RW198 - Formed Out of the Mud
This week, Dan and John talk about:
- John’s recent birthday trip to the Oregon coast (Currents)
- The weather in Texas (Geography)
- Joe Rogan’s new podcast studio (Podcasting)
- Dan interviewing Weird Al (Dan Benjamin)
- John doing a talk radio show called Talk Soup in Spokane during college (Early Days)
- TV talk shows, the last sophisticated talk show (Movies)
- John looking for the right bathroom-tile (follow-up) (New House)
- House update (New House)
- John only being able to tell the story after the fact (Personality)
Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:
- Trying to find the right bathroom tile (New House)
- How to not sweat the details of your relationship? (Relationships)
- Has the coronavirus situation changed John’s understanding of war times? (COVID)
- John teaching his daughter to punch (Daughter)
The show title refers to Joe Rogan’s place in the talk show host landscape.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
John’s recent birthday trip to the Oregon coast (RW198)
John just woke up. Another day in paradise! Happy birthday! John took a little trip. He never likes to celebrate his birthday from the time he was probably 16 on. Dan as well. John finds it embarrassing to be fetted (?) in that way for no good reason, nothing you did, but just because it is your birthday. John always avoided it, but when you have a kid you can't avoid things like your birthday because kids are interested in those things and John’s family likes to celebrate birthdays.
They have made it a tradition in recent years that they go somewhere for John’s birthday as a family. They settled on the Oregon coast as the place, and John likes the Oregon coast. This year the fires were raging and although the Oregon coast was not the most dangerous place to be in the country, it was polluted and it was a bummer, but they had a house on the coast and they all hunkered in there, John’s mom and sister, and they did the thing that John has been doing for six months now, which is just hunker down and make food all day.
It is hard to say that John needs to relax more because his life isn't exactly full of hard toil, but he did find it relaxing. Dan thinks that everybody could always use to relax more. There is always a formulation in John’s mind judging whether or not he deserves nice things, so any time he gets something like relaxation or even a nice meal he has to run the numbers on it if he earned this or deserved this. It is one of the major topics of all of his shows why that is and how he can do whatever work is necessary to stop thinking that way.
It is very upsetting that the fires are raging out of control in the Northwest, although it is not unprecedented. They used to do this in the 1960s, but it sucks. In particular this point in the 21st century timeline: Do we need another thing? It has been shitty to feel like: ”Can't have nice things!”
The weather in Texas (RW198)
In Texas it has gotten much cooler. It was pretty warm for a little while and all of a sudden it got cold, which meant it went into the 60s and and then it stayed in the 80s and is about 82 degrees (28°C) according to the new widget on Dan’s iPhone running iOS14 now, and it is going to have thunderstorms. Anything that keeps it below 90 degrees (32 °C) is good. If it stayed in the 70s all year round, imagine that life! Speaking of relaxing and feeling good! Dan doesn’t need it to be warmer than 75 (24°C) or colder than 70 degrees (21 °C).
There is a place where that is possible called Santa Barbara, California, but the problem is that everybody wants to live there and so it is expensive and also intolerable because of the humans beings there. Some are nice, but not most of them. The older Dan gets, the more he realizes that most of the stuff he wants is the same that everybody wants. He used to think, especially before we had the Internet and Twitter and Instagram, that the stuff he wanted was unique and no one else knows about it.
Joe Rogan’s new podcast studio (RW198)
Now everyone wants to live in Austin. They got Joe Rogan, they got a $2 billion Apple campus, they got Tesla, they all want to be here and it is getting worse and worse and worse in Austin. Dan has been there for almost ten years and he knows it pretty well now. Joe Rogan is the latest one and he is the big news. Apparently he bought some house out on Lake Travis and converted one room of it into his new studio, and it is the worst looking studio Dan has ever seen, it looks like a bunker, which could be cool. Who wouldn't like a bunker? But it looks like the inside of an airplane, the walls curve right into the ceiling, and it is painted red, but not a good red either.
The most amateur TV or film student would tell you that the closer the person is to the background, the more flat the shot is going to look. Even a basic YouTuber understands that you want the background to be blurred and the way you get that is by using a certain kind of lens and being a certain distance from the background behind you, which creates that effect where the background is still visible, but it is softened. The cameras that he is using are more the camcorder kind of camera that don't give you that beautiful look that a DSLR will give you.
It is not a money thing, he could have any equipment he wants, he is freaking rich, but he is using this equipment that almost makes it look like cable access TV. Dan is so disappointed because Joe had this amazing opportunity to do something that really looks amazing and put all the rest of us to shame, but there are YouTubers with an $800 budget that have a better set up than he has. It is ponderous!
Either a friend of John’s or somebody that he read about in a magazine made a bunch of very professional graphic art signs that were meant for panhandlers, like: ”Please give!”, ”Anything helps!” ”Just trying to get some room in a shelter tonight!”, but done really beautifully. It was probably from a magazine, because if it had been a friend John would have interrogated the artist’s motivation pretty hard. It is a pithy art, maybe this was John’s friend Sean Wolf?
He went around and gave these signs out to the panhandlers who stand by the freeway entrances and exits, traded their scrawled signs and replaced them with these fantastic ones. For not very long the panhandlers in question stood there with these signs and very quickly they flipped the signs over and scrawled a similar message in chicken scratch because they found that the beautiful signs were not working, but the scrawled desperation-looking signs, the graphic elements played a role. It was messaging!
If Joe Rogan built a studio in his house that was professional and tasteful and useful and made him look like the Bujji media person that he surely has become in his heart and soul, it is going to really send the wrong message to his legions of herpaderps who are like: ”Meh, there aren't even any TVs in there!” It is messaging. He has to look right, and for Joe Rogan to look right it has to look wrong. John might be on to something, but Dan thinks he is giving him too much credit.
