Ep. 196: "The White Fresh Crüe"
Merlin: This episode of Roderick on the Line is sponsored by Cards Against Humanity.
Merlin: This month, they asked the DoubleClicks to help me say hi to John.
Merlin: Roderick on the Line It's Roderick on the Line
John: Hello.
John: Hi, John.
John: Hi, Merlin.
John: How's it going?
John: Good.
John: I had some audio problems there, and then I realized what I had done is I had muted the computer.
Merlin: Oh.
John: Has that ever happened to you?
No.
Merlin: I think it happens to all men.
John: Yeah, yeah.
John: I was watching The Young Ones last night on the YouTube, and then I muted it after a while.
Merlin: You just want to capture the visual components of Vivian's shtick.
John: Yeah, I muted it, I think, because it wasn't as great as I remembered it being in 1984.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah, that's a tall order.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: It's still pretty manic.
Merlin: Did you watch University Challenge?
Merlin: I did, yeah.
Merlin: Oh, boy.
Merlin: That's got its moments, though.
Merlin: You, Laurie.
Merlin: You, Laurie.
Merlin: You got Emma Thompson?
Merlin: Yeah, Stephen Fry.
Merlin: Oh, Emma Thompson.
Merlin: Isn't she wonderful?
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: You got Motorhead?
John: Yeah, Motorhead's there.
John: Yeah, all the greats.
Merlin: And isn't there an animated sock at one point?
John: I think so.
John: And there's a yeah, there are a few.
John: There's an animated sock.
John: The washing machines rebel.
John: But let's not talk about the young ones as much as I want to.
Merlin: But there's layers, you know?
Merlin: You got the A story, you got to do laundry, you got a B story, University Challenge, and you got a C story, which is Neil really needs to use the toilet.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: See?
Merlin: He keeps hitting his buzzer.
Merlin: That's good stuff.
Merlin: Oh, hey, man.
Merlin: I really have to go.
Merlin: There's an episode of that show.
Merlin: I don't think it's that one, but it might be.
Merlin: Is that the one?
Merlin: And there was this very brief, like, 30-second flash where they all play each other.
John: Yeah, there is that, and it's wonderful.
Merlin: You've only ever heard the guy who plays Neil.
Merlin: I mean, I'm not unfamiliar with stuff he's done outside of there.
Merlin: It's so weird to hear him not being Neil.
John: Well, yeah, and Rick does such a fantastic impression of Vivian that you're like, oh, wow, that was really good.
John: You know, then that show actually did introduce me to Motorhead.
John: I had no experience of Motorhead.
John: Until 1984 or whatever, when I saw Motorhead perform Ace of Spades on The Young Ones.
John: And I said, whatever the hell kind of music that is, I want it.
Merlin: Yeah, well, I would go so far as to say that with the exception of, I see, I don't remember very well.
Merlin: I want to say Madness.
Merlin: With the exception of maybe like Madness, I don't think I knew any of the bands.
Merlin: Like when the Damned were on there?
Yeah.
Merlin: When they were in their vampire-looking stage?
John: Yeah.
John: I knew about The Damned because I was a big fan of Captain Sensible.
Merlin: Oh.
Merlin: That's one of those names I just know from books.
John: Captain Sensible was a member of The Damned, and he had a single very early on an MTV single called Walt, W-O-T?
John: The chorus to which went,
John: I said, Captain.
John: They said, Captain.
John: I said, what?
John: I said, Captain.
John: I said, what?
John: I said, Captain.
John: I said, what?
John: And then some other lyrics.
Merlin: Oh, it's weird.
Merlin: It's almost a little bit hip-hop-y.
John: Well, yeah, it's it's sort of it's little rappy and he is walking around a sort of English in a hotel.
John: I always thought it was public housing, but maybe it is a hotel.
John: And and I really I really connected with that song.
John: when I was 13 or 14, and so then I learned about the damned backwards, which I guess is, you know, however you're going to do it.
Merlin: You know, African American and Puerto Rican people in particular from New York City get a lot of credit for hip-hop.
Merlin: I don't think we give enough credit to all the white people that helped hip-hop.
Merlin: Well, Prezen, Cullen, Ensign, Cusall.
Merlin: Prezen, Cullen, Ensign, Cusall.
Merlin: That was, I mean, that's the Rosetta Stone of rap, let's be honest.
