Does anyone actually like their job? (classic)

Speaker 1 Hello.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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 piñata.

Speaker 2 This year, we're starting the practice of periodically rebroadcasting some of our favorite episodes, at least on the main feed.

Speaker 2 Our incognito mode, which you can sign up for at searchengine.show, does not air rebroadcasts. But honestly, I'm pretty happy to play this one for you again.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 6 Anyway, please enjoy the story after these ads.

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Speaker 31 When I was in my 20s, I had this recurring fantasy, this little movie I'd play myself in my mind to calm down when my brain was too jittery and I couldn't sleep.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 36 And it would be me, but older.

Speaker 32 And I'd have just a moment in passing to ask him, does it work out?

Speaker 16 And this older, grizzled version of me would just like sagely nod his head and then disappear, presumably into the fog of night.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 42 I wanted to tell stories for a living.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 11 I wanted this the way people forced underwater want oxygen.

Speaker 44 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.

Speaker 31 Like I would not feel pain.

Speaker 46 Taking ecstasy would be like drinking room temperature tap water.

Speaker 42 24-7 nirvana if I could just get a job telling true, reasonably amusing stories.

Speaker 7 My life had a focus.

Speaker 13 Perhaps too much focus.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 16 There's a word for this toxic condition, this poisonous all-or-nothing kind of thinking.

Speaker 11 It's called ambition.

Speaker 11 You get a glimpse of a life you want, you fix on it.

Speaker 17 And from that moment on, you feel intense, all-over pain every moment you're not there.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 36 But that despair felt, like most things about life then, completely unique to me.

Speaker 51 I couldn't find a container that could hold it.

Speaker 49 My boss at the time had this sign above their desk that said, quote, the sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new.

Speaker 52 I became convinced that everyone in a 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.

Speaker 31 But then I heard about this band.

Speaker 27 They were called the Hold Steady.

Speaker 11 Indie rock music, the kind of band that seems to have zero casual fans. Either you've seen them a hundred times or you don't really get it.

Speaker 55 I got it.

Speaker 11 The songs I thought were perfect.

Speaker 11 Stories about down-and-out partiers in America.

Speaker 56 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.

Speaker 11 Constitutionally unable to enjoy something without becoming obsessed with it.

Speaker 7 Yeah, very obsessed with the band.

Speaker 11 And in particular, with this one small part of their mythology.

Speaker 40 I'd heard about how the singer, Craig Finn, had supposedly had a very strange path into his music career.

Speaker 38 And the story of that path gave me a kind of hope.

Speaker 49 What I'd heard on the internet was that before the whole study, Craig Finn had languished in a drab office job.

Speaker 27 In one version of the story, he was an IT guy at Goldman Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 44 And this legend, it was believable because Finn was a balding, horned-rimmed, glass-swearing guy with a pretty nasal voice.

Speaker 11 The joke in the reviews of the band was sometimes that he actually looked more like an accountant than a rock singer.

Speaker 44 In the version of the story I'd heard, he'd basically become an accountant and he'd had to make peace with it.

Speaker 11 But then after years languishing in a job he didn't want, he started this new band just for fun, The Hold Study.

Speaker 6 And that band had taken off.

Speaker 7 It had rescued him from his life.

Speaker 7 And there was a little more evidence for this story.

Speaker 28 The story of a guy who late in life had escaped a job he hated and found one he loved.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 8 He started to tell stories.

Speaker 25 And then on the stage, he'd offer something that felt almost like a prayer.

Speaker 59 Man, I say the same thing almost every night.

Speaker 45 I don't, I don't, I'm not fooling anyone.

Speaker 48 But I only say it because it's true.

Speaker 56 Where he would just express pure gratitude that his life had worked out, that he got to do his job for a living.

Speaker 61 There is so much joy in what we do up here.

Speaker 59 I want to thank you for being here to share that joy with us.

Speaker 11 And I came to understand that maybe I was going to all these concerts really just for that moment.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 50 But being constitutionally incapable of not becoming obsessed with things, I started to think about it too much.

Speaker 35 And I started to wonder, like really wonder, what if Craig Finn was lying?

Speaker 11 Because I knew that even most dream jobs eventually become jobs. They become onerous.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 For years, stuck in my own unhappiness, I wondered about his happiness.