The panhandlers who threw away the nice signs and scrawled some old ones were not media experts, but they were working on instinct, and that is probably what is happening with Joe Rogan, too. There was some consultant who said: ”We will put in some nice sound board, we will make sure the sightlines are good, we will set up a reality where if you are doing video, why do we all have to have headphones on and be talking into RE20 microphones, there has got to be a way with all the money in the world and this super confined space and these super low expectations that we could actually create a talk show that doesn't look like somebody standing there with a handycam at a morning drive DJ booth!”
Dan interviewing Weird Al (RW198)
Dan sends John a picture of it. John thinks it is a Winnebago, but it is in a house. It is a failure to communicate, a failure of the imagination. He is doing a talk show and he built a teenage boys version of what would be a cool place to be a disc jockey, but Joe Rogan could have totally pivoted to the Johnny Carson show with a desk and couches. Dan once interviewed Weird Al Yankovic. His friend who started the company New Relic that all the developers in the audience will know, and they were part of a conference called the Open Stack Conference, a super nerdy, geeky conference in San Francisco, and they needed someone to come in and moderate and run a couple of their panel discussions, so they asked Dan and Dan loved to do that.
A few days before Dan got there, they said: ”By the way, we got Weird Al and he is going to be doing a private concert for the attendees!”, which was awesome because Dan loves Weird Al and he started listening to him on the Doctor Demento show in the 1980s. He was Dan’s lifeline, he and Mark Mothersbaugh and Devo spoke his language and of course meeting Weird Al would be amazing. They said he can do an interview on stage, they paid for that and didn't even know that we are getting that, but they needed Dan to interview him, which was the dream and who wouldn’t love to interview Weird Al!
Dan told them that this will have to look like The Tonight Show with a wooden desk and two chairs, and the chairs have to have a little table in between them. This has to look right, like the real thing. Somehow they pulled out the stops and made this happen, and there is this wonderful video that Dan is not allowed to share from the Future Stack conference of him doing an interview with Weird Al. This was just for this audience and it can't be shared or distributed. The people that Dan knew at the company are no longer there, so he can't actually get any information if he is allowed to show it now, but probably not. It is super frustrating!
Why would Joe Rogan not have done this? It is not a budget thing, he could have any desk that he wanted to have! He was formed out of the mud in an era where that is what media looked like and it would be impossible for him to have the imagination. This is the problem with The Carson Show set, which is what we dream of. John wanted to host the Carson show, but there is no reason that it needs to be a desk and two chairs. Every single person in media right now could be doing their show from Victoria Falls, if they could get a visa, which they can't, but we could be doing the show from anywhere, even from inside a moving car.
There is no reason why John is sitting at this desk other than that he hasn’t used any imaginative power to put himself and this show into a different context. How much background noise would be acceptable to our listeners if the payoff was that John did the show while he was walking. He could do 6 miles every week during Road Work, not that he would be breathing hard, but there would be some background noise, some birds, passing cars every once in a while. Would that sound to the listeners unprofessional? It probably would! It would not sound as good, they wouldn't be appearing in their ear holes in quite the same way, but people watch the Joe Rogan show.
John doing a talk radio show called Talk Soup in Spokane during college (RW198)
Dan didn’t want to be a DJ when he was little, but he wanted to host a TV talk show. Dan majored in RTF (Radio, TV Film) for part of college, because that is what he wanted to do. There were two different times in John’s life when he actually was taking radio and television production in high school and in college where he felt like maybe that could be his major. It never was, but he took some steps down that path, he actually went to radio stations in Anchorage and in Spokane with his resume and applied for jobs as a DJ, thinking that that was probably the greatest job that you could have as a college guy.
Dan didn't want to do music, but he wanted to do a talk show, like he is doing with John right now. John ended up having a talk show on the radio in Spokane called Talk Soup. John didn't name it, it existed already and they needed a host, it was college radio, John did Talk Soup and he was thinking that there wasn't a better world than Talk Soup. It pushed the boundaries of John’s imagination for his life at the time. It was a late night show and it was basically this, he would go sit in the radio station and they had bits and they would have people come in for interviews.
John was terrible at it and it was terrible, but it set the stage in a certain way and John got accustomed to the idea that there was a whole branch of media that was just people sitting around an unlovely environment, which every radio station booth is, it is never nice in there, you are surrounded by machines, you are wearing headphones, there are mics on booms, all radio stations looked the same, the ones where people try to decorate them or make them comfortable, they look exactly the same except worse.
TV talk shows, the last sophisticated talk show (RW198)
John asks what the Joe Rogan show is and how it fits into the architecture of the modern world. Dan doesn’t really listen to or watch the show, except there is a YouTube channel called the Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, where they will show a clip from an interview with an interesting person and Dan will occasionally watch those on YouTube and it will show the highlights of the interview with Elon Musk when he came on or whatever. The dude that used to be the sidekick to the dude that was the sidekick to Ben Stein when Ben Stein had Win Ben Stein's Money. It was Jimmy Kimmel, he was Ben Stein's sidekick, he was great on that show, it was top shelf Jimmy Kimmel, and then Jimmy Kimmel started a show with some other dude where girls jumped on Trampolines, The Man Show, and then that dude, second sidekick dude was Adam Carolla and then he got some radio show. He also was on Loveline with Drew Pinsky for a long time, for like 10 years, where they were giving love advice, mainly from Drew Pinsky.
Dan gets all of his politics from John, which a lot of people should do.
As far as those dudes and what kind of media that is and what they represent. They present themselves as fun friendly dudes. Marc Maron, and John has never heard any of these shows, but as Kye Russell likes to say: ”Just because I don't know anything about it doesn't mean I won't talk about it!”, but Maron presents himself as grouchy from the start. He doesn't pretend to be likable, whereas the other two dudes, Carolla and Joe Rogan do that fake edgy thing, but they really just want to be liked, your fun friend who is not afraid to say how things really are.
