Ep. 117: "Put on the Carrot Hat"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
It's really early.
Oh, how did your night end last night?
I'm trying to think.
It was so long ago.
Um, I think that it just was a, it just kind of petered out instead of ending with a bang.
But, uh, the, because of global, uh, uh, climate change, um,
The city of Seattle has been enjoying spectacular weather.
I'm sorry.
It's been a real trial.
And normally June is the month where it rains a lot.
June is the month where everybody is like, every year it surprises us.
This has been true for the last 20 years of me living here, and I think throughout time.
Because you have a couple of nice days in April and May, and you're like, hey, summer's here, and then in June, it just rains.
And everybody goes, oh, what?
And we forget every year, we forget that it happens.
And then when it happens, it's like this bait and switch.
We feel like we're being robbed.
And then July, summer comes, right?
That's the typical Seattle summer.
Well, the last couple of years, it's just been sunny all June.
Like, just sunny the whole time.
Sunny and 75 degrees.
Which is, you know, a real rip-off.
Mm-hmm.
And one of the things that I guess we never realized was that when it rained, it kept all the pollen and the allergenic components.
It kept them down in the ground.
Tamps them down a little bit.
It kept them down in the ground where they belong.
And now there's nothing keeping them down.
The sky is just filled with bits.
It's funny.
And they're floating around and they're getting in my nose and they're getting my eyes.
And I wake up in the morning and it's like, it's like there's gum in my eyes, chewing gum.
And my nose is all scratchy.
And so just like such a global warming is really, really bad.
So you think it might be real?
I mean, I'm sorry, climate change.
I didn't mean to say global warming.
But, like, you know, for instance, like, I'm sure there are some people whose houses are being washed away into the ocean because they live on an atoll.
And there are, you know, the bears are dying in the Arctic.
But, you know, I have really scratchy eyes.
Yeah.
And I feel like...
If you had a parade, you probably couldn't go.
I couldn't.
I'd have to, you know, I'd have to be in a motorized chair.
It's going to be a John Travolta bubble.
Yeah, because it's like, ugh.
Mr. Roderick sends his regrets.
As I walk around in a t-shirt and shorts and enjoy the, you know, life in paradise here.
God.
It's itchy.
So undignified, too.
Sneezy.
I mean, and I suppose I could do some research and take some kind of medicine of some kind.
I take a nose medicine every day, and it's one of those things where I think it helps.
It's one of those really annoying kinds of things.
It's like an old person pill where you only notice that it's doing anything when you stop taking it.
Mm-hmm.
Now, how's that figure?
Could you go to a Costco?
Could you get, as I do, a large bottle of generic Claritin?
Is that in your thought technologies?
So this is another one of these problems.
Are you ready for this?
So, you know, I rented an office.
And that is, you know, that's a payment.
I have a monthly payment now for that.
And then that comes with, there's a little utility payment or something that accompanies it, where it's like, oh, I see, the rent isn't really the rent.
It's the rent plus this other amount.
And then I got to get internet there, and there's one company that provides the internet.
You can't shop around.
I'm familiar with that.
You have to pay the one people.
You have to pay them whatever they ask.
And they will provide you whatever service they think is their service.
If you say, I want internet.
I want internet that's fast and good.
And they're like, well, we have this internet.
We have this amount of internet that we are able to give you or willing to give you.
Well, can I say what you described?
Because it sounds like something from like the late 90s.
You go into this place and your option is pay for this wireless that we have here or don't have internet.
Right.
That's it.
That's all you got.
So you can't get like a nice ethernet connection there.
No.
Those are your options.
You could not go down to the marketplace.
Yeah.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Where all the people are there hawking their wares.
AT&T, Comcast.
They're all there with little booths.
Hey, little barkers.
Hey, guy, come on over here.
Check out our internet.
There's none of that.
But I have to have internet down there, so that's another payment.
And then I start thinking, like...
Oh, well, you know, I've been having this trouble invoicing people, and now I've downloaded this invoicing program, and it turns out that that is a payment.
You pay for that.
And then now I'm looking at nose spray.
I've got to get that going.
I've got to pay for nose spray every month.
That's an additional cost.
And, you know, it's one of these things.
When I first realized that I was not going to be able to live in the modern world without a driver's license...
And I realized this at the age of about 26.
I was like, you know what?
I've been living without a driver's license for a long time.
And the inconvenience of it has now surpassed the indignity of having to get one.
And I went and I got a driver's license.
And then, you know, right away, like, oh, you got to get insurance.
And, oh, you got to start obeying the law.
And all these other, you know, corollary effects.
And, you know, once they get you, you know, then they just, they, they drag you back in.
Well, you know, I, I know you're in kind of a raw place right now with, uh, with the expenses, but, but let me put this in front of you too, as somebody who's doing those things with an office is also now you need a second set of everything.
So if you want to get the nasal crumb or you want to get the generic, um, Claritin, you gotta have two.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Well, it's like when I got the iPhone 5, all of a sudden I needed to buy five new cables because I had, over the years of owning an iPhone 4, I had acquired all the cabling that I needed, right?
I had a car charger.
I had a cable at my mom's house.
I had a cable upstairs.
I had a cable downstairs.
Yeah.
I had a cable at my mom's house.
And then you buy the new phone.
You wait for the new phone to come out and you get it.
Oh, all your cables are garbage now.
Yeah.
I had to get all new cables.
And then...
Not everyone in my family switched over to the iPhone 5, so we got duplicated cables everywhere.
4 and 5 cable.
How do I trust that Apple isn't going to come up with a brand new cable with the 6?
You're telling me I should trust that.
You're saying, no, they wouldn't do that.
But how do I know now?
You know what I mean?
Burn me once.
Shame on you.
Burn me twice.
Is that the shame on me one or is it the third time that it's a shame on me?
Fool me once.
Can't fool me.
Right.
That's right.
You're doing all that with gum in your eyes.
That's miserable.
Tell you what.
Tell you what.
So anyway, I just I feel like I might as well just start up an auto pay at my bank.