Speaker 14 Wondered if it was real.

Speaker 4 I would plot and scheme about ways to ask him about it where 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.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 31 The band's manager even followed up with me, but I ducked his emails.

Speaker 32 I chickened out.

Speaker 63 Whenever I'd see Craig Finn's name after that, I'd feel this little jolt of embarrassment and regret.

Speaker 25 In the years that followed, a lot of things would happen in my life.

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 63 But now with a podcast where I get to call people and ask them all sorts of questions.

Speaker 65 Questions about ambition, questions about jobs, questions about about how to survive as a person.

Speaker 39 So, after the break, Craig Finn.

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 14 A few months ago, I tried just sending Greg 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.

Speaker 62 He said he was game.

Speaker 38 Okay, so I think my first question for you is: just:

Speaker 53 can you give me a picture of like

Speaker 17 your early life?

Speaker 38 Like, how old were you when you first decided the job you wanted was musician?

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 Saturday night.

Speaker 45 I was listening to bands like the Bay City Rollers and Kiss and getting really enthused about music and also the monkeys who are on TV. It looked like that was the best job.
You know, it looked like

Speaker 45 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 in bands.
Like the whole thing looked pretty great.

Speaker 45 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

Speaker 45 ask for an electric guitar.

Speaker 38 And what did your parents do?

Speaker 45 Oh, my dad

Speaker 45 worked for Ernst ⁇ Young, the accounting firm. And my mom was a homemaker since I was born.

Speaker 45 So they were not, you know, 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.

Speaker 57 And did you feel like, like, I think one of the things that people use the word ambition, and I think, I think what's weird about my relationship to that word is that it sounds like a powerful feeling.

Speaker 68 It's like, I'm going to do all this stuff.

Speaker 57 But whenever I've experienced it, it's been like a painful feeling.

Speaker 70 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.

Speaker 38 Like, did you feel that way towards music?

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 45 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 reviewing records.

Speaker 45 And that was, you know, I did that and maybe I did okay at it. But like

Speaker 45 I got the feeling that that wasn't the side of it I wanted to be on. Yeah.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And I started hanging out with her and helping her with some of her stuff.

Speaker 45 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, the whatever involves booking a tour.

Speaker 71 Now, turn your stereo up and your TV on to Cable Channel 6. Here's your host, Amy Dahl.

Speaker 19 This video clip is from December 1997.

Speaker 51 A 26-year-old Craig Finn is playing with his up-and-coming band, Lifter Polar, on live public television in St.

Speaker 16 Cloud.

Speaker 71 Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Lifter Polar on Monday Night Live?

Speaker 60 Thereafter, you will refer to this.

Speaker 56 In In the video, Craig Finn 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 Chinos, playing a telecaster covered in stickers.

Speaker 47 I will say, Lift or Polar, I do not love the way I would love what would come later, the hold steady.

Speaker 38 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 Finn is going to do really well in his next band.

Speaker 11 He's going to tell these gossipy stories about an underground world that he has this magic ability to conjure.

Speaker 57 This seedy, sleazy underbelly of Minneapolis that might only exist in Craig Finn's own imagination.

Speaker 66 People here are always waking up up high and bewildered on intersections that alliterate.

Speaker 8 The drug dealers cross paths with the sorority girls.

Speaker 25 Everybody wonders about this mysterious fire set at a nightclub called the Nice Nice.

Speaker 58 It's a world you can sink into.

Speaker 11 The characters from one song sometimes cameo in another.

Speaker 4 By the time Lifter Polar started in earnest, Craig Finn had decided not to pursue his music industry job as a booking agent.

Speaker 4 In his mind, it just didn't feel right to be working in the industry while simultaneously trying to make it as a musician.

Speaker 16 Like, maybe people wouldn't take him seriously.

Speaker 35 So he got a real day job.

Speaker 4 And the job he got, not what you would expect from a man staying up all night in clubs singing songs about arsonists and drug dealers and pimps.

Speaker 31 It wasn't the one I'd heard.

Speaker 32 He wasn't an IT guy at Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 40 But honestly, it was pretty close.

Speaker 45 I started working at American Express Financial Advisors, which has a big campus downtown Minneapolis.

Speaker 28 So you were working at American Express Financial Advisors while you were in Lifter Polar?