The world now is populated by media figures who are trying to be your fun friend, which was probably what Carson was, and all we wanted to do when we watched the Carson show was hang out with those guys and have Don Rickles ash his cigarette in our bourbon drink. The difference is just that Carson was our sophisticated fun friend and there are no sophisticated people anymore. Who was the last sophisticated person? Conan O'Brien is very definitely, although probably personally a sophisticated person at some level. The appeal of his show or what he thought was the appeal of it was that he was not a sophisticated person and it was not a sophisticated show.
His shtick was: ”We are on cable TV and this is just this joke kind of thing!”, even though you could tell he took it very seriously and he takes it very seriously. He was very self aware of the fact that he had had The Tonight Show and was fired from The Tonight Show and was now doing a late night talk show on cable TV, but that gave him the freedom to do the wacky, funny, silly, weird things that he had done on The Late Show, couldn't do on The Tonight Show, but now could do even more because this was his playground. He was sophisticated in real life, but was able to play a role where he isn’t.
Jay Leno’s version of The Tonight Show was that he was an unsophisticated guy and this was going to be just plain folks having plain folk unsophisticated talk. Dick Cavett did not at all pretend to be a regular guy. That version of television and that version of American culture was one where the people on screen… even Dean Martin who was drunk was witty and well-dressed and clearly occupying a world that was not regular or plain or just folks. Even Don Rickles, who was not sophisticated in the sense of taking the stage and say: ”Come with me on a journey to a faraway place!”, but he was very rooted in the here and now.
At the same time he was not presenting himself as a working class hero. Don Rickles’ humor was not: ”I'm so relatable! I'm just a regular guy who is just like you!”, but all the humor then, even when it was low brow, was aspirational in a way. And Letterman was not pretending to be a downtown guy, his whole thing was like: ”I'm an anarchist from Indiana!” He wasn't trying to be your friend. You wanted him to be your friend, but he wasn't trying to be your friend. The great thing about the Letterman show was: You wanted Letterman to be your friend. He did not want to be your friend. And that was exactly the vibe of Carson, too.
With Carson you felt like maybe he could pretend to be your friend in a way that Letterman never would, but post Jay Leno you got all these guys… He is the fountainhead of this genre of media dudes. Joe Rogan actually wears a car mechanic jacket. If you think about Jon Stewart, you also want him to be your friend, but he doesn't want to be yours. Jon Stewart is sophisticated, he got sophisticated humor, he is not trying to be your bro at all. Until recently there were still media figures that weren't just trying to make us feel less lonely, and so many of these dudes are just like: ”Hey man, will nobody talk to you? I'll talk to you, bro! Pull up a chair and I am just going to talk about the things that you want to talk about!”
It is an unprecedented genre, at least in John’s lifetime, that that would have even been identified as a demographic that wasn't already catered to with sports. That is what sports are supposed to do: ”Hey man, do you want to just relax and just talk about some stuff? We are going to talk about getting this ball over the end zone!” It is the sports culture that isn't about sports, somehow. That is what John always felt watching The Jay Leno Show: ”Can we just stop pretending that we are talking about anything but sports and just talk about sports here?” because Jay Leno talking to a starlet about her new movie, he just wants to be talking about sports or cars!
Dan is not a big Leno fan, really, but now there is no Leno anymore and he is splintered into Joe Rogan and the other guy Adam Carolla and all the many, many others. There is just not enough of an audience for whatever version of talking about sports Dan and John are doing. It is not scratching a wide enough itch and they need to find a way to widen the itch they can scratch. Maybe they are personally off-putting to most people? There has to be a reason, it is not like their show is hard to find. People listen and a lot of people go: "Oh no, just the sounds of their voices… I can't! These other people have nicer voices!” Dan disagrees. He thinks John has an excellent singing voice, so maybe he should sing instead of speaking.
John looking for the right bathroom-tile (follow-up) (RW198)
John realized something last week. They talked about John’s house project and John described this problem in finding tile. They have a lot of feedback about the tile for the post show. John didn't say that after months and months of this very difficult road he has recently found tile, made the decisions, he had already turned a corner on it, and after they did that show last week John was just inundated with responses from people, not responses like: ”Hi, here is a link to Home Depot!”, but people with tremendous resources, people saying: ”Hi, I am an architect and an interior designer!” or: ”Hi, I also was on a years long mission to find the right tile!”
A couple of people wrote from Europe, saying they have these tiles and they could probably source them for John and links and links and links, resources that were all very thoughtful and a lot of people prefaced it by saying: ”I don't want to be the person that is sending you a link to something that you have already seen!” and some stuff John had seen, but a lot of stuff that was like: ”Wow, what a good idea!” There was somebody that said: ”Why don't you buy unglazed tile and go to the University of Washington and talk to the ceramics professor and get ceramicist graduate students who can't attend class right now to make your own personal tile?” These are amazing ideas!
John realized that he didn't tell the story of the tile when it was ongoing, but he told it later because… he has been thinking about this a lot all week because he keeps getting these emails and these messages from people and… he is not disappointed. The tile that he ended up getting was tile that he had custom made by a tile company that makes custom tile for vintage style and it was expensive and it was excruciating and it wore him down, so all these links that people are sending to him and all these ideas, John is having that thing where he is just slapping himself on the face because he ended up going with Home Depot tile and now he got 50 people showing him the way.
John did pursue a path where he spent a lot of money and got the tile that he wanted, so he is super grateful to everybody, but he realized a couple of things, one of them is that we have a great diversity of listeners, and if John were capable of coming to the Internet with his actual problems in real time and saying back in January: ”Oh man, I want this kind of title, I can't find it. I have tried a few places and it doesn't exist. I wonder if anybody has any resources!” and then was able to deal with the 50 emails he got and pick a path, that would have been very different and a very different relationship to the audience and the listeners, a very different way of thinking about what they are doing as broadcasters, like: ”Crowdsource this for me, everybody!”
