RW183 - So You Grew Up In Anchorage

This week, Dan and John talk about:

• How the Coronavirus pandemic affects podcasting (COVID)
• People who enjoy being in their car (COVID)
• Dan seeing an interesting vehicle (Dan Benjamin)
• Facebook groups for John’s different shows (Gary’s Van)
• Facebook group about Anchorage (Alaska)
• Hot air balloons in Anchorage, insurance taking away all the cool things (Alaska)
• Why don’t billionaires have a dirigible? (Dreams and Fantasies)
• John’s accent, dialect, and writing voice (Language)

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

• Dan preparing for doing a newsletter (Dan Benjamin)
• Dan wanting to write a book or do a podcast about UFOs (Dan Benjamin)
• John seeing an UFO in the desert when the brakes on his van failed (Stories)

The show title refers to a Facebook group called ”You Know You Grew Up In Anchorage If…” that John mistakenly called So You Grew Up In Anchorage.

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 Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first!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.

How the Coronavirus pandemic affects podcasting (RW183)

Quarantine for Dan is still the same. He is doing the same thing. He is privileged that he can do the work that he needs to do from mostly anywhere and without too much trouble. Things have slowed down a little bit on the sponsor side, but most of it is just pushed out till later in the year. It was interesting to see the reaction in the podcasting community, both for podcasters, listeners, and advertisers: At first it was fairly encouraging and it was assumed that people will have much more time now and will be listening more, replacing the idle chatter that you might get in an office with podcasts while be all alone in their homes.

Maybe that is true in some cases, but what is happening more is that the people who were filling their commute time with podcasts now no longer have that commute time. Instead they are not listening to the podcast. They might still be downloading them, but they are not listening to them in the same way that they were because now they can do other things. Dan actually thinks those other things in a lot of cases for people are YouTube. What makes a podcast wonderful is that you can listen to it while you are doing other things like driving or mowing the yard, cooking, working out, on a walk, or whatever!

You can listen to a YouTube video, but a lot of YouTube stuff you want to see. There are a lot of people who have two hours in their car driving to and from their job and they are not saying: ”Well, normally I would be driving and listening to the shows, I am just going to listen to them now at my desk!”, but instead they are just not listening to them and they are doing other things. Maybe they are being with their family or if they are alone they are watching TV or watching YouTube or doing something else.

Dan subscribes to a couple of newsletters that talk about that type of thing. Every single podcast hosting company has a completely different story. One company will say: We are up 53% since the coronavirus thing and people are listening like crazy, while someone has seen a 40% drop in their downloads. There is zero consistency at all and there seems to be zero consistency in what the predictions are for it, too. So many companies, even companies that you would think wouldn't really be affected by whether or not there are lockdowns or not, are just being fiscally conservative and moving out to Q3, Q4 and things like that. Dan is not really sure why they have that reaction.

The entire podcast economy is still 80% in shadow, how listenership is determined and who has access to that information and how that gets translated into business. In the early days of podcasting, when they were just selling ads for themselves, it was pretty clear cut. You would reach out to a sponsor or they would reach out to you and you would say: ”We have this many downloads. How about this much money?” - ”Fine!” Then all those intermediaries got involved and the money was half and then half again and then half again.

In the music business it is the same. You don't know how many albums your favorite band sold. They will tell you when the record goes gold or platinum and they talk about sales in those moments, but you can't as a pedestrian, as a regular person, access how many records your favorite band has sold and you can't know how many of those records were bought by the label on opening day just to put the record in the charts in the payola years. All that is made illegal now, but it is still so shady!

Part of it is that so much of media is built around the idea that people want to know that a thing is popular before they listen to it and they don't want to listen to something that other people don't already like and so gaming the optics to make a thing seem popular seem like a big deal. We do know what the opening week receipts for films are. They talk about that very candidly. It seems just an industry-wide thing that is grandfathered in from the dawn of time. At the end of that first week you know how many tickets were sold and that really matters if your film is on the charts, but in the music business they will talk about first week sales, second week sales because they are talking about the charts, but after that first couple of weeks it just fades into total invisibility.

That is where the business people are collecting money, so they want to make it hard to audit. John has four podcasts and when people talk about the numbers of downloads and the number of people listening, it feels like those numbers have stabilized in the sense that John hears the same numbers from multiple sources, but it didn't used to be. Somebody would say the show got 50.000 downloads and the next person would say your show got 35.000 downloads. Where are these numbers coming from? Neither one of them sound reliable.

People who enjoy being in their car (RW183)

To John it seems like people aren't listening to the shows like they used to when they commuted. That was their sanctum sanctorum time and as much as they hated their commute, they had figured out a way to populate that time with one of their favorite things. John is grateful that people aren't commuting. In the end it is a net positive, unless: There are so many people that don't really enjoy their home, generally because there are other people there that they don't like or for some other reason their home is a stressful environment.

There are also an awful lot of people who don't enjoy their work. They don't like the work and they don't like the people that they work with, so it is a stressful environment. There got to be a subclass of people, and given how many people there are in the world that don't really feel relaxed in their home and don't like their work, that has to be a measurable group of people that feel like being in their car is their favorite place in the day.

