Search Engine - Does anyone actually like their job? (classic)

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

... Or, am I being lied to by a Brooklyn-based musician? At twenty-five, I had a question for The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. This week, I finally got to ask it. Support the show To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello! This week we're rebroadcasting one of our favorite episodes. It's about a question that actually haunted me for most of my 20s. Does anyone actually like their job? One of Search Engine's pet obsessions, you may have noticed, is work. And this episode was the first time we took a swing at that pinata. This year, we're starting the practice of periodically rebroadcasting some of our favorite episodes, at least on the main feed. Our incognito mode, which you can sign up for at searchengine.com, does not air rebroadcast.

But honestly, I'm pretty happy to play this one for you again. Listening this week to it again for the first time since we aired it in 2023, I remembered that for me, I'm constantly on this strange wheel of samsara with work, loving it, feeling pummeled by it, wondering if I'll ever find some kind of balance or if that balance is even a real thing. And I found that our silly question and our exploration of its answers

had actually given me some guidance, some notes towards some kind of solution. Anyway, please enjoy the story after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI. If you ever worked with an IT team, you know how quickly their day gets eaten up by repetitive tickets, password resets, access requests, onboarding. It all adds up. And as your company grows, those requests just keep piling higher, pulling your team away from the work that actually moves the business forward. That's where Serval comes in.

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at serval.com slash search. That's s-e-r-v-a-l-com slash search. This episode of search engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients keep more of what they earn, Vanguard is here to help you with that. Vanguard is slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds. That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors in 87 of their funds. In an increasingly high-priced world, Vanguard is staying true to excellence without expense. With Vanguard, your clients get access to sophisticated, active, and index bond funds at industry-leading low costs, backed by a fixed-income team that's truly obsessed with consistent outperformance. Lower fees don't just mean savings. They give Vanguard's skilled

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This little movie I'd play myself in my mind to calm down when my brain was too jittery and I couldn't sleep. I'd picture myself walking down my block late at night, completely alone, when all of a sudden this guy would come around the corner. And it would be me, but older. And I'd have just a moment in passing to ask him,

does it work out? And this older, grizzled version of me would just like sagely nod his head and then disappear, presumably into the fog of night. Just to be clear, this anxiety I had about my future, it was not about my health or my friend's health or who was going to be president. From about 2006 to 2014, what I fervently stayed up all night thinking about was whether one day I would get to do the thing I'm doing exactly right now in this moment. I wanted to tell stories for a living.

I was living in New York, a college dropout, with a decent temp job doing research and editing for a radio journalist. But I wanted to tell stories myself. I wanted this the way people forced underwater want oxygen. I was convinced that if I could have this, every other problem would take care of itself. And I'd just be in a permanent state of happiness. Like, I would not feel pain. Taking ecstasy would be like drinking room temperature tap water. 24-7 nirvana, if I could just get a job telling you,

true, reasonably amusing stories. My life had a focus, perhaps too much focus. Because on the flip side, I was also convinced that if this didn't happen, no matter what else worked out, I would be miserable. There's a word for this toxic condition, this poisonous, all-or-nothing kind of thinking. It's called ambition. You get a glimpse of a life you want. You fix on it. And from that moment on, you feel intense all over pain every moment you're not there. I now know that despair is not a rare feature of anyone's 20s. Even very fortunate people often spend that decade stuck in a life they don't want without a clear path to the one they'd prefer. But that despair felt like most things about life then, completely unique to me. I couldn't find a container that could hold it. My boss at the time

had this sign above their desk that said, quote, shown having no alternative on the nothing new. I became convinced that everyone in a job was miserable, that the entire world was filled with people who spent Friday dreading Monday, that anyone who claimed to like their job was just lying, to me, personally, for what reason I'm not sure. But then I heard about this band. They were called the Hold Steady. Indy rock music, the kind of band that seems to have zero casual fans, either you've seen them 100 times or you don't really get it. I got it. The songs I thought were perfect.

Stories about down-and-out partiers in America. People with fucked up lives who had slid far off the path of their own dreams, but still had a sense of humor about it. Constitutionally unable to enjoy something without becoming obsessed with it, I got very obsessed with the band. And in particular, with this one small part of their mythology, I'd heard about how the singer, Craig Finn, had supposedly had a very strange path into his music career. And the story of that path gave me a kind of hope.

