Ep. 260: "My Snapchat Years"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
It's going okay.
You sound extra good today.
Is that right?
Did you do something different?
You know, I'm just working out all kinds of differences.
Are you in the basement?
No.
Oh, God.
Although I have... You think you're going to get past that groan, buddy?
I've got a follow-up for you.
I have now achieved a state where the basement is a constant 65 degrees, which is very appealing.
On purpose?
Yes.
Well, it will never get nicer than that.
I'll take a 65 any day.
Right?
Oh, God, it's so nice.
It used to be a root cellar and a coal hole.
Coal hole.
And now it's a constant temp.
I've been faking this for a long time.
I think I know what a root cellar is.
That's where you put tubers?
You put up some tubers for winter?
Is that what that means?
Any other kinds of things?
You get a rutabaga?
No.
I think that's... Is that a tuber?
I don't know.
It's one of those land vegetables.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where you put your canning.
Yeah, we put up peaches.
Yeah, you put peaches up it down in there, I think.
Well, but maybe a root cellar is even...
Even darkier and mustier than that.
All right, I'm going to look it up.
I mean, you throw your roots down in a bin, right?
A root cellar's got a root bin?
I think it should have a bin in the cellar.
And the ironical part is you don't really put them up, you put them down, right?
Put them down, you do to a dog.
You put your peaches up.
Peaches up, roots down.
You put your peaches up on the shelf...
down in the cellar okay it's like the theme to um it's like the the theme song to the um
Yeah, that was a wonderful reference I was about to make.
It's early.
It's very early.
Vegetables stored in the root cellar primarily consist of potatoes, turnips, and carrots.
Other food supplies placed in the root cellar over the winter months include beets, onions, jarred preserves and jams, salt meat, salt herring, salt peanuts, winter squash, and cabbage.
Not a single mention of a rutabaga.
No.
It has root right in the name.
I think a rutabaga might be a vegetable captcha.
I've never seen a rutabaga in use.
I think it might be a canary trap or a false flag.
When I see a rutabaga at the store, no disrespect to rutabagas.
I'm sure that's somebody's, well, one imagines that's somebody's favorite vegetable.
I wouldn't even know what part of it to eat.
It looks impregnable.
Let's see.
Rutabagas.
I feel like I went through a stew-making phase.
And I feel like someone got me on a rutabaga tip.
And I think I put it in some stew.
It says here it's a cross between a cabbage and a turnip.
Cabbage and a turnip.
I don't know how you would even cross those things.
The roots are... You put a boy turnip and a girl cabbage in a room and get them...
You call it vegetable husbandry.
You know, you got to get them in the right state of mind.
I don't know much about husbandry.
It's never really appealed to me.
But, you know, you know, rutabaga, you know, meets a turnip coming through the rye.
You know more about husbandry than I do.
I don't know.
It's one of those things.
We've talked about 4-H.
Is that the one?
It's kind of early.
And what brings people to want to do that?
Especially in areas that are not strictly farm areas.
It's kind of like farm cosplay, but with a cool jacket.
Do you go to the state fair?
No.
When was the last time you went to the state fair?
I don't even know where to go.
Last state fair, I mean, what I can tell you is that we went to many, many fairs when I lived in Florida.
We would go to regional fairs.
I feel like I've been to the state fair.
I was almost killed on two occasions by Bob Hope at the Ohio State Fair when I was a child.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I was almost hit by his limousine.
And you've seen Bob Hope?
Yeah, yeah.
So his limousine, I was running where I shouldn't be running.
Bad on me.
I almost got hit by a limousine.
Limousine goes by, and I look in the back seat, and I exclaim, Mr. Hope!
A lot of young people aren't going to appreciate how cool it is to almost get killed by Bob Hope.
That's very cool.
Arguably, this country's best known, most popular comedian in his day.
Yeah, I mean, he's the comedian.
He's the er-comedian.
He's like the original Tom Hanks.
You know what I mean?
Oh, boy, yeah.
Golly, Bob Hope.
You know, I saw Count Basie at Disneyland, and I thought that I had some real connection to the real America.
But you almost got killed by Bob Hope.
Two times, you say.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember.
I wrote it down.
I haven't thought about it in a really long time.
But yeah, yeah, I was at the Ohio State Fair.
Now, I like a fair.
My ongoing favorite fair in Florida...
which is a lot of F's was the strawberry festival in plant city where they celebrated the harvesting of strawberries.
And there were many strawberry related.
First of all, it was a generic, you know, a fair, you could see like night ranger or a country band, but you also like go make your own strawberry shortcake.
And I like anything with strawberries, the doll, the doll, which one,
strawberry you could make your own strawberry shortcake doll like a build-a-bear type situation yeah yeah i don't think it was if they did you know they did not have the rights for it it was not a build-a-bear situation i see i see i see rutabaga sponge cake
I've just, I've been spending a lot of time on the internet lately and, uh, and so I'm back in this whole mode of like, oh yeah, people are just making, uh, making sex styles for themselves based on just whatever, whatever they want now.
Oh, I would like to put a giant pin in that because I would love to hear more about that.
Is this like the anime guys with the pillows?
Similar kind of thing?
I think so.
I think the technology, you know, now that China's gotten into the game, boy, it's just the whole, the whole industry has exploded.
Is it disrupting, John?
I imagine if you wanted a strawberry shortcake doll in that style, you could get one pretty cheaply.
You could probably Amazon Prime a pretty generic strawberry shortcake fuck buddy, but if you wanted a bespoke model with an articulating cake... Or one that looked like...
Looked like Annie.
Or looked like the lady from Lost or something like that.
Like if you had a real specific idea in mind of how you wanted your cake to be shorted, you could probably, you know what, 3D printing?
Maybe you could get different faces you could put on it?
People keep telling me, people in the 3D printing world keep telling me that 3D printing is not as great as we all want it to be yet.
Oh boy, everybody sure talked about it for a while.
Well, they sure did, but I was like, hey, I've got a thing.
that i want 3d printed and the answer was no no no you can't that's that's you can't do that yet and i was like well what about this simpler version of that no you can't really do that yet either oh i see so this is one of those this is like a this is a this is a little bit of a
It's a teaser, 3D printing.
Now you can sit around and think.
It was kind of like, remember when we first heard about the internet?
You were like, oh, this is amazing.
I was going to say VR, where it feels like every three to eight years we hear how VR is really there.
Yeah.
Have you done a recent VR tour?
John, I've never done a VR tour.
I have a couple of people here in Seattle.
Seattle's a big VR community.
And I went to one of the VR startups.
Actually went to the shop.
Sat down in the chair.
You physically went there?
Went there.
Okay.
Sat down in the chair.
A lot of people there.
A lot of people with mustaches.
A lot of people with top knots.
All looking at their computers beavering away.
And they're like, sit in the chair.
Are you ready for this?
Mm-hmm.
They put the whole apparatus on, and then I went through a thing, and it felt like I was...
I felt like I was at the IMAX at the Air and Space Museum in 1979.
I was like, and now we're flying and now we're going over a cliff.
I bet it can be really cool.
I mean, I'm excited when any kind of technology is moving forward, even if the tip of the iceberg that we see is kind of silly.
Because the truth is that VR is going to have lots of nice knock-on effects.
Like computers will get more powerful.
No doubt.
As a result, I have no desire to do that.
With that said, if I go to a Disney property or a Universal, I'll go on a Harry Potter ride, and I'll think it's amazing how you can trick my mind into thinking that I'm falling, and I'm a little bit impressed by that.
Yeah, that is impressive.
I think AR is where I'm excited.
But anything that happens in VR, I just feel like if your body isn't engaged in it,
It's always just going to be a show.
You're just going to put it on.
It's going to be a show.
It's a demo, right?
If you're not, if you can't touch with your fingers and if you're not actually walking in the environment,
Then it's, yeah, you're just sitting in a chair, uh, watching a thing.
And, and no matter how realistic it is, no matter how much you're like, I'm going through the room.
It's like, no matter how much you're playing mist, you're never, you're never going to be, uh, you're never going to, um,
Get across that uncanny valley.
It's going to be more virtual than reality.
Yeah, whereas AR really thrills me.
You know, John, I got to tell you, there's all kinds of applications for AR, and it is existing on your device.
It is pretty weird and pretty cool.
I remember the very first time I used something like that that I can remember.
might have been at max fun con where i didn't want to be around people for a while and i went and i wandered around outside the property and i used the various sky apps which is really fun when it's when you're somewhere dark with lots of stars like it really really works yeah that was the first time another time i had this really cool app that pulled information from wikipedia and maybe yelp but wherever you were you could hold up your phone and it would like show you the actual stuff i thought that was pretty clever
I think there's an app, and as of today, or actually as of yesterday, I got this app called Tap Measure, which is an AR measuring app for your phone, where you can point it at the four corners of a device, of an area, and it scans.
You could build a model of your whole room.
I hope you see where I'm going with this.
I do.
I don't know if VR has a role in John's life right now.
I think AR, I could think of several ways AR could have a huge role in your life right now.
Somebody was just telling me about the...
About like some kind of little scanner in your phone that would be based around maybe like a Kinex style.
I forget what those are called, but like three dimensional special camera things.
that you would be able to stand in a room and the thing would just do measurements of your body and then just throw that to custom clothing makers where it's like, oh, you want to order this shirt?
Just put your camera in the corner and it'll scan your size.
Yeah, like, Siri, will this make me look dumpy?
Yeah, that would be so fresh.
I'm imagining your ongoing project to museumify your collections.
I could see you doing an inventory of your current extant collection and being able to model that in various ways.