They get in their car and for however long, for the hour it takes them to get to work, nobody is yelling at them and they can listen to their music or their podcasts or whatever, they are on their own, and they are in a safe, groovy place that they like. For the subclass of people who prefer to be in their cars and hate every other aspect of their life, John really hopes that there is a return to some kind of opportunity for them to get back in their car.

Dan is not interested in driving. He would never get in a car again if he didn’t have to. John does like long drives. Running errands in a car he doesn’t like it at all, which is what his mom and dad and sister all love. If you gave them a list of 15 things and they were spread out all over town, they just love driving around in their cars with the stereo on and just doing stuff being busy. When they were working on John’s mom's house, she would go to the hardware store sometimes five times in a day because they forgot to get that and needed to go back to the hardware store. John had been to the hardware store today!

But to get in a car and drive for eight straight hours across a wide open American landscape, if you gave John any valid excuse to do it, like you need him to go to Missoula to pick up a little box with special coins in it, he would get in the car immediately after the show is over and start driving to Missoula because he just love that. Get the car up to speed, get it out on the open road and just watch the yellow dotted line just whizzing under your tires. Dan has done a lot of cross country drives and he is fine with it. When he lived in North Carolina he loved the opportunity to visit family in Florida, which is a 10 hour drive, and it was nothing, he wouldn't even stop. Would he want to do that instead of getting there without it? No!

Dan seeing an interesting vehicle (RW183)

A couple of weeks ago Dan was driving and one of the most amazing vehicles that he had ever seen was driving behind me. When he pulled up to the light the woman driving the vehicle pulled up next to him and Dan was going to try to get some pictures of this. He brought the phone up and immediately the woman driving the car looked over to him and smiled. She was a cool lady in her mid/late 30s with sandy blonde hair, sunglasses on. She had a wakeboard in the back and the vehicle was so cool and she said Dan could take all the pictures he wanted.

Dan took some pictures and send them to John who got very close to identifying exactly what the vehicle was. The only thing John got wrong was the year and not by much. It is called an International Scout II, one of the great classic little Jeeps. There are people in the world that use the word Jeep to mean any little capable 4x4 truck, but this is effectively what it is: The International Harvester company made a little competitor to the Jeep, and it was made sort of unchanged for like 20 years.

The lady told Dan what it was, an International Harvester Scout from 1978. They can be like a pickup truck because the back part of it can pop off, so there was no roof on the thing. The back is open like a truck and the windshield folds down forwards, so you don’t even have a windshield if you don't want it! John is not sure in the 1978 whether the windshield still folds down, it was more of a 1960s thing. That removable hardtop is a the thing that the Chevy Blazer was able to do for many years. In the late 1970s a lot of the trucks like the Blazer and the Bronco could take the back off, but you couldn't take the whole top off.

The doors and the metal frame of the window remained for a while, there was a roll bar, and then they just put a roof over the driver that was not removable. The trucks where you can take the whole top off were Blazers up until about 1976/77 and Broncos until 1978 and these little Scouts and Jeeps. Modern Jeeps you take the top off and the doors still have frames. Things aren't as cool as they used to be!

Facebook groups for John’s different shows (RW183)

See Gary’s Van!

Facebook group about Anchorage (RW183)

The group on Facebook that is the most active is called So you grew up in Anchorage (actually: You Know You Grew Up In Anchorage). Any post will have 500 comments and 89% of the group is Boomers and old Generation-Xers, saying: ”Who remembers when the Montgomery Ward on Northern Lights had a nickel-powered rocket ship out front that you could ride and a guy in a clown outfit would give you a lollipop?” and then there are 500 comments like: ”I remember! That guy's name was Morris Minkelstein and that Montgomery Ward is where I got my first pair of dungarees!”

Probably 20% of the comments all say exactly the same thing. If somebody asks a question like: ”Where was the Montgomery Ward?”, you will get 250 people all saying: ”on Northern Lights!”, ”on Northern Lights!”, because they all post before they read the other comments. They are Facebook boomers and every time they see something they think that person is asking them that question directly, like this is a personal website for them, and so in a lot of ways it is awful, like those emails you used to get from your dad or your granddad that had all those 8-bit graphics in it and the corniest jokes in the world about how getting old is isn't for sissies or whatever.

John got one of those the other day and couldn't believe it. It felt like it had been circulating in the geyser of the Internet for 20 years or something and it finally landed in John’s inbox. He almost saved it because he thought maybe it was a super-clever joke, but it just seemed like one of those emails with joke after joke after joke that felt like a thread almost. John hopes someone one day does an oral history of those dad emails.

The other day John was on this Anchorage website because he likes that stuff, like: ”Whatever happened to that building?”, or: ”Oh wow! Manny’s Taco Wagon! That guy was great!”, or there was a guy that stood downtown on a street corner and waved at every car that was a fixture for a long time.

Out at the Eklutna Indian Reservation, up on the bluff above the highway, guys from the reservation had brought couches and chairs out and set them up on the bluff. They weren't benches, but upholstered couches that sat out there all year, all through the winter, covered with snow. There would sometimes be 8-10 guys sitting up there on these couches watching the traffic go by, and if you waved at them or honked, they would wave. It was at a time when there was a lot less traffic on the roads and you could drive by and you would be the only car they had seen in a minute or 30 seconds, but they would wave every time.

