Ep. 531: "A Perfect Bead"
John is muted.
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Happy Easter, John.
Happy Easter.
Happy Easter.
I'm turning this down.
Oh, wait.
Let's see.
Original Sound for Musicians is off.
I think I'm going to turn that on.
Noise suppression is disabled.
Oh, interesting.
We'll see what that does.
I don't know if I'm doing this right.
Hi.
John, the work continues.
Ah, it so does.
The work continues.
The work does.
Or as the guy says on Severance, the work is mysterious and important.
Which is also true.
Oh.
Yeah, just because you don't know what you're doing doesn't mean the universe doesn't know what you're doing.
There's a plan.
Oh, yeah.
Happy Easter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I am feeling like there is not much of a plan right now.
Oh, really?
Interesting.
And is this, I would love to interrogate this, is this a new feeling, a different feeling, an evolving feeling?
What is it that feels different to you, John?
I'm...
You know, I used to listen to that show like in 2012, but they started always talking in this really high voice.
It doesn't even sound like my usual voice, which is what the internet sounds like to me.
I have different voices for that.
What does the internet sound like to you?
Well, one of them is, forgive me for quoting myself, a character I created on You Look Nice Today called Carl Van Hoot, who begins every sentence with this.
Let me see if I can get into character.
Quiet, everyone.
So, I was listening to the latest broadcast of her program on the...
numerous misconceptions about the concept of cloud storage that need to be addressed.
So... Isn't this the old internet, though?
Does the internet still sound like that?
Oh, no.
Well, forgive my saying.
The internet has many voices.
Oh.
Let me see if I can just do some off the dome that you might know.
That's very Buddhist.
Let's see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You forgot the long run by the eagles.
Wow.
the long run or um you did forget it wow if this is your first time seeing this you haven't been paying attention uh that's another one i can don't like that guy no no but john this is getting us away from the more uh the salient issue the real the real chewy issue yeah
I've got to get a better Wookiee.
Yeah, see?
Fuck you.
God, you suck.
Uh-huh.
Back on your, what is their home planet?
Hashish?
Is that what it's called?
Hashish.
Hashish.
And happy life day to all who celebrate.
Oh, that's right.
Yay, bet.
what's different John says John Roderick says he feels like there's maybe not a plan I have thoughts yesterday I used to go on Redfin as a form of yeah
You know, like just fun.
Go on Redfin, look around at the world.
Is that house porn kind of?
Yeah, sort of.
Or just kind of just that idle curiosity.
Like my kid, my kid's so goddamn weird.
My kid and his friend like to go to open houses sometimes.
Yeah, see?
My mom used to love to do that, go to open houses.
My mom used to host them when she was a real estate agent.
So I've seen both.
I looked at clouds from both sides.
I don't know.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah.
Redfin, you can go in and you can see, like, of course, there's those funny Tumblr sites that'll be like, oh, my God, this totally has a sex dungeon in it.
Or look at this place.
It's really nice.
And it has an oubliette.
Like, this is very strange.
They don't always mention the monk holes because, obviously...
Sure, sure, sure.
You don't want to mention that.
Sometimes you used to go on Redfin.
It's like saying, oh, here, I'm going to give you a tour of my 16th century desk that has 40 different drawers.
I have a minimalist 16th century desk.
But it's like printing your password on your screen door.
Anyway...
Redfin is the thing you used to go on.
Well, yeah, because, you know, I like geography already.
I like walking around cities.
I like knowing different places and have been to a lot of places.
And so Redfin was another layer you could put on that where you're actually able to look into the places you're standing out in front of if they had a real estate listing and you can see the prices of everything and how people are living.
And you see what's interesting, like in so many things,
Sometimes I'll see like a wiki, I mean famously, like you'll see somebody's photo on Wikipedia, right?
Which has to be, you know, within the rights that are available.
You can't just go grab something off Getty Images and put it up.
So I think I haven't checked, but for example, the photo of Estelle Getty, the late great, the late, the great Estelle Getty, her photo is extremely bad.
Last time I checked.
My photos have always been extremely bad on, I've never understood it.
I'll give you rights to use any picture of me in the world.
But you're not allowed to do it.
But anyhow, have you ever seen a photo of somebody or you see a take in a movie?
Like you watch Madame Web and you're like, watching Madame Web, my main thing I kept thinking was like, this movie was really worked on and fixed.
And like they did all this stuff and rewritten and reshot and they did all these things.
And so a thought that comes in mind, whether it's Madame Webber, the photo of Estelle Getty, I think, was this the best one you had?
So when you're watching Redfin, you're seeing that's the best it's going to look.
Probably, right?
Because, right, like, and you're like, if it doesn't look okay, knowing that everybody works it and stages it within an inch of their life, you're like, oh, man, you can't cover up that sex dungeon.
Oh, except the opposite too also is that there are so many conventions of real estate listings.
Sometimes you have to see through their perfect staging and their crap, you know, like fisheye lenses and their, you know.
Sort of like calling Tenderloin Lower Knob Hill.
Yeah, right.
Or there's no such thing as Hell's Kitchen anymore.
It's all lower, upper, this and that.
Daredevil Heights.
It's dangerous because it also is alternate universe porn.
It's like there but for the grace of God or something.
Everywhere you go, I can go right now to some neighborhood in Vienna and go pouring through different people's apartments.
And of course, what's happening is I'm thinking, what if I lived there?
Well, what if I lived there?
Well, what if...
What if I live there?
What if you live there in terms of like, you know, you're like, I had that realization in the last year.
Sorry, this is quick.
I had that realization in the last year that it's not being different places that I dislike.
It's traveling to different places that I dislike and the preparation and the anxiety for like, which I think is a,
maybe it seems like a silly distinction but when people say they love travel like I don't love travel I like being other places and so are you talking more about like being situated in this house if it were anywhere in the world as against like oh my god I could definitely put up with having a being if I could had a toilet in the kitchen it'd be great because I got an affordable place in Brooklyn in particular you weigh all those things yeah
location location location cubed having been to a bunch of places but also having never been to a lot of places you okay i'll do it right here around seattle i mean and and this is where it's really dangerous is like well what if i lived what if instead of moving to this house i had moved to this neighborhood and that and you know you're you're a renter
and a person i have a very different view of the world for reasons yeah right and as a as a somebody my age i mean most of the people i know that were that worked in rock and roll or creative life are they rent you know they're they because it was very very hard next to impossible to ever put together and back in the day you had to have 20 percent down
Yeah, right.
And, you know, in 1996, that was $25,000.
Where are you ever going to find $25,000?
For a corner lot in Tallahassee with mature trees?
You kidding me?
Who has that guy?
Who has that kind of money?
I'm currently channeling my friend, Jonathan Lammers, who is obsessed.
We worked together at arealestate.com, and we're playing bands together in Tallahassee.
But he's exactly the kind of person you're talking about.
He had a corner lot on a beautiful street.
He and his wife at the time had a beautiful house on a corner lot, and I think it was like $80,000.
And then he moved out here, and he would look at local listings, and he would just hear over his cube, he would yell out...
Fire Damage Teardown.
I say, what, John?
They say, Fire Damage Teardown, but it's a couple blocks from Valencia.
So it's $1.3 million.
Yeah, right, right.
There was a house, a group house we all lived in at one point, down on 22nd and John.
that the owner we knew the owner and my friend bethany was like you know you know the way a group house is where there's one queen bee and she just runs the whole thing and people move in people move out but like there's always a president of the house my friend my friend michael was the president of the house when he lived in san francisco in a beautiful place on mcallister uh he he seeded the role of of uh president of the house to to kirsten
Oh my goodness.
You know what I mean?
Because he had somewhere to go.