What I had heard on the internet was that before the hold steady, Craig Finn had languished in a drab office job. In one version of the story, he was an IT guy at Goldman Sachs. And this legend, it was believable because Finn was a balding, horn-rimmed, glass-swearing guy with a pretty nasal voice. The joke in the reviews of the band was sometimes that he had. actually looked more like an accountant than a rock singer. In the version of the story I'd heard, he'd basically become an accountant, and he'd had to make peace with it. But then, after years

languishing in a job he didn't want, he started this new band, just for fun, to hold steady. And that band had taken off. It had rescued him from his life. And there was a little more evidence for this story, the story of a guy who late in life had escaped a job he hated and found when he loved. When I'd see them play live over and over again, there's this thing he'd almost always do, towards the end of the set. He started to tell stories. And then on the stage, he'd offer something that felt almost like a prayer. Man, I say the same thing almost every night.

I'm not fooling anyone. But I only say it because it's true. Where he would just express pure gratitude that his life had worked out, that he got to do his job for a living. There is so much joy in what we do up here. I want to thank you for being here to share that. And I came to understand that maybe I was going to all these concerts really just for that moment. Maybe I really needed to believe that someone really did love his job, that everybody else wasn't just faking it the way I was faking it.

But being constitutionally incapable of not becoming obsessed with things, I started to think about it too much. And I started to wonder, like really wonder, what if Craig Finn was lying? because I knew that even most dream jobs eventually become jobs. They become onerous. And if Craig Finn had ever just once publicly said in some interview that he loved his job, and if people had responded to that, he would have been bound to that fiction forever.

For years, stuck in my own unhappiness, I wondered about his happiness, wondered if it was real. I would plot and scheme about ways to ask him about it, or I might get a real answer. in 2014, I bid in a charity auction where the prize was, you got to go jogging with Craig Finn. I had this idea that if I asked him when he was sort of winded, then I'd get a real answer. I won the auction, but I never sent the email to book the actual run. The band's manager even followed up with me,

but I ducked his emails. I chickened out. Whenever I'd see Craig Finn's name after that, I'd feel this little jolt of embarrassment and regret. In the years that followed, a lot of things would happen in my life. Over a decade later, I think I'm now actually the age I was picturing back then when I couldn't sleep. That grizzled older version of myself. But now, with a podcast, where I get to call people and ask them all sorts of questions.

Questions about ambition. Questions about jobs. Questions about how to survive as a person. So, after the break, Craig Finn. It never happens at a good time. The pipe bursts at midnight. The heater quits on the coldest night. Suddenly, you're overwhelmed.

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alongside politicians and thinkers like Corey Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back to the show. A few months ago, I tried just sending Craig Finn an email. telling him where I was coming from and asking if he might be up

for what could be a slightly unusual conversation. He said he was game. Okay, so I think my first question for you was just, can you give me a picture of, like, your early life? Like, how old were you when you first decided the job you wanted was musician? I think, I mean, I remember telling my babysitter

when I was really young that I wanted to be a rock and roll singer, like when I was like, I don't know, eight. I was listening to bands like to Bay City Rollers and Kiss and getting really enthused about music and also the monkeys who were on TV. It looked like that was the best job, you know?

It looks like I think there was the camaraderie of being in a band that looked fun. Yeah. The ability to burst into song. It seemed like girls liked guys and bands. Like the whole thing looked pretty great. And I was a very mild-mannered nerdy kid, so like it was not, it didn't seem like I was destined for it.

But it's what I wanted. And I think it led me before too long, probably to ask for an electric guitar. And what did your parents do? Oh, my dad worked for Ernst & Young, the accounting firm. And my mom was a homemaker since I was born. So they were not rock and roll people. But they were very supportive. And maybe I was half saying I'll probably work in the music industry.

And did you feel like, I think one of the things that people use a lot ambition. and I think what's weird about my relationship to that word is that it sounds like a powerful feeling. It's like I'm going to do all this stuff. But whenever I've experienced it, it's been like a painful feeling. It's like I want this thing. I see a huge gap between my life and the life I want. And I feel like I'm on the other side of the glass and it like hurts.