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 45 It was a really kind of interesting,

Speaker 45 spectacular place. I started out in the annuities department and people would call in and you'd tell them their balance and you'd do small transactions for them.

Speaker 45 You know, I'd wear a headset mic and there'd be, it'd be like this like football field sized office, right? Like, you know, and everyone had their little cubicle.

Speaker 45 And there were a lot of young people that worked there. So there was its own scene, you know? I mean,

Speaker 24 what was the scene like?

Speaker 45 It was weird, you know? I mean, it was like the office kind of experience that in some ways is very stereotypical. Like, you'd have a Christmas party and people would misbehave.
Yeah. You know,

Speaker 45 I remember there were these guys that I'd hang out with sometimes, and they would, they would come, they would like go out almost every night and then they'd come in and they'd rate their hangovers.

Speaker 45 They would like, uh, and you had, we had like an intranet system, you know, like, um, so you could like talk to each other.

Speaker 45 And I can't remember what the level, I think, level six was you threw up at work.

Speaker 48 Um,

Speaker 48 so

Speaker 43 that's so such a low number for them throwing up at work.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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,

Speaker 45 not wanting to go to work, like lying in bed and being like, I don't want to go there today, you know?

Speaker 11 A lot of people, faced with a job they don't love, survive just by living in their imaginations or looking forward to nights and weekends.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 44 He realized there were these tests he could take to climb up the corporate ladder.

Speaker 45 There kind of was like a company-wide directive that you had to pass

Speaker 45 what they called a Series 6 exam, which it's a regulatory thing.

Speaker 45 And a lot of people had problems passing that exam. And I think a lot of people were in a different place than I were.
They were parents, et cetera, and they just didn't have time to deal with it.

Speaker 45 I was able to pass it pretty easy. And so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to go get this Series 7.

Speaker 11 Listening to Craig Finn talk about all this, I have a moment that feels like genuine disassociation.

Speaker 44 This person who I admire so much, his ability to tell stories, his ability to make music that has sustained me as a human.

Speaker 14 He's talking about his LinkedIn corporate accomplishments with such straightforward, normal pride.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 45 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

Speaker 45 you have, you need a Series 24 to kind of sign off on their transactions. So I saw this exam taking as as a way to kind of make myself indispensable.
Yeah.

Speaker 45 And through that, I moved up to a wealth management area.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 68 Like it doesn't sound like it was like a life of quiet desperation.

Speaker 64 It was like an insurance policy that was supporting.

Speaker 45 Yeah, it was exactly that. And it allowed for some stability.
I mean,

Speaker 45 you know, my bandmates largely were doing more like,

Speaker 45 you know, freelance stuff.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 11 When he looked at his life then, what he saw was a steady paycheck that let him focus on his real passion, Lifter Polar, a band that was becoming Minneapolis famous.

Speaker 56 One day he got a call from a guy above him on the Amex corporate ladder.

Speaker 45 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 Polar, and their singer has the same name as you.

Speaker 45 And he didn't think for one second it could be me.

Speaker 62 Stuff like that would happen, and it was cool.

Speaker 38 But Lift or Polar struggled to break out beyond the local scene.

Speaker 11 And pretty soon, the band realized they'd probably gone as far as they were going to go.

Speaker 11 Lift or polar breaks up, and Craig Finn goes from being Craig Finn from Lift or Polar to just Craig Finn, ordinary person.

Speaker 24 He moves to New York.

Speaker 6 He gets a new day job doing the thing he said he wouldn't do, working on the business side of the music industry.

Speaker 38 He joins this tech startup.

Speaker 11 They're trying to stream concerts online in grainy, early millennium quality internet video.

Speaker 45 It was 2000.

Speaker 45 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, you know one knew how they were going to make money, but you like ate cereal and sat in beanbag chairs.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 31 He was 29 years old.

Speaker 57 He'd made peace with the idea that professional musician had just been a fun, youthful dream.

Speaker 43 Was he miserable?

Speaker 34 No, of course not.

Speaker 14 He was fine.

Speaker 40 A couple years passed.

Speaker 58 He told himself he'd still write songs just for himself, just for fun.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 11 So he and a few friends decided to start a new band with the explicit goal of not being successful, of not taking off.