And everybody I shake hands with, it just starts paying them something.
You know what I mean?
Like, just, oh, hi, nice to meet you.
Oh, now you're connected via some app, right?
Some Tinder app.
Where it's like, oh, hi.
What?
Okay.
Hi, nice to meet you.
Now we're now we both.
Oh, it turns out we both like Fogcat.
All right.
Well, here's 20 bucks.
You're like Robert De Niro in Goodfellas.
He's walking around giving everybody 20s.
Just goes and starts going into your account.
I'm never going to see you again.
But, you know, that's what that's what's going to happen.
You're going to get you're going to get these apps.
You know, you're just it's just a plague of apps.
Well, we decided that we – well, long story short, that basically my daughter needed to have a room at some point because she was a kid.
And plus I was pretty sprawled out in the second bedroom and so I should get an office.
The only point is that at the time, it seemed like kind of a big deal but not a huge deal.
Like, oh, I'll have this office where I will go and I will do office things.
Mm-hmm.
And it seems so simple, and my daughter got a room.
And now, like, I hate how much I kind of can't imagine going back.
I would love to not have the expense of this, but it would be chaos.
You can't go back to a pre-office economy.
Well, I mean, you know, part of it is the bad on me part is, like, now the sprawl is all in the office, and I just, I dread the idea of having to consolidate all of this.
I could probably just walk away.
I could grab the laptop and literally walk away.
Just set it on fire.
Keep the nasal crumb.
Yeah.
I get the paddle ball game and the chair.
Do you think you'll keep the office?
I mean, it sounds like it's still kind of a weird fit for you.
Well, it's a lot of hassle.
If I could say, how committed are you?
Do you got like a lease and stuff?
No, I mean, it's, you know, it's Seattle, right?
You could, anyway, the most stringent lease in the city, I feel like you could walk in to the manager's office one day and just be like, yeah, you know, I just, and the manager would be like, oh, yeah, okay.
Like, no, it's not, who's going to, is somebody going to sue me?
Yeah.
No, it's not that I feel bound.
I like having it.
I'm not using it yet because the big, big problem, my whole life I've done this.
It's like, oh, well, if I dangle a carrot, if on Monday I put a carrot on a string and I put it out and I attach it to a fishing pole and I attach the fishing pole to a hat,
and I put the hat on every morning when I wake up, then I will start working.
And if I do that on Monday, by Wednesday, maybe I'll have forgotten that I did that.
And it'll just be this carrot that I don't know where it came from, and I'll wake up in the morning and I'll put on my hat that I always put on.
You know, I've never put on a hat in my life, but this is the idea, right?
I'm going to put on this hat.
All I have to do is put on the hat, and then the carrot will be there, and then I'll go, and I'll chase the carrot, and I'll forget that this is all a plan that I'm trying to sneak in on myself.
I know it's early, but let me try and understand this.
You're saying you need a way to habituate yourself to doing a work thing over a period of time.
Kind of?
Yeah, but that's been true since I was in fifth grade.
And so when I was making record albums...
a lot, which I never actually was making them a lot, but the times that I did make record albums, the fact that there was a lot of expense involved and you had to get a bunch of people all pulling together actually did have the effect of getting me at least to finish those things that I did finish.
So this office is just another one of these strategies that
Of like, well, if I get an office and I buy a new computer and I put the new computer in the office and I am paying for the Internet at the office, then necessarily I will wake up every morning at nine, have a healthy breakfast.
Mm hmm.
Read the newspaper, and by 9... Put on your carrot hat.
Put on the carrot hat, and by 9.30, I will be, you know, I will be merging into traffic.
You commute to your office.
On my way to the office, and then I will get there, and I'll, you know, hang up my hat on the hat rack, and I'll say...
Change the carrot.
Good morning, Marge.
And I'll sit down at my computer and I will write the work that I really truly do want to write.
And that I feel like I desperately need to write.
But obviously don't need to write strongly enough that I just wake up and write it without all this like...
baloney in the middle and it's astonishing how easy it is to wake up in the morning not put on the carrot hat and um you know and spend like three hours looking at my phone and then decide that it's been a long time since i've had fried chicken
So I'd better take care of that before the day gets too much older.
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We could not do it without this.
And then, you know, another day goes by.
So in answer to your question, I love the office.
I do not yet resent it.
Like it hasn't become a thing that I'm paying money and I just don't know.
I don't even want to go down there because it makes me feel so bad about the waste, which is, you know, I can remember a gym membership I bought in the mid nineties where I went down, I bought the gym membership.
I decided I was going to get a year instead of a month to month because that was the only way I was going to, it was that year membership was going to motivate me.
I got my picture taken and,
I got an ID card with a photo on it.
I put it in my wallet and I never went back to the gym.
Not a single time.
Really?
I did not even go in to use the bathroom when I was walking by.
I started changing my route.
so that I wouldn't go by the gym and be forced to remember it.
That's a terrible feeling.
But I never took the card out of my wallet because what if tomorrow is the, what if tomorrow is the day?
And so it's a terrible feeling and I've done it to myself a thousand times.
Now the office has not turned into that.
The office still is a place of hope.
And I still believe because I have all these things.
I have all these wonderful things.
projects that feel like they're i'm i'm so tantalizingly close to to embarking on these little projects i bought some i bought the expensive voice recognition software oh yeah and i'm gonna try did you train it yet i haven't trained it i want to hear about how that goes
I'm going to train the software, and then I'm going to play the tapes into the software.
And if I play the tapes into the software, and it produces even a 75% accurate document, I feel like that will...
That will be work I'll be excited to do.
Comb through the transcripts.
Fix it up.
Clarify the ideas.
Begin work on a big project, a big writing project.
But the dictation software could also produce Jabberwocky.
Yeah, and I don't want to spoil this for you.
Because I'm the same way.
I feel like if I were to get transcripts of all the bullshit I've said over the last three to five years, I'd have three books that just need to be edited.
For shizzle.
And editing is fun.
Yeah, it can be.
Editing.
My problem was – I mean, God, I – gosh.