Like did you feel that way towards music? Yeah, I mean, one thing I can point to is like in college, I went to Boston College and I was writing for the school newspaper. I was like reviewing records. And that was, you know, I did that, and maybe I did okay at it, but, like, I got the feeling that that wasn't the side of it I wanted to be on. Yeah. And then a friend of mine had started a booking agency, and she was booking cool bands

and maybe a little more part of this indie scene than I was. And I started hanging out with her and helping her with some of her stuff. And again, it just got me closer to bands, made me realize, like, what I wanted to do was to just play my own songs and have a band, rather than do sort of this, you know, whatever involves booking a tour. Now turn your stereo up and your TV on to cable channel 6. Here's your host, Amy Doll. This video clip is from December 1997.

A 26-year-old Craig Finn is playing with his up-and-coming band, Lifter Puller, on live public television in St. Cloud. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Lifter Puller on Monday Night Live. Thereafter, we'll refer to this. In the video, Craig Vinn looks quite young and like a guy who maybe did not have time to change after work. He's wearing a red Oxford tucked into Chino's, playing a telecaster covered in stickers.

I will say, lifter-puller, I do not love the way I would love what would come later, the hold steady. Honestly, it might just be that the lyrics are harder to make out. But I do feel like I can already hear some of what Craig Vennel. Finn is going to do really well in his next band. He's going to tell these gossipy stories about an underground world that he has this magic ability to conjure. This seedy, sleazy underbelly of Minneapolis that might only exist in Craig Finn's own imagination. People here are always waking

up high and bewildered on intersections that alliterate. The drug dealers cross past with the sorority girls. Everybody wonders about this mysterious fire set at a nightclub called the nice nice. It's a world you can sink into. The characters from one song, sometimes cameo, and another. By the time lifter puller started in earnest, Craig Finn had decided not to pursue his music industry job as a booking agent. In his mind, it just didn't feel right to be working in the industry while simultaneously trying to make it as a musician. Like, maybe people wouldn't take him seriously. So he got a real day job. And the job he got, not what you'd expect from a man staying up all night in clubs, singing songs about arsonists and drug dealers and pimps.

It wasn't the one I'd heard. He wasn't an IT guy at Goldman Sachs, but honestly, it was pretty close. I started working in American Express Financial Advisors, which has a big campus downtown Minneapolis. So you were working in American Express Financial Advisors while you were in Lifter-Puller? Yeah, yeah. It was really kind of an interesting, spectacular place. I started out in the annuities department, and people would call it.

all in and you tell them you their balance and you do small transactions for them. You know, I'd wear a headset mic and there'd be, it would be like this like football field sized office, right? Like, you know, and everyone had their little cubicle. And there were a lot of young people that worked there. So there was its own scene, you know? I mean, what was the scene like? It was weird, you know?

I mean, it was like the office kind of experience that in some ways it's very stereotypical. Like you'd have a Christmas party and people would misbehave. Yeah. You know? I remember there were these guys. that I'd hang out with sometimes. And they would, they would, they were, like, go out almost every night. And then they'd come in and they'd rate their hangovers.

And they would, like, we had, like, an intranet system, you know, like, so you could, like, talk to each other. And I can't remember what the level, I think level six was you threw up at work. That's great. That's so, such a low number of throwing up at work. Yeah, I mean, and it's funny. The thing was, is there'd be a tax season. where people would need their tax forms and whatever. Yeah.

And it would get really busy. And it was really awful. Like, people would have to wait on hold for, like, a long time before they talked to you. They'd be really angry when they got you. Yeah. And so, like, I remember during that period each year, not wanting to go to work, like, lying in bed and being like, I don't want to go there today, you know? A lot of people face with a job they don't love,

survived just by living in their imagination. or looking forward to nights and weekends. Craig Vinn, for whatever reason, decided the way he would thrive at American Express Financial Advisors was he would just apply himself to the job more deeply. He realized there were these tests he could take

to climb up the corporate ladder. It kind of was like a company-wide directive that you had to pass what they called a Series 6 exam, which is a regulatory thing. Okay. And a lot of people had problems passing that exam. And I think a lot of people were in different place than I.

