Does anyone actually like their job? (classic)

... 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 https://www.searchengine.show/join

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  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.show, does not air rebroadcasts. 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

• 0:39PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 1:31PJ Vogt?

  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. 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 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.

• 2:11PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 2:26PJ Vogt?

  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 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.

• 3:10PJ Vogt?

  There's a word for this toxic condition, this poisonous, all-or-nothing kind of thinking. It's called ambition.

• 3:19PJ Vogt?

  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, "The sun shone, 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

• 4:03PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 4:24PJ Vogt?

  They were called The Hold Steady. Indie 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.

• 4:49PJ Vogt?

  The songs, I thought, were perfect. Stories about down-and-out partiers in America. People with fucked-up lives, who'd 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'd 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.

• 5:31PJ Vogt?

  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 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, The 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 one he loved. When I'd see them play live, over and over again, there was this thing he'd almost always do, towards the end of the set. He'd start to tell stories.

• 6:18PJ Vogt?

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

• 6:21Speaker 01

  And then I say the same thing almost every night. I don't, I don't, I'm not fooling anyone. But I only say it because it's true.

• 6:29PJ Vogt?

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

• 6:35Speaker 01

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

• 6:41Speaker 01

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

• 6:44PJ Vogt?

  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,

• 7:25PJ Vogt?

  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 an 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.

• 8:11PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 8:35PJ Vogt?

  So after the break, Craig Finn.

• 9:00PJ Vogt?

  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 is 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?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  I was listening to bands like the Bay City Rollers and Kiss and getting really enthused about music and also the Monkees who were on TV. It looked like that was the best job, you know? It looked like, I think there was the camaraderie of being in a band that looked fun.

• 10:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  The ability to burst into song. It seemed like girls liked guys in 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 till, asked for an electric guitar.

• 10:22PJ Vogt?

  And what did your parents do?

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Oh, my dad was, worked for Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, and my mom was a homemaker since I was born. 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.

• 10:40PJ Vogt?

  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. It's like, I'm gonna 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?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  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 OK at it, but like, I got the feeling that that wasn't the side of it I wanted to be on.

• 11:23PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  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, the whatever involves booking a tour.

• 11:49Speaker 02

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

• 11:54PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Lifter Puller on Monday Night Live.

• 12:07PJ Vogt?

  Thereafter, what we're part of this, it's the fourth. 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.

• 12:33PJ Vogt?

  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 Finn is gonna do really well in his next band. He's gonna 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.

• 13:11PJ Vogt?

  People here are always waking up high and bewildered on intersections that alliterate. The drug dealers cross paths 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 in 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.

• 13:56PJ Vogt?

  He wasn't an IT guy at Goldman Sachs, but honestly, it was pretty close.

• 14:02Speaker 01

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

• 14:08PJ Vogt?

  So you were working at American Express Financial Advisors while you were in Lifter Puller?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It was really kind of an interesting, spectacular place. I started out in the annuities department. People would call in and you'd tell them your balance and you'd do small transactions for them. 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. And there were a lot of young people that worked there. So there was its own scene, you know? I mean--

• 14:37PJ Vogt?

  What was the scene like?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:48PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  You know? I remember there were these guys that I'd hang out with sometimes and they would, they would, they would, like, go out almost every night and then they'd come in and they'd rate their hangovers. They would, like, uh, and you had, 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.

• 15:09PJ Vogt?

  That's great.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  So--

• 15:12PJ Vogt?

  That's so, such a low--

• 15:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:23PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And it would be 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.

• 15:34PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  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?

• 15:44PJ Vogt?

  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. Craig Finn, 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.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  There kind of was like a company-wide directive that you had to pass, what they called a Series 6 exam, which it's a regulatory thing.

• 16:13PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  And a lot of people had problems passing that exam. And I think a lot of people were in a different place than I do, or 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 gonna go get the Series 7.

• 16:27PJ Vogt?

  Listening to Craig Finn talk 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 LinkedIn 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.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:17PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 01

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

• 17:20PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was exactly that. And it allowed for some stability. I mean, you know, my bandmates largely were doing more like...

