Very Fine Day #44: Parker Molloy
"Put out what was said, what’s not true, give the full context, and hope for the best, basically."
VERY FINE DAY features weekly interviews with writers, creators, reporters, and internet explorers. Learn more about the people who keep the internet humming – and check out previous editions here. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter, or just follow Brad. Subscribe now and never miss an edition.
“Eventually, I just got tired of writing about mostly trans stuff and mostly LGBT stuff. And if I could go the rest of my life without having to write about trans issues again – or even talking about them – I’d be totally cool with that. It would be great. We can all live our lives and I can focus on my true passions. Which is probably spending time on Twitter, I guess.”
Good conversation this week. PARKER MOLLOY is on VERY FINE DAY, and we’re talking about finding your place in the world, in the workplace, and up against it. Parker has worked in a lot of different ways for a lot of different companies, and has a really interesting understanding of the way technology helps us communicate. For better and for worse. You can check that out in THE PRESENT AGE.
How’s things with you? Good?
My meditation app has started implementing all sorts of obvious data-farming strategies. Asking me to rate my day out of 10, picking a smile or a frown before I begin, asking me if I’d like to “meditate with other people” virtually. I don’t know. All I wanted was a timer, some nice bells, and a record of consistency. Now I have this emotional attachment to an app on my phone that I don’t pay for. So I can’t complain.
I know all of this is a bit much to drone on about – especially here. You don’t subscribe for that. But it did get me thinking about how little autonomy we have over our own digital experiences. I mean, that’s obvious. But sometimes it just takes little things, like your meditation app suddenly deciding to force a motivational quote on you every time you open it, that has you losing trust in the whole thing. Anyway. If any of you have suggestions for alternatives, please send me an email.
Two more weeks and then Very Fine Day will go on holiday for the Christmas break. I appreciate y’all for understanding. Without assuming too much about your relationship with your inbox, I have a suspicion that open-rates are going to go down over the holidays. And that’s good. Turn everything off, touch some grass, check out the world. If you struggle to do that, pretend. You might trick yourself.
INTERVIEW BEGINS
VFD: As I was sending you the message to get this started I saw your tweet about Kacey Musgraves covering Coldplay’s “Fix You” for Chipotle. That’s a hell of a thing to wake up to.
Parker Molloy: Always. Because what time is it where you are?
VFD: It's about six in the morning. It’s OK, I get up early anyway.
Parker Molloy: Yeah. Still…
VFD: Where are you?
Parker Molloy: I'm in Chicago. So it’s 1PM here. I think I’m a little bit more than a day behind you.
VFD: Did you grow up there?
Parker Molloy: I grew up in the southwest suburbs of Chicago and then moved here for college and have been here ever since.
VFD: Right, and what’s that like?
Parker Molloy: I like it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But it’s one of those things where it’s like: this is just where I’m from. So in non-pandemic times it’s great. Lots to do. Slightly less to do during the pandemic, but that’s the world now.
VFD: Did you say you grew up there… but then moved away for college?
Parker Molloy: Yeah – So I lived about 40 miles southwest of Chicago and grew up there. It’s kind of rural, but still close to the city. The setup when I was growing up was pretty rural, but then I turned 18 and graduated high school and moved. I stayed in Illinois but I moved to central Illinois, about three hours south. Stayed there for three semesters of college and dropped about, then went back home with my parents.
VFD: What were you studying?
Parker Molloy: I was studying music performance. I was like: I’m going to be great at guitar! And I’m gonna have have a degree in guitar performance! But I realised that, well, look: you can be really good at guitar and you don’t need a degree. No one’s gonna be like: are you a good guitarist? Can I see your degree? So I ended up dropping out because I was just like: why am I burning all of this money going here?
I moved back in with my parents for six months and then went to school in Chicago, majoring in music business, which was safer. And then, well, the music industry kind of fell apart.
VFD: Yeah. So you never studied writing or journalism or anything like that?
Parker Molloy: No, no. I once submitted an article that was about music to the school newspaper and it didn’t get picked up. I think they were just like: Yeah, thanks… I think we’re good. Thanks, but no thanks. Which is kind of funny because I wonder how many people who were actual journalism students at school had things published in the school paper. Were they more successful than me? I don’t know. Maybe a lot - maybe a few. Maybe nothing.
VFD: Well, it sounds like you’ve let it go.