Merlin: Yeah, it goes... You take your James Brown, you take your George Clinton, but let's be honest.
John: Sure, it goes all the way back to an Italian comedian.
Merlin: Yeah?
John: Yeah, who's making mouth sounds.
Merlin: But, you know, so sure, I mean, he's where, let's be honest, he basically created rap.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: But then, I mean, would rap have gotten big if it weren't for Captain Sensible, if it weren't for Falco?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: If it weren't for Blondie?
John: Right.
John: They really popularized the genre.
John: I think so.
John: Yeah.
John: Yeah, there should be like a baseball hall of fame, except for the white people that really helped rap.
Yeah.
John: my parade well sure and what about uh well now i'm trying to think did uh did uh 99 luft balloons oh that's such a rap song i see
John: You know, just the Germans.
John: Just the Germans and the Austrians alone that help popularize rap.
Merlin: That's a really good point.
Merlin: I don't think white Germanic peoples get the credit that they deserve.
Merlin: Well, for most things, they don't.
Merlin: Well, that's true.
Merlin: That's true.
Merlin: They're very well organized.
Merlin: Think about the trains.
Merlin: Oh, sure, I do.
Merlin: I think about the trains.
No.
Merlin: I know you do.
Merlin: Hip-hop would have gotten bigger if they'd spent more time doing German versions of songs.
Merlin: Like, you take something, you know, like a rapper's delight.
Merlin: I think if they'd done that in German as well, apparently they did that, like, very quickly, you know, in, like, a take.
John: Yeah.
John: Well, it shows.
John: Given the amount of technical and vocal dexterity that is required in contemporary rap, when you listen to
John: Sugarhill Gang, when you listen to the original formative rap tracks, it really does feel like people are improvising some words.
Merlin: And I think one of the dudes, I think his part was ghostwritten.
Merlin: I know this from probably a public radio show.
Merlin: What I know about Rapper's Delight.
John: Also something that really popularized rap, public radio.
Merlin: Well, to be honest with you, I don't think public radio gets the credit it deserves for making hip-hop as big as it is.
John: You've opened a whole line of inquiry.
Merlin: There needs to be a Netflix series about this.
Merlin: Enough with the weed documentaries.
Merlin: Enough with the documentaries about food.
Merlin: How about a six-part documentary on the history of white people and rap music?
Merlin: Like your crazy uncle?
Merlin: Here's my name, and I'm here to say, like at the wedding reception, you know?
Merlin: Sure, sure.
John: Well, you know, I actually have, this is awful, what I'm about to reveal.
John: But pre-Beastie Boys, I'm going to say 84, my friends and I had a rap group.
Hmm.
John: Wow.
John: That's early days.
John: And this is terrible, but we were called the White Fresh Crew.
John: The White Fresh Crew.
John: All right.
John: And we were Alaskans, right?
Merlin: It does everything it says on the tin, except for being fresh and being a crew.
Merlin: We were a crew.
Merlin: You could have just been the white.
John: And I'm pretty sure that we spelt crew like Motley Crew.
John: Oh, nice.
John: Right?
John: The White Fresh Crew.
John: And what we didn't have...
John: I'm not embarrassed about this, but it maybe is hard to imagine.
John: It's almost like an alternate universe door that we didn't step through.
John: But we would, on a Friday night, go into my basement and beatbox.
John: Oh, dear.
John: And rap to each other.
John: And it was just the three or four of us.
John: And we would...
John: we would march in a circle.
John: Right?
John: So we'd start walking.
John: And then we would take turns
John: improv-ing and and but we were but we're marching right because Because I don't know maybe the maybe the look or the rhythm of like four guys standing in a circle Yeah kind of moving their arms in a in a sort of like boom, you know like yo yo yo way Maybe that hadn't evolved more like a like a like a street corner and less like a circle jerk
Merlin: You should have some motion.
Merlin: Well, we were moving, right?
John: Sure, sure, you're marching.
John: We were marching in a circle, and we were kind of, we were doing the exact thing that we were wrapping into the center of the circle, right?
John: We weren't marching like wrapping into the backs of our heads, we were wrapping into the middle, but we were in motion.
Merlin: It's got that kind of breakdancing vibe where you've got people kind of shucking and jiving in a circle.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: There was a breakdancing element, but none of us would necessarily try to do any breaking.