• 17:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:50PJ Vogt?

  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 twenties 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.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  There was a guy who called down and said, hey, do you follow local music at all? And I was like, yeah, a bit. And he goes, there's a, there's a band called Lifter Puller, and their singer has the same name as you. And he said, he didn't think for one second it could be me.

• 18:47PJ Vogt?

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

• 19:22Speaker 01

  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 gonna make money, but you like ate cereal and sat in beanbag chairs.

• 19:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:41PJ Vogt?

  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. Couple of 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 Puller, his final artistic endeavor, had just been that the fun of making music had been kind of ruined by ambition.

• 20:11PJ Vogt?

  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 rules.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it was comical what we were talking about. Well, one was that we weren't gonna play any shows.

• 20:31PJ Vogt?

  You didn't want to? Why?

• 20:34Speaker 01

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

• 20:40PJ Vogt?

  Wait, what does that mean?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  You know, like, once you get, like, I mean, I think it was like, okay, so, you know, like, in Lifter Puller, you go out and you like, you wanna 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.

• 21:07PJ Vogt?

  Between the band?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  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. But of course, that wasn't gonna work. Second someone asked us to play a show, we're like, o-okay, yeah, you know?

• 21:23PJ Vogt?

  This show, not a show exactly. This invitation for the least ambitious band in Brooklyn went thusly. Some guy had a comedy troupe.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  It's called Mr. Ass.

• 21:36PJ Vogt?

  Mr. Ass?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they were doing this thing at Arlene Grocery, and they're like, do you wanna 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 like Back in Black. No singing. So I was like, yeah, that sounds fun, that's something to do. So we go and do that.

• 21:52PJ Vogt?

  And are they doing like improv sketch?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:55PJ Vogt?

  So they're doing improv, a scene ends, and then you guys will play like, 30 seconds of Back in Black?

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then, 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, I showed the guys Knuckles, which ends up being the first Hold Steady song we ever had.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  And so we played that. And that was, I guess, the first Hold Steady show.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  But then after two of those, we were like, yeah, you know what was the most fun part of all that is when we played our own song.

• 22:47PJ Vogt?

  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 should 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'd almost be like an album.

• 23:07Speaker 01

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

• 23:12PJ Vogt?

  And it didn't feel as easy. Like, you're describing it as like, not accidental, but just breezy.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  I think I knew that there was a power in keeping it light or something, you know, or keeping it, you know.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  If you take whatever the opposite of desperation is.

• 23:31PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I think people really react to that. And so we were kind of like, whatever, you know, well. 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, in 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 masterpieces? Like, no, you know, we got 10 songs. Want to hear them?

• 23:56PJ Vogt?

  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, 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.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  And we were kind of in this big sloppy bar rock band.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Kiss with broken hearts, kiss with broken bones.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  We kiss with the kidney stones.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  And I think people were kind of like weirdly refreshed by it. And it took pressure off in a way that like, um, I don't know. Maybe at that point in my life, I just didn't need pressure on the art.

• 25:05PJ Vogt?

  When I was in my twenties, I was unhappy in a challenging job. And so I fell in love with this band called The Hold Steady 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 in just not trying so hard.

• 25:38PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 25:55PJ Vogt?

  But the problem is, the universe has a sense of humor. And so the band that was built to not succeed, obviously, they started to.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  So with The Hold Steady, I thought, we just like play these shows around town and we do this bar rock. And, um, but eventually the bar started filling up, you know?

• 26:16PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  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, you know, I mentioned the local weekly.

• 26:27PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  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, um, 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. And it was the first time a band had been on the cover in a long time, a decade or something. And, um, like, that was really experienced as a turning point. Um, 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.

• 27:13PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 28:10PJ Vogt?

  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

• 28:51PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 29:22PJ Vogt?

  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 Hold 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 offstage.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  There is a business aspect to the band, as well as a musical performance. And, you know, that part can be hard.

• 30:17PJ Vogt?