You know what?
I shouldn't even say anything.
But, you know – Say it.
Well, you know, like for me, I went and bought the voice software.
Wow.
When, when I was in a similar place to what I perceive you to be in right now, which is like, there's a big writing thing I need to do.
And my problem is that, that I know, I know all this stuff and I can feel that thing just out of reach.
That's, that's almost this thing.
And what if I just, you know, in my case alternated, like, yeah, some cases I'll sit down and type, you know, make outlines.
I'll do things.
I'll write all, but like, it would be pretty great if I could just walk around in my private office and have the, the, the, the dingus take it all down.
Hmm.
My problem was like – you can guess what the ending was, which was that like it didn't help.
Partly because I think I never got it trained to quite write and I never could forget the fact that I was talking into voice recognition software.
I think that's the key turning point.
You say 70 percent.
If I had 95 percent correct, it would still drive me bananas.
Yeah.
But it could work.
My problem also, and I don't know if this helps or harms, but when I look back at having gotten an office in 2008, that's an interesting point.
I think it was something like maybe the summer of 2008, something like that.
This is a different office than your current office.
No, same office.
You got that office in 2008?
Yeah.
You've had it that whole time?
I had no idea.
It's expensive.
But what – what a funny thing happened.
I mean it's ironic that – like a lot of the reason I got it, it's super ironic that I got it because I need to record podcasts and so therefore now I have a streetcar going by outside that everyone can hear.
I should have really thought that through.
But apart from having to record things like a total of maybe one hour of music during that entire time, recorded music, but hours and hours and hours of podcasts.
The funny part is that within probably a few months even or at least no more than a year after that, everything got so much easier to do with stuff like –
My iPhone.
And I didn't really – I mean I needed a place to put my giant computer and my giant screens and my giant connections and my giant router and all that stuff.
But the truth is if I have something to say, if I really have something to say and I'm motivated to say it, I can type that on the iPhone.
No problem.
And that's what kicks me in the ass is like I have all this expense and all this trouble and all this hassle and all this garbage in my office when like honestly to be a writer like, you know, it isn't like I have 10 books and things that need to be edited and I need to do, you know, the Magna Carta in translation or something like that.
You know, it's kind of funny that I have all this infrastructure at a time when I could be writing anywhere.
But I'm not.
That's not the office's fault.
Well, it's not, but it is kind of.
I mean, it's the myth of productivity and of user-friendliness.
I'm listening.
It is, like, Apple, in particular, above all other companies...
has profited from the idea that we are all artists and all we lacked was the tools and i mean that premise was sort of at the foundation of 70s education 70s childhood education that all we needed to do was
free these people's little minds and get them out of this 1950s model of education and let them play and let them have finger paints and we're going to discover this generation of artists and that and that that even if we even if that were true and that we've discovered a generation of artists the the further leap was that that's what we want that we actually want a generation of artists and
Nobody really thought that all the way through.
Can you imagine what that would be like?
If everybody really was an artist, oh my God.
What a fucking nightmare world we would live in.
But that was the premise that my mother used to raise me.
I'm going to let him explore his creativity.
I'm going to let him discover...
the artist within but but if you recall back to when we were in school it was incompletely a pardon me i have a i have some glue in my throat you know it was incompletely applied and there were certainly students in the schools that were not being encouraged to finger paint but in general it was much more finger painty the um
The philosophy of education.
And Apple has consistently done a marvelous job of convincing us that we are all filmmakers.
We are all graphic artists.
We are all podcasters.
We are all writers.
And all we needed all along was just this box of tools.
And once we had those things, the box of tools would set us free.
And we would be making the beautiful things we wanted.
It was so easy to make up the record that we just made with the film that we're working on.
And once that thing was done, you know, we would be completely validated and we would be helping people.
And so we've all been buying these boxes of tools from them, these toy boxes really, now for a couple of decades.
And we each of us have, sitting on our desk, the ability to make a complete film with animation and all the music and, you know, like...
Well, importantly, you can shoot it and edit it on your phone.
Right.
Shoot it, edit it, compose the music.
You don't have to even play an instrument because all the musical parts are in there.
You just have to cut and paste them and make a new symphony.
Right.
And, you know, the I mean, you can't resent them for it because it's a beautiful idea and it's a beauty and they have actually made very elegant software that enables us to do it.
But but once again, the number of people that are actually making films like it more or less has remained constant.
But what we all have now is like these giant, super expensive guilt boxes that sit on our tabletops and say, look how elegant I am.
And you could be making a film on me right now if you were just slightly more of a person.
You could already be writing the book about the making of the film.
But you're not, and it's not that you don't have the tools.
You have the tools.
It is something else, some other flaw in you.
And I already had that voice in me.
I didn't need an elegant white box to amplify it.
Every morning when I woke up and walked past my elegant box of tools that is basically just has a Welsh troll voice now.
My Siri just speaks to me in Welsh.
And, you know, but that has always been the case because before Apple came along, I mean, I am a middle-class person who was given the opportunity over and over again, the art lessons or...
Nobody insisted that I major in engineering at college.
I was invited to major in literature or whatever struck my fancy.
And so the burden of why I have not made...
And as much beautiful stuff as I feel I should have, the burden of that is all on me.
I cannot point to any obstacle, any real obstacle that is outside myself.
And I wonder whether that is part of this conversation that we've been having for months and years about this generation that's on our heels, that is so excited about all the obstacles that they perceive.
in the culture you know the the reason they haven't succeeded is because of of um reasons well right all the institutional uh institutional problems that maybe you maybe you look at them and you see them as being a privileged middle class person but that's not how they see themselves because you're not perceiving the
All the cultural walls that prevent them from using their little white boxes to make, you know, in particular, all the ones that don't have the little white box, that have to use a Dell, which also has all the same software.
Or maybe doesn't even have a Dell.
Maybe has to go to the computer science center at the library to use their incredible little white boxes that are available free to anyone.
Yeah.
I got a lot of thoughts on this, but I'll keep it short.