And I could certainly see how your podcast studio of the future and your root cellar, like putting that together could be really useful.
You could scan the room and decide where you want your captain's console to be and everything.
I'm just saying.
Now that I'm no longer now that I no longer have a non-disclosure agreement with Snapchat, I can speak.
I never actually had one.
Were you harassed?
uh harassed bond snapchat yeah well i don't know i don't know what you can say no no you know my uh millennial girl millennium girlfriend was a snapchat oh the uber nda of admitting that your millennium girlfriend worked at snapchat rice right really that's you're out of that officially you can say
Yeah, I'm, you know, like time passages.
Buy me a ticket on the last plane home tonight.
That's right.
And so now when I reflect back on my Snapchat years, on my time in the trenches there with Snapchat, you know, I was in a very privileged position prior to the release of the Snapchat glasses.
You may remember this was a big event.
They were rare as hen's teeth.
Very hard to find.
That's right.
Matt Howey even sent me an email during the excitement.
Is he going to use it to open his garage door?
He said, what do I have to do to get a pair of those glasses?
uh you know within that that first week of just like they were they were fifteen hundred dollars a pair you know they were just going crazy didn't you buy them out like a vending machine yeah you couldn't get them anywhere except these vending machines and snapchat would put a vending machine somewhere and not tell anybody and then it was just like oh there's a vending machine over there and you know they had this whole this has got to be the most millennium thing ever
Pop-up $1,500 camera glasses stands.
Yeah, and you could only buy, I think you could buy two.
You could go to the machine, you could buy two, and then it was done.
And so during the run-up to the glasses, right, I mean, my lady was the lawyer there, and she was the lawyer of the labs that were developing the technologies, the glasses and stuff.
Not app side, but like real-world side.
So these glasses, we're all talking about these glasses.
It's all shush, shush, shush.
Nobody can talk about it.
And little by little, like the glasses start to, what they are and what they're intended to do, start to trickle
to me i can i see a prototype of them i'm you know that like millennium girlfriend has a pair all of a sudden and we're playing with them and this is you know long time before it's it can be talked about and i got really excited about it at the beginning at the with the teaser because i thought of course this is this is the beginning of real useful
AR, it's going to be glasses where you put them on and it puts Snapchat filters on people in real time.
It was just like, this is going to be so killer.
I've been thinking about stuff like, ever since I was a kid, I've always thought, now I think this is a terrible idea, but when I was a kid, I thought it'd be cool if we were always recording everything that we see, and you could go like, oh, was that really Craig T. Nelson I saw at the airport?
Let me roll that back.
You know, that kind of thing.
Is that what that person said to me?
And you could go back.
But even still, just the ability to have these little round glasses with a camera in them, and you could be snapping and chatting all the time.
Well, when Google Glass came out, my friend Dave Minert, who owns that bar, I've taken you there, the Five Point here in Seattle, they put up a very conspicuous sign that said, no Google Glass allowed in the bar.
It was part of their overall policy to be as punk as possible at all times.
But that got into the New York Times.
Nothing's more punk rock than prohibiting things with signs.
That's right.
No vaping.
So I put my hair up into my hat and went in to ask him why.
Is that everywhere a sign?
Yeah.
Huh.
But then as it got closer and closer, these specs, it was clear as they got closer to being released that they didn't do anything.
They were very cool-looking glasses, I have to say.
The goggles, they do nothing.
All they did was just take...
30 second snaps and you couldn't even see it didn't there was no playback mechanism it was just a little tiny camera in the corner of some sunglasses oh it's a thin client eyeglass yeah it sends it to your device you're gonna deal with it there that's right and then then it's on your phone and then you can post it or whatever but it wasn't it didn't have any the glasses themselves did did zilch basically it was just like holding a phone up to your to the side of your head
And I guess it was cool if you were somebody that wanted to Snapchat yourself like skiing off a mogul or something.
But otherwise, most people just hold up their phone.
And you couldn't selfie, which was the number one thing that made Snapchat interesting to people.
Right.
That would be some acrobatic glassware.
Couldn't do it, right?
You'd have to have your friend snap you and you'd snap your friend.
And that's not how Snapchat even worked.
It wasn't meant to be like that kind of thing.
So anyway, there was this huge rollout.
And Millennium Girlfriend and I actually went to New York City for the big rollout.
And there was a pop-up store that they built right next to Apple, the Apple store across the street from Central Park.
And it was like all secret and covered in scaffolding.
And we went there the night before.
And it was a big, big, empty, cold, empty room.
And at the very end of this cold empty room was this little vending machine that looked like a Pokemon.
And it was the cutest little vending machine in the world.
And you kind of walk up to it and there's a computer screen on it.
It sees you.
And it's like, hi.
And you're like, hi.
And it says, do you want these things?
And you're like, I really do.
And then you have a little fun moment with it.
And it gives you the little things which are beautiful.
And they're in a little case that's beautiful.
Everything about it was beautiful.
They just didn't do anything.
And so then it was release day and there's this line down the block and like Kanye's managers there.
And, and, uh, and it's just this whole big scene and everybody's trying to, everybody's clamoring for these things and they're on the internet.
I swear to you, they were like $1,500 a pair.
And, uh, I'm getting emails from Matt, how he right and left.
And I, I went, uh,
with my lady to the event and she's there kind of lawyering around and then someone says to oh oh oh and they're like tons and tons of snapchat employees there and they're all um they're all super casual but when you when you really know the deal like their t-shirt and jeans like cost fifteen hundred dollars each or whatever i mean it's like very very tech tech up cool up down cool
everybody's got a headset on they all have little ear pieces and microphones and and the word gets to us like do you guys want to go in the line up to the machine do you guys want to get some specs yourself and we looked at each other and we were like sure you know like yeah of course we get it we get to go up there because they were it was an embargo right you couldn't employees of snapchat did not get these things for free this was like sometimes he would drop
And when I say he, I mean whoever the kid is that runs Snapchat who's like 28 years old.
This thing is Todd Snap.
Todd Snap, right.
Todd Snap of the East Coast Snaps.
He would put these little Snapchat machines, like, in the Mojave Desert, or he'd drop one into the Amazon.
And it was like, what are you going to do now?
These are available, but only at this thing that's, like, up the Amazon River.
Todd understands scarcity.
And people were like, ah, I'm buying a $20,000 plane ticket to fly!
Ah!
Anyway, we walk up to the machine and like all eyes are on us, right?
People have been waiting all day to get in this.
And we're like, we've cut ahead in the line and it's cold warehouse and people are standing around looking at us.
And we walked up to the machine and put in $1,500 in singles.
The machine is just like, you're sitting there flattening out dollar bills.
Yeah.
Hang on.
I've got like big, big peanut butter jars full of quarters.
Yeah.
But we walk up and we're looking at it and we're talking to the machine.
The machine's like, hey, you know, what's up?
And we're like, oh, man, you know, we can pick a couple of different colors and we have some decisions to make.
Like, which colors do we want?
And she and I are looking at each other and we're like, oh, well, we should get some for this person and that person.
And we both kind of just...
arrived at this moment of like i don't i don't really want one of these to you no and this is i'm just not to interrupt but this is after having played with the prototypes and the emerging you know you'd already had experience with these things as it was getting uh prototyped and in the like three days leading up to the release of the thing we had been walking around manhattan wearing them okay almost like you got like a demo from apple like you got this unit to try out but it wasn't gonna be yours to keep
Yeah, and it was like, you know, we'd walk around with these things on until we saw somebody looking at us, like some young person who was like, oh my God, are those?
And then we would quickly take them off and like run away, like run down the steps of the subway because we were the Beatles in 64.
You'd be set upon by top knots.
That's right.
Oh my God, oh my God!
Run, run, run!
And we ended up not, we ended up like standing there
And basically the only thing we could think of is, well, if we bought a bunch of these, we'd go turn them on the internet real fast.
And it was like, well, yeah, that's not really who we are either.
So that was an example of a tech moment in recent days where I felt like super excited about what a thing could be.
And then as the thing got closer and closer to real, it was clearer and clearer, this is not real.
This isn't going to be cool at all.
This is a thing that is going to lay the groundwork for someone else to come along and do the thing which we all know is coming, which is to make a Google Glass that looks cool.
Like, the problem with Google Glass is that it was a good idea that wasn't very functional yet.
It was dorky and a little bit ahead of its time.
Right.
The thing about Snap Glass was they looked super duper cool and did zilch.
Now, we're still waiting for someone to come out with glasses that looks cool that can also do things.
And the day it happens, man...
Somebody's going to get to be a rich person.
They're going to get to put their vending machine in the Amazon.
I've got a lot of thoughts on that.
Are you ready?
I mean, are you ready to... Not that interesting.
Are you ready to VR?
You are.
You're ready to AR.
There's a couple things with that.
I mean, anytime some new thing comes along, and I haven't prepared anything for this, but I'm thinking about how...
Like, for example, for a long time, a lot of people have said, I really hope Apple makes a real – like, not just Apple TV, the set-top device, but I really hope Apple makes a TV.
And, like, I don't – on the infinite time scale, as John Siracusa says, yeah, sure, that could happen.
But, like, really?
Do you really want that?
Like, I want –
fewer things that have to be this one way i mean think about the way that your phone went from being something that was a flip phone that had phone numbers and the game snake on it to being something where you could put your own put apps on there that did lots of stuff and now it became not a dumb device it's a very smart device but the smartness of the device came out of what you were able to put on this really top-notch thing
that was a pleasure to use even without apps.
The problem is, though, would you ever just buy those round glasses with a little camera on it?
No.
I mean, like, what you want is you want something bigger out of that.
