Ep. 238: "We're Not Farmers"
Hi, Merlin.
Hi, John.
Oh, wow.
I did a little switcheroo.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
No, you got to keep it fresh.
I mean, it's weird.
It's weird.
I don't think I've ever done that in a long time.
Well, you're letting your guard down.
You're relaxed.
I do feel a little bit like my guard is down.
Oh, no.
Do you feel vulnerable?
I feel a little vulnerable, yeah.
Oh, no.
I'm sorry.
I'll be gentle today.
Thank you.
How's John doing?
Aw.
You should do some self-care.
Yeah.
I'm sitting here holding a half-squeezed tube of athletic shoe and boot patch goop.
I'm still processing that sentence.
That's the kind of stuff that's going to put me back together.
I can't believe you could even get a sentence like that out.
I scheduled a nap today.
oh oh okay i put a nap on on my calendar okay oh boy we're off to the races you know you know how i am about my calendar right yeah well sure i'm on the receiving end of it a lot of the time hey no no no it's very helpful well you know very helpful uh you know time is a flat circle
Yes, it is.
You got to respect time.
It keeps on ticking.
Because you don't get to bend it to your will.
Time, you got to be there for time.
Time will not wait for you.
Time.
Time.
Flowing like a river.
Time.
Time.
Time.
Time.
Time!
This is even before I realized, according to Twitter, today is, I don't know, International Nap Day.
I just realized there's two things that I know that I've got to do, I've got to just do.
I've got to eat more protein, and I need to take naps.
Is that right?
You have decided that naps are now...
Not a luxury, but a necessity.
They're not a necessity, but it's kind of complicated.
But as much as I am an advocate for naps, and most people are not, a lot of people I know do not like taking naps.
They don't like the idea of naps.
I think most of us share a secret shame about napping, which is that... I was with you with secret shame.
Well, yeah.
Well, you know, it's...
Secrets, secret shame.
I'm still waking up.
I've got to take a nap.
It's very early.
It's very early, and I think that people are...
understandably, naps feel like weakness.
It feels like a lack of strength and vigor.
And I think that's a young person's game.
I do.
People like to joke with a person about getting older, and that's okay.
That's something a young person does.
But the truth is that I don't have the energy that I used to have.
And I have certain prophylactics that I put in place to deal with that.
And one of those is getting a little bit of walking exercise, which has been really hard because it's rained and rained and rained over the past few months.
But two of them are, this is really boring, but two of them are, I need to eat more protein and less of the other things.
And I'm going to occasionally have the temerity to put a nap on my calendar and make every attempt to actually honor it.
Right on the calendar.
So finally, the reason I'm doing this is that what happens instead is...
i futz around i look at the internet i start to read a book that's not a nap i listen to the beatles and pretty soon it's 3 15 yeah and i gotta pick up my kid which is a thing that i do and i happily do but then i say to myself i say oh i'll get a nap after i bring her home and that never no almost never works and if it does work you
I feel bad.
She feels bad.
She says, oh, I didn't know you were sleeping.
And now I really do feel like a layabout, as you say.
Yeah, you're just goofing around.
Yeah, so I'm going to try getting in an hour-ish nap, and I'm going to see how it goes being on the schedule.
I didn't mean to monopolize the podcast, but that's the thing that I'm going to try.
Tell me about when is the nap scheduled.
I have some experience in these matters.
All right, let me go look.
What are the hours?
You've got an hour?
I'm going to talk to John Roderick from 10 to a little before noon.
I'll slice this bitch up, as I like to say.
I put it on the Internet.
I put it on the Internet.
And then the nap that I have planned is for about 1.15.
Oh, wow.
You're just going to get off the podcast.
Yeah.
As you say, slice this bitch up.
Yeah.
Quotes.
Which is funny, because it's neither a bitch nor sliced.
No.
I mostly just make a little couple cuts.
I put in that Sugar From Sand song, and then it's on the internet.
That doesn't sound like something Adam Lizagor would have said.
So it's not from the past.
No.
It's just your... It's old thinking.
It's old thinking.
And then you're going to go, boom, right into the nap tube.
Yeah.
I'm trying to give myself a little bit of time to go home, maybe have some protein, trying to eat more protein.
Because one thing I know, here's a life hack.
One life hack I know, and I learned this yesterday, is if I eat a big midday meal, I get very tired.
Oh, yeah.
But like yesterday, I had a gravy day.
We're not farmers, Merlin.
It's not like you just came in from the plow.
We like to think...
to think we're farmers yeah we need a hearty more more gravy ma ma i need me some biscuits no that's not what we are yesterday i did that thing i do where i took my daughter out to lunch and um i had a i had a you know i had my multiple sauce deployment system so i had a patty melt with with french fries and then i had ketchup mayonnaise and a side a monkey dish of white gravy for dipping yeah and
And then I had no problem taking a one-hour nap yesterday.
But see, now that is a nap under duress.
That is a body, you know.
You're shutting down.
It's like we've got to get out of Hoth.
We've got to start loading up the ships and get out of here.
Well, let me tell you.
As a longtime super napper, I've got a few things to say about this.
I want to hear every single one of them.
Well, it turns out that in fact an hour nap...
I'm getting right into some deep life hack territory here.
It sounds to me like you're verging into what I'm going to call science.
We're going to get into a little bit of nap science.
An hour, it turns out, is not the optimal nap duration.
It seems like the benefits of a nap would only increase as you increased the length of the nap.
That's what it seems like.
Doesn't that seem like, well, a 45-minute nap is good, an hour nap is going to be better.
But naps, there are different kinds of naps.
And what you want to do...
is get the restorative benefit of the nap.
You're talking about like a disco nap.
I dropped the spoon kind of nap.
Well, so there are little sort of pockets that are based basically on your brain waves.
Let's be honest.
We're talking about brain waves now.
And you want to get in and get out.
But if you can't get out, if you can't get in and get out, then you've got to stay in
Until the next opportunity to get out.
I've heard this and I have believed this for years.
I'm going to be honest with you.
I have preached this for years.
That most people have a sleep cycle.
I learned this in college.
I was told in college by a cognitive psych professor that everybody has a slightly different wave thing.
I'm going to call it.
That's a science term.
But that most people have a sleep cycle that comes down to increments of about 90 minutes.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
And he would say, this is a thing that you can exploit.
So if you're driving for a really long time, and I don't mean to hijack your topic, but this is what I've always heard, was you could pull over, and if you know your cycle is 90 minutes, you sleep for exactly 90 minutes, you get through a full cycle, that's not as good as eight hours of sleep, but it's way closer to eight hours of sleep than an hour is.
Or, conversely, two hours.
Two hours is not good, because now you're breaking up your REMs.
Yeah, you can't break up your REMs because then you got Bill Berry out driving a tractor.
You lose the drummer.
You got this guy over here.
Yeah, this guy over here.
Now you're down in Toto Santos.
I've heard that for 20, almost 30 years.
And the only thing I've heard against that is our mutual friend, Max Temkin, knows somebody who's a sleep researcher who says that's kind of bullshit.
I still think I believe that that's probably true.
And yet... And yet... And yet, alas...
I'm still waking up, John.
I'm really still waking up.
I'm sorry.
My experience has been, as I've explored all the naps, is that truly a five-minute nap has the power of a thousand naps.
A five-minute nap, which seems completely against all intuition.
But a five-minute nap is a mind-blowing little, like, gym jam.
Just like you're hitting reset.
It's just a reset.
You go down, and there's a, you know, and that, you lay down, you're immediately like, because when you're, this isn't a nap where you're like, all right, I've got to make myself nap, and you lay down, and your feet are jamming, and you're like, oh, flip, flop, flop.
Right, I've heard that called a Churchill nap.
A Churchill nap is where you act like you're going to sleep.
You take off your clothes, maybe you put on your jammy-jams, you shutter all the blinds, you act like you're going to sleep, like in a hotel room.
That's a full-on Churchill nap.
But you're describing something more of what I've heard called dropping the spoon, which is when you lay in the hammock, you get a spoon in your hand over a plate.
I know this sounds weird.
And as soon as you drop the spoon, it hits the plate and you wake up.
Kind of like Inception.
But that is enough for you to basically restart your Mac, is what you're saying.
Yeah, if you need a nap, which I so often do, you're like, oh, fuck, I need a nap.
I do this all the time in a chair.
Talk about getting old.
Talk about being mocked by young people.
Ugh.
My millennium girlfriend works with a group of lawyers in a little room, and they all think they're real special, these lawyers.
They're all in their 30s, let's say.