John: But, you know, it was all rapping about, you know, we're the white fresh crew and we take no crap.
John: We dish it out and it don't come back type of run DMC style rhymes.
John: Yeah, I'll call it the one, two, three, four, five, six.
John: Yeah.
John: And we did this.
John: We did this for quite a while as a as a sort of, you know, Friday evening half rack of beer.
John: And we were doing it out of just pure enthusiasm for the style.
John: So we were fans of DMC and the Boogie Boys and this first generation of popularized rap music that had become popularized to mainstream.
Merlin: Right.
Right.
Merlin: well i mean let me ask you this i know you and i are famously fast and loose with dates and i'm not trying to pin you down can you just because it helps the story a little bit can you really mostly locate that in around 1984 because that would also be around the time of flash dance yeah which i mean so like the the rap that i knew was like i knew the apache song i knew apache you know i knew i knew the uh the rapper's delight i knew rapture i don't think i'd even heard nucleus yet jam on it was the one that made me fall in love with rap
Merlin: jam on it i love jam on it with a little funny voice wiki wiki wiki shut up you know but so but 1984 was a big year because that's you've got it was really crossing over into like there was videos there was there was famously there was break dancing in flash dance right remember she comes and she joins in with the kids she's got that cute hat and she comes out and dances i think 1984 was the year that rap broke what was the year of the movie breakin
John: Break-In came out in 1984.
John: Break-In Prime.
Merlin: And that's... 84.
John: Yeah, Break-In came out in 84.
John: They should have done a second one of those.
John: Well, they did.
Merlin: Break-In 2.
Merlin: Break-In 2, Electric Boogaloo.
Merlin: No, you said it.
Merlin: You said it.
Merlin: It's the canonical second movie joke.
Merlin: Break-In, yeah, 1984.
John: So Break-In came out, and I feel like... I mean, you know, again, we're talking about Anchorage.
John: But this was the this was the I think the exact moment when Alaska, the culture in Alaska caught up to the culture in America.
John: And now the two cultures were happening simultaneous with one or contemporaneously.
John: Right.
John: Up until that point.
John: All of our television was on a week delay because the Carson show would happen and then they would literally bundle the tapes up and fly them to Alaska and play them the following week.
John: Wow.
John: So but even worse than that, most cultural things, disco and so forth, like disco arrived in Anchorage in about 1980 or 79.
John: Right.
Merlin: It was it was it was like time delayed.
John: It was it was time delay.
John: All culture was sort of time delayed up there.
John: And in some ways it still is, because if you get off an airplane in Anchorage now, it feels like it's 1994.
Merlin: I can tell you almost, I think I can tell you almost everything I know about Alaska in like four bullets.
Merlin: It's one of those two last states we strapped on.
John: That's right.
Merlin: Okay.
Merlin: You got baked Alaska, which is a kind of fancy, fancy dessert.
Merlin: You've got Alaska is where Santa lives, which is not actually correct.
Merlin: And you've got that everything, the footnote at the bottom of every commercial.
Merlin: Prices, something like prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii.
John: Yeah, I don't think that even happens anymore.
John: I think that's from the 70s too.
Merlin: But that was always, I mean, every Sears commercial or whatever, it started to seem like, oh my gosh, what must be so difficult about that?
John: Well, yeah, you have to put it on a Sealand barge.
John: But in 1984, right, we finally all had MTV and it was happening.
John: Cable TV allowed things to happen in real time.
John: And so we were seeing what America was seeing now.
John: Oh, it's almost like time travel.
John: It's almost like you skipped two years.
John: Yeah, we did.
John: It was just like, everything got really fast all of a sudden.
John: And so we're, we were up there formerly still really enthralled with Boston's second record.
John: And then all of a sudden like rap music descended upon us and, and new wave and punk and all sort of arrived at once in 80, 81, 82.
Um,
John: So anyway, 84, yeah, we're up there.
John: And at that point, there wasn't any indication that there would be white rappers.
Yeah.
John: But also there wasn't, it was still sort of that mix of like, there wasn't any indication that there would ever be a white Michael Jackson either, but it didn't keep us all from being Michael Jackson all the time.
