Ep. 107: "Built for Now"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty darn good.
Not too early.
P-Y-T, pretty darn good.
No, it's not too early.
It's medium early.
Has your schedule been upended today?
Part of, you know, just in the time that we've been doing this podcast, part of what has happened to me is that my life has been transformed from one that had no schedule of any kind to one that has a moving target schedule that's happening all around me, coalescing in space.
It is crystallizing out of the solution, but I am still like John Travolta, boy in a bubble, not really touching the atmosphere.
Is this making sense to you?
Oh, all too much.
I've been in that bubble.
I've put my hands up against it.
Touch me.
Feel me.
I have a very unsympathetic situation, which is that I have...
When I had a job, even though it was a job where I might have to work on the weekends or something, there was some sense of like, ah, I got to go to my job at 8 a.m.
And then, yay, I get to go home at 5 or 6.
And I think this is more having to do with family and getting older, but also to do with career stuff is that like I feel like –
I do almost nothing, and yet I have an infinite number of things to do.
And even when I do a lot – like the other night after dinner, I came to work and I got three things done that I – which is like a month of work for me.
Like accomplishing three things I meant to do or had been procrastinating about, it felt really good.
But that's such a –
I get that dopamine hit for about three minutes, and then I instantly go back into, oh my god, there's so much stuff I should be doing.
I have a list of like 50 things to talk to you about.
And we don't have to talk about any of them, but we could, and that makes all the difference.
Do you know what I mean there with my plastic bubble?
I do.
I do.
I have a gig tonight where I am required to do five minutes.
But it's something I have to do.
I have to go do it.
I have to get there.
I have to stand around.
I have to do it.
I have to stand around some more.
Drink that backstage coffee.
And I got a couple emails today from people that were like, remember that thing?
that we talked about a month ago.
It's due now.
And then there were a couple more emails that I'm just remembering now that I'm talking about it, where a week ago, I was like, listen, I'm really going to get you that thing this week.
And both those people were like,
all right, like we're holding it, waiting for your thing, waiting for your part of it.
And again, I mean, it's all things where like, you know, again, I understand this is an unsympathetic thing, but like there's like this thing that I could do and I'll probably work really hard on it for a long time and it won't make any money, but it might, or it might be an opportunity thing or whatever thing or a career thing.
But there's like an almost infinite number of things I could do for almost no money right now that might turn into something.
Mm-hmm.
But then all across the spectrum, there's all these little micro things where it's not really a calendar event.
It's kind of a to-do, but I got to write this talk description.
Oh, that should only take me five minutes, but it takes me a month to get it done.
Right.
MC Frontalot, are you familiar with his work?
I am.
MC Frontalot communicated with me two months ago, maybe three months ago.
And said, I want you to sing on my record.
Here are everything you could possibly need.
The lyrics, the track I made, the idea I had in mind.
He really, more than any other musician I've worked with, gave me the entire deck of cards.
Of like, here is everything to make it so simple and fun for you to do.
It's a dream gig.
And I was like, how exciting.
And the ease of the preparation made me feel like, I'll just, I'll be able to do that in an afternoon.
And many, many afternoons have gone under the great spirit in the sky.
Yeah.
And here I am, lonely orphan doe.
Bachelor farmer, bubble boy.
Still haven't done it.
And Frontalot is a good enough dude that he's not an email hassler.
He's not giving me any grief about it.
He actually has a contingency plan, probably, where it's like, well, Roderick didn't come through, so I went ahead and did another thing.
He might have sent it to 50 people and just said, you know, whoever responds first.
But there it is.
I really want to do it.
I'm excited to do it.
I like that man very much.
You better hurry.
You might be up against Colin Malloy or Bon Iver.
Bon Iver.
You found the one guy that can trump Colin Malloy in my drop an octave and say his name.
Sleep stakes.
We'll see you next time.
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We could not do it without him.
Oh, Bonnie Bear.
Yeah.
It's a beautiful day here in Seattle.
It's a beautiful day in my neighborhood.
I was out in the yard poking around.
You know, I'm living the life of Riley here.
Can't complain.
As you say, completely unsympathetic.
It's completely, I mean, I had a wonderful 90-minute phone call, and I'm exhausted.
I'm completely exhausted.
I got up.
I laid in bed.
I looked at Twitter.
I made a coffee.
I had a shower.
I came to work.
I diddled around.
Come on.
You're exhausting me even listing all the things you've done today.
Shower?
Coffee?
Come on.
It takes it out of me.
Oh, me too.
Just hearing about it.
I had a meeting yesterday at my new office space with the Roderick Group.
This has got to be a cable show at some point.
Which now numbers five people.
This includes your manager, your assistant manager, your manager of assistants, your various assistants.
You got your conciliary.
Yep.
Executive producer, co-executive producer, assistant co-executive producer.
And so I go down to my office.
I'm there with my daughter.
We need to go to the potty, as you know.
That's a thing that happens.
Usually with not a whole lot of notice.
It's like, oh, I need to go to the potty.
And you go, oh shit, let's go.
And I go out of my, it's this brand new office.
I go, I check the doorknob as I'm leaving, which is a thing I don't typically do, but there's a new space.
So I'm like, check the doorknob.
The doorknob turns freely.
We go down to the potty.
We come back.
The door has locked itself somehow.
And I'm standing there in the hall with my daughter and I'm like, my keys are in there.
My phone is in there.
Oh, no.
I cannot even go to the emergency location because the car keys are in there.
All that stands between you and carrying on your life is a tremendous analogy for your life.
And so my daughter and I play in the hall of the office building for a couple of hours while we wait for the rest of the people to arrive.
The staff, the Roderick group is all coming.
The titular group.
The group.
And I'm going to reveal something that is a little, well, I'm just going to reveal it.
I'm not going to characterize it.
But I searched through my wallet looking for the exact stiffness of card needed to jimmy a lock.
