Ep. 300: "The Airplane Doesn't Care"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Marilyn.
How's it going?
Good.
Oh, we sound good today.
How are you going?
Pretty good.
Good.
Is it early?
It's a little bit, a little bit early.
Did I turn on my volume or something?
We sound, I sound loud.
It's nice.
Loud?
Loud?
Yeah, sonorous.
Like, oh, yeah, yeah.
I was listening to some, oh God, this is loud.
I was listening to some music and I manually turned it up on my little box and now we're extra loud.
Oh, that must be it.
I kind of like it.
I'll try it again.
All right.
Loudness.
It's really... Yeah.
I got a coffee.
You went to the potty.
I did.
I went to the potty.
I got a coffee.
I'm out of cream, so I used milk.
My mom is here.
And she's... No, no, no.
But here at my house.
So as I was walking around...
She saw that I have a big bruise on my leg and she was concerned about the bruise.
And so we got on a little bit of a tangent where she wanted me to call my doctor.
Well, hang on.
Now she's standing here in the doorway and has, does have something to say.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, okay.
Hi, Merlin.
Hi, Marcia.
How are you?
He asks, how are you?
I'm great.
She's going to Apple?
She's going to Apple?
Yeah, she... Don't tell her not to let them... Don't get pushed around by those jackals.
Merlin says, don't let them push you around.
Okay, bye.
You know, that's probably the least necessary thing I've ever said.
It was just her birthday, and we got her an Apple Watch.
Oh, terrific.
Wait, you have tight clustering on your birthdays, huh?
Yeah, we do.
Wait, when's yours?
A couple of weeks.
Okay, cool, cool, cool.
I'm not getting you anything.
I just like to know what I'm not observing.
Are you sure it's not coming up in your cow?
I don't believe in celebrating anything.
I know you don't.
You got her an Apple Watch.
Yeah, and then she looked at it.
She was like, well, this doesn't have all the functionality that I'm looking for.
I want the cell one.
She wants the red dot.
Yeah, she wants the red dot.
So she's headed down there to red dot it up with those people.
Yeah, my mind broke.
Your red dot?
My red dot broke.
Oh, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How are you monitoring your steps?
Well, I have a Fitbit right here on this hand.
And I have my very, very, very, very old, pardon my saying, shitty Apple Watch over here on this hand.
Oh, I see.
So while your third watch is being repaired?
No, no.
Can't repair it.
And it's too close to announcing the next one.
So I was roundly talked out of buying a new red dot and told that I should wait like a big boy for the next one.
This one sucks.
It takes forever for Siri to hear me.
It's the worst.
When's the next one come out?
Should I stop my mom and tell her, don't go, don't go, wait and get a new red dot?
That is a fine watch.
The Red Dot is the first ready-for-prime-time Apple watch.
It will serve her well.
You might want to tell her to wait.
Really?
How long?
Do we need to stop the show?
Well, let me go look.
So what you do is you go to... Hey, Mom!
Hang on, Merlin has some other advice.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Mac Buyer's Guide.
Mac Buyer's Guide.
Merlin's doing some research now about whether or not you should go get your Apple Red Dot Watch today or whether you should wait for the release of the brand new one, which is coming out in some number of weeks.
The Apple Watch Series 3.
Series 3.
Series 3, the Red Dot.
Days since release, 332.
Average 445.
There might be a new one.
There's a pretty darn good chance there'll be a new one next month.
Like beginning of next month or the end of next month?
It'll be announced next month.
Here's the thing.
Mama has a question.
So I have this watch.
Could I just turn it in a month from now?
Well, I think there's a 30-day window on no questions asked returns.
I'm just looking at this very quickly.
It's my understanding there's a pretty good chance they'll announce a new one next month.
I don't know how soon it will be available.
I can tell you that's a good watch you got, but there'll probably be a better one coming in the fall.
Okay.
And what about, like, what I have is a Series 3 with GPS, and what I'm going down to talk to him about is upgrading to one that I wouldn't have to have my phone.
Right.
You want the LTE model, and you're an AT&T family?
AT&T.
Yes, we are.
Yeah, yeah.
So what you'll do is you call up those jackals at AT&T, and they will add that as another device to your account, and then you will have that as an independent device.
You could still do a fair amount of stuff with that.
It's not quite the same.
If you're taking a walk, you'll be fine, but I wouldn't go out the whole day without it.
But it's a very capable watch.
I wish mine hadn't broke because I love it very much.
But do I need a different watch to have that capability?
Yes.
Well, does yours have a red dot on the crown?
No, she does not have the LTE.
Yeah, so you need to, it'll be a little bit more dough to get the red dot model.
And then you, with your mobile provider, you'll get that provision for the service.
There'll be another eel they'll attach to you of some such dollars a month, $20 a month or something.
But yeah, if you go in and get that new one, and it's like I say, mine broke and I'm bummed about it.
It's a real good watch.
But I just want to give you the caution.
If you want to be on the bleeding edge, you know, the thing is Marcia, life is short.
You should go get the red dot today and enjoy it.
Yeah, I'm not really a bleeding edge type of person.
You used to be.
That's not true.
You used to manage bleeding edge people.
That's not true.
All right, you guys.
Okay, thank you, Marilyn.
Would you please text me if I can do anything or email if I can do anything to help?
Okay, all right.
Okay, break a leg.
Bye-bye.
Okay, bye.
That was kind of our first guest.
Have a nice trip.
Was that our first guest?
Oh, you had your building manager on one time.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Oh, right, right, right.
Yeah, he said something from the door.
Yeah.
I'm not 100% sure.
I think my daughter might have gone squeak, squawk maybe once.
She whispered something once.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think.
Well, we just validated our placement there in iTunes as a Mac podcast.
Yeah.
Mac Padcast.
Padcast.
Padcast.
Hi.
Welcome to Watch Talk.
I'm here with horologist John Roderick.
I hate that word, horologist.
That's a terrible word.
It's terrible.
Really problematic.
Oh, God, it's early.
I hope that goes well for her.
It's a good watch.
Yeah, she's going to be fine.
And, you know, she's like, oh, I'm not a bleeding edge.
But I'm like, Mom, I would never get one of these things.
You're the tech.
She's the tech-savvy one.
She's also decisive.
And it sounds like she knows what she wants.
Yeah, yeah.
She's on the...
She's on the train now.
She's going to go down.
You know, she gets AppleCare.
She gets the most extensive AppleCare she can get for everything.
God, on everything but this watch.
I'm so stupid.
So fucking stupid.
Because she talks to them.
She's gotten probably... They earn it.
They earn every dollar.
She's probably gotten $200,000 worth of consultation from them.
She calls them and they talk to her.
What's a recent example where she's drawn on that resource?
Oh, well, what she asks them to do is help solve her functionality.
It's not just, I can't get this to boot up.
But she calls them and says, Excel.
And they do it.
They probably got a flag on her.
If they have any sense, they'll put a flag on her.
Maybe so.
Yeah.
They've had, or she's had them go through her entire music catalog.
Because, you know, all this stuff where I transfer a thing and it's like, oh, your music's gone.
Oh, well.
And I go, well.
What are you going to do?
Sure, just one more kick in the balls.
It's a new age.
Things are different now.
These millenniums, they love their avocado and they just don't care about their music.
She grabs on like a rat terrier and just walks them through.
She's like, well, I don't see.
I used to have every Creed record.
I go out of my way not to tangle with her.
I'll put it that way.
If I have anything to say, you know what they used to tell us in military school?
They said there's only three potential answers to every formal question.
You either say, yes, sir, no, sir, or no excuse, sir.
Bill, right.
Right.
And so, like, if I feel tempted to try and slide in any kind of fourth answer, I don't, you know, I don't try to, like, soft pedal it because she doesn't respond well to that kind of thing.
But I try to be, it's a very soup Nazi type situation.
I try really hard to be clear and concise.
I try to address the core of whatever it is we're talking about, and I say what I think we should do about it, what I can do about it, and if there's anything she needs to do about it, which I think a manager appreciates.
A manager doesn't want somebody to come in there looking for a parent.
They want somebody who's going to do the work.
Yeah, that's tough for me because I really.
She is your parent.
Well, and the thing is, every manager I've ever tried to hire, the first thing I've done is said, Excel.
Sorry, this is not a scope for your AppleCare, John.
It's just like, ah.
I, you know, speaking of suit Nazis, when I do have to interact with the Apple system, and I'm just here to tell you, I just think the Apple store, I've argued with my friends about this.
I don't think it's nearly as fun to go to the Apple stores as it used to be.
It's so crowded and getting dealt with there.
It used to be, time was, you could just stroll in there with your Hot Sam or your Orange Julius and just like get some help with something.
Oh, I remember.
You really want to get an appointment.
So for example, when my sweet, sweet daughter broke her iPad,
um, a few months ago.
Um, I called like, we were going out on a trip.
I called from the road as we were headed toward our destination and it was a week.
Oh yeah.
So I came back and I went in there and my, my experience, I was, you know, it's always very much the same.
We're like, there are people who are walk-ins and the walk-ins come in there and they're like, I can't get into iCloud.
This is the most common one.
It's like, I'm locked out of iCloud.
And they're like, um,
there's very little we can do to help you.
We have designed this system to be that we can't get into it, let alone a bad guy.
And so there's really not much we can do for you.
It's so sad.