They became almost a geological fixture. You could give directions to somebody like: ”When you see the guys on the couches, take the next exit!” Stuff like that doesn't exist anymore that you would forget about if it weren't for a Facebook page called So you grew up in Anchorage where everybody is posting that stuff.

Yesterday somebody posted a picture of a poster that John actually had in his room, taken by an Anchorage photographer named Myron Rosenberg in Anchorage. In the 1970s and 1980s posters were a big art form or home decorating form and there were lot of posters in the world. Anchorage had a lot of its own local posters that were local pride. Dan didn’t have posters on his wall of Philadelphia things, but he had posters of guys in the Eagles and Van Halen and the picture of Christie Brinkley with the Ferrari from National Lampoon's Vacation (probably this one). He never had the Kelly LeBrock one from Weird Science (this one?), but in retrospect he should have.

Alaska had so much that was unique to it. In the 1970s it was still far enough away. They had their own beer Prins Brow (?) and it was its own culture. There were a couple of different photographers that every year would take a picture of Anchorage from a different airborne perspective. They would go up in a small plane and find a great shot of Anchorage. You could see the mountains in the background, you could see all the latest buildings that had been built and you could see where your house was on this big panorama. They would sell these posters and everyone would have one. Every year you would get a new poster of the city of Anchorage.

Hot air balloons in Anchorage, insurance taking away all the cool things (RW183)

This picture that was posted on So you grew up in Anchorage was a picture of a bunch of hot air balloons all inflating midwinter fur rendezvous time, all starting to inflate, happening on the football field of John’s high school. You can't see the high school in the picture, but you can see his mom's office right behind it at Alyeska Pipeline that was right next door to his high school, the next building over. It is snow covered ground and these balloons are just these fantastic rainbow hot air balloons in every color.

John was shocked at the memory because when he was a kid in Anchorage hot air balloons were in the sky all the time, all year long, even when it was freezing cold in the winter. You would look up and see 15 hot air balloons in the far distance or right over your head. In the summer they were up all the time, too. Hot air ballooning was a sport and a tourist attraction, a fixture on the landscape. One night at maybe 8pm they were sitting in their dining room and heard the telltale sound of a hot air balloon, the propane burner, and it got louder and louder, and they ran outside to see what was going on.

They lived right next to a lake, and there was a hot air balloon that was coming down in the lake. It dropped down and they were hitting the gas and the basket touched the lake water with the burner full on and somehow they got enough lift that they could lift off. At the time John thought it was a narrowly averted crash, but later he wondered whether or not it was a stunt. It was a small lake and you can't steer a hot air balloon. He couldn't have set out to do it! They dropped down, touched the basket on the lake, and then they flew off!

Looking at these pictures John was suddenly struck by the insanity of it because you could not possibly launch 15 hot air balloons around the city of Seattle and just have them float around and maybe they are going to float into the ocean, maybe they are going to float into a building or into the airport traffic. They are just floating! Anchorage is a city surrounded by water and mountains. Their only steering is: If it looks like you are going to float out over the ocean, you dump gas and just go down as fast as you can. Down to earth is your only maneuver. If you are blowing into the mountains: Go down to earth! But then they stopped. There were balloons everywhere in the sky, and then there was a day where they were never there again.

It was a great poster that did hang on John’s bedroom wall and the person who posted it said in their little caption: ”Why don't we ever see balloons anymore? We used to see them all the time!” and 500 people commented: ”Insurance. Insurance. Insurance. Insurance. It's because of insurance. The insurance. It is the insurance!” Over and over, hilarious. Of course it was the insurance! That is why you don't have cool trucks anymore where you can take the roof off, because insurance! Insurance has taken all the dangerous cool things out of life and replaced them with uncool stuff. When there was enough sentimentality built up about the good old days when there was cool stuff, people tried to reintroduce cool-ish thing, but insurance made sure that the cool thing was not that cool.

If you took the Plymouth Prowler and you took off the 15 mile impact bumpers, it might even be a cool-looking car. It is a horrible car, even without the bumpers. but if you take the bumpers off it is a cooler looking car and looks like an H.R. Geiger version of an old hot rod. It becomes a little bit Alien vs Predator, or the alien in Aliens.

John is not against insurance, but he wants to live in a world where there are balloons in the sky on a hot summer night or on a cold winter's day. How can he separate that desire from the weird Boomer sentimentality about things? He doesn’t want to be somebody that doesn't get with the times and spends any time at all thinking about how great things used to be, but there aren’t balloons in the sky, and for someone to have never seen that, never look up and see beautiful rainbow balloons fly by, it seems like a small and unnecessary indignity.

Insurance is protecting whom? What is going to happen? What are those balloons going to do? How many hot air balloon crashes were there? Three people died? Five people took their lives into their own hands and climbed into an unstearable balloon? The balloon came down on some power lines and knocked out power for a while? They probably got in the way of airplanes, but even that! A balloon would get down out of the sky if it went anywhere near a big airport, and a little Cessna can fly around a freaking balloon. They move so slowly!