Let's say they're in their early 30s, late 20s.
A bunch of accomplished lawyers who work in a room.
And it's in a place where they can keep the windows open, so you imagine there's a little bit of sea breeze wafting through there.
And they have started teasing her.
For dating an older gentleman in the form of me.
And they've started referring to me as Peepaw.
That's adorable.
Yeah.
How do you like that?
Peepaw.
How's Peepaw?
Yeah.
That's actually really funny.
You know, they're a bunch of smarty pantses.
They all went to Ivy League schools, and they think they know something that I don't.
Oh, they're still young enough to think they got it all figured out.
Yeah, they think they know some things.
I passed the test.
How's Peepaw?
And I'm sitting somewhere far away going, oh, yeah, Peepaw's pretty good, actually.
You know, I'm dipping my corncob pipe in some dish soap, blowing bubbles all across the yard.
That's what Peepaw's doing.
But I lay back, and your eyes go shut, and boom, you're asleep, right?
If you really need a nap, boom, you're asleep.
And then that first little jolt, which happens really quickly, where you're like, whoa, what?
Oh, that thing where you go, ah.
Yeah.
You're done.
Yeah.
And, you know, and it lasted like not very long.
You don't know how long it was.
No, you have no idea.
But you stand up and you kind of shake it off.
And, you know, and your ex man's got a new girlfriend.
Right.
And boom, you're up on your feet.
And Bob's your uncle.
you're rolling.
And it really, it really works.
But in the past, right, I would get that start like, and then I would interpret that as part of the long, slow, you know, the componentry that leads to a long nap.
So I'd fuck my pillow and I'd
Dig back in.
But in fact, that is your body saying, you're done.
That takes training, I'm guessing.
I know it takes training to take a nap because you have to get your head, you got to get your mind right, as Strother Martin says.
You got to figure out, this is the thing that I'm doing, and if I feel bad about it, it's the thing I'm not going to be able to do.
So now you're somebody who fails at naps, which is possibly worse than being somebody who naps.
But you also have to then, like you're talking about this turbo situation where you say, that's it.
I am restored.
Time to get back to blowing.
People need to blow some bubbles.
I like this.
I like this.
Because you know what?
Here's the other thing.
It's like what?
It's like bourbon, mustard barbecue, or cunnilingus.
A lot of people say they don't like it because they've kind of been doing it wrong and never really learned how to do it, right?
So you say you don't like a nap.
You say you want a revolution.
Maybe your problem is, you, the listener, with your skepticism and your peepaw talk, maybe you're all like that because you never got good at naps, and you're one of those animals that tries to sleep for four hours starting at like five o'clock at night.
Bad idea.
Bad idea.
Do you want onions on your In-N-Out burger?
The answer is yes.
Maybe you don't want all the onions.
Mmm.
Mmm.
See?
Mm-hmm.
It's like asking Guy Fieri if he wants jalapenos with that.
Yeah, of course he does.
Of course he does.
Can you deep fry them?
Of course.
The thing is, here's another thing.
Here's a little life hack for you, and you may have done this already.
Yeah.
But, you know, I have a vague familiarity with your office.
I've been in it.
I've looked at the shelves.
I've seen the lighting.
um i don't you know your home is nearby so maybe when you it's nap time you just uh you shuffle off the buffalo but for your system your system really would i have napped i have napped a plenty at my office i used to have a sleeping bag and a pillow here that i eventually had to donate to the household for a sleepover and never came back i need to get some kind of little pallet i could sleep on
Like a little Ishmael kind of thing.
Get myself a little bed to sleep on.
Hopefully not with an Indian, but I'll have a place to lay down here.
A little straw mat.
So the way it is right now when I nap at home, I think to myself mentally, okay, fresh air is going to the first commercial break.
Or like, I know, oh, oh, oh, this is ending, news hour is starting, I have a rough idea of how long it's been.
And I think somehow out of the corner of my ear, I'm listening for that.
I should probably turn off the radio when I'm sleeping.
I cannot imagine taking a nap while NPR is churning.
And I really do feel like all these kinds of conversations, the way that people listen to NPR, I really think that there should be a special way of gauging public radio ratings.
Because NPR has amazing ratings, and that's how they get all that money from the government.
That's right.
For now, for now.
The money wave, right?
Right, and the Joan Kroc Foundation, the government.
Lumber liquidators, Viking River Cruises.
NPR is just in the background like the dishwasher.
Boom.
Oh, that was my entree.
I mean, I went from listening to Car Talk once a week to having NPR on all day.
Because when I moved to Tallahassee, that was the first place I lived that had both a full-time classical and a full-time news and information.
So I had a full-on, full day of public radio.
And you're right, it was just an all-day dishwasher.
Bob Wood's mother used to listen to NPR, and she was the most beautiful of all of the upper-middle-class moms that I knew growing up.
Oh, she had the Aung San Suu Kyi tea.
She lived in a bookcase, right?
Was that her?
That's right.
That was Bob's mom?
Bob's mom.
And so I always had a special affection in my heart for... I mean, you know, Bob's mom must have been 40 years old at the time.
So I was right.
She was probably...
She's probably, like, empirically... Make her an NPR lilf.
An NPR listener.
But, yeah, so, I mean, there's no going back.
But you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Nope.
But I've never myself been able to...
uh listen to npr at all and partly it's because i think i don't know where the electrical outlets are in this house yeah yeah it's an older house it's interesting to me that you don't do that that's very interesting you think you think that should affect their ratings though there should be some way and maybe use the camera in your microwave but you have a way to identify whether people are actually mostly kind of sleeping while they're listening to npr it's really hard to know right because i don't want to know
I don't want our ratings to be reflected.
I don't want the fact that people are listening to this and then sometimes going, wait a minute, I've got to rewind that.
Did they just say something?
Did I just miss something?
I can't imagine listening to this show while you're doing anything like trying to sleep.
You need to stop everything you're doing and just focus completely.
You can maybe wash dishes if it's just plates.
But if you're going to be doing a lot of silverware, go listen to some other show.
My friend Kevin would lay down to go to sleep at night with his boombox on the bedside table, which is to say six inches from the front of his face.
um with the you know just the boombox just cranked playing accept and the you know new wave of british heavy metal just blasting in his face he'd sleep like that all night do you think he had tinnitus i've had friends with tinnitus that uh sleep with pretty loud music or tv on well i mean he was 15 at the time i don't i
I don't know whether I have no idea.
I think he was just metal.
I mean, you have to be pretty metal to do that.
But there is a part of my nap strategy, which is to make myself uncomfortable, not to make myself uncomfortable, but to not pursue comfort.
As a prerequisite of taking a nap.
Oh, that's smart.
It's smart in so many ways.
On the one hand, it's smart because you're not going to do a full Churchill.
That's not what you're there for.
But on the other hand, you're also lowering the barrier, the barrier to entry, as we say in business.
You're making it easier to slide into a five-minute turbo nap.
I keep a pillow in my truck.
And when it's time to take a nap... Just in case you need to deliver a baby or something.
You know, there's a lot of reasons you might need a pillow, right?
Somebody invites you to a college football game at the last minute.
And you're like, ah, those bleachers.
Or mom said you can go to a sleepover.
I've got a pillow.
But the key to the truck nap is you might think, oh, get out of the driver's seat, go back, lay down on the bench seat, the second row bench seat.
That's not any more comfortable, right?
Because you've got seatbelts poking in you.
It's not long enough.
That's right.
You would have to contract your body.
So just stay seated in your driver's seat.
Grab the pillow.
And I have actually done a truck nap where I didn't take the seatbelt off.
You grab the pillow.
You squeeze the pillow like a pillow-sized teddy bear.
And then you just kind of fall over.
holding on to the pillow, and the pillow then is between, you know, because it's next to your cheek, it's between you and whatever you fall against.
Oh, it could be the wheel?
It could be the wheel, it could be the seat next to you if you fall sideways.
I envy those people who can do that on a plane.
You see those people who can lay on their tray, that filthy tray?
I'm always amazed that people can sleep on that thing, because I've tried it, and I feel like a dope.
You know what it is?
I probably didn't practice enough.
But you're saying whatever you fall on,
Have you ever seen those people that carry the big wedge, the sex wedge?
I've seen the sex wedge in SkyMall.
There's also a sex wedge where you can get a hijab.
You put the whole thing.
It's kind of like a seat hoodie.
You put on this whole thing.
You get a whole atmosphere you get to be in.
You get your own private space.
So if you drool or talk or something, you know.
You're in there developing old photographs.