John realized is that he couldn't have done that in January or February or March because he was embarrassed by his indecisiveness and embarrassed by the emotional tangle he was in and would have been ashamed to talk about it and to go on the Internet and ask for help. It was only after it had gone through its personal arc in John’s life, after it had wreaked havoc throughout his life, having conjured the orb of this problem and the orb floating through electrocuting things, he was only able to talk about it after it had converted into a story because it only became a story when the end was clear, and the end was only clear when he had finally ordered the tile and the tile had started to arrive, because then he could cast back on it and try and learn from it or tell the story with him as the dupe at the center of it.
John can only think of episodes like that in his life once he has lived through them and storified them. In the present moment of them he is way too emotionally raw. If he had talked about it in June and had gotten those 50 emails from people, he doesn’t know if he would have opened them. The problem is so much more convoluted than just that he couldn't find the link to the thing. This whole process of the past week of opening these extremely helpful emails where people are very generously tiptoeing around him, like: ”Hey, just wanted to say I am not trying to fuck with your head and I hope that this is cool, but it made me think of this or this is how I solve the problem or have you thought of this?”
John doesn’t feel that taken together they are some group of people, as much as each one of them is an individual person who is trying to help him and he is incredibly grateful and he doesn’t know how to respond because he wasn't asking for help, but he was telling the story of something that he could only tell after he was past the point where anybody could help him.
House update (RW198)
What is going on right now: The lead carpenter quit four days ago, quit his job working for the main contractor and the company that made the stone that the bathtub needs to sit in, which was never John’s design idea, but was a thing that everyone insisted was necessary, relocated during the process of cutting the stone from one place to another and in the relocation their business has come off the rails and no-one can get them on the phone. John has paid them and they have the cut stone waiting somewhere, but the installers can't be found and the people aren't answering their phone.
John’s contractor is bad at managing, and after the main guy quit he had one of his employees come finish some plumbing and that employee installed the tub and plumbed it without the stone being there, and you can't put the stone in after the fact because the tub sits on the stone. Picking the stone and waiting for the stone has been also a months-long process. Now John finally picked the stone, he had forced the contractor to go with him to the stone yard and stand there: ”You come with me! I am not going to just go pick a stone out of 500.000 stones!” and John paid for it, he got it cut, and then his guy installs the tub with no stone there, so now he has got to take the tub out in order to install the stone, but the company that made the stone is AWAL (?).
John only being able to tell the story after the fact (RW198)
That is where John stands today. Maybe he is going to get emails from people that are: ”I am actually a stonemason and a tub installer!” It is entirely possible, but John can barely talk about it, he can barely get that out because he doesn't know the end, and if he doesn't know the end he can't tell the story. It is not about entertainment, but he doesn’t know another way to process his own experience and life, other than to adopt the role of the narrator, retelling the quest with himself as the protagonist that is kind of a dope.
John is not sure why that is the interface and why is that how he thinks of his own life. He is not doing it for the sake of podcasting, the reason he podcasts is because this is how he already was processing his own experience, and always was. He was a good storyteller in 11th grade, and it was because he was already processing life this way. Everything he saw, everything he read, every conversation he had, they were all inputs that went into this machine that was trying to make sense of the world by converting it into stories and songs.
It wouldn't be noticeable if it weren't for moments like this, where he told that story as though it were two and a half months ago because the bathrooms aren't actually finished, the tile isn't actually here, it is all on order, it is sitting on somebody's workbench somewhere, it is on pallets, but John is past the decision. It is very weird to realize that he is processing his experiences in a certain way, and he is not sure what it would be like to not think in terms of story. There are people, his daughter is one, who is just living in the now, not thinking about how it all fits together.
Is there a way to modify it somehow so that it is a more successful program? Is there a way to live better? If John was able to ask for help! He got a lovely message from Tiffany Arment, Marco's wife and better half, who said. ”Hey, I also am a real stickler for tile and I worked real hard to get the tile right and here is a picture of my incredible bathroom where I just decided that I was going to do everything, instead of making the choice between 15 different tiles I was just going to use all 15!” It looked fantastic and it was very individual and very her, and John wishes that he for the last six months had just been talking to her about it, like: ”Tell me more about your tile journey!” That is really what he wanted to hear from people!
John said to his mom the other day that the only stories he wants to hear from people right now are stories of how hard it was for them to fix their house. He doesn’t want to hear stories of people's success, and last thing he wants is to hear stories from people that had a great experience with their contractor and it came in early and under budget. He just wants to hear fix up your house nightmare stories from people who are on the other side of it now and are doing great. The people are like: ”For a year and a half I was in hell and now I am in my house and it is great, but it cost way more than I thought it was going to, and it was totally a nightmare, and let me tell you all the terrible things that happened!” John wants to commiserate and he wants to not feel like such a dummy.
When John’s house got broken into (see The Burglary) however many years ago because he thought there was a possum in the wall and John talked to Merlin about it, he only talked to Merlin about it nine months later after the whole thing had resolved itself (see RL176). For nine months John walked around every day, convinced that there were burglars scoping his house and that somebody was using his passport, and he could never have talked about it with Merlin because it was an open wound. To the listeners he just sounds like he is just normal John, having a normal day that whole time, just like he has been with Dan for the past nine months, just dealing with the coronavirus or whatever, and as soon as he gets off the computer he is back in this hell of trying to figure out how to fix his house and how to get it going.
BONUS CONTENT
Trying to find the right bathroom tile (RW198)
A few people wrote in about the title. A lot of people wrote John directly or DM:ed him about it, people came at him from all directions. It is wonderful to have the experience of seeing who the Road Work audience is in a way that you wouldn't be able to see by addressing them directly. The after show audiences is a much smaller group, but to say to the Road Work audience: ”Hey, tweet me if you are this or that!” there is that silent majority of people that are like: ”I listen to the show, but I am not looking for a ton of engagement, I don't want to tweet you, I am embarrassed to out myself as listening, actually!”, but then you talk about tile and it is a thing that people can have different experiences of, a way that they can say. ”Oh, I know about tile. This is a chance to help!”
