got publishers, you've got marketing, right?
I think there's a role for us in doing very little real work with other people's intellectual property.
You've got a lot of connections, John.
You're very well connected.
What would the job description be?
I think we'd be executive producers like Stan Lee.
Thank you, executive producer.
I've been wanting that title for a long time.
It's a pretty great gig.
I think it is kind of an official thing that everything Marvel puts out, Stan Lee is an executive producer.
He executive produced my burrito yesterday.
I feel like I want to be one of those executive producers that shows up to every fifth recording session, falls asleep on the couch wearing sunglasses.
Shoots his wife.
See, this is the Rick Rubin model of producing albums.
All right.
Okay.
You got sunglasses on.
You're laying down on the couch.
Nobody can tell whether you're asleep or not.
And then every once in a while, you raise your head up a little bit and you make some kind of like – you make a gesture with one hand and say like more cowbell or whatever.
Cut out the mids.
And then that's not even – he doesn't – that's not an executive producer.
He actually gets the producer credit.
Well, the producer tells the engineer to cut the mids.
That's right.
Cut the mids.
You know what?
Can you notch 4K?
Just notch 4K a little bit.
You want to get a little bit of roll off on the bandwidth.
Yeah, that's right.
You want to roll the bandwidth off.
I totally agree.
And I think this is why it's extra super confusing, because executive producers, I don't know this for sure, but my understanding of it, historically, at least with movies, was that the director is the head of the creative team.
Well, really, you know, of the making of the film, but of the creative aspects of putting the movie together, the technical aspects, and that the producer is more of the logistical and, if you like, money person.
Right.
And then the executive producer is the brother of the guy who gave the most amount of money to the movie.
okay i think that i think that makes sense i think but executive producer i think can mean you're steven spielberg and you put up a bunch of dough oh right or it can mean you're stan lee and you did some good stuff in the early 60s right that's true or you're suge knight and you have a pistol in your sock yeah you know they put him in a wheelchair he's pretty mad about that was that suge knight is he the one in a wheelchair they they put him there or he's on trial right now i think he's on trial yeah
Yeah, he's very frustrated.
He had a fit, some kind of a fit in the courtroom, and then they made him sit in a wheelchair.
He portrayed it as an involuntary fit?
I think he had some kind of a – what my grandmother called a conniption.
Yeah, a conniption.
Like a little bit of a seizure type situation?
I don't know.
I'm not a journalist.
You're not a doctor.
I'm not a physician, as you know, but I feel bad for the guy, you know?
Now, you're going on record here on our podcast as feeling bad for Suge Knight.
I don't know much.
Didn't he supposedly kill a rapper?
Was that him?
Is he the one who supposedly killed Tupac?
Am I saying that right, Tupac?
He was in the car with Tupac.
Oh.
But also he was the one that dangled vanilla ice out the window off a hotel balcony, dangled him by his ankles.
Wow.
That guy's got a lot of upper body strength.
Well, he's a big man, Suj.
Suj.
And yeah, he did a lot of terrible things.
He's generally, I think, universally understood to be a bad man.
who created a lot of havoc, but also built an empire and then lost it, sort of the Al Capone of the Southern California music scene.
Oh, that's a good way to put it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, unless we're compelled to for reasons, industry reasons or violence, we would not have him on our Beatles dog project.
No, I don't think so.
And, you know, over the years I have been, he's one of those people where I will, I'll write a, let's say, for instance, a humorous tweet.
I will write a humorous tweet that features a Suge Knight in some component.
And then right before I post it, a little voice, a little bell rings in the back of my head and a little voice goes, are you sure you want to get on the wrong side of Suge Knight?
And then I always post it because I say, silence, Bell.
I am not afraid of some person who's a long way away from me who doesn't care about me.
But there is that little moment where I'm like, he's exactly the type of guy that would get mad about a tweet and then drive all night and come burn down my house or something.
I know.
Well, this tells you how times are changing.
For years, I had a lot of really good material on Scientology that I wouldn't release because I know how those guys roll.
You were afraid that they were going to Theten you?
Man, did you see that movie?
You know, like a lot of popular culture, as it was being broadcast, I followed along on Twitter as everyone talked about it.
But I did not see it.
Well, I know you have a lot of spare time right now.
I would suggest reading the book.
The book is very, very good.
And it just shows you how scary these guys are.
Hodgman went through a phase where he was very interested in Scientology and acquired all these secret videotapes.
Yeah, they're amazing.
And then he made us all sit down a couple of nights.
I was going to say one night, but actually it was more than one night.
We all sat down at his house in Maine and watched Scientology videos into the middle of the night.
And they're long.
Well, they're very long.
There are none that are not long.
I could never quite be... For myself, I was never quite certain that this wasn't an elaborate hoax.
That those things were actually real.
Yeah.
I couldn't quite ever, like, swallow.
Yeah.
I got a hold of one, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago that was going around, and it's one that's – I think it's the kind of thing that's featured in the movie.
It's an event, a very, very large event that I will describe as a combination of the Oscar Awards and Triumph of the Will.
LAUGHTER
There's already quite a lot of crossover between those events.
But instead of Neil Patrick Harris, it's a creepy little guy.
What's his name?
David Miscavige.
Yeah, Miscarriage.
Sick burn.
Right?
You're going to be scrubbing toilets in a trailer soon, buddy.
So now tell me, you're talking about this being 10 years ago.
Is this some kind of church of the subgenius thing where people were trading these tapes around?
Yeah.
Oh, dear.
You know, I got to be honest with you.
Yes, kind of.
Because, you know, it's kind of been an internet thing for a while to be interested in what's up with Scientology and look critical of it.
And what's weird about it, though, is that even just reading about it and even just watching these videos, you get this kind of second order cult feeling.
Like I found myself getting a little obsessed with it even when I just read about it for a little while.
There's so much jargon.
I'll spend an hour and a half just reading glossaries of Scientology terms.
I don't mean to interrupt with some kind of... Is this breaking news, John?
I don't want to interrupt with a German fairy tale here.
No, please.
But there was a fly that was pestering me.
And while you were just talking, I got up with my... I took my shoe off.
And I was chasing the fly around the room, not chasing, I was patiently stalking the fly.
And the fly landed in a place where he thought he was safe.
And I dispatched the fly.
I did not kill seven with one blow.
I killed one with one blow.
But I feel pretty good about it.
And you had my full attention.
I was listening to the Scientology thing, but I also second career.
You're telling me you have the ability to hear complex information on study tech.
from me even as you are going into action literally taking care of a problem in real time.
That's right.
This is exactly what the people of Seattle need, John.
I was performing the roles both of Secretary of State and SEAL Team 6.
simultaneously oh my god there's another fly in here i thought i thought oh i'm so mad right now i you know what i heard i heard you shouldn't kill a bee because uh the smell of a dead bee attracts bees have you ever heard that have you ever driven across america in a van in the summertime well what happens is some parts of america you will uh you'll kill a lot of bugs
Oh, yeah, like the love bugs in Florida, that kind of thing.
Well, and like in the Midwest, there are just sometimes when you're just all of a sudden you are going through a terrain of very large bugs, and you are killing these bugs with the front of your van until it is truly an encrustation of dead bugs.
And then you'll stop and go into a restaurant or something, and when you come out,
Your van is still covered with gross dead bugs, but then another layer of bees.
Oh, God.
Which, for whatever reason, a reason I've never researched, I don't understand, but the bees seem like carnivorous or something.
The bees are swarming the dead bugs.
Maybe dead bugs make a flower smell.
But there must be something that scent-wise attracts them that they won't have to go check it out.
Or maybe they're wasps and not bees.
Maybe it's wasps.
Or like a yellow jacket kind of thing.
Yeah, and they're eating the dead bugs.
But in any case, come out.
It's a very hot day.
I'm trying to paint a picture here for you.
Very hot day, somewhere in the Midwest.
It's 95 degrees.
You and the band have just had a couple of chicken fried steaks and milkshakes.
Yeah.
And now you're getting back in the van.
You got to get to Iowa City for the big show.
And you come out and the front of your van looks like a panko encrusted chicken breast.
covered with bees that's so gross terrible and then if you don't if you're not careful getting into the car right you then the bees will get in the car and then you're driving across the country with like will you whatever yellow jackets no that's no good you don't want that no so yes i know all about that and i don't like it you ever encounter the love bugs
You're talking about the giant – they're like giant – the flying cockroaches?