Parker Molloy: Yeah, certainly not hanging on to this or anything.
VFD: OK, cool. So, obviously, I know you as a writer and not a music performance person. You still have time! But how did the writing happen?
Parker Molloy: Oh yeah, right. Basically, after I graduated from college I was just doing various jobs here and there. I worked at an insurance agency for three months before I got fired, which was kind of embarrassing because my dad worked for the company and had been there for my entire life. So when I got fired by one of his friends it was extremely awkward. But I was just not very interested in that job.
VFD: Right,
Parker Molloy: Then I had a few internships here and there, semi-related to music. I interned at a record label in Chicago that was very tiny called Flameshovel Records – which is just a weird name. But they had some great music on it that I still love. But that didn’t go anywhere.
I ended up getting an internship at Pitchfork, and that was my first entrance into the world of media, generally.
The internship was fine. It was good. It was cool seeing how things worked out, but I got stuck with the worst possible things to do. Very intern things.
VFD: Like what?
Parker Molloy: So, for instance, they would have me drag the unsolicited CDs that they would receive in the mail from downstairs, up two flights of stairs, and then sort them. And it wasn’t sorting them so they could listen to them. No, it was sorting them so they could go and donate them later. Like, sell it to the local record shop or something. Which, y’know, that’s fine.
VFD: What year was this?
Parker Molloy: 2007 I think. It was quite a ways back. And then my whole job while I was there was transcribing things for people, which is still my least favourite part of anything to do with writing.
VFD: Gotta agree. And that’s what most of VFD is!
Parker Molloy: Yeah, I mean, it’s not fun. Especially when the interview I was transcribing, a lot of them would be bands being interviewed by one person. And the interviews were like: a guy from Pitchfork asks a questions and then three people from whatever band it was all try to answer at once. So I can’t hear any of them and then they move on. That happened a lot. I always felt bad being like: “inaudible cross talk”. But that internship ended.
I ended up, for a little while, getting a job at a talent management agency, where I actually got to use my degree a little bit. This person that I worked for – she manages bands – and one of them was this guy who’s also from Chicago named Andrew Bird.
VFD: Oh cool,
Parker Molloy: Yes, lots of violins playing loops and whistling all sorts of very strange, weird stuff that I absolutely loved. And he was a very strange and wonderful person. So that was a cool job. I did that for about two years and that brings us to around 2010.
After that I just bounced around a little bit just doing odd jobs. I applied for a job at The Chicago Tribune – one of our two big papers here – and I ended up getting a job in the classifieds section with classified advertising. I basically worked in a call centre and people would call in and be like: I need to sell my lawn mower. And they would ask me: OK, how many characters do I have left? 19 left on this line? They wouldn’t want to pay for a second line so they would try to abbreviate things super short. And at the end of it all I’d be like: OK, that comes out to $4.50. It would be something so small. Something that was just so tiny that it wasn’t worth my time or anyone’s time. That was before they made the full shift to just getting everyone to take out ads online.
VFD: Yeah.
Parker Molloy: So that was an experience. And my goal – which I hoped to achieve – was like: Cool, I’m going to start here and then I’m going to try and make friends with people who are actually journalists and then move up. But that didn’t happen. That’s something that could happen in a movie or TV show, but not so much in real life.
The closest thing I had to that was one time I was going to lunch and the billionaire owner of the paper turned around a corner that I was turning into and we just ploughed into each other. And he just started daggers into my eyes. I was just like: I’m dead. That’s it. It was this dude named Sam Zell who was the owner at the time.
VFD: Right. Just like: there goes my classifieds job…
Parker Molloy: Yeah. Just real: I’m screwed, this is over, I’m gonna have to go do something else. But it was fine. I stayed there for a few years and eventually got laid off, because Craigslist kind of destroyed the classified section. And that was grim, too.
At first I was helping people sell things, but then around that time there were a lot of foreclosures happening on houses because of the financial crisis. So a lot of the classified section just became a legal notices section because if your house is being foreclosed on the bank has to take out an ad in the paper saying “this house is being foreclosed on and will be sold at auction”. So I would be sitting there, typing away, getting their ad in.
But I didn’t have it as bad as some people. Some people had to do death notices, which was always awkward, where it’d be for people who couldn’t afford a full obituary but who wanted to announce where the funeral was being held. Which was fine. But it always involved talking to family members of someone who had just died and I’m just glad I didn’t have to do that. Especially since that’s one of those sections that if you screw up they’re very, very angry.