Apparently John has friends who work for the government of Norway, restoring vintage Scandinavian bathrooms as part of a government program who are willing to help him source tile. John didn't know that! That is great! If only he had known that. There is a problem that he is going to have six months from now, and the people that can help him solve that problem are Road Work listeners and he has no idea what that problem is going to be and no idea that Road Work listeners could help him, but it is going to be there and he might not know about it until six months after the fact. It is pretty fascinating!
Hi Dan and John,
I will keep this short, but I became very interested in John's search. I am no expert, but I do kind of think that these look somewhat legit. Maybe I am wrong and John has probably seen this link already, but when I saw the picture, they took me viscerally back to my 1950s high school locker room and back to friends houses where the walls had been dripping in decades of mid-century cigarette smoke and alcohol. You can see what you think.
Anyway, I was going to email, but kept thinking about it and I thought I might as well send this link just in case. Love all your shows, especially recently, have been a great kind of comfort each week. Best! —Andre.
Hello Dan,
As a longtime listener of Road Work I have been following John's epic saga to find / create the perfect home. In the spirit of trying to help in his quest for the right tiles I am sending a link. It is a crappy website, but this family owned company has a decent collection of tiles and sizes, shapes and colours, reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s. Cheers from Montreal. — Sara.
Dan has been to Quebec, it was very cold, snow covered the ground, and they do have great tile up there.
Hi! Should you ask what your tiles are called on Twitter? I think you might be missing the names for what you want. You are reacting to this trend, which superficially resembles the accurate mid-century stuff you seem to be looking for. You should look for people in LA or Palm Springs. They may be able to help since there is more old stuff there and people understand that style a bit better. Thanks! — Rob. PS.: Syracuse, China made a bunch of great dishes you might like. I have a pattern called Atomic Star. The only downside is that you can't put them in the dishwasher, so I have some stuff from Target, too.
Paul, the guy who did the Viking mats wrote to Dan and said that he will be sending a complimentary mat, he just need to go in and pick the one that he wants for his gaming table.
How to not sweat the details of your relationship? (RW198)
G’day, gents!
25-year old male Australian, $160.000 per year, 75 kg, 173 cm. This might take my PB for submission length, my apologies, I cut it down as best I could. In your last release of bonus content, John discussed not ”liking” a lot of his friends. John's tone, as well as Dan's input, left me believing that this was expected and not very noteworthy. This touched on something that I have pondered for a long time, but that has been on my mind more than usual lately. I am young, still very idealistic, and a perfectionist to a fault.
I feel that this may carry across my relationships, romantic or otherwise, to the point where it encourages self-destructive behaviors. I have an inclination to only be involved with people that I like and have very little issue with. This sounds very obvious to me, but it feels at odds with what you have discussed. I identify as being an extrovert, so I don't feel that this is a result of trying to conserve social energy. I'm the sort of person to always want more friends, but I have no inclination to do this by padding my social circles with people that I don't actually like, and I am differentiating between ”like” and ”enjoy being around”.
So I guess it is a question of tolerance and internal compromise, which I am not good at. I have abruptly ended many a friendship or relationship over a niggling issue I have had with someone, and I constantly find people's faults rubbing me the wrong way to the point where I grow to resent them. I acknowledge I have my own faults that certainly annoy other people and their tolerance is appreciated, but this doesn't help me to return the favour. I would love for you both to speak to your feelings and philosophies on this subject. What am I doing wrong?
Dan, as the co-host in a long term traditional monogamous relationship, I will mostly direct this next part toward you. I appreciate that you were reluctant to speak candidly about this topic. I suspect that John will also have an opinion, especially seeing as he has Marlo. My life, stage and desires are at a point where I feel that it is time to start settling down. The discussions around marriage I have had with my partner are at the point where we both just assume it is going to happen at some point.
I am not much of a traditionalist, but I acknowledge the reality of the social importance of marriage, so this is prompting me to to evaluate my relationship. I feel that my perfectionist and idealistic tendencies are messing things up. In the grand scheme of things, my partner and I are largely very compatible and see eye to eye on a lot of issues, we share a lot of interests, enjoy each other's time and have cohabited for about four years. We do genuinely love each other and I don't want to understate our compatibility in a lot of areas.
There are things about my partner that bother me of varying severity. I am sure that the reverse is true. Some of these things are comically stereotypical cohabitation disagreements about things like cleanliness (I am the cleaner one) and money (I earn a few times what she does and she insists on keeping completely separate finances). Some of these things are more severe, situational and hard to blame anyone for. For instance, whilst we both really love children and want our own, my partner cannot have them. This is growing to be a frequent source of anguish in our relationship for both of us. I do not blame her for this, but the reality is that it is ”because of her”.
My partner also has a disability that impairs her mobility, which limits what we were able to do together, and it will continue to do so to a worsening degree into our future. Assuming that you do not think that your partners are perfect humans, how did you manage to sift through your differences to end up where you are today? What were the issues that you had to reason with or reckon with? How do you not sweat the small stuff? Does your relationship history inform your current relationships and where you are today? Again, I understand any hesitance to speak candidly about this.
John, much to your disgust for the purpose of this discussion I am considering your daughter's mother to be your partner, though I think that I am across a lot of the nuance of your relationship with her. Of course please draw from any other experience if you wish. Thanks! — Kye
Dan’s response
Dan doesn’t know how to give someone else advice on whether they should get married to someone or not, not even if he knew Kye for 10 years. It is different for everybody, every situation is different, every relationship is different, every single person's wants and desires is different. Dan would have liked to have heard: ”I am so in love with my partner, she is everything to me, we are so in sync with everything and we just have so much fun together. Gosh, there is this one thing that bothers me and she can't have kids and that is a downer, but I love her and I know I want to be with her. Maybe we could adopt, what do you think?”