One thing is that we really are still in the infancy of a lot of this stuff.
The problem that you're describing is not new, but what is new is that in the course of – I won't even say 20 years.
In the course of really kind of five years, but especially of 10 years, we've gone from so many things that were out of touch.
So many things where – as we've talked about ad nauseum, I mean a time when the idea of being able to write, perform, produce, and publish and sell your own music –
Each required a different special set of stuff that was costly.
Maybe not the writing.
You could hum along and play the ukulele, but recording your music meant going to a studio.
It certainly meant buying and mastering an instrument.
um getting that pressed and mastered cost money uh getting that distributed to sam goody all of those steps you know it's it seems so far away and it's partly what made rock stars seem like rock stars is that all that stuff required the benediction of so many people and or you know or a fat wallet i mean you know you do remember like seeing ads in the back of rolling stone for being able to publish your own book
And the idea that – we used to call it Vanity Press, right?
So you could go out and publish your memoirs and say I have a published book that I happen to have bought all 1,000 copies of.
So I mean that's always been something that's available to people.
But it's – I think we're – I mean I don't know.
It's so different from person to person.
But I think we're all still catching up with that in some ways.
It's just that right now I think it is – I don't know how much it says about like artistic –
This is nothing overarching about our artistic future, but, you know, it's just... It is very easy and fun to take a photograph, add some filters to it, and put it somewhere, you know, and then collect your stars.
That is really fun.
And there's a... It's addictive.
And it's a big community kind of thing.
And if you...
I'm trying to pivot to a bigger point here, but in that case, like I'm guilty as anybody of like saying, Oh gosh, I said a funny thing.
I hope people like it.
I put up a pretty picture.
I hope people star it.
And that is what could be more distracting or more procrastination making, or this is even setting aside the entire anger industry of all the things that we're supposed to be passionate about.
But, but in all, in those cases, I mean, everybody knows what they've got on their phone.
Everybody opens up garage band at least once and plays with it.
Um,
People have probably edited videos of their baby when they're very motivated about that topic and send it to the family.
But it isn't something you keep going with.
And the pivot is that this really awful and annoying and in my experience absolutely true fact, which is that –
To paraphrase, I think it was Will Durant, we are what we frequently do.
Whatever it is that you do a lot is what you do.
And you talked in a previous episode about manifesting, about the idea of sort of announcing that you're now a professional photographer or the one that always gets me is people announcing that they're an SEO expert or a thought leader.
It doesn't cost anything to do that.
And other people who are aspiring may now look up to you because of that.
But it's not the same thing as showing up and doing that work every day.
What's an SEO again?
It's search engine optimization.
And it's this huge industry.
It's a Google.
Yeah.
The basic idea is, to put it in the least value-laden way, it's a way of making sure that the content on your website is being gobbled up properly by Google.
But then as that gets darker and blacker hat, it's a way of trying to gain the system so that you show up at the top for Viagra or whatever.
But anyway, I mean all I'm saying is like – I don't mean this as advice except in as much as it is advice that I need to hear, which is that like, well, it really – it's just a matter of if you write, you get up every day and you write regardless of where you are.
And that's what I struggle with because I know it really is that simple.
That's the part that having this expense of having a – I could get up at five, an hour before my daughter wakes up and have an hour to write.
If I wrote 15 minutes a day every day, I'd have so much more written.
All the time that I've sat around thinking what I really need is to go on some kind of a retreat so that I can finally write the thing I need to write.
And now I've got an office where I can do that and feel bad about that too.
That's the advice of Bird by Bird by Annie Lamont.
Yeah.
It's a pretty great book.
Yeah, it's a nice little book.
Can I also recommend The Artist Within?
Yeah, The Artist's Way.
The Artist's Way, that's it.
You can do your morning pages.
Yeah.
I mean –
I don't mean to describe all this stuff as though it were an actual additional obstacle, as much as to say it is another in a long line of non-actual obstacles, but that are authentically obstacles, you know, in the sense that in 1964...
If you wanted to design a new car, if you worked for General Motors and you wanted to design a new car, you drew it on a big pad.
And then you went out and you constructed...
You constructed that drawing in three dimensions using clay and wood, and you shaped it with an X-Acto knife until it looked like the GTO in your imagination.
And the process that it took to get that drawing...
into production and to make a new car was incredibly labor intensive and yet at some point
It happened every year.
You know, they redesigned those cars every year.
The difference between the 56 and the 57 Chevy and the 58 Chevy, I mean, they don't look alike at all.
They were redesigning those cars using clay models, and everybody signed off on it and put those cars into production and were, you know... And across town, there were people that were making missile trajectories.
They were calculating missile trajectories
using slide rules and you know they did not have we now have the technology to calculate missile trajectories on our phone if we wanted to
And we now have the capability using auto drafting programs to just... We could design a new car every day and make a 3D model of it on a printer in our living rooms.
But if you look at the design of cars now, or the design of buildings, or really the design of anything...
I don't think it's just a matter of taste.
I think it is objectively worse and worse all the time, right?
The easier and easier it gets to make things.
You think that's related?
Well, I can't feel like it's not in the sense that...
in the sense that what used to be special knowledge that was prized knowledge is now diffuse knowledge.
If you call yourself a car designer and you design a bunch of cars, like if General Motors...
If General Motors... I cannot imagine what is happening in the car design salons at General Motors.
But I have to imagine that where there once was a room and some people in their shirt sleeves and horn-rimmed glasses walking around drafting tables...
And at a certain point, the design had to come out of somebody.
And then if the committee or other people wanted modifications made...
you know, they each time knew, it was kind of like recording on tape, right?
You knew what the limitations were before you made a suggestion.
So it's like, okay, we just recorded that track live.
The bass player made a little futz.
The bass player screwed up a little bit.
Is it worth it for us to go back and record that entire thing and shoot for the moon knowing that we're going to either be burning tape that's expensive or that we might lose this take?
And like the limitations of number of tracks and stuff like that.
And all that stuff.