No, no, no, no.
No, where I lived in west central Florida, like the Suncoast, I want to say maybe in springtime there's – and I'll look this up.
But there's some kind of species of insects that are maybe about the size of a fly.
Yeah.
And they go into mating.
And their mating is they have intercourse and fly, usually over a road.
And your car is just covered with splattered intercourse, coitus bugs.
What a way to go, though, right?
Am I right?
Are you telling me?
Up here.
You can get a special screen to put over your grill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I used to wonder, is there anywhere in America that you can live that you don't have to have things like bugs or tornadoes or earthquakes?
And I don't think there's anywhere.
You would know.
You've traveled a lot more than I have.
Are there places you can go that are free of annoyance?
Well, so Alaska has no snakes.
And it has very few, like, creepy, crawly, poisonous bugs.
Yeah.
But it has mosquitoes in, you know, prolific mosquitoes.
In the winter as well?
No, no, no.
But in the winter, it has cold.
Yeah.
Seattle has a nice mix of... Spiders.
You got spiders, right?
Oh, we have fucking spiders.
That's right.
So Seattle has very few venomous things.
Very few, like, the cockroaches that are here are very small.
There's no, like, big... Just A&R reps.
Yeah.
Just a lot of A&R reps and then massive, massive spiders all through the fall, summer and fall.
You know, California, it goes without saying, has every kind of pestilence.
I think Florida might win.
If you think everything that Florida's got, they got all kinds of snakes.
They got brown recluse spiders.
They have many varieties of cockroaches.
They kind of have those annoying New York cockroaches, but mostly they have what we used to call palmetto bugs or water bugs.
Mm-hmm.
Water bugs.
The ones that are like, you know, like size of a baby's fist.
Yeah.
Water bug.
You can hear water bug.
We don't have, honey, honey, we don't have roaches.
We have water bugs.
I can name every kind of bug.
Water bug.
Tree bug.
Bugs scampi.
And plus then you do have tornadoes and you got hurricanes and you've got just the culture of Florida, which is its own kind of creepy crawly.
Right.
Plus alligators.
And you know what?
They just show up.
They just show up in neighborhoods and eat dogs.
That's a fact.
That is a thing.
So every time I'm in Florida, which is a surprising amount of time considering how long I went in this life without ever going to Florida, then I turned a corner and then suddenly I was in Florida all the time.
I'm always thinking that there is going to be an alligator.
I've never seen an alligator on the hoof.
And yet I'm there all the time and I walk around all the time in parks and at night and stuff.
And I'm afraid that an alligator is going to come out of the bushes.
And I don't even know if they live in bushes, but I'm worried about them.
Oh, they're there.
I was mowing a lawn one time and I saw one.
They come out of those, you know, they make those quote unquote lakes.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
It's really just like from runoff from the roads.
I noticed from the air you look down and you're like, that is a man-made lake.
There's no reason for it except that then they can call that waterfront property instead of swamp.
Right.
As you know, in Florida, every development is named after whatever was destroyed to make it.
Right.
So if you've got Indian deer lake, no more Indians, no more deers, no more lakes.
And, you know, the perfectly, it's almost like, you know, like you get the kind of like California swimming pools that have like a very regular, irregular shape.
That's what those lakes look like.
And that's what those streets look like from the air.
It's really peculiar.
But no, I remember, I mean, we have canonical family stories about this.
One day walking out of a beauty salon, maybe 1970, my mom, there's like an alligator by our car.
They just show up.
And what do you do when there's an alligator by your car?
Well, try to move away, and if you have to run, zigzag, because they can run 40 miles an hour.
Did you know that?
Most people think, you know, shortest point, I'm going to run in a straight line.
Not good.
Those little feet, they go up to 40 miles an hour.
Wow, that's fast.
Yep.
And they drag you down into their meat locker and flip you around.
Well, you know, we were plagued for a while by moose in our front yard.
And my mom would go out because the thing is they would come in the winter and eat all of her trees.
Mooses eat tree?
Yeah, they do.
They like to eat portions of young trees.
Yeah.
You know, they're always grazing, grazing, grazing, grazing.
And so sometimes we would look out the window and there would be one big bull moose and nine different cows and calves all in our front yard.
That sounds so cute.
i thought so but my mom would get very upset because they were eating her little japanese maples or whatever she decided to plant the year before and so i have a couple of very strong images burned into my mind of my mom in a house coat with a broom running out the front door and and swatting the moose
She confronted the moose with a broom?
Yeah.
She struck the moose?
Well, no, swatting at them, swishing at them.
Like a scoot motion.
Right.
Well, but kind of, you know, their moose are like, particularly the bull is like seven feet tall at the shoulder.
And let me tell you, there is no thing more hilarious than the look of complete
Blase on the face of a moose when confronted by a woman in a housecoat like they would stand there just slowly chewing her trees down to the nub completely unfazed and she would be going Scott Scott and swishing this broom at them and they would just they would look over their shoulder.
It would take them a full minute just to turn their head.
They were so bored.
That must have driven your mom nuts.
Drove her even crazier.
And I'm standing on the front porch, you know, completely just doubled over in laughter and completely unwilling to join the fight.
Right.
She's like she's like, get this broom.
Come help me.
And I'm like, I refuse.
I think every I think that every summer we should plant trees and and nurture them all summer long, just as moose food, just to recreate this this drama every winter.
It was truly a wonderful thing to behold.
But I imagine if you came out of your house and there was an alligator in your front yard eating your Japanese maple...
you would be less inclined to try and sweep it away.
Here's the thing.
I lived in Florida for a really long time, and I have over the years, as you know, John, I am trying to grow as a person, and so I don't want to just beat up on Florida.
It's just that Florida gives us so much to beat it up about, and it doesn't seem to mind.
You're very careful to always refer to your part of Florida as the Suncoast, which is, I think, very generous of you.
That's like the sign that they put up
on the interstate highway announcing like you're now entering the Suncoast.
And you're always good about that branding.
I think Florida owes you a debt of gratitude.
Thank you.
I want to provide a rounded view.
But I mean, here's one thing.
I think this was – I don't know if it was for Pasco County writ large.
I think it was for Newport Ritchie in particular, which is where I went to junior high and high school.
And you know how every city has like a slogan?
And you see that on the cop cars and you see it on the official signs and stuff like that.
And you don't really notice it until you notice it.
Do you know what Newport Ritchie's slogan is?
gateway to recreation which is at first at first that sounds really good but I want you to realize they're the gateway to recreation it's sort of like you know what there's not a lot here but once you pass through here you might find something yeah it's just right over the next rise
But there are no rises in Florida.
No.
No, it's permaflat.
Have we talked about mega tsunamis?
Oh, I don't think so, no.
I'm pretty freaked out about a tsunami because a tsunami is kind of like a – not a perfect storm.
That's too clichéd.
But a tsunami is kind of like multiple problematic weather events all wrapped in one, right?
It isn't like just you get a hurricane.
It's like a hurricane plus an earthquake, right?
Yeah.
Well, let's see.
I mean, you could have a mega tsunami that was generated by an earthquake far, far away.
So you didn't actually come from earthquakes, too.
Yes.
Jesus.
So if there's an earthquake, you know, in Japan, it could create a wave so large.
It's like my daughter sloshing around in the tub and making super waves.
That's right.
You get the cycles right, right?
You go a little bit with the water and then you start going against the water.
Then you go with the water again and it's all over the floor and I got to clean it up.
That's exactly what would happen.
But with the ocean.
And your location there, your undisclosed location there somewhere on the California coast...
You know, it's far enough uphill, it'd have to be a big tsunami, but a mega tsunami?
Oh, our place would, you know about pancaking?
Oh, yeah, right, because you're just built on sand.
Well, yeah, we're built on sand.
There's parts of San Francisco, this is not interesting, but a big part of the whole giant western part of San Francisco nobody's ever been to, where I live, is just sand dunes.
Yeah, dunes.
You know like the marina is built on wrecked ships?
Yeah.
Well, that's true in Seattle, too.
There was a big part where all the sports stadiums are here.
Yeah.
Was originally just where we put our poop.
Right.
And then later auto dealerships.