So, I mean, the real technology, it seems like it's going to be more like a sci-fi contact lens type situation where you take whatever glasses you already have, affix this almost impossibly tiny dingus to it, and get all of the functionality out of that without needing to have dorky glasses that have a camera built into them.
I know that's very, you know, future stuff, but that's when you'll know it's arrived.
I mean, you have to go through these stages of awkwardness.
You have to learn what doesn't work.
You have to learn, you know, just the component parts get cheaper and more powerful, all that changes.
I don't know.
I'm always skeptical of the first version of anything, not because I think it's a bad idea, but because, like, just what you described, which is there's so much stuff out there I'm excited about.
It arrives, and it's fun for 90 minutes.
Yeah.
And you go, like, this is a gizmo.
This is a gadget.
It's a fun thing.
But, like, this is not going to be part of my life yet.
You were an early adopter of the Apple Watch.
Am I correct?
Early-ish.
I'm trying to think of what I was a really early adopter of.
Podcast, probably.
But as far as technology.
You were early on Twitter.
It's pretty early on Twitter.
But as far as, like, the hardware stuff.
Okay, look at it this way.
Talk about watches.
I've had, like, I don't wear watches.
Right.
But I got, like, a sleep watch.
Where, of course, I'm obsessed with my sleep, and another friend of mine, who was also obsessed with his sleep, talked about this watch you can get, and it was so dorky.
I mean, it looked like, not even as cool as a dive watch, but it was like having the box from an engagement ring on your wrist all the time.
It was just this huge, ungainly thing.
And then when you woke up in the morning and you said, I've done sleeping, then you would go and attach it via USB to your computer and it would suck down that information into a terrible app.
And like, okay, that's it.
You know, it was like a Palm Pilot for sleep in some ways.
Whereas now today I have a Fitbit that automatically detects when I go to sleep.
It automatically, yeah, yeah.
And I want to talk about my sleep at some point.
But, yeah, no, it does all that automatically now, and it's fine.
Early adapters of stuff.
I've bought a lot of digital cameras over time.
Yeah.
I love, you know... I remember.
Yeah, when I first met you, it was kind of like when I was really getting into this whole stack of, like...
Digital camera plus Flickr as a thing.
And I really, that was, and Flickr was a really fun community and a great app, a great site.
And so that was a nice thing.
You were an early adopter of LiveJournal.
I was, I loved LiveJournal.
Yeah.
But I look at, it's funny now, I look at photos even of like around the time, most certainly...
Stuff I took on my first digital camera in 1999 is hilarious.
Like pictures of my now wife and me around the time I first got a digital camera.
And they're just like a colorful smudge.
It's so weird.
I mean, and, you know, there's those services that'll like say, oh, you know, here's photos you took this many years ago.
And even photos taken during my daughter's lifetime, I can't believe the difference in quality.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this.
I haven't been an early adopter of that many things.
You did so many great Charles Peterson-style camera effects with your digital cameras.
Oh, the rock and roll flash?
Yeah, I ruined a lot of photos with that.
I was ruining photos with filters long before filters existed.
I know.
I have some great photos.
There's a picture of me with some chopsticks in San Francisco holding up some kind of bean, and you have digitally smeared it with light, and it's so cool.
There's a picture of Madeline and me talking at the... Oh, yeah, I got a lot of good pictures of your mom that way.
Tell her I said hi.
Smear.
I don't think I have any of those.
I'd love to get some pictures.
Oh, sure.
It was when you guys were doing your little Inside Seattle mini tour for probably putting the days to bed.
And we all and Josh and Emily and everybody were like.
Oh, I don't have any of those pictures.
Really?
I got some good photos.
Got some of your dad.
Did lots of high-quality hang time with your dad at, I think, a Death Cab show you guys played at?
Oh, give me some shots.
I'll snap them to you.
I'll snap them to you.
Yes!
You know, a lot of people don't realize that the first contact I had with you was contact that I don't think you were... I'm not 100% sure...
That you even were aware of it was I mean, I know you were aware of it, but I don't think when we actually met in person that we made the connection right away, which was that a kid came up to me in Boston.
This guy in San Francisco is stalking you.
No, he said, here, hold this bag of Pirates booty.
The Pirates booty, Dan.
That would be my friend Dan.
He puts a booty in your hand and we took a photo.
Yes.
Yeah, little Dan in Boston who was a sweet guy.
He's in his 30s now.
He was at Emerson at the time and now he's a big boy.
Yeah, he was little then.
And he was one of the mafia of indie rockers that would come to...
to all indie rock shows.
But he was like, hold this thing of Pirate's Booty.
I want to take a picture for you for a friend of mine in San Francisco who has a blog of rock musicians holding Pirate's Booty.
Memory serves you had short hair and no beard at the time.
I looked like I was 17.
Yeah, like a scallop.
I look like a scallop, and I'm holding this virus booty with this big, dumb smile of like, okay, because that was what the internet was to me at the time.
It's no wonder you had such a strange idea of what the internet was.
Yeah, I was like, okay, so a guy in San Francisco and you in Boston are friends, first of all.
And you send him these pictures and he puts them on the Internet.
And so I see that picture pop up every once in a while.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, that was really like I honestly did think that the Internet was a was just some kind of like a message board for nerds sharing this type of thing.
And then when I met you, which wasn't that much longer.
I remember having a conversation where you were like, you're in the pirate's booty thing.
And I was like, that's you?
I'm looking at these here.
We got David Cross.
We got Mac from Super Chunk.
We got my dog.
Let's see.
I think Matthew Cause is in here somewhere.
Sure.
I'm sure.
All of the extant long winners at the time are in here.
My friend Matt the Surfer.
Oh, yeah, these are good.
These are good, good photos.
Is Flickr still available to people?
Can people still go to Flickr?
Yeah, I mean... What happened?
Why didn't they become the future?
Right.
they were the present it's a long story i mean i i think the the shortish oh there's so many cute pictures with dogs too these are so cute i'll see if i can find yours in here um well you know they got bought up by the yahoo oh look oh it's jay from sloan and there's matt from oranger there's chris from sloan this is good these are good photos um copy tape look i should close this oh somebody put it in mayor fiorello's statue hands look at that
You know, they got bought by Yahoo, and everything was fine for a while.
And then they got kind of under and de-resourced, and I went and actually visited, did a little mini-talk with the Flickr group after the acquisition, and they were still, like, so game, and they were trying so hard, but...
there's no wood behind the arrow you know once you're part of the the big company it's it's hard and it's it sucks because it was such a great app it was so fun to use and it really was like a little community like it was one of those rare things where like at the beginning this is so fucking boring at the beginning of that kind of exciting web 2.0 era there was like all these great little things that people would get on and it was actually useful and actually fun and you actually would meet people through it you know like like live journal which is very web 1.0
but i'll find that photo for you it's gotta be i gotta close that tab though because i'm looking at all these old pictures and boy the photos are terrible cameras used to be bad yeah yeah yeah they were terrible they were terrible terrible terrible yeah the first digital camera i ever saw was at a restaurant in seattle where i used to go to get late night stroganoff and this was during that phase where you know when i was a little kid when i was a kid i loved stroganoff because stroganoff was made with hamburger and
And cream of mushroom soup.
That was back when America understood how to make garbage food for kids.
Oh, God.
Campbell Soup Company, they really got behind that.
They said, look, there's stuff you could do with our soup that you have not even thought about yet.
Yeah, throw some hamburger in it and then put it over noodles.
Now where are we?
Yeah, where are we?
We're somewhere further down the road is where we are.
We think we're better.
Well, so I started going to restaurants at that magical age when I could suddenly afford to buy not just tacos.
Right.
Because I had a job and I could go to places at 11 o'clock at night that were open and I could order things that I wanted.
And I saw stroganoff on the menu and I was like, ambrosia.
stroganoff and it showed up and it was flank steak and onions cooked and put over noodles and here's the thing that you don't want which is a long cooked onion over a plate of noodles because an onion a cooked onion looks like a noodle i don't think that's anybody's favorite food no no no and it was that it was an early experience
Of the over fancification of things.
And I realized that, oh, stroganoff, I guess this is how it was originally.
And maybe the hamburger version was an abomination.
But this is way worse.
But I loved stroganoff, I thought, and so I spent years eating flank steak stroganoff.
but dreaming of hamburger stroganoff.
And now I'm finally at the age where I can just go back and eat bean casserole and hamburger stroganoff and nobody can tell me different.
It's like I can have cafeteria food for the rest of my life.
And people yell at me.
They yell at me with their eyes.
I was at a party the other day and I was like, so I get up in the morning.
Oh, they were like, tell me about how do you do a podcast?
And I said, well, what I do is I get up in the morning, I microwave a cup of coffee and I go talk to my friends.
And they were like, it was a, it was a husband and wife and they both like took a small step back and were like, microwave your coffee.
I was like, oh, don't get me started.
Here we go.
I microwave my coffee.
I have a little, then I microwave some hamburger stroganoff.
I sit in, sit on the front seat of my dad's car, which is like a couch.
Sigh.
Go to the state fair.
be at a party or a dinner or waiting for a bus and have an argument, not an argument, but an argument with somebody about whether something existed.
Not an argument, but an argument.
But an argument.
Yeah, it's an argument, but yeah.
And there was not really a way to resolve it.
It's like, you're not going to get on a bus and go to the library and go to Famous Firsts, which is a great book.
You're not going to go look at an encyclopedia.
You can't, because you've got to get on your goddamn bus.
This is why...
I'm sorry to interrupt.
This is why the Guinness Book of World Records existed.
I know.