Why don’t billionaires have a dirigible? (RW183)

John always wonders why Elon Musk doesn't have a dirigible. It can’t be because of the hydrogen gas because he has access to inert gas that is probably lighter even than hydrogen with an atomic number of 1/2. If you were a billionaire and were just looking for dumb things to do? Bill Gates doesn't have a dirigible because Bill Gates is a conservative guy. He drives around in a Subaru Outback, he is not flashy, he doesn't want to be a showy, rich guy. But there are so many showy, rich guys who are like: ”Check me out! I live in an undersea lair and I am stealing nuclear submarines from all the world powers!”

Why wouldn't one of those Ding-Dong billionaires…? The young kid who started Snapchat decided he was going to buy up all the available real estate in Venice, California and make Venice an unlivable place. Until recently Venice had always been a scummy little hippie town, but now it is the most expensive real estate in California because this kid bought up all the stupid little two-story balloon warehouses and turned them into Snapchat offices. Why does that kid not have a dirigible, a giant one like the old U.S. Navy ones with two different gondolas and eight engines. You could just cruise the world, or just park that thing off of Catalina Island!

What an inspiration you would be to people around the world! ”Here is what a billionaire looks like! Like a crazy person!” A billionaire by definition is a crazy person. The day your assets go over $1 billion you long passed the threshold of being a crazy person. Why don't crazy people have more imagination? Why do they buy basketball teams? Why do they do such unimaginative things?

Dan knows a handful of people who have become exceptionally wealthy and who have tens of millions of dollars, and they all don't know what to do with the money. They don't spend it or donate it, they are not contributing it to people in need, but they continue to live in the same little house that they are in, not because they say it is enough for them and they would rather do some humanitarian things or philanthropy, but they just don't know what to do.

Dan would do so many amazing things if he had just a tiny little fraction of that money. First of all you would never hear from him again. He would never be on social media or podcasts ever again because he would be too busy doing things in the world.

John knew a guy in San Francisco, one of the guys who invented Quora and was doing other stuff, too. He had all this money and he bought a McLaren, but he lived in a one bedroom tech guy apartment with no art on the walls. He lived there because he a utilitarian mind and didn't need more, so he just had this one better apartment and a McLaren that he never drove because he wasn't really a very good driver or interested in driving, but he bought a McLaren because it was a car he had a poster of when he was a kid or something.

If Dan had for example $300 million dollars, he would have such a long list that they don't have enough time to go over this now. The first thing he would do is literally that no one would ever see or hear from him again. He would be out of America because he can't buy enough land here. Dan loves Telluride in Colorado (he has switched his way to pronounce Colorado for John’s sake and because he needs an affectation, they talk about it for a while).

John’s accent, dialect, and writing voice (RW183)

John does not have an accent and speaks flawless unaccented English. Pacific Northwest American English is the most accent-less of all spoken English (see discussion in RL154). As English has travelled away from the received pronunciation world of the Queen it has traveled the furthest when it reached the Pacific Northwest. Obviously they speak English in Australia and New Zealand, which are much further away, but they were colonies for much longer and psychologically it has travelled the furthest and has been away from the mother tongue the longest, both in time and distance, when it arrived in Seattle and ultimately in Alaska, where it has been honed to its diamond-like perfection.

John speaks uses a lot of dialect, he has a lot of found objects in his language. He doesn’t do a lot of intentional language games and goofs, he plays with language a lot, but he doesn’t say ”Colorado” to be difficult, but that is just how he says it. A lot of that is influenced by the fact that his mom had a very strong Western Ohio accent and lexicon from the depression era, real country, but not southern country, but Midwestern farm talk.

John’s dad’s parents were Victorians and had a crazy Jazz-age way of speaking. Their parents were born before the civil war! There was an additional lexicon with references, language jokes and language play, the mid-Atlantic clipped way of speaking, that John is very close to in terms of generations. His dad spoke a lot of that stuff and made fun of it, too. He was doing it often ironically, but John and most people weren't aware of the source material and it was unclear what comment he was making on the Coney Island washboard. John took all of that, both the original source material and the ironic commentary on it and assimilated it into the way he spoke.

Alaska had such a huge diversity of Americans. Sarah Palin talks the Fargo way and the people who immigrated to that part of Alaska were all farmers from Minnesota and ultimately from Norway who came directly to Alaska and started a very honest colony there. That is their native way of speaking! A lot of them are third or fourth generation Alaskans and they speak with that weird Norway/Minnesota voice. Tons and tons of people came up during the oil years from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. John’s uncle and his group of people were Ivy League people who had come to Alaska to start a new country, basically.

All of that language was in play all the time. Anchorage was like the Mos Eisley Cantina and everywhere you went people were talking every which way. There were very smart and educated people there and there were really uneducated people. Everybody had money and was firing on all cylinders. Even within the native Alaskans, there were five completely different language traditions where the languages didn't really bear any resemblance to each other. Native Alaskans don't all speak in the same language family. There are an awful lot of different peoples there.

At a certain point John abandoned the idea that he had to really follow any one path. The only thing he did believe in was grammar. He learned grammar well enough that he started to make grammar jokes in the way he spoke and a lot of those grammar jokes became habits and became unconscious, so they were no longer a grammar joke, but just sounded like bad grammar or invented grammar. John wasn't inventing it because he didn't know what the grammar was, but he had gone through this whole process of language play that then became habitual and had started to make him sound like an eccentric.