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

• 30:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  And you're like, oh, we aren't going to make very much money on this show, you know? And that's, that's like a very sober 1:00 PM conversation, you know? But it's pretty easy for me anyways to have that conversation and be a little disappointed at 1:00 PM. And then at 9:00 PM, when it's time to get on stage, to turn up the amp and be like, well, this is great.

• 30:53PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 31:21PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do, because, you know, I turned 50, I'm 51 now, but, um, you know, like, when I get together with friends from college, I mean, like, The Hold 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. Um, and so, yeah, when you're, when you're getting together with the guys at 51 and your friend's talking about sending his kid off to college and then they're gonna go down to their beach house and you're like, well, that's, that's, there's a part of me that says that sounds nice. I understand I didn't pursue that.

• 32:07PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  You know, but there is a part that's like, wow, that does sound nice.

• 32:10PJ Vogt?

  Are those like, and those are people who follow like more of like the Amex path?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, some sort of traditional path.

• 32:16PJ Vogt?

  Yeah. It's funny, there's probably so many more people on the other side of it. People who pursued more like safety and comedians who are sort of like, have like the faint ghost of like, what if?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Well, there's this funny thing that, um, I was thinking of on the way over here because I, you know, I knew what we were gonna 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.

• 32:44PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  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?

• 32:54PJ Vogt?

  What, what do you mean?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Well, like, you know, so, so like, how much money, how much money you guys make? You know, like, and it's like, wow, I'm not telling you, I'm, I just met you, you know?

• 33:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when'd you quit your job? Like, they really wanna 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?

• 33:15PJ Vogt?

  Interesting. Like, if they knew how much you made and they knew they made more, then...

• 33:19Speaker 01

  If they knew exactly how poor you were, they could feel better about themselves.

• 33:25PJ Vogt?

  That's such a brutal conversation.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  I know. And it's really, it's like, dude, I, I'm, 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.

• 33:34PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Um, that, that will really press for that.

• 33:39PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 33:50PJ Vogt?

  But also, how different is he from me, really? The question he's asking about money is obnoxious, is 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.

• 34:34PJ Vogt?

  So you believe, you believe that it is possible to like your job?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  I absolutely do. I think that the hangups 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 goalposts 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.

• 35:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And they're all singing the words. So I think it's important to kind of train yourself not to like, look 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 natural 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.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  All your stuff in the storage shed. Twisted sheets on the trundle bed. And the antipsychosis meds.

• 36:14PJ Vogt?

  Craig Finn, 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 pjvote.com. Stick around after these ads. Craig Finn has a question he would like Search Engine to answer.

• 37:32PJ Vogt?

  Oh, yeah. One more thing. Is there anything that you have a question about, any topic at all, that you'd like me to look into?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:41PJ Vogt?

  Oh, all right.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So, my question on this is, um, it seems like somewhat, uh, it's very anecdotal, but when I was growing up...

• 37:59Speaker 01

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

• 38:06PJ Vogt?

  I remember this.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:18PJ Vogt?

  Right, right, because I remember, first time I smoked weed, I was like 12 or 13, this guy Ned, and we smoked out of a film 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, so.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that was always the thing. But it also felt like the way they were explaining it, that you were kind of like, you're putting in the experience. You were making a deposit at the bank.

• 38:46PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  It was only the second time or the third time that it was going to pay off.

• 38:50PJ Vogt?

  Did you, the first time you smoked weed, did you get high?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:53PJ Vogt?

  Interesting.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  But I don't think it was the first few times.

• 38:56PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  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 them.

• 39:01PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 39:03Speaker 01

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

• 39:10PJ Vogt?

  That's a really good question. Thank you.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. Well, I hope we get an answer.

• 39:14PJ Vogt?

  We'll see what we can do.

• 39:18PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pindamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Theme and original composition by Armin Bezarian. Fact checking by Elizabeth Moss. Show art by Ali Moss, no relation. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrell, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Casey Clauzer, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff.

• 39:55PJ Vogt?

  Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion NYC. 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.