People are like, oh, I dropped my phone in the toilet.
Now all my kids' pictures are gone.
It's like, it's the worst.
But they're also in front of me and they're kind of taking up a lot of time when I could be, you know, getting taken care of.
Have I mean, this is one of my superpowers.
I have a friend who manages an Apple store nice and So I do have the ability to excel to Well, you just get him on the blower to send him a text and say I'm down here at the mall.
I need to talk about the app store and he's like and then somebody comes out with a mustache or some extraordinary tattoos and
Or a flat top haircut or really big glasses.
Sure.
Oh, I see.
And they say, are you John?
And I go, yeah, maybe.
And they say, who are you?
What can I do?
And then they are always the person that while they're talking to me,
40 other Apple employees come up and say, hey, this guy wants... Oh, it happens all the time.
If you don't have that guy, I'll call him Cecil.
If you don't have Cecil, you're getting somebody else and you're getting passed around.
It's not unusual to be handled by three different people who have to play a game of telephone about what they're doing for you.
And they wait on three people at a time.
It's a mess.
It's crazy.
And I always feel both good that I have the person that everyone's consulting and
My person sometimes even has suspenders.
Oh, you know you got a good one.
Cecil with suspenders?
That's a keeper.
And Cecil and it's like gender unclear.
Oh, good for them.
Often like flat top and suspenders and you're still like, yeah.
Yeah.
But they are also very in demand.
So then sometimes I'm like, hey, my eyes are over here.
Like, why are you helping this guy get his thing going on?
But it's like, because, yeah, because I'm the manager and the reason I'm helping you is that somebody made a phone call to me that said that you were important.
So this is what important looks like at the Apple store.
You get white glove service.
Sometimes those fingers got to touch somebody else.
Wow.
But it was amazing.
The last time I went in and got a phone, like they did all, they were like, here, why don't we put on the, why don't we put on the protective covering?
Why don't we do that for you?
And they just ported everything and they did all the stuff.
But even the little stuff, like they put the case on for them.
They were like, well, that's unusual.
That's unusual.
And I was like, I was like, yeah, this is nice.
This is good.
But you know, like my, my person at the Apple store, uh,
The person who makes the call is also an important person.
So it's like, you know what I mean?
Like if you get referenced, if your reference is like a buck lieutenant.
Oh, no, there's a lot of levels to that.
It's not just getting moved to the front of the line thanks to your privilege.
It's also that you will get somebody who is, you're not going to get a ding-a-ling.
I used to have a guy, you know, that mall down the street from us.
Oh, I remember that guy.
I had a guy, the Utila-Kilt guy.
And a very handsome guy.
And I think he got called out to the bigs.
I think he ended up working at the spaceship in Cupertino.
I don't know.
You know what's really sad, John?
You know, nobody knows me either.
I go in there, nobody knows me.
That's insane.
That's impossible.
I know.
I know.
I used to be well known in the Mac and Apple community.
And now you're Merlin Mann of MerlinMann.com.
These kids are very, very young.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, when I was Merlin Mann, a lot of those kids were in high school.
Yeah.
I see this a lot.
You get that a lot?
No, no, I just see this a lot.
Oh, you see that?
This episode of Roderick on the Line is brought to you by Mack Weldon.
You can learn more about Mack Weldon right now by visiting MackWeldon.com.
And listen, when you go there, use the promo code ROTL for 20% off your order.
It's a pretty good deal.
Hey, listen, I'm a big fan of Mack Weldon.
I'm wearing Mack Weldon right now.
I wear them all the time.
Basically, Mack Weldon is the pillar of my entire wardrobe.
Comically so.
My daughter has told me, she actually, the actual quote yesterday was, you wear five things, is what she said.
And I think four of them are Mack Weldon.
Here's what they told us to say.
Mack Weldon is better than whatever you're wearing right now because Mack Weldon is a premium men's essentials brand that believes in smart design and premium fabrics.
Now, that's all true.
They told us to say that, but that is all true.
This is really, really good stuff.
Mack Weldon believes in smart design, premium fabrics, and simple shopping.
They have a very easy-to-use website.
I have to tell you, I have purchased hundreds of dollars of their clothing using their website, and it's always a doddle.
Mack Weldon will be the most comfortable underwear, socks, shirts, undershirts, hoodies, and sweatpants that you will ever wear.
That's true.
And they even have a line of silver underwear.
And shirts that are naturally antimicrobial, which means that they eliminate odor.
But they want you to be comfortable with whatever you pick up.
So if you don't like what you got from them, you keep it, and they will still refund you.
No questions asked.
It's good stuff.
Really try this out.
Try the Pima Cotton Tea.
That's really good.
I really like their white undershirt.
Just stays tucked in.
Beautiful, beautiful.
Their polo shirts I've recently gotten into.
Very cool.
And yeah, their underwear.
It's pretty ace.
So, uh, not only does Mack Weldon's underwear, socks and shirts, listen, I'm recording this right after finishing this episode.
You haven't gotten to the end of this episode yet, but it's pretty wild.
So yeah, I'm a little bit emotional.
It's kind of weird.
Anyway, Mack Weldon, they perform well.
Uh, they're good for working out, going to work, going on dates or, or just everyday life.
Honestly, get the Mack Weldon really seriously.
I mean, they paid for this ad and stuff, but like, it's really good.
Try Mack Weldon.
They're good.
You go to Mack Weldon.com and you get 20% off your order using the promo code R O T L Mack Weldon.com.
Our thanks to Mack Weldon for supporting Roderick Online and all the great shows.
Fuck you.
I was just reading the writings of one Benjamin Gibbard who was running down his list of he force-ranked the Death Cab records.
I read that too.
It was pretty good, wasn't it?
It was.
Yeah, it was.
It was, uh, it was, it's nice to see him like, just go for it.
I'm glad transatlanticism was one.
I would have liked to see something about airplanes higher.
I never got the whole built to spill junior thing out of them.
Oh, for sure.
You think so?
His, his vocal stylings particularly?
Well, no.
And just the kind of twisty turny, like, uh, at the time in 1997, uh,
Any good band in Seattle was trying to sound like built a spill.
It was just, it was just the way it was.
Modest mouse sounded exactly like built a spill.
Exactly.
But with one or two, the two weird things with modest mouse, uh, were that Isaac Brock had a lisp, which did not sound like Doug Marsh, but, uh, and, and also the like, kind of like, uh, uh, wang bar melodicism of both of those bands.
Uh,
Isaac Brock didn't actually, did you know this?
He didn't have a whammy bar.
He would buy the cheapest guitars that he could find and they were all these like heavy metal kind of pointy horn like Kramers and stuff that nobody wanted at the time.
Right.
They all had tremolos, but he would take the bar off, and his way of playing was he just kept the heel of his hand.
On the tailpiece?
Yeah, and like under it almost.
Wow.
And he would sit and play and just kind of like push and pull his hand off.
on the on the like floyd rose tremolo system oh you get like a locking type situation okay because i was gonna say i saw them one time and they seemed really high that seems like a very high level like no they were they were in in incapably high uh on drugs they were on something because it was a real bad show there was a while this is the time when they got into more of what i'll call circus music i don't i don't want to speak
I don't want to speak too far out of turn here, but I happen to know for a fact that they, at least, no, I think they were huffers.
Oh, nice.
Well, you know what you save buying a less costly, you know, Kramer.
Yeah.
You could turn that right into, that's Scotchgard for the table.
Sure, you go down to 3M and get a case.
Yeah.
Get a case of adhesive.
Yeah.
And that really affected their musical style.
But Death Cab was like it.
I mean, the bands that were all post-grunge, we were all so influenced by Built to Spill.
You can't even describe it.
And so when Death Cab, when I first saw them, I was like, they are extremely good and extremely capable of sounding like Built to Spill.
And it was just the evolution of
His writing style, obviously, completely unique to him.
I felt that same way.
You can hear that more on We Have the Facts.
I agree with him.
I went back and listened to We Have the Facts yesterday, and that is a very good record.
It's overshadowed in my head by the first one, because that's the first one I heard.
I really imprinted on...
um champagne from a paper cup and definitely shaking and all those songs but that it is it's a much it's a much more interesting sounding record for sure my problem with we have the facts is that i was playing i mean i played uh 50 to 75 shows with that that band during the period between um the recording of something about airplanes and the recording of
we have the facts and at the time the band during the something about airplanes years the band got harder and harder like big rock show like loud and and expressive you know big gestures and and he does that hip thing he has that guitar hip thing he does he does that but you know they were like they were they were soaring really as a rock act
And then somewhere right in there, you know, they were, they were very young and I think very, I think there was something like around 21, 22, 21, 22.
Yeah.
And I mean, at that point I was 28 and I was extremely susceptible to the winds of musical fashion blowing around and I didn't even know what they were, but those guys were really, really, really in the, in their moment.
and in that strange little area of 1999 it was that whole wave of quiet is the new loud uh like anti-punk emo the american analog set like really like would you put that on there under the ages of what you call don't yell at me music don't yell at me music
And those guys went out.
So they were playing shows and they would get tours with bands that were at their level and they really admired.
Like they did the Dismemberment Plan tour.
Oh, the Death and Dismemberment, right.
Right.
That was huge for both bands.
What a weird pairing.
It was super weird, but both bands were really into it and the fans were really into it because it was just like, what the hell is this, you know?