I've said to her you don't talk to me like that.
I have found it.
Why does it smell like rotten eggs?
Yeah, it's interesting.
No, it's electroplating.
I've seen people, it's better than eating a pizza, and that's all I'm going to say about that.
On the plane.
I admire you for so many reasons, John, and this is just another one to add to the ongoing list.
I did not know you were this good.
I know you have an interesting relationship with sleep as a thing, but I didn't know you were so sleep fluid, and I'm really glad to hear it.
Well, and part of the necessity is that I'm... This is really hard for me to say because it's not what I want.
You know what I mean?
There are sometimes things you don't want to say because it's not what you want.
Right, you avoid thinking it, let alone saying it, because you go like, that is off-brand.
That's not daddy's brand.
No, and what I'm about to say is that I am having increasingly a difficult time sleeping at night.
Again, you're back to this.
Yeah, and so the daytime naps are very necessary, and these little five-minute long, you know, like a truck nap, you're not going to get comfortable in that situation.
It's a necessity nap.
But you wake up, throw the pillow over your shoulder, start the truck up.
I mean, the guy that ripped off my house a couple of years ago, the way he got caught was he took my computer, obviously, and gave it to some meth dealer to get some meth.
This all happened in the middle of the night.
And then smoked a bunch of meth.
And then at a certain point, you know, I don't know if you know about your meth arc, right?
You smoke the meth.
It's very exciting.
You get very energized.
You feel like you could just march right through the Black Forest, let's say.
Every 12 hours.
You're just going to swoop right around Paris, and the war's going to be over.
But then somewhere up there after the P. Slight miscalculation.
What if we take Moscow?
What if we take Leningrad and Stalingrad?
Why don't we take all of the grods?
The thing is we need that oil.
We need the oil out there in Baku.
We need the Baku oil.
Meanwhile, back at the wolf's lair.
This guy, this ding-a-ling crashed in his car with the motor running.
This is less than 24 hours after the incident, right?
I mean, it was pretty soon.
Yeah, 24 hours later, because he probably hadn't been sleeping up to whatever the decision-making process he was going through, where he was like, I'm going to break into this house where this guy is sleeping.
This guy with an umbrella stand full of swords.
I'm going to just walk right in his house and steal his stuff.
He probably hadn't been sleeping for a while up to that point.
Anyway, so that's how he got busted.
Yeah, he had a sleep deficit.
He probably wasn't at the top of his game decision-wise.
Yeah, right.
So I'm always conscious of the fact that when I'm taking a truck nap...
That some, you know, some Bobby is going to come along and rap on the windshield with the billy club.
Say, what's all this then?
And say, no parking here.
You got to move along.
No parking.
You got to move along.
And then, you know, then I'm coming down the stairs out of the public library or whatever.
And the cop turns and shoots me.
That's what typically happens.
But I feel like the presence of a pillow in that scenario, any cop is going to look in and go, unless I'm illegally parked, they'll look and say, oh, this guy came equipped with a pillow.
There's no pipe on the dash, and the man has a teddy bear-sized pillow.
Yeah, he's okay.
But I've got to address this nighttime sleeping thing, because nighttime sleeping is also important.
Yeah, you struggled with this for quite a while.
You were thinking about UFOs and owls.
This was an ongoing theme.
I don't like to talk about the show on the show, but this is an ongoing theme for a while here, was what was happening with John at night.
Yeah, I'm tossing and turning, and my feet are going zippity-zap.
And I feel like I've got this, if I sleep in certain postures...
I have sleep apnea, and then other postures I don't.
I'm not sure how that works.
I do not want to be treated for sleep apnea.
Oh, Jesus.
I've started apparently snoring loud enough to make my family mad, and I just don't want to have to wear one of those things.
This really is becoming like a podcast between George Burns and...
I groom my eyebrows often enough that it is still really alarming how often my daughter will just be staring like not at my eye and she's like you got another one I'm like you're kidding I just I just dealt with this
So this is curious to me because when I see an older gent, when I see a peepaw who's got unruly eyebrows, I feel only complete admiration and envy.
Yeah, you're like a wise dune kind of person.
Yeah, but every woman I know, including most vociferously my own sister—
They feel like unruly eyebrows are something.
My sister is so against unruly eyebrows.
Oh, yeah.
She was pretty fixated on that with your dad, if memory serves.
Yeah, she'll whip a pair of scissors out of nowhere and start snipping your eyebrows.
It's like, hey, slow down.
Snicked.
But nobody in my life seems to feel like the unruliness of eyebrows is an advantage.
And as we've discussed before, I don't have a ton of...
Eyebrow depth, particularly not at a distance.
Because my eyebrows are very, very, very blonde.
It's what makes you look, in part, what makes you look so different when your glasses are off.
You have a different face.
Yeah, right.
It's why I wear glasses, to give my eyes some eyebrow, some frame.
Um, because I just, my eyebrows are just very, very, very, very hard to see.
And that is infuriating to me because eyebrows are where a lot of the character of the face is located.
And so when I start to get unru, when my eyebrows start to get unruly, my first thought is, well, at least now as they, as they become like a hedgerow, um, even though it's, even though it's blonde now verging into white, um, they'll be like, interesting.
I'll be, I'll have eyebrow character finally.
And then, you know, and then my sister was like, not on my watch.
I bet it's I suspect it with regard to hair.
I suspect it's a little bit like somebody trying to grow a beard, which obviously you don't have a problem with.
But for like people like me, like growing a beard is very painful to watch.
You know, and now everybody needs a beard.
So everybody's growing beards.
But like, you know, when it's first getting going, especially when you're younger and like, I could never get a fill in right here.
This, this area, like right below the size of my lips, you know, there's that one spot that doesn't really fill in very well.
So if you're going to go full, you know, down below, like right here.
And you're talking about the Wolfman Jack problem.
I am.
Thank you.
Yes.
Capture that.
Yes.
I know.
But the thing is, like a lot of jazz saxophone players, I can I can reference your I can reference your riff based on.
Your prior riffs.
Go ahead.
Yeah, so anyway, I think it's just hard to watch.
If you're going to go full Dune, if you're going to become the Dune guy, and you're going to get really serious, cool eyebrows, you're going to go nuts, you're going to become an adjunct professor,
or an emeritus professor, if you get emeritus eyebrows, I think that's something anybody could look at and go, that's pretty baller.
The problem is when you just got like four of them, it's a little bit unseemly.
So you need to commit and you need to avoid your sister.
Now, what about your millennium girlfriend?
How does she feel about the eyebrows?
Well, you know, she's... She's very accepting of a lot of...
what would be described as my peculiarities.
And I feel like the... But she has particular...
She has her own very specific kind of ways that she likes my peculiarities to be expressed.
I think that's a reasonable balance.
So she said an interesting thing not very long ago, which was, I do not like people with unruly beards and well-groomed hair.
Oh, and that's kind of a look now.
Yeah, that's the fashion.
Oh, you get like a Macklemore.
You get like a Rudolf Hess kind of thing going on up here.
And then down here, you're all iron and wine.
Right.
She said, not into it.
She said, I do like it when you have unruly hair and a fairly trimmed beard.
And I go, hmm, that is what I do.
I do the unruly hair, but I keep the beard kind of like in line.
That's a good look.
And she said yes to that, not to the other thing.
And, you know, that was great because that's my inclination.
If she came to me and said, yeah, I really like your hair to be super vermarked,
And your beard to be Grizzly Adams.
And she would never say Grizzly Adams because that's not a reference that she would ever understand her making.
But she would say, but that's she said Wolfman Jack.
I would run around the yard because, wow, Wolfman Jack.
Weird.
But you don't hear about Wolfman much anymore.
No, you know, you heard about him a lot.
He was everywhere.
And he was like he was like the original Charles Nelson Reilly, where it was very difficult to understand why he was that famous.
Was he an American graffiti?
Yes.
OK.
Yes.
But, you know, he was already like that was back in the times, I think, when when those really powerful outlaw radio stations in the Midwest should be heard in 14 states.
And you'd lay awake at night in your room with your little radio, trying to hear Wolfman Jack out of Tuscaloosa or wherever.
Where was he?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but also radio was a fairly regional thing, where you could get somebody who was very well-known in, you know, you get Rodney on the Rocks, or you get a Wolfman Jack, and you would know these names, but not have much context for...
I was watching a Netflix documentary series last night, believe it or not, about a really good four-part series about the history of hip-hop.
And the first episode about the early days was really, really, really good.
And, you know, talked in particular about this one fella who, like, was such an important driver.