VFD: Understandably so.
Parker Molloy: Yeah. I mean, there was one really famous example of someone screwing up in a gigantic way. There was a woman who died and the picture they had sent over was some little old white woman. And the picture that accidentally ran was for a different person who had just died. And first off: it was a man. And he looked nothing like the woman. He was black. He just looked nothing like it. There was no way that you could possibly, accidentally, make this happen if you were paying attention at your job at all. But that happened.
Then, the next day, they called and it was just them responding to the wrong picture being run in the paper. And all they said was: I am so disappointed. And then hung up.
I’m glad I didn’t work on that desk.
VFD: Yeah, that’s a bad day in the office.
Parker Molloy: But yeah, after that I eventually got laid off and I started working at an ad agency in Chicago where I did search engine marketing stuff. So ads when you Google search. And then social media marketing, which was kind of new at the time, because Facebook didn’t really have ads until 2008 and this was 2021-ish.
So Facebook was just starting to roll out new ad products and some of those products were terrible.
There was one that was just boosted posts. So if someone “likes” something on Facebook, the company could pay to have that random person’s posts promoted into your feed. And there’s one gigantic example– which is kind of why Facebook stopped doing this – which was like a 55 gallon drum of lube for sale on Amazon. And someone had posted about it as a joke and Amazon had one of those sponsored posts set up to run with it. So this one random guy had his post that was like: Hey, for Valentine’s Day be sure to buy your 55 gallon drum of lube blown up. Facebook quickly realised that was a problem.
VFD: Yeah,
Parker Molloy: But this job was mostly writing out really short ads that would run when someone would search “McDonald’s” – and we’d be working for Burger King – so we’d make sure an ad for a Whopper would pop up. Which is, y’know, not what they wanted. It just gets at one of the core problems: yeah, you’re advertising, but you’re putting things that people don’t want at their feet.
So after a while there I just started getting bored and started pitching articles to various places writing about music and culture and politics. Some of the first things I put out there were – because I’m transgender – about that at the beginning. I’d just be like: Hey, this thing is happening that involves trans people. Here’s a story. I’d pitch that to Huffington Post and Salon and Rolling Stone.
And my whole goal with writing was to write an article for one publication and then pitch future articles, to different publications, by pointing to that lower one. Like a stepping stone. I think a lot of people would say: you may have seen my work in Salon, and Talking Points Memo, and Huffington Post. Which anyone could do at the time, basically.
VFD: What was that like? Writing about trends, culture, and experience in the mid 2010s.
Parker Molloy: Yeah, it was around 2013-2014 – somewhere around there. It was interesting because now everyone seems to have a really big opinion on everything. Back then it was just people being like: I don’t know what any of this stuff is! And it was kind of nice, compared to now, where you’ve got these groups that are very, very focused on trans issues, especially when they’re focused in a very negative way.
It would be like: California had passed a law that was about trans kids. Basically, it said trans kids in schools should not be bullied for being trans and they should be allowed to use the restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, as long as it’s consistent. And they should be allowed to play sports if they want to, on teams that correspond with their gender identity. And that whole thing was fine. There was nothing really outrageous in this law. However, there was a group that was trying to have it put on the ballot for public recall.
So, I had to interview them for this piece and interview people who wrote the law. Luckily, the law ended up staying. They weren’t able to recall it. But it was my first taste of watching exactly how the anti-trans arguments go, where someone will stake out this really obvious, really over-the-top example.
They’ll be like: So, what if LeBron James decides he’s a woman one day and decides he wants to play in the WNBA? Would that be OK? And it’s like, well, first off: he’s not going to do that. Second: we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about kids. Like, the point of school sports is to win, or to make friends, and to get along. And you have to weigh these things based on that.
But, anyway, to this day there still has really been no issues with the way that law operates in California.
VFD: Yeah.
Parker Molloy: And it’s all these years later. So still waiting for the doomsday scenarios that they predicted. But, with that it’s like: that whole little argument happening in California that I reported on for Rolling Stone – that whole issue… It’s happening on a national and global scale now. So it’s frustrating because not a whole lot changes with this. People who are against trans rights will constantly make the same arguments. They’ll constantly find outlier cases to yell about.