The credit card that is... Yeah, the old trick.
Yeah, your lock jimmying card has to be a certain kind of card.
It's a very special kind of card because it has to be thin enough to fit, but stiff enough for you to go wooka, wooka, wooka.
Right.
And I'm going through my wallet and I'm like, ah, you know, I don't have a driver's license like an old laminated one anymore.
I have one of those executive driver's licenses, enhanced driver's license that's like a hard, brittle plastic card.
Give Washington's license clear.
That's right.
And I don't want to use my credit card because I use it 50 times a day and I don't want to be standing here in my office locked out and with a credit card broken in half.
And I'm realizing that all the new cards I've received are all either made out of paper-thin cardboard, so not stiff enough to actually pick a lock, or they are like hard, brittle plastic, not flexible enough to fit into the door jam.
And so I'm standing there and I'm like, I can't believe that I don't even have, in an overfilled wallet, I don't have a single card that I can use to jimmy a door.
Like that is, that makes me mad and that makes me feel like, it makes me feel like I don't have a small bag packed.
No, it's a failure in the system for sure.
It really was and I wasn't anticipating it.
And I was and I was mad at myself.
So I'm standing there in the lobby.
And, you know, you know, sometimes what happens to me is I get mad at myself.
And then I then I decide that the adequate punishment is to that my punishment is going to be that I just sit on a cold linoleum floor for an hour or whatever, like just like you don't have yourself in the corner.
Yeah.
You don't have a lock pick.
You don't know.
You don't have anybody's phone number memorized anymore.
And there's not even a phone in this building.
You don't even deserve to know.
You don't.
You know what?
You should be sitting in the rain.
And the only reason you're not is because your daughter is here, you know, and she is your shield against the anger that you are feeling toward yourself.
What a pussy.
Yeah.
And at one point, at one point, she turned to me and she said, uh,
She said, Daddy, don't.
And the thing is, I thought I was completely opaque.
But she said, Daddy, don't feel anxiety.
Oh, no.
It's like, I didn't even realize I was projecting anxiety.
But thank you, little empath.
There are so many levels of sad to that.
But anyway, so then the Roderick group starts to trickle in.
And we realize, oh, not only.
are we locked out?
But I had the only key because the key had do not duplicate on it.
And the Roderick group members who tried to get the key duplicated were thwarted.
And so to credit to them, they, they gave me the one key and then I like the nutty professor did.
So we're standing there in the, in the hallway wondering what to do.
And assistant to the assistant manager, Roderick Group, like Sergeant at Arms, Bailey McCann, kind of disappears around the corner.
Five minutes later, she comes and she's like, I picked the lock.
What'd she use?
If you can say.
Well, I'm not going to reveal her secrets.
That's humbling.
That's humbling.
Well, not just humbling, but also, like, you realize, oh, of course you did.
Like, yes, this is the team.
This is the crew.
I was unprepared.
She was not.
Mm-hmm.
And somehow as I become crazier and less useful, I'm magnetically surrounding myself with apparently office ninjas.
So now I don't even need to carry lockpicks.
I just have a lockpicker on staff.
I'll tell you, though, it sickens me, this nanny state.
You know, the do not duplicate key.
Thanks, Obama.
Thanks, Obama.
You know, we're going to have to probably cut literally all of this out, but I'm a little bit surprised that you don't have some kind of a small lock picking kit.
I am very surprised, too.
Seems like there would be something.
Surprised at myself.
I think those are technically in the nanny state illegal to own.
But it seems like there should be some kind of, what do you call it, the dark net?
What do you call it?
Yeah, dark web.
There should be a dark web version of ThinkGeek where you can go and get something that's the size of a Zoom membership card that could be used as a lock pick for non-sophisticated locks.
Well, believe me, I came home and I took all of the ID cards having to do with the local swimming pool and the ID cards, the ID card that I have from the local community college that I basically signed up for the community college just to get a student discount so I could buy a new Mac laptop and then went and realized that Macintosh is wise to us and
wise to students and they were like here's your discount fifty dollars what it was like what are you talking about you said there was a 20 discount they were like yeah on desktop computers oh come on but laptops for students so fifty dollars off your laptop that's your student discount take it or leave it because we are apple take it or leave it that should be their motto take it or leave it here we go but it'd be beautifully typeset
I got a couple of tweets from a guy yesterday who was like, I don't know why you spend so much time complaining about Apple products online when all you need to do is go to the Apple store and they will fix it for free.
Why do you not seek solutions?
Why do you complain instead of seeking solutions?
That's such a partial answer.
And I wrote like five...
versions of all cap fuck yous to this guy.
And I didn't send any of them.
But I was like...
Bon Iver.
I think you dropped two registers on that one.
I saw you expressing your frustration with the Apple group yesterday, and I had to close the browser because I didn't even want to see.
I didn't even want to see what kind of response you were going to get.
I think the phrase you used was something like that they should be ashamed of themselves.
Yeah, and then somebody else tweeted me and said, no one monitors the at Apple group.
twitter group so don't try and except for literally millions of people who like to yell at people like you but he was like don't even try and and and shame them because they're not paying attention no they're not i'm not trying to you know like i that is not where i'm demanding satisfaction that is just a place that is just a place of like
You know, Twitter is my place.
It's not your place.
You know, there's lots of things that you could do about a lot of things.
And there's an endless number of times, there's an endless number of things that you could do about something, but that's not what I'm bitching about.
What I'm bitching about is it's incredibly frustrating to me that I have to go and navigate all those could-do things.
Yeah, right.
I need to sign up for an appointment with some geniuses.
And that's going to be two days out.
At their convenience, not mine.
I get to pick one of three times.
And then I go down there and they're going to take the phone in the back room.
And the first thing they're going to do is come out and say, this phone has gotten wet.
And so all your warranties are void.
Get out of our store.
Well, I want the impossible.
I want satisfaction.