He was a radio guy.
You know, but it was so neat because they touched on I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it wasn't just like cool.
It wasn't just cool.
Herc.
It wasn't just Grandmaster Flash or, you know, all the names you kind of know from that era.
It was also like a pig meat Markham.
You know, here come the judge.
Here come the judge.
Like you go back and listen to that song from 1968.
It's totally a rap song.
And, like, I don't know.
I thought it was very interesting.
I'm very interested, though.
You think about the history of the importance of the DJ.
And, like, you don't get that so much anymore.
Like, even in the 80s, you had, like, Casey Kasem.
You still had Dick Clark.
And, like, you know, now today, if people know Dick Clark, they're going to know him as probably from bloopers or New Year's Eve.
Oh, dear.
Don't you think?
Well, in the early 80s, in Anchorage, at least, the DJs were still...
You know well-known local personalities and I aspired to be one like that was the the first job I really wanted and that I imagined was like perfectly suited to me was radio DJ and I Listen to the radio, you know, we all listen to the radio all the time But I listen to the radio with that in mind that this was potentially my career and
And at 16 years old, I reflect back on this, and I do not remember ever having this much moxie, but I did have moxie.
Apparently, I had a ton of moxie because I actually did this, which was I went around to every single radio station in Anchorage.
applied for a job how old were you 16 years old Wow and I I would walk into the you know and radio stations are not that glamorous when you walk in to the they're usually also pretty well fortified they are they're fortified there they're generally like in strange buildings like kind of dealt with strangers wandering in a lot yeah right you don't walk in and meet Lonnie Anderson no
you typically walk in and all the doors there are four doors leading out of the anteroom and all of them are locked you know but I went around and I said to each person like hello my name is John Roderick and I would like to work here at your radio station may I have an application and the person on the other you know like whoever was there whoever was standing there or whoever buzzed me in
uh generally someone who looked like uh who had a cigarette dangling out of their mouth or you know who who looked like they'd just gotten done like fixing radios would say huh and i'd say yes i am here to apply for a job as a dj i hear djs on the radio i believe i would be a good one um may i have an application please and again they're just like
You know squinting at me through the haze like you say what now?
Yeah, and and Apparently what I didn't understand is that that's not how you get a job as a DJ It's all you know It's like it's like you don't get a job in a regional theater company by walking in and saying hello I would like to join your regional theater company, right?
It's like if you you get into this you've found your hamlet.
Let me in Yeah, you get you get into you get into it another way, but so I went around and
And applied everywhere.
And I was agnostic about format.
I was like, listen, I'll do country.
I'll do sports.
I'll do R&B.
Like, doesn't matter.
And you should have seen the reaction when I went into the R&B radio stations.
It was like, I would like to be a DJ here.
But I applied all over town.
I did not get...
Very many callbacks and the callbacks that I did get were you could hear someone on the other end of the line like muffling the phone receiver and everyone in the room was laughing.
Oh, no.
So I did.
And I was just like, listen, I don't think you people understand the opportunity you're being given here.
This is me at the start of my career.
Who wants to launch it?
Right, right.
And they were like, thanks.
Thanks for stopping by.
We'll put your application on file.
You know, like digging around, they found an application.
Half the time they handed me a yellow legal pad.
We're like, fill out your own application.
But eventually, you know, I went down and I went down to the local UHF.
24-hour music video television station that had just opened.
I've told you this story, I'm sure.
Have I told you this story?
I feel like I don't know this one.
No, tell me again.
In Anchorage in the mid-'80s, the success of MTV brought a new business model, which was... And the low operating cost of MTV.
I mean, right?
People just give you free stuff to put up.
Well, yeah, they had, what, five old radio...
What were, I think, considered the cool radio DJs, and they just sat there, basically played videos.
But what we didn't know, and what we didn't know about them, what we didn't know about Casey Kasem, or at least I didn't know, was it wasn't recorded in real time.
It wasn't like there was always somebody sitting there watching the video.
Oh, it's, and here we go, a flock of seagulls with Iran with their palm against their cheek going, hmm, yeah, he walked along the avenue, look at that.
They're not actually watching the video while it's playing.
Get a cup of tea and wander around like Howard Hessman.
It's true, only the lonely can play.
So wise.
That's right.
That's right.
But that was how they did it at regional radio stations, right?
At local radio stations.
Oh, absolutely.
Right.
It was all happening in real time because they had to be there to answer the telephone when you called.
And so this regional model was, hey, there's all this UHF frequency, which they still don't understand.
I still don't understand why UHF wasn't completely populated by television channels.
It must have been hard to get a license, but I agree with you.
Why weren't there like 10 UHF stations?
All we had was independent and PBS.
I feel like the barrier to entry is can you get a transmitter, can you get a powerful enough transmitter that you can be seen anywhere?
Right.
Just for a quick real-time fact check, Wolfman Jack was indeed broadcasting from a border station.
So he was in LA, but XERB was like 50 miles away and shooting at 50,000 watts.
Well, and I think even before he was in LA, if I recall his story correctly, he was down in Texas or something and went over and was like,
I'm on a Mexican radio.
Radio.
Or, you know, it might have even been like, I hoid it, I hoid it, I hoid it on the X. Border blaster station in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, branded as the Mighty 1090 in Hollywood, California, the station boasted 50,000 watts of boss soul power.
There we go.
Boss soul power, Merle.
Hmm.
Anyway, so in the early 80s, mid-80s, there was this thing with like, hey, music videos are easy to get a hold of.
They're thick on the ground right now because everybody's making them.
And we were watching them.
Every spare minute I had before school, after school, before bed, every spare minute I could, I was like, how do I get more of the videos?
Yeah, I'm sitting there waiting for the Captain Sensible video to come back on.
MTV only played that Captain Sensible video 15 times, and it was just like, this is dumb.
And they threw it in the waste paper basket.
That was me and Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants.
It was a real rarity.
When it came on, it was like it made my day.
Stand and Deliver!
With the smoke machines and them chomp, chomp, chompity, chomp, chomp.
So in Anchorage, and this is one of the very few, I think it was only a handful of places in the United States,
A group of business people said, this is the future of television.
It's like radio.
And all we have to do is hook it up to a transmitter and hire some young people to understand the lexicon.
We'll get a bunch of videos, which it's not hard to acquire somehow.
I guess probably because record companies were like just shooting videos out of a cannon at whoever would take them.
And they opened a television station called Catch-22 on UHF Station 22 where they were playing music videos.
And it was local VJs.
And when that came on the air, I had already applied all over town at all of the radio stations.
And I was like, you have got to be freaking kidding me.
We just opened our own local MTV Catch-22 where the music station...
where the music is or whatever the catchphrase was.
That's got you written all over it.
Yeah.
And I was just like, you've got, and I ran down there and put in my application and they laughed at me.
But because of this moxie that I'm describing,
I just kept going back.
I went down there and I would sit in the lobby.
I made a videotape of myself in front of a camera.
And of course, I didn't own a video camera, so I had to go use a friend's video camera.
And I sat there and was like...
Hey, everybody.
Hey, Anchorage.
That last track you saw was Jeff was Def Leppard and up coming is the is the ZZ Top Band.
Stay tuned.
And then, you know, I did a bunch of those and made this video.
Did you run the video?
I took it down there and I handed it off to the to the, you know, and and and Catch 22 actually did have a Lonnie Anderson.
Yeah.
playing like a battle ball game.
And then there obviously was a back door to this place because then it would get to be the close of the business day.
And she would say, oh, I'm afraid that he couldn't see you today.
He's already miserable.
You're Rupert Pupkin.
Yeah, it happened many, many times.
Uh, and then somehow, and I just kept going.
I don't, I cannot think of another.
Oh, wait a minute.
There's another example.
And it happened at the same time in my life when I decided that I was going to, um, that I was going to be Kelly Kiefer's boyfriend.
All right.
And I'd never had a, I'd never had a girlfriend before.
I didn't know how to do it.
And so I just was like, I just kept sending her notes.
Yeah.
I did.
I was like, I'm going to be your boyfriend.
And she would say, no, you're not.
That lasted for months until I was her boyfriend.
So at this point, and I don't know why I didn't learn this lesson, because it worked with Kelly Kiefer and it eventually worked with Catch-22.
I kept going down there until finally he came out.
The great Richard Hadley, who was one of only two rockabilly guys in all of Anchorage,
Richard Hadley finally came out from behind his magic wall and said, all right, kid, I looked at your tape.
It was terrible.
There's no way I'm putting you on the air, but I will give you a job as long as you promise never to skip school.