And then the auto dealerships came in.
And then I think there was a Hooverville there for a while.
And little by little, we just threw all of our broken furniture and dead horses into the mud pond.
And pretty soon it was like, you know what would look good there is a baseball stadium.
So I think that's part of the evolution of every city, right?
You have a poop hole, throw some dead horses in it, and then build a baseball stadium.
The auto malls are a good canary in the coal mine, though.
It's always interesting to me how they're all in the same place.
Yeah, because people, when they're shopping for cars, they just want to drive down one lonely strip.
I think it's kind of like a Disney World type situation.
You know the history of Disney World?
Now I've got you way off topic.
But at Disney World, they went in and the – what was it?
The Reedy Creek Development Group, I think it was called –
based on this nominal little creek there.
But they went in and the Disney Corporation went in under all these different like shadow organizations and shell companies.
That's how they were able to get so much land for so cheap.
Right.
Because, and I think it were auto malls work like that too.
They just go where nobody else wants to go.
Right, because if they had gone and said, hi, we're Disney and we're buying up land, there would have been some holdout person who was like, I want a million dollars for my palm trees.
Well, so the wonderful thing about Florida as it relates to the mega tsunami...
is all the way across the Atlantic off of the coast of Africa, in the Canary Islands, there is an unstable sort of volcanic face of an island.
And the island has, over the years, sort of...
created an unstableness to itself, either through volcanic action or erosion, so that it is a giant sort of mountain that has a... The entire sort of west face of this mountain is at an angle that is too steep to support its own weight.
This is the theory.
Excuse me.
And that...
In the grand tradition of Leonard Nimoy, it is only a matter of time before the entire mountain collapses into the sea.
And when that happens, it could potentially or will absolutely, depending on which television program you're watching,
create a 300-foot-tall tsunami wave that goes all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
And as you know, there is nothing in Florida taller than 300 feet.
No, I mean, I think New Orleans was famously below sea level.
A lot of Florida is at sea level.
At sea level, right.
But not a lot of tolerance there.
What's the tallest point in Florida?
Three.
There's got to be Mount Deer Lake, right?
Mount Indian Deer Lake.
Tallest point.
I'm just going to put this into the computer right now.
Tallest point in Florida.
Tallest point in Florida.
Let's see.
Britain Hill.
There's a list of highest points.
Sugarloaf Mountain.
So Britain Hill is 345 feet.
Look at that.
Look at that.
It's like pretty much already.
It's just really Alabama.
It's not even really Florida.
Oh, right.
It's all the way up there.
Oh, my gosh.
It's 300.
Let's see.
300.
Second highest point.
Sugarloaf Mountain.
Britton Hill.
Oh, Britton Hill in the panhandle.
Look at that.
It goes up to 345 feet.
Wow.
That's right.
So let's imagine now a 300-foot tsunami wave from the Canary Islands slowly making its way across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Canary Islands have collapsed.
And we are all aware that this tsunami wave is coming.
Now, the tsunami wave is also going to inundate Charleston and Savannah and New York City.
And it's just it's going to be a wave of devastation.
But Florida uniquely has nowhere to run.
And so all the people in New York City are frantically scrambling sort of like at the beginning of World War Z. They're all trying to get in their stolen Winnebago's and drive inland.
There's a lot of places even though that is also – I don't know if it's technically a peninsula.
I guess it's an island.
But there's still places to go.
You can still go upstate or something.
Yeah, you got to just go, go, go.
I mean, I'm not sure if I were down in lower Manhattan, maybe I would just go up a skyscraper and feel like, well, maybe this wave will just hit the skyscraper really hard but not knock it down.
It'll be fine.
They make those pretty strong now.
Yeah, they're strong, right.
But in Florida, there is nowhere to go.
And so however many – let's ask the computer how many millions of people are in Florida.
Here's what I'll tell you.
I will tell you as somebody who at one point I lived –
In Tallahassee, which is very near Georgia.
And I had family, as you say, back on the Suncoast.
That was a, if I honored the law, that was a four hour drive.
But like driving to the East Coast, like trying to get out of like Palm Beach or even, God, Miami.
Palm Beach, that's going to be eight hours to get out of the state.
Really?
Yeah, it's like an eight-hour drive.
Here's the other thing.
Here's the funny thing is every dumb spring break kid goes, oh, let's go to Key West.
And so you drive.
You get in your car in Lutes or Elfers, and you start driving.
Oh, yeah.
You start driving, you drive, you drive.
You go, holy shit, this is a really long drive.
You finally hit the end of Florida, and you're like, yay, Key West.
Like, no, no, sorry, Johnny.
Now you get to the real part, like where you've got to get to Key West, which is like just super slow.
It's a really long drive.
This is a good point, John.
Did you know I'm learning this from Wikipedia, which is never wrong.
There was a mega tsunami.
Do you know about, this is in your parents' lifetime, Lituya Bay?
In Alaska.
1958.
That's right.
Do you know about this?
I do.
It's exactly the same type of situation, a big landslide.
A giant landslide at the head of Latuya Bay in Alaska caused by an earthquake generated a wave with an initial amplitude of up to 1,720 feet.
The highest wave ever recorded.
And there is a person.
Talking about keeping a small bag packed.
Holy shit.
There's a guy who claims to have been on a boat on that bay and it lifted him up and took him up the side of a mountain.
and then brought him back down, and he survived.
1,700 feet, that's like from here to the Safeway.
That's pretty, that's pretty, that's a lot of feet, John.
It's a big wave.
If you imagine that there's nothing in Florida taller than 300 feet, 1,700 feet is really, really a big wave.
You'll be okay for a couple minutes.
But you know, Florida, I'm now discovering, again through the internet, that Florida is the third most populous state in the Union with almost 20 million people.
So now.
California, New York, California, Texas.
What's the second?
You know, Texas has got a lot of people in it.
California has the same size economy as Italy, turns out, and it's got a lot of people.
What's second?
Well, let's see.
Let's go.
Most popular states of population.
Most popular states.
I guess Texas is going to be right in there, right?
California, Texas, Florida.
That's right.
And New York is fourth.
California has 37 million people.
That's insane.
It should be five states.
No question.
They should be balkanized.
There's no question.
38 million, almost 40 million people.
John, I think you know I'm all for diversity.
Yeah.
But like Stockton and Eureka and San Francisco and San Diego should not be in the same state.
No, it's true.
Those should be in different states.
There are 40 million people in...
The UK, right?
I mean, Germany has 60 million people and France has 40 million or UK has 40 million, something like that.
I'm not sure.
I know I'm sitting and looking at the internet right now, but I'm not going to just sit and talk about the internet.
No.
But anyway, I want you to picture the 20 million people in Florida all trying to figure out what they're going to do
As a 300-foot wave approaches, some of them are going to get in their big boats and head toward the wave, which I think would be the smart move.
That's the Christian thing to do.
Right?
Some of them are going to try and get over to Tampa.
And that wave is just going to be right on their heels, right?
Do you think it could just crack off and go right off the foundation, just crack off and become an island?
It seems like that wouldn't be that hard to do.
It's barely hanging on, John, at parts.
It's pretty skinny.
I think this wave would go across it.
and like maybe a few days later the water would subside and scour all of the you know all of the uh the sort of roadside flat roofed one-story malls and uh you know and then it'd be a clean slate it'd be just back to dunes and we could start all over again build a railroad down there
Thomas Edison and P.T.
Barnum come down and build a hotel?
Sure, the Barons.
The Barons would come down.
We should get our friend, the physicist Grant Balfour, involved in this.
He knows a lot about Florida and he's been there most of his life.
Yeah, he's one of the great Floridians and also a physicist and an editor and a scientist.
Yeah, yeah.
We've been talking about our other enterprise.
Yeah.
It's going to be tough to do with what you're up to, but I'm telling you, we could help a lot of people by talking to Grant.
Listen, there is nothing that I am up to that would preclude enterprise, right?
That is the foundation of America.
Oh, my God, John.
That brings us to an important point in our conversation.
There are two things.
There are two fucking things that we are going to cover today.
Okay?
One of them is I would absolutely like to hear an update on how things are going with your latest venture.
And you sure as shit know I'm going to get my chicken recipe today.
I'm so excited.
Have you seen the Vox Populi?
People are losing it.
They want to know.