But they went out and they did a tour with a band that was super duper quiet as the new loud.
And they came back from that tour.
And all of a sudden, from my standpoint, all of the energy had gone out of their set.
And they were trying to be really precise.
The volumes had come down.
There was no jumping around.
It was just like, pling, plong, plong, plong, plong.
Real, real gentle.
Super gentle.
And then they recorded We Have the Facts.
And the thing is, some of the songs on We Have the Facts are some of the greatest Death Cab songs.
But I really, I was waiting for that record to come out and be...
This like stadium rock that they were that they had been playing three months before.
OK, sure.
And instead it came out and it set the tone for this because they play stadium rock now.
Like if you go see Death Cab now, it is a massive, massive.
Epical.
I haven't seen them in years, but even then they were soaring.
It was very big sound.
That Transatlanticism tour was really, really good and really big.
They were really in their corn back then.
Yeah, well, so that's what I mean.
They walked themselves back up to this massive sound, but having been with them at the time, they artificially restarted themselves at We Have the Facts.
And had to kind of walk up... If they had made that record before going out on that one tour... Would have been a different record.
It would have been a different record and a different band, a different career.
Because they would have been... I think they would have been 100% closer to what they ended up doing later.
Sonically.
I don't mean songwriting-wise.
Songwriting-wise, it's always... They're very consistently putting out amazing songs.
But that's just my... Too close to the...
Too close to the font to have like a not biased feeling about every single thing.
Speaking of fonts, did you look at the Wikipedia page for stream?
I'm looking at it now.
Do you find this as interesting as I do?
I don't know why, but this morning I woke up and I says to myself, I says, now something I've done with my daughter in the past, she's done on her own, I've done on my own, we've done together, is to go out and interrogate the idea that
What is a city?
What is a village?
What is a hamlet?
What is a megalopolis?
Those are all pretty well defined.
But today, as you do, I woke up thinking about water.
Yeah.
What is a stream?
Well, yeah, what even is a stream?
It's a stream.
Like, I've come to believe that a stream is a subset of many different kinds of bodies of water.
But I don't know, I mean, there's probably some government definitions, but it was just, it was real interesting.
So when I started Googling around, some people say, you can jump over a brook, you can wade through a creek, and you can swim across a river.
But I think all that varies heavily.
I was just excited to know that there was this much detail about the taxonomy of water lines.
But what's a nick point?
I mean, what's a thalweg?
What's a gill?
I mean, these are all important questions.
You've got a psych, a branch, falls, you get a kill, a run, a burn, a born, a bet.
You didn't say crick, you said creek, right?
I say creek.
There are a lot of people where I came from.
It's touchy for me because I am from Cincinnati.
And a lot of my family is from Kentucky and West Virginia.
And so, you know, it's sort of, I don't know, Eliza Doolittle type situation.
I push back on a crick.
There are a lot of people in Alaska that call it a crick.
Call it a crick.
And I have been in situations like when I was working at the gold mine.
Is that a strip club?
When I was working at my high school gold mine.
Gold mine.
Gold mine.
uh i call i had to call things cricks because that was just if you'd called it a creek you would have been you would have been trying to be a new york city yeah a little bit fancy uh but you know out here we have uh we have a lot of slews a slew is that slew like a slough a slew is a slough but it's not a sluice
It is not a sluice.
A slu... Did you get down to section three, other terminology?
Look at all those wonderful words.
I am loving the other technologies.
Bifurcation?
I'm afraid that I lost... You may have noticed, I lost a tooth.
No!
Yeah, and so I'm having a little bit of a... I don't... I don't notice it until you start exaggerating it like that.
I've been talking to you for 25 minutes and 19 seconds, and I haven't noticed anything.
The problem is that this time in particular, I don't know why I've lost this 2,000 times, but all of a sudden my tongue does not have any articulation, and I keep thumbling over words, and it's really driving me crazy.
So a slew, the slews are very, they're major features of the Northwest and Alaska because it's just a kind of like,
You've got them so much there in San Francisco, like everything, everything in the East Bay is a slough, basically.
All those places where the rivers come in and it's kind of a brackish, swampy.
That's another, you know, like it's just sort of like a what is this?
Is this a stream?
Is this a pond?
Is this a lake?
Is this an inlet?
Is it an estuary?
What the hell?
And it's always a slough.
So we have a lot of slews out here.
And you look at it, you want to call it a slough.
You just can't help it.
I've seen that word since I was a little kid, but I still can't not call it slough.
I just think of it because of the office, I guess.
Oh, because of the office.
Okay, here's what it says in the Internet Science page.
It's important.
I think stream is a good jump.
If you're interested in bodies of water that mostly move, this is interesting.
And you start realizing that rivers are very important.
Rivers are very, very important.
Oh, wait!
There was a thing on KQED this morning where they talked to a fellow, 75-year-old guy that's been working with river stuff and the environment for a real long time.
Of all of the many, many, many rivers in California, I believe, I'll try to find the webpage for this.
Supposedly, there's only one river that is governed by the Johnson era, something like the Wild Waters Act or something.
Uh-huh.
Whereas this idea of like, hey, these dams are great for lots of reasons.
We can build shitty housing here.
We can get some power out of it.
There's all these things.
But there's only one river, one like large river in California that is not dammed in any way, which I was very surprised to learn.
Is it?
Because there's a lot of rivers here.
Is it the Russian River?
No.
Is it?
It's one I didn't recognize.
Russian River is a good ass river.
It's a great river.
You can tube on it.
You know, the Rogue River in Oregon is a hell of a river.
Let me recommend, if you're looking at rivers... This would be a good e-book.
We should do this.
High Quality Rivers by John McQuinn.
I think the Rogue River gets...
Rogue River is more important than even we know.
Oh, it's a Turns Out.
It's a Turns Out River.
Because the Rogue is one of these, like, so much water flows through the Rogue.
And it has so many opportunities for dams.
And the hydrologists and the geologists and all the big extremologists, governmentologists.
They said, no, they said, leave it.
We're not going to damn this.
Well...
We'll damn it a little bit.
They wanted to damn it so hard.
You know, I mean, if you only got a hammer type situation, right?
If you're a maker of dams, right?
You're going to be out there to cover things onto which dams can be affixed.
Every problem looks like a dam.
But the people in California in particular, I think, look at the Rogue, which is in Southern Oregon, and they think, hey –
You know, we need water in California and you, Oregon, are just dumping, dumping, dumping all this incredible, wonderful, clean mountain water straight into the ocean.
Please stop that.
Please let us divert your delicious water here to California where we will turn it into soap tasting dreck.
Mm-hmm.
To serve our millions and millions and millions of huddled masses yearning to drink free.
And Oregon goes, I don't know, man.
The salmons and the stuff and the wildness of the river.
You got some lava stuff.
Oh, look at that.
Mount McLaughlin.
Oh, look at that.
That is beautiful.
Did you read the – what the hell am I – absolutely.
My tongue went into my tooth area.
Oh, no.
It diverted you.
I got confused.
Did you ever read The Monkey Wrench Gang?
I don't think so.
So The Monkey Wrench Gang – were you ever a member of Earth First?
Yeah.
No.
Did you ever say to anyone, no compromise in defense of Mother Earth?
No.
Oh, okay.
Did you ever wish that schools would get all the money they wanted and you'd have to hold a bake sale to buy a piece of military equipment?
Did you ever do that?
Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
You like gladiator movies?
No.
There was quite a while, I think, in my early 20s.
Where I really felt like being an environmental, not activist, but an environmental vigilante might be where my life was headed.
Oh, that's super interesting.
I was so profoundly affected by the logging culture up here.
And the clear-cut culture.
And partly because my family is in timber.
Old wood, big wood.
Old wood, big wood.
And partly because it's in my nature to look at the world as a system and to feel like you can push the...
push the system only so far before it starts to collapse and if once it collapses you know and this is all stuff we talk about now in terms of global warming we didn't have that terminology then but we we definitely understood that um that ecosystems
were delicate and that we had we were i mean you're the thing that's i think implicit in what you're saying that a lot of people continue to overlook is the this is very turns out but how surprisingly intermingled all these lives are and you don't have to go as far as flapping a butterfly's wings but you know there's but there's so much connection between these ecosystems and we've seen for years you know what happens when you when you try to bring
you know, get the coyotes out of Yellowstone and now there's too many rabbits or whatever.
There's all this kind of stuff where it's a more delicate balance than people like to realize because it seems so sturdy and because God made it in a very Genesis way, it's nature and it's good and, you know, it's... And as a teenager, I think what we were seeing, we definitely now understood that the dams had killed the salmon runs.
We were watching overfishing destroy the East Coast fisheries.
Um, we were seeing, and this was the spotted owl era where they were, they were chopping down the forests and the only, you know, and we were just scrambling.
Like, it wasn't a question of this dumb little owl.
It was a question like, where are the deer going to live?
Like where there's the, you're taking all the wood.
There's no place for anything to live.
Like forget spotted owl, but the spotted owl was a thing that they, the, the,
the ecological community could point to and say like this bird will be gone if we don't do something and you know and that and it became comical because the loggers were like who cares you know the snail darter thing started in 1973 isn't that something that's way longer ago than i would have guessed well so because that was besides you know the spotted owl came along later but for a long time everybody sneered about the snail darter
Yeah.
Like, who cares?