Instead he is very matter of fact about it and paired up with the first part of the email where he says that he is young and idealistic and a perfectionist to a fault and that he drops friends if there is some little thing he doesn't like about them, maybe the way they chew gum or something. Dan feels he has got some growing up to do and don't worry about it, just chill out! It is COVID times, just enjoy being with the person that you are with and see what happens. Don't rush into anything, take your time, and that could mean spend another four years together and see how you feel then. There is no urgency for it, people are getting married later and later and later and later, and don't rush it.
John’s response
The problem of being 24, relative to being 50, is that when you are 24 you have only ever been 23 and 22 and 20, but you don't have any experience of being 24 yet, but when you are 52, you have also been 24 and 34 and 44. To listen to this problem laid out John can't help but put himself in the story at 24 and at 24 he felt a lot of those exact feelings and would have probably phrased them in that exact way. He was very impatient with his friends and even more with the fact that he was confined to a world of potential friends and none of them seemed like they were going to level up into real friends or useful friends.
John wondered what he had done wrong, what path he had taken in life that had put him in this situation where his friend pool was so shallow. He imagined that in New York City there was some group of people his age who were all super smart and also kind to each other. There was no shortage of super smart people, but they were wicked, and the people that were kind to each other all seemed really dumb. John was extremely judgmental of people around him and he doesn’t want to dissuade young people from being that judgmental because it is not a thing you can talk yourself out of. There are plenty of of places to go if you want to hear people lecture you about mindfulness and how you should be kind to people and not be judgmental and maybe even the Joe Rogan show.
John would never say that because being judgmental has been a big force in his life. It has brought him a lot of pain and suffering, but it is also a key element in how he perceives the world. He left a lot of people behind and some of them maybe for the wrong reasons. He found it very hard to be friends with people that didn't have any ambition. He found it very hard to be friends with people that didn't have a sense of humor. When he looks back at those relationships and thinks he maybe should have given that person a little bit more leeway or a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt, from the standpoint of being 52 he goes: ”What? Why? There are too many people in the world to go back in history and give some witless person a little bit more rope to hang themselves with!”
When you are 24 you can't possibly know how big the world is and in some ways how many friends you will have, if you have this mentality. John knows a lot of people and has a lot of friends who are still friends with the people they were friends with in high school. Dan is also still friends with one of his high school buddies.
John’s daughter is giving every indication of being somebody that falls in love and marries her high school sweetheart or her college sweetheart, and they live together. She is way more like that than John ever was. There is no way at the age of 9 or 19 that anyone would have looked at him and said: ”Oh, he is going to marry his high school sweetheart!” No way would anyone have made that mistake because it was just written on his face. That is not what he was here to do. It isn't a mistake, it is not that he is broken, but he was not put here by the Great Spirit to marry his high school sweetheart, but for some other reason, to search and be dissatisfied and to judge and to storify and to be fraught.
Two things are true: 1) John had 1000 friends, and 2) he still knows all the people he went to high school with and he is still friends with them. It is strange that you can move through life and be so different from other people and yet still all together sharing the same planet, sharing the same World Wide Web. John could sit on his computer right now and send an email and get a reply from a friend that married the girl they were dating when they were juniors in high school. They are grandparents now and they look amazing, and they would write him back and be like: ”John! Great to hear from you! What is going on? I saw your post the other day and… ”
John has lived 1000 lives and presumably they have too, although their 1000 lives that they have lived are all within the context of their significant. They met in sophomore year and they live in the same town and they drive past the high school every day on their way from their house to their job. All of the times that John was in a ferry boat off of Corsica, wondering whether or not he should go up to the guy that looked like he was in Mosad and ask him for a job, none of that actually took him anywhere where he is not just another guy sitting here in the world, able to be friends with anybody and yet it did.
John’s life is so different from his friend’s, and if he were to fly to Anchorage now and have dinner with them, at the end of dinner he would say: ”This has been great! Thank you for having me!", and they would say: ”It has been great to see you. We should totally hang out again soon!” - ”Absolutely!” and then they would be good for 20 years and John would look them up again when they are both 70.
All by way of saying: At 24 all of these questions feel so important and pregnant and things that at 24 you think you need to proactively solve, to go out and say: ”I am making these decisions. I need to choose. I need to pick a path. I need to find a way. I need to stop being so reactive and start being active!”, but a lot of these things are really more the framework of your life, and what you are seeing right now are the early examples of it, and so they feel specific, but most of those things are just templates. You are going to live through those experiences with other people, it is going to come up again and again.
The question of your betrothed and the fact that you want kids and can't have them, these are all questions in the family of: ”I love her, but I am not in love with her!” family of questions. If somebody says things like: ”This person is my one true love and I really want to be with them and we will adopt and I can solve all the problems!” John doesn’t believe it and this person is never going to feel that way about anything. To wait to get married or to take a job, for that kind of enthusiasm to be the indicator that this is the right path for them is to wait forever because some of us are made with natures that just don't ever feel that way.
John is saying: ”Who cares about waiting? Mary your friend!” He doesn’t think that the marriage will survive, but is that a reason not to get married? If you are thinking, as so many of us do, that your marriage should last forever, that your job should be perfect, that your friends should be the best friends anyone ever had, you can wait your whole life and have those experiences slip through your fingers while your perfectionism and your desire to not make the wrong choice cause you to live in a state of suspension.
If John were to go back and have gotten married at 22 to whoever he was dating at the time, if he had married Ellen when he was 23, their relationship would not have lasted, but it didn't last anyway, and if they had gotten married it wouldn’t have been worse. If John had married Laurel maybe that would have been a fantastic five years. They certainly would have gotten divorced, they might have a 20 year old together who would right now be enrolled in an arts program at Pomona City College or something. He didn't marry Laurel because it wasn't perfect. Not that Laurel wasn't perfect, although Laurel wasn't perfect, but it wasn't perfect.