They say, I love chicken.
I like cooking well enough.
Give me a life-changing thought technology on cooking chicken.
Well, and this is a little bit of context that I can provide for the listeners.
Although you have introduced me to multiple food thought technologies, including making bacon in the oven, including— Before it was called the bacon method.
Before it was called the bacon method.
I don't make a big deal about it, but I've been doing that for years.
Yeah.
You introduced that to me over a decade ago.
And it blew my mind at the time.
You also introduced me to the concept of weekend morning dim sum eaten in large quantities.
Ordering dim sum in quantities you cannot possibly think that you're going to finish and then just doing it.
I've never not finished the dim sum.
But also, I have to credit you with the – whether you specifically gave me this thought technology or whether you planted the seed that developed into this thought technology.
But I believe I got the make all the bacon philosophy from you.
That's so interesting.
It's like calculus.
Everybody kind of figured it out about the same time.
I do that now.
We buy the big Ziplocs and we make all the noodles, all the great noodles.
That's right, all the noodles.
And I'm not sure whether we just both arrived at that together or whether that is part of our American heritage or what it is.
But you are not a person who makes half a pot of coffee.
Let's just put it that way.
Right?
When it's time to make another pot of coffee, you make an entire pot of coffee.
And sometimes somebody will be like, can I make some coffee?
They'll be at my house.
Can I make some coffee?
Oh, sure.
Go ahead and make some coffee.
And they make like four cups of coffee.
Oh, like toy coffee.
And I'm like, what are you doing?
Mm-hmm.
All of that work, you put all of that English on it and you're just getting four cups of coffee out of it?
No, it's a total waste of time.
And especially for somebody like yourself who's not afraid to take coffee that's been sitting there for a couple days and take it on the road and drink it.
Hello.
Because I actually happen to think that whatever that mold is that develops on coffee, in the first few days, it just has a kind of psychoactive quality.
It's not all the way to like, oh, this is terrible.
It just puts a little bit of...
It puts a little spin on the ball.
They probably laughed at the first guy who ate an oyster or the first gal who had a mushroom.
And in your case, you're enjoying coffee mushrooms.
The first person that hated peanuts so much that they mashed them so hard that it turned into peanut butter?
Yes, exactly.
I hate these peanuts!
And I was like, wait a minute.
This is delicious peanut sauce.
I think that was – I made a joke at you the other day about George Washington Carver, who I still just remember so much because it was the first biography I ever read as a child, I think.
He's the one that created the peanut gin, right?
That's right.
That's right.
And it was a thing that revolutionized the South.
They were able to make ashtrays, rearview mirrors.
He actually made peanuts out of sweet potatoes.
Jimmy Carter got elected on the strength of that platform.
Jimmy Crack Corn.
It was an amazing time.
Mother of invention.
That's right.
There's so many things.
That's the kind of innovation we're talking about here.
In Alaska, that might be moose, but you've got to take what there's a lot of.
In my case, that's noodles, and I make it all.
You remember a time, and I surely remember a time because I'm the one introducing the topic, when Swizzle Sticks
were a major feature on the American landscape.
Is that like the Red Vines competitor?
No, no, no.
Swizzle sticks are the little plastic sticks.
Oh, like a drink stirrer with rock candy on it, that kind of thing.
That's right, a drink stirrer.
But for a long time there in American history, swizzle sticks were –
were an item of schwag, you would go into the... I collected them as a kid.
That's right.
You go into the bar, they'd put a little swizzle stick in your drink to stir your drink, but the swizzle stick would be embossed with the name of the bar and some... Or the airline.
I had Delta Airlines ones that were really cool that had a big logo on the end.
And so it was a very popular collector item.
You'd try and amass an enormous collection of swizzle sticks from around the world.
And I'm sure out there in America right now, there are swizzle stick collections just sitting on mantles.
Googling it right now.
Right?
And I look for them in thrift stores all the time that I'm going to find somebody's swizzle stick collection.
I've never found one.
Oh, my God.
But in the 70s, there were swizzle sticks everywhere.
And the reason I bring this up is that in Alaska, it was very popular.
one of the big tourist sellers in the 70s was a moose turd which as you know looks exactly like one of those little chocolate easter eggs wrapped in foil except made out of compacted grass so a little moose turd and they would dip the moose turd in polyurethane
and then put it on a swizzle stick.
What?
So the moose turd swizzle sticks were a big, big item.
I'm sure that there are tens of thousands of moose turd swizzle sticks, and they call them moose nuggets because nobody likes to buy something with the word turd in it.
But moose nugget, swizzle stick.
big big item it was you could get it in any airport in any it was this type of thing like I'm leaving Alaska and I didn't get presents for anybody haha look at this moose nuggets whistle sticks I'll get one for the whole family wow so that was a major export
Before we, I mean, sort of after gold, but before oil.
Right.
Sure, sure, sure.
We had gold, and that was a big deal.
Then there was this interregulum where there was like, oh, shit.
Oh, John, these are horrible.
Yeah, they're the worst.
Oh, my God.
They look like it's almost like not a Tootsie Pop, but it really looks like poop on a stick.
So then using the pet rock theorem.
Then people were like, oh, if we can put a moose nugget on a swizzle stick, who wouldn't want moose nugget earrings?
And then you could buy moose nugget earrings.
Get a tie tack, a key ring.
Picture someone meeting you for a blind date and she is wearing moose nugget earrings.
But it was a very popular item at the time.
That just says local gal.
The 1970s were a very unusual era.
So anyway, swizzle sticks, I miss them sometimes.
I wonder like whatever happened.
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Two things come to mind.
One is cost cutting where like if you could have a little dinky straw, maybe it's something now where like the economies of scale to making dinky little straws has gotten so big that you don't need an extra swizzle stick.
It's like more skews to keep in stock.
But then there's also the McDonald's problem.
And I don't know if this is true.
I think this is probably a turns out thing.
But, you know, people supposedly, you know, McDonald's used to make a pretty sweet little swizzle stick.
Oh, that's right.
With the little M on the top.
It had a beautiful golden, like it was white, but it had the arches on one end.
And what did it have at the other end?
Oh, it had like a Hamburglar.
No, it had a tiny, tiny spoon.
It did have a spoon.
It was adorable.
It was this tiny spoon.
And so my primary use for those was... Okay, right.
Yeah, my primary use... Yeah, exactly.
You've gotten it.
My primary use was if you hold a rubber band between your thumb and middle finger and put the arches into the rubber band and pull back...
That shit will fly like 50 feet.
You can really harm a person with one of those.
Wow, it's like a little homemade little hand crossbow.
A hand crossbow, yep.
But I don't know.
Now, again, this is the way America works, and this is what needs to change.
I want to get back to your campaign.
But this is the problem, is that I think the story was that...
I bet it's one of those second-order urban myth things.
So wait, so you're going to use a McDonald's stir to snort cocaine?
I bet people heard that and then they had to get rid of it because now the urban myth was bigger than the thing.
That's my guess.
It was exactly the kind of little dimensions of a Coke spoon.
Yeah.
Maybe that's where they derived the design of Coke spoons.
Hmm.
You know, like who knows?
Chicken and egg, chicken and egg.
Get on it, Malcolm Gladwell.
So, oh boy, so many things have changed in our lives.
The other day you sent me a beautiful picture of a deluxe VHS set of...
The classic World War II D-Day invasion movie.
I think it's got to be, it sounds like it's intellectually one of your favorite movies, but it's also like you and your dad used to watch this movie, right?
The Longest Day.
The Longest Day.
An amazing film, an all-star cast.
And really, what's amazing about The Longest Day is there are a lot of comedic actors in it playing dramatic roles.
Hmm.
like Red Buttons is in it.
Oh, right, and he plays it straight.
And there's a lot of playing it straight happening, and it's one of those all-star casts where you feel like, oh, this is one of those Brad Pitt movies where everybody and their mom is in it, and it's just going to be terrible.
But in fact, these people show up, these famous, famous actors show up and do kind of small parts.
Before they were super famous.
Some of them were already famous.
Some of them were already famous.
You got John Wayne Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, right?
But then you got a very young Sean Connery.
Right.
A young Richard Burton.
Can you believe that?
And everybody just like acting their pants off.
And it's a big budget film.
And unlike later World War II movies, they still had access to all the actual hardware.