Speaker 3 Because he knows now that success or the desire to have success can be a kind of poison.

Speaker 11 So they make some ground rolls.

Speaker 45 I mean, it was comical what we were talking about. One was that we weren't going to play any shows.

Speaker 72 You didn't want to.

Speaker 45 Why?

Speaker 45 Because I surmised, perhaps correctly, that when you move the gear, that's when the trouble starts.

Speaker 7 What does that mean? You know what I mean?

Speaker 45 Like once you get like, I mean, I think it was like, okay, so you know, like when 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?

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 72 Between the bands.

Speaker 45 Yeah. So I was 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.

Speaker 45 But of course, that wasn't going to work. So the second someone asked us to play a show, we're like, okay, yeah, you know.

Speaker 47 This show,

Speaker 19 not a show exactly.

Speaker 24 This invitation for the least ambitious band in Brooklyn went thusly.

Speaker 12 Some guy had a comedy troupe.

Speaker 45 It's called Mr. Ass.

Speaker 38 Mr. Ass?

Speaker 45 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 bumper music.

Speaker 45 It'll be like, you know, when we're changing sets, you'll play like back and black. No singing.
So I was like, Yeah, that sounds fun. That's something to do.
So we go and do that.

Speaker 57 And are they doing like improv sketches?

Speaker 48 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 So they're doing improv, a scene ends, and then you guys will play like,

Speaker 45 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?

Speaker 45 And I showed the guys Knuckles, which ends up being the first hold hold steady song we ever had.

Speaker 45 So we played that and that was I guess the first hold steady show.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 42 Remember, they weren't going to be ambitious. They weren't going to turn this into a real thing.

Speaker 7 The trouble starts when you move the gear.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 57 they were having fun.

Speaker 72 So they figured maybe they should just take the songs they were playing and record them.

Speaker 14 They made a demo.

Speaker 72 They kind of liked it. They made another.

Speaker 10 They realized, oh, you could sort of put these together.

Speaker 42 It'd almost be like an album.

Speaker 45 We just combined them and called it a record. But it was really started with demos.

Speaker 24 And it did it feel as easy.

Speaker 20 like you're describing it as like

Speaker 72 not accidental, but just breezy.

Speaker 48 I think

Speaker 45 I knew that there was a power in

Speaker 45 keeping it light or something, you know, or keeping it, you know,

Speaker 45 if you take whatever the opposite of desperation is,

Speaker 45 I think people really react to that. And so we were kind of like, whatever, you know, we'll, I mean, that was always my thing about how the whole study was going to operate, at least at the beginning.

Speaker 45 I was like, every time we have 10 songs, we'll call it an album, you know? Like, in that way, you're not like recording 25 songs and being like, which are the best?

Speaker 45 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?

Speaker 48 It's so, 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,

Speaker 24 things that succeed are the product of like worry and desperation and painfulness and like fussing.

Speaker 70 And like

Speaker 64 it's so

Speaker 28 it feels like you're praying to a different God than me.

Speaker 45 Well, we were, we were,

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 And we were kind of this big, sloppy bar rock band.

Speaker 45 And I think people were kind of like weirdly refreshed by it. And it took pressure off in a way that like,

Speaker 45 I don't know, maybe at that point in my life, I just didn't need pressure on the art.

Speaker 57 When I was in my 20s, I was unhappy in a challenging job.

Speaker 11 And so I fell in love with this band called The Hold Study because they seemed like they were having fun at work.

Speaker 28 And I needed that to be true.

Speaker 57 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.

Speaker 14 The desire to succeed can give you what you want while at the same time removing your ability to enjoy it.

Speaker 12 And there's a secret power sometimes in just not trying so hard.

Speaker 57 In the early 2000s, as the band began to play shows, Craig Finn remained disciplined.

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 12 They were a bar band and nothing more.

Speaker 58 But the problem is, the universe has a sense of humor.

Speaker 57 And so the band that was built to not succeed,

Speaker 7 obviously they started too.

Speaker 45 So with the whole study, I thought we just like

Speaker 45 play these shows around town and we do this bar rock. And

Speaker 45 but eventually the bars started filling up you know like and the thing is is when you're in new york

Speaker 45 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

Speaker 45 booking agents want to talk labels want to talk and then um

Speaker 45 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're putting us on the cover.