Robert Earl Hughes.
But go on.
And now today, you can, like, before somebody's done having their out-of-nowhere reckoned about something, somebody else has already looked it up, and you can say, no, no.
No, no, no, no.
You know?
But, like, the other side of that is, back in the day, you could also get a blanket party from a bunch of people who thought that, no, you're doing stroganoff wrong.
So I guess now you, you know, as the aggrieved party, you could pull up your phone and say, no, no, there are many kinds of stroganoff.
Like, I can do this anyway.
This is my house.
You know what I'm saying?
Mm-hmm.
it's a land of contrast but i do kind of miss the the unknowability of things yeah yeah well i do too but i had a i had a interesting insight uh not very long ago which was that my dad being uh the greatest generation ever ever of all time um born in 1921 he and his cohort
Which includes Sammy Davis Jr.
Well, that's... You can't overlook that.
And John F. Kennedy.
What about Johnny Carson?
Would he be part of that cohort?
Johnny Carson, absolutely part of that cohort.
They continued to be the prime movers of the culture.
I would say all the way through the Beatles...
all the way until about, well, until about 1968.
And we like to look back and think, oh, you know, from the Beatles on, it was the youth, or even from Elvis on, it was the youth of America and rock and roll.
But those people were just children in terms of the culture, who was really driving the culture.
And it was only in about the late 60s where kids in college were
And their protests and the, you know, and the fact that the the liberal dream of my dad's generation, which was Kennedy, Martin Luther King, LBJ, all of that stuff, all everybody was killed, basically.
And then right about the late 60s, right about 1970, the greatest generation just lost the just steering wheel got taken from them.
And my dad was, you know, an absolute, like, as far left as you could be, but it took him several years to get to an understanding that you could protest against the army being in Vietnam.
He was just, it had never occurred to anybody of his generation to be against the war.
We see this played out in episode nine, I believe it is, of the Vietnam War series that I've now watched twice.
Mm-hmm.
It was pretty awkward and pretty weird, especially after the Veterans Against the War march when things got further radicalized, and they found themselves that even though the tide of opinion across the nation was turning against the war, now they were radicalizing everybody by saying, oh no, but you're doing this protest wrong.
It must have been hard to know what kind of footing to find at that time.
Well, my mom was against the war from the very beginning, and it was a contention within their marriage, but they were like...
That was the way liberals were.
It's the way liberals still are.
Right.
She was like against the war.
And dad was like, you can't be against the war.
It's the United States of America.
But, you know, my dad's first wife, this is a little known story in my family.
My dad's first wife, who was the mother of my older brothers and sister.
At one point, my dad was running for like a major position in the Washington State Democratic Party.
And his wife, Jean.
um decided to run against him i've never heard this if i have i've forgotten this this is good oh my god if you can imagine what it was like around the dinner table between those was he already declared and running and then oh yeah he was oh he was running and then she was like i don't think so and threw her hat in the ring i should mention something so
You know, this is the early 50s, and this was how, well, their marriage didn't work out, let's say.
It happens.
But they were married for eight years or something, eight, nine years.
That's not nothing.
Not nothing, considering that she's running against you.
And she ran at him from the left, too.
I mean, he thought he was a wobbly.
Oh, I bet he didn't see that coming.
Oh, no, you never see it coming when they run at you from the left.
Not when you think you're a good liberal.
But one of the insights that I had was, in 1968...
my dad was 47 right so 1970 he was my age 49 years old oh my god and that was the moment that he and his friends finally just the culture just went past them and from that point on the b the baby boomers were determining what the
What the dialectic was.
Mm hmm.
But you no longer were really laying it out there.
It almost seems like, I guess this happens a lot, but it was so clear and such stark relief then that, like any American, you still get a vote on what this stuff is, but you don't have this veto power or utter primacy of opinion anymore.
There's a lot of people that aren't going to automatically agree with you because you're from the greatest generation.
Right.
Because you're the dads or the moms, right?
And Carson retained his...
cultural presence.
But you see him even turn throughout the 70s into somebody that when Dean Martin
was on the show carson was real comfortable and then he would have young people on and just sort of be like so what are you folks all up you know what are you kids doing today it wasn't so far off uh tiny tim i mean it was a little bit like you were having these people on as a curiosity yeah right and and dick cavett was more you know was more on the street or whatever um but but
But that's the age that we are now, you and I. And unfortunately, because Generation X was so small, we never had the feeling that we were making the culture, really.
I think it's fair to say no one has really cared what we think.
Never cared.
I'm not saying that's wrong, per se, but there's not that many generations that should have the right to be listened to.
Yeah.
Nobody, really nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
No, we were just too small and we were just, we were too, even from an early age, we were too resigned.
We were just like, we're losers.
But this feeling now of being 49 and looking and saying like, oh, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether I'm for or against the war.
It's just, and it's not like you go out to pasture, but you definitely feel like you...
I mean, it's not even that I hand over the reins.
I never had the reins.
You never had the reins.
It's just like you watch the reins get handed over in front of you and you're like, I didn't even get to touch the reins.
We're like the Prince Charles of cultures.
It's just like I've been sitting here in my double-breasted jacket until the sleeves are all frayed.
waiting to be king even for a minute you know my daughter has actually asked about that she's because and it's it's really interesting to think about this man's in his 70s at this point right it's like and she's what 90 something yeah always a always a prince bride never never a queen yeah never a queen mother he'll go right to being queen mother
Oh, is that Harry?
No, who is it?
Who's the lead son?
Jimmy.
He has two large sons, right?
Bob.
Bob.
King Bob.
The son, the number one son, top son, is very handsome.
Mm-hmm.
And then he surprisingly, I think, lost his hair and everybody was a little surprised.
He looks a lot like his beautiful mother, but with a receding hairline.
Yeah.
It's a shame.
It has receded all the way, pretty much.
But it did it at a young age when he still was, you know, when he still was so beautiful.
That sucks.
And he didn't do a Donald Trump where he was just like, you know what?
I'm going to be standing out in front of an airplane a lot for the next several years where my hair is going to be blown all around.
I'm going to make—oh, yeah, or you're going to become President Pastry Hair.
Well, he was always Pastry Hair guy, right?
But he became candidate baseball hat pretty early on.
That's smart.
You think that was a logistical decision based on planes and helicopters?
Sure, because you're standing around.
You can't—I mean, in the past—
He was photographed always under his own conditions, and he could have three people in the closet spraying lacquer on him.
But I think early on, he was standing out on a tarmac somewhere while the plane was winding up, and his hair was standing straight up like a sailfish fin.
You may not be aware that I collect and curate.
photographs, unflattering photographs of the president.
No, really?
It was in the early days of the whatever this is we're going through.
I have several small forms of therapy that are mostly just for me.
And one of them was every time I find a really good unflattering photo.
And a lot of them are him and his giant ass playing golf.
But I do have a few of his hair giving up the ghost a little bit.
And like a lot of guys with that kind of pastry hair, he has some bits that are very, very long.
And once they come away from the primary pastry unit.
Yeah, they're way up there, aren't they?
Oh, brother.
You can see them get caught a little bit in like minor tornadoes where the hair is like not only up, but it's also sort of twisting around.
There's some things we know and some things we can guess about the man.
It is believed that he has some kind of apparent anxiety about stairs.
This is fairly widely documented.
It has not been proven, but for years he's been tweeting about how President Obama should use the handrail when he gets off Air Force One, that it's very unsafe.
He's got some hang-ups, and I think one of them is stairs.
So we know he doesn't like stairs.
We know he doesn't like wind.
He's got a low center of gravity.
He should be pretty good on stairs.
Yeah, I think he doesn't trust his tiny feet.
I think he's afraid he's going to go ass over tea kettle.
But think about getting on and off of planes.
It must be such a stressful thing.
And yet lately, he's been doing more and more of the screaming over the helicopter blade sound, little mini press conferences.
So he must have found something that is working for him.
I feel like the... I mean...
Just the like small power of the presidency, which is no small power.
Right.
But the small power to just be ferried everywhere by helicopter and like Air Force One, even even though Air Force One is probably decorated atrociously and he's not helping.
uh i can imagine that they have they have probably screwed some chandeliers into the ceiling of air force one and we're just not seeing it yet i imagine it being like uh the duke in uh a number one king of new york oh yeah let's go from new york where he's got like a chandelier on his limo i bet it's on the limo oh why does that not become a meme
But I was just in D.C.
the other day and some minor, minor, minor dignitary drove by in with a police escort.
And I think it was a caravan of like two SUVs.
And I speculated to there was somebody standing on the street corner.
And as you know, on the East Coast, nobody likes being addressed more than just an East Coaster standing waiting for a light by by a stranger like, hey, who do you think is in that?
Caravan, that type of thing.
And the local guy was like, I don't know, man.
And then the light changed.
And I was like, well, hey, great talk.
But I was trying to think, like, who gets a minor league police escort like that?
Like, you know, it wasn't super minor league.
It was four cops, two at each corner.
And they were getting to run lights.
Maybe somebody from Congress?
Well, somebody else, I think, overheard me talk to Mr. Guy, who then split.
And I think over my shoulder, they said, might be Paul Ryan.
And I was like, huh, Paul Ryan, you think it's that?
Yeah, I suppose that's about Ryan.
You know, it's like because like the king of Mombasa is going to get a big entourage.
They're going to throw they're going to be throwing flower petals out in front of them.
That's that's in his rider.
That's in his rider.
Right.
So but that type of thing where everywhere you go, that's the thing money can't buy.
Like, like Zuckerberg doesn't get 50 cops following following him and like running red lights.