Eventually, I just got tired of writing about mostly trans stuff and mostly LGBT stuff. And if I could go the rest of my life without having to write about trans issues again – or even talking about them – I’d be totally cool with that. It would be great. We can all live our lives and I can focus on my true passions. Which is probably spending time on Twitter, I guess.
VFD: You said that experience was your first interaction with the organised, anti-trans approach, with all of their talking points. Had you not experienced that kind of thing just… living?
Parker Molloy: Well, the tricky thing is that – at the time – I had dealt with anti-trans stuff happening on an individual level. People making fun of me, or people talking behind my back. Those sorts of things. But there wasn’t really a loud anti-trans lobby. So it didn’t affect me in a really direct way just yet.
I mean, the things that did affect me were movies and TV shows, like Jerry Springer. These TV shows that were just trashy and over-the-top, where the reveal is like: hey, there are six women – which three of them are actually men! That would be a whole genre. And the crowd would be like: Yo, Jerry, that one! They’re a man! And then it would turn out that no, they’re not trans. And she would just be crying. Y’know. Good times.
VFD: America.
Parker Molloy: Even in movies like Ace Ventura. That’s one example where the whole thing hinges on this idea that the villain of the movie is trans. And that’s why they couldn’t find her. There’s that trope that’s been done over and over in movies, and I think has really informed a lot of what people think of when they think of trans people. Which is unfortunate. But at the same time it’s not the same as someone being like: Hey, so we have to inspect people’s genitals as they go into the bathroom. Like… that’s way over the top. I can take goofy, dumb, anti-trans jokes, but I’d rather people not do that.
VFD: When it becomes a part of bureaucracy and law.
Parker Molloy: Exactly. It’s a little frustrating with all of that. I feel like writing about these things early on, in the modern context of these arguments…
VFD: Like: social media world.
Parker Molloy: Yeah – the social media world. And that was really amplifying all of it. I think that was helpful in shaping my own approach to writing. I learned a lot of lessons along the way as follower counts went up. It was like: oh, I probably shouldn’t engage with someone who has 15 followers, and quote-tweet them. That person’s an idiot. Because what if I have 200,000 followers and they’re all like: I’m gonna go yell at that person. Then you’re just a bully.
VFD: Right? It’s a tough game, because that kind of compassionate thought doesn’t work the other way around. There’s someone anti-trans with 100,000 followers and they just think it’s great for their social media.
Parker Molloy: Yeah, I’ve tried to remind myself that if 1% of people who follow me on there respond to someone it’s still gonna be them getting 2000 messages. And it’s like: How bad is whatever this person has said that I’m disagreeing with?
VFD: Exactly. OK. So you’ve started to establish your voice and you’re gaining followers. And then what came after that? Was there a steady job that you locked down?
Parker Molloy: So that was in 2015. I got my first, permanent writing job – to the point where I could quit my day job at that ad agency. And if I’m being totally honest, I worked that job in the sense that I would show up to work every day and then I would just sit there on my computer with the screen having whatever looks like my actual work at the top and just sitting there writing an article at the bottom.
I was like: they don’t like me here. I don’t like being here. It’s not gonna work out in the end. I’ve got a few months – I’m gonna make a big push to try and get a job. And it worked.
I ended up getting a job at Upworthy. Upworthy used to have all of these videos that were very much like: Hey! This happened! You’ll never guess what happened next! Two people are friends now!
Basically, it was taking YouTube videos, re-writing the headlines, and putting them in articles. Which was super easy. And that was a whole genre of internet content for a while.
VFD: Totally. I feel like that’s going to be the silent movie-era of Internet Content. People are going to be like: Wow, that’s so primitive! That was really weird…
Parker Molloy: Wasn’t it? But the reason they had so much success was that Facebook’s “like” algorithm was set up where it was only prioritising the click-through rate on stories. And because the headlines were all very much like “You’ll never guess what happens next”, there was this curiosity gap thing where people go: OK, now I need to see what happens next. And then they would click it and they would see it and they would close it. Because at the same time, Facebook wasn’t really concerned about lengthy engagements. They were just concerned about the clicks. It ended up boosting a lot of content, which probably wasn’t a great thing.
I mean, it wasn’t necessarily good. When I got hired there it was after they had already hit that peak with Facebook, because Facebook realised it at some point. They were like: This isn’t good. Our Facebook pages are turning into mush. Other places had started to copy that style and it was just bad.