Merlin: At least from where I was, it was uniquely located, I mean, I learned in retrospect that there were many other, there's lots more to it than the obvious stuff, but the stuff we knew about was it was mostly black people in a very urban setting in New York, like maybe even identified as a borough of New York.
John: Well, see, that's in the 70s.
John: I think by the early 80s it had...
John: It had disseminated... It had disseminated pretty widely.
John: It was just that it didn't... I just mean in the public eye.
John: Yeah, you mean to white people.
Merlin: Well, yeah.
Merlin: I mean, I'm here looking at the Wikipedia page for 1984 and hip-hop, and you've got Run DMC, the first Run DMC record.
Merlin: You got Houdini.
Merlin: Right.
John: Also 1984, the first Run DMC record, which descended upon us like a thousand tons.
John: Right?
John: That...
John: We knew every word of that album, my group of friends and I. And what was crazy was when that Beastie Boys record came out, which was in 86, only a couple of years later,
John: It was that weird feeling of like, oh, wait a minute.
John: We thought of this.
John: Like we were doing this exact thing.
John: It could have been us.
John: It could have been us.
John: Yeah.
John: It could have come from Alaska instead of three Jewish kids from the Lower East Side.
John: It could have been the Alaska Beastie Boys.
John: And so there was a lot of, I felt a lot of sort of resentment to that first Beastie Boys record.
John: Because it was almost exactly what we would have done, right?
John: Whiny, drinky.
Merlin: You would have essentially helped to liven up and refresh the genre with a whole new spin and production like nobody had ever heard before.
John: Well, but...
John: Like, thematically, right, the Beastie Boys did not try to be anything that they weren't.
John: Oh, right, yeah.
John: They were just like, we are... Snot-nosed kids.
John: We're snot-nosed kids, and these songs are about masturbation and drinking beer and aspiring to be cool.
John: And that's, you know, that was kind of the... That was what was cool about them.
John: But that is also what would have been cool about the Whitefresh crew.
Merlin: Did it have a diuresis, John?
John: I don't know what you mean.
Merlin: Oh, I'm sorry.
Merlin: Did it have like an umlaut over the U?
Merlin: Oh, yes, it did.
Okay.
It did.
John: I mean, we didn't, we spent a lot more time drawing album covers for the Truly Awful Band, which was, which was our other music act.
John: Truly Awful Band and the White Fresh crew were pretty much the same members and the same, and the same era.
Yeah.
John: It was a lot easier to draw out.
Merlin: Oh, it's a Dukes of Stratosphere type situation.
John: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
John: We were the headcoates as well as being the headcoats.
John: Oh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
John: But alas, neither act... I mean, the Truly Awful Band actually played a couple of shows.
John: I think if we... Our rap...
John: I think maybe we tried to rap at a party once where our female component was there.
John: Female component of my gang.
John: Yeah.
John: And the girls in my gang were stronger than the boys, as is so often the case.
John: And they scorned us.
Yeah.
John: We started to rap in a circle at the party, and we got scorned pretty hard.
John: So we stopped doing that.
John: We stopped doing it publicly.
John: I think we kept doing it amongst ourselves for a while.
John: The other problem was I don't think we ever wrote our raps down because we understood it to be an extemporizing thing.
Merlin: It's an oral tradition.
John: That's right.
John: And so we never sat like Eminem in the bus, scrawling our rhymes in a notebook.
John: We just let them go into the air.
Merlin: It would be like writing a short story about touch football.
Merlin: Like, no, you would just go out and play touch football.
Merlin: You wouldn't write about it.
John: Yeah, precise mole.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So it was – if you scored a good little bon mot, as they say.
John: As they say in rap.
John: In rap.
John: You would just – everyone would acknowledge it with like, uh-huh.
John: Uh-huh.
John: But then it's not like you would try and grab it and put a leash on it and drag it back to earth.
Yeah.
Merlin: Also, you're very, at least in the times I've known, we're more prosaic.
Merlin: I'm not to say that you're not capable of short blasts, of spitting rhymes, as they say, but you're more of a long-form, polysyllabic kind of guy.
Merlin: Your flow works on a 5,000 word level.
John: This is what I mean about stepping through a door to another thing, right?
John: There are all those moments when you look back in life and go, if that had, because it absolutely resonated with me, it connected with me and with my friends.
John: If we had felt just that little bit more liberty to say, this is actually something that I really want to do.