And when when the president comes here, they close down the freeway.
Oh, yeah.
It's so disruptive.
And that is a big, I think, a thing that that that president baseball hat probably like after he realized, oh, you don't get chandeliers in your limo, but you do get to close down the freeway.
That's got to be really enticing.
That's got to really make a person not want to retire, not want to resign.
You know, even if you do want to resign, that's going to make you think twice about resigning.
Because once that goes away, you never get it back.
I mean, something that...
Many of us can appreciate or understand is first class on a plane.
So I'd had an okay number of plane flights throughout my life.
And then at one point during the dot-com days, my boss, who was a really great guy, upgraded me.
And I flew in 1999-2000.
I flew in first class for the first time.
And, you know, it's such a lame joke to make, but it is kind of hard to go back.
Like, once you've been in first class, and especially today, I mean, first class today is like, let's put it this way, coach today, not a fun experience.
We've talked about this.
But it is, once you have experienced that, and you go like, this does not have to be stressful and awful.
And I get to feel a little bit fancy.
Like, especially if you're a poor kid like me, you go like, ooh, this is kind of nice.
I would love to do this again.
And I bet it's like that to the 10th power.
Especially if you're, say, a Steve Mnuchin.
Or you're a Price.
We're talking about politics.
We promise we wouldn't do that.
Did we promise we wouldn't talk about politics?
No.
Well, you know, you always had an unofficial policy of let's not talk about politics.
Because I want to be able to release them.
This is why we don't talk about religion in the ones that make it on the air.
But we are talking about optics.
We're on a good streak, John.
Don't break it.
No, no, no.
Believe you me, my friend.
I know where the line is.
I know where it is.
Yeah, because you get quiet.
You get quiet for a little while, and then there's a little bit of... There's a little moment where you're like... It's an hour and 20 minutes in.
What?
No, no, no.
I know.
I know.
There was a while there, right, where right about an hour and ten minutes in where you were like, this is a releasable podcast.
It would be so good.
It would be so close to being done.
It would be so close.
And then you would find a message that you wanted to get out.
Yeah.
But, you know, I don't disagree with your message.
I just want to, you know, help the nice people.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
So, no, I believe the children are our future.
Yeah, yeah.
Are you prepared to let them lead the way?
Are you really prepared?
That's the thing about being 49.
I feel like one of the challenges that I've been facing is how do I continue to be useful to people, which I've always desired to be and tried to be.
How do I continue to be useful while also acknowledging that whether or not I think a thing matters or is good or is sensible no longer really matters?
matters and so i want to continue to be useful it's one thing to realize that intellectually and then it's one thing to see it played out in every single exchange of your life yeah yeah yeah you don't want to be hober simpson's dad where you're yelling at clouds yeah yeah um but you do want to be useful and there was a time i think a long time before my dad's generation
Where the understanding continued to be that as people get older, they accrue wisdom and so are more useful.
Even if they aren't down in the trenches doing things, you go consult them or whatever.
But, you know, things changed.
That's not fair to say.
The 20th century, a lot of stuff happened really fast.
But for many decades, maybe even centuries, the pace of change would not exceed what happened over two generations.
And you could say, well, you know, Dad, Mom and Dad have seen some shit.
Like, we should listen to them.
Yeah, right.
I mean, Dad, what's the best way?
They know how to deal with the root cellar.
We need the root cellar.
They know from root cellar we should be listening to them.
Yeah, right.
The wagon is broken and only dad knows how to fix it.
Or how do you how do you water an older horse?
And, you know, Gramps has got that kind of but but Gramps now is like, here's how you water an older horse.
And like the kids are like on Jetson scooters and they're like, we don't use horses.
That's a good example.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I like to help.
You've given it some thought.
You've given it some thought.
But like how can we be useful without seeming grouchy?
This has been something that we've been navigating all this time.
And realizing that my looking at those photos of my dad right around the time that I was that I was a young, young guy.
And my dad was like, they all grew their sideburns long.
Like over one season, suddenly every guy had sideburns.
My dad went from wearing a James Bond tuxedo to having sideburns, long sideburns, and wearing a kind of leather trench coat.
Not even leather, but like suede trench coat.
And I was like, what happened to my dad?
It's a pimpification of dads.
Yeah.
And then they're and then they're like going on ski trips and they got big, big, big, wide ties.
And that was that was during that era when the when my dad would appear in court and the judge would because the judges were maybe the last people to adopt sideburns.
The judge, a couple of times a judge told my dad that that that his.
the blazer that he was wearing in court was not suitable.
Oh, right.
Like that's your freebie.
Yeah.
You just got your freebie.
You know what, Dave?
Because they also like, they all drank together or whatever.
So it was like, hey, Dave, sidebar, don't ever wear that jacket in court again.
And my dad was like, well, you know, I was on my way somewhere else.
Yeah.
So that, you know, I also don't want that to happen where we're just like, okay, well, we're going to dye our hair too.
uh we're gonna i'm gonna like manic panic my hair just just to stay in the game it's like no you're not you're not gonna do that either yeah who's that helping yeah you're not gonna manic panic i think uh this is not interesting or funny but i think two things you can do are uh to embrace uh curiosity and kindness oh curiosity and kindness it's not funny but curiosity and kindness you know kindness kindness doesn't hurt anybody
It doesn't hurt you.
It doesn't hurt them.
As long as you're not being a dick about it or doing it for your own selfish reasons.
But, like, you know, if I go to the bodega, you know, a couple, three times a week, and I see the lady at the bodega, who's always a lady at the bodega, and, you know, she goes, she's a woman in flux.
She's a recent grandmother.
She's always trying new things.
She's got different nails.
She's got different eyebrows.
She's got different hair.
She's trying some things out.
And I will frequently, if I feel this, I will say, hey, I really like your hair.
And that's it.
That's it.
Cool eyebrows.
I hope that's not too gross a thing to say to a 60-year-old woman.
But, like, I'll say, hey, I really like your hair.
And that's it.
Have you ever said eyebrows on fleek?
Oh, I should do that.
I should do that.
I don't want to get too personal about, like, a specific part.
Like, I don't want to be like, oh, your left arm looks good today.
You know, you get too specific and it gets kind of odd.
Like, you have nice incisors.
There was a while there where when I would use on fleek, which I now spell E-N.
Fleek.
En fleek.
En fleek.
En fleek.
Oh, in the French style.
I would get a lot of big eye rolls from my Millennium followers.
Yeah.
You're like the lady on Curb Your Enthusiasm who says LOL out loud.
LOL.
LOL.
Well, you know, I say LOL out loud all the time.
You got me on LOL.
You got me on LOL, and now I'll never look back.
There's three different LOLs, and I deploy them tactically.
Yes, the three LOLs, right?
The three LOLs you meet now.
Well, someday when the book is written about our time, the three lols are going to be a whole chapter.
It seems like one lol.
That ain't one lol.
That's three different lols.
But as time went on and the millenniums decided that Enflique was no longer their thing, they weren't doing it, I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Enflique is a thing.
You can't turn back now.
You may not want it, but I want it.
You put it out there.
You did that.
You put it out there.
Yeah.
Enflique was you, not me.
But now I feel like, and the thing is, originally Enflique was only for eyebrows.
Yeah.
Is that right?
Yeah, it was just for eyebrows.
Only eyebrows could be on fleek at first.
John, is that one of those Black Lady Reaction GIF type things that we need to talk about?
Are we being racial when we say on fleek, or is that just a purely without regard to race millennium thing?
I don't think so.
I think it's pure millennium.
On fleek, I don't know where it came from, and I don't think anybody does.
It may be one of those things where it was a misspelling, like prawn.
Like, oh, that's a really good prawn and what it means was porn, but they were typing too fast.
Oh, I thought you meant shrimps.
And also prawn.
Shrimping, they call it.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Or whatever.
All those things that come out of 4chan where somebody is like typing too fast and they don't.
I'm sticking your computer away.
They don't get it right.
Like now on 4chan, instead of lol.
Yeah.
They say Keck, K-E-K.
Because they're near each other?
No, they're not at all.
They're not.
I mean, all is right next to each other.
K-E-K is far away, but it stands for something else.
And so on...
4chan now, everybody goes kek, kek.
And it's a forced meme.
That's a fun thing.
Yeah, the forced meme, okay.
People are always trying to force a meme.
I'm hoping I can make a meme out of the fact that I'm always typing something wrong on iOS and I end up getting a comma and the letter M in the middle of a word.
Did you ever get that?
When I'm texting, I end 30% of my texts with a lowercase b.
I'm like, what time are we going to be there, B?
And I don't know why.
Oh, it's because the B is right in the center above the space bar.
Oh, so you do a dip-dip on the bar and you accidentally hit a B. I accidentally hit a B. So where are we going, B?
And no one ever comments on it.
Nobody's ever like, why are you calling me B?
It's kind of rappy.
It sounds a little bit rappy.
Yeah, what's up, B?
What up, B?
I have a friend that ends every text with BB.
What's up, BB?
And I think what he means is baby.
What's up, baby?
Oh, I don't like that at all.
I hate it.
And I said to him a couple of times, like, please don't call me BB.
And he's like, no, it means like...
It means like baby.
I'm like, no, no, no, it does not.
I don't like a mommy blogger.
I want to spend more time with my baby.
It's like a French diminutive that I don't like applied to me.
Oh, like a baby.
Like a baby.
Now, is that a black lady reaction gift thing when you call somebody bae?
Isn't that a black lady reaction gift thing we need to talk about?
Don't think so.
I think that's a pure millennium thing.
Okay, what's a bae?