Speaker 45 And it was the first time a band had been on the cover in a long time-a decade or something.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 45 like, that was really experienced as a turning point. Um,

Speaker 45 felt like that's kind of when we, all of a sudden, things kicked into overdrive, and we became the Holt Steady as like a real band.

Speaker 10 After the break, the whole study becomes a real band and a real job.

Speaker 18 20 years of a real job.

Speaker 56 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.

Speaker 60 That punk with the mustache who brought us our breakfast never came back with a chip.

Speaker 60 On our third day of driving, with no expectations, except some vague sounds to the west.

Speaker 41 On the side of our arms in the air, amazed by the size of the sky.

Speaker 3 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.

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Speaker 4 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rosetta Stone.

Speaker 7 I'm always threatening to learn a new language.

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Speaker 57 I've thought about Craig Finn and his happiness since I was 23 years old.

Speaker 11 And when I finally decided to interview him almost 15 years later, it was this March.

Speaker 19 It was the same time I was trying to figure out this show, the show you're listening to now.

Speaker 11 It's a funny feeling to be starting again. I made a podcast before.

Speaker 25 It was successful.

Speaker 14 The success didn't feel the way I imagined it would.

Speaker 31 Getting what I thought I wanted didn't give me the feeling I told myself it would.

Speaker 4 It was like instead of crossing a finish line, the race just kept going.

Speaker 4 One problem was just that I had a very disorganized kind of ambition.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 11 And it was a 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.

Speaker 53 So I just didn't think about it.

Speaker 42 I figured probably more success or external validation would solve these problems.

Speaker 50 Didn't work out that way.

Speaker 16 So starting this show, I was thinking a lot about that experience and very desperate not to recreate it.

Speaker 31 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.

Speaker 50 Does anyone like their job?

Speaker 42 Obviously, I now know that some people like their jobs. I have liked my job.

Speaker 33 But the more we talked, I realized, oh no, my real question was actually a different, more pressing one.

Speaker 50 I wanted to know how ambitious people find a way to be happy.

Speaker 11 Like, how do you succeed without making your own misery part of the machinery of that success?

Speaker 31 Craig Finn is now 20 years into his job as frontman of the whole study.

Speaker 49 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 offstage.

Speaker 45 There is a business aspect to the band as well as a

Speaker 45 musical performance. And, you know, that part can be hard.

Speaker 64 And what does it look like when it's hard?

Speaker 45 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%

Speaker 45 more than what you budgeted for. Yeah.
And you're like, oh, we aren't going to make very much money on this show.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 48 This part's great.

Speaker 45 Still kind of bummed in the back of my mind about the 30% over budget on the flights,

Speaker 10 but

Speaker 45 like, I can forget about that easily for the next two hours. Um, sometimes, again, it's not ticket sales, it's the expenses, you know, or

Speaker 45 there's a lot of business stuff that, 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.

Speaker 24 And do you, 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?

Speaker 45 Yeah, I do because, you know, I turned 50. I'm 51 now, but

Speaker 45 you know, like when I get together with friends from college, I mean like the the the whole study has allowed me to do amazing things, but I'm certainly not anywhere near wealthy.

Speaker 45 And it's probably another path would have led me to more wealth or more stability or something.

Speaker 45 And so, yeah, when you're when you're getting together with the guys at fifty-one and your friend's 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,

Speaker 45 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, wow, that does sound nice.

Speaker 70 And those are people who follow more of like the Amex path.

Speaker 45 Yeah. Yeah.
Some sort of traditional path.

Speaker 34 Yeah.

Speaker 64 It's funny.

Speaker 45 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 um i was thinking of on the way over here because i would 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 not a different guy each time but a type of guy yeah who really has like these pointed questions about like what you have and and you get the feeling that he's trying to figure out like trying to make himself feel better you know like what type what do you mean well like you know so so like how much money, how much money do you guys make?

Speaker 45 You know, like, and it's like, wow, I'm not telling you, I'm, I just met you, you know, and yeah, so when'd you quit your job? Like, they really want to know, like, how this all works.

Speaker 45 And you get the feeling that's like, maybe

Speaker 45 they're trying to justify their own last 30 years or something, you know? Interesting.

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 25 That's such a brutal conversation. I know.