Well, no, no, no.
Because it's like, well, you got to like step out of the way.
I mean, this is Henry V. Of course he's going to run the army.
Like in Kirsten, like she did the shore wheel.
She did the, you know what I'm talking about?
You're talking about somebody, often a woman who's like the house mom.
Bethany was like a stone soup type person where everywhere she went, she just created a community.
Like she walked into a bar, she'd park her two dogs out front, walk in the bars, pick up, you know, sit at a, at a bench.
And within 20 minutes, it's a community.
It's like you going in like, Hey, Mr. Guy is here.
I'm running the place.
Like she ran the place.
Well, but you know, but also there was, there was a gravitational pull to her and she knew the owners of this house and it was like a little Victorian.
It had two, it had a downstairs that had three bedrooms and upstairs that had two bedrooms.
And I remember she came to me and she was like, yeah, you know, I was talking to him and they said they would sell it to me for $50,000.
And, you know, where would I get $50,000?
And I was like, $50,000?
How, you know, at the time, like $500 was what we could put together.
And 50, so what you need is- Several times a year, $20 meant everything in the world.
Well, yeah, and so you'd need 20% down, so that's $10,000, and no chance, right?
None of us, and now, of course, well, first of all, that house is gone, and in its place are 30 condos.
But anyway, so the problem with being a homeowner in this world is that that's my only asset, right?
I don't have any money.
I don't have any stocks.
I don't have any.
And I bought my first house kind of luck of the draw.
You live in your investment.
Yeah, but it was just lucky that I got a house when I did.
But then that house grew in value, and then I was able to buy another house, and that house grew in value.
So it is wealth.
but it's the only true property is the only true wealth that's right yeah but it's completely it's completely uh taken up in the property and what happened a couple years ago or maybe just a year ago
you know, they bump the interest rates and all of a sudden nobody wants to sell or buy, right?
Because if I sold this house, I would immediately be paying more, I'd be paying twice as much to buy the same house immediately back, right?
Just because of how the finances are changing.
But looking at Redfin, you look around and you have this false sense, Redfin will tell you how much your house is worth.
According to comps.
According to comps, right?
That's just in their imagination.
But then you can take, they give you a number.
This is the amount.
And then you can take that number around the world.
and overlay it and say, basically for this, let's say my house is worth X, I can go to Istanbul and find a house that's worth X and just say, well, I could just move into this house.
Here's my budget.
I've got an account on this site.
Here's my budget.
Show me what I could get.
Like this year with $50,000 or $100,000 down.
Show me what I could get anywhere, right?
That would be so interesting.
And it's really fascinating.
But it's also for somebody like me who is very, very already kind of primed to this.
Like, hey, do you want to trade lives?
Why don't I trade lives with you?
You move into my life and I'll move into yours.
It's not a thing I've ever done, but looking around at Redfin.
So I had to stop doing it because...
It was kind of like a video game, except it gets inside your soul.
You get infected with unrealistic options.
I think this happens when people look at kitchen remodels, for example.
And I know you think we need a remodel, and we do.
But that's an example, though, of people like when somebody says to me as a renter and friend of homeowners, and I sent you an image that's germane to this.
Um, I think about my in-laws who redid their house, like at actually a kind of a terrible time and they had to use a portal it for like three months.
Like it was, it, it was completely disruptive.
Other people see, oh, it's going to look like dwell magazine and a lot of horizontal wooden slots and barefoot children in white clothing.
And it's like, all I see is like all the ways that could go wrong.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Well, and the thing is like,
I have been to places, right?
So there was a while during the pandemic where the nation of Portugal was saying, apparently, you can move to Portugal and we won't charge you any tax or we won't give you any problem.
Whoa.
You just come to Portugal because we'd like some influx of outside money and we welcome you Americans.
And there are places like this in Europe, you know, little...
Sicily or whatever is like, hey, do you want a town?
We have all these towns.
Nobody wants to be in them anymore.
Would you like a town?
All you have to do is live in the town and try not to get killed by the Tessios.
The town is haunted and you have to spend a night there.
But massively true in Japan right now.
Really?
Everybody in Japan lives in Tokyo.
Tokyo is the largest city in the world.
It has 750 million people.
And then there's the entirety of Japan.
But Osaka, which is figuring largely in a TV show I recommended to you called Shogun.
Osaka, which used to be, I think used to be like the in 1600.
I think I have to ask Jason Finn.
Capital city.
I think it was the New York and the Washington, D.C.
Right Japan right right but cities like maybe not even as big as that but like places that are Say San Francisco or Seattle sized that would accommodate you Well, but no what it is is you go a little bit out in the country Japan is bigger than it seems but it's a weird shape very hard to attack
It's hard to attack, right?
You can go to Japan and there are seriously like, well, here's a seven-bedroom house.
It's a 15-minute walk from the train.
It's in a seaside town that's famous for its fireworks or its broken pots or whatever.
And you can have the whole house plus an outbuilding and a garden with a bridge for $30,000.
Please come buy it today because no one lives in this town anymore.
And I'm so susceptible to that because and as you're saying, because you're prime.
That's the thing is what you're saying is not that you immediately want to do that.
But I'll bet there's people out there who are like, you know, I haven't I haven't had sex with somebody who's not my wife, but we're both open to swinging.
It's just never come up.
Right.
It never comes up or never comes up with the right person.
As Chris Fleming says, you know, the people you never want to be poly or poly.
It's people you wish weren't poly.
But you're right.
Isn't that kind of it?
It's like your heart is open to this idea of the equivalent of not a student exchange, but a housing exchange.
And you say to somebody, hey, how about I take your place in Osaka for six months and you take my place in Seattle, right?
I like that, except that there is...
You know, I think what it is is when I was young and all through my 20s.
Right.
I always imagined I would, first of all, live forever and I would live 50 lives.
I would live for a while in Germany.
Just keep getting better forever.
You know, just keep getting better.
Stronger.
You keep moving up the ladder.
Your health is strong like bull.
Yeah.
Pretty soon.
I'm you know, I have a fife.
Like in Shogun, people are always giving each other fiefs.
They're giving each other honorifics.
That's why Tornaga's guy, he wants to increase his fief.
He thinks he's going to get killed.
Oh, and then.
That show's so fucking good.
Isn't that show good?
But you get to be this age, my age, and you go, oh, I'm probably never going to live in Iceland.
I mean, it's possible still.
Right, right.
But, you know, when I used to travel.
I heard it's wonderful there.
I've heard it's tremendous there.
It's nice, except I know how it is when the sun is not in the sky for half of the year and then the sun is always in the sky.
Like, there are places closer than Iceland where I can go to experience that.
But my feeling is I want to be there for a reason.
I don't just want to mope into some Japanese town and be like, hi, neighbors, and have them be like, oh, fuck.
It's not just a simple, just for a moment, I guess, excluding all of the complexities of having a child and things like that.
But excluding that, it isn't like you just want to do some kind of cosplay change of scenery.
Yeah.
this is not a hashtag van life style like i'm a digital nomad no i want to be i want someone to force me to move to a small japanese town because of something i have to solve a mystery or i have to be you know i'm like the sheriff of twist it might oh what if you were hired by a i think it's called a prefecture like what what if you're what if you were brought in as the new sheriff of osaka or similar
Not Osaka, but I only know the name of like five cities.
I know Okinawa, the Battle of Okinawa.
Don't sleep on the battle at Okinawa.
It is one of the tragic events of the war in terms of loss on both sides.
And if you are, I'm not saying I'm pro-Truman dropping the bomb at all.
But if you wonder...
Write that down.
Print it in the paper that I'm not pro-nuclear bomb.
You didn't say you were against it.
You just don't want to be on record.