A bay is like a, it's like a sweet baby, but it's, that's my baby, but it's bay.
What about squad goals?
See, I use, I deploy squad goals all the time.
I will not say bay and I won't let anybody call me bay.
Okay.
Oh, you just lay that out there.
Just, this is not a thing we're going to do.
Don't call me, don't call me bay.
And most people, most of the millenniums that I associate with have the good sense not to use bay even in their own lives.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
They say, oh, yeah, we're shipping Todd and Alice from Rippy Bachelor Show or whatever.
And I didn't understand what that means.
And the answer that I got is really unsatisfying.
They say, A, it's been around for a long time, idiot.
Not so sure about that, but okay.
And it has to do with relationshiping?
Are you familiar with shipping as a thing?
Sorry, sorry, no.
Never seen it, never heard it.
I just don't want to be culturally appropriative if I don't need to be.
Appropriation or two?
I don't want to appropriate appropriation.
That's what I'm shipping.
yeah well i think that there's i think that the millenniums have a lot of different levels of relationship that we didn't have oh say it sister right because we had like not very many levels okay not even knowing what the relationship is they seem totally fine with it's just every everything's all higgledy-piggledy like whatever yes you can say someone's your bae you can be shipping with them you can be netflix and fleeking with john john could it be complicated
I think that's part of where it got started, right?
Does the complication begin with a hookup?
Are you shipping a hookup?
It might be a Netflix on fleek.
Oh, it's fleek and chill.
It's fleek and chill.
I'm not sure if it's true.
One of my first millennium friends, back when they were still like 20...
Yeah.
Used to say to me all the time, used to sort of brag in a braggy young person way about how fluid their relationships were.
And as time went on.
That's kind of woke, right?
It was.
Well, at the time, I think it was.
Ben, it was it was a contrast that that that this friend was making between.
uh his like young cool more groovy people and my old stuck in the mud people and i never had the heart to tell him that you know that i'd uh whatever man i'd like touch more dicks than you've had hot dinner you even took my you took the entire line you took both parts you you were there you're your patient zero for fluidity that's right i was so fluid in the early 90s right for notes it's you've had you've touched more dicks than you've had hot meals is that it hot dinner
if you put in hot lunches too it's too many it's too many dicks it's too many i haven't touched that many dicks but okay but uh but more than hot more than he had had hot dinners at the time now he may have had more hot dinners in the in the interim but i was i was so fluid i had a viscosity you know what i mean like it was like early times this was like we were very free existential viscosity you were like a you were like a human semen squid you could just fit into any space
Look, you know, give it to you.
Tell me where it is and I will squeeze in there.
Yeah.
What time and what do I wear?
But as time has gone on and now that he's a person that's in his in his 30s, like that fluidity, his fluidity has has really coagulated right now.
He's just sort of like he just wants a girlfriend now.
Oh, you get in the habit of thinking that you're progressive.
Yeah.
Yeah, or you think like, oh, man, I'm always going to live like this.
Me and my friends are always going to pig pile naked and just like Netflix and fleek all night and day.
And it's like, nah, well, maybe, but probably everybody wants, eventually everybody wants a white picket fence, except for a very few of us.
And I also just always think about the guys that they were kind of ungraciously called townies, but the guys in their late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, who kept coming to college parties years after they had gone there for one semester.
Nah, I mean, that's not a good look in a pig pile.
No, there was a young kid.
That's not for you.
There was a young kid who had a band during the peak indie rock years here in Seattle.
And his dad was the bass player in the band.
And his dad was probably in his 40s.
And the kid was late teens.
And his dad wore color in his hair, you know, like Manic Panic.
Hmm.
And it was very uncomfortable for all of us because you don't want to really be interacting with the kid because he's a child.
That's quite a pairing.
You don't want to interact with the dad because he's a dad.
He's not your dad, but he's clearly a dad.
He's a dad, yeah.
But they would be at parties and events.
The kid could be there because his dad was there.
And his dad shouldn't have been there.
And that was always very hard.
But what's fortunate is that now I can go to those parties and there's usually a padded chair that I can sit on in a corner.
And if people want to come pay their respects, they can.
But you can go and put your dogs up and maybe hold court a little bit.
Yeah, you try and put your dogs up.
And, you know, the people that don't want to come, the people that want to stand across the room and go, ah, that guy.
I've never liked that guy.
They can do that.
They don't have to come over.
But it's not like I'm circulating.
You know what I mean?
I'm not out there, like, trying to figure out who the young bands are and go hang out with them.
It's like, if the young bands want to come say hello, that's wonderful.
I'm doing a recording right now, actually, and the person playing the drums is a member of one of the young bands.
And we have a great time together.
Oh, I'll bet you do.
You know, but then I'm sitting around... Music is intergenerational, John.
There's so much you guys still have in common.
Yeah, it really is a language, Merlin.
But then I'm like, oh, wait, I'm 20 years older than this person.
20.
20 years older, which is the lifetime of an entire cool musician.
Yeah.
You know, these young musicians aren't 20.
They're in their late 20s.
They're already at that age where a musician has to confront the fact that maybe they didn't make it.
Mm-hmm.
And yet there is still a young man.
Yeah, now they're playing with an old guy.
Now they're on some record by a guy who's like, I'm sitting in a chair with my fly unzipped.
And he's like, yeah, you know, I'm playing with Howlin' Wolf now.
You've reached that John Hooker stage where you just sit on a crate.
Yeah, sit on a crate out in front of a diner.
Which would absolutely be my dream, right?
Apparently, John Lee, for a long time in the later days of his career, and I talked to many people that played with him,
He did just keep his fly down.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
He just I mean, and it wasn't really like the audience could.
He was sitting on a chair.
The audience couldn't really see it, but everybody else could.
And I guess it was like he was just venting.
Uh, but that's, that's a bold place in life.
You know what that is, John's squad goals, right?
You can just have a group, group of men that you can really relate to.
And you're all just totally comfortable sitting around with your flies down.
Nobody talks about it.
It doesn't have to be weird.
It's not even anything you have to coordinate.
It just happens.
I, I for sure feel like at least for me, squad goals is only, uh, an internet joke for me.
Like personally, I don't really have squad goals.
Um,
I do have a goal to have five or six people around my property in my employ.
But I wouldn't call that a squad.
Well, you'll know if it becomes a squad.
And maybe not everybody who's on the property in the compound is technically in the squad.
You might have some, you know, you think about Elvis, right?
You think about anybody or you think about Don Corleone.
You get these people that are kind of in this hammer, right?
You get this retinue.
Of these kind of characters that move in and out, right?
Right.
And Hammer was paying all of his friends to be there.
He was a nice man.
He's still a nice man.
He's not that much.
You remember that?
Hammer's 50th birthday party.
Now I'm 50.
Who's the asshole now?
I know, right?
And your birthday party's not happening at the Tonga room or whatever.
No, we just go out and have a quiet dinner and get to bed early.
I have a couple of squads I'm actually a member of.
You have a couple of squads.
I think I'm an emeritus member of some squads.
I think I'm an adjunct squaddie.
But there are people that are full on like the squad is where they live and belong.
I bet it's because of FOMO.
fomo first first in last out first made it's called the fear of missing out olympics oh the fear of it's the primary uh existential characteristic of millenniums is their fomo oh they have fomo they have fomo they have a fear of missing out i feel like the squads that i am that the squads that i attend um
They're not millennium squads.
They're like squads of guys that get together and watch football games and play poker.
Like rock people who do that.
Play some rock poker.
They used to be ashamed that they would watch football a little bit because it wasn't very rock.
But then at a certain point, they just were like, that's...
I just want to watch football, whether it's rock or not.
You once described it as something people took pretty seriously, where you weren't allowed to just shuck and jive and walk around and play grab ass.
A lot of your friends take it fairly seriously.
Some people watch Game of Thrones.
You have to watch this with a very prayerful mindset.
You do.
Particularly in Seattle, professional sports are understood in a kind of George Will context where people intellectualize about sports here.
Oh, yeah, I get to be George Plimpton.
Yeah, there's a like, oh, no, no, no, we're talking about the book.
about sports we read the book about sports we didn't we're not just here for the movie oh i get it yep yep yep yep yep yep and so and particularly when we lost our basketball team then it became existential you could be like dark about sports and
We're still talking about getting a basketball team back.
It's almost like different kinds of goths.
From the outside, it all looks like the same goth.
But when you're in the squad goal of the goths, you realize there's different.
There's Moby goth.
There's football goth.
You got McDonald's goth.
There could be all different variations.
Now, a lot of people aren't going to know who McDonald's goth is, but you'll know.
If you're in the goths, you'll go, oh, it's that guy.
It's McDonald's guy.
And every once in a while you'll see somebody that's like, I'm skater goth.
And you go, no.
Skater is outside of the realm of goth.
You are not skater goth.
That's another captcha.
That's another one of those tests.
You throw in a skater goth and everybody else, you can instantly know who the real ballers are in the squad goal.
Exactly.
You're like punk goth?
Yes.
Like football goth?
Sure.
But then you're like nature goth?
No.
No, there's no nature goth.
That sounds more black metal.
Isn't that a black metal thing?
Like those bands that are like druids with the kabuki, the samurai makeup, whatever it's called?
Yeah, they're out in those little Scandinavian huts.
Scandinavians or Czechs.
You could be a Czech goth.
You could hella be a Czech goth.
That's the entire goth comes from the Czech Republic.
I bet the Czechs.
With all due respect to the mini black metal and dark metals of the Nordic lands, I bet the Czech's just looking there and like, give me a fucking break.
I'm standing here in a creek playing guitar.
You want goth?