I promise.
And he said, if I ever catch you skipping school, you're fired.
And I was like, I swear, I swear I won't skip school.
And then, yeah, he gave me a job, and my shows were overnight.
So I actually, I should have learned from those experiences that if you have Moxie,
you can accomplish anything.
But I think, if I look back, after I got that job at Catch-22, I never had any moxie again.
What happened to your moxie?
I forget about moxie, but moxie's definitely a thing.
I stopped ringing doorbells.
I stopped going in and sitting in people's offices and swinging my feet.
I stopped saying, you know what, sir?
I'm going to be the best salesperson this store has ever had.
Wait, I tried one more time.
When I was 24...
And I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to be a professional alcoholic or whether I was going to, you know, whether I really had the moxie to do that.
Really going for the green jacket.
I was just like, listen, that's right.
Am I going to Augusta here or am I going to be a pro at like a community golf course?
Right.
And I was thinking to myself, because I was trying to work downtown.
I was trying to work.
I worked at Piper Jaffray, which was an investment bank.
Is this the place that had all their other files in the top floor?
That's right.
That's right.
And I would sit at a manual typewriter and type out these million and a half dollar checks to the Gates's while I was wearing combat boots because, hey.
Typewriter.
And I said, this isn't for me.
This is not.
I mean, there are plenty of people at this investment bank who are professional alcoholics, but they are coming at this from somewhere else.
They got a business degree from Washington State University, and they're in here, and they did not pursue this job in order to...
Put a man put it put a beard on their functional alcoholism That is a the alcoholism is a byproduct of trying to sell stocks to okay All right calling people to sell stocks and I'm going the other direction.
I'm starting out with alcoholism as the goal.
What kind of job?
Will allow me to you know allow me to pursue my true vocation and I said to I said to mine self I
Used car salesman.
Used car salesman is the perfect job for me.
I like people.
I like cars.
I like talking to people.
You could have a bottle in your desk.
How cool would that be?
Exactly.
You just got a flask in your hip pocket.
You're like Kurt Russell in used cars.
Ugh.
You get to wear a blazer.
You get to wear a freaking kooky blazer.
You get to go outside.
You get to ask people, what do I have to do today to put you in this sedan?
That's right.
You get out there.
You say, look, the undercoating comes like that from the factory.
Talk to my manager, but, you know.
It's a used car, right?
So you don't even have to do that.
And on.
OK, now that I'm remembering this correctly, when I was taking this, this was not an idea that started when I was 24, because when I was applying at radio stations at the age of 16, I was also applying at used car lots in Anchorage.
I absolutely did this.
You have more moxie than you realized.
I forgot completely about that side of the story.
I was applying at radio stations and at used car lots because somehow I recognized that the two jobs were very, very similar to one another.
Wow.
And when I rolled up on used car lots where there actually were like strings of flags flapping in the wind and a double wide trailer set at the long axis at the end of the parking lot with some steps up to it and like a screen door cut into the side.
I distinctly remember walking across this parking lot and there was a guy standing at the top of the steps up to the double-wide trailer with the sliding glass door open because it was spring.
And he's standing there smoking.
I am remembering him smoking a cigar.
I have no idea whether he was or not.
Right.
But he is a genuine Herb Tarlick standing up there.
And he sees me coming.
And he imagines to himself, here's a 16-year-old.
I'm going to put him into a 1969 Dodge Dart.
He's looking for his first car.
Sure.
And I walked up and I was like, sir, I am ready to work for you.
And he said, how old are you?
And I said, 16.
But I can do anything around here.
But the thing was, I was not saying to him, I'm ready to wash cars.
I'm ready to schlep stuff around in order to learn your trade, sir.
I am ready to apprentice to you.
No, I was walking up saying, I am a born used car salesman.
And just turn me loose.
You're not Daniel-san, you're Mr. Miyagi.
That's right.
Put a blazer on me and turn me loose on people.
And he had an even worse look than the radio station people.
He was just like... Because it was like I walked in... As far as he was concerned, it was like I walked into an emergency room and said to the emergency room doctor...
Step aside, my good man, and let me show you, you know, where I'm twirling scalpers.
How old are you?
I'm 16.
I'm 16.
Have you ever seen Doogie Howser?
It hasn't even come on the air yet because I am he.
Your kids are going to love it.
But so I went down.
So at 24, I guess I revisited this idea.
Like, this is going to be a great job for me as I practice my true art form, which is dissolution.
Yeah.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to make this real.
And I went down to the Honda dealership, which also ran a used car lot.
And it was right down the hill from where I lived.
And I walked in, and the salespeople were about my age.
Really?
Yeah.
You know, guys in their mid-20s selling cars.
Wow.
Yeah.
And they are – so I walk in, and they are hustling.
These guys are moving fast.
They're fast walkers.
They got a big car lot.
It's right in the center of town.
And I said, hey, you know, I said, hey there.
I'm looking for a job.
I think I'm a natural at this.
And the manager, who was 35 –
Took me kind of seriously, although I was wearing combat boots and I had a soul patch and probably a puka shell necklace.
Let's be honest.
And so he actually gave me a real application, which I filled out.
And then he actually gave me an interview where I went and sat at a desk.
And he was like, all right, well, let's talk about this.
You know, you're looking for a job.
We're looking for people.
And I said, well, I think it's a math made in heaven.
And I was ready to start that day because I'd been out of work for a while and I needed some cash.
And he said, all right, well, you know, tell me about yourself.
And we sat and chatted and dup, dup, dup, dup.
And then I said, so, I mean, my idea...
This is 9 to 5 job and weekends off and sometimes my band plays on Friday so I would need to get off a little bit early in order to make it sound check.
And, you know, we practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I'll probably be out of here at 4.45.
And he's just sitting there with his chin on his hand.
Anything else?
And I said, you know, given that you're selling used cars, it's not like you've got to be here at 7, right?
Who's buying a car at 7?
So, you know, feeling like rolling at 10, roll out at four.
You're managing expectations.
Yeah, I feel like I'm going to sell a bunch of cars in that time.
And he listens to me talk for a while and lay out what my expectations are.
And then he does a very curious thing, which is some guy is fast walking past.
And this is the era of the wet look in men's hair gel fashion.
Do you remember this?
Oh, yeah.
I was a dippity-doo, man.
Yeah.
A lot of hair gel, which causes your hair to become brittle like the top of a meringue.
Right?
Yeah.
No, I know.
It's very crispy.
Yeah.
And yet also looks wet.
Like it's solid as lucite.
Yeah.
But wet looking.
And this guy's fast walking past and he's got this short hair, but it's wet.
It's wet.
Dippity do covered in.
And the manager's like, hey, you know, hey, Brendan or whatever.
Hang on just a second.
And Brendan like goes from fast walking to stopped.
And he's like, what can I do for you?
What's what's up, Bob?
What do you need?
How's the bad?
And Bob says, hey, would you tell John here kind of what your schedule is like?
And he was like, huh, what?
You mean my work schedule?
Yeah, as a matter of fact.
Sure, I will.
And they're very friendly.
Yeah, sure.
And he kind of puts his hand on the back of my chair and he's like, I get here about 7.
I stay until about 10 or 11 o'clock at night every day.
I'm here seven days a week.
I'm just hustling.
You know what I mean?
Every day I'm hustling.
I'm trying to sell some cars here, and if somebody needs me to stay, if somebody can't decide, and it's 9.30 p.m., and they want me to stay till 10, you bet I'm going to stay.
He's got PMA.
He's got positive mental attitude.
He freaking does, and he's trying to put some people into some automobiles.
And as he breaks it down super friendly, and Bob is super friendly,
I'm sitting in the chair realizing, whoa, this is not the job for me at all.
Where's all this hustle coming from?
These guys really care.
You've already shown an extraordinary amount of moxie just to be there.
It seems like at this point you should be able to just kind of rest on your laurels.
Well, sure.
And I mean, I don't know if they've ever seen me in action.
But you assume you'd be great at it.
You know, the thing is, there are stormtroopers, right?
And they're a Jedi.
And stormtroopers seem to be marching all the time.
They're marching down the hall.
They're marching this way.
They're marching that way.
They got that little toaster following them really fast.
A toaster doesn't seem to be able to get down a hall without bumping into a wall.
Yes.
Whereas a Jedi just kind of sneaks around.
Sliding into your DMs like, exactly.
You're coming.
You know, Pauly, he didn't move fast because he didn't need to move fast.
You know what I'm saying?
You come in there.
You're going to change the temperature in the room, my friend.