They fucked it up.
There's a lot of ways they could handle that whole thing better.
But there was this, you know what I'm saying, though?
There was that feeling of we can't keep having Okinawa.
To get this thing to end, we can't keep.
I don't want Okinawa.
It was really bad.
I mean, especially for the Japanese.
But they were really hard to beat.
And how do you get that entire island?
That's all I'm saying.
Oh.
You could become the sheriff of Okinawa.
You could mend some fences.
But there'd have to be a reason.
I wouldn't want to put my knee.
But you have to solve a mystery.
And John's the only person, the only sheriff who's going to fix this town.
There it is.
There it is.
And it would be one of these hilarious northern exposure situations.
Fish out of water.
Constant cultural misunderstandings.
And you could trade your bathrobe for some kind of a, what do they call that?
A kimono.
Yeah.
A kimono, right, and I'd trade my scimitar for two katana.
Yeah, right.
There I'd be going.
You'd store it on that little shelf next to your armor.
Yeah.
You don't want to be Tycho.
You have told people.
You've been very clear about this.
Stop working against my fife.
I don't want to be Tycho.
No, I just want my ship back, but you can't have it.
You can't have your ship back.
You can't have your ship for your men, Tom Hardy guy.
You're the, oh my God.
I said, while I was watching the show and I was like, this guy's exactly like Tom Hardy.
He's exactly like Tom Hardy, except for once.
And my lady friend was like, I don't see it.
Oh, come on.
Well, there's one scene when he's in the pit.
He's in the little prison pit with his guys in the first episode where he's totally doing Daniel Day-Lewis.
Oh, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Have me come up there.
He's basically doing Daniel Plainview, but he's totally Tom Hardy.
Anyway, so Japan, you know, hit him up.
You know what I'm saying?
The other day, I'm on my phone.
I don't know why.
I honestly don't know how it got there because my phone now and my computers and everything.
Everything is against me now.
We had that conversation a couple of weeks ago and I had all that computer problems and I had all this and that and now it all has turned.
All of my devices are listening to me constantly and they are choosing to do things
uh to that are both teasing you're saying they're deliberately working at cross purposes with you yeah things are starting to like uh to glitch like the matrix glitch where i'm scrolling on my brand new phone and it goes and i'm like i saw that i saw that they get you that's how they get you and i was like i saw that but that is not a thing i could take you to the to the back to the store and say hey this thing is like on me they'd be like i don't know i've been looking at it for 20 minutes it hasn't done a thing and i'm like
It only happens once a day.
But so the phone, I'm sitting there on Easter and the phone goes, and all of a sudden somehow Reddit is open.
Not Reddit, Redfin.
The Reddit of real estate apps is open.
And I'm like, oh, I haven't been here in a long time.
And I'm looking around and...
you know two years ago it told me my house was worth x and then uh now it tells me it's worth 20 less than than x because of the change in interest rates or something yeah and i'm looking around and then i didn't do anything i didn't put in any parameters but it throws up a house
In fact, it's the opposite of the parameters I was currently engaged with.
Throws up a house two blocks from my mom's old house on Capitol Hill that is designed by a famous architect, a locally famous architect, and former city councilman, and there's a park named after him, a guy my dad knew, designed by him as a bachelor pad for himself,
In the early 60s.
Sounds like a James Coburn movie.
This is crazy.
It's one bedroom house.
And I had walked past it, obviously.
Can you give a sense of like, do you remember what the square footage was?
Oh, small.
Like 1,500 square feet.
1,500, 1,000.
Yeah, 1,500, something like that.
So the size of our house.
Yeah, that's right.
But ours is just under 1,000 square feet.
A big main space that's like living room, dining room, kitchen, and then one bedroom off to the side.
Oh, my God.
It's totally like, what am I thinking of the James Coburn movie?
Not Our Man Flint.
Oh, The President's Analyst.
Like that cool house he has in The President's Analyst.
Okay, well.
I have to go watch that.
Oh, get a fireman pole or something?
Like, oh my God, it'd be amazing.
So here's this place.
I've walked by it probably 60,000 times.
It was right between my mom's house and Capitol Hill.
I walked past it every day.
But...
Berlin, it's mid-century modern.
And so what it presented to the street was nothing.
It was just a sort of a blank white wall that had the house numbers on it.
I walked past it every day.
I went, huh, I wonder what that is.
But you know, until I moved down here to Normandy Park, I didn't have any interest in mid-century architecture.
I just thought, eh, it's always some dumb thing that's falling apart.
Is it because you just hadn't had that much, I mean, you like old stuff, but had you just not had as much like firsthand exposure to it, or it just was aesthetically not what interested you?
Well, no, it's kind of, people don't understand, I don't think, one of the other amazing things about Generation X.
that i'm here to tell you all about where we love telling you about us if you if you'd like to invest in my generation x futures huh is that we grew up uh you and i specifically grew up in in one way what was the wreckage of the united states we just didn't know it yet in the sense that all the victorian houses were had all gone to shit
all of the bungalows all of the like Art Nouveau bungalows had all gone to but also we were old enough just I'm sorry we were just young enough what am I trying to say just young enough that all of the mid-century stuff of the 50s and 60s that was all futuristic and cool and modern old people it had also gone to
Yeah.
All those houses were leaky.
All that Danish modern furniture was in the thrift stores.
Well, I mean, don't you remember hearing like the falling water is just a nightmare to maintain?
Yeah, just falling apart.
That's an extreme example, but like there's a lot of construction issues before you even get into like brutalist concrete stuff.
There's a lot of stuff that you get into with construction issues and 60s stuff because a lot of it came up really fast.
well and all of that sputnik looking stuff and all of that google architecture google architecture it all looked old to us because it was it was already 30 years old and nobody had really understood how to take care of it i mean if you think about the c the seattle center all those all those uh motels and and uh and like uh all that stuff it just looked like crap and
if you think about the architecture of our childhood split level houses and brown shag carpeting and that all looked like crap too sunken living rooms i mean just things that bear i always think of things like in the early late 80s early 90s you remember how like every retail place got like an awning and a like a yes
Yes, an awning.
Suddenly everything got an awning and like every like racks and Wendy's got a solarium, like a little like a sunroom and like all those.
Why do I say that?
Because it just was at the time, even in mid to late 80s, it was already really dated looking.
But also when they like you got into things were like, oh, we started building this mall and stopped.
or there's no occupancy, but we got the awnings up, and those awnings look like shit in about a year.
They're moldy and weird.
Yeah, they're flapping like a Star Spangled Banner flag, right?
And so it's like, not only is this look incredibly dated, but it's like in our neighborhood where
There's a certain kind of restaurant in our neighborhood that famously, there are restaurants that will, I have many photos of people putting up a banner that says grand opening that's covered with mildew.
It's been up for years.
And you're like, it doesn't look very grand or open.
Going out of business sale.
But you know what I mean?
Like you live with the consequences of design decisions from before your time.
And it's, you know, like grandparents love the kids and the kids love the grandparents.
Things skip generations.
It's like the people who appreciated the pristine MCM that you see in a CB2 catalog or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like one of those like expensive or like, oh God, the hilariously named design within reach.
Yeah.
That stuff is really costly.
$9,000.
Yeah.
For a recreation.
Oh, this is a horse.
This, this is a full size horse, like, you know, made out of obsidian or like, this is this coffee table that has a googly boomerang pattern.
You know, like we bought a loose site coffee table for,
from one of those places.
And it was so costly.
What I'm saying is it skips a generation in terms of appreciation, too.
If all you know of Victorians is what stuff on an oak and fell looked like in 1963...
Well, they had seen, those Victorians had been around for, what, 80, 100 years?