He would use the wrong vowel sound, he would put the accent on the wrong syllable, he would incorporate words from different languages, but either mispronounced or hyper-pronounced. All that stuff started as a game at some point, and then it became an eccentric way of speaking. John can't even remember some of the origin stories of pronunciations. He calls it Eugene, Oregon, originally probably to infuriate somebody, which was the point of a lot of language games because people are so self-serious about language and grammar.

John grew up in an era where kids learn grammar and the first thing they want to do is correct the people around them. Kids incompletely learn grammar and so it is one of the funny, charming things that kids do, where they say: ”You said that wrong!” and then it turns out that the kid is wrong because the kid learned one rule but didn't learn the 15 other rules. John loves to antagonize people like that or infuriate them, to catch them. This sounds twice as insufferable that you would be laying mouse traps for people, hoping that they were going to jump in and correct you, and then it turns out. John didn't do that for very long, it was a very 7th grade thing.

During that period of laying mousetraps for people John just realized sometimes the wrong way is more elegant or sounds more fun. It doesn't sound better, but more fun. Why wouldn't you call Eugene, Oregon? The people that get mad and say: ”It is Eugene!”, to pretend not to understand them and say: ”That is what I said!”, that is just so fun and John got habituated in playing that way and now he can't tell anymore how many words are… because he is not dyslexic, but he has made fun of words for so long that he doesn't even know what he is doing half the time.

Also, as a young kid when you learn words from books you sometimes put an extra syllable in. John heard a woman say ”particuly” and doesn’t even know how to say it because he has always said ”particularly” and maybe either one is the right one, he doesn’t even know. He will often put an extra vowel in words like that and that comes from from learning language from reading where you ghost over a word like that and you are sure there is another T and I in there somewhere. Particularly is a word that John is pronouncing incorrectly, but if you had asked him at the beginning this show if he was pronouncing that correctly, he wouldn't be able to tell you.

He also does a weird hyper-diction thing where he pronounces every syllable. He slurs plenty, but there are words that he hyper-doesn't-slur. It might have to do with song-writing and songs-singing because you can do whatever you want with pronunciation in a song, connecting language to song and realizing that speaking is singing and singing your speech in a way. John doesn’t speak-sing in his songs, but it goes the other way and when he write words he will think of them how they will sound read aloud.

John worked a long time on making his written voice and his speaking voice the same. When he first started writing his written voice was alien to him and he didn’t like it. He would write a long essay in his late teens, early twenties, and the mannerisms of his writing were just excruciating and wince-worthy. It wasn't the way he talked! It took him a long time to get those two voices to be the same and some of that process was that he started to speak in a way that was a little writerly or conscious of what this would be like if it were written.

At the same time he was trying to take all the strange mannerisms out of his writing and made it sound like he was speaking. He is pretty close to it, but he doesn’t write enough these days and can’t say that he has a clear writer's voice anymore, but when he does write something it is really hyper in his voice, which makes it feel a little unnatural. Whatever he writes now, it is always comedic. He is not writing grant-applications or something!

BONUS CONTENT

+ show block

This week’s bonus content was attached to the main show and was available to everybody.

Dan preparing for doing a newsletter (RW183)

If Dan writes anything it is code. He hasn’t had a chance to really sit down and write except stupid newsletters and updates and stuff. Currently he is writing notes in gearing up for a newsletter that he will be doing. He has been gearing up for it for six months. He will do a lot of research, which is a reaction to a life that was spent mostly with impulsive decisions, making decisions impulsively, not thinking things through, agreeing to things that would later come back to torment and haunt him, so now he will spend a long time researching something, thinking about something, looking it up, trying it on like a jacket for a while and wearing it before he really commits to doing something, but when he does it, he will see it through until forever, until there is an end.

That is not what he used to do at all. He was constantly abandoning things and would start them and get very excited about the beginning part of things and then he realized he bit off more than he could chew and couldn’t do these other 20 things that he committed to and he had to cancel half of them. Dan spent a long portion of his life doing that kind of thing and now he takes his time, he plans, and he thinks almost to the point that it seems like procrastination, but it is deep contemplation.

Talking about doing this newsletter, he wants it to be great and he won't do it unless it is great. He is slowly researching all the different pieces that he would put together on the back-end to make it work and then then he will start writing again. Dan has been writing his whole life, he started writing when he was a kid, he got a degree in writing, so it is still there. Writing is the one thing that he does that comes naturally and effortlessly to him. It is the only thing that he is really good at. Writing code he is average. He has good ideas and if you were to compare his code to someone else's code, it would be fine and good, but no-one is reading it had gets his mind blown.

Writing has always been the thing that he has been fantastically good at and it is very easy for him to do it, but he has to feel enchanted by whatever the thing is he is writing about, so he has been holding off on the newsletter until he really nails the thing that he wants to do. John thinks his newsletter is going to be great!