Yeah, that's right.
You're going to be like John Roderick in there.
You're going to learn a lot about how to move some automobiles.
Precisely.
It's a Sicilian message.
It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.
What I'm saying is you don't know.
I'm going to walk into this used car lot dressed in a burlap robe.
And I'm going to say, with puka shells, and I'm going to say... This isn't the dart you're looking for.
No, I used to work with your father.
And then people are going to be driving out of here...
It's going to be a freaking traffic jam at the next light.
The number of people in Honda Civics heading in every direction.
I feel a great disturbance in the force.
As if thousands of people are suddenly going to get a great deal on financing.
Yeah, it's like thousands of people are driving CRXs on their way.
I'll just always think of you wearing the robe with the hood up.
And then you're out putting balloons on the car.
It's like you'll be looking at me.
but i'm filling up balloons right that's the sound of my helium you got pma you got positive mental attitude you got a little bit of moxie and you're you just happen to be a guy who sells used cars yeah people are gonna see that moxie they're gonna they're gonna see they're gonna sense the moxie they're gonna feel it they're gonna be over at carl's jr and go like i think i might need a new automobile
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to walk out the door of that double-wide trailer, and the Jawas are going to scatter.
And then little broken droids will be lying around in the sand.
He's got a bad motivator.
so it's gonna you know what it's gonna be like fucking thwompin nerf rats no i know it's a nerf herder i see it in my in my in my mind's jedi eye right now i see you fundamentally changing the way the cars are sold i see it i see it that's what i saw too but but bob bob was trying to give you a little bit of his own a little a little bit of jedi from bob he's trying to give you a little bit of mind trick
Brendan's leaning in and he's telling me about his schedule, but I look around and I'm seeing that Chet and Dougie and the other guys have all been listening in on my interview because it's an open plan office, which is to say there's just a bunch of desks in the lobby of a car dealership.
They've all been listening and they're all smirking.
And this is the one, and I think as Brendan walked by and got grabbed by Bob, he had also been listening and was also smirking.
And this was one of the rare instances where a whole bunch of guys with dippity-doo in their hair smirking at me was justified.
They were justifiably smirking at me.
Because, again, I had walked into hockey practice.
with a pair of skis and i'd said look i got this have you guys you guys maybe have never seen a guy uh audition for the oilers with skis but here i am one of the problems of the outside the box thinker is that in a given context you need somebody who first understands what the fucking box is before they decide to be out of it
You got to know what the box is.
You know what I'm saying?
I didn't know what the box was.
Right.
Like, you know, you don't get to be Picasso by just, you know, scribbling on a page, you know, in that case.
But that's that's what it feels like.
And this is that weird provincialism of youth is really feeling like, you know, it's like my friend Harry used to say, he's like, I've never played drums, but I just feel like I'd be really good at drums.
He did eventually learn to play drums.
But you know that feeling.
Give me the tennis racket.
Obviously, I'm Pete Townsend.
Yeah, well, and I'm picturing a situation where, like, I'm standing there in the car lot and, like, Hamid Karzai with his 11 family members arrives wearing his Afghani toque.
And he says, I want to get into a CRX.
And I say, awesome.
We're going to make this happen.
I got band practice.
But...
Let me give you my card tomorrow morning.
Come sign the documents.
So you'd be also moving into fleet sales.
Well, I mean, or who knows what cars I was looking for at the time.
That's a good point, yeah.
He might not want to be too matchy-matchy.
Exactly.
And I don't know exactly at that point what the best Honda for a desert environment is, right?
Because that was a little bit prior to the SUV.
But you'll figure that out.
The problem is that...
The thing is, you get people who are too constrained by the idea that they have to understand how to be a car salesman.
You're going to miss a lot of people.
You're going to miss a lot of Jedis with PMA.
Precise.
Yeah.
Precise.
Anyway, so I look around and I realize that I am a figure of fun to the six dippity-doo guys who used to be in the same fraternity at the University of California, Davis.
And so...
I get up and Bob is real super nice about it.
And he's like, um, so anyway, based on this, I feel like, uh, you know, do some thinking on it about like how, and he actually says this about how committed you are to selling cars.
And I stood up and he stood up and we shook hands and I was like, I'm going to go do some hard thinking on this.
And he was like, OK, great.
Get back to us because we are looking for somebody.
Super interesting.
I was like, very good.
Talk to you.
I'm sure we'll talk again.
He was like, good.
I look forward to it.
And everybody in the everybody in the place as I walked out the door was like, thanks for stopping by.
Look forward to talking to you.
You know.
And really, really nice as they just as we I moved toward the door and they had a very light hand on my back.
Have you processed what was really happening?
Because, I mean, do you think it was ultimately a kind of sales job where they staying in character?
They didn't they didn't like break into behind the scenes mode in any way, it sounds like.
No, I think it was a situation where car dealers, I'm betting, have already, I mean, they know as well as we do that there is a cliche, right?
That people cast dispersions upon them.
And so within their fraternity, they understand that they are actually a breed apart, right?
And they embrace the misunderstanding that they are sleazes.
as a component of their own group identity, right?
They're like, yeah, I get it.
You think you'd be a good car dealer because you think you're a sleaze.
And they probably, part of the whole program would be to project that, oh yeah, you know, there are some bad apples out there, but that's not what's going on here.
That's right.
And I think what they saw in me was, and I'm not sure how many layers they were going down with me, but they were like, yeah, we get it.
You think that
being a car dealer would be funny.
You think that being a car dealer would be fun because you would get to just be corny.
You'd be a cheese ball and also sell cars.
But here's the thing.
Being a car dealers is not just hard.
It truly is a calling.
And we are like being a car dealer is where you begin your career as a salesperson, sir.
And if you are truly a salesman,
One day, you know, this is like rabbit at run.
Run, rabbit, run.
Well, it's also a little bit like Paris Island.
I mean, you're going to come in here and you're going to learn stuff that is going to be applicable for the rest of your career.
Yeah.
You will die if you don't make it through this particular phase of the training.
There's no such thing as an ex-marine.
That's right.
You know what I'm saying?
Call me sergeant.
I work for a living.
Yeah.
I didn't know they stacked shit that high.
So they were being very kind because what they were...
Because it was a joke within their gang that like, here's another one who came in here trying to sell himself to us, but you don't sell to us.
Okay.
We sell to you.
You're telling us that the undercoating is from the factory on you?
We know that the undercoating is an option.
So they spun me around and got me out of it.
They had no interest in sending me out covered in shame because they knew when I thought about it, I didn't have it.
They gave you plenty of mental and emotional ammunition to realize how off base you were.
Kind of?
Yeah.
Well, and walking up the hill from the Honda dealership, thinking to myself, I do not have what it takes to be a used car dealer.
Was for sure a reckoning because at that point in time, I could not differentiate between between the motivation of any career.
So it seemed to me that if you were going to be a philosophy professor or you were going to sell boats.
or you were going to reupholster mid-century modern furniture, the commonality between those three jobs was that you had some quality of job-having-itude.
Right?
That every one of those jobs required that you have moxie, that you work overtime, that you want it so bad.
And maybe that's actually true.
I mean, from the standpoint of a 22-year-old, if I wanted to be a philosophy professor, if I wanted to sell luxury yachts, or if I wanted to be an upholsterer, I would need to pursue that and pursue it with enough passion to get through the apprenticeship period.
And what I knew about myself was that I did not want to do anything that much.
I'm so interested in the idea of the calling.
That's a phrase, I think, I feel like that's a phrase you would hear used primarily to say calling to the clergy.
Like you feel a calling to become a priest or you feel like the Lord is calling you to become a nun.
And it's interesting because I am not a salesperson.
I don't like talking about money.
I'm bad at all of that.
But I do think at least sales writ large might be a kind of calling or sort of like I can't imagine any other job.
You know, like my mom is just really, she was a really, really good salesperson.
She was that rare kind of salesperson where like, not rare to me anyway, where like people genuinely liked her.
Like they wanted to please her.
And she was always so kind with people and so patient with people.
And she would put up with shit that I would never put up with in a million years, whether it was real estate or retail.
But I do think that there is a certain kind of personality.
And maybe it's a little bit manic or a little bit, to my mind, a little self-deceptive.
But the truth is, a good salesperson can sell anything, whether it's a car or a diamond or a house or whatever it is.
And I feel like we characterize salespeople as...
as slightly unethical.
Or predators.
Predators, because we've all had an experience where we walked away from a deal feeling like we had been robbed.