They were their parents, et cetera, and they just didn't have time to deal with it. I was able to pass it pretty easy. And so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to go get this series seven. Listening to Craig Finn talked about all this, I have a moment that feels like genuine disassociation. This person who I admire so much, his ability to tell stories, his ability to make music that has sustained me as a human. He's talking about his linked-in corporate accomplishments

with such straightforward normal pride. It feels like we've slipped and fallen into some other multiverse. where I'm now a hiring manager trying to figure out if Craig Finn would be a good fit, synergy-wise, for my team. Series 7 allows you to trade stocks and bonds. So I went and studied for that, and then I got Series 24, which for every amount of Series 7s you have, you need a Series 24 to kind of sign off on their transactions.

So I saw this exam taking as a way to kind of make myself indispensable. Yeah. And through that, I moved up to a wealth management. area. And so you're not, were you, when you would go into work at your day job, was it like, it sounds like it felt fine. Like it doesn't sound like it was like a life of quiet desperation. It was like an insurance policy that was supporting. Yeah, it was exactly that. And it allowed for some stability. I mean, you know, my bandmates largely were doing more like, you know, freelance stuff. They were like catering and things like that. And that was, felt more stressful to

me than getting a paycheck every two weeks. So just to remind you of the question I'd actually come here to answer, I'd wanted to know if Craig Finn liked his job as an indie rock star. It had never occurred to me to ask the much stranger question of, before he was an indie rock musician, did Craig Finn like his job working at American Express? But he had. He liked it fine. So the first thing that surprised me is that Craig Finn, like pretty much every person I've ever met,

was better adjusted in his 20s than I was. When he looked at his life then, what he saw was a steady paycheck to let him focus on his real passion, Lifter Puller, a band that was becoming Minneapolis famous. One day he got a call from a guy above him on the Amex corporate ladder. There was a guy who called down and said, hey, do you follow local music at all? And I was like, yeah, bit.

And he goes, there's a band called Lifter Puller and their singer has the same name as you. And he didn't think for one second it could be me. Stuff like that would happen, and it was cool, but lifter-puller struggled to break out beyond the local scene. And pretty soon, the band realized they'd probably gone as far as they were going to go. Lifter-puller breaks up, and Craig Finn goes from being Craig Finn from Lifter-puller to just Craig-Finn, ordinary person.

He moves to New York. He gets a new day job doing the thing he said he wouldn't do, working on the business side of the music industry. He joins this tech startup. They were trying to stream concerts online in grainy early millennium quality internet video. It was 2000. It was kind of his first internet boom, you know? And it was kind of that time where there was a lot of internet companies and there was

like, no one knew how they were going to make money, but you like ate cereal and sat in beanbag chairs. So I knew a lot of people that were doing gigs like that. And I moved on a Friday and I started on a Monday. And I didn't have the job when I moved. He was 29 years old. He'd made peace with the idea that professional. musician had just been a fun, youthful dream. Was he miserable? No, of course not. He was fine. A couple years passed. He told himself he'd still write songs just for himself, just for fun.

In fact, the story he started to tell himself was that maybe part of the problem with Lifter Polar, his final artistic endeavor, had just been that the fun of making music had been kind of ruined by ambition. So he and a few friends decide to start a new band with the explicit goal of not being successful, of not taking off. Because he knows now that success, or the desire to have success, can be a kind of poison. So they make some ground rolls.

I mean, it was comical what we were talking about. One was that we weren't going to play any shows. You didn't want to, why? Because I surmised, perhaps correctly, that when you move the gear, that's when the trouble starts. Wait, what does that mean? You know, like, once you get, like, I mean, I think it was like, okay, so you know,

When the lifter puller, you go out and you're like, you want to be in a rock band, but, you know, you start out your rock band. And you end up learning a lot about your van because it breaks down a lot, you know? And, like, suddenly, like, all your time is, like, auto repairs, you know? And I'm like, well, this wasn't exactly what I imagined. Once you get, like, move the gear and get it in a van and go play a show, then that's when the fighting starts. Between the band. Yeah. So it's like, well, if we just, like, drank beer on Tuesday nights and played, wouldn't that be, like, the most fun?

part of it, and then, you know, no pressure. But of course, that wasn't going to work. Second, someone asked us to play a show, we're like, okay, yeah, you know. This show, not a show exactly. This invitation for the least ambitious band in Brooklyn went thusly. Some guy had a comedy troupe. It's called Mr. Ass.