If Dan was going to write a non-fiction book, it would be the story of John’s life, birth to death! There continues to be some confusion about whether or not the stories John tells are 100% true or whether they are 120% true. What matters is that John believes it. Like that story with the dog, that was real to John, but Dan knows there was no dog and it didn't even happen. The story where John was running around one night and was high on something and a dog came and it spent the evening with him and at the end of the evening John just said goodbye and the dog just ran off into a field. Dan will treat that as a factual story for the book.

Dan did not enjoy history when he was younger growing up, but that changed in college when he had a really great history teacher who provided a lot of background information, whether they were talking about carpet-baggers or the trenches in World War I, he was able to bring so much detail and backstory and humanization of the stories that it changed Dan’s perspective on it. Ever since then, and even more as he gets older, he truly enjoys reading about history and learning about the people, more the people than the actual things that happen. He is not as interested in how a specific battle was fought and how many casualties there were, he is more interested in the personal stories behind that or how people around it were affected. He is not qualified to write a book on that because he doesn't know enough about it, and the things that interest him he doesn’t think anyone would buy a book about.

Dan wanting to write a book or do a podcast about UFOs (RW183)

There is no autobiographical aspect of Dan’s life that anyone would want to read. If Dan would write a good book about his life he would have to wait for a lot of people to be gone because he knows too much and it would be a tell all. He would like to write a book on the UFOs, that would be fascinating for him because he has a lot of research for 30 years, about alien abductions and UFOs and things like that, but there are enough crackpots out there ruining that space already and politicizing it so that it makes him not want to be a part of it anymore.

The USS Nimitz UFO incident that is in the media right now (the Tic Tac video that was declassified) seems to be a lot of what people are seeing right now. It would be interesting to trace the different shapes of UFOs that people report seeing. The Tic-Tac is one of the newer ones. In the 1940s/50s and really through the 1960s UFO reporting didn't really exist in the same way and you were immediately labeled as insane if you even claimed to see something like this. The military industrial complex was in its early stages and wouldn't acknowledge something like this.

Back then you saw flying saucers because they were saucer shaped. Eventually people started to see other things for a while, they would say cigar shaped‚ then of course you have the infamous triangular shaped UFOs which people claimed to see more and more often. A lot of people would claim that the TR3B, which is what the triangular shaped UFO is called, is actually one of ours, in that we have appropriated advanced alien technology and we are building those. There is this whole conspiracy theory within the UFO conspiracy theory of people saying that we are actually building UFOs and sending them out amongst the existing UFOs so that if and when there is a real alien invasion we can cover it up or vice versa.

That is not Dan’s thing and he is not interested in that. He doesn’t get into a conspiracy theory thing, they can talk about JFK another time because he has been doing a lot of research in that over the last few years. There is a really good series on YouTube by a guy who does this stuff for a living, talking about JFK, and there is still a lot to figure out there, and a lot to unpack in that space.

When it comes to UFOs Dan is more interested in what is really going on. The Tic-Tac shape, what he likes about that is that it is an impossible object that behaves in an impossible way. It comes to a complete stop, it accelerates to barely visible speeds almost instantaneously, it can turn at 90 degree angles, it can increase or decrease its altitude almost instantaneously, and when it moves it does so at random angles and doesn't have a certain angular relationship to the earth. In other words, a plane has to fly flat unless it is performing a maneuver that it is pulling off, but these don't have any such limitations.

They are reported in all kinds of altitudes, they are captured by space station footage, they are captured by pilots all the time. That is a very interesting one to Dan and he is pretty sure that the ones that people suspect that we are building look very different and don't behave that way because the ability that we have to understand this technology is in its infancy. If we were in fact building these things. We may have figured out the the anti-gravity propulsion stuff, but we are not able to build full machines the way that whatever technologies built those is.

John wants to know more and would start a whole separate show on UFOs. Dan was wanting to do that for a long time, but this space has been polluted and perverted because now you can't look at any of this stuff without it being politicized, without it being connected to QAnon, which Dan doesn't care about at all. None of that stuff is interesting to him. He is a-political. He follows it, he pays attention, he votes, but it is not something he wants to talk about. Now for whatever reason UFOs and all of this stuff has been completely co-opted by that movement and it is very difficult to talk about any of this stuff without it being like that.

Dan doesn’t want to throw himself into that crowd because it is not interesting, which is tough because he really wants to talk about it. He grew up listening to Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM, it was his bread and butter and his favorite thing to listen to. David Jacobs was a professor at Temple University where Dan’s dad worked for pretty much his whole career, and he worked with Budd Hopkins for a long time and is one of these people who talks to people who claim to have had encounters or abduction experiences. He has written lots of books on this topic.

There are people who are simply more focused on UFOs, like: What is going on? What is happening in the sky? What are these objects we have now? The Navy is admitting that there are things we don't know about in the sky. They won't say they are from another planet or another dimension, but they are not ours and we don't think they are anyone else’s either because the technology to do this stuff doesn't seem to make sense.

There are people who focus just on the facts, like: Here was a sighting. Tell us about that sighting! But then there are other people like David Jacobs who talk about the abduction experience, who try to chronicle that, who try to get information from people about that, but people are horrible when it comes to remembering things accurately, including Dan himself. We all struggle to remember things accurately, even when we are paying close attention.