It's in the Wikipedia picture.
It's in someone's hand next to a paperclip.
Like, who fucking cares?
Who fucking cares?
Right.
And, you know, and this all started with Silent Spring, which is a great book.
That's a hell of a book.
DDT.
DDT and what?
Eagle Eggs?
Mm-hmm.
I had an environmental ethics class that was very upsetting.
Yeah.
Well, and so I felt one of my early – because this is still Cold War, but I was feeling very radicalized about environmental issues as a young person and felt like the bulldozers and the chainsaws were such a – were marching in such lockstep across the West –
that as a Western person, like, I was moved to feel like... I never moved to chain myself to a tree or to climb up into a giant redwood and build a tent up there.
But it wasn't an abstract or philosophical issue for you.
You could see the consequences of what this change meant and could continue to mean.
Yeah, I think I might have told you the story where my dad and I were flying in a little plane over the Cascade Mountains, and...
You know, and I started to, and I'm not a 10-year-old at this point.
You know, I'm in my 20s, but I looked out, I surveyed from as far as the eye could see from 5,000 feet or higher.
We were flying over the mountains.
So we were, you know, we were up high enough you could see for a great distance.
And I said, look at this, because he and I had been arguing about environmentalism, and he came from that era of, like, the blogger is the, like, pinnacle of the Western man.
How do you, what do you mean don't log?
Like, logging is where you go out, and that's how you put yourself through college, logging.
Uh, which was his attitude.
And I, you know, I pointed from one end to the, of the horizon to the other and said, where are the fucking animals going to live dad?
Like the forest is gone.
The forest is fucking gone.
And he saw it.
He finally saw it, uh, through those eyes.
And so we then were at my uncle Cal's who was at the time president of Macmillan blow Dell and
And Cal and dad were sitting there and dad said, well, I was flying with John.
No trees.
The forests are all gone.
And what the, you know, like, what the fuck have you guys been doing?
You took all the forests.
And Cal said, oh, that explains a lot.
And my dad said, what?
What does that mean?
And Cal said, well, yeah, more people are flying.
This is the greatest one-man show I've ever been to.
And my fucking Uncle Cal's, my fucking Uncle Cal.
He's saying it's a problem that you're noticing too much?
Yes!
Yes!
Okay.
All right.
How about killing the messenger?
He was a timber baron during the era when they realized... He's old wood, big wood.
Yeah.
He was of that era where they realized, hey, if you leave a buffer of about...
100 feet of trees on either side of the road, then you stop getting phone calls from people.
Oh, I see.
It's a Ceausescu type situation.
Yeah, they're driving through the forest and they're like, it's so beautiful.
We'll staple some more trees up, yeah.
100 feet behind.
That's really interesting optics management.
Well, and it's still true.
I mean, drive in the West and you will still see those buffers around the road.
I'm a 51-year-old man.
That never occurred to me until right now.
How even would I know?
Yeah, right.
Because I'm not going to go to places where they're clear-cutting.
And the timber, well, I mean, they're anywhere in the West, right?
Anywhere in the mountains?
And they and the timber companies figured that out.
But but dad is telling this story and Cal Cal.
It went into Uncle Cal's ears and he was like, oh, that explains why we're getting so many letters.
OK, because people can see it from the air.
He sees the problem differently.
He does.
And so he was just like gears turning.
Like, how do we black out the windows of airplanes?
Or like, how do we what if we spray painted the ground green?
Like he's just, I mean, it's just his mind is somewhere else, right?
Because the idea of harvesting timber to him is just a different thing than it was to me.
And growing up late, I mean, as time went on and I realized like, oh, 98% of all the old growth forest in the West was all cut down in 1850.
You know, there's the number of pockets of actual old growth forest that's that's a thousand years old.
Yeah.
It was already really a small area.
No kidding.
Yeah.
Because that's not even I mean, obviously, they were efficient for their time, but that's.
Long before we got to the point where we could do it at scale like we can now.
But the thing about what they do at scale is they're harvesting trees.
They're harvesting like third growth, fourth growth, because they cut all those trees down in 1850 and replanted them.
And by 1890, those trees were ready to be harvested.
And they cut them all down again, and then they replanted them again.
And in 1935, they were all, you know, like they've been managing these forests for years.
Uh, for a century now or more.
And that's just how the timber people just are like, yeah, to you, they're mountains full of deer and stuff, but to us, they're farms.
And, and also like,
Have you figured out a better way to build a house?
It's Cal, right?
This is absolutely not a change of subject, but the way Uncle Cal is approaching that I think is really instructive for somebody who thinks of themselves as an idealist.
Because somebody who's an idealist or somebody who thinks that the system is...
crooked and rigged and everybody's out there trying to hide something, which there's all kinds of reasons to believe that today.
But listening to the way he thought about that, you tell me if I'm dead wrong about this, but I'll bet you it was... Okay, think about this.
If I'm trying to get my kid... Let's put it this way.
I would like my kid to try new foods.
And try different foods and different combinations of foods.
I don't know if this is like this for you, but if I, no matter how I introduce this as a new food, all the red flags are up and she's in a defensive mode.
She's not interested.
She knows it's going to be gross.
She tried something she quote unquote already tried it once and didn't like it.
On the other hand, if I just give her something to eat and she eats it,
We're fine.
I made, I made a, I made a rookie mistake a week or two ago when, uh, actually while we were camping, um, last week, she, uh, she got a sandwich and it's really a kind of sandwich she would like.
It's like a cowgirl creamery, like fancy ham and fancy cheese on a fancy, beautiful roll.
And she was, you know, she didn't eat a lot of it, but she had some of it.
And I made a stupid mistake, which I was like, I was like, that was pretty good.
Right.
You can see where this is going.
And she says, yeah, it was pretty fine.
Fine.
I was like, you know, you just, uh, you just ate mustard.
Yeah.
And I might as well have said, like, I shat on it.
She was mad at me.
She's mad at the sandwich.
So that's the thing, is like, I think Uncle Cal is being like me in some ways.
He feels there's a rightness, a properness, a correctness, a normalness in what he is doing for a profession.
He doesn't see what he's doing as wrong.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is...
I'm not a mustard villain.
And Uncle Cal, at least in his own eyes, is not some kind of robber baron from Oldwood Bigwood.
He's just a guy doing a job, but he understands the optics of needing to minimize the amount of this looking bad, even though he thinks it isn't bad.
Isn't that kind of fair to say?
Yeah.
He doesn't think it's bad.
But he doesn't feel like he's covering up a bad thing by doing that any more than I feel like I'm covering up a bad thing with mustard.
I think that helps explain a lot about why we don't always see the same way about things.
Yeah, he definitely felt like that environmentalism was a form of hysteria.
And it was a political...
It was politically motivated.
A way to get leverage for, you know, change this dumb thing to get this good thing kind of thing.
And just in general, like a symptom of a kind of anti-industrial, anti-corporate, anti-capitalist.
Mm-hmm.
like general movement that he disparaged because he was pro-industrial poor pro-corporate and pro-capitalist did he think do you suppose do you suppose or imagine that he thought um that uh that the protests and concern were ultimately disingenuous yeah or disingenuous or ill-informed
Primarily like ill-informed.
Primarily he felt like they were movements of children who were yelling.
Sad because we ate the pretty pig kind of thing.
Yeah, right.
And just like they did not understand economics.
They didn't understand how things were made or built.
They didn't understand where their parents' money came from.
They had expensive college educations and were now out yelling and screaming about the birds.
Right.
And they were doing a good enough job of it.
They were attractive.
They were Jane Fonda's or whatever.
And so they were getting – so the risk to him and his business was that popular opinion might turn because the pretty people felt this way.
And the thing about Weyerhaeuser and those companies is that over the years, they really – they managed –
This optical switcheroo where they became stewards of the land.
I mean, Weyerhaeuser now is a major property development company.
We hear ads all the time on KQED for the Almond Board.
It's like the thirstiest crop in California.
It's constantly doing these ads.
And it's like the kind of thing you see on like NewsHour.
Those kinds of like, in Archer Daniels Midlands, we make the farm the table or whatever.
No, you don't.
That's not what you're doing.
You're just a giant, giant, giant company and you're just putting a straw hat on it, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, I like almonds as much as the next guy, but they're a very, very... I mean, almonds and iceberg lettuce, I think, are up there in terms of how much water goes into producing a very, very tiny amount of product.
But I'm saying, I think everybody's done that.
A lot of these people want to, like, these companies want to reframe themselves.
And do you remember back in the Bush era when it seems like every kind of welfare or environmental gutting act got some kind of a sweet name?
Like the preservation...
precious deers act or whatever the kiss the the birds on the beak act the caressing the trees with metal act well but but but i think it's key from our standpoint we look at those and we think oh they're greenwashing themselves as a part of this evil uh like uh
from our standpoint, within the parade made up of papier-mâché marionettes who are like, well, I'm evil capitalist, you know, the papier-mâché top hat and the bulldozer.
That they are, you know, that they just have totally evil motives.
I don't have a proper job.
I just show up and disrupt other people's work.
But from their standpoint, there's the same amount or more of just like
conviction that they're the ones that are doing the right thing they're the ones that are helping people that are building things that are making the world better and they have to greenwash things just in order to to like sideline this yelly bratty a bunch of powders who have their own agenda who are their hands aren't clean either they're trying to accomplish some kind of
Social engineering that just gets in the way of the good, natural American progress.