I want them to go that, like, we've made a whole bunch of fucked up stuff, and we're sorry that we inconvenienced you.
That's what I want.
That's what I want, too.
That's all I want.
I want my phone to work, but I want you also to acknowledge the fact that the literally thousands of dollars that I've spent on this company, on the strength, are partly with the expectation that I don't have to take the advice of some pimple-faced kid to go to the mall today.
I want this to have worked.
I want that letter from the U.S.
State Department, too.
Oh, one of those, like, sorry about slavery letters?
Exactly.
I am sorry.
I am sorry that every war we've waged since World War II has been a complete fucking... You're not even asking for reparations.
You're asking for a simple grown-up apology.
We started... My mom and I went down to Chase Bank the last few days, and we've been trying to set up a business account with all of the... You know, we want, like, five different credit cards and so forth, and we got some manager...
And the manager was like, oh, this will be really easy.
But he didn't know what he was doing.
And then, you know, the other people in the bank were like deferential to his managerial status.
But turned out as the process went on, he's a manager in training.
So he doesn't know what he's doing, but he's the person in authority.
He is the he is the buck lieutenant.
who's out in the jungle with his fucking helmet on backwards.
He would have gotten fragged.
That's right.
He's calling in a fucked up fire mission, and he's getting his own guys hit with howitzer shells, this guy.
But nobody's yelling at him.
Because he's a lieutenant.
Because he's a lieutenant.
And so he screwed up this thing so badly, and by the second day, my mom was like...
She's like, I don't want to deal with these people anymore.
And I said, Mom, this is one of our core principles.
If we do nothing else in this family, it is that we punish companies who do bad jobs.
We make time.
That's right.
Even if this doubles our effort to move this account.
It's not a question of getting an account.
It's not a question of getting cards.
It's a question of making the fucking point.
This is a question of, that's right, if we have to fall on our sword, if we never get a bank account, we are not going to do this business with Chase.
They have screwed this up so badly.
And she's like, oh, you know, and then she goes through that little phase she has because she's afraid of a police state a little bit or she's like she doesn't like she's she's one of these people that's like, don't complain to the waiter because they'll spit in your food.
And she's like, but this guy at the bank, he has all my information now.
And I'm like, if are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
This guy.
Like, the idea that this banker would have some retribution against us.
What would he do with it?
Well, that's what I mean.
And it's just like, you know, we would be in a position which I have always wanted, which is a position where we could legitimately sick our family attorney, Byron D. Coney.
LAUGHTER
on a corporation.
Byron D. Coney, the 80-year-old pit bull of Washington.
You're saying you and Byron go to the mattresses.
Byron and I would freaking go to the mattresses.
When I was in my 20s, Byron sometimes would come by the house and he'd say, hey, you want to go for a ride?
He had a Jaguar or whatever.
We'd go for a ride.
And then I'd realize once we got out that he was...
That he was serving people with papers.
Oh, my God.
And he would – he'd put the papers in my hand.
He'd say, go up and ring the doorbell and ask for fucking Frank Jones.
Oh, my God.
And he was like using – You were a process server?
Yeah, he was using me to serve people because they wouldn't expect because I looked like a grunge rocker or whatever.
I looked like the guy that was there to –
I looked like a bike messenger basically.
And then, you know, guys would come to the door and I'd be like, here, here's your blue papers.
Oh my God.
Very.
And, but you know, so Byron's, you know, Byron's the guy you want on your team, even though he's now in his eighties and like, um, uh, he's still, he's still a ferocious guy.
And I have always wanted to have a actual reason for,
to really go after some some company like chase some company with a with a million lawyers because you know byron is underused and he's one of these you know he's one of these lawyers with a pair of glasses on top of his head a pair of glasses on his nose and a pair of glasses hanging from a chain around his neck that would just file he would file papers all day long he would file papers he would file so many papers yeah
I know.
I know.
It gives one chills.
Anyway, so I've convinced my mom that we are going to punish Chase.
You're going to punish Chase with your business.
We're going to punish Chase in a small way by taking our business to another bank, one just as reprehensible probably, but another bank.
Unfortunately, there is not really another Apple unless you count all the other phone companies.
No, but I think that's also – I mean I really don't want to talk about this.
No, no, no.
Let's not.
Let's not.
But I'll just say, but this is – to clarify here, I don't want to punish Apple.
I want Apple to do what they're good at, which is make shit that works.
Right.
That's all I'm asking, and believe me, I have been the one who stands at the gate and says, no, you guys don't get it to other people.
When they say, oh, you can go get this thing for a nickel over here, you get a free phone or whatever.
Yeah, free soup.
It's like, no.
I watched that last night.
Did you?
Yeah, that's you over here.
Yeah.
I did.
I watched Three Mysteries.
Not me, not me.
Not me, not me.
I do not like racial intolerance.
But, yeah.
Yeah, you know, I mean, there's not an answer for this.
The answer for this – I understand what people are saying.
I mean – but I also – I kind of dread the idea of a future where –
I don't know.
I'm probably catastrophizing this a little bit, but it's frustrating to me that I have to do it at all.
It's one thing to take home a new computer and the hard drive breaks because, you know what?
Apple didn't make that hard drive.
And hard drives, at least back in the day, when I was the computer guy at my job, there were times where we would get a shit amount of hard drives and three-fifths of them would be broken because that would just happen back in the day.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean the thing was you would really –
This might have been superstition on my part, but I mean this is what it used to be like to be a computer user was you would use – you would back everything up really well, which was very expensive.