The only things that people in this space can rely on is what essentially becomes an anecdotal story told by a so-called abductee. If your memory of what you did first this morning when you woke up is kind of cloudy, like: Did you get a drink of water first? Did you brush your teeth first? Are you sure? Are you positive? In what order did you turn the lights off last night in your kitchen and your dining room? Was it the dining room first or the kitchen first?

It is hard to remember little details like that and oftentimes if you are emotional it is impossible to remember exactly what the details were. They have done so many tests and studies where they had someone come into a room of college kids during a lecture and shout something or do something and run out of the room. Then they asked what color shirt he was wearing and if you had 100 students you probably had 50 different answers because especially in in a situation like that our memories are unclear and we don't do a good job of remembering those details.

If you're trying to get somebody to talk about an abduction experience, of course it is a stressful and emotional experience, even if it is fully imagined. Dan had dreams where he woke up and had been emotionally freaked out or devastated because of it. As a result of that, you have these people who were regressing these people through a basic kind of hypnotic suggestion and Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs have created an incredibly rigid protocol that they use when they are talking to people who are attempting to recount these experiences and they ask questions in a very specific way as to try to reduce that type of response in someone where they they do not want to unintentionally guide or instruct or inform and answer. Even so it is hard.

There is something going on, even if it is a medical condition that causes these people to hallucinate the same way. Whatever it is, something is going on, a medical condition, a mental state, or an actual abduction, we don't know, but something is going on. These kinds of things are fascinating to Dan and he would love to write a book about this, but there are people who know much more than he does, so why even bother?

When Dan was in college he had an English class that was one of his technical writing classes. As an example of technical writing, the teacher was teaching a book by Robert M. Pirsig called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a fantastic book and the overarching topic is the pursuit of quality and what does quality mean. The teacher. Dr. Jones had been spent five years writing a book about quality and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance.

Then he met two other dudes who had spent 10 years together writing a book on this. When he met them he said he was not going to bother then because they were five years past him and there were two of them. Dan feels like any entry he would have in this space… but he could do a podcast about it because the podcasts that are out there about it are all done by people who are cosplayers almost, they are super fans who believe everything.

Dan doesn't believe anything! He doesn't believe that there are UFOs or that there aren't UFOs. He doesn’t believe that they are or are not either or both in tandem to one another. He has no belief at all about it. He simply wants to know. He wants to believe, sure, bu he does not have an opinion either way, which makes him the perfect person to talk about it, because he is open-minded to both the fact that there are or are not UFOs, he is Schrodinger's UFO in the sense that he neither believes nor does not believe until something happens.

These people that say that they go up on the ship and everything else, they are not in control of themselves and they can't secretly sneak like an alien paperclip out of there. They're not able to do that, generally speaking. If these are true, how come that out of the millions and millions of people who talk about this stuff we don't have one single reliable artifact? That makes it very hard for a lot of people to believe. In all of those times, there should be one person who was going be able to take something back. There are weird things, people who have weird scars, weird injuries, people who claim to wake up and they are in someone else's clothing because maybe they were doing something on a ship and they just grabbed the wrong shirt.

That doesn't prove anything! You are just in a red polo, that is all that proves. Despite all of the attention that this is getting now, whether it is in the mainstream media, with the Space Force, or the work that Tom DeLonge is doing, trying to shed light on this stuff, the admission from the US Navy about videos being legit and pilots seeing this all the time, it is still seen as fringe and kooky nuts-o conspiracy theory stuff. As interested as Dan has always been in this, he doesn’t really want to throw in with that group because you open yourselves up to so much garbage and Dan doesn’t have time for that, he has other things to do That is why he is not writing a book right now.

Tom DeLonge from the band Blink 182 got interested in UFOs and he wanted to try to shed more light on all of this and get to the bottom of it or try to get people to treat it more seriously. He started a UFO research firm and has for whatever reason managed to get a lot of buy-in from scientists and the news and he is regarded as an authority in this space and people seem willing to talk to him and go to him and discuss it with him.

A lot of people who study this stuff are now saying that he is unwittingly being used as a mouthpiece for the secret agenda of those who really know about what is going on behind the scenes and he is himself unwittingly part of a limited hangout and is actually sharing propaganda without even knowing that he is being used in this way. Any leaks that he is getting and any materials that he is being shown are part of a bigger conspiracy to mislead us, the populace, through him. They seized the opportunity when he started doing this and are feeding him falsehoods. Dan doesn’t know if that is true, but any serious attention be given to this topic is worth it. It has been there for so long and if we have an opportunity to learn more about it, we should.

John seeing an UFO in the desert when the brakes on his van failed (RW183)

One time John saw a UFO. The Long Winters were on tour. They used to pull over in the middle of the night to take what they called star breaks. When they were in the western United States they often were traveling through parts of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado that were some of the darkest places in America. If they were driving through those places in the middle of the night and John was behind the wheel, he would pull off the road, go up a dirt road a couple of miles out into the middle of the desert, wake everybody up and say: Star break! and they would all get out and stand in the desert and look up at the stars.