I got goth.
I got heavy goth.
I worship a fucking twig.
I feel like the Slovaks are... There's a lot of... This is a thing that you don't always know.
The Eastern Slovakia...
is a very mountainous region.
You know, the Romanians get all the Transylvania vibe.
They get to be like, hoo-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Because they got Transylvania there, and it's mountainous, and it's like scary.
But Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, there's a place in there where the Carpathian Mountains are very, very tall.
Like super tall.
Like icy...
Full of bears tall.
And they're up there doing very gothy things, I think.
You've got to get outside the mainstream.
I don't doubt that there are metal bands in Prague, certainly.
Just the law of large numbers tells us that there will be Prague metal bands.
But I bet you've got to really go up a Carpathian to find some serious goths.
Yeah, and that's not even the serious goths, right?
Just people untethered from the expectations of the city.
I think somewhere up in Finland.
You know, the Finns hated the Russians so much that they sided with the Nazis.
Not because they believed in Nazism, but because they hated the Russians that much.
Yeah, the enemy of my enemy.
That's right.
The enemy of the enemy is my friend.
And they are very, I bet you there are some holes up there.
That are full of dark magic.
Which is the one, is Iceland the one where they have gnomes?
Iceland has gnomes.
Do the Finns have gnomes?
I don't think of the Finns as gnomic.
Okay.
I think that the Swedes have gnomes.
I think that the Norsk have gnomes.
The Danish definitely have gnomes.
The Dansk.
The Dansk people.
And I think the gnomes of Iceland probably came, they were like in the hold of the ship that came from Denmark and they snuck out.
Like a brown rat.
Like a little bit of a rat they colonized.
But it's a little on the nose there, because for them, that's like Pokemon's there.
That's just part of the culture.
There's nobody who's going to be freaked out that you believe in gnomes.
Maybe a fin.
You take a fin, a true Russian-hating fin, and their attachment to the gnomic culture is something that's more bespoke and personal.
That's their squad goal.
I feel like probably in Finland they have raids.
Oh, I love raids.
I love them.
Right?
More than gnomes.
There's not like somebody living in a tree stump.
It's like a ghoul walking through a blown out forest that never sees light.
We had Tom Petty.
He was our race.
Ah, Tom Petty.
I know, right?
Fucking A. What else was I going to ask you about?
I wanted to ask you about your basement.
No, go ahead.
Talk about Tom Petty.
Oh, just for a second.
No, I'll talk all the Tom Petty you want.
I do want to hear about the progress of your house, if it suits you.
Well, so progress of the house goes like this.
Some.
Mm-hmm.
I know you don't necessarily follow the internet as regards to this show, but I can tell you this has been brought up on other programs that I do from people who listen to the show.
People are very interested in what's happening with Psalm.
People are very interested in who's in the basement.
Peter.
Okay, Peter.
Peter and Sam and Retinue at your compound.
People are very curious about what's happening with this.
Just as much as you're comfortable, could you give our listeners an update on where you are?
So Sam really kicked it into high gear at a certain point.
Sam had everything going at once at one point, right?
He had a lot of balls in the air.
He was power washing the paint off the house.
He was rebuilding the porch that I had torn apart.
He was also doing kind of a magical thing, which you always want, but can never sort of know how to ask for, which was he was just walking around the house and in the course of doing his other things, pressure washing and the like, he was also noticing broken things and fixing them without being asked.
This is a phenomenon that I call power puttering.
It's the ability to move through a space, accomplish things, even as you're realizing what else needs to be accomplished.
It's a very powerful concept.
It's incredible.
And I came home one day and walked around the back of the house and some had put a bunch of he had replaced all the broken shingles.
And I was like, we didn't even talk about shingles.
And he was like, oh, yeah.
He's got that in his van.
He's just got shingles sitting around.
Yeah, he was.
Well, or he went and got some.
He was like on his way to get some paint.
And he was like, I'll get a little bundle of shingles, shingles, too, and fix those broken shingles.
So he was doing that kind of thing, which was pretty astonishing.
And then his friend arrived.
And his friend was from Mexico.
And Sam and he did not have a common language.
And I said to Sam at one point, how long have you been working with your friend?
And he said, oh, for years.
He's like my guy.
Their bond goes beyond language?
Yeah, listening to them talk.
Psalm is throwing out some pigeon Spanish, and the guy is back at him with a little bit of that sort of see, know kind of stuff where they were just communicating, I guess, by common understanding of what needs done.
And so he was Psalm's painter.
And all of a sudden, he was on the roof.
He didn't carry a little transistor radio with him.
He just was on the roof doing things.
And within the space of two days, the entire house went from a stripped like a bomb crater to a completely painted house and like pretty well done.
Unfortunately, this was right when the people across the street, Dan and his wife, who had finally completed the restoration of Jamaica's house.
Right.
They were trying to have open houses.
So all of a sudden, all these people that I'm hoping will filter down into my new neighbors, they're all coming by the house to see how it's going.
And I've got like a couple of guys on the roof.
One of them with a transistor radio on his belt yelling at each other in like a Patois.
In a language of their own design.
Yeah.
And one of them's like got a compressor in there.
And so I talked to the real estate agent and they were like, no, no, no, it's good.
It communicates that the neighborhood is really coming up.
And I was like, OK, I guess.
But.
But when you combine that with the RV, that's a third element you're asking other people to accept.
That's a lot to grok.
Two guys on the roof.
But the boss of the porch is still missing.
Yeah, and the owner appears to have dug a trench around his house, and he has a vintage RV.
That's a lot to take in.
But this entire time...
This entire time Peter's down in the basement also with a compressor, also like doing, also like finishing a basement, which was never intended to be finished.
And there is some goth graffiti down there from a time in the seventies.
I think when one of the kids, one of the 12 kids that grew up in this house had some sort of heavy rock band, but pre, I mean, like,
Like Newcastle Brown Ale era heavy rock band.
Okay.
Like, this is where Venom is from.
That type of thing, right?
So there's some little, there's some quizzical sort of like quasi-satanic...
Pentagrams they can't see that right nobody can see it.
No, but they know there's a compressor down there You can hear a couple of different compressors going on and off around the prop But so where we are right now what happened was?
Solomon his partner were just kicking ass and then the one disappointment I have is that right at the end They
They got to the finish line.
They got to within sight of the finish line.
And then they just like sort of chucked it all in and were gone.
And what that meant was they were just like,
And we're done.
Bye.
And I walked around the house that day and I realized, oh, no.
In the last day, they painted all the windows shut.
Like they just got excited to be done.
Kind of.
And you would think that somebody that did this professionally would know how to not just get excited to be done on the last day because he had done so much sort of strangely meticulous work around the place.
He made everything.
It all came together, right?
He fixed the porch.
He did the shingles.
He did the roof.
He flashed everything that he didn't have to flash.
He fixed stuff all around the house that no one asked him to do.
And then at the 11th hour...
His guy and he just painted all the windows shut.
And as he was leaving, I think I said, hey, hey, you guys coming back to do the like not paint the windows shut thing?
And they were like.
I think they both were like, oh, right.
And they walked around the house once.
And I was like, oh, OK, they're going to take care of this.
And then they were gone.
And so now here I am.
And I'm going around the house with an exacto knife and and a and a pry bar.
And I'm cutting the paint and I'm pry barring the windows open.
Oh, no.
And that means that I'm going to have to fix the paint where I fuck it up.
Trying to get the windows open, right?
Because you can't, you know, if that's painted as a seam and you.
If it tears off a little sheet.
Yeah, a little bit going to tear and then you got to paint.
And then in painting the windows shut, I did kind of a little bit of a radical thing, which I'd been wanting to do for 10 years, which was that.
So when Psalm said, I'm going to paint the house, he was like, what color do you want to paint it?
And I said, Sam, it's a white house.
It was born – it's a farmhouse, right?
It was born white.
It's always going to be painted white.
The trim is white.
The house is white.
The porch is white.
It doesn't – if I were to come in here and be one of those people that's like, I want my house to be gunmetal gray with –
with the luminescent green trim, I would be the asshole.
I would be, that's wrong.
It's like your house wants to be white.
It is, and it couldn't be other.
It has a white barn, it's a white house, and it's not one of those neighborhoods where there are a lot of white houses.
This is the only one.
It's got a white picket fence that matches the house.
That's how it's made.
And so Sam was a little disappointed that he didn't get to make it fancier.
But I did say what I've always wanted is black lacquer window sashes.
So just the innerest part of the window, the part that actually moves.
Black as in like black?
Like lacquer.
Black, like it looks like a Japanese box.
So black.
Black, none blacker.
Mm-mm.
Wow.
That must be a very dramatic look.
It's very good.
And the thing is, it's very subtle.
You don't notice it so much as you feel it.
You feel that sort of Slovakian, Carpathian darkness.
You may not know what it is.
You notice there's something about this, though.
This is special.
Like a Japanese box.
But Sam and his best friend did not properly tape...
And so there's a little bit of bleed.
So I have to go back, not just and paint the windows where I've cut them, but also paint over the little dabs of black that are on the other side.
I hate that feeling where you've had work performed and now it just makes work for you.
Yeah.
And yet, I mean, this is certainly work I'm capable of doing without too much complaint, but it isn't done and it didn't get done 100% right.
And everything else he did was great.
And it just felt like I was very sympathetic to it where he was like,
I'm going to be done by Thursday.
And then Thursday came and there was another day of work to do.
And maybe he had budgeted.
Maybe he had scheduled something that started on Thursday.
Yeah.
And he just had to leave.
And the thing was, I gave him a nice tip because I. So you did eventually get to where you talked about money.