And then you would kind of watch real carefully over the first month of use because my experience was that if a hard drive –
broke it would tend to be in the first month of usage and you'd watch them real carefully and then we discovered that it was just a bad lot that we got from lucy and they they sent us new ones but you know what i don't want to do that with apple i want them to give me something amazing the first time and shame on them that's all i'm going to say about that well yeah and i and i feel like we've talked about this many times but it is it what i see from young people
um who have never ever ever lived in a world where the expectation of businesses was that when they were providing you a good or service that they did it right the first time it was a well-made thing that they stood behind and that their customer service philosophy was the customer is always right what can we do to make it right now you know in the rare occasion that something goes wrong
Like, everybody stops what they're doing and tries to fix the problem for you as fast as they can because what they value is first, you know, their reputation and their reputation is predicated on your satisfaction.
And so there's a whole generation and maybe now into two generations of people who have never experienced life in that world.
And they have grown up in a world where everything is disposable, where companies' mentality is...
We're just going to keep pushing stuff out, and if we lose 20% of our customers to dissatisfaction, just 20% more are going to be lining up at the door to buy the garbage that we're putting out there, and the 20% of the people are going to go across the street to another shit company that's churning out garbage, and they're just going to bounce back and forth because all they're interested in is what's cheapest.
But also, I mean, part of what you're describing, I started thinking about restaurants where a restaurant would be a business for 30 years.
How many of the things that you're using right now, where you've been using a company's stuff for 10 years, I bet most of the company's stuff you've been using for 10 years have been around for a lot longer than 10 years.
Because the other side of this, companies go away, products go away.
Yeah.
I mean, can you tell me who made your DVD player?
Can you tell me who made your TV?
Like we used to really know that stuff inside and out.
Nerds know that.
But most people don't know.
I don't know.
It's a thing I bought at Costco and it breaks up by a new one.
But what you're describing in terms of like a restaurant, like today, like, you know, there's a place that recently reopened down the street from where I am.
And they had three reviews on Yelp before the place opened.
Whoa.
Yeah.
What did the reviews say?
Oh, my God.
This is fantastic.
I've never – I thought I'd had gourmet sandwiches before.
But these were amazing.
It wasn't open yet?
No, because all their buddies went in and left reviews.
And that is the cynical environment that we're in right now.
And that place won't be there in two years.
It'll be something else.
It'll be a Verizon dealership in no time.
Right.
Well, and I see that all over the place.
Like, people now, this is how they feel about shoes.
You buy a pair of shoes.
They're not cheap.
They cost $150.
They never got cheaper, even though you don't get them fixed.
Yeah, right.
They never got cheaper.
They're still extremely expensive.
But the idea is, ah, you wear them for a year or two, and then you dump them.
And it's like, I still have, I mean, I have shoes that are 50 years old.
You know, I have shoes that I bought.
From a person, a living person you knew?
Well, no.
Deadman's shoes.
Yeah, Deadman's shoes.
I have shoes that I bought vintage 25 years ago that were 30 years old at the time.
And I paid to have them resold.
And I still wear them.
And in some cases, I've had shoes resold a couple of times.
And I recognize that I am an old man and that that is an archaic way of thinking.
But I cannot describe how much better these shoes feel and how much better they are.
And I put on new shoes and they're kind of like stonewashed already.
They're broken in already.
They're comfortable.
They're lightweight.
And you put them on and you're like, they're fashionable looking.
They've got blue crepe soles now and they're made out of suede and they feel like slippers and we, and you run around in them.
And as soon as there, you know, as soon as you get a stain on them or as soon as the thread starts to unravel or the, you know, like I've got a pair of, I've got a pair of boots and I stepped on a,
sharp thing and it cut through the sole all the way to my sock what and i looked at the construction and it's this it's the one of i mean this is the way that they keep these products uh cheap is that the sole and the top of the boot are bonded together so it's kind of like a shoe balloon
there's not actually a piece of leather that they build the shoe on the top of and the sole on the bottom of.
That's like the way you construct a beach ball.
You just kind of glue them together.
Yeah.
It's kind of a rubbery sole thing, and you glue it to the open sort of top part, and you make this shoe balloon that you put then an odor eater in,
And it's like shoes.
It's a shoe.
And it's great, except if except they are unrepairable.
Right.
It's not a construction that you can take any portion of and change.
You can't put a new sole on it.
You can't put a new top on it.
You can't.
You can't really even change the odor eater out because the odor eater is like custom shaped.
And so the whole thing is just built.
It's built for now.
And I, I'm still living in this dream state of like this red wing based dream state where you buy a pair of boots and,
And you think, now I have the boots that I'm going to wear.
Now I have the boots I'm going to hand down to my grandson.
Right.
These are the great boots that I needed.
And it'd be amazing if it lasted a year.
The balloon shoes.
Yeah, the balloon shoes, and they're not meant to.
The problem is a lot of these conversations that you and I have here and the conversations I have out in the world, they're being received by people that speak the same language that we do and understand the concepts, but they don't have in their heart that fundamental...
that the relationship, that their role as consumer of things is a position of power, or it traditionally was a position of power.
You were the buyer, and the buyer...
had the power of choice and the power to reject bad products and that that was the that's the myth of the of american capitalism but it's also it's also how brands have changed though i mean i think about stuff you think about things like filson stuff you've got i've got a like a windbreaker that my dad bought in 1970 that i still wear uh it's dirty it's very handsome it's bright red it's really cool
But it's still got the patches on it, carefully sewn on in the early 1970s.
Does one of them say High Life?
No, no, there's no beer ones.
It's got large lures on them.
Oh, it's a fishing tank.
It could be, sure, sure.
But, you know, I mean, this is going to sound oversubtle, but think about how our relationship with brands has changed.
And, you know, it would just go right back to you, and then was it North Face?
Yeah.
And, you know, there was a time.
It's basically the bubble shoe of backpacks.
But in that case, I mean, you know, people would use that to actually go do stuff.
They would use that to go do stuff where the weather might change and they might have to be out an extra two or three days and they would have to make do.
And I'm not saying it's like survivalist kind of stuff, but that was stuff that was made for that kind of wear and tear.
Whereas now today, I mean people align themselves with these brands based on – I mean in the case of Apple, I think you could fairly say, yeah, it is based on a certain kind of build quality or whatever.