Unfortunately John has bad vision and is looking at them through his glasses, which is never quite the same, but still phenomenal environments. You can see that in Alaska, too, which is what inspired him, because growing up in Alaska, if you get out of town any distance, you can look up and see amazing things in the sky. Of course Alaska is very far north so the sky looks different and in these desert states often you can see from horizon to horizon and you have a lot of sky to deal with.

They were in Las Vegas and they were headed to Los Angeles because they had been invited to play on the cool Indie Rock cool radio station KCRW there that had a very cool program called The Young and the Restless, maybe. They were never on it because they were invited to play it, they headed to Los Angeles in order to play it, and then they called and canceled it the last minute. This was one of those things that every Indie Rock band has played and they were extremely disappointed.

John didn’t just want to sit in Vegas for a day and he didn’t want to go to Los Angeles a day early. So why don't we go to Death Valley? They had never been to Death Valley, there is no reason to go to Death Valley, but they could just turn around and drive up there and go through Death Valley. Death Valley is very mountainous there and you have to go up over mountains and then on the other side you have to go up over mountains again.

They went over these incredibly steep mountain range with their fully loaded van and they found this to be true over the years that when the van was fully loaded with gear and dudes, the brakes were pretty heavily taxed on steep mountain roads and it was Death Valley, so it was hot. By the time they got down to Death Valley their brakes had overheated to the point that they were visibly glowing red. They got down to Death Valley and let the brakes cool off, they spent a little time down there, marveling at this extraordinary place.

But they were meant to be in LA the next day and couldn't stay forever. They got in the van and the breaks had cooled down enough and they drove off and now the sun was going down. They drove up the ridge on the other side and it took them way, way high up again, and at the crest of that they realized that they had to go down an entire other mountain thousands of feet to the desert floor. The breaks had cooled, but not overnight or anything, but just for an hour or two. They were still screwed.

They started down this hill and John was trying to use the brakes as sparingly as he could, but it wasn't long before they heated up again and now it was dark and they heated up so much that they could tell from inside the van that they were red hot and they were failing. They pulled over to the side of the road and they had some water in the truck and they threw the water on the brakes and there was steam everywhere and they realized that throwing water on the brakes, what is that going to do to the whole thing? It could warp it, but they were glowing so hot that they were afraid they were going melt some important equipment and then they would be stranded.

They were standing there next to this steaming wreck of their van, everything turned off, wondering how long they should wait there in the dark before getting on the road again. They started to do what they do during a star break, just wander off 50 feet in some direction into the desert. They were always conscious of snakes and spiders and werewolves and stuff, but it was always the middle of the night when they were out kicking around.

John was wandering down a road, looking up at the ridge-line of a mountain range that was off to the north of them and there was a tall power line tower with red lights on it, widely spaced and otherwise it was completely dark desert floor. They were looking around, some of them were looking at the ground in the moonlight, some of them looking up at the stars, and somebody said: ”Look at that!” and they turned and realized that there wasn't a power line and that this giant tower that had far-spaced red lights on it where the where the power cables would go to keep it from getting hit by airplanes was actually moving.

They all stood there and watched as it very slowly moved and was rotating and they watched it move behind the mountain. John had noted it as a power line and then looked elsewhere, so by the time someone said: ”What is happening over there?” and they all turned their attention to it they were watching it as it moved behind the mountains. When John had noted it as a power line it was on the mountain already and he looked away, so they only recognized it as something for 15 seconds before it was gone and they were all alone in the dark and there were no red lights or lights of any kind.

They immediately started talking about it, comparing stories, and in the 15 seconds that the four of them had looked at it, all four of them had a completely different description of what they had seen. John’s description of it as a giant tower of power lines that had come to life and was moving across the sky was not at all what any of the other dudes saw. They each described a thing in the sky having different colored lights than John saw, shaped differently than John saw, moving differently than John saw.

It had just happened, but within a minute they were in complete disagreement about what they had seen and they all got back in the truck and just stared out the windows, trying to make sense of how they could have seen such a thing. They only really collectively looked at it! John saw it, he just didn't realize it was moving and thought it was this. They said it wasn't a tower at all, it was a rhombus or it was a perfect circle.

They got back in the truck and realized that the brakes were were gone. They were completely burned up. They put the truck in gear, started the motor, and started down the hill, and because they were in complete desert they could see forever. John took them all the way down that mountain without touching the brakes. It got scary, they were going pretty fast and the road was doing its thing, but it was a big, wide, curvy road built probably by the Corps of Engineers. They drove all the way down through the mountains and then through the desert on the California side never touching the breaks.

John had done this a couple of times in the course of all the years of being on tour where he wondered how far he could go before he had to touch the brakes. It was a thing he had practiced and he managed to get all the way to Ridgecrest, California where there was a hotel, an auto repair place, and a restaurant. Everything was closed, but they checked into the motel and in the morning they took the van three doors down to the Ford dealer, went to the diner and had pancakes, and by mid-morning the Ford dealer had replaced all of the breaks at great expense, and they made it to LA in time for the show and Space Land that night.

It all worked out, but John still thinks about that UFO and how clearly he would have described it to a researcher, and if the interviewer had interviewed Eric Corson and Nabil Ayers the next day, they would have said it had white lights and it was shaped like a banana and it made a wooshing sound.