Mr. Ass. Yeah. And they were doing this thing at Arlene Grocery, and they're like, do you want to do, like, bumper music? Like, get a band together. Do, like, bumper music? It'll be like, you know, when we're changing sets, you'll play back in black. No singing. So I was like, yeah, that sounds fun. That's something to do.

So we go and do that. And are they doing, like, improv sketch? Yeah, yeah. So they're doing improv, a scene ends, and then you guys will play like... And then they like, you know... So we did that twice. And the second time they're like, hey, do you guys have any songs? You could just warm up the crowd, play a song.

And I showed the guy's knuckles, which ends up being the first hold steady. song we ever had. I've been trying to get people to call me Freddy Knuckles. People keep calling me right said Fred. And it's hard to keep trying when half your friends are dying. It's hard to hold it steady when half your friends are dead already. And so we played that. And that was, I guess, the first hold steady show.

But then after two of those, we were like, yeah, you know what was the most fun part about that is when we played our own song. Remember, they weren't going to be ambitious. They weren't going to turn this into a real thing. The trouble starts when you move the gear. But they were having fun. So they figured maybe they just take the songs they were playing and record them. They made a demo.

They kind of liked it. They made another. They realized, oh, you could sort of put these together. It would almost be like an album. We just combined them and called it a record. But it was really started with demos. And did it feel as easy? Like, you're describing it as like,

not accidental but just breezy I think I knew that there was a power in keeping it light or something you know or keeping it you know

if you take whatever the opposite of desperation is yeah I think people really react to that and so we're kind of like whatever you know I mean that was always my thing about how the whole study

was going to operate at least at the beginning it was like every time we have 10 songs we'll call it an album you know like And that way you're not like recording 25 songs and being like, which are the best? And how do we perfectly sequence them? And how do we make our masterpiece? Like, no, you know, we got 10 songs. Want to hear them?

It's so, there's like a part of my brain that refuses to accept the story. Because I think that I, in my mind, things that succeed are the product of like worry and desperation and painfulness and like fussing. and like, it's so, it feels like you're praying to a different God than me. Well, we were, we were, I mean, we were the antithesis of something, you know, like a lot of the music that was happening there was really syncopated and pretty tight. And we were kind of this big sloppy bar rock band. Kiss with broken hearts and kids with broken bones. And I think people were kind of like weirdly refreshed by it.

And it took pressure off in a way that, like, I don't know, maybe at that point in my life, I just didn't need pressure on the art. When I was in my 20s, I was unhappy in a challenging job, and so I fell in love with this band called The Hold Study because they seemed like they were having fun at work, and I needed that to be true. What I didn't know then was that it was true,

but it hadn't happened by accident. The singer, it turned out, had already learned a lesson that was about a decade away from me. The lesson was this. The desire to succeed can give you what you want while at the same time removing your ability to enjoy it. And there's a secret power sometimes and just not trying so hard.

In the early 2000s, as the band began to play shows, Craig Finn remained disciplined. He told anybody who'd listen, the hold steady was a bar band. A bar band, like the ones you see in your hometown that play Journey covers and never hit the high notes. They were a bar band and nothing more. But the problem is

the universe has a sense of humor and so the band that was built to not succeed obviously they started too So with the whole study I thought we just like play these shows around town and we do this bar to rock

But eventually the bar started filling up you know And the thing is is when you're in New York the press is inherently national You know, like in Minneapolis, you were hoping for like the, you know, I mentioned the local weekly. Yeah.

But then all of a sudden it's in Rolling Stone and then, you know, booking agents want to talk, labels want to talk. And then I remember we decided to make our second record and the Village Voice did an article on it. And then we got word that they were putting us on the cover. And it was the first time a band had been on the cover in a long time, a decade or something. And like, that was really experienced as a turning point. It felt like that's kind of when we all of a sudden things kicked into overdrive, and we became the hold steady as like a real band. After the break, the hold steady becomes a real band and a real job.