And as a 22-year-old, I was really on both sides of it because I was having dinner at Uncle Cal's, you know, just eating that roast beef that the death of the spotted owl had paid for.
But on the other hand, you know, at night I was...
Not to say that I was like putting a black mask on and going and pouring sugar in the gas tanks of bulldozers, although not far from it.
And it was, you know, and I think part of my education, like part of my self-education came as a result of trying to reconcile those two worlds, both of which I knew intimately and say like, okay,
Uncle Cal is a very confusing man to me.
He's very hard to, um, he's very hard to get off to the side at a party and ask real questions up.
Uncle Cal resists that.
If you try and guide him away, he will guide himself.
He's like, have you met Rajneesh?
Uh, but he does, you know, he does it like with himself, but, but the monkey wrench gang, uh,
Uh, and the rogue river like these, uh, the monkey wrench gang is a novel written about a group of like a ragtag group of people who all, uh, banded together in the desert Southwest to stop the construction of a dam.
And it's written as like an, an adventure novel.
And the more I think about it, I'm astonished that it never got made into a movie.
When I first discovered it in the mid-80s, it was still a – to read it felt really transgressive because it was effectively advocating a form of domestic terrorism in defense of a larger principle.
Like in order to save Mother Earth, we're going to have to periodically –
destroy a dam, you know, some big, big gesture.
And it felt, it felt like a, like a piece of contraband to have this book.
And it was in that same family of like ecotopia books that were, were sort of prognosticating a future world in which the Northwest or the West sort of seeded from the United States and formed a ecological socialist utopia.
Yeah.
which I think there's a whole new generation of people that imagine that might be possible.
They're mostly Portland Timbers fans.
Um,
But the reason all this is, like, really present for me is that I just did this week-long motorcycle trip in the mountains of Oregon, and I rode around logging roads, basically, for six days.
We had two very, very different camping experiences around the same time.
We did.
You were pretty lean.
Yeah.
You had a pup tent that fit, like, in a backpack.
We had a six-person REI tent with a wall in the middle and an add-on garage.
Yeah.
We had to rent.
I sent you a photo.
We had to rent an SUV for ours.
Just to carry the tent.
Oh, oh, oh.
And the big husky boxes for all the stuff and our new Cadet Fire Coleman Grill.
Aren't you fancy with your husky boxes?
Husky boxes.
Those things aren't cheap.
Oh, they're so good.
You get the short ones and the tall ones.
No, the short ones are great.
The tall ones are great.
No, everything that I had was it all fit on the back of a motorcycle.
What about food?
What did you do for food?
Well, you know, we'd go down to town because we're riding in this mountain range where most of the – so it's all logging roads.
And what the logging companies figured out a long time ago was, hey, we're going to be taking a lot of timber out of these mountains.
And rather than just build some rutted like shit gravel road,
We might as well build roads like, you know, not not like two lane divided highways with sidewalks, but like proper roads up into these mountains because we're going to be running a bunch of trucks in and out bulldozers, you know, men and equipment.
And so the roads.
So so the mountains, the coastal mountains of Oregon are mostly unpopulated.
mostly just covered with forest and they are uh and they're like they're these capillaries of roads that go all the way up to the summits and they curve they wind they're twisty turny little snakes of road point of information yes of course i've avoided asking this because it sounds like i'm trying to it's it's uh were you driving your own motorcycle i was driving my own motorcycle really you weren't like riding on the back
No.
You see why I didn't want to ask.
I thought you might be touching.
For sure you shouldn't have asked.
You know how to ride a motorcycle?
Yes, I know how to ride a motorcycle.
Shit dog?
In the group of people that I was in, at one point there were seven of us.
Was it a Yamaha?
It was not a Yamaha.
Okay.
There were seven of us and six of us were either...
professional motorcyclists, former professional motorcyclists, or lifelong seasoned racers, dirt bikers, people that grew up on motorcycles, people that live on them, people that ride them every day, and then at the... Or people who think punk rock is bullshit.
Either.
If you're looking at this as a pyramid...
Either at the top of the pyramid or at the very bottom of the pyramid, there was one completely novice writer.
uh and that is me okay utterly a novice and uh have you so like you have the have you gotten the hang of changing gears on a two-wheeled vehicle before yes because i i think it's tricky i think it's tricky personally i'm a vespa rider okay all right you know asked and answered yes my first motor vehicle was a was a vespa so i the first thing i ever rode was a two-wheeled thing that had four gears
And I rode when I was 17.
I bought that Honda CB650 and rode it from Yakima to Oakley, Kansas in an attempt to ride a motorcycle across America.
I got as far as Kansas before I rode it off the road and crashed.
But that's not an inconsiderable distance from Washington to Kansas.
And that was a lot of time on a 650.
Uh, but then, you know, back to Vespas and for the most part, like somebody would throw me the keys every once in a while through their motorcycle and say, go get some beer.
But I, I didn't ever own a motorcycle after that.
And so last week, this group of guys had been talking to me for a while, like we're going to go on this epic motorcycle trip.
And I was like, well, I don't know.
I'm a little intimidated.
I am not a, I don't have a motorcycle.
I don't ride motorcycles normally.
And you guys are all like pro motorcyclists, like really super good at it.
Good at motorcycling.
Let's call it that.
And also like good at everything around motorcycling.
I mean, if you're talking about mountaineering, you could just as easily say, well, shit, if you guys are used to doing this all the time, I'm going to be a real drag on this trip.
And I kept saying that and they were like, don't worry about it.
You'll be fine.
And I kept saying, well, I don't think that I necessarily will be fine.
And they were like, you'll be fine.
Don't worry about it.
And so it got to the point a couple of weeks ago where I was, you know, I was asking myself, like, you don't want to do something just because somebody is telling you that if you don't do it, you're a puss.
At least I think one eventually grows out of that.
Or, you know, or implying it.
Sure.
But this is the kind of adventure that I have staked my whole life on.
This is exactly what I do.
Somebody says, hey, I'm building a rocket in my backyard out of plywood.
Would you like to go to the moon?
And I go, is there room?
What time and what do I wear?
Is there room for my dog?
Like how many s'mores are you bringing?
And so what my friends were offering, and a lot of this is spearheaded by a friend of our show, Ben King, who is an architect in Portland, who is a motorcycle enthusiast.
And he and his pal, Gregor, and their motley crew of motorcycle people were saying, we'll give you a motorcycle.
We'll give you a motorcycle costume.
You look sharp and fit in that outfit.
And it's like an armored costume.
suit but it's kind of like a modern technical right it's modern technical right it's not my technical technical suit and we'll give you a helmet and gloves and we'll give you we'll tell you what you're going to do every day you don't have to think about anything and uh this sounds like it's right in your wheelhouse yeah we'll just go motorcycle around for six days oh my goodness
And I said, I don't, I'm very afraid.
And they were like, well, it's good.
You should be afraid.
That's good.
Good, good, good.
That's exactly what you want to be.
And I was like, okay, that's a great trick to do when someone's like, I'm afraid.
And you're like, that's exactly right.
You're like, okay.
All right.
Well, that's no longer an excuse then.
Being afraid is the key.
Okay.
All right.
I'm following.
I can do that.
Uh, so at the very last minute I said, uh, okay, I'll do it.
And I, and I called you and said, I can't do the show next week.
And I called, uh, everybody else that I had an obligation with and said, I'm going to be gone for an entire week.
And I mean, I, the way my life is structured, I can do that.
And everybody goes, oh, all right.
See you next week then.
So I didn't have, there was nothing I could say where I had to do something, right?
I couldn't say I can't go on the trip because I have to do something.
It's clear.
Everybody knows I don't.
Well, you know, I can cancel everything I have to do with one phone call.
I'm pretty accommodating, don't you think?
You were great.
You were like, see you next week.
I'll take care of it.
And then you said, I'm going camping too.
Yeah, I'm going camping too.
I got an SUV.
I was like, wow.
You can start it remotely with a button.
So I drove down to... We had like a 100-quart cooler.
You can start the truck with a button from outside?
Click, click.
You can open each of the side doors.
It'll slide open.
The back hatch, all of it.
What kind of truck was this?
A Dodge something-something.
A 2017 Dodge something-something.
It has two different...
uh you know the ac like the cigarette lighter power things one for running when it's turned on one for running when it's turned off so we're able to reinflate our mattresses electrically every night with that and recharge all of our ios devices with the with with the power converter i had delivered from amazon prime this is not at all what we had not at all
Yeah, your tents were a good deal more modest in size.
Well, keep going.
I'm going to send you a picture of our tent.
So I got down there, and here are all these guys.
There was one guy from Naples, Italy, who owns an Italian restaurant in New York City.
There was a hedge fund guy who had a $50,000 Ducati motorcycle that had just recently appeared in all the motorcycle magazines as a custom build.
Wow.
And now he was taking it out on a shakedown tour.
There was a kid in like blue jeans and a backward baseball hat that had built a motorcycle out of parts he found at a thrift store, but who was like some kind of genius motorcyclist that everybody else had.
uh really respected because he had like a motorbike savant yeah he had like zero fear and was and and had it had just a natural way of riding a motorcycle but they all did like gregor is a like gregor was a gp motorcycle race racer and builds motorcycles for a living and i mean they're it like i was right in the right in the thick of it and what they like doing is talking about motorcycles
And they're not uninteresting.