And so before anyone made a suggestion, everybody had it in their mind that like, oh, if I want to change some minor thing about the taillight of this design, this talented draftsperson and the designer, they're going to have to go back and redo this whole thing.
Yeah.
And it's going to take them a lot longer, and it's expensive to do.
It's not a question of just moving the mouse and the thing, you know, like, oh, let's try that.
Let's take a look and see if... What if the taillights were oval-shaped?
What if the taillights were shaped like a bat?
You know?
It was... And so what ended up happening was the design more or less came out of one person's imagination.
Maybe you made some suggestions, but for the most part, like...
The work in getting it to the place where everybody could even see it was the lion's share of the work.
And I can only picture now, just as in the recording studio, the ease of putting on a thousand tracks, the ease of manipulating the waveform of the bass line.
Like being able to drag across the screen and grab 10 or 15 points on a 3D vector drawing and drag them to completely change the shape of the car.
Yeah, right.
And so anybody walking through that salon who has the clearance, who has made it to the level of manager, can waltz by presumably and say, what if the whole car was two inches shorter and two inches taller?
Yeah.
And everybody knows that there's no cost to making that suggestion.
So even though the designer is sitting at the computer going, oh, my God, please fuck off.
He kind of has to look and answer to the guy and be like, okay, sure, let's try it.
And so he makes it two inches taller.
He makes it two inches shorter.
And the guy goes, I like that better.
And the designer goes, oh, fuck.
It's worse.
We just call that over-the-shoulder time.
If you ever go to the print bureau that we used to go to in Tallahassee, they had a rate, they had a rush rate, and they had an over-the-shoulder time rate, which is if the person with the print job stood over you while you were doing stuff with it on the computer, you had to pay a lot more.
I bet, right?
But that's got to be happening everywhere.
Yeah.
And so as I drive around the city, I can point to a building and tell you whether that building was designed sort of pre or post AutoCAD, right?
You can point to the architecture or the development of neighborhoods or things at a point at which it was no longer expensive to design things, really.
The quality of the design just like drops.
And so because all of a sudden now you're like, well, the design is just a thing that we just can do.
And so now it's a question of how much does it cost?
How much are the materials going to be?
And so there's a designer there who's like, and then I put dragons all across the top of the building and every window is quadruple pane, purple glass.
And there's somebody that's like, well, no, that's too expensive.
Can you figure out a way to do it without those things?
And the guy's like, delete, delete, delete, delete.
Yeah, here's the version of it without anything.
Yeah, that looks good to me.
Does that look good to you?
Yeah, okay, good.
Let's go.
And it's true across the board.
I mean, if you think about contemporary car design, the way that they do things now is they make a platform, and then that platform runs for 15 years.
And every year, they slightly change the taillights, and they make a little modification here, a little modification there.
One way that those places I assume are similar to Apple or any electronics maker is that – I don't want to say they start with the components.
But I mean one reason you may or may not see a revision is they have to offset the cost of what they're losing in scale.
So for example, Apple could put out the 5C because it was using the same processor as the iPhone 4S.
Anyway, the point is they had gotten a break because they were buying in such volume.
It's very costly to start all over with stuff that you're going to try and make at scale.
You know what I mean?
But so for my part, the projects that I have in mind right now are that I should finish my album.
I should also...
finish an album of songs that are different than the songs that I'm making currently, like an album of songs that do not sound like the long winters, but your shoegazy, my shoegaze record, right?
I should finish my book about my walk across Europe, please.
I should.
My wife asks about that every few weeks.
I should.
Anybody who you let read part of that book is like, what is wrong with him?
This is such a good book.
I'm sympathetic, but still.
I should finish or I should then write my book.
I should write my theory of feminism, which is going to be a pretty thick book, but it's going to change the way we look at the world.
I should write my book on economics.
Again, massive tome.
You're going to write a book on economics?
Yeah, absolutely.
Those are hot right now.
I have a really good book on economics that's going to blow people's minds.
But, you know, it's hard work.
It requires research.
Wikipedia.
I would need at least three minions where I could sit and be like, what is the... Let's figure out how much...
Trees are worth.
And, you know, and then also...
I have essentially, if I collected all of my Seattle Weekly columns, all the columns I've written in the last couple of years, there is the thread of a kind of rock and roll autobiography slash book of cultural musings.
I mean, the page count is already there.
It just requires the connective tissue.
I used to think that.
Yeah, I know, right?
And so all of these things are like, oh yeah, it isn't a question of pick one and go.
It is because if I pick one, I work on it for a little while and then I'm like, oh, but that other thing.
And
I have to imagine that writers have been doing this for centuries, right?
And the unpublished works of All My Heroes are all these half-thought-out scribbles and outlines of the books that they should be writing and so forth and so on.
But, you know, in addition to all of that work, you know, I have to maintain my Twitter.
And I still haven't graduated from college.
And other people's Twitter.
And I have to maintain other people's Twitter.
You got to, you know, right?
You got to go and make corrections.
Yeah.
Errata.
So, I mean, obviously, like, I don't believe that the technology is any kind of new inhibition because it has just given a different shape and form to very old inhibitions or very old roadblocks in between, as you say, the real process of just waking up in the morning and writing.
Yeah.
which couldn't be simpler.
And yet... It's not easy.
It's simple, but it's not easy.
Right.
And yet each new tool... I mean, I remember WordStar and sitting and working in WordStar and having to remember the commands for all the very simple little edits that you wanted to make.
And, you know, and feeling like,
This is better than a typewriter because with a typewriter, you can't go back and change a whole paragraph.
But
But the fact of a typewriter is that once you write the paragraph, it at least is written.
You can go back and cross it out with a red pen.
Yeah.
But it's there.
And maybe two months later, you come back and you're like, why did I cross that out?
That was actually the germ of a great idea.
And in word processing software, I will all the time delete...
a page of stuff that is just sort of deleted.
Right.
I mean, I guess I could go back to an earlier draft, but never do.
Right.
And a lot of times you delete as you're writing and it's just like, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope.
And what you end up with is what you end up with.