And yet, I think there are a lot of very ethical salespeople whose primary motivation is, look, I want to get you what you want and make you happy and make you feel like you got a good deal, which is a great feeling,
While at the same time selling this thing for more than I paid for it.
Yes, which is which is intrinsic to capitalism
And making me feel like I got a good deal.
So if we can arrange a situation where you get what you want and you feel good about it and I get it to you and I feel good about it, we all feel great and we all get what we want.
And I feel like that motivation within a salesperson is ethical.
There are a lot of honest salespeople that are motivated by this desire to make people happy.
Um, and the unethical ones are the ones that are just like lying to you about what their costs were.
I mean, you have to do a certain amount of like, Hey, look, I got to make some money here.
Right.
But it never, you know, like I'm always, I'm always trying to deal with salespeople in a way that's like, no, you know what?
I'm not going to walk out of here satisfied unless you lose.
Yeah.
Or a situation like rip off the next guy.
But give me a good deal.
Yeah, I searched on the Internet.
I know what this thing costs.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm nobody's fool.
And, you know, I spent I spent enough time in the Moroccan carpet markets to know that whatever you whatever you think the lowest price that those guys paid for the carpet is, they paid half that or they paid a third.
But I am not a salesperson.
My parents weren't salespeople.
There's no one in my family all the way back as far as I can tell that ever sold a goddamn thing.
They all bought high and sold low.
That is like our family motto.
Buy high, sell low.
It's right on the top of our crest.
That's not our business.
You know, our business is making people happy by them walking away feeling like, wow, I just took over a bank.
And he just didn't even know, he doesn't remember where the papers are.
The thing with – so my mom started after my – I think it might have been like while my – no, it was while my father was alive was when she started.
But of course, that's what she started doing full-time after he died.
So this is 1974.
She's doing this full-time.
But as we used to say in the business, real estate is a contact sport.
It's really so much – at least then, I can't say if it's true now.
I suspect it's true now.
It's all about a couple things.
Right.
I mean, as far as the business part of this, a big part of it is once you decided, am I primarily a buying person or a selling person?
Do I work on a team?
Do I do this?
I don't know how much that's changed since the 70s.
I'm guessing a lot.
But what was true then was that it was all about repeat business and word of mouth.
To get started, it was going to take you, you know, year two, three years to get to where you might have somebody who bought or sold a second thing with you.
But it was really all about going, well, listen, if you're going to do anything with real estate, you have to call this person.
Like you need this army of people out there who think you are like unimpeachably honest and decent.
And like that is your opportunity in that kind of a market where there is the idea of the like the skanky guy in a blazer with the dippity dupe.
You know what I'm saying, though?
So it really benefited her to be the way that she was.
She would rise above that feeling of this being this really skeevy kind of industry.
But, you know, I assume that that's true for cars, too.
Like your dad with the mechanic, right?
With his airplane mechanic.
You know there must be people who love going in and just go visit with Bob.
Bob is the best.
I would never buy a car from anybody but Bob.
No, my dad would fly to Alturas, California every year just to hang out with this guy that never said a goddamn word.
As far as I can tell.
I mean, my dad and he would stand there, kick the tires for four.
I mean, I would sit out on the tarmac in the hot sun and look at them inside that hangar.
And they're walking around, they're kicking dirt on the ground.
I don't know whether they're talking about World War II or what, but...
As soon as I walked in the hangar, not a word was spoken.
It was just like, all he would say, yeah, my dad would, well, you know, and he'd go, yeah.
But somehow they had this relationship, you know, and my dad trusted him.
But this idea of a calling, I really felt that the absence of a calling was the thing that was keeping me out of the world.
You're raised to feel that way.
I mean, I think you're really raised to feel that way.
And I really did feel like I was born this or I was born that.
I felt like I was a born philosophy professor.
I had no interest in selling boats or doing upholstery.
But I did feel like I should be somebody.
Basically, they hadn't invented podcasting yet.
No, but BMOC.
Right.
I felt like lightning needed to strike.
And it happened one time.
I may have described this to you, but I was on a ferry boat.
From Tangier to Marseille.
And I'm sitting on the ferry boat.
And somehow I strike up a conversation with a guy who was probably my age now.
You know, mid to late 40s.
A people.
A people.
But he had that, you know, he had that glint in his eye.
He was he was an American living.
Some kind of life where he was on this ferry boat and he seemed very comfortable on this ferry boat.
Like he'd been on, like he'd gone from 10 years to Marseille many times.
And somehow we saw each other across a crowded dance floor.
And I was with a bunch of young people and we, you know, we were, um, we were smoking KIF and drinking some kind of, you know, uh, garbage beer.
And smoking camels.
And he was sitting somewhere on the ferry boat.
And I have no idea how we got into conversation with each other.
But we really zoomed in on each other.
And this isn't a short ferry ride.
This is all the way across the ocean.
This is an overnighter.
And we're just like...
And really, he was like an older me.
And in fact, he looked like me.
I have no idea whether he was me.
He could be time travel me.
Bootstrap paradox.
This could be alternate universe me.
Who's like, hey, pull up a chair, kid.
I mean, because why would he have grabbed me out of the mist?
He knows, even if you don't.
Mm hmm.
Right.
And we sat and talked for a long, long time.
And, you know, I was so full of shit when I was 20 years old.
I was I was so full of shit.
I was a giant.
So rare.
So rare for somebody in the early 20s to be full of shit.
I was I was like a tanker truck of shit.
And I had I just was spinning all the time, spinning yarn, spinning big, highfalutin, you know, just gobbledygook.
And he was very patient and we were talking earnestly, just frankly, as I would be if I was, if I met somebody like that now, right?
I would be very patient.
I would be slightly bemused as this kid told me that he was meant to be a philosopher and a used car salesman or whatever, or that, that the philosophy of used cars was something that no one had fully explored.
And, you know, and he kind of, he seeded, he seeded the pot a little bit.
And after many hours of this, he said, listen,
Here's what I think you should do.
And I was like, yes.
Because very few adults ever said that to me that way.
And he said, don't go back to America.
You don't belong there.
This is where you belong.
Out on the open ocean.
Like, make your own way.
Make your own way in the world.
Don't worry about the go back to college.
Don't worry about this go back to the United States and impress your high school friends.
Like, get on with it.
There's a big wide world out there.
And you're already... You've cut the cable already.
You've already done the hardest part in some ways.
You took the first step.
You're out here.
You got no money.
You're washing your clothes in the sink of a pension every night.
You got no friends, let's be honest.
And you got nothing.
You got nothing except you are young and you have all your strength and
And you've got all this – you're spinning all this garbage, right?
You've got – your mind is going 1,000 miles an hour.
So get on with it.
Get out of here.
What are you doing on this boat?
You're going over to Italy to hang out with some –
college dorks at the University of Florence.
Like, that's not what... I mean, go for it, right?
I mean, there's more beer to consume.
He's encouraging you to really shake up your worldview.
Yeah, he's saying go to India.
He's saying keep moving.
He's saying... I mean, and this was two months before the Berlin Wall fell.
So he had this... Because he was time travel me, he had this idea, right?
That there was this opening that...
Up till now, there was no Prague.
But in four months, there was going to be a Prague.
And you could not live in Prague except under special circumstances in June of 1989.
But by May of 1990...
Be the be the first Western dumbass student to decide that Prague is where they're going to plant their flag or Warsaw or Istanbul or whatever.
And he's just and he just blew the top off of my head like like here you are.
This is you're already doing it.
You already have the calling.
Now just cut that last rope and be gone.
and i was on this boat and and you know my eyes were white as saucers and he had this you know and he was smoking cigarettes right he's this this is an earlier time when 50 year olds still sat around in ferry boats smoking cigarettes well it's also i feel like it's important to highlight that when you are that age and you feel so wise that if when somebody is able to hear you respond and then cut through your own truckload of it can be very
moving it can be very you really have this sort of like this feels like an important moment moment don't you think absolutely and this was this feels portentous this feels like the as they say the universe is trying to tell me something when i look back on my life i often say where were my mentors where were the guys that that said you know come with me i mean where were the mr miyagis
And the problem was I wasn't really looking for one there.
They may have come across the bow multiple times.
And I was like, listen, you don't need to tell me about selling used cars.
One of the characteristics of a mentor is not that he's begging 20-year-olds to accept his teachings.
What can I do to put you in this philosophy today?
That's right.
Like, oh, you would like to learn glassblowing?
I'm begging you to follow me.
But this one particular encounter was actually this moment where there was a teacher...
And it was prior to any kind of situation where I could have remained in contact with him.