Right.
Right.
So it's not it's not like a lot of those a lot of the later World War Two movies like there'll be planes flying over all the time.
But if you are somebody I'm not going to say like who.
But if you're the kind of person that could tell every every plane that's ever existed by its shape.
If you're that sort of person.
If you're the type of person like me who is looking at the planes in those scenes instead of what the actors are doing underneath.
you will begin to notice that they only have three planes and they keep flying them by in different configurations.
Like here comes one plane and now there's three planes, but the first plane is in the little group of three too.
And you're just like, and particularly when they use the wrong plane,
Like, here come the Germans.
Huh, wait a minute.
They're flying Piper Cubs.
Right.
It's very frustrating for me.
Which would be like, I don't know, in the war scenes, they've got toy guns.
You would look at that and go, that doesn't even make any sense.
That's a consumer plane.
And I don't want to be one of those Civil War reenactors that's like, that's the wrong belt buckle.
The problem is if you know a lot about a thing, it's kind of hard not to be that guy.
Yeah, right.
You're just sort of like, oh, this is a disappointment.
And part of the disappointment is when I realized they only have three planes, I also realized like, oh, those are the only three F4U Corsairs left in existence.
In 1962.
And that makes me very sad.
Oh, it's so sad.
But during the longest day, they were selling all that military hardware.
You could go buy a P-40 Tomahawk for $14 if you could just get the gas in it.
And so they're making this movie and it's just like, wow.
I mean, I'm sure there were a lot of people on the set that had actually been at D-Day and they were just working as gaffers or something.
It's impressive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And to state the obvious, but I think this is very interesting.
Also, people who were some of whom were just about a little young, maybe, but just about at the age where they might have even served in World War Two or at least have been in the army at some point.
Are you kidding?
I think everybody in that movie was.
Yeah.
Right.
Except for John Wayne.
Uh, well, you know, he served in other ways.
Uh, he, um, he had a, he had a, he had a hernia, a herniated disc.
Oh no, really?
No, I don't think so.
No, I think he just, I think it took away from his smoking time.
Yeah.
I think he's just a shirker.
A layabout, a gold brick.
You think he's a malingerer?
You calling John Wayne a malingerer?
You know, I don't know.
I just feel like 62, that was John Wayne's, you know, that was like, he was even a little bit past his.
Oh, yeah.
He did stagecoach in, I think, 1939.
Right.
And, you know, he could have done a Benny Goodman.
He could have gone out and played the trombone for our boys.
Glenn Miller, right.
See, now, look, look, I was just that guy with you.
Nobody would have fucking cared that you said Benny Goodman, but I know it was Glenn Miller who died.
Glenn Miller played the trombone and Benny Goodman played the clarinet.
You know what, John?
In some ways, modern life and especially modern manhood is just deciding which subset of things you're going to be insufferable about.
Yeah.
Actually, there's a space in OS 10.
Since declaring for public office, I've gotten into a few long conversations with people on the internet, which are very much in the spirit of that, like, well, did you ever consider blankety-blankety-blank?
And I'm learning that I need to really, really, really, really choose how long of a conversation I'm willing to have on Facebook Messenger.
Because I had eliminated Facebook almost completely from my life.
Oh, you've got to have Facebook.
You're running for office.
My God, that had not even occurred to me.
Yeah, so I had to get Facebook back.
You were kind of weaned off it pretty good.
It felt good.
I just used – I ported over my tweets over there.
So if people that I went to high school with that didn't have Twitter, if they wanted to hear my thoughts, which none of them did, but they were there, right?
Yeah.
But now I had to download the Facebook app to my phone, and then I had to follow through on their whole scheme to get me to download Messenger, which is just the worst.
They vulcanized their app.
They used to have one app, and now they've got a bunch of apps, right?
Yeah, and they're just the worst.
They're all the worst, and it's just the worst place.
It's not as bad as LinkedIn, but it's pretty bad.
And so now I'm over there and people want to message me.
Somebody messaged me the other day that was just like trying to enlist me in some sort of like sex scheme.
It's just it's an awful environment for the for the for the public good.
Well, you know, I mean, people people have a different idea of how their public servant, how they want different constituencies.
That's right.
Thank you.
But enough about that.
Are we ready to talk about the chicken?
Well, I'm ready in a second to talk about the chicken, but it's only been a week now.
Yes, that's right.
Would you like to talk about how it's been going?
Well, it's been going swimmingly.
The challenge for me is I do believe passionately in public service, and I believe in the city of Seattle.
The question is, how do you run for public office in America and not become a monster?
Because everyone wants you – this is the thing about politics, right?
Everybody wants you to be a monster.
They expect you to be a monster.
That's who – this conversation that we have with one another about like –
about politics, we're all so exhausted by the fact that everyone who runs for office is a monster.
But then when someone runs for office, we expect them to perform in a way that only a monster could do.
The only people who could stand up in front of a room and say, I have the answers, are liars or maniacs or sociopaths.
Um, no, no one has the answer.
We don't want to elect people who have the answers.
We want to elect people who are capable of, of like acting on our behalf to make difficult choices and to make choices is very different than to have the answers.
Um,
To make choices is a set of – that is a skill set, right?
Where you are capable of processing a lot of complicated information, a lot of like opposing views that all sound sane and reasonable and then make the best choice that you can on behalf of the rest of us because we can't all possibly choose everything, right?
And it's like one of the foundations of civilization, right?
Every person doesn't walk into the room and decide again whether or not they're going to wear pants.
We just mutually decide that we all have to wear pants.
That's one of the rules.
And if you walk in and say, well, in my culture, we don't wear pants, everybody doesn't get a chance to assert that, right?
It's just like, no, we all wear pants.
That's longstanding pants detente.
We may not love it, but it keeps the peace.
That's right.
And ultimately, it's totally arbitrary, right?
It's completely manufactured that we all have decided to wear pants.
but we have, and you can argue it, but the case is kind of made.
Let's get on down the road, right?
So public servants are, I mean, there are scientists to adjudicate the science.
There are bureaucrats to fill out the forms and file them properly.
The public servant is someone who
you elect in your stead and you trust that person to make difficult decisions on your behalf.
And so you ask only that that person have, have good character, have a like lucid mind and,
And be willing to make decisions and take some heat for them.
But also make them in good faith.
But then when someone offers to run for office, we immediately start asking them to show us...
that they are willing to stand in front of us and claim to have either perfect knowledge or infallibility or spotless character.
Spotless character that if a person actually, if a person came to a party at our house and had a character with no spots on it, we would talk to them for a minute and then move away from them and go find someone interesting to talk to.
All these things that we – all these ever-narrowing apertures that we force – Well, they're – what's the word?
Contradictory, paradoxical.
You can't have all of these things.
You can't.
You can't have somebody who's got a vision for change.
Well, I mean I don't want to draw too many false dichotomies, but it's difficult to have somebody that ticks all of the boxes on every single side and isn't actually a psychopath.
Right.
And so we keep then electing psychopaths because those are the only people that pass the litmus tests.
And then we're disappointed in their behavior because they go to office.
Partly because of what they had to do to get through the campaign.
That's right.
All the different people that they had to, whose bar they had to sort of pass.
So in the course of even just the first week of my campaign, I have had a handful of choices to make where the choice was presented to me.
This is what the expectation is.
And I look at the expectation and I say, well, in order to fulfill that expectation, I would have to
In fulfilling it, I would be demonstrating that I have a lack of character.
Because to do that thing is completely incompatible with being good at this office.
And so I will not do the thing.
I will not debase myself.
in order to get elected in such a way that I would be compromising the very thing I think I would bring to the office.
And what's been fascinating so far is that in every instance, the reaction that I get has been surprise and then sort of delighted acquiescence.
Everybody goes, oh, okay, great.
Sure.
Well, then let's just not do that.
And I'm like, okay, great.
Well, let's not then.
Let's not just manufacture a conflict with somebody.
Let's not put every single idea I have in a false equivalency with someone else's ideas.
Or like a fault in some kind of, I do not intend to run for this office by contrasting myself with someone else.
That's what I'm realizing in everything you're saying.
There's implicit in all of those risky propositions are a couple things.
One is constantly assuming a comparison with someone else that is being made or should be made.
And then second, I think kind of related to that is...