John didn't marry Laurel and thank God he didn't marry Meagan, but that would have been fine, too! He didn't marry Millennium Girlfriend and now he is 52 and he didn’t marry anybody because it was never perfect. Looking back at it now it wasn't perfect anyway. By not having married all of those people he wasn't any safer and life wasn't any simpler. He doesn’t pay alimony, he doesn’t have kids that live with their mother and hate him, he doesn’t have the experience of being a divorced dad three times over, but did he not just trade those pains he didn’t have for other pains? Of course! There is a maximum amount of pain any one can feel, and John is at that max all the time.
Dan argues that different people can tolerate different kinds of pain. To be alone doesn't create loneliness or sadness in John and there is no pain associated with that, but for other people that would be a very high degree of pain and they would rather be married and be third time divorced, that would be less painful for them than being alone, but for John the opposite is true. Everybody has to have their own weird threshold for what drives them versus what does not drive them.
Extroverts make a lot of concessions in order to be around people and it is very hard to be a perfectionist and an extrovert. It is easier to be a perfectionist and an introvert, because as you reject people you are fine. You can say basically: ”All my friends suck and I am just going to be alone!” and at least the alone part isn't adding to your pain. A lot of extroverts find themselves solving for togetherness and forgiving a lot of sins and it got to be hard to be an extrovert and a perfectionist.
But where is anybody's threshold of pain? John is lucky that the wreckage that he has caused in other people's lives has been mostly nonmaterial. He never left anyone impoverished, he never left anyone physically injured, he never left anyone in legal turmoil, he has never stolen anything, no one has ever had to lose their house because of decisions he has made, but everyone he hurt in life he just hurt in their heart. If he had been married 4 times he could have taken that hurt and really spread it across a whole spectrum of injury, where people would say: ”I wasted my best years!” or ”My child and I are living on the streets after our house was foreclosed upon because John…”
You can really leave a trail of destruction in life, and John hasn’t because it is not his nature. He is not someone who would ever let his decisions result in someone else losing their house. It is not how his responsibility plays. There must be people who go through life and never once hurt another person's heart, people who are hurt themselves, probably, but when other people look back at relationships with them, they think: ”Wow, that person was just really generous and good to me. It didn't work out, but they were lovely!”
Whatever divot they leave in the world, it isn't one where they are the source of pain for others, and there have to be people who live in a world where their pain is very much temporal or their pain is related to knowable things, and in matters of the heart and matters of loyalty and friendship their experience is uncomplicated and the people around them also have uncomplicated experiences of one another: ”I love you!” - ”I love you, too!” - ”I am mad at you because you did this!” - ”I am sorry!” or ”I am mad at you, too!” - ”Oh, we have resolved it!”
John doesn’t know what that must be like, but it has to be true that there are people who don't look back at their lives and go: ”I have hurt everyone I have ever touched, mostly because I wasn't what they wanted me to be!”, which is how John feels. He doesn’t know if that is a shared experience. He doesn’t know a lot of people that would describe their own path that way, and perfectionism and the inability to ever rest or be satisfied is at the heart of that, but he wouldn't go back to his 24 year old self and try to talk himself out of it. He wouldn't be able to and he wouldn't try to think of how it could have shaken out differently.
If John could go back to himself at 24 he would say: ”Whatever you do doesn't really matter. Just make sure you buy Bitcoin when it's $0.15 a piece!” Other than that, he doesn’t know what he would tell himself. Should he have married Laurel? He was incapable of marrying Laurel! But if he had married her that would have been a fine life. They would be divorced now, but would that have been a greater tragedy than never having married Laurel? Looking at the scale and trying to imagine the alternate history, having been married to Laurel for five years and having had a bitter divorce and now being friends is just as plausible. John didn't even know Laurel when he was 24 and he wouldn't meet her for four more years.
Has the coronavirus situation changed John’s understanding of war times? (RW198)
Hey Dan and John,
not my first time writing, so I will spare you my personal details.
Tonight I was watching a show set during the Great War and I couldn't stop thinking how in some weird way this Corona situation totally changed my understanding of the period. We are not going through a war, but somehow I now feel that I better understand the world during the big wars where absolutely every aspect of life was defined and dominated by the ongoing war. Before COVID things like entire industries switching to the war effort or half of the population, i.e. women, completely changing their place in society seemed like very far fetched and weird concepts that I couldn't really grasp. Now it is like I get it. The world can totally stop in a matter of weeks.
My question to John is: Has a pandemic made you reflect about life during the wars? In particular, has it changed the way in which you view the war stories told by your dad and his war pals? I don't know if you Dan have any personal connection to the wars, but has it had any effect on your thinking of recent history?
All the best! — Max.
John has always been curious about the experience of people who go into a war as middle class people living in a normal world. A war comes to every person differently, but you see all the time stories of Jewish businessmen in Berlin when things got worse and worse and they were making decisions based on totally understandable things like: ”It is not like I am just going to leave my house! This house is worth a lot of money. I am going to try and sell this house!” and then they try and sell the house and can't, and by the time they get to the point where they are like: ”All right, whatever, I will take a dollar for the house, but I need to get all of our clothes and silverware and stuff packed up so that we can ship that stuff to our new place wherever we land in Paris or whatever!”
They get all the stuff packed up and they even get to Paris, but all of the stuff gets taken at the border crossing. Then they are in Paris and they don't have their stuff, but at least they have their clothes and their dignity. It is this gradual chipping away at a person where when they end up walking through the gates of Auschwitz it wasn't that they were sitting in a comfortable chair and someone came in and arrested them and put them on a train, but it was a series of small decisions and small indignities that happened over the course of a decade.