And had seen every shitty, dumb upgrade cut into multiple units.
Not bad, but it's good.
It's good that three-story houses got made into three units.
That's part of what made San Francisco good and cheap for a long time.
But the inside was all, like, fucking peeled linoleum and weird, you know, you get the, when your paint chips off,
We've got like so many, I'll send you a picture, a rainbow of paints where it gets chipped in our bathroom.
There's somewhere in there, there's always the most horrifying aqua paint that everybody used for everything.
Avocado home furnishings.
There's even a bit on Mitchell and Webb about one of those real estate reality shows where the person's supposed to say, I couldn't possibly live with this.
And like, don't you see all the avocado?
You're supposed to say, I couldn't possibly live with this.
But now, in retrospect, if you've got a really fancy one that was like a deep freeze, like blah-da-da-blah, you know what I'm saying?
All that stuff, the people you remember, if you had a house in the 60s that was a pain to keep up, you're not going to want a boomerang coffee table.
You're going to want something that's easy to clean and isn't costly.
You know what I mean?
Well, but, you know, we were – if you think about it,
Nobody that wasn't there can imagine this, and I think a lot of us have forgotten.
In 1965, they tore down Penn Station.
Do not get me started on this.
Tell me what you're going to put there.
It's like we talked about with taking down, remember we talked about that in San Francisco and the plan for taking down the mall in town with absolutely no, the mall downtown, which is called Westfield Center, bankruptcy, long story, four story Nordstrom is gone.
Hundreds of thousands of feet of available space.
And the mayor's plan was to tear it down and build something else.
And I was like, okay.
Madison Square Garden.
I get, right.
Yeah.
And you know, the YMCA I stayed at near there is gone now.
I think it's taken over by Billy Joel's helicopter pad.
You know, he makes two to three million dollars for every one of those shows he does.
No, I do know that.
I looked it up.
He flies home.
That's what I was saying.
I said to Madeline, you know, that man gets on a helicopter at his house in Long Island, flies to Madison Square Garden and then flies home.
And I said, I'll bet he makes.
I remember hearing one time the journey made forty thousand dollars per show in the early 80s, which always blew my mind at the time when the concert tickets were eight dollars.
But I said to Madeline, you know, he gets on a helicopter in Long Island.
He flies to Madison Square Garden.
He does a really good show.
And then he flies home.
I said, I bet he makes a million dollars from that.
He makes two to three million dollars out the door every time he does that.
I saw him at Madison Square Garden.
And as I was walking, as I was, you know, walking past the T-shirt sales on my way out,
uh the guy i was with who kind of was he knew the he knew he didn't know billy joel but he knew the operations of the of the whole uh industry concert industry okay he said was it matt was it matt no it wasn't matt but we were walking we're in madison square gardens still walking towards the door and he said you know billy joel is home by now
He got home faster than you.
He said he was on that helicopter while we were still trying to get out.
And then it's the helicopter.
The helicopter ride to Long Island is short enough that I know for a fact he's landing in his yard right now.
We're not.
But if you think about if you think about the fact that that that.
historic preservation didn't exist, but also every college shithouse I lived in had a kidney-shaped coffee table and some sort of Danish chair where the straps that held the seat cushions had half of them had snapped.
Oh, my God, yes.
I know what you're talking about.
Is it Vanderoe?
But that one kind of chair that's like the metal in the straps.
And when you see it in a museum, it's beautiful.
But you don't want to see the knockoff of that from 71.
When you were in junior year of college and you had to move off campus, you moved into a house that already had all that furniture, which is now.
There's been so many bongs on that coffee table.
Yeah.
And it's just like, no, that was the shit that we threw away.
So I had no interest in mid-century modern because it just looked like shit to me.
It reminded me of shit.
Just as my mom had no interest in Victoriana because she grew up in a house that had that had a little crocheted doilies on the back of all the chairs.
And the trim was so elaborate that you needed basically a whole set of little modesty doilies on the feet of furniture because it was too erotic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's so weird.
So I'm sitting here on Easter.
My daughter called me up in the morning, and she's like, hey, you got to get over here.
We're having Easter.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm on my way.
And she said, and wear pink.
Wear pink.
And I was like, you're talking about half my wardrobe is pink, so that's not going to be a problem.
And so I'm sitting there on the couch, I'm in my pink Easter outfit and my phone, because I'm looking at my phone because she said it's Easter and I want you to make cheesy biscuits.
I said, cheesy biscuits are for Christmas morning only.
And she said, but we made it and took it to school.
See, she's getting a confusing signal.
I don't think it's your fault, but it is your problem.
It is my problem because now cheesy biscuits are out of the pan, right?
Cheesy biscuits are running all over the- But Ari doesn't have a good pan for the cheese.
What are you going to do?
There you go.
It's in a nutshell, right?
So I'm just like, you know what?
Daddy's gonna look at his phone for a minute.
How about that?
How about if we give daddy five minutes to just stare at his dumb phone and my phone goes and throws up this house two blocks from my mom's house.
Mid-century perfection designed by Peter Steinbrook, the great Seattle, uh, councilman and historic preservationist as his Capitol Hill, one bedroom hipster pad.
and it is now for sale for one million dollars that's a really good deal it's an it's and i and i mean i know it sounds crazy a lot of money it is a lot of money but for what it is where it is it's insane there's it's gotta it's gotta have ghosts so well what's going to happen they priced it under i'm sure under because what it is is it's the perfect gay bachelor pad
Right on Capitol Hill.
Right in the center of it.
And some extremely rich gay man, the same age as me, with the same number of pink shirts in his wardrobe as I have in mine.
Or with a husband who makes as much money as his husband does.
There you go.
And all they really need is a cool, cool place to crash.
Double income, no straights, they call it DINs.
They're urbanists, too, so they're eating dinner out every night.
They don't need a big fancy kitchen.
The only parties they're hosting are intimate.
Yeah.
Peter Steinbrook for mayor parties.
That's right.
Peter Jr.
Peter Jr.
I'm going to get pictures of Peter Steinbrook now.
He's not old.
I thought he was going to be old as hell.
Well, no, that's young Peter Steinbrook.
Old Peter Steinbrook.
Oh, I see old Peter Steinbrook, they called him.
Yeah, old Peter Steinbrook original.
Father, pair.
Yeah.
And so I'm looking at this, well, what happens to me is I just get crushed by a giant, like Indiana Jones boulder of what ifs.
An Indiana Jones boulder, not of what if my life had taken a turn 20 years ago.
Unbidden, John.
This was not on your mind at the time.
You were thinking about being a pink-suited man with all the frills upon it Easter morning.
This thing pops up on your phone.
I'm just like, oh my God, I got to make cheesy biscuits again is what I was thinking.
Let me just look at my phone for a minute and then I'll make cheesy biscuits.
I'm just going to look at my phone for five minutes and then cheesy biscuits.
Cause you know, I'm trying to have good, I'm trying to have good digital hygiene and I'm trying to say to my daughter, look there, it is okay to look at your phone.
If you just mark out the space, here's five minutes.
Daddy doesn't want to be interrupted.
I'm going to be in a public place.
I'm going to be on the couch, not hiding in the bathroom.
And I'm just gonna sit and look at my phone in a meditative way, and then I'm gonna put it down.
I'm not this guy that's gonna be looking at his phone all day.
No, that's not who you are.
I just need a little five minutes.
And then here's this thing.
And I look at the thing.
Now, I can't afford it, right?
If I were to sell my house, I'm not gonna just waltz in and outbid dual income, no kids, like sexy people.
But I'm looking at it.
You're not gonna just go in there and fight with the sexy dinks.
No, because there are going to be sexy people.
That sounds very racist.
At this open house, basically you could go to this open house and get invited into a relationship, I'm sure.