Making comparisons that may or may not need to be made.
And also kind of trying to be preemptive about something.
Like trying to preemptively lay this groundwork.
It's almost like the opening game in chess.
Like you're trying to get things set up in this certain way.
But they both require you to be something other than a person who's in that moment in some ways.
Yeah.
But then I guess once you start thinking about it, it must be difficult to stop thinking about it because then you do have to think like, oh, if I say this, there's probably 50 things you've said in this that somebody could take out of context just today and turn it into something weird that now you're expected to respond to.
Yeah, right.
And also just the sense that like, well, you need to – something happened in Washington and you need to make a press release where you get out in front of it and you compare –
yourself to other candidates in such a way that it makes them look slow and dumb.
And I'm like, well, I would do that if I...
Well, I mean, I would release a press release about my ideas about this event, but I'm counting on Washington voters and Seattle voters and
if they want to elect me to this office, to do so on the strength of the ideas that I put forth.
Not on how quickly you cobbled them together.
Well, and not on how I posit those ideas against someone else's ideas.
I'm very confident that I have good ideas and that I'm good at this conversation.
Right.
I have no interest in going to war with another person who also is doing a difficult job of volunteering for public service, asking people to listen to their ideas and appreciate their ideas.
And if five people are running for an office and five of them put forth a slate of ideas, it should be
a simple matter of choosing the candidate whose ideas and whose personality and character reflect yours the best.
Without needing to, without the candidates needing to
make this sort of pedantic comparison between themselves that always takes the form of like an insult war or, or worse, that kind of like stiff necked, like my opponent believes that children should be thrown down wells.
I do not believe this.
And it's like, your opponent doesn't believe that, first of all, sir.
And second of all, of course you don't believe that.
It's the reason that we feel like we're being spoken to like children.
Because the dialogue takes on this lowest common denominator kind of tone.
Anyway, so long story short, I am getting into this campaigning thing.
And I'm enjoying every aspect of it.
But multiple times a day, I have to kind of stand there, plant my feet, and say, I'm not going to run that kind of campaign.
If you can say, based on advice you get from others, based on the pressure you feel, based on emotions for what's happening right now, based on what kinds of things?
All of the above, right?
You get people, potentially, good people, smart people, but advising you on something where you're like, I can't do that.
I'm not going to do that.
Well, and then you sit down with some reporters and they start immediately asking you questions that are phrased in a way to prompt you to make that kind of statement.
They say, well, your opponent says this, that, and the other.
How do you respond?
And you just go...
Well, I'm happy for my opponents, all of them.
I think it's very hard to come up with things to say.
Anyway, do you have a question about what I'm about?
Right.
And it's very much like the music business.
When you first start off as a band, everybody you talk to that has been in the music business for a little while is like, listen, you need to get a press release or you guys need to go stand in front of a brick wall next to a train track and smoke cigarettes and get some photos taken.
Right.
and you're like oh okay and so you go down and stand on the train tracks next to a brick wall smoking cigarettes get your photos taken and then you put those out and then somebody says you guys got press photos taken in front of a brick wall next to some train tracks you're idiots that's the biggest cliche in the world you need to get something cool you need to get something different why don't you get a press photo taken where you're jumping up in the air
And then you're like, oh, that sounds good.
And you do that.
And then you get a little further down the road and somebody's like, you got jumping up in the air press photos?
That's almost as bad as train tracks.
And everybody's trying to tell you that you need – this person's like you have too many weird time signatures in your music.
You need to straighten it out.
This person's like your music's too straight.
You need to have some interesting time signatures.
Everybody's an expert.
Yeah.
And a lot of bands go through that process and get ground up and turned into a kind of hamburger that is trying to feed the masses.
And then every once in a while, a band comes along that's just like, no, we're not going to do that.
We're going to do our thing.
And it becomes a huge hit in spite of everyone saying that there's no chance for it.
Because the people – and this happens all the time with TV shows today where there are these – you see like so many TV shows that are – especially on networks that are so derivative of other shows.
CBS is basically just –
it's there's just one kind of show that they like to make and then you get something that comes along maybe on netflix or amc and everybody goes well of course it's the most obvious thing in the world like why why wouldn't why wouldn't you have a show about women in prison like that's it but somebody had to make a really courageous leap past a lot of people who wanted to executive produce their life in order to come up with an idea that was that outside the box and then actually see it through to fruition and have it be good my god talk about you know degrees of difficulty
It's really gnarly.
And yet, I mean, I have a lot of experience taking a lot of advice from people and saying, okay, well, I'm just going to do this other thing.
And I'm always reminded of those recordings of JFK and his cabinet during the Bay of Pigs.
Have you listened to those recordings?
No, I don't think I've heard.
I've heard some of the Johnson stuff.
I'm not aware of those at all.
So there are recordings of them talking about the Bay of Pigs as it's happening.
And Kennedy is sitting in this room and there's all these generals, Curtis LeMay and his whole brass, his brother Bobby, Mick George Bundy, all the guys.
And they're talking about the blockade.
And they go around the room and the consensus is that they are counting down the hours until those missiles in Cuba are active, at which point there's a total consensus that the Russians will launch those missiles.
And so they are advocating for a first strike.
They're advocating that Kennedy launch the missiles, not just at Cuba, but at Russia.
And they're talking about 70 million dead, manageable amount of dead, but the alternative to let those missiles go live in Cuba would be to effectively seal the fate of all Americans.
And Kennedy is listening to this and his brother Bobby is also advocating for a first strike.
And JFK keeps asking questions.
And ultimately, you know, he's a young president, new to the job, youngest president in history at the time.
And all of the big minds, all of the big shots are telling him we need to preemptively nuke.
Our enemies.
And he and and Kennedy makes the decision.
No, we're going to we're going to open up a back channel phone line to.
To the Russians, we're going to call Khrushchev on the phone, we're going to we're going to stall, we're going to take another option, we're going to take another hour to look at this.
And it's an incredible, you know, Kennedy is denigrated so much as a lightweight and he wouldn't be a great president if he hadn't been killed and all that, you know, you hear all this terrible stuff about Kennedy.
But in that moment, that Bay of Pigs moment, I'm sorry, not Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis moment.
Have I been saying Bay of Pigs this entire time?
I think he said it once, but no, I know what you're talking about.
Cuban Missile Crisis moment.
Like he averted total disaster.
Just by, like, taking all the information in and then saying no.
By not feeling – I mean, that's so complicated because, I mean, like you say, a young guy surrounded by people who are smarter than him, you know, on the Facebook.
All these generals, World War II generals.
Right, right.
But, I mean, it takes a lot of courage to –
I kind of like what you were – not to go too far back, but what you were saying earlier about the way reporters can ask questions.
I think a lot of what's wrong with discourse today sometimes is that we allow – we agree to even accept the premise of a question when it's impossible to answer.
We feel like we have to answer a question.
Somebody – the classic have you stopped beating your wife type question where I mean I think –
And again, a lot of people get around that by going, so, and then answering a different question.
But I mean, part of the problem is that in that instance, he not only didn't do the one crazy thing everybody wanted him to do, he also didn't feel like he had to take any extreme action in order to placate people or do the right thing.
And doing what, quote unquote, nothing takes a tremendous amount of courage.
Do you know what I mean?
To not feel like you even have to choose the options that people are giving you as the only extreme options.
Well, and in particular, like, if he had said, all right, let's do it, let's launch, and people...
had uh come to and history had come to him later and said you killed 70 million people uh how dare you he could have said you know everybody agreed it was a consensus between all these great minds and i just was you know i was the one that needed to choose and i chose what all my advisors were telling me to do
If you look at the other option, which is that he didn't do it and the Russians did attack us and we were caught with our pants down.
Right.
And history said, what were you thinking?
In either case, he's responsible for millions of deaths.
In either case, he's responsible for millions of deaths, one of which is his own people are destroyed.
And in that instance, he would have been solely accountable.
Right.
And history would have recorded like everybody told him to do what should have been done and he refused and we were destroyed as a result.
Like the risk is so much greater for him to go against that council because he would have been protected by the consensus.
He would have been protected by groupthink if he had just said, you know what, all right, let's just launch the missiles.
Such a simple thing, such a simple decision.
And he had the stones not to do it and to say no and watch those generals and his own brother file out of that room, shaking their heads, muttering and saying, you fool.