But I mean there's all kinds of stuff where you're – you like the way this – excuse me.
You like the way this logo looks until you find out that somebody on the board was against gay marriage.
And then that's a different thing.
Now you go look for another logo that's more comports with how you feel about the world.
And I think maybe that was just maybe a little more subtle in the past.
But, you know, I –
And, you know, I'm not trying to say this is anything grand.
I think a lot of this has to do with amazing marketing over the last hundred years.
But every family, you're a Hunt's family or you're a Heinz family or a Coke family or a Pepsi family.
And, you know, you would rarely meet people who would, you know, go over, cross over to the other brand unless I guess it was, you know, because of a big sale or something.
But even still, Kevin Horning's mom would not drink Coke.
If if a truck backed up and gave her a lifetime supply of free Coke, she wouldn't have consumed Coke.
She was Pepsi all the way.
You know, the irony is, John, there are so many things today where I could not pass the quote-unquote Pepsi challenge.
I could not tell the difference between five wines.
I couldn't even say what color most of them are.
But to this day, I can still tell you the difference between a Coke and a Pepsi.
in an rc yeah well i i i feel like part of this is that every time i walk out of the door and you know and i and i i don't i'm not exaggerating when i say this it seems like maybe that this is some increasingly it's it's become kind of my my brand and that that it is that it's funny uh but it is literally true that every time i walk out of the door
I think, what if I never come back?
Like, I'm walking out the door in these clothes.
What if this is the last time I walk out of this door?
For whatever reason.
Like, nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.
And if you walk out of the house in, like...
In your flip-flops and drawstring shorts.
What if that just happens to be the day that everything comes unraveled for whatever reason?
And then you're out there in the world.
with your flip-flops and your drawstring shorts and that, and you've got to make it from that point forward.
You know, you've got to like, you're, you're the person huddled up in a drainage culvert in your, in your, in your drawstring shorts and your flip-flops.
And you're saying to yourself, well, where can I, where can I find lamp oil?
Right.
Like this would be hard even if I were in shoes and pants, but I have made it additionally difficult because now the first thing I have to do is go find some shoes.
Like before I do anything else, before I go searching for lamp oil, I've got to get shoes first.
And so this is the premise behind keeping a small bag packed.
This is the premise behind having that bag in your car and ultimately the idea behind why didn't I have a lock pick in my wallet.
Yeah, I didn't want to bring it up.
But you can never know where the soft spots in your scheme are unless you're always probing them.
Yeah.
For me, every time I walk out the door, and there are times when I walk out the door and it's like, if this is the moment, like I'm putting myself in fate's hands right now because I am going away from my house with no contingency plan because it's a hot summer day and I'm just going to the fucking beach and I don't want to think about it right now.
But it's always in the back of my mind.
What happens if I never get back here?
And if, you know, so if I have a house full of survival gear,
it's going to really benefit whatever mutants end up colonizing my house because I am living in a culvert somewhere.
So, the concept of readiness, the premise of readiness is like, you need to always be ready.
And it's fun for me.
You know, that is a game.
It isn't based on paranoia.
I mean, I recognize that our systems largely work.
Right.
But you have no control over that.
You're lucky.
You're lucky.
It's amazing how often you can roll around without a contingency plan.
Even something as simple as having a key hidden outside your house or something like that.
You can go by for years and years and years, and that will never become an issue.
But there's a writer I like named David Allen, and one of his things I like a lot, he said something along the lines of, the worst time to decide that you really need to practice martial arts is when you're getting jumped in an alley.
Yeah.
Right, right.
And the worst, yeah, exactly right.
And the worst time to discover that you don't have a lockpick in your wallet is when you're locked out of a place.
And that is when you're going to discover it, right?
If you don't, if you're not thinking about it all the time, and if you're not just kind of consciously borderline aware, like I think about being in a wheelchair, if I were in a wheelchair.
The world would look very different to me.
The landscape would look different.
Getting from place to place would look different.
You should really fix the pavement outside your house.
That would be – Because once you're in a wheelchair, that's going to take longer if you have to do it yourself.
Except I would have – I think that what I would have is I would have a motorized wheelchair that I never used the motor.
You'd be in constant training.
I'd be pushing against... Like in the 70s when people would walk around with weights on their ankles and wrists.
That's right.
I would be pushing against the additional weight of the motorized wheelchair all the time.
Partly as punishment to yourself, probably.
But I would want the motor there.
In case I needed it.
Or in case I wanted it.
And honestly, that would require that wheelchairs be redesigned.
And honestly, wheelchair design seems to me to be a really unexplored... I know there are people doing it.
Oh, I totally agree.
But I feel like wheelchair design should be a place where startups... Like Elon Musk, I don't know why he has not built...
uh the the like uber wheelchair and i know the dude the segway dude yeah built some kind of standing wheelchair that was that was his precursor to the segway was this amazing wheelchair that could like lift you up in the air yeah but you also just think about how many people you see on rascals just because they really don't want to walk i think it's a huge untapped market
Well, yeah, the supermarket rascal, right, where you come to the supermarket and part of the appeal is just – Yeah, those are beaters.
But I mean once you've written in one of those, you get the idea pretty fast.
I would call it a convenience chair because first of all, the thing you realize about accessibility, honestly –
whether that's a ramp or whether that's larger type, is it's not really a question of whether or not you are crippled.
It's not whether or not you're crippled.
It's not whether or not you're handicapped.
It's the fact that you're healthy for now because you're eventually going to need pretty much everything that accessibility gives us.
Everybody's going to eventually need a ramp, trust me.
Everybody's eventually, if you're lucky enough to live long enough to have your eyes fail, you're going to want the big type.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm just saying, comfort shares.
Maybe something to think about.
I really feel like this is an untapped market, a huge growth possibility.
But you know what?