If you look like me and you were dressed well and you're just like, hey, this relationship already has a daddy, but what about a second one?
An ad hoc throuple, yeah.
Yeah, what about second sexy dad?
There are so many things you could.
I bet there are people at these open houses that are just like, this is a cruising spot or maybe they're putting deals together.
I don't know.
Like, hey, it's good.
There's nothing.
John, these are not competing ideas.
It's like saying, well, I do want to live in New York because, you know, the publishing industry, the banking industry, the good culture or New Jersey.
And you're like, well, do I need to pick?
Because I think I get all of them if I live in.
I want all of those.
Right.
And if you're in there and you're like, okay, we're now in a relationship, but also have I got an opportunity for you to get into crypto?
Like it could all be happening.
I met a crypto person this morning.
Yeah.
They're out there.
I would like to know more.
Oh, I...
I had a nice 10 minute, just briefly had a nice, uh, by the way, it's Victor Steinbrook is the one.
And he worked on the space needle.
He's the, he's the dad.
He worked on the space needle.
Um, he, um, so I, I, I'm not gonna say her name, but mainly it was just, it was a baby, like a little baby, like a kid walking around and saw me on the scooter.
And so I stopped and I was like, hi, we both have cool rides and we're chatting.
And we had a nice like 15 minute talk about, about life.
Uh-huh.
And children.
And veered into crypto at one point.
She is at a company that does crypto things, and she is a tech recruiter for them.
So I was like, what kind of jobs are you most hiring for?
Like full stack or close to the metal?
Like, it's you guys that have all the NVIDIA cards.
Ha, ha, ha.
And like, anyway, yeah.
Did she have an NFT8?
By any chance?
Well, it's funny you should say that.
Because I said, I think one of the problems is that people think crypto and blockchain are the same thing, which is kind of a bummer.
And especially the people who say that are crypto, forgive my saying, crypto douchebags.
Oh!
And she's like, I know.
And I said, you know, and I think one of the failings of the messaging on crypto from the beginning was that this is a substitute for money.
Which it's not, unless it's like overstock or something.
There's not places that will just take crypto, really.
And I said, that was never really, I don't think what it was intended for, but that's how it was pitched.
And people were like, this isn't like money.
And I said, I said, look at you.
It's not like they pay you in NFTs, right?
And we both had a good laugh.
So she might have been paid in NFTs.
She might have a yacht ape.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yachty.
Anyway, well, so I'm looking at this and, and I'm thinking to myself all of a sudden, like, it's not just like this place resolves all my problems.
but it kind of is.
Like, I'm just, I'm really, I'm coming to that place.
Beware of skeleton keys in life because like sometimes you see something, you know what I mean?
No, no, I'm not criticizing.
I'm saying it's just sometimes like your brain knows there's no way this is a quote perfect solution because I know that my brain is going to reshape what I regard as the problem that's being addressed in direct proportion to what the answer I've discovered is.
Which is how you end up going, I don't like where this place is.
And then you end up living under somebody with Doc Martens who listens to techno all the time.
Yes.
And like you never weighed what you don't appreciate you have right now until it's gone.
You don't know how bad it could be in Trieste.
You don't know what you got until it's gone, I'm saying, you know?
But the other day I was walking home.
I went to the hardware store because I needed some caulk because I had caulk, but it was clear.
It wasn't until I opened the caulk and started and was prepared to start caulking that I realized it was clear caulk and I needed white caulk.
So I got, I decided I wasn't going to drive.
All I needed was one thing, a caulk.
So I was going to walk to the hardware store, but I live in the suburbs.
It's not like I'm going down to the hardware store.
I'm going to see a bunch of people.
I know it's like,
I'm going to the hardware store.
I'm not going to see another living soul except cars driving by.
I got there.
I had a conversation with the guy at the hardware store, but it's not like it was where it all smells like keys and oil and people with aprons on.
It's just a bunch of people sitting at a computer, and I walk up and go, is the caulk in aisle five or six?
And he's like, six.
I got the caulk.
I came back, and as I was walking home,
and I've never had this, this never happened before.
I said, if an airplane fell out of the sky onto my house right at this moment,
I live close enough to the airport that this is always a possibility.
Boeings, man.
Just saying.
What if an airplane?
Sorry, no disrespect to Boeing.
No disrespect.
I didn't mention the brand.
They have a wonderful, you know, if we took everything up to about 10 years ago, it's one of the great American companies.
One of the great American companies.
Once upon a time.
This is the thing.
I'm not, I am not for Truman dropping the bomb.
I didn't say I was against it.
I'm just not for it.
I do not, I do not want to.
That's a very bold, that's a bold, brave stance, John Roderick.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
But if an airplane, here I'm coming, I'm walking home, I could see the path of the airplane from here.
I could watch it fall.
Could it be a Mustang, like a P-45 Mustang?
Holy shit.
Holy shit, that airplane's falling out of the sky.
Hopefully it doesn't hit my house.
If it landed right on my house.
Or it is like a Howard Hughes situation.
Maybe it's a test pilot, right?
On some kind of like... And it's covered with razzle-dazzle camouflage, you know, like an automobile.
Maybe it's Sky King.
Maybe Sky King comes back from... It could be Sky King is back or D.B.
Cooper.
They never found that guy.
Maybe it's Sky King's buddy, his number one buddy, who was like, I miss Sky King.
Yeah.
And you know what?
That's how I want to go out too.
I think he's the Sky Prince-ling.
It's Sky Prince-ling.
Right.
Sky Prince of Wales.
So Sky Prince of Wales crashes an airplane.
It lands right on my house, and everything burns.
Yeah.
I'm so sorry, John.
That must have been hard for you to deal with, thinking about that for no reason.
I'm walking with this thing of caulk in my hand, and I'm like, the first thing I would have to establish to everyone is I wasn't in the house.
I wasn't in the house.
So God sent me to the hardware store because God had a plan.
God was behind Sky King.
Sent you to the hardware store to get caulk for your house.
And now I'm standing here.
All I have left in the world is this thing of caulk and this paddle ball game.
Yeah, my favorite chair.
And would I feel...
bad at all of the things i had lost neutral because i am just uh i'm just a leaf in the wind i'm just a sea turtle eaten moss or what i feel good relieved at having almost every problem that i have solved enthused enthused for the next part of this adventure
Because where you go like you're like totally Buddhist about it and you just go like come see comes up.
This happens now.
What's next?
I'm now the mayor of a small town in Japan solving the history of sky sky princeling Who who hails your own murder?
It's like I gotta solve my own murder, but there's a clue that's only available in Okinawa Oh, and it's a guy in a cave who still thinks the war's going on.
He's 90 years old.
He's intubated
He was only two years old at the time, but he was still fighting the war.
Well, but it's like that episode of Gilling a Silent.
Maybe he had a kid.
And it turns out the caulk plays a role that I don't understand yet.
The white caulk, not the clear caulk.
The clear caulk was destroyed in the fire because I left it on the kitchen counter.
So that was the day before.
It's the universe trying to tell you something.
That as I was walking home, I said, if a plane crashed into my house at this moment and everything was destroyed, every little note from high school that I kept, every photograph, all of my guitars.
All those backstage passes, John.
All those backstage passes that now are basically like a tree.
I mean, they look like a tree hanging from a coat rack.
Everything.
All of my everything.
All the stuff that I inherited from my dad.
All the little ivory carved polar bears fucking that I have lying around here.
You're Braille Playboys.
Oh, my God.
It's just occurring to you.
Little by little, you're remembering.
Oh, and this and that.
And that jacket I like that fit really well in the arms.
Oh, but my Braille Playboys also.
All of the Filson bags.