And here we are, right?
That didn't happen.
Nobody died.
And so, like you're saying, I mean, reporters want there to be a fight.
The people want there to be a fight because that's what people understand.
This guy's running against that guy.
When are they going to fight?
And I'm just not interested in it.
I want to put out ideas.
I want to write papers about what we can do.
I want to get that job and do a good job at it and not have it be characterized by needless contention.
There's enough contention already in any decision without papering it with like fighting, just false fighting.
So that's my first week.
It's been really interesting and it has required that I be really on my toes because you sit down with the reporter and they're like –
Your opponent reportedly says that you have a fat butt.
How do you respond?
And to be like, I'm not sure that he did say that.
And I don't want to be one of those politicians that's skirting the tough questions, but I'm going to skirt the dumb questions.
And so let's talk about transit and housing.
Right.
I always enjoy – that sounds like a heck of a week and a lot to learn.
I always enjoy listening – I don't know why I'm thinking of him in particular, but Barney Frank.
But there are other people like Barney Frank who have been in this racket for so long that you can see they've passed through many – I mean obviously the level of experience there is just tremendous.
But they've passed through so many –
cycles of this stuff they've been they've seen it so many times and it's like the difference between even a young in some cases presidential candidate but you'll see even young candidates for president younger and now in this case the guy announced today who's younger than me which is a new one for me I know isn't that great it's really weird but but you know but they still they feel the need to be real real fired up in the way that they answered and like you know
I have guesses partly why he's like this.
He's been around a long time.
He's had a lot to put up with.
He's had a lot in the past that he didn't want to be public, but then he got through the crucible of that.
But somebody like Barney Frank, no matter what you ask him, he's unflappable.
And it's not unflappable in a way that he doesn't care.
It's in a way that he's seen all of your kung fu before.
Mm-hmm.
Like, this is not his first magic rodeo.
Like, he's seen your wizard tricks many times before, and he doesn't even need to fight back.
He's going to be effective and on point and answering any relevant questions, but in a way that's constructive.
And just watching somebody do that, to me, it's like watching a magic trick.
Because it seems impossibly difficult, especially when you're new.
Well, and Al Franken is another example of a guy who has...
You know, there's so many politicians that are so brittle
You ask them a question... Right.
And they're just like so tense and... They get emotional that you even ask that question.
Yeah.
And that becomes part of their shtick.
Yeah, right.
He got so polished so fast and he seems very resilient.
Because he's heard it all, right?
I mean, that's the wonderful thing about coming at politics from the arts.
Like, is there an insult that Al Franken hasn't heard?
I mean, he sat in the Saturday Night Live writer's room...
Like he's heard it all.
And so he, he's got a story to tell and you're not going to dislodge him so easily, right?
He's not going to join in some specious fight or feel like his core values are being attacked.
He's gonna, you know, he's like, he's anxious to tell, tell the story as he understands it.
So, I mean, all of this is, uh,
it's going to be borne out throughout the course of this campaign.
And I'm going to, it's going to be a struggle because there will come a time, surely when someone attacks me and,
And it may not be one of the other candidates.
It may be the newspaper or it may be some political action committee or it may be just a private citizen.
But somebody is going to go after me and...
and I'm going to have to continue to stay on the high road just because that's the only place that I'm comfortable.
Especially because most of your responses are going to be strangely public.
I mean, in a way where if you went to a Kiwanis breakfast with your dad in the 70s and you encountered like a trilateral commission guy,
The way that you responded to that person – and let's even say he's not even a normal trilateral commissioner.
Let's say he's obviously unhinged.
There are things you do when you talk to crazy people, for example, that you talk to them in a certain way because you don't want to escalate it and you don't want them to freak out.
But you wouldn't necessarily want what you said to them to be your on-the-record remarks about it because it's a one-on-one, right?
Yeah.
But in the case of today, you're constantly – everybody is tacitly expected to respond to everything publicly.
So even though – so that means – and I like the democracy of anybody having access.
I don't like the democracy or the non-democracy of being expected to have a response for every person's every nutter idea.
Yeah.
So just as one crazy – this is a totally crazy random example.
But this guy tooted at me the other day, guy or girl, I think a guy, tooted at me the other day saying something very disparaging about somebody that I used to do a show with.
And it was very, very aggressive.
And my one word response was, yikes.
That's all I have to say about it.
And in short order, this person retweeted that.
Two other accounts that I am going to guess are probably sock puppet accounts of that person went out and started rethooting it.
I went and looked at this person's Twitter profile and...
And with some breaks, presumably for hospitalization, it's nothing but months and months and months of attacking this one guy that I know.
Oh, wow.
So it's real super weird.
But, I mean, why am I telling you that?
Because, first of all, there are people out there who are nuts and will just have a hard-on for somebody.
And that's just their thing.
You see it with the Gamergate stuff.
You certainly see it in politics.
But suddenly you just get a hard-on for somebody and, like, everything you do is going to be a way to tear them down and try to get other people drawn in to your destruction.
Yeah.
And so in that instance, I mean, I'm glad I said what I said, which is just yikes, which is really mostly just like, wow, that's really an extreme thing to say to a stranger.
But if I had, think about almost any other way I might have handled that.
And just on a bad day, maybe I would have said something sarcastic about that person.
who has a certain kind of reputation.
But I wouldn't attack somebody that was like a friend of mine that I've been on a show with.
But in that case, what I said to that nut in public could be taken a completely crazy way.
I guess I feel what I'm saying is I'm saying obviously there's nuts out there, but also I'm really grateful that I didn't accidentally say something really inadvisable that would have then been used to show that I'm on that guy's side.
Right.
Because that's the conversation that you're having is in public conversation.
No matter who you're talking to, increasingly, I'm sure you'll go to pancake breakfast and baby kissing contests.
But like a lot of what you do is going to be in front of other people.
And as we all learn eventually from social media, no matter what you say to one person is kind of implicitly not only heard, but somebody sometimes taken by everybody.
It's as though you are talking to them.
Whatever tone you take with one person is the tone you're implicitly taking with everybody.
Right.
Well, yeah, and I had one this morning where somebody tweeted me, please help this homeless family link.
And I did the initial due diligence where I went and looked at whether that person was following me or not, and they weren't.
But now, and so normally when somebody tweets something at me and they're not following me, I am pretty suspicious right away.
So you go to their timeline.
But in this case, because I am... I go through this 10 times a day.
Right.
In this case, I'm running for public office.
Save this kid who has this horrible disease.
Please help this family.
And you go.
They don't follow you.
They have two followers, which is not a popularity thing, but an indication that they're new in this thing.
And then it's just dozens and dozens of the same tweet that automatically went out when somebody posted something.
Well, and so this is – but because I'm running for office, this changed my normal thing, which I normally would do exactly as you just described.
But in this case, I was like, oh, I'd better go to this link because this person maybe isn't following me, but he sent this to me because –
Because I'm a candidate.
Oh, changing their – I get it.
I see what you're saying.
You have to reprocess that old way of dealing with that.
Right.
So I go to the site where the person describes the fundraising that they're trying to do.
And it feels a very Nigerian scam.
But I'm like, as a candidate, I can't dismiss this out of hand.
This could be someone who has just moved to Seattle.
I am keeping the plausibility of this in play a lot longer than I normally would.
And I read the entire pitch, and it doesn't feel right, but I'm still thinking as a candidate,
And so then, having spent five minutes on this site, then I go look at the Twitter timeline.
And it's just as you describe.
It is a total spam account.
They send this same link to 800 people.
And then the only personal tweets...
are just scraped from Eckhart Tolle's Twitter account, right?
Just completely like unrelated in a different voice, random.
And then the Twitter photos are two kind of blurry pictures of a 10-year-old girl
Yeah, I mean it's just randomly grabbed pictures of civilians.
But I spent five minutes where I would have spent five seconds before because I feel a different responsibility as a candidate to – I'm no longer just a private citizen who's like, well, you're a spammer.
Go to hell.
I'm now like, oh, I'm going to do a lot more research about things.
Because I can't, not only can I not afford to, but I don't want to be inaccessible in a way that inaccessibility was part of my survival mechanism as a musician.
But as a candidate, I can't be inaccessible in that way.
And so I'm going to spend a lot more time reading spam accounts, I guess.