Facebook tried to get away from clickbait by prioritising the length of time people spend on an article that they click through to, which is probably a better metric. And to respond to that, Upworthy was like: Cool, we’ve got to shift with it. So they hired someone to come in from The New York Times to run the site. And they were like: We’re gonna hire some more serious writers. And they hired me and a handful of other people to do lengthier things and write actual articles, instead of just being like: hey, here’s a video, and here’s three sentences setting it up.
So that was it. It was very interesting in the sense that one of the things I learned there was just the gigantic difference a headline can make in terms of how many people will click on it.
VFD: Definitely.
Parker Molloy: And it’s kind of depressing that the headline and the share-texts that you include on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the image that you use, are the three things that really determine whether something will go super viral or if literally no one will click on it.
It was cool to be able to mess around with that a little bit. But y’know: it just got boring and tiring. I was never a great fit there because I feel like I’m too cynical. I feel like you have to be a really huge optimist to work at a place that’s very much like: Hey! Everything’s great! There’s a reason for hope!
But that was 2017. And when I finally ended up leaving, at the nose-end of 2018, it was after Trump had been elected. And some of the articles would be like: Trump has tried to ban immigration from all of these countries but here’s what you can do to fight back! That sort of thing. And I just felt bad, constantly being like: Hey, don’t worry, you can make a change, you could fix the world, you could change it! But it’s like: these things that are happening are so big.
Eventually, Upworthy was bought out by a different company called Good. Which is an interesting name. My thoughts on that is the same thing as pieces of legislation with a very positive name. Like, here in the US we have the Patriot Act, and people will be like: Oh, that sounds good! Patriot! And then you read it and it’s like: Oh, cool, it’s a law about how you can spy on us. So it’s that sort of thing when it comes to company names, also. Like: your company is just called “Good”? OK.
VFD: Not even “Great”?
Parker Molloy: Yeah. It’s just “Good”? But anyway, I ended up getting laid off. Everyone ended up getting laid off.
VFD: It’s a tradition.
Parker Molloy: Exactly. They laid us all off and they just replaced the writers with people who’d work for less, or who all lived around them, basically.
After that I ended up getting another job at Media Matters, which is a progressive media watchdog group. It’d be watching a lot of Fox News and watching a lot of conservative media. It was very draining but rewarding work where it would like: so here’s a bunch of things that Tucker Carlson said last night that aren’t true. And here’s the correct information. Here’s the transcript.
And that was always about putting the whole thing out there. Put out what was said, what’s not true, give the full context, and hope for the best, basically. Hope that people read it.
VFD: Was that not incredibly depressing?
Parker Molloy: Oh, extremely depressing. But at the same time I care about this stuff. I care about news outlets misrepresenting things, or not doing their jobs particularly well. Because it’s the same thing that I saw when I was writing about trans issues early on, where you’d be like: this thing that a newspaper wrote isn’t quite accurate. That’s not the truth. And so I’d try to correct that a little bit in my writing. And the same thing would happen at Media Matters – but instead of just being about trans issues it was about literally everything.
Y’know, a piece of legislation gets introduced and you would have Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram and all of those people at Fox, for one, would just make things up about it. Or they would exaggerate things.
There was this bill, or resolution, called the Green New Deal. And it was like a seven page, non-binding commitment to not let the world fall apart.
VFD: Yeah, climate change.
Parker Molloy: Yeah. It’s one of those things where it’s like: OK, cool, you’ve got this little blueprint but it doesn’t mean anything. You could have passed it, and it doesn’t change anything right away at least. But then you have, on Fox News, this whole alternate universe approach to it. You’d have Sean Hannity saying: Oh, they’re going to abolish the combustion engine! There will be no more aeroplanes! They’re going to get rid of cows because they contribute methane! There’s gonna be no windows in buildings anymore!
None of it made sense. It was just a bunch of nonsense. And when Trump was in office he would go and repeat that stuff out to his crowd. Every once in a while he would have some weird rant about toilets or windows. And it makes sense, if you’re really immersed in the Fox News universe, but a lot of people are just like: What is he saying?? What is he talking about??