If it all burned.
Now, this is...
And the thing is, I thought about this at the time.
Is this because in the United States, if you have halfway decent homeowners insurance, what this actually will be is everything burns and somebody hands you a check.
You basically are issued a cashier's check for a new life.
But I considered that and I said, what if the plane crashed into your house and you got nothing?
And I still was like, I'm fairly agnostic on that.
Doesn't change the fact that it's still a new adventure.
You got to get your mind right.
Got to get your mind right.
Now I really have to solve my own murder because I didn't get a big check.
Have to, John.
What are you going to do?
Move into where Howard Hughes crashed his Mustang into your house?
What are you going to do?
No, you can't.
I'm not going to rebuild.
Plus, the whole ravine was full of av gas that burned for two days.
There's nothing left.
Oh, my gosh.
That's a load-bearing plane now.
Yeah, the whole thing.
The whole thing.
It was a Superfund site, and it wasn't my fault.
Nobody's going to sue me for this.
This is just like, hey, I just fell out of the sky.
This is Sky King Jr.,
this is a buddhist gift is what it is john and then yeah and then the phone is like oh how about how about victor steinbrook's house two blocks from your mom's old house which is just just so we say is a really cool neighborhood your mom had a very cool house in a very cool neighborhood it's a cool neighborhood although times have changed right capitol hill is no longer the gays are mean now
well everybody's mean now in the world but you know it's when you live a place for long enough it's the old um you don't live forever problem and part of that is there are new people now younger people and they think of it as their neighborhood as i once thought of it as mine sure and when i walk down the street now
It's not like the old days where I get stopped three times every block because somebody wants to talk to me about something.
Now I walk down the street and it's like, out of the way, old man.
We're coming through.
We just built a float.
You're going to a parade.
And the float has to go down the sidewalks.
Because that's how our float is designed.
And their precious adopted sons, Tyson and Tyler.
And so I'm like, oh, well.
No, but Capitol Hill is the most wonderful neighborhood in Seattle.
But also with wonderful comes all of these other crimes against humanity.
And living in this Peter Steinbrook house, I would immediately be confronted.
I would walk out the door day one like, look at me.
and i would go right to the cafe that i always went to except nobody that works there anymore is my ex-girlfriend and i would sit alone at a table waiting for some old person like me to walk by and go hey john what are you doing up here man and i'd be like hey you want to sit and have a coffee rain a lot last night we could use it
Yeah, no, I got to get going, bro.
I got to, you know, I'm a renter.
It's Jason Finn.
It's Jason Finn.
And I'd be like, okay, well, I'll see you soon.
You know, I'll see you around.
Yeah.
Okay, man.
I went two days before that.
Take a sleazy.
Knock on.
Check you later.
I went to a thing downtown, which was an art gallery show of portraits of all of the Seattle music scene people.
And unlike most of the time,
Where it's portraits of all of the white Belltown Seattle music people.
This was a show of all of the Seattle music people.
And, you know, there's been a huge hip hop scene here the entire time that never gets talked about.
All I know is the Baby Got Back guy.
That's the only one I know.
Yeah, sure.
Mix.
And Mix's manager was there.
And he and I have been close for a long time.
Yeah, yeah.
He sounds so cool.
He sounds like such a nice guy.
and mix is great and mixes like getting the heat he was talking about like you know what man i think i think that whole thing where you sell your whole catalog to uh to bmg for 80 million dollars um we're thinking about maybe maybe doing something like that not better now than next year well that's it that's true i mean like so you can while you can at this point
But it was for sure one of those things where I'm walking around and there are a lot of s 58 to 62 year olds in there.
A lot of them old like hip hop heads that I've known all this time too.
And they narrow that story never gets talked about when the grunge story is getting talked about and we all laugh about it.
It's like, well, is this a bell town thing or a central district thing?
Because in a bell town thing, you're gonna see a lot of pictures of Kurt Cobain.
But in a central district thing, you're going to see all these guys.
But he's not from there, right?
He's from... What's the place he's from?
Kurt Cobain?
What's the place he's from?
Isn't he from... Aberdeen.
He's from Aberdeen.
Okay.
All right.
Anyway.
Yeah.
So the Victor Steinbrook house is not going to solve all my problems.
But if my house got hit by a plane, if my plane got hit by a house...
And everything was gone.
And I had to move into a one bedroom, mid-century modern house.
I don't think I'm insured for this.
And it could be in Vienna.
It could be in Japan.
It could be anywhere.
And so then I'm in my Easter pinks.
That's what makes a start new, John.
It's a new start.
It's a new start.
And I'm in my Easter pinks.
And my daughter comes over and she goes, your five minutes is up.
Get on the cheese sauce.
And I'm sitting there stirring the cheese sauce with a wooden spoon thinking, what?
Rudefully staring into the middle distance as you stir cheese again.
I'm stirring the cheese.
I'm looking out the window, stirring the cheese.
And I'm going, what next?
What now, brown cow?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, because a plane didn't hit my house, and I have to go back there and sort through these fucking bins of long winter t-shirts.
Well, John, if I could say you've got to still deal with the clear caulk and then apply the white caulk, and it might even work.
And maybe you didn't cut it off fast enough, and now you've got weird little caulk boogers like we have to live with.
So here's the thing.
I was like, there's two areas that need to get caulked.
The area that I'm going to see all the time and the area that I'm not.
So I'm going to start with the area I'm not.
So I work out all the kinks.
That's so smart.
I'm the same way with stuff.
I totally agree.
It's like when they say, like, you know, if you're going to use goo off or, you know, use this on a, do it on a test area.
Yeah, do a test area.
Yeah.
Well, so what I did was I laid down a perfect bead
all the way along the area that I am never going to see.
A perfect bead.
And then I went over it with a wet fingertip, and you couldn't have put it in a design within reach catalog.
You're not going to get that from a TaskRabbit.
Boom.
Boom.
And then I was like, knowing what I know now,
Now I'm gonna do the caulk around the, uh, around the area where I'm gonna see it all the time.
And then the wheels went completely off my caulk game and I did it and I redid it and I redid it and every new redo, it was worse than the last.
And finally I'm sitting in the tub and I'm, and I'm saying to myself under my breath,
leave it leave it it's done just leave it just leave it and as i'm saying that to myself i'm with it i'm with it with my finger and i'm like leave it leave it and i'm saying it out loud you're not getting through to yourself i'm not getting through to myself and i and i'm with it i'm with it and i'm now i'm getting louder leave it will you leave it will you just leave it and it's like i'm talking to a robot that doesn't have ears i'm just like doing with it and then i shout
fucking leave it you goddamn fucking leave it and i realized i had opened the window in order to air out the bathroom as i was doing it and two passers-by who are pushing a baby stroller with with three kids in it and and two dogs i they're walking by my house and they i can't believe tyler and tyson had to hear that
They hear somebody raging at somebody who's like, there's something upsetting about hearing that kind of talk.
There's something about hearing that talk loud, but there's something very unnerving about hearing that talk on loud.
And clearly the person is not in control of their faculties.
It's very because because anyone walking by would think that I was yelling that at some very abused person.
And they're gonna hear that and they're gonna think there is an extremely abusive relationship happening in that house.
Do I call the police?
Do I go knock on the door to see if the person is okay?
And the person is me in my own bathtub covered with cock.
Trying to get what should have been.
The area you won't see is fine.
Yeah, the area that I won't see is not fine.
And the area you will see is getting worse.
It's beautiful.
It's getting worse with everything you do to try to ameliorate the problem.
Everything.
And I've spent 20 minutes trying to tell myself to go do something else.
Have a cup of coffee.
Go into the other room.
Sort t-shirts.
Find your dad's polar bear fucking statues or whatever.