Oh, my God.
Trying to sort out the ones that are legit.
I don't want to make this sound dire, but that same theme goes so far beyond that because you're going to – through the election and if you're elected, so much of what you do is going to be dealing with strangers whose personality may not be compatible with the way that you like to operate.
But now you're – I mean you're like a – you are like a literal public office that anybody can walk into.
You don't get to go, you know, I don't like your attitude.
I'm going to go talk to somebody else.
You could do that.
But there are people who are probably seeking redress or asking for help on things who are just kind of unpleasant or annoying or stinky.
And like you're still going to have to take them as seriously as you would anybody else until you've come up with something better.
I think what happens to politicians is they either –
began to think that the entire public is crazy because the only people that come to city council meetings are people with a grievance.
I bet it feels that way sometimes.
Or the alternative.
There's not people who are just there on a field trip from school to watch how the process works.
Yeah, or just normal people that are like, oh, yeah, I have a question.
What's the difference between this and that?
You know, like nobody engages quite that way.
Um, but the other, the alternative is that as a city councilman, you, you began to think that the, that your real constituents are the lawyers and lobbyists that mill around afterwards and, you know, and kind of like wink and nudge at one another.
And I think that becomes like the new backstage.
Yeah, exactly.
And my advantage is that I understand that most of the people in the crowd do not stick around to get their T-shirt signed.
And they don't have backstage passes, but they came to the show and they love the music and they, you know, and they take away a memory that you cannot, you can't manipulate it.
You know, you're going to put on a show, they're going to watch it and they're going to walk out of there with a feeling.
Yeah.
And that's not up to you.
They're not going to give you a second chance to talk them through it.
They're going to have a feeling.
And that is true of the electorate, true.
People are generally quiet and yet also thoughtful.
And you have to, in public office, represent those people even though the people that you meet every day are either yelling at you or winking at you.
And keeping that awareness in the forefront of your mind that most people are not either one of those.
Most people are just busy with their own lives, but they're counting on you to do a good job.
So... That's good, John.
You get a long bell for that one.
Long bell.
Now, for the love of Christ, can we talk about the chicken?
Here's how it works.
And I'll try and find where I got this recipe from.
I did not invent this.
I found this, and I've just been working on it.
But here's what it comes down to.
Um...
You know, we've got a family, and so we do stuff like we buy chicken breasts from Costco.
Sure.
Okay?
You get a big bag of chicken breasts.
You can get them, and they come these little scored things.
You can break them up.
You can take out like a pound and a half of chicken at a time.
So here's what you need.
You need heat.
You need a pan, like a saucepan, or rather a, like a, what do you call it?
A frying pan.
You know, what are those called?
The big ones.
Yeah, frying pan.
Can you use a cast iron pan or does it have to be a nonstick pan?
I would go with a nonstick pan, but you need heat, you need a pan with a lid, and you need some chicken.
Okay.
Here's everything you need to know in three steps.
Okay.
Okay, you ready for this?
I'm ready.
So you're going to heat up the pan to medium, depending on how hot your stove is, medium to medium high.
When it gets to temperature with a little bit of oil in there.
What kind of oil?
Whatever you like.
You could use butter.
I tend to add butter later.
For the easy one, I just use canola oil.
And you don't need a lot of it because it'll get too wet.
But you basically just want to have something in there so they can scoot around.
So step one, you put the chicken breasts in for one minute.
And you're not going to exactly brown them.
They're going to kind of brown a little bit.
But one minute, you have them in there.
With the lid on?
It doesn't have to be in that case.
Okay.
But then, thank you, good question.
But then, step two, you're going to flip those over and put the lid on the pan.
Uh-huh.
And you let it just sit there for 10 minutes on like a medium-low heat.
Uh-huh.
Don't touch them.
Don't touch them.
Do not lift the lid.
Whatever you do.
At the end of that 10 minutes, you turn off the heat and you let them sit there for another 10 minutes.
I have done this five times now and they've never not been flawless.
You could do anything.
I've done it with brine chicken.
I've done it with hardly anything on it chicken.
I've made herb chicken this way.
It depends on what you like.
But all I'm saying is you do not have to go crazy.
You don't have to be that guy sitting there with a fork poking at your goddamn chicken.
You put it in there.
You just brown it.
You flip it.
You let it sit.
Put it in the pan for a minute.
Sort of brown it.
Yeah, it just gets a little bit heated up on the one side.
You're not going to fully brown it.
You're just going to kind of crisp it up a little bit.
Flip it over.
You flip it over.
You put the lid on.
Put the lid on.
For 10 minutes, you just ignore it.
Don't even think about it.
Set a timer on your phone.
10 minutes.
You're doing something else.
You're reading a little bit of a magazine.
Yeah, and then you're... Because that's a timer on the iPhone.
And then... Then 10 minutes, you turn it off.
And it's such a great recipe for men because we're stupid and we fiddle with food while it's cooking.
And my number one tip pretty much anytime you cook meat is don't play with it.
Never play with the meat.
Don't poke it.
Don't prod it.
Don't scoot it around.
You don't need to scoot it around in the pan.
You just let it sit there.
It's going to be fine.
These are modern pans.
You're taking away all my cooking moves here.
Poke it, scoot it.
Now, I understand, as I sit here today, after all the weeks of buildup to the chicken recipe, that this might be a letdown, but I would encourage you to try this.
You might try it with brining.
It doesn't feel like a letdown because the simplicity is so simple that it feels like a thought revolution.
Now, let me just get to the end.
I just want to stick the landing.
So you turn the heat off after 10 minutes.
And then what happens?
You still don't open the pan for 10 minutes.
10 more minutes.
Yep.
You got browning.
You got 10 minutes with the lid on, on the heat.
Turn the heat off.
10 minutes of waiting.
It sits there.
Do not lift the lid off because now you're getting a little bit of steam in action, which is not so bad for a chicken.
So you are calling this Merlin's 21-minute chicken.
21-minute chicken.
That's got that kind of eight-minute abs kind of feel.
Merlin's 21-minute chicken.
You put it in for a minute.
You flip it.
You cover it.
Ten minutes on the heat.
Ten minutes off the heat.
Yeah.
Merlin's 21-minute chicken.
Well, I mean, I got the recipe off the internet.
But, you know, people steal recipes every day.
I'll try and find the source recipe.
Now, all I will say to you is before you try this for a large group of people, test it out with the way you like to cook chicken, the way you like to season it, and then, like, how hot your oven is.
Because, you know, ovens today, they're all over the map.
We have a very low BTU oven.
You're talking about, are you talking about an oven or are you talking about a range?
A range.
I should say a range.
Yeah.
Now, let me ask you this.
Will that work with a steak?
I'll tell you what I do with a steak.
Are you talking about a thick steak?
Let's start with a thick steak.
Well, here's what I do with a thick steak.
I get the pan super hot.
If you're going to make an inside-the-house steak, here's what I do.
I get the pan super hot.
I unplug the smoke detector, as you do.
And then, depending on how you like to make this, I would say heat the oven up, the inside oven, to about 350 because you're going to need that in a minute.
And what you do is you brown the steak on each side.
Super hot.
Without, yeah, without seasoning it, throw it on there with not too much stuff.
It needs to be pretty hot because you want to get a good sear on there.
And then you finish it in the oven.
Finish it in the oven.
Treat it like a little, like a tiny roast.
It depends on how you like it.
Some people, you might want a 250 if you want to do it slow.
I think 350 for not very long.
And here's the thing.
How do you know it's done?
It smells like food.
If it doesn't smell like food yet, it's not food.
If it smells like food, it's probably food.
If you don't smell food, it's not food yet.
I'm going to go down.
I'm going to go to a Wajamaya right now, the supermarket across the street, and I'm going to get a sweatshirt, not a hoodie, but just a normal old-fashioned sweatshirt with iron-on letters that says, if it smells like food, it's probably food.
don't poke it don't play with it don't scoot it around don't scoot it don't squeeze it it's just just put it in there and you you will get a feel for it you know that's it's uh maybe we should do a cooking segment i'm just saying i i think that could help a lot of people i've just learned about brining small scale brining yeah and it's pretty fun because you know about big brining where you're buying like a turkey or something part of my campaign is that i'm against big brine
Fuck, fuck.