And I’ve been there, shaking my head. It pains me that I know what he’s talking about. I should not know. I should not be able to hear something that incoherent like that and then be like: Oh, no, this makes total sense. If you’re a big fan of Fox News cinematic universe…
VFD: Yeah. My favourite Trump thing – I shouldn’t say favourite – but the thing he would always do is start on a subject, like toilets or whatever law, and then as soon as one person’s name is mentioned he becomes fixated on the emotional surroundings of that person. So he’d just be like: Oh, and the inventor of this toilet, John Smith, he’s a great guy. A tremendous guy. A guy who I’ve met many times…
Parker Molloy: My favourite portion of those things was when he’s talking about someone but he makes a mistake talking about them. But rather than correct himself he would just pretend he was totally right, all along. And there was one time during one of his State of the Union speeches where Trump was talking about some guy – I think his name may have been DJ Smith or something. And this “DJ Smith” is a border patrol agent. And Trump misread is as “CJ” at first. And he’d just go: CJ Smith. DJ Smith. Or is it TJ Smith? He said call me either one.
And like: no, he didn’t do that. And the whole time the camera is on the guy who’s just looking like he’s happy to be there and happy to be getting credit. Like: Call me either one?? What is this?
VFD: Yeah, call me any name.
Parker Molloy: And that was always his approach. When he would make a mistake he wouldn’t just correct himself. Instead, that was his way of correcting himself – to include what he said to make it seem like that was also correct.
VFD: Yeah. Well, how do you feel about where America is at now? Things are good?
Parker Molloy: I’m kind of a pessimist. Generally, though, a bunch of people were going into the 2016 election where Trump beat Hillary Clinton like: Yeah, Clinton is going to win and we can put this whole Trump thing behind us.
But I was sitting there on election day, casting my vote, like: Trump’s totally gonna win. This is gonna be horrible. And then he won. And then I was like: It’s gonna be bad. And then it was bad.
But, honestly, the state of things in the US… I do not have a whole lot of confidence because the way it’s set up with our electoral system, having this electoral college where certain states are worth more than others. Someone voting in Wyoming is, like, counted eight times as much as someone’s vote in New York. Or something along those lines. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the 2020s. Maybe in the 1790s it sounded great.
So the setup of that sort of stuff really makes me worry about what’s going to happen the next election, because as it is – politically speaking – it’s the Democratic Party. They’re really struggling to get much passed because they have a very, very, slim majority at the moment. And the rules of the Senate are really weird where you need 60 votes to pass most things, but there’s only like 50 Democrats. So you have to get 10 Republicans on board which is damn near impossible a lot of the time.
So, the 2022 election is going to happen and the Democrats, I feel like they’re probably gonna lose control of Congress. So they’ll just have the Presidency. And then the Republicans will take over Congress and they’re just going to torpedo Biden’s Presidency for the rest of time. Then, 2024 comes ‘round and who knows? It’s hard to feel super happy and excited about the future when it’s just like: maybe, two years from now, things are gonna go right back to where they were – but maybe worse.
VFD: Well, that’s cool. A nice thought. I was gonna wrap it up there but… What do you do to stay positive?
Parker Molloy: I spend a lot of time with my wife and my dog. And we have a cat, too. But the cat is a cat. He has his own thing that he does. But I like to play video games. I have a PS5. That’s been a lot of fun. I like to play music. I like to make weird little animations on the computer. Working on my newsletter – The Present Age – which has been a lot of fun. It’s slow going. Growth has been pretty minimal. I’m not one of these Substackers who’s bringing in $800,000 a year or whatever Bari Weiss is bringing in.
VFD: Yeah.
Parker Molloy: But it has been interesting so far. And it’s nice to be able to work from home to be able to really just control what I write about and not have to fit things into certain boxes. Working at Upworthy it’d be like: Hey, write this story about this kid who gut stuck in a well but was saved. That’s good!
VFD: He’s malnourished but he’s not dead!
Parker Molloy: Exactly. Or it would be something that’s really horrific about society, but framed as a good thing. Like: This man had to walk to work 17 miles and after three years of working, and walking 17 miles a day, his boss bought him a car! And it’s like: well, OK, cool, but at the same time it’s not good that anyone has to walk that far to work. We should not have to say: Look, things work out! Things are great!
But yeah. That’s kind of it. Watching TV, playing video games, reading, music. It’s all the basic stuff.
VFD: The American dream.
Parker Molloy: Yeah, totally.
VFD: Well, thank you so much.
Parker Molloy: Of course.