If you're going to keep doing this, take a break because you can always come back to it, right?
You can always.
Well, no, because cock's going to dry, Merlin.
And then you're fucked.
Cock is going to dry.
I'm screaming at myself.
He said, leave it.
Leave it until I got out of the bathtub.
That's what your mom used to say to Gibson, if memory serves.
Leave it.
Leave it.
I got out of the bathtub because I was scared of myself.
I was in an abusive relationship with myself.
Did you not know who you'd become?
I don't even want this house.
Burn it to the ground.
Where's Howard Hughes?
I'm sitting here with this thing a cock and I'm like... I already had a plan.
I already planned to become Sheriff of Okinawa.
I was going to take this unopened thing a cock with me as my last memory of my house.
It'd be your totem.
Yeah, that's right.
The only thing that survived is the thing I had in my hand.
That's right.
I was going to draw a smiley face on it like a beach ball, and I was going to talk to it all the time.
I was going to tell it to stop.
When you are in a war and you get shot with a bullet, my dad had a bullet.
No, he did not.
Sorry, not a bullet, a slug, whatever.
A shrapnel or something?
Well, he had a little bent up end of a bullet, I think it's called a slug.
That was in him.
Well, that had like hit something near him and he saved it.
I mean, I think a lot of guys have is, yeah.
I mean, that's, that's your call.
Yeah.
That's you.
That's you.
Merlin, can we, can you hold it right there for just one second?
Yeah, of course.
I'll be, I'll be right back.
Yeah.
I have to go.
Okay.
Hang on a second.
Okay.
John's stepping away from the mic for a minute.
I don't know how long this will be.
Um, I'll use this as an opportunity to say something I wrote down a little while ago.
Um,
Which is, I read this in several places.
Hi, everybody.
Thanks for listening to the program.
And thank you if you can support it at, I think, on Patreon.
So thank you very much.
All I wanted to say was this.
Okay, I've read several things about this, and I think this is very interesting.
I shared this with my wife, and she was uncharacteristically fairly interested in what I had to say about this.
So we were talking, we're in the automobile driving around and we were talking about like changes, like lots of things that have like happened recently.
And one of the things is, oh my gosh, so many people getting laid off from things.
So many companies like direct-to-consumer companies, all these different companies, like what happened, the layoffs and layoffs and layoffs.
And I was able to share a fact that I had learned that's germane to something that John said a little bit ago.
So even setting aside those terrible, what are they called?
Those companies that buy a publishing company and then gut it.
The big problem, the big reality that only became a problem when it became a problem, the big reality is interest rates.
Money is no longer free.
And since the financial crisis...
Supposably, interest rates have been so low that for practical purposes, it was free money, which meant you could, in addition to your VC funding, in addition to whatever, you could keep doing like Amazon did for 20 years, just keep dumping money into something because it didn't cost that much to borrow it.
Now, here's the thing.
Now, it does cost money.
It does cost money to pay interest on things.
That's very costly now.
And so there's less growth.
Less growth also means stuff like we just can't have all these people on payroll.
The interest rates are too high because money is no longer free.
I used that opportunity to say a fact that I have read about.
Hello.
I was saying to my lady friend how a lot of stuff you're like, oh my gosh, why so many layoffs?
Why so many whatevers?
And I have read in numerous places that it's
Very largely about interest rates, which is realistic.
The interest rates have become realistic again.
And so you can, I'm sorry, the listeners have already heard this, but so you can't just like borrow willy nilly, strap that onto your VC money and like deliver boxes of fennel to people for years.
There you go.
Right.
That those kinds of things, forgive my saying as a non-economist, the kind of thing that I consider a false economy.
Like so much of the U.S.
was for so long a false economy predicated on principles that were not sustainable.
But my mom in the 1980s was paying what?
Between 14 and 17 percent.
The rate on houses when my mom was a real estate agent in Florida.
She'd been a real estate in Ohio.
But when she was, I remember two things from the early 80s when my mom was selling.
One of them was the gas went up to like $1.45 a gallon for unleaded.
Yes.
And I remember that interest rates, which I still don't, I didn't really understand like practically, but I remember hearing the interest rates had just hit an unprecedented 15% for what, like a 30 year mortgage on a house, like a fixed rate 15, which is like, that's a lot of money.
You get your 20%, you put down all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
So that's I don't I'm not saying that apply.
I'm not trying to make that a skeleton key for understanding the world.
But in addition, it is.
Well, there's so much shitty investment that's a false economy.
But that's a different flavor of that, which is like if we can just keep getting money, if we can grow faster than our competitors, put them out of business and then become the market leader in this, we just need to stick it out.
I mean, when we got- It's the Uber model, right?
Where they lost money for eight years just trying to destroy everybody else?
Amazon lost money for years.
Yeah, like when we got our A round at the company I worked at, it was $30,000, sorry, $30 million.
And like a big question the VCs kept asking was like, well-
When are you going to spend that so we can get the next round?
Right.
Do you have a path to make money was never the question.
It was spend this money.
No, and that's why you see things like in various companies, including Boeing.
I've watched a couple documentaries about Boeing recently.
I think it was a front line about it.
There's been a whole bunch of stuff.
It's so sad.
It's so sad, but a big part of it was we bring this guy in from the other company because he's not...
going he's where he'd been in what spirit like what he'd been at the other airline that they quote-unquote merged and he was a super cost cutter and boeing i think at least supposedly was a place where anybody on the shop floor like the things you hear about japan in the 80s anybody could pipe up and go well first of all like here's something that we could improve but saliently could like do the equivalent of stopping the line to go like no and they were all engineers too that's not like they were just a bunch of people that have been hired for
They weren't just a bunch of minis who were fretting.
These were people who were in a position to say, like, I know how this thing stays together, gets in the air and lands safely.
And even though this is not a showstopper, but first, even though this is not a showstopper, like this is not up to muster.
for what we do you can't spackle this problem and then but like there's that kind of stuff that comes along so the cost-cutting guy everybody's like if you're the guy who goes like hey guess what i got a way to spend 20 less on everything you're like whoa that's a really big deal i'm just speculating here but it's just all you have to do is have these parts uh made in romania
I mean, you forget to bolt them on?
Really?
That seems like something QAQC would catch.
Yeah, you would think.
But, you know, these are the end times.
It breaks my heart.
I love Bowling.
I love Bowling.
They're only the most recent end times.
You know what I mean?
There's been so many end times.
The latest end times.
The latest end times is where we're at.
And, you know, that's one of the things.
I can't buy the Victor Steinbrook house because...
When I bought this house, I got two and a half percent interest is what I'm paying on this.
Really?
Yeah.
That's a lot less than 15, John, and I went to a public college.
The lowest interest rates in history, a ludicrously low interest rate that just happened to be where we had settled the day I bought this house.
Two weeks later, it was like, wait a minute, we can't, we literally cannot give money away.
And that is a fixed rate?
Is that what that is?
Yeah, a fixed rate 30-year mortgage, 2.5%.
I could basically... I don't know how... There are 700 ways I could monetize that.
I could get a... I don't know.
I think I could get a reverse... No, no, that would be a bad idea.
You could get a double reverse mortgage and you'd end up owning the house twice.
Yeah, I could lease it.
I don't know...
Actually, it turns out, John, Dean Warmer says you've been on a double secret mortgage for the last quarter.
The amount that I pay on a monthly basis.
The amount I'm paying on this house on a monthly basis, you could not rent a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle for the same amount of money.
Money is much more expensive for poor people.
It would be idiotic for me to do anything.
Because if I sold this, I'd be buying the Victor Steinbrook house.
First of all, I couldn't afford it.
But if I could, I'd be buying it at what are the interest rates now?