These people are fascinated.
They look jolly.
Not in fact that way, but they look like a happy garrulous bunch.
This was another thing that this was.
This was the first time in 20 years that I'd stood around with seven people, seven men, and stared into a campfire.
You said as much on Instagram.
I was just like, this is pretty amazing.
I used to do this all the time.
And it is its own thing.
It is its own thing to do that.
It's not just, you can't replace that with like standing around a green room with some podcasters and looking at a TV.
No.
It's like watching Cameron Esposito get her hair done.
It's not the same thing.
I know how to build a campfire.
That was one thing we could do, right?
So we got there and everybody's, the first thing we did when we pulled into a campsite was one of the guys decided they needed to take their motorcycle apart.
And the other ones would get their tools out and pretty soon the motorcycle's all taken apart.
And I'm like, I couldn't take that motorcycle apart in a surgery in a hospital with a YouTube video and five people helping me.
So much dust.
So much dust when you can't.
They're just like tearing it apart.
And so I would say, tell you what, I'll go build the fire.
And I at least can do a thing.
But off we went.
And the best piece of advice I got was from my friend Andrew McKaig, who is also a motorcyclist.
And he's the guitar player in the Presidents of the USA.
Oh, oh.
He's one of these triple threats.
Say it again.
Andrew McKay is a great guitar player.
Because they've got two guitar players and no bass player, right?
No, the bass player is Chris Ballew.
Chris plays the bass.
That's right.
Okay.
But all their instruments are goofy, right?
They're all goofy.
Two-string bass, three-string guitar.
Jiminy.
Hope they're good strings.
They're heavy strings, yeah.
Oh, he does like an EAD?
uh i think that he probably does some kind of it's probably tuned down anything but dbg is all i'm saying i think it actually dgb dgb who knows what it is because you can't do the good power chords and they have the three strings that always go out of uh out of key i've you know i've never actually asked because i don't have any intention of playing a three-string guitar so you have to listen to the whole explanation i like to just have it be the magic of the president no don't make a sandwich you don't want to eat
Andrew is a great guitar player, a very handsome, also garrulous person.
I'm embarrassed that I forgot that Chris plays bass.
I'm really sorry about that.
Well, because Chris's bass is... Chris is such an emphatic musician.
An interesting guy.
He wrote us an email and I still haven't responded to it because I haven't found the right words to respond.
He's a very thoughtful guy.
Yeah, because it's very hard to understand how to respond to Chris Boyz's bass.
But I'm glad he shares this program with his youngster who's not so young anymore.
Have we ever officially said hi to them?
Hi.
I'm going to say hi.
Hi.
Hello.
Hi.
I say hi to them all the time.
But if you ever get a chance to go stand at the foot of a stage where Chris Blue is playing and watch what he's doing on his instrument, whatever instrument that is, you will find it extremely transformative.
I love the Thurston Moore stuff.
I love the B-52 stuff.
I love the wackadoo tuning stuff.
Yeah.
Well, and this is something Chris learned from the guy in Morphine.
I think they were friends, and the morphine guy was like, hey, kid, come over here.
You got too many strings on your guitar.
I'm going to make it twice as good with half as many strings.
Yeah, so it's a thing.
It's part of the continuity of life.
So all by way of saying, oh, what Andrew said to me was, look, you're on a ride with six professional motorcycle people.
Here's the way that you do this and don't die.
He said, do not follow them.
Do not try to keep up with them.
Do not play with them because guaranteed they're all super macho about motorcycling.
It's just how it is.
You get on a motorcycle and immediately you're trying to go slightly faster than the guy next to you on the other motorcycle.
And he said, if you try to keep up with them, they are way better than you.
They will do things you can't do and you will end up in the trees.
So he said, you're on a ride with these six guys and here's what happens.
You all start at the same time and then you immediately lose sight of them.
And do not try to ever see them again until you get to the crossroads where they're waiting for you.
And in the meantime, just be on a motorcycle ride with yourself.
Oh, that's so good.
That's so smart.
A motorcycle ride with yourself.
Yeah.
He's like, you're just riding a motorcycle in the country and you're practicing your turns and you're thinking about what you're doing and you are enjoying the air and your life.
And then you come to a stop sign and here are the other six guys who have been waiting there for however long you don't care.
You don't care how long they've been waiting.
Fuck those guys.
And then, and this happened every, this happened six times a day.
I would pull up and they'd all be sitting there with their engines off and their helmets off.
And they'd be like, hey man, having fun?
And I'd be like, I'm having an amazing time.
And they'd be like, great.
And off they would all go, you know, huge cloud of blue smoke.
And then I would go.
And I had an incredible week.
And I know up ahead of me, they were like they were like X-wing fighters going through the, you know, trying to try to kill womp rats with the dollar or whatever.
And I and I was just like on my motorcycle ride.
No, no, no.
You were on your motorcycle ride.
Yeah, I was on my motorcycle ride.
That's right.
Oh, and I was on a KTM 990, which is the biggest bike I ever saw.
I mean, it's as big as a pony.
As in cubic inches?
Yeah, and it was 990.
No, no.
That's a, that's a, that's a big scooter you got there.
Big, big boy.
Um, big and incredibly powerful.
I mean, incredibly powerful.
A lot of displacement.
And we were on dirt roads.
So, so the tires were spinning and things were going sideways.
And I was just like, here I go.
I don't know what I'm doing, but you know, and as time went on, I kind of got, well, you learn a lot spending six straight days on a motorcycle and
And by the end, you know, now I would put myself in the category of totally novice writer.
But you're beyond step zero.
Yeah, but I'm a rider.
You're a rider.
I still feel like a total novice.
But as time went on, I got smoother and smoother, and I could go faster and faster.
But I never had that feeling that I used to have on motorcycles, which is every corner I went into, I wasn't sure if I was going to come out of it.
Yeah, yeah.
And now I go into a corner, I know...
how to do the, how to come out similar experiences, uh, because I'm a writer of a segue.
So I think I probably have a lot of the same skills.
Yeah.
Well, a segue is just like, it's like a motorcycle, but the wheels are in different part and it goes, you know, almost 10 miles an hour.
But it, uh, but you got to learn not to think about it.
You know, it's like Ted Williams say, he says you can't hit the ball when you're thinking about hitting a ball.
You know what I'm saying?
What's amazing about this is that riding these bikes and talking to these guys about it.
Cause they're philosophical about motorcycle riding too.
I think a big part of why they do it is that when you're doing it, it is consuming so much of your attention because there's the technical aspect of doing it.
I think also just the situational awareness of being more aware than ever of what's happening around you, what's not happening, what could happen around you.
Every turn represents somebody who could just not see you.
Absolutely.
You're driving down a road and you're like,
always scanning is there a tractor is there but also like is a bird gonna fly out and hit me in the in the helmet like you don't want that if a bird hits your car you're like whoops wouldn't that be a sucky way to die break your neck because a fucking bird hits you in the face there's so many ways to die on a motorcycle oh my god all that has to happen is anything you just eat it and just go down so so you're super super attentive and what i noticed in that six days is there's not a lot of room to think about other stuff
You don't sit on a motorcycle.
Oh, that's good for you.
That's good for me.
That's good.
It's good.
Your mind does not drift off to some insult that somebody paid you 42 years ago where you're like, that kid stole my bullet that I had.
He got my pog.
You know, like it's just – you're just driving.
You're just in the – you're really in –
between the turns and looking at everything and smelling the air.
And, and so it was, it was an experience that I'm still processing.
And, and a big part of it was being so in Oregon, like I know Oregon, I fucking know Oregon, like the fucking back of my hand, but I'd never been quite this immersed in Oregon.
Like, I've been, I'm more in Oregon than most people in Oregon right now, even though I'm not in Oregon right now.
Oregon's still in you.
But Oregon is in me.
That's right.
Oregon got in me.
Slipped in your saddlebag.
That's a good feeling, John.
I'm glad you did this.
It was a good challenge to yourself.
Yeah.
And now you get a little bit of a reset.
Yeah, I rode over a thousand miles on a motorcycle that a week ago I had never even seen.
That's insane.
We made swordfish.
I see that you got the REI Co-op Kingdom 6 tent.
And the garage.
And that tent, I have, I hate to say this, I have been coveting that tent for several years.
The problem with REI tents, and this is not going to be like a North Face bag situation.
These REI tents, we don't go camping that often, but they're like fucking Honda Civics.
These things are great.
They're so good.
They are so relatively easy to put up.
They're so spacious.
They're so dependable.
Again, we do car camping, and we've never been in a lightning storm or something.
See, now my daughter and I wanted to get a 12-person tent, which my wife said is right out.
There's no way.
There's no way.
No 12-person tent?
I want the most expansive tentage that you could have.
I want rooms.
I want it to be like... I want a stately pleasure dome decreed.
I want a fucking balls-out baller tent.
The last three we've had were great.
We had a Hobby Tat, one of those orange ones that...
It was perfect for my wife and me.
Our family grew a little bit.
We got the next big size one.
And then we went with this one.
It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but you can see from the photos, it's pretty capacious.
You can stand up in it, right?
You can stand up in it.
You can add a garage to it.
You add a garage, and now you're zipped up in your own environment.
It took up like two-thirds of our campsite.
It was fucking amazing.