And a lot of times it feels like it's what you settle on rather than what you, rather than it being crafted, particularly crafted, you know,
I've recently gotten to be friends with this guy.
It's going to be virtually impossible to redact his name because anybody can guess who this guy is.
But he's – you know I use this word parsimoniously.
I think he's very inspiring.
Tom Hanks?
Yep.
He's a good man.
Yeah.
No, it's this guy who does a webcomic that he puts up every day, and it's pretty popular.
It's pretty super popular.
So he sits there in Photoshop, and he makes this webcomic, and he puts it up every night by midnight, and that's just the thing that he does every day.
It's brilliant.
There's so much about what he does that when I say inspiring, it's like I want to steal his ideas for what he does.
In that sense, it's not so different from blogging in some ways.
But he has a pretty rabbit following for his comic.
But he just strikes me as such a smart guy because if you ask what he does, you say, oh, he does this comic you've heard of called This.
And he does that and he puts it up every night.
But he really interests me because first of all, he does that every day.
Which is harder than it sounds.
Having something you got to do – if you haven't seen it, there's a pretty good documentary, recent documentary called Stripped that's all about comic strips and making them.
And lots of great interviews and watching people draw.
But it's kind of drudgery.
It's real drudgery to have to turn in weeks of Kathy or whatever.
Like there's a lot of work to it.
But anyhow – so that's interesting to me that he manages to pull that off every day.
Yeah.
other things that appeal, like, you know, he's, for lack of a better word, leverage that into these other things.
So basically he's just constantly making web comics and he's making with these characters you're familiar with.
So like today he put up a post on medium.
He has a, a column quote unquote in Mac world every week where one of his, you know, cartoons is featured in Mac world.
And, but you know, it all started with this thing where he just had a thing he put on the web and now that's turned into all those places.
Now here's the twist.
And,
is that he's a very frustrating character to a lot of people because he – I don't think he has any advertising on his site.
If he does, it's just for his stuff because what he's done is also built this platform of like selling so many like T-shirts and coffee cups and ice scrapers and stuff that – it's really, really fun stuff that people love to get.
And I think people – that makes people love him even more, that he's like, here, you like the comic?
Don't worry about the ads.
Like buy the ice scraper.
It's a really cool ice scraper.
Yeah.
And that's his thing now is like he's just constantly making comics, constantly putting them out.
But then his whole like revenue thing is about making things and selling them.
And there's something really appealing about that to me.
First of all, I love the idea of making a thing that you sell to people, like whether that's an app or whatever it is.
There's something I have to admit is a little appealing to me about a physical good, even though, God, the overhead of that is just crazy.
But I don't know.
I find something like that so inspiring where, like, to me, that's a success story of what the tools let us do in so many ways and how the changing platform hasn't left him behind.
Because while everybody's running around scrambling, trying to get more and more, I mean, do you ever look at – I don't know.
I read a lot on my –
iphone and my ipad i read a lot of news stories i'll follow a link somewhere and you know used to joke about used to give me a hard time about you know websites where the content is the size of a can of tuna and then it's just surrounded by ads that's how i feel now i can't even scroll down the page because there's just so many ads on the page and the irony is of course they could they could give a flying fig about any of those advertisers they treat them all equally poorly but there's something i don't know i i find that really appealing it's somebody who's
been able to, and he's certainly not alone in that, but the idea of like making a little thing every day, putting it out and being able to do that on your own, not being beholden to any given one source of income for what you do.
I find that really inspiring.
And I think it's a good example though.
Not everybody can do it, but not everybody's trying to do it.
That's something where like he's found a way using those tools, the changes in the platform, the changes in the environment around what's possible.
I mean, that would not have been conceivable to do – conceivable, you couldn't have made money off it.
You couldn't have made those kinds of goods that quickly and sold them 10 or 15 years ago.
That's all gotten so much easier.
We've talked about doing T-shirts, on-demand T-shirts, which we should totally do, by the way.
But I don't know.
I like looking at examples where that did turn out well, and he's constantly stressed out because – not stressed out, but I mean it's a lot of pressure to have to do that every day.
I don't have – the pressure that I feel is that I'm not making stuff.
His pressure is that he has a thing that he makes every day, and people love it.
I don't know.
There's something I find really appealing about that.
I'm not about to say that these tools don't make us procrastinate more because they certainly can and they can guilt us.
But I think it's neat to look at people who are finding a way to like have a creative voice and a way to make dough in a way that would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
And I feel like that's going to change – has to change even more and more quickly like in the next five years.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, I do, but I feel like, and I admire your friend, too, and aspire to that kind of productivity.
Aren't you a little envious, though?
Yeah, and there are innumerable examples among our friends where it's like, oh, I aspire to have a workflow like that person and to make good stuff like that person does.
But I do feel like this, but I feel like zooming out from an economic perspective or from a larger cultural perspective.
And you are writing a book on economics.
That's right.
That really what that is is returning to an almost medieval economy where each person is sort of carving little apple heads around.
carving little shrunken apple heads and selling them at the fair.
We each have a little booth where we are producing our small little product, arrowheads, matchbooks, souvenir spoons, and we're going out to the Ren Fair and
Each of us kind of, you know, trying, even successfully making a living with our little wares.
And it's very different from a system whereby we are... I mean, for instance, that is not how you would build an interstate highway system.
Nor is it how you would build a skyscraper or even...
work a farm, you know, it's very siloed, it's very much not thinking of the system as a thing that we are actively changing, but it's just like, okay, this is the system, and here, how do I find a way...
Within it to make, you know, to make my booth unique enough that people come here and buy, you know, because ultimately, like ultimately t-shirt sales, like we all have all the t-shirts we need.
And so any new t-shirt is just a t-shirt.
Any new t-shirt is an excess is an excessive t-shirt.
Right.
I mean, like if every one of us is making a living selling t-shirts, there is.
At a certain point, we're going to run out of clean water.
Well, I wasn't implying everyone should do it.
Well, right.
But this is the thing we've all experienced in bands for the last 10 years, which is like, are we really in t-shirt sales?