6%?
Something normal?
5%, 6%, something like that?
I mean, the thing is, like a lot of people used to say about spam.
Email which is like if this is not strictly true, but it's close enough for government work if spam cost anything to send It wouldn't be a problem.
It's the fact that it literally costs nothing So any non-zero increase in interest rates is going to have an impact On entire the entire economy.
I'm not saying here's what I'm saying though This is the problem.
It's like just because it used to be a false economy and now we don't have it anymore This is why an obsession with the past is not wholesome
things are, things are not going to be the way they used to be, especially if the way they used to be never made any sense.
Right.
See also black people in the fifties.
So, well, you know, if you think about all of the, I'm, I'm watching, or I started to watch another show recently because Shogun, I got into Shogun because you told me to, and now I'm, I'm one of these poor dopes that's waiting for a new episode.
I can't believe this is what I'm living.
I started it again for the third time and made Madeline watch it.
I'm watching it from the beginning for the third time.
When I started watching Game of Thrones, it already had nine seasons or whatever.
And I was like, I'll just watch them all.
And now I'm like, when's the new Shogun out?
And doesn't that look pathetic?
Can you believe you're saying that out loud as a grown man with caulk?
No, it's very dumb.
What is it, Tuesday?
Is it Tuesday?
I don't even know.
I don't know what day it is now.
I know.
It's TV.
It just shows up.
I agree with you.
What was the other show?
What was the other show?
Well, I'm watching a Holocaust show.
Which one?
Jews in Poland.
It's called The Lucky Ones.
They all get out.
But it's one of these shows.
I'm noticing.
You've got to watch Zone of Interest, dude.
You've got to watch Zone of Interest so hard.
Well, one of these things I'm noticing about streaming as, as streaming as the, as the number of show runners and the, and the world gets more diverse, right?
It used to be all shows were made by a team of 37 year old white dudes.
Just throwing money at Dick Wolf.
And now it's like, no, there are shows made by all kinds of people and that's wonderful.
But what it means is that the, that for me as a viewer,
I'm very conscious of like, oh, this show clearly is being made by a team of women.
Oh, I totally.
And Asian people.
Did you hear about what they did to get the subtitles and the dub right?
They had an entire team of writers.
This is discussed on the podcast.
And just apropos of nothing, one of the writers, the quote staff writer on the show is a woman called Emily Yoshida, who I know from being a regular guest on a podcast I love called Blank Check.
And so that's what I know her from.
But what I – she hosts the podcast about the show.
This is quick but I think worth – I won't – you should listen to the podcast to get this precisely right.
But they had writers and a lot of the writers were like Asian people and Asian American people.
But I guess whatever they wrote got passed through a much more strict like –
Japan regulatory board inside the writer's room who would look things over long story short by the time they were done with the script into they then gave it to a in English gave it to a different set of translators to generate the subtitles and the dub titles
So the subtitles and the dub match, which is unheard of in most even high profile production sales of John Siracusa, but it's authentic and it works and it matches the mouth and it's really, really good.
They cared about getting this right and bringing in women and Asian people was a huge part of not fucking this up.
Of not fucking it up.
But you're absolutely right.
I said this last night on Mastodon, but I said something like I realized I'm suddenly because I'm also obsessed with three body problem, like a lot of people.
And I was like, I'm suddenly realizing that there's those two shows, but a lot more.
I said, a lot of the shows that I love right now, TV shows are extremely well written and feature fully formed Asian women in leading roles.
And I would love for both of these things to continue.
Because it makes it so much more interesting.
In a world where there is an unlimited number of TV shows to watch, it's very funny.
Like this Holocaust show is at one level a new...
take on it just in the sense that we're now from POV.
Yeah.
We're just with this Jewish family and we're watching them kind of, you can understand that whole question of like, well, why didn't the Jews leave Poland in 1937 when things were getting the ones who could afford it did.
Well, but not necessarily.
This is a rich family.
But you had to leave.
You had to leave all of your stuff.
The Nazis, they would take all of your stuff if you left the country.
And this is even before Nazis.
This is just Poland, where they're like, what are you talking about, leave?
And then when they first get evicted from their apartment, it's like, well, we have to get all of this really nice fabric from our dress shop.
We have to put it on a cart and take it to our new apartment in the Jewish corner.
This is months before putting your diamonds into bits of bread and swallowing them.
This is back when, like, are you kidding me?
There's no way I could leave our silver set here.
But you're living through it.
But what's interesting about the writing is that if it was a show written by...
Uh, by dudes and, and I'm not saying there aren't dudes writing on this show.
Maybe there are, but what you would have is a bunch of people cowering in the rich apartment.
And then there would be several scenes of people running through the streets with guns.
There would be several scenes of airplanes flying low over the town and bombing it.
And then you would go back to people cowering in the closet.
Yeah.
But this show is all people cowering and no guns.
It's all people like there's a scene where two girls are trying to run across the border.
and the and there are russian soldiers all around looking for them and they're hiding they're hiding down by the stream and they're talking to each other and i'm watching it it's not just like inglorious bastards like hiding under the boards well no and i'm watching it as a as a person that's watched a lot of war movies going hey be quiet you're hiding be quiet why are you talking
What are you taught and they're talking about like I don't know they're chatting, right?
I mean, they're scared chatting But I'm like this is not problem is as long as you're alive.
You still have to live Well, you know, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
I'm not trying to be cute I'm just saying like well, you still have to keep your kid you have to have your kid eat and you still have to you know It's difficult to just go straight and not everybody out there is some survivalist that knows to sit in silence with face camouflage makeup on
because so it is it is i definitely like i got i got several episodes into the show and i was like oh and it's also one of those shows where 80 of it is filled filmed in such low light that i have to turn every light off in the house and hang blankets over the windows to even see the faces of the people that are on the show i'm like what is happening that late game of thrones problems
yeah where it's just like what is happening is why is there just smudges in orange 45 minutes of this show and i haven't been able to see a thing and all i hear is people talking while there are flashlights looking for them i can't even see torment giant's pain
Anyway, so I'm sitting here.
I'm sitting here basically in the ghost of my house.
It's the memory of my house that I would be recalling fondly after it burned, except it never burned.
I'm still in it.
I still have all this shit to deal with.
You're already grieving it in such a wholesome way, which totally makes sense, except it didn't happen.
Yeah, right.
I was already with the turtles.
I respect you for being able to handle.
You're handling it very well, considering even if it's something that didn't happen.
Yeah, I woke up this morning and I was I was in a state of not apoplexy, but definitely discomfited because I woke up and I'm like in the bathroom.
There is a fucking beat of cock I cannot own.
I cannot claim that beat of cock, but it's mine.
And now I'm sitting here in the living room and I've got a poster that I never hung.
that says hot dogs and it's got three hot dogs on it okay and then there's a little shadow box of my great grandfather's civil war medals from the grand army of the republic uh in ohio and uh i've got like a
And it all could have burned.
But just sitting there in the same state as the hot dog art, they're unfinished things.
You have not done it.
It would have gone up in the fire and then you wouldn't have with respect to your patriot hero first responder family member.
But like that all would have been gone.
You would never have had to hang it up, let alone apply the clock.
no and as i was walking be grieving like a wholesome person i might have thought like oh remember that hot dog poster lol yeah and then that and then it was tears and rain tears
That's exactly what I was thinking.
But just like Roy Batty.
Roy Batty has resigned at that point.
Yeah.
He's already had, what, a nail through his hand?
He's had a lot of problems.
Yeah, he's holding a dove at that point.
He's holding a dove.
Why am I not holding a dove?
Huh.
Where's my dove?
You gotta stop there.
That's plenty.
Jesus Christ, John.