I had an insight the other day, a business that I really actually do kind of want to get into.
Do you remember Buck Rogers in the 25th century?
Sure do.
Aaron Gray.
Boom.
The television show.
Oh, yeah.
With Tweaky.
Bidi, bidi, bidi.
Right.
Well...
The more I reflect on that television show, the more I realize that it really affected, really influenced my idea of what the future was going to look like.
In particular, two things.
One, whenever there was a gathering of people, whenever there was peace or sociability or they were meeting a new culture, what did they do?
They got ribbons out and they danced in a circle holding ribbons with one another while somebody played the weird synthesizer oboe.
Right?
So there's like some synthesizer, some oboe dance music, and then they're kind of doing like a maypole dance holding ribbons.
That seemed to be like... What's a better way to say we're not a threat?
We're not a threat.
Here we are.
We're all dancing with ribbons together to some oboe, electric oboe music.
So I'm upset that that isn't... I have yet to see that really be part of hipster culture, and I feel like maybe that could be next.
But the other thing, and the number one thing is jumpsuits.
Yeah, I do remember shiny jumpsuits.
Unitard outfits.
And as you recall, my orange flight suit was a big part of my pre-teen, early teen years.
I was thinking about it the other day, and I was like...
It's the one thing of the 70s that has not been reintroduced initially, ironically, and then earnestly.
But there is nothing better than a onesie.
And if you could make onesies, and the thing is you can.
You can make onesies out of sweat pant material.
You can make onesies out of fleece.
You can make onesies out of anything.
Would this also include things like Dickies or Carhartt coveralls?
Not overalls, but you're talking about the kind of suit a painter would wear, maybe.
But here's the thing, and this is the reason why I think this is so of the moment.
People are...
Like half the population are, have just surrendered to the idea.
And we get into fights about the fights with people about this all the time.
They've just surrendered.
It's like, they believe that everyone in the world should see their ass crack.
If it makes, if it makes them 1% more comfortable on an airplane, boots and jammies.
They're just like, I am a gross slob.
I am wearing juicy sweatpants and a halter.
And that's my right as an American and comfort above all.
My comfort is my church.
That's right.
My comfort above, above all else.
So half the population is there.
And then the other half of the power, certainly a percentage of a large percentage of the youth population and people that live in my circle are, have, have gone all the way to the,
like this new era of fashion that is so form-fitting and so tailored that it cannot possibly be comfortable under any circumstances.
You know, the stovepipe pants and the super tight shirts and the really tailored jackets close-fitting everything, you know, to the nth power.
Unless you're spending $6,000 on a suit, you're wearing some Ludlow, off-the-rack J.Crew suit, you are just...
You're just barely holding it together.
You're definitely not going over a fence in that outfit.
And I think when we think about unitards and we think about boiler suits and jumpsuits of all kinds, your immediate, your mind leaps to the image of someone at a furry convention in like a suit that their grandmother made that's like a lion.
But it has little pilling, little polyester pills on it from having been washed so many times.
Well loved.
To get all the semen and centaur out of it.
It's got a little fuzzy tail.
A semen-stained pilling lion suit.
But it doesn't have to be that.
My unitard idea is that we make it out of these modern fabrics, these comfortable fabrics that people love so much.
But we tailor it so that it's very becoming.
Sometimes you put a row of double-breasted buttons on it.
Sometimes you put a little patch that says Gone Fishing on it.
You can express yourself.
It's a movable feast.
It's a movable feast.
That's right.
You put epaulets on it.
You put a faux belt.
Some of them have bell bottoms.
Some of them are pegged.
And it's a whole new fashion.
It's very fashion forward.
Some of them are side zip.
Some of them are middle zip.
You got a gusset in the crotch?
A little gusset, maybe a double-breasted like a Herman Goering, like Chief of the Air Force look.
Powder blue epaulets.
But you know what else you get out of it is you think about what you go through with travel, air travel, and you've got to think, am I going to check my luggage?
Am I going to drag this giant luggage onto the plane and take up the entire rack?
Your suit, your double-breasted coverall onesie could also be your carry-on luggage because you get a lot of pockets.
A lot of pockets.
You see people with utilicilts, you can carry a whole toolbox in those things.
That's right.
In fact, yeah, you are a toolbox if you're wearing one of those.
Yeah.
You could put a Subway sandwich in there.
You could have a hammer.
You could definitely fit in a large iPad in some of those pockets.
Sure, and TSA would have a sign that says, you know, anything you can put in your unitard...
is fine.
We don't do an additional search.
Our new backscatter body scanners can see all the things that you have in your pockets and every pocket... We tailor make the pockets so that you can't... They're TSA safe.
That's all we need to say.
That's right.
TSA compliant.
But I feel like we need to get ahead of this comfort style...
The thing is, John, it's not going to go away.
We need to go where the ball is headed, where the puck is spinning.
And if we go there and arrive there with a jumpsuit, I think there's going to be people standing in line, probably wearing jammies for now.
Jumpsuits, jumpsuits, jumpsuits.
It appeals to the jammy crowd.
It appeals to the cosplay crowd.
It appeals to the fashion people crowd.
And it absolutely appeals to the vision of the future I had as a kid where everybody was coordinated.
And, you know, dare I say it's sleek, like it looks and it's and it's in keeping with the increasing militarism in our society so that everybody is kind of in a very uniform of various sizes.
I mean, you could in some cases you could pair it with like a bow tie and a sports jacket.
Mm hmm.
I mean, you know, in time, the thing is, if you had asked people like 15, 20 years ago, would you ever expect to see coeds with tramp stamps walking around in suede, suede, basically slippers?
Yeah.
They would have said, no way.
No way.
Not even, no way.
We're never going to, you know, then 9-11 happened.
Everybody's got UGG boots.
But we could get, I could see within one year, there's atrocious stuff that happens in fashion every day, John, but this is practical.
Mm-hmm.
It's democratic.