John: You know, you step through and then maybe I would have become somebody that because when I several years later, I was living in a house where all of my roommates were rappers and sat around rapping all the time.
John: But by that point, I understood that I was not.
John: That was not I was not.
John: basically invited to sit down and have the on the couch and and rhyme with everybody like my job at that point was to roll joints and not appreciatively um but you know it could have been so much different oh you're okay i see huh maybe i could have been maybe i could have uh uh uh decided that that was where i was going to pour my creative the 80s of the golden age of we talked about this before the extra guy in the band
Merlin: You could have a Professor Griff, like who's there to give you some philosophical guidance.
Merlin: You got the dancing guy in Happy Mondays.
Merlin: Maybe John's the guy who rules the joints.
John: Yeah, but I would have wanted a more featured role, right?
John: Maybe you could roll him on stage.
John: See, I liked to be the guy at a party that rolled joints.
John: I really did.
John: It gave me an activity.
John: I could sit at the coffee table right in the center of the party, right?
John: You're right there.
John: You're right in the heart of it.
John: Yeah.
John: But you've got a job, and it's an important job.
John: You're somewhere between a sommelier and a magician.
John: Yeah, right.
John: I mean, people are going to, you don't have to do any, you don't have to talk, you don't have to do anything because you're rolling joints, but you can.
John: And if you start talking, everybody's going to like, it's like H&R Block, right?
John: You're going to, everybody wants to.
Merlin: You're only busy for a couple months a year?
John: Yeah, everybody wants to hear what you've got to say.
John: Oh, sure, Smith Barney.
John: That's rolling the, yeah, Mr. Barney.
John: Smith Barney was that kind of wine cooler, right?
John: Yep, yep, Smith Barney and James.
John: So I would just, I mean, but you're also, you're showing off your expertise, right?
John: To roll a joint is a thing that requires a certain amount of, not just finesse, but like to roll a good joint and I could roll a good joint.
John: Every one, you get done and just sort of, you know, you do that thing where you tip it up.
John: So now the joint is pointing up in the air so everyone can see it.
John: You're like, almost, it is a reveal, a magician's reveal.
Merlin: Voila.
John: Voila.
John: And then, oh, everyone starts salivating.
John: They can't wait to get their hands on this joint.
John: But maybe you don't hand it to somebody.
John: Maybe you put it down on the coffee table.
John: Maybe, you know, maybe you lay out three or four of them before you start handing them out.
John: So that everybody can see that they're uniform, that each one, you know, that they're a beautiful match set.
John: So that was the job that I really appointed.
John: I appointed myself that job.
John: And, of course, I never had the pot, right?
John: I didn't bring pot to the party.
John: I didn't have any money.
John: Oh, right.
John: So the person that had the pot...
John: could also convey to the room that they were a big enough deal that they didn't need to sit rolling joints, right?
John: They had the pot.
John: And so rolling the joints allowed me then to have some ownership over the weed so I didn't have to stand there like a goofball and be like,
John: Hey, you going to pass that over here?
Merlin: Well, you're certainly you're adding value.
John: I've added value.
John: That's precisely it.
John: So the guy with the pot is like, you know, I'm too big a deal to to be rolling joints.
John: That's a that's yeoman's work.
John: Uh, but, but then I, you know, having rolled the joints, I was entitled at least to take a, you know, to take one of those joints for myself.
John: Right.
John: You know, you roll five, slip one in your pack of cigarettes and, and everybody feels right.
John: Everybody feels right about it.
John: This is, this is all going in my Moochers Bible.
Merlin: That's a good idea.
John: When I finally write the Moochers Bible.
John: You can do that as an ebook.
John: No, I'm thinking it's like something to be in airport bookstores, something you read on an airplane.
Merlin: Well, like a survivalist Bible, like a Dr. Strangelove Bible.
Merlin: Like you get like a tiny little, what's called the Moocher's what?
Merlin: The Moocher's Bible, yeah.
Merlin: The Moocher's Bible, and it could be very small.
Merlin: It could slip into a wallet.
Merlin: It should, or certainly in your shirt pocket.
Merlin: It should be about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
Merlin: And it should be inexpensive enough to replace because your friend's probably going to steal it from you because, let's be honest, they're a moocher.
John: Well, sure.
John: I mean, you're probably going to try and steal it from the bookstore in the first place.