Is that what we are?
That was the suggestion 10 years ago.
Would you rather be in ad sales?
Well, no, you wouldn't, but you'd rather be in music sales where you are, you know, where you're selling your music.
And people told us in 2005 that that wasn't, that we couldn't expect that anymore because music should be free.
And if you, if you were really good, people would buy your t-shirt and that that's what you should, you know, that that's where you should go.
And, and, and
And all power to the music is free people.
But you know what I'm saying?
That's not directed at any one person, and it isn't directed at you and me trying to sell Roderick on the Line t-shirts, because I would be thrilled to do it.
No, they sell themselves.
I wouldn't worry about that.
You know what I mean?
Like Roderick on the Line t-shirts, there's already bootleg Roderick on the Line t-shirts, and I want to discourage anyone that's listening to this show from ever bootlegging, because our team of lawyers is going to come after you like fucking barracudas.
Is it coming down on the tapers?
But you know what?
Home t-shirt making is killing podcasts.
But from the perspective of like, well, what are we doing as humans?
Where are we headed?
What is our plan?
I don't feel like the atomization of making is necessarily a step forward.
And maybe it is.
That's the thing.
Maybe 10 years from now we will look back and be like, oh, it was only through the atomization of making and the democratization of manufacturing, I guess, that we were able to arrive at this next place.
which was actually an advancement of thinking, you know, like a brand new way of imagining us as humans building something new.
But at least for now, right now, it just feels like, okay, everybody's got a garage sale now.
Like, we have gone... We have lost our industrial base.
We have lost a degree of collective, cooperative making of things.
And now we just have one million garage sales.
And we are being... And Apple or the internet, our internet overlords are encouraging us to... Every one of us have an Etsy store.
But that that isn't, like, really...
progress.
We're back to selling our knitting, which was a thing that we've been doing for a long, long time.
And the fact that we have a website to do it doesn't change the fact that it's just knitting.
So, yeah, I mean, I, you know, but I wonder if part of the thing like whether that's with GMs or GM or highways or whatever, it's just that there's not the money at an institutional level that there used to be for those kinds of things.
But I mean, there's so much money now more than ever before all over.
Yeah.
I mean, I think about like, oh, I want to publish a book.
Right.
I definitely do not want to die.
You don't want to die unpublished.
I don't want to die from this life without having published at least one book, and hopefully more than one.
But looking at my shelf of books that I'm sitting here lovingly pawing with my eyes, if I were to publish a book now,
It wouldn't be like those books, right?
I think just as started happening in music where people were like, well, are you actually going to make a CD or are you just going to put it up online?
It's like when that became a question, when that became a valid question, not a question that you would just ask a band that thought they were going to sell 500 CDs, but a question you would ask an established artist.
Are you really going to manufacture CDs or are you just going to release it on iTunes, put it up online?
It was like, oh, wow.
That happened so fast.
Mm-hmm.
that music went from you know that that that an that an album was something that you owned and and even clean like took care of yeah right you know cleaned and and took out and looked at alphabetized that it just became like oh you're just gonna you're just gonna huck it into the sea with everything else and and
And your music is going to be valued accordingly.
Your new album comes out and a certain small segment of people put it on repeat or put it on their iPads and listen to it at the gym.
But a lot of people will download one song off of it, listen to it once, and then they'll...
And it's not that they don't like it.
They download it, they listen to it, they're like, that's great.
That's not how people consume music anymore.
And it just goes into the thing.
So now, if you're like, I have a new book, I think we're very, very close to a time when the question is, well, are you actually, I mean, do you know how expensive it is to actually publish it as a book?
Mm-hmm.
You know, isn't it just a Kindle file?
And...
And so it isn't a book, you know?
Like, let's stop kidding it.
Let's stop kidding ourselves that bands aren't making albums anymore.
They're not.
And let's stop kidding ourselves that people are writing books anymore.
They're not.
I was on an airplane with our good friend John Hodgman the other day, and he was like, listen, we're going to go meet George R.R.
Martin, and you have never read a word of his writing, and you are an embarrassment to me.
And I was like, well, I mean, I've been meaning to.
And he handed me his phone, and he had Game of Thrones on his phone.
And I was like, whoa, you actually read it?
And he was like, I have read it.
You don't do that?
You don't buy books that way?
On my phone?
Well, phone, iPad, Mac.
No?
Okay.
I do not.
No, I still buy them in book form.
But I'm sitting on an airplane and I start to read Game of Thrones on Hodgman's phone.
And it's a nice, like the interface is nice.
It's definitely different.
It's different, but it's nice because the type is big.
It's easy to read.
Maybe he gave me the easy-to-read version or the grandpa font.
But you read, and then you flip to the next page, and each screen is much shorter than a page of typewritten book writing.
It's like a paragraph and a little.
A paragraph and a little, but that, but I found very quickly that that was kind of an enjoyable way to read because you, you kind of get, you have a thought and then you flip to the next page and you have another thought.
And so pretty soon I'm sitting on this airplane and I'm not talking to him.
I'm reading, I'm reading Game of Thrones on his phone.
And by the time the plane landed, I had read a couple of chapters and I really enjoyed it.
And I enjoyed the ease of reading it on my phone or his phone.
And I was like, okay, right.
Like, I can't be opposed to that because that was nice.
That was pretty great.
And it's dumb to be opposed to something that is happening, that's already happening.
And it's really like value neutral, right?
It's just easy and it's no different.
The reading part, I guess, is no different.
But when I think about like I wrote a book and I am happy to publish it.
And the fact that it's not probably going to be a book, an actual book, or that if it is an actual book, it's like releasing records on vinyl now.
You mean like a hardcover book with a slip case?
Yeah.
a cover on it yeah that is that is stacked in a pyramid in the window of a bookstore right that people go in excitedly to buy it in that form and carry it around in their in their bag and read it on park benches or whatever you know that that makes it that makes me feel that makes me feel sad which i think is just nostalgia or it's just it's just like oh that makes you feel sad well too bad but um
But it changes the nature of, it changes my feeling about it in a kind of a primary way.