Mm-hmm.
It's not costly to get a jumpsuit, jumpsuit, jumpsuit.
It's absolutely true.
And the thing is you can custom make them so that they have – so that if you want a back flap, if you want a poop flap, you can have it.
If you want a sex hole – Oh, like a little boy in a children's book?
That's right.
A little boy in a children's book.
That was my biggest hang-up was like what if you wanted to poop or masturbate?
Would you have to take off the entire garment?
Would you have to drop it?
We would, we would account for that.
And then you'd be able to see, you'd be able to see people walking through the airport.
Like this person is in one, this person is in a suit that he has had custom made and he apparently does not ever poop or does not fear the need.
He has a very, he's very candidly hidden jock hole.
But this person over here has basically got a colostomy bag built into the, into their suit.
It's like the entire, everything below the waist is just flaps.
But you've got pockets, you've got buttons.
I think it could be a very smart look.
And it can be very flattering, especially if you're slender.
Well, so this comports with a further idea, which is that as the years go by, and now I'm prognosticating way into the future.
As the years go by, what are the great brands?
Mm-hmm.
you got your nike you got your apple like levi's levi's coke also judaism that's a strong brand christianity big brand right the the uh the the the moon of uh the moon of islam those are big brands right you've got the american flag that's a killer brand
I feel like the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union is a great brand that's being underutilized right now.
Andre the Giant.
He has a posse.
The rising sun flag of World War II.
The Japanese in World War II.
Great brand.
Think about that.
I mean, ultimately, like the swastika.
Amazing brand.
So, as we go into the future and brands become...
what we're really talking about, right?
Like eventually there's going to be a situation where the Nike people and the Christians have some beef with each other.
It's like, I represent Nike and I'm tired of being persecuted by the Christians who only wear Adidas or whatever.
The brands are going to come up against... There's plenty of room for unnecessary factionalism.
There's no reason we couldn't make a little bank off of that.
Well, that's the thing.
Right now, the religious brands are all in contention with each other.
And we're increasingly seeing religious brands attached to national brands.
So from the Middle East, when they think of the United States, they think of the American flag.
They are subconsciously attaching Christianity to that brand.
And even though there's no cross on the American flag, that's what they are seeing.
And it's a misunderstanding of it, but in some ways maybe a hyper-understanding of it.
And when we look at the Arabic script...
we are also seeing the half moon of Islam, right?
So these brands are going to start, are going to start bleeding into one another.
And, you know, like, oh, the star of David, the Israeli flag, the star of David on that, on that powder blue, right?
Oh, what an amazing brand that is.
And when that starts getting sort of attached to commercial products, as all these ideas start to blend into each other, what are we going to have?
We're going to have an international league of neighborhood stick fights.
with people in unitards with these various brands.
So it's going to be the hammer and sickles against the Maytag washing machines.
Oh, I understand.
The giant stick fight league.
National Socialists versus Bronies.
Thank you.
Right.
And everybody's, you know, the different jumpsuits are going to be different colors.
They're going to have different sort of patches and brands on them like NASCAR racers.
And this is going to be the United Nations of the future, where we're kind of resolving these things on the game field.
There's a certain amount of death and mayhem involved to satisfy our human bloodlusts, but really it's going to be brand against brand.
And I want to get in on the ground floor of those jumpsuits.
I like it.
I like it.
And it's sort of like the way Apple came in, you know, 2006.
People are saying, oh, who's going to – why would Apple make a phone?
Like phones are commodified, right?
You can go get it in a box of Cracker Jack these days.
But then Apple figured out how to do it right.
It sounds like part of what you're saying here is we get on the ground floor of this where it's not super costly to make something like this.
But we make something that will – years after you are crippled or dead from your neighborhood stick fight, your suit will live on.
Your family can keep using it.
It's going to be that well made.
Like I think about Carhartt pants I've got that are like quintuple stitched.
You know what I mean?
Like logging pants.
This could be a really nice stick fighting jumpsuit.
Well, yeah, sure.
And then, you know, and you're going to have you're going to have your like your eyes odd alligator.
Have you seen those those new those new Ralph Lauren shirts where they have blown up the the polo pony so that it's the size of like a pie plate?
The thing is, we sound like such grandfathers right now because they've been making these things for years and all the frat boys have been wearing them for a long time.
But you know, the little teeny polo pony.
Right, used to be like three quarters of an inch high.
Yeah, now on the new shirts, it's basically the size of like a small frisbee.
Same polo pony, but it takes up a quarter of the front of the shirt.
And this is, you know, this is the genius of branding where the company was like, let's make this thing so big and people will think that it is like fresh.
You get more brand for the money.
Yeah, but now people can, you know, like they can see from space what brand of shirt you're wearing.
So eventually it's going to be the case that that polo pony no longer needs to actually be attached to something as small as a shirt.
Like what matters is not the garment.
What matters is the polo pony.
You could put it on a stadium.
You could put it on a stadium.
You could put it on a jumpsuit that was manufactured by anybody.
People are not that discerning.
As long as it's got the pony on it, they're going to buy it.
I remember in the 90s seeing a gal, it was one of those hot summer days where the gals in Seattle, particularly the lesbian gals, are all wearing wife beater t-shirts.
This was in the 90s when, and I think it may even still be true, I'm less up on contemporary summer lesbian fashion, but in the mid-90s,
All the girls who loved girls switched to tank top, like, you know, white colored Frank Norton style tank top t-shirts at a certain day in the summer.
And then that was what they were wearing.
And one day I was sitting around, I was sitting outside a bar called the Wild Rose, which is the women who love women bar.
And there's a gal sitting at the table next to me, and she has a big Nike swoop tattoo on her shoulder.
And it was the first time I had ever seen somebody.
Since that time, I've seen thousands of instances where people put sportswear logos tattooed on their body.
God.
But this was the first time I'd ever seen it.
And it took me a minute.