Speaker 45 And it's really, it's like, dude,

Speaker 45 I'm getting away from you, but like, there's, there's a type of guy. And let's be honest, it's always a guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 45 That, that will really press for that.

Speaker 7 This guy who has finagled his way backstage in order to harass a musician about how much money he has, very badly behaved.

Speaker 37 We can all agree.

Speaker 55 But.

Speaker 43 Also,

Speaker 57 how different is he from me, really?

Speaker 31 The question he's asking about money is obnoxious, it's kind of rude.

Speaker 4 But underneath that question are other questions that I can't help but recognize:

Speaker 11 Am I doing any of this right?

Speaker 34 Are you happy?

Speaker 42 Why aren't I happy?

Speaker 14 I was told if I did everything right, I'd be happy.

Speaker 10 What happened?

Speaker 35 We only get to be here once, which is such a short time to learn anything at all.

Speaker 36 We're given these very confusing lives.

Speaker 50 It's normal to look at other people for clues, to wonder if maybe they figured something out

Speaker 67 So you believe

Speaker 45 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

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 45 It's like, you sold out, like, there's like a thousand people here, yeah, and they're really all singing the words.

Speaker 45 Um, so it's, I think it's important to kind of train yourself not to like look it for that, you know, like other shiny object. I mean, it's like

Speaker 45 things come and go, but I mean, it is also a very natural human instinct to be like, I want more.

Speaker 45 So, I do think you have to kind of remind yourself

Speaker 45 to be grateful and be present in that moment.

Speaker 45 In a spoon,

Speaker 45 all your stuff in the storage shed

Speaker 45 Twisted sheets on the trung bed

Speaker 45 and the antipsychos meds

Speaker 45 made you feel on the roof

Speaker 5 Last summer at the shore when I was warning Craig Finn, lead singer of the whole steady He says he's happy

Speaker 14 I think I believe him

Speaker 11 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.

Speaker 8 It's called The Gospel of the Hold Steady, How a Resurrection Really Feels.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 31 You can find them on my newsletter at pjvote.com.

Speaker 65 Stick around after these ads.

Speaker 56 Craig Finn has a question he would like Search Engine to answer.

Speaker 56 And we snuck into the ballroom

Speaker 56 And made echoes and it's empty

Speaker 56 And I grabbed you and I spun you

Speaker 56 And we both just started laughing

Speaker 3 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Perfectly Snug.

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Speaker 37 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 24 One more thing.

Speaker 72 Is there anything that you have a question about, any topic at all, that you would like me to look into?

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 34 Oh, all right.

Speaker 45 So my question on this is, um,

Speaker 45 this seems like somewhat,

Speaker 45 it's very anecdotal, but when I was growing up, um,

Speaker 45 it was considered kind of common knowledge that the first time you smoked weed, it didn't work.

Speaker 48 I remember this.

Speaker 45 And

Speaker 45 I

Speaker 45 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.

Speaker 37 Right, right.

Speaker 14 Because I remember 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.

Speaker 21 And I didn't get high.

Speaker 45 And then it was the the second time and the other thought i had was like maybe i'm just doing this wrong like i didn't smoke cigarettes so right well that was always the thing but i i it also felt like the way they were explaining it that you were kind of like you were putting in the experience you were making a deposit at the bank and yeah it was only the second time or the third time that it was gonna 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 and you know every once in a while you'd be like some guy would be like i got high for the first time and you kind of wouldn't believe him yeah You know?

Speaker 45 So I'm wondering, now that we have all this legalization, I'm wondering if there's any science to this or any answer.

Speaker 7 That's a really good question. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 45 Well, I hope we get an answer.

Speaker 43 We'll see what we can do.

Speaker 8 Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions.

Speaker 19 It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthi Pinamanani, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Speaker 74 Theme and original composition by Armin Bazarian.

Speaker 3 Fact-checking by Elizabeth Moss.

Speaker 49 Show art by Ollie Moss, No Relation.

Speaker 11 Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Speaker 66 Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt.

Speaker 8 And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

Speaker 66 Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clauser, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

Speaker 31 Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at PublicOpinion NYC.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 62 Thank you for listening.

Speaker 65 We are off next week.

Speaker 31 We are back September 15th.

Speaker 74 You can always find our schedule at the newsletter, pjvote.com.