I really love that.
I want one just for the backyard, just to go out there and do yoga.
And it comes in a bag with straps on it, so you can wear it like a backpack.
In the 13 steps from your SUV to where you're going to put it up.
Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a stream may be referred to by a variety of local or regional names.
Long, large streams are usually called rivers.
However, even the Amazon is a stream.
Come on.
They're all streams.
I think streams are a superset.
This is, oh, so this is like a rectangle is a square?
That's right.
That's right.
A brook, a brook, the thing that makes a brook a brook is that it's shallow.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
A creek is a small to medium-sized natural stream.
Right.
But see, again, this is all like a hamlet.
You say it's a hamlet because it's 50 people or whatever, right?
I mean, there are ways to break this down.
There's all these beautiful floats.
You can get a runnel.
You get tributaries.
Tributaries.
Mm-hmm.
Not tributaries, but tributaries.
I don't know.
I might have said it wrong.
Anybody can edit the page.
I feel like tributary should be something else.
That's like somebody that wants Brexit.
think um have you ever looked into uh the why am i even asking you this anybody else i wouldn't ask this have you ever looked into wildfire management
Oh.
That shit is fascinating.
It is.
Wildfire management is fucking lit.
It is crazy.
It's crazy.
Well, you know, I knew kids... I mean, one of the things you did in Alaska, if you didn't do commercial fishing, was you did smoke jumping.
Firefighting.
But, like, I was reading about the history of...
Control burns and fire breaks and how they do all that kind of stuff over time.
Back burns?
Yeah, and everybody thought it was crazy.
Like, look, there's all of this fuel that's built up because we haven't had a fire in a while.
We can easily burn off this fuel and that will not affect our redwoods.
We were in the midst of the redwoods.
It was totally executive camping, but we were lousy with redwoods everywhere around us.
It was incredible.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's a big deal now.
I don't know if you heard.
There's a lot of fires going on right now out here.
Yeah, I have heard that.
It's a real big deal.
That's in the newspapers.
Did you get that in the papers?
I see it in the papers, yeah.
A wetted perimeter is the line on which the stream's surface meets the channel walls.
Isn't that beautiful language?
It's like Richard Hugo wrote this whole page.
It's so good.
Floodplain, gauging station, headwaters, nick point, riffle.
It does feel like a thing, you know, that you could have like zigged instead of zagged and then this is what you do.
What's that?
The water or fire?
Waters and fires.
Just waters and fires.
Great forces.
Great, great forces.
I really, you know, we're past a pretty good ding, but I really do want to talk about that airplane kid.
You want to go for a maxi episode?
Yeah.
i wonder whether we should whether we should do like a maxi episode special 300th episode maxi episode okay uh hi john um hi merlin i i didn't know if this was too on the nose to bring up with you but i'm reminded by listener of the show john syracuse of i text this morning this is so in your fucking wheelhouse yeah over the weekend a fellow who worked at seatac correct yes uh
Basically stole a Horizon Air.
It's a real plane.
This is a big boy plane, right?
It is, yeah.
It's a big turbo passenger plane.
This dude who worked at the airport basically, I think, as a luggage carrier.
He was a baggage handler.
Baggage handler.
Handles a lot of baggage.
He took this bird up in the sky, I think, on Friday night.
We'll skip over for the moment.
We'll skip over what he did while he was up there.
But apparently, he had some struggles, including landing.
But no, basically, it looks like it was maybe a suicide-ish.
But here's the monkey balls part.
A, a guy who's a baggage handler...
Stole a plane.
And then according to this article from this morning in CNBC, incredible maneuvers by, quote unquote, incredible maneuvers by airline ground agent who stole plane baffles employer.
His only training appears to be quote unquote video games.
Yes.
Um, I'm trying to get some descriptions of it, but he was, where's the descriptions?
Call him patient.
Uh, so he was doing, what kind of, wasn't he doing like tricks?
He's never flown a plane before.
Okay.
This happened in your neck of the woods, in your industry.
Mm-hmm.
This guy's got big motorcycle energy.
What the fuck happened?
Jump in anywhere you want.
How did he get a plane?
And then how hard is it to take your skills in video games and turn that into doing fucking tricks in a real Q400 twin-engine turboprop plane?
This is insane.
This event is...
you know, every once in a while you get one of these events, like the, the, like the death of Chris Cornell, uh, or of the, uh, the guy from the frightened rabbit, like these things resonate here.
Um, in a way where they resonate in me, where I just, they're, they don't go away immediately.
And this, this Richard Russell story where he, um, he stole this airplane and took it on a joy ride and crashed.
Um,
It's really affecting people in my world and me.
Because, yeah, well, you know, we're aviation adjacent.
Like I grew up flying planes.
I actually have stolen an airplane before.
When you put it that way, this really could be a long winter's B-side.
This is a hell of a story.
Yeah.
Richard Russell grew up in Alaska.
Hmm.
And works for Alaska Airlines, basically, Horizon.
And he just... He's proximate to airplanes.
It's his job to be out there.
It's not just baggage handling.
Those guys do all that stuff.
Move the plane around on the ground.
And they're in their little trucks.
All the people you see running around on the runway.
Yeah, they're all a team.
And so he's next to airplanes that have gas in them.
Then he knows how to get in them and move them around.
And...
So he just got in one and started it up.
And, you know, SeaTac is an incredibly big, incredibly busy airport with three active runways going all the time.
And he ran that thing out.
on a taxiway, and everybody said, uh, there's a, what is this guy?
And they shut the airport down real fast, and he just got out on a runway and ran it down and got it up in the air.
And, you know, if you go stand out by SeaTac and just watch the planes coming and going, like, there's not a space.
They don't leave a lot of space open for a guy to throw another big airplane in the air, but he got it up there, and then he's just joyriding around
the Northwest and he's on the mic, he's talking to air traffic control and you can listen to the recordings and he is such an Alaskan.
Like my sister listened to the recordings and got very emotional because here's this guy that, I mean, he's, he's 20 years younger than I am.
Um, but you can just hear, you hear exactly who he is.
He's like,
Hey, I'm just up here on this airplane.
Got it.
Flying it.
And it's a pretty crazy day.
Beautiful weather.
And you just, you know where he's coming from.
And what's too bad about this story is that all he had to talk to was air traffic control.
Because air traffic control is busy.
Those guys are busy.
And they're working all day.
One of the things you listen to on YouTube is just the raw air traffic control feed for SeaTac.
And this guy's voice pops in every once in a while.
And you just listen to straight 45 minutes of people going... And they're all just keeping their cool.
It's just like, you know...
Tango Golf, you have Echo Quebec, maintain 6,000 feet.
Echo Quebec, 6,000.
And they're doing that all day long.
And these air traffic control has in their minds and on their screens 500 moving objects.
And this kid is out there wanting somebody to talk to, basically.
And he's like, hey, man, you can see all the way to the mountains from here.
And the guy that's charged with talking to him is like, yeah, Rich, you can see the mountains.
Anyway, I'd like you to start executing a left-hand turn.
And Rich is like, yeah, yeah, okay, left-hand turn.
Hey, do you think there are any whales?
And the guy's like, yeah, I bet there are whales, Rich.
Can we get you starting that left-hand turn now?
And the air traffic control, like no slight against them, but they are not in the business of like – They're not like a police negotiator.
No.
And somehow in this whole process, no one in the system managed to get Rich over on a frequency way up at the end of the dial where somebody was talking to him.
And just like, Hey Rich, this is amazing.
You, you stole an airplane.
Like dude, high five.
Cause Rich just, Rich wanted a high five or two.
Um, and whatever his plan was, I don't know.
This is hard.
It's hard to talk about because you and I've talked a lot about mental illness and there's a whole subset of
internet concern trolls now that are on the mental illness beat.
And a lot of it is structured around this idea of like, uh, that people need help and that we need to get people help and, um, and, uh,
a lot of people understand that you can't understand.
And so they're tweeting now about how you can't understand.
And it's gotten like everything on the internet, aggressive.
People are like mental illness shaming each other if they say the wrong thing.
And there's a lot of talk about Richard
Russell in terms of just immediately turning this whole event into a tragedy about how this kid needed help and couldn't get it or that he had untreated depression or some people diagnosing him at a distance and and it's very hard for me because whatever motivated this whatever motivated him to decide today was the day
that he was just going to throw it all in the fire.
And instead of go sit in a garage somewhere with the motor running or whatever, he stole a fucking passenger jet and not trying to hurt anybody, not trying to do anything, you know, not trying to make a political statement, not flying it into a building.
He just went out and did some loopty loops.
in a plane that you should not be able to do that.
He shouldn't have been able to get it off the ground.
He should not have been able to keep it in the air.
And he absolutely should not have been able to do a barrel roll and not pass out from the G forces, let alone pull it off, let alone like
do multiple... I mean, I watched some of the videos.
I'm thinking if you're like a Navy pilot for 20 years, you get in one of these things, are you even going to try a barrel roll?
All airplanes are rated for more stress than they normally handle, right?
I mean, you should be able to pretty much roll any airplane because it's just an aeronautical...
maneuver, right?
The airplane doesn't care.
If it can, you know, if it can handle, if the wings can handle the stress of the maneuver, the plane can do it.
It's just not a thing that, that airplane, the Q400, I'm pretty sure has never been looped.
Like, even during testing, I doubt that they bothered.