20 years of a real job. How do you stay happy when you get the thing you want? When you find yourself in a situation that you're really not allowed to complain about. Mustache who brought us our breakfast, never came back with a chair. On our third day of driving, with no action. Expectations except some vague sounds to the west On the side of the road with our arms in the air Amazed by the size of the sky

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at the Home Depot, now through April 29th. I've thought about Craig Finn and his happiness since I was 23 years old. And when I finally decided to interview him, almost 15 years later, it was this March. It was the same time I was trying to figure out this show, the show you're listening to now. It's a funny feeling to be starting again. I made a podcast before. It was successful. The success didn't feel the way I imagined it would.

Getting what I thought I wanted didn't give me the feeling I told myself it would. It was like instead of crossing a finish line, the race just kept going. One problem was just that I had a very disorganized kind of ambition. Like if we did a great story and people liked it, somehow immediately that great story became competition that I felt like we had to outdo and quickly. And it was a little embarrassing, absurd even,

to have found a dream job for myself and then to notice that I was just experiencing it as pressure, not really enjoying it very much. So I just didn't think about it. I figured probably more success or external validation would solve these problems. Didn't work out that way. So starting this show, I was thinking a lot about that experience and very desperate not to recreate it. When I emailed Craig Finn, I initially thought that what I was doing was kind of weird, asking him a question that belonged to a younger version of me.

Does anyone like their job? Obviously, I now know that some people like their jobs. I have liked my job. But the more we talked, I realized, oh, no. my real question was actually a different, more pressing one. I wanted to know how ambitious people find a way to be happy. Like, how do you succeed without making your own misery part of the machinery of that success? Craig Finn is now 20 years into his job as frontman of the whole study.

He says the job is fun, but that it's the kind of fun where the good parts of the job are obvious to everyone, and the harder parts of the job, those happen a bit off stage. There is a business aspect to the band as well as a musical performance. And, you know, that part can be hard. And what does it look like when it's hard? Well, I mean, just standard money stuff, you know? I mean, like, here's an example. You book a show.

It's in another state. And you make a budget. And when you go to book the flights, they're 30% more than what you budgeted for. Yeah. And you're like, oh, we aren't going to make very much money on this show. You know, and that's like a very sober 1 p.m. conversation, you know? But it's pretty easy for me anyways to have that conversation and be a little disappointed at 1 p.m. And then at 9 p.m. when it's time to get on stage to turn up the amp and be like, well, this is great.

Yeah. This part's great. Kind of still kind of bummed in the back of my mind about the 30% over budget on the flights. But, like, I can forget about that easily for the next two hours. Sometimes, again, it's not ticket sales, it's the expenses, you know? Or, you know, there's a lot of business stuff that is kind of boring, but it is part of being in the band, you know, and especially for me as someone who gets involved in that.

And do you have times in your life where you think about, like, the alternate version of your life where you had stayed in a more, like, job job? Yeah, I do because, you know, I turn 50. I'm 51 now, but, you know, like when I get together with, friends from college. I mean, like the whole study has allowed me to do amazing things, but I'm certainly not anywhere near wealthy, and it's

probably another path would have led me to more wealth or more stability or something. And so, yeah, when you're getting together with the guys at 51 and your friends talking about sending his kid off to college and then they're going to go down to their beach house,

and you're like, well, oh, that's, there's a part of me that says that sounds nice. I understand I didn't pursue that. Yeah. You know, but there is a part that's like, well, that does sound nice. Are those like, and those are people who follow like more of like the Amex path. Yeah. Yeah. Some sort of traditional path.

Yeah. It's funny, there's probably so many more people on the other side of it. People who pursued more like safety and convenience who are sort of like have like the faint ghost of like what if. Well, there's this funny thing that I was thinking of on the way over here because I, you know, I knew what we were going to talk about a little bit. And every once in a while, I'd say like 10 times in my career, I've been cornered by this guy, a different guy each time, but a type of guy who really has like these pointed questions about like what you have. And you get the feeling that he's trying to figure out, like trying to make himself feel better, you know? What do you mean? Well, like, you know, so like how much money, how much money you guys make?

You know, like, wow, I'm not telling you. I just met you, you know? Yeah. Yeah, so when did you quit your job? Like, they really want to know, like, how this all works. And you get the feeling that's like maybe they're trying to justify their own last 30 years or something, you know? Interesting. Like, if they knew how much you made and they knew they made more, then...