There are so many European Jews that in 1933 if they could see what was coming, they would have walked out the front door of their nice homes and started to do whatever they could to get out, but that wasn't ever apparent, and to us it is even confusing how in 1942 there were still Jews living in Berlin who were thinking that this has got to be either temporary or it can't get any worse than this. It isn't just the Jews, but anyone living in Warsaw, anyone living in Eastern Europe, anyone who had a son in the army. There were people living comfortably in Münster who never once thought that some chain of events would result in Münster being carpet-bombed into piles of bricks.
Thinking about where we are right now, with the quarantine and the upcoming election, John inputs all that data into the function machine he has been running his whole life, which is: The baseline of existence is: ”You have only what you can carry and any encounter with another human being is potentially one where that person is going to take whatever you are carrying, so you have only what you can carry until you meet the first person who is bigger than you, at which point you don't even have what you can carry. You just have you!” and then that baseline experience is: ”You have you until you meet the next person who wants you, who either wants you dead or wants you as a prisoner or a slave, or wants to just torture you for pleasure or whatever!”
There is no baseline of security that isn't vulnerable to at the drop of a hat being replaced with not just death, but horror and then death. How hard is it to go from where we are right now to that? There are so many instances in history where the only lesson is: ”Not that hard!” It can happen really fast! Think about the people living in Berlin in 1929 who were rich! It was less conceivable to them than it would be for John now to think in 10 years time all of this will be gone and in 15 years time Berlin will be gone and everyone they know will be dead, including themselves because of some stupid shit!
It is not even as smart as a pandemic, which is just God fucking with you, but it is way dumber than that. All the Bugaloos and the people that are trying to prepare for it, what they don't understand is that all those guns will get taken from you because unless day one you dig a hole and sit and fight until they overrun your foxhole and kill you. If you think you are going to waltz through a situation like that, that your little stockpile of guns is going to cause all these people to just walk around you like you are a big rock in a river and go. ”Oh, that guy has got guns and he is flying a Bugaloo flag, so let's leave him alone and exploit the weak who live down the block!” then you are a fool!
There is no one in Europe in World War II who by virtue of a stockpile of guns and some canned food in their basement survived the war with their personal autonomy intact. There is no house in central Poland where one guy just lived out the war in his own personal Slobovistan and the Russian army and the Wehrmacht just fought around them. No, what will happen is: Your door will get kicked down and you will die in a hail of bullets, or if you don't, if you want to live more than that, they will take your guns and they will shove them up your ass and they will take your food and they will take your family. No one can sit it out!
The question for John is always: ”Can I live with nothing and walk forever on nothing? Do I have the intestinal fortitude? Do I want to live enough to do that? And if I don't want to live enough to live at the absolute base level of of life, that is no crime, that is no shame, the world doesn't care whether I live or die!” Millions die and the world does not mourn them, really. You mourn them in the sense that somebody plants a giant cross in the middle of Flanders Field and everybody goes and looks at the names and goes. ”Oh wow, there were 42 McMillans that all died at Passchendaele!” - ”I know. That has got to be tough for Grandma MacMillan!”
But is John’s desire to live such that he could live with nothing, even to not have a pocket knife? All the everyday carry people, if history is any gauge, that little pocket fishing pole and that pocket knife and that compass and that flashlight, all those will be taken from you by the first gang that comes along that wants them, unless you are in that gang, unless you are the person who decides that in order to live you will be the agent of violence and you will be the cruel one who will live at the expense of others. That is harder for John to picture even than to just try and make it through sleeping in holes, scavenging food. It is harder to imagine John as a collaborator or a raper. He can see himself as a bandit, but only in service of something greater than just his own survival.
These were not the experiences of John’s mom and dad in the war because we are Americans and we have up until now been insulated by our distance from the places where war has been conducted, at least in the last 150 years. John’s people survived the war and their experience was: ”There is no coffee!” John’s dad was a pilot in the Pacific and his experience was mostly: ”I got Dengue Fever!”, but none of them have ever confronted the possibility that: ”When the first soldiers came they burned our house down and they killed all the men!” We are talking about the same war that John’s mom was like: ”Dad couldn't get coffee, so we had to drink Chicory!”
There are people John’s mom's age whose memory of that same war was: ”They burned my father in a hole and they burned our house down and that was the beginning of six years of terror!” The woman that has that story to tell is living right now in a village somewhere, and there are tens of thousands of them that are living somewhere in Europe and they also have lived full lives and they have kids and grandkids and great grandkids. Americans have impoverished imaginations when it comes to really understanding what horror is and what is possible.
We have never been closer to it than we are right now. You cannot plan or prepare and all the fishing line in the world that is tucked in your go bag is going to be sufficient when total war arrives. All you can do is be prepared to suffer, and John spent his whole life preparing to suffer, and he is not sure that was a very wise way to spend his emotional resources, except he was doing it because it is its own reward. Being prepared to suffer is its own reward!
But there is nothing you could take from John, except his daughter. That is a position of power and that is the intent. The only thing that he cares about is his daughter and he would suffer any indignity to spare her, but he also knows that that isn’t in his power, really, because for him to die protecting her, that doesn't protect her because when he dies protecting her and she will be alone and the next person that comes along that that wants her, then he is not there, so dying to protect her doesn't help.
John teaching his daughter to punch
John has been teaching her lately, he never expected it and he has been doing it very light heartedly and they are having a lot of fun with it, but John has been teaching her to punch. She did some pretend punch a few months ago and she didn't make a fist very well and she made this pretend punch where it was clear that if it had been a real punch she would have either broken her hand or her wrist. He taught her to put her wrist like this, clench her fist like this, and punch straight. They started working on it and it is a fun father/daughter thing they are doing.
She doesn't know that John is serious because they work on stuff like this all the time, her times tables and the piano and whatnot, but now John is doing it with punching and with kicking. He is not a martial arts expert, but he started to say to her that it is inevitable in her life that at some point someone is going to get on top of her or wants her to do something she doesn’t want to do, and at that time she needs to punch.