It's just not a, I mean, they're powerful turboprops, but
But all of it to imagine that this, that this kid is just, and part of the thrill is like, he didn't care if he crashed.
So why not try it?
Um,
But he ends up crashing.
And eventually they got some F-15s up here to shadow him around because they wanted to make sure he wasn't going to go crash into a building.
But I think those guys were just an honor guard.
They just kind of flew back behind him watching him do his thing.
But nobody ever got on the horn with him and said, Rich, bro.
You're legend.
Like you're going to go to jail, buddy.
But like you pulled it off.
Like you gave your life some meaning or some color or some framework.
Like for all of the ways in which this is a complete violation of the social compact, you made a difference today.
Or like you did an extraordinary thing.
which is going to result in some jail time.
And you should be, you should think about this long and hard.
We do not want other people doing this typically, but also like good job, weird, weird, weird choice today.
Uh, and good job.
And what, you know, rich never once on the, on the horn sounded anything other than just like, uh, I mean, basically like anybody I grew up with.
And it could have happened if this, if this idea had occurred to half of my friends, if this, if this had occurred to Kel McCarl, he absolutely would have done this.
Um, and maybe halfway through would have been like, you know, there's no way out of this.
I have to, I have to crash.
I can't, I can never face anybody again after doing this.
But it, but at the same time, I can't look at it and say,
Oh, this is a failure of her mental health system.
Or, oh, there's no way to talk about this other than that this guy is... That this is a mental illness event.
Because it... You know, life is short and full of pain.
And people die all the time.
And sometimes, you know, like, they're just...
There's no one way, you know.
And this kid did this thing where you go, huh.
And 10 days from now, we won't think about it again.
You know, it'll just be, there'll be a marker for him somewhere and his family and friends are sad that he's gone.
But he really affected me.
yesterday and today and and the day before and he you see it as some kind of an achievement in some ways though he was able able to do what he did i mean it's pretty cool i don't know i it's it's it's really hard to look at this and say like good job but at the same time you you know i'm agog with wonder at um at the whole event and i
And I think that's the reaction I'm seeing from people in aviation who are like, he did what?
Like from a video game?
Right.
I mean, because so much of pulling those maneuvers is tactile.
It's not a thing that you would learn on a video game.
You pull on those controls and the plane moves underneath you.
You have to hold...
Those, you know, it requires force and it requires a kind of ballet to fly an airplane like that.
You know, you're you're you're dancing with a big, powerful animal.
And he did it.
He did it.
He did a thing I couldn't have done.
And I mean, I'm not a pilot, but there are a lot of pilots that are impressed.
And I just, I'm sorry.
Like a lot of these things, like a lot of the people that died and made an impact on me recently, my only thought is, God, I wish I could have sat down with him.
I wish I could have been the one on the other end of the radio.
Because if I'd been on the other end of the radio and had said, hey, don't worry about all that, you know, like, don't worry about all that.
Like, what's going on?
What's going on, bro?
This is kind of, this is pretty cool, actually.
But, like, what's going on?
And just give him a chance, even if the end result was the same.
Just give him, like, ten minutes to spell it out.
And I know he...
He made a passing comment about being white.
And there are a lot of people that are jumping on it because people like to jump on things.
I didn't see anything political about what he did.
It just felt like a kid from Alaska that had reached an end point.
And I'd reached 100 of them.
And the people I know had reached 100 of them at 29 years old.
Where you're like, I'm fucking 29.
I should have all this stuff figured out, and I have zero figured out, and I feel like a complete fucking loser.
And yet, I'm also capable.
For the love of God, I'm capable of stuff, you know?
Mm-hmm.
And so I guess today I'm going to steal this airplane and I'm going to do some loop-de-loops over Puget Sound and I'm crashing into an abandoned island.
Or not abandoned.
The people that live on that island are going to send me some letters because I know they all listen to the show.
Fifteen people on that island.
I hadn't heard this kind of take on it.
I'm not very tuned into the news right now, but I had not heard that take on it.
It's...
Interesting and open-ended.
Yeah, I don't know.
You feel close to it on a lot of fronts.
It's hard for you to feel a lot of distance from it, but you are sensitive, wrong word.
You are vulnerable to several angles on this.
Yeah, I mean, I've never felt suicidal.
In the darkest, darkest depression I ever had, that just was not an impulse I had.
But it is an impulse that a lot of people close to me wrestle with all the time, struggle with.
Yeah.
The ease of the ease that it feels like how it feels like that would be a form of rest.
But.
You know, to to to put this event and just and just call it suicide.
I it's.
I can't I can't limit it to that.
And I, you know, like however, Chris Cornell died.
However, um, you know, however Robin Williams died.
Yeah.
That they weren't just, um, it's not just a small thing.
And what, what is, how do you address the idea that, you know, lives have beginnings, middles and ends and they don't all have to go to 90 years.
Like, um,
Scott Hutchinson from Frightened Rabbit, we don't know what happened, but it feels similar.
He had a bad night at a bar.
He was out.
He struggled with this stuff for a long time.
He had a bad night.
Somebody, he had a conversation that bummed him out or he had some bad thoughts.
It wasn't, you know, a lot of these suicides don't happen because it's the worst day of their life.
They just have a bad day.
But it's the day that they just, you know, the stars line up and they're like, you know what?
I'm just going to go jump off the bridge.
Forget it.
And you go, whoa, you've made it through so much else.
So many thousands of worse things today.
This thing is the thing that throws you off the bridge.
And this thing is the thing that caused him to steal that airplane.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I can't lament it almost.
in a way i kind of and it's but it's hard to salute it yeah i mean for yourself and within society i i don't want to get too deep into this it uh personally but it's um
I don't want to make this a referendum about the internet, but you're right.
I feel that same sense of this tension between, on the one hand, a lot of good-hearted, presumably good-hearted intention about helping all kinds of people.
That comes from a good place.
The way that that gets expressed becomes weirdly partisan and personal very quickly.
Yeah.
Especially if you're somebody who's a well-meaning, you know, innocent bystander.
Well, like I said, I tweeted something about it like, you know, this I said, my sister listened to this and it really feels like somebody.
It really feels like somebody that we could know or somebody that we that we know.
And somebody tweeted me and said, it may be someone, you know, because depression is silence.
See, those kinds of things, that is a kind of meme reaction that I feel at this point is about as useful as, forgive my saying if this is crass, but like when there's a fire or there's a hurricane or there's a tornado or there's a terrorist event and people get on Twitter and say, Paris, be safe.
Okay.
I'll pass that along to everybody to be safe.
Yeah, somehow it turned in, in that Twitter exchange, into just someone, I don't know who, felt like I needed to be coached.
Yeah.
And I saw that in the way people were reacting to other people, or generally about this.
Like,
Because there's a lot about this event where you kind of want to laugh.
At one point, I actually... It's so wacky.
I actually, listening to one of the recordings, he said something.
There was some moment I could see what he was doing in the air.
And I actually, without even thinking about it, put both of my...
fists up in the air in a gesture of triumph and started to cry where I was just like, Oh my fucking God, you did it.
Like, like I just went like champion and, and I knew that he was, I knew that part of what he was saying was like, I'm going to nose it in and call it a night.
What the fuck?
That's a, that's like, that is a,
I mean, what a line.
What a feeling.
Is that what he said?
What a thought.
He's like, well, what he said, the guy was like, you pulled off the
Because air traffic control, those guys have less sense of humor than a German motorcycle builder.
They're a pretty dry bunch by nature.
Yeah, and he's just like, okay, you pulled it off.
Well, let's try and get you back into that left-hand turn and get you lined up.
And it's just like, oh, my God, really?
You guys have got so little joy in the way that they look at aviation.
Because this kid is just, he's one of 500 airplanes they have to deal with right now, and they just want him out of their mind.
They just, you know, they're just like, kid, you're on a joyride.
Like planes crash all the time.
Figure your shit out.
Please just stay out of our airspace or whatever.
You know, and they're being gentle with him.
But he pulls this thing off.
You sure wouldn't want five of those every night.
No.
But he says at one point, he comes on the mic and he's like, well, you know, in all honesty, I didn't think I was going to pull that off.
I thought that was it.
I thought I was going to pull that maneuver and that would be the end.
And I would be dead now.
I would have gone out making that maneuver, but I actually pulled it off.
And now I don't know what else to do.
I didn't have a plan B. And you're like, wow, okay.
Yeah.
try another one or, you know, like do a, do like a corkscrew or something that beats me.
But you know, he, what he never did was go buzz Seattle.
He never went and he wasn't, he didn't go fly over his girlfriend's work or anything.
Yeah.
This is his version of a motorcycle ride with himself.
Yeah.
He was on a motorcycle ride with himself and he was talking to these guys.
Cause I got, you know, he seemed like a extrovert or whatever he needed.
He wanted somebody to talk to.
Um, and he didn't really get, he didn't get much,
pushback.
I think if I'd been on the phone with him, I don't think he would have come back either.
I don't think I could have talked him into landing.
I think he, he had decided what he was going to do, but at least we would have had a pretty fun hour of like, Hey, why don't you go out over the water and see, see what this baby can do.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's, um, it is, it's a, it's a, it's, it's emotional.
And part of that is, is has to do with like just that basic, basic stuff of, um,
What are we doing?
What is the point of anything?
I don't know.
I like that.