John: Yep.
John: But the only problem, I think, is that a lot of the tenants in the Moochers Bible aren't really applicable anymore.
John: Oh, nobody smokes.
John: Well, yeah.
John: What are you going to do?
John: Walk up to somebody on the street and ask for a cigarette?
John: They cost a dollar each now.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: So, yeah.
Merlin: They've gotten really costly.
Merlin: And the vaping is not such a bargain anymore either.
Merlin: San Francisco is coming down hard on the vapors.
John: uh you mean they're taxing vaping well uh like at my daughter's school there's a sign right out front that says no smoking and yes no vaping either it's got one of those big robot cigarettes so you can say like like here don't do that don't do that well the question with vaping isn't so much i don't think that that it's you know you can no longer do it on airplanes or whatever but more that you cannot you can't mooch a toke off somebody's vape can you it seems like a very personal
Merlin: Can you mooch a toke off somebody's vape?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: The kids I see in our neighborhood, they're very sophisticated-looking ones.
Merlin: They look kind of like a Zenith remote control from 1977.
John: Yeah, something that you would see in the cantina scene in the original Star Trek.
Merlin: The original Star Trek, where they're listening to Benny Goodman and vaping.
John: Yeah, whoop, whoop, whoop.
John: I don't know if you could talk another fellow's vape.
Merlin: Also, they have a lot of fruit flavors.
Merlin: I think there's a lot of variety to the vaping today.
Merlin: It used to be you got Marlboro or Camel, and now you can have any kind of flavor you want.
Merlin: You had menthol, though.
Merlin: Menthol smoking is a purely defensive tactic.
Merlin: I know you think that.
John: I learned this from people.
John: I know you think that, and it's true.
John: If you smoke menthols, people don't want to bump cigarettes from you, but people claim that the menthol is an additional thing you get addicted to.
John: I believe it.
John: So now you don't even want to smoke a normal cigarette.
Merlin: If you put anything in your mouth enough, eventually you're going to want it there.
John: But you price your... If you get into menthol smoking in order to keep people from bumming cigarettes, you price yourself out of ever bumming a cigarette from anybody else.
John: So in the end, what started off maybe as a defensive technique ends up biting you in the ass.
John: Because you don't want it.
John: Hoisted by your own petard.
John: That's exactly what it is.
John: You go to a bar and you're like, hey, can I have one of those?
John: And you...
John: Oh, shit, it's just a Marlboro.
John: Like, I need to go dip that in a candy cane because I can't enjoy a cigarette that doesn't taste like a fresh breeze on a cool mountain day.
John: But I'm curious about whether, and maybe some of our vaping listeners will chime in on this.
John: But if you're hanging out around, standing in a circle, maybe doing some marching and some rapping, everybody's presumably got their own vape cigarette, right?
John: You don't take a toke and pass it on.
Merlin: It's not like a bong.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So it's a big part of this whole identity thing to it.
Merlin: When I see these kids in their sportswear, they usually have their sunglasses on the back of their neck and they're walking around making vapes.
John: Yeah, vaping.
Merlin: Sometimes they've got an energy drink.
Merlin: The other thing I notice a lot about vapors is they do that leg thing, that shaky leg thing.
Merlin: Remember when you're a teenager and you got energy and your leg's always in motion?
Merlin: They seem very keyed up, the vapors.
Merlin: And you can really identify them.
Merlin: I think that's the energy drink.
Merlin: Oh, I know.
Merlin: I mean, at a certain point, I'm not sure you can even separate them.
Merlin: The vaping and the energy drink.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: It feels like a lifestyle.
Merlin: It feels like a whole kind of community college lifestyle.
Merlin: It doesn't have a little bit of a CC vibe.
John: Well, it always did, but I'm seeing a lot of urban sophisticates now.
John: Well, let's not call them sophisticates, but urban people that I would normally in the past have seen smoking cigarettes, which is a universal indication that you are cool and rock and roll.
John: Right.
John: There are still a lot of those people actually smoking cigarettes, burning cigarettes, which I can't...
John: I was walking through the cool neighborhood yesterday and I was like, my God, people are still smoking cigarettes.
Merlin: When I'm in Manhattan, I noticed that.
Merlin: I don't know if it's still true now.
Merlin: Last time I was in Manhattan, I was struck by how many people still smoke.