And I think it changes, like it shatters what it is.
It isn't a book, right?
It's a, like, is it a, I mean, Game of Thrones obviously was published first as a book, now I'm reading it on a phone.
But if that was published today...
Like it's a novel, but is it a blog even?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I think I do.
I mean, you know, I've always been really interested in – I had a lot of friends in college in particular.
Well, I mean like everybody I knew, I kind of hoarded books.
I wanted books.
I wanted to have books around.
I would tote them around in boxes from place to place.
I think it's somewhat important.
One way it is – I think it is pretty different.
maybe from music and maybe even comics, I don't know, is I think there are people who like books and there are people who like reading.
And as it happens, the Venn diagram for that is pretty tight.
Most people who like reading like books and most people who like books like reading.
But I mean, there are, I do, I have to say, I have a lot of friends that say they're reading more than they ever have in years because they can get on a plane with all of those books on it that they would never in a million years truck around it.
And candidly to flip that around,
You know, I can't tell you for how many years I would go to Books A Million in the 90s and, you know, pick up five books and kind of glance through the first chapter of three of them, maybe read one of them, maybe read the fifth one a year later.
Like, I've always really loved books, but, you know, having that at hand, I don't know.
I mean, it's a different kind of thing, but I take your point.
But do you feel, I mean, I guess it's the, in a way, the democratization of the platform, right?
Yeah.
There used to be a huge difference between putting on a vinyl record and listening to your friend's demo on his cassette recorder.
And you would listen to your friend's demo on a cassette recorder, and you'd be like, oh, yeah, sounds good, man.
Your band sounds great.
And then you would go put on your vinyl record that just by the format alone you knew was something special.
And now, you put on your headphones, you sit in front of your computer, and you listen to your friend's demo, and you listen to a major label release, and you can hear the difference, but in some cases, the major label release is intentionally lo-fi, and your friend's demo has been dressed up with a lot of expensive sounding plugins.
But it's just as over-compressed as Top 40 that you hear on the radio.
Yeah, and it's like...
In a way, yes, the quality of the good stuff should always win out.
And you should be able, with your eyes closed, to tell the difference between something really wonderful and something that is just made to approximate something wonderful.
Well, the way you describe it, though, a demo is more like a sketch in some ways where everybody knew that it wasn't the finished product.
It was meant to be something to give you the gist, right?
Well, and ultimately, for that cassette demo to make it all the way to a vinyl record required, as you were describing...
So many intermediary steps where somebody had to say like, yes, this is good enough to make it to the next level.
And I remember the feeling of having a cassette demo of my band and feeling like there's no way we will ever make an actual album.
We're just not good enough.
But here we have this cassette and I can play it for people at a party.
But now, reading a novel on your phone...
and then using that same device to read a YouTube comment section, or using your same device to read BuzzFeed, ultimately, you're interacting with the device the same way, and the words look the same to you.
And so, it's a very different experience of reading...
of reading everything through the same window.
And I have to imagine that like your brain, like the work of saying like, Oh, this is Thomas Pinchon.
This is good.
And now I'm on a comment section and this is bad or this is garbage writing.
Um, um,
We're not taking the intermediary steps of like, okay, I'm not listening to talk radio anymore.
Now I'm putting the radio off.
I'm going over.
I'm taking the book down.
I'm changing gears.
It's just a different app, essentially.
Right.
And so, when you work on a novel or a book of ideas, and you're like, I am adding my book of ideas to the world conversation, and people are reading your book of ideas...
And switching between Twitter, which is a world of ideas, and BuzzFeed, which is a world of ideas, and all the ideas end up kind of being in a soup of ideas, and it's hard to remember which ones are the good ones and which ones are the bad ones.
There's no... We're not allowing ourselves the...
We're not privileging any ideas over any others, in a way, even just by format.
I don't know.
It feels ultimately that I have this problem all the time where it's like, I don't remember where I read that.
Did I read that in the New Yorker?
Or did somebody comment on a Chemtrails website and I read it there?
And, you know, nobody is chasing down attributions.
I mean, I posted a Carl Sagan quote on my Twitter the other day.
Yeah, I saw it.
And
You know, like probably 80% of the replies were like, wow, amazing.
And then 10% of the replies were, that's probably a fake quote, because generally anytime somebody says something really smart and prescient, it turns out that it's fake.
And then 10% of the people labored to explain to me how Carl Sagan could not actually see into the future, but all of his observations were obvious.
And not one.
That'll teach you to post a Carl Sagan quote.
Right?
And so all the people are like, wow, amazing.
I mean, that was the response I was trying to solicit.
But my Carl Sagan quote on my Twitter was probably just one of like 40 quotes that they read between Facebook and wherever else they go.
And all of them are, wow, amazing.
And all of them completely out of context.
And then it was hilarious to me, the people who believed, who were chastising me for posting a fake quote that wasn't actually fake.
They didn't take the two seconds.
Did you track it down?
I did.
Tracked it down and I replied to those people or at least a couple of them until I got bored of doing that.
Saying like, here's the attribution of the quote.
It's actually a quote from a book.
But the best ones were the people who somehow mistook me saying like, wow, Carl Sagan could see into the future.
Mistook that as me actually saying, I believe that Carl Sagan could see the future.
You know, like they didn't perceive that I was saying, not that he could see the future, but that isn't this... It's an interesting remark.
Isn't this an interesting remark?
It seems to apply to us now.
And I mean, if I had read that in a book, instead of reading it, instead of like scraping it off of somebody else's Twitter feed and repurposing it...
Retweeting somebody else's Photoshopped image of a Carl Sagan quote.
It would have more gravitas if you read it in a book.
I feel like if I had read it in a book.
You should have put it on your Pinterest.
But you know what?
Maybe in my whole life I never would have read that book.
And right now I couldn't tell you a thing about that quote, frankly.
I bet it was Mark Twain.
It's in the past.
I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt.
Mm-hmm.
I'm so sick of myself.
I hear that, Johnny.