I did.
I was like, he made me an offer on the whole job.
He was like, what about this amount?
And I felt very strongly that Sam was somebody that I had absolutely no interest in.
Trying to negotiate him down.
I was like some that is a fine amount and let us have it be the project management triangle becomes like we're locking in this amount and then our scope and quality will Kind of is encompassed by this amount the hard edge is the is the amount
Yeah, and I feel like you can definitely paint your house for $15,000, and I didn't want to paint it for $15,000.
But if you paint your house for $7,500, you do not get a $15,000 job.
And I felt like the quality of the job overall that Sam did on the entire property was well in excess of what he was asking.
And so I tipped him also.
But there is this additional problem of like, oh, now I have this thing to do.
It leaves a bad taste in your mouth, because everything else went so well, he didn't nail the landing.
Yeah, only slightly, because I still feel like he did a bang-up job for me.
But there is that little bit of like, hmm, some guy, as he described him.
This is his mejor amigo?
Yeah, did not maybe take the pride...
He might have been a bad influence.
Who knows what's going on between those two?
I cannot imagine them going and getting a drink after work because I do not know what they would talk about.
Because they didn't have even a lot to... It was not... I think some often...
instructed him on what to do next by pointing with the backside of a paintbrush.
That'll work fine.
I think if you're clearing brush, and you understand that there's an area where there's brush, where you want there to not be brush, and brush has to go to somewhere else via a given means, pointing with a paintbrush is more than enough.
Yeah, but there was an understanding between them because Psalm's guy was not a young person, right?
He was a man my own age.
So there was an assumption between them, I think, that he was talented at his work and did not need to be supervised.
And my feeling about the painting of the windows shut is not that some guy did it and didn't.
And some wasn't hip to it.
I think it was more that they both like there was a little bit of a nod that went on between them.
Like, are we good here?
I feel like we're pretty.
I feel like we were pretty good.
And it might be that some underbid the job and felt like by the end I had gotten good value because that's how I feel.
But Psalm definitely left in a way that did not...
What I wanted to say was, Sam, you're welcome here anytime.
God, that would have been so great to land on that.
This whole story has been leading up to, Sam, you're welcome back anytime.
You know what?
I could see this getting to a point where he's on something like a retainer, where Sam just, when it suits him, every six to 14 weeks, he just drives by and notices something that needs fixing.
Yeah, and comes in and says, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to fix this for you.
And I'd be like, absolutely, Sam.
You know what?
Like I want, you know what I want now?
I want a weather vane on top of the barn.
I want a weather vane in the style of, um, not of a chicken.
I don't want a chicken on top of the barn.
What I want is a sailing ship, a sailing ship that points in the direction of the wind.
And I have a little creativity.
You could just say, I want a cool mailbox.
It's hard to knock down.
Boom.
Mailbox.
I do need that.
My current mailbox is actually like screwed to the phone pole.
Oh,
Is that up to code?
I don't think so.
I don't think anybody likes it.
But when I got here, it was screwed to the phone pole.
And then when it started to fall down, because phone poles, you need a pretty good screw to get into an old.
And I have old phone poles.
They're very porous.
They're porous.
This one's rotted to the core.
And so I had to find.
So the mailbox started to fall off the phone pole.
And so I had to find some hell of screws, but I found them in the barn.
And so I zipped that thing back into the phone pole.
And even now, when the garbage truck goes by too fast, the mailbox sort of rattles.
It's prime to get mailbox baseball, but I don't think kids today know what that is.
Uh-huh.
These kids today.
These kids today have never hit a mailbox with a baseball bat.
They don't even know how fun it is.
They're busy out there Snapchatting with their fancy glasses.
Yeah.
So anyway, but Peter's still here.
And now Peter has done a pretty great job of...
of doing the basement so much so that the basement now is like is a constant temperature of 65 degrees whereas before a good temperature yeah the basement used to go from 90 degrees to 9 degrees depending on what was going on outside and you don't want to have fancy equipment down there in a situation like that nope that's not a place that you want to store your uh your precious uh old uh like
Like Western State Hurricanes posters, because they're going to get little mold spots on them.
But I think today, even, Peter is down in the basement, even maybe while we speak.
So while we were doing the show, my mom came into the room, and she handed me on a piece of yellow legal paper a note that said, handed me a note that said, I'm sorry, comma, I'm getting sick, and I'm going home to bed.
Oh, no.
I've given Peter the codes to the storage unit.
So now Peter has the codes.
Okay.
Now, I don't know what she and Peter have discussed.
That sounds like quite an escalation.
Is that in Peter's purview?
No, no, no.
I trust Peter with the codes.
Okay, trust him with the codes.
I feel like Peter could have the launch codes even.
Peter, so I went to a party the other day, and another friend of mine said that he and Peter were...
We're thinking about getting into the apple cider business.
Okay, I'm listening.
I said, tell me more.
And he walked me into his garage, which was full of bins of little crab apples.
And he said, these crab apples are from the Loire region of France.
And these crab apples are from the Piedmont area of Italy.
And I was like, where do you get all these?
And he said, well, up north of Seattle, there's a large agricultural area around the town of Arlington.
And there's a man who has a large property that has all of these magical vintage cider apples growing up.
with names like the names of heritage rabbits.
Oh, okay.
So they originated from these European climes, but these are locally sourced, technically speaking.
Yeah.
Because I don't know how you get a crab apple from Italy and still have it be nice for cider.
Well, that's right.
You wouldn't have that shipped.
But the apples are... A lot of them are...
Like apples that are lost to time.
No, they don't exist in France anymore because they've all been like mega cultured, mega agri out.
Because apparently all the cider apples they have there now are by Monsanto.
Yeah, monoculture.
So these are like these incredible cider apples.
And my friend Michael has decided that cider making might be his new jam.
But he and Peter are going to partner up on this.
Okay.
Peter sounds like a go-getter.
Oh, Peter lives on a houseboat.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Peter's always... You've got to have a certain state of mind to be on a boat that's a house.
You've got to have a real different state of mind.
And when I talk to him about it, I've never actually been on it, but he says, it's more of a shed boat rather than a houseboat.
And I'm like, I've been down around Lake Union a lot, and I have seen a lot of these shed boats on
which are old, you know, they're properly like, these were places that fishermen lived in the 1910s that are still there.
And they're usually like what you would, which you would call like a shingled bedroom house.
on a floating pallet it's the way somebody would do ice fishing in a cartoon kind of yeah it's like it's like a portal it that happens to be floating yeah enough to put a enough to put a like a double bed a lamp chimney a potty and maybe a maybe a little kitchen but like not a ton of i don't think it's a time i don't think you can play frisbee in it but you also isn't it true a lot of the times with these things it's not the kind of thing where you would unmoor it and like go out for the day
No.
It's mainly, it is a floating shack.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a floating shack.
And I think what happens is you're renting the right to tie it up to someplace.
But if that person says, like, you're out, you know, we don't like your kind here, you can hook a 15 horsepower Evinrude to it.
Nice.
And on a calm day, like, meh, your way across the lake.
Wow.
To a place where somebody else is like, yeah, you can tie your house.
You gotta find a new slip.
Tie your house up here.
But the end of the dock position on all of the houseboat ridges around Lake Union is really pride of place.
You do not come along.
Because you get privacy?
Well, and expansive view.
I mean, you're the end of the dock, right?
It's like you're at the top of the mountain.
And you don't just come along and, like, moor your little outhouse on the front of somebody's dock.
I mean, there's, like, little slots, I think, that they will find for you.
Right.
But typically, so Peter was actually talking about the people that own the birth.
They own the moorage where there's this houseboat community.
And it's one of the older style ones where everybody there is still a hippie.
Most of the houseboats now are owned by moor.
We can allow that up in Marin.
Yeah, right.
There's still hippies, tons of hippies.
But I mean, especially living on boat shacks.
Living on boat shacks.
I think Alan Watt did that.
I think Alan Watt lived on a boat shack.
I feel like up until about 1995, you could be just somebody that lived...
on a houseboat it wasn't a thing that was considered magical it was neither cute nor weird it was just like oh yeah i live down on a houseboat oh sure sure like you like living in a small place that that that goes that bobs around when somebody goes by on a boat but then i think i think uh sleepless in seattle changed it but also like lawyers are always looking to take something nice and make it bad
But Peter still lives in one of these communities where everybody's like an old grouchy hippie, and the people that own the marina just rented a new end space.
Oh?
Which did not... There were people already there that were on the end.
Seems like you'd want to promote from within.
It does, but in this case, they said... Is it Paul Allen?
They said somebody came along and they want to pay a lot of money to be on the end.
The only true wealth is property.
And that's right.
It's a view space.
And they built some enormous... Because there are limits on how big your houseboat can be.
God willing.
Yeah.
Nobody wants a monster house.
Yeah.
The Coast Guard says, no, no, no.
You can't do that.
But they went right up to the property line, if you know what I'm saying, on how big their houseboat could be.
And they plopped it down on the end.
Oh, shame.
Shame.
I know.
And the entire neighborhood is up in arms about it.
And by neighborhood, I mean...
floating people in shacks but like yeah you you could go happy good jackie on that guy you know if you you got you you want to get along with your neighbors in an environment like that because a lot of things can go wrong if you know what i mean yeah but this guy doesn't care because he looked he looks at all those people behind him and he just says you guys are a sargasso sea of shingles laughing and floating floating and laughing and he's out there with the big view of the city and the people are mad but you know what capitalism shit dog
And Peter's in there, and he's just like, look, I'm living in an outhouse.
My name's Paul, and this is between y'all.