If they knew exactly how poor you were, they could feel better about themselves. That's such a brutal conversation. I know. And it's really, it's like, dude, I'm getting away from you. But, like, there's a type of guy. And let's be honest, it's always a guy, that we'll really press for that. This guy who has finagled his way backstage in order to harass a musician about how much money he has, very badly behaved. We can all agree.

But also, how different is he from me, really? The question he's asking about money is obnoxious, it's kind of rude. But underneath that question are other questions that I can't help but recognize. Am I doing any of this right? Are you happy? Why aren't I happy? I was told if I did everything right, I'd be happy. What happened?

We only get to be here once, which is such a short time to learn anything at all. We're given these very confusing lives. It's normal to look at other people for clues, to wonder if maybe they've figured something out. So you believe, you believe that it is possible to, like, your job. I absolutely do. I think that the hang-ups really come. I don't want to say from ambition,

because I think ambition is healthy, but from this kind of envy or coveting. And I think that it's very easy to, like, no matter who you are and what you do, it's very easy for the goalpost to move, to be like, okay, well, like, oh, that band's selling out this room, and we only sold out this room. It's like, you sold out? Like, there's like a thousand people here. Yeah. And they're all singing the words. So I think it's important to kind of train yourself not to like look at for that, you know, like other shiny object. I mean, it's like things come and go.

But I mean, it is also a very national human instinct to be like, I want more. So I do think you have to kind of remind yourself to be grateful and be present in that moment. Every morning we burn the bread. Walk it down to the water's edge See the seagulls eat cigarettes Check your breath in a spoon All your stuff in the storage shed

Twisted sheets on the trundle bell And the anti-sacosis meds Made you feel on the rooms Craig Finn The lead singer of The Hold Steady He says he's happy I think I believe him. That's it for us this week.

You can pick up a copy of the band's new oral history book celebrating their 20th anniversary, written in collaboration with music writer Michael Hahn. It's called The Gospel of the Hold Steady, how a resurrection really feels. I also have for you, and I've been really waiting my whole life to say this, a long playlist of my favorite Craig Finn songs,

including this one now that you're listening to. You can find them on my newsletter at p.jvote.com. Stick around after these ads. ads. Craig Finn has a question he would like search engine to answer. Hey, business owners, the NFL season is a big revenue driver. Now there's a smarter way to get ready. Everpass is the only authorized commercial platform for NFL Sunday ticket, delivering every live out-of-market regular season Sunday afternoon game. Locking the best offer now with up to 40% off saving up to $2,500. For the first time, you can pay over nine months.

Get up to six free devices and a free bar kit. Sign up by April 27th. Everpass.com. Limited time offer. Terms apply. Oh, yeah. One more thing. Is there anything that you have a question about, any topic at all, that you like me to look into? Yeah. Oh, all right. So my question on this is, this seems like somewhat, it's very anecdotal. But when I was growing up, it was considered kind of common knowledge that the first time you smoked weed, it didn't work. I remember this. And I always wondered if there's anything to that

or if it's just the first time you smoked weed, you most likely got a hold of bad weed. Right, right. Because I remember the first time I smoked weed, I was like 12 or 13, this guy Ned, and we smoked out of a filming canister, and he told me, he's like, you're not going to get high the first time. And I didn't get high. And then it was the second time.

And the other thought I had was like, maybe I'm just doing this wrong. Like, I didn't smoke cigarettes. Right. Well, that was always the thing. But it also felt like the way they were explaining it that you're kind of like you're putting in the experience. You were making a deposit at the bank. And it was only the second time or the third time that it was going to pay off. Did you, the first time you smoked weed, did you get high? No. Interesting. But I don't think it was the first few times. Yeah. And, you know, every once in a while, you'd be like some guy would be like, I got hired for the first time and you kind of wouldn't believe them.

Yes. You know? So I'm wondering, now that we have all this legalization, I'm wondering if there's any science to this or any answer. That's a really good question. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Well, I hope we get an answer.

We'll see what we can do. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It's created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Penaminani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme and original composition by Armand Bizarian, Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss. Show art by Ali Moss, no relation. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Burman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Thank you to the team of Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perelo, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Klausor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion and Our You can follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We are off next week. We are back September 15th. You can always find our schedule at the newsletter, PJVote.com.