I don't think either of us made any attempt to, to retain contact with each other because as far as I could tell, and he may be thinking back on it, he may have been full of shit too.
Um, but he gave the impression of being someone who had done this, who had cut these ties and it would have been, he would have been coming out of a sixties context and
So he may have been the rare individual who cut the ties and then prospered.
You know, he wasn't sitting on the streets of Mumbai with a tin cup.
He had cut his ties but now was a citizen of the world.
And I think he may have even used the term citizen of the world.
So for about four months...
in europe at that time 1989 i vagabonded around i did go to the university of florence and drink a lot of what ended up being chianti because they don't really this is almost a decade before the big walk yep it was exactly a decade before the big walk and i wandered around europe at the time thinking to myself i have
Cut the cable.
I am now a citizen of the world.
And I'm the cat who walked by his wild loan and all things look alike to me.
And then the Berlin Wall did fall.
And I did happen to be, it wasn't happen.
I read on the front page of the International Herald Tribune that there were protests in East Germany.
And obviously in Hungary at that point, things had come unglued.
And it seemed like all the dominoes were falling.
What the fuck was I doing in Florence?
And I got on a night train to Berlin and arrived on November 11th, 1989, as the wall opened.
So I was there.
and spent that you know and spent 10 days with a hammer and chisel chipping away at the freaking wall and what really yeah i was there how did i not know this oh my god um and i and had and and got there only because got there at that moment only because i was laying around in florence uh drunk on chianti and had been there a month and i was like what am i doing and then i saw this newspaper headline and said this is not florence is not the center berlin is the center
And so I was there and there, you know, whenever there's a retrospective of of all those photographs of people climbing on the wall sections falling over.
Yeah, they're at Brandenburg.
I always scan them because I was there.
And I've never found a picture of my there was a I remember being on a ladder hammering.
And the thing about the Berlin Wall is it wasn't just like you didn't put a chisel onto that and hammer it and big chunks of it fell away.
That concrete was really strangely.
Like amazingly solid, but also kind of spongy.
So you would hit it with a hammer and your hammer would kind of bounce back.
You would barely get in.
You just get these tiny little slivers.
That's why when you see the Berlin Wall having been chiseled, it's just kind of like tiny little openings, right?
Nobody, nobody got up there and just broke whole sections of it away.
They actually like you chiseled like you were breaking out of prison.
It would take months to chisel through this wall.
But I'm up there on a ladder just hammering away at this wall and there were photographers all around like kapow, kapow, kapow because they didn't know what to point their cameras at.
And when the actual like – when the gate opened and the little – and all the East Germans in their little trabants –
Like six of them in a Trabant driving slowly through Checkpoint Charlie.
And on the other side, like the West Germans were were like actually throwing handfuls of Deutschmarks in the windows of these Trabants.
Like, welcome to the West.
Here is money.
And handing them champagne.
And just like it was a it was a orgiastic riot of like welcome to the West.
It couldn't they were shaking cars with enthusiasm.
And the East Germans looked like they were they had just landed on Mars.
You know, their eyes were just freaking out.
They were just freaking out.
They didn't have.
I mean, was it in East Germany?
They probably that was a pretty controlled media, too.
They probably I'm guessing didn't.
Yeah.
does.
When it happened, it happened pretty fast.
It just seemed like that one year, so much stuff happened so fast.
Well, because I had been in Germany in September of that year and had gone and stood there next to the Reichstag and looked across the river and the border guards are looking at you through binoculars and they're in the river in their boats, their machine gun boats.
I mean, it was a tense and freaked out atmosphere.
Even
I still have my East German visas because I actually paid the 50 Deutschmarks and went over into East Berlin in the summer of 89.
And it was it was just like every spy movie.
You know, it took us.
We went through five different long hallways with blind turns and come to a guy.
So you could go there, but they couldn't come over here.
Yeah, you could pay money and go into East Berlin and walk around and have dinner.
And, you know, and you had to pay for you had to exchange Deutschmarks at the official rate.
But as soon as you were out in East Germany, it's not like there were people standing there ready to change money.
It all was done kind of like somebody would sidle up to you and be like, you want a little bit better deal on the Deutschmarks than you got there at the border?
And then you could trade $50 West German Deutschmarks for like a million East German Deutschmarks.
And it actually was a problem.
Because you couldn't take the money back over, and they wouldn't exchange it back.
You had to find something to spend it on.
Yeah, and we went into the nicest restaurant in East Berlin and ordered every single kind of food we could.
And we were appalling because it was the nicest restaurant in East Berlin.
All of the Burgermeisters were there.
It was like a very elegant place.
And we were gross.
It was me and a friend.
We were disgusting American college gross people who were super drunk and just getting more drunk on whatever and ordering food and just dropping it on the floor.
Yeah.
We were disgusting.
And we're walking around trying to go into trying to go into department stores.
Like, I got to spend this money.
Just money falling out of our pockets.
I got to spend this money.
People get their ideas about Americans.
Oh, we were terrible.
We were, you know, we were the worst.
And you couldn't buy anything.
You'd go into a department store and it was just like there wasn't anything.
There was nothing to buy.
Wow.
It was it was amazing.
But all by way of saying, like, these historic—this experience and all of that experience of just, like, living by the seat of my pants during that whole period, I was doing it under the rubric of this man on this boat having said, cut those ties, go.
This is your calling.
Be a citizen of the world.
You are done.
Your decision is made.
And I'm here in Berlin, and frankly, I could have—
gone the opposite way they're all pouring in and I could have poured out poured the other direction and have kept going I don't know to Moscow right I mean that was such a tumultuous time that an American student who was just like what's over here could have
been, you know, could have gone wherever.
Right.
I could be, I could be Vladimir Putin by now.
Um, but it got to be Christmas time and it was cold as shit and I was in Germany and somehow I had followed some, I met some German guy and he was like, I live in Garmisch Partenkirchen.
You want to come home with me for Turkey dinner?
And I was like, sure.
Sure.
And I got to Garmish, and it was cold, and I was so poor, and Garmish was so rich, and sentimentality creeped in.
And I was like, it's Christmas time, and my mom, and it's so cold, and I don't have a jacket.
I didn't have a jacket, which I probably could have.
I could have found a jacket.
But I let myself... I was weak, right?
And I let that weakness spread in the form of sentimentality and in the form of feeling incapable.
I was scared.
I was scared to be a citizen of the world.
I was scared to look out at infinity.
Because I wasn't sure that I had whatever it was.
I was not...
prepared to cut that last rope.
You were vulnerable.
I was.
I was 20.
And didn't know that I could.
And that sentimentality got in me like gangrene.
And eventually I was...
I called my mom on the phone.
I was like, hi, Merry Christmas, mom.
You know, this was back when you had to make a long distance call was a whole afternoon's worth of rigmarole.
My mom was like, how is it?
And I was like, it's cold.
And she was like, well, I mean, if you want to come home for Christmas, we'd love to see you because she's my mom.
Mm hmm.
And I and I made that classic decision, which is I'll go home for Christmas and then I'll come back.
I'll fly home for Christmas, but there's a lot going on here.
I want to be the first American dingbat in Prague.
The rope is still detached.
You'll just knot it up for just this little while.
Yep.
Go back.
Have Christmas at home.
Get a jacket.
I have one in the closet that I didn't bring.
I'll get a jacket.
And then I'll be back here in January.
It'll be like going home for winter break.
And then I will resume my life of a completely free citizen of the world.
I just want to go home because my mom makes amazing fudge.
And, you know, and really I'm doing her a favor.
Sure.
I'm doing my mom.
You're being a good son.
Being a good son, I'm going to go back there.
I'm going to give my mom a little kiss.
I'm going to reassure her that I'm a good boy.
And then it's back to Europe to pursue this life of danger.
And so she said, you know, I'll fly you home.
And I was in Garmisch and she was able to buy some, you know, at the time you could fly $275.
She found some ticket from Paris.
So I had to get from Garmisch to Paris.
And so I went on this long trip.
train ride across Europe across the Alps at Christmas time and it was very beautiful and I felt a sense of purpose I was going home to help my mom and have some fudge and get a coat
And I felt really good about it.
And then right back to my new life.
And then right back.
Right back to the life of a man of adventure.
Listen, maybe you can put some fudge in a bag.
It'll help sustain me for that first few weeks in Yugoslavia as I'm making my way into the future.
And I got back to Alaska and I collapsed in a heap and spent then
like five months smoking pot and then I got a job as the Red Robin.
Truly a citizen of the world.
Did you quote Rudyard Kipling to me?