I was looking at it.
I was like, is that a Nike swoop?
Is that a check mark?
Am I not seeing that right?
Is this some kind of Rorschach test?
Yeah, your gaze is already a little bit normative.
Right.
Well, no, my gaze has never been normative.
But I understand what you're trying to say.
But in any case, I'm looking at her swoop, and I realize it's a fucking Nike swoop.
She's got it tattooed on herself.
I do not know what she means.
I'm not sure what... There's nothing... The brand is meant to differentiate this pair of shoes from that pair of shoes.
But when you put it on your skin...
Yeah, I mean, you're flipping through this irony Rolodex for all the possible readings.
Well, it's one thing, you know, if you go out and you decide to get a UPC symbol on your forehead.
Like, we know that's probably a statement.
Fucking super punk.
Boy, I'll tell you, those doors just open up.
But even if you do something that's kind of working against the grain ideologically, even if she had a Toms of Finland guy tattooed on her arm, you say, oh, well, she's making a statement about gender and sexuality and power and things like that.
But the Nike swoosh, that's beyond irony for me.
I don't understand that.
That was the moment when I realized that eventually...
The shoe, and because already the people that, you know, the little brown hands in China that are making Nike shoes are the same ones that are making Adidas shoes.
It's not like there's any, it's not like really the product itself has any differentiation at all.
It's just the swoop versus the stripes.
And eventually they will figure out a way to just sell you the swoop and dispense with this,
business this stupid business of manufacturing shoes garbage balloon shoes that that that blow away in a year they'll find a way to just sell you the brand now the nascar thing makes sense so what you're saying is you get whatever kind of piece of crap clothing you want or high quality clothing doesn't matter and you get your the your preferred brand affiliation put on there that's would there be a licensing fee for that
Absolutely.
So it's going to cost you $100.
The suit's going to be $30 one way or another.
The suit, and everybody's got the, you know, the suits, you can get them tailor-made, you can get them at the drugstore, it doesn't matter.
The suit is immaterial.
That's exactly the point.
Exactly the point.
What matters is that you paid $100 or $1,000 or $100,000 to have Bugatti on your suit or, you know, whatever the brand, it's the brand that you paid for.
It's the licensing of the brand.
People know, and it's a form of – it's a Veblen good, right?
Conspicuous consumption because we know you had to have paid that licensing fee.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And so we don't have – so we no longer have to bother with this stupid manufacturing of stuff and shipping it back and forth across the oceans on these giant ships.
We can just – you can just go back to a situation where locally there's some dumb mill that just is churning out unitards.
Right.
one after another, and then you customize them with your own sort of like, so my unitard would have a Star of David and a BMW logo and, you know, and then like a Filson thing across the middle.
And then I would have, you know, then like my favorite porn actress and who I voted for in the last election, you know, and in this sort of NASCAR patchwork.
And then you walk out in the world.
Everybody knows where you stand.
Everybody knows who you're rooting for in the stick fight that's coming up.
Everybody knows who you're rooted for in the local stick fight, in the national stick fight, in the inter-global brand stick fighting.
But imagine that like you get to 100 or 200 years from now or however long.
It could be 50 years.
But imagine when the materials get to a point – like right now we're at the point where you can get like a foldable screen or you can have these curved screens.
Imagine if we get to a point where there could be some kind of materials processing where you'd be able to like basically rent those logos or lease those logos for a certain amount of time.
And you could change them in real time.
You say the Mariners just don't have the pitching today.
Change my logo.
Right.
Or I'm going to a big party and I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to fork out the money to be in Louis Vuitton.
Oh, like head to toe.
My unitard is going to switch to Louis Vuitton branding, but just for the next hour and a half while I'm at this cocktail party.
And then at the stroke of midnight, it's going to turn back into a pumpkin and you're going to see, you're going to see basically that I'm just, that I just have like shell oil, uh,
Not even Shell.
It's just an Arco suit.
Yeah, right.
So you run your card and get re-unitarted.
Yeah, so people are like, wow, she's super fancy.
And then, oh yeah, she's just renting some...
She's just renting the branding for tonight.
It's nice, though.
It's a nice combination.
It's the kind of industry you couldn't have had 100 years ago.
You've got the brand-conscious young people.
You take that and you combine it with inexpensive goods and the rent-to-own furniture model.
I think it's very attractive.
So how do we get in on the ground floor of this where we're actually profiting from this idea?
We might need to acquihire Dickies.
Hmm.
Okay.
Or someone like them, somebody who's got like, there's a paint store we walk by in our neighborhood and they sell all the different like white Dickies things that you can get.
I don't think that stuff is super expensive.
It's not at all because it's made out of, uh, it's made out of hemp basically.
Hmm.
I mean, that's the thing to, to produce good for the environment too, to produce a rough white garment, a rough white unitard.
Yeah.
It's not expensive.
It doesn't have to be.
You could do that right here.
We could be making those in Washington State right now, and the only reason we're not is that we got convinced that, oh, no, we don't want a locally made... Thanks, Obama.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
I need to get this.
This needs to say Ralph Lauren on it, and so...
Therefore, it needs to be shipped across the ocean.
But look at what that's doing to those poor companies, John.
It's ridiculous that Rob Florent and Nike and Adidas and the National Socialists, it's amazing how much money they have to spend overseas to get their logos put on something when people could give a fuck.
They just want the logo.
They just want the logo.
It's just schlepping, schlepping, schlepping.
I mean, and the thing is, those brands deserve our respect.
Yeah, we should not.
I mean, the last thing we need from Nike gym shoes, Nike sneakers, the last thing we need is the actual shoe.
They're good at the branding.
They're obviously not great at the shoes.
They've done an amazing job building that brand.
Why are we forcing them to continue to make things?
As long as they're being compensated through the appropriate legal channels and licensing agreements, I think it's good for everybody.
Well, and this is where drones come in.
That'll do.