John: Still smoking cigarettes.
Merlin: I'm not here to judge, but you don't see it as much around here for sure.
Merlin: Let's be honest.
Merlin: You are judging.
Merlin: No, I'm not.
Merlin: I'm judging the vape people.
Merlin: And I want to distinguish.
Merlin: First of all, I just want to say I don't want to talk about this.
Merlin: Please don't email me about this.
Merlin: Please don't tweet me about this.
Merlin: I don't want to be persuaded about vaping.
Merlin: Please keep it to yourself.
Merlin: Let me just criticize you on my own, please.
Merlin: Sure.
Merlin: It's one thing.
Merlin: You're right.
Merlin: It's your right as a podcaster.
Merlin: That's my right.
Merlin: It's one thing to go out.
Merlin: I don't care.
Merlin: But I'm distinguishing between.
Merlin: There's a smoking over here.
Merlin: Then there's like you could buy the disposable ones that look like cigarettes.
Merlin: right that's that's really they look down the vapors look down on that that's real kid stuff oh really there are there are vapes that are disposable that look like cigarettes yeah they're awesome they're not they're not one hitters no the one hitters that look like cigarettes those are pretty cool yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah not super cool but no but they had their purpose and then you got the ones that are more like what i would call the ethernet wizard cigarette and that's more like the little one that looks like you're playing a flute yeah
Merlin: I think those serious vapors now carry this thing that looks, I haven't paid a lot of attention to it, but I see them sometimes in the neighborhood.
Merlin: They're unavoidable.
Merlin: And it's a little bigger than, like I say, like a Zenith remote control.
Merlin: I want to say it's a little bit smaller than the gyro mechanism you would use for a remote control plane.
Merlin: It's big.
Merlin: I mean, it's like the size of a Walkman.
Merlin: And then that's got a big butt plug coming out of it that you toke on to make your vapes.
John: Yeah, when I see that, I always think of that episode of the one show where Fry gets the magic.
John: He gets the devil hands.
John: He gets the robot devil hands.
John: He and the devil switch hands.
John: Okay.
John: Right, and the devil wants human hands, and he offers Fry the robot hands, devil hands.
John: Fry gets the devil hands, and then suddenly he can play the magic flute that conjures images.
Merlin: Lots of complicated plot for a half-hour show.
John: Well, yeah, but that's the thing.
John: They got done making The Simpsons or whatever, or didn't maybe get done making The Simpsons, but...
John: Same people, right?
Merlin: Yeah, I think it's the same.
Merlin: It started out as the same roughish team.
John: Yeah.
John: It's a fun show.
John: It's a fun show.
John: A lot of smarts there.
John: But anyway, so he's playing the magic flute, and it conjures up these images of him dancing with Lila, and he wins Lila's heart.
John: But then at the end, he doesn't consummate the relationship with Lila because that would ruin the show.
John: The whole show would end.
Merlin: Yeah, that's the Sam and Diane moment.
John: That's the Sam and Diane moment.
John: That's right.
John: At that point, Diane has to... Yeah, exactly.
John: But anyway, so Fry is playing this crazy electric flute with his devil robot hands.
John: And that is... I cannot not see that when I see people vaping on the street.
John: I just feel like...
Merlin: Yeah, I get you.
Merlin: But to me, it's almost like the way I used to feel watching people use a BlackBerry, where before and even in the early days of the iPhone, a lot of people were still always using their BlackBerrys.
Merlin: And they were talking about how much they loved using their BlackBerrys.
Merlin: But I've never seen anybody look happy using a BlackBerry.
Merlin: And people who are vaping, they look like they're, I don't know, ashamed of what they're doing.
Merlin: It's dutiful.
Merlin: Well, they should be.
Merlin: I mean, it's real silly.
Merlin: Nothing against it.
Merlin: I mean, keep doing it.
Merlin: Have fun.
Merlin: But it does look very silly.
John: I think some of that might be that we just do not live in that suburban or that exocity, the edge of a city where people aren't influenced by the city as much.
John: You're talking about an exurb.
John: An exurb, that's right.
Merlin: You're saying you're at an umbrella table outside the Quiznos by the old Starbucks and you're vaping it up.
John: I think that as you leave – if you're in the center of the city and you are – and your pants are riding low and you are vaping and you have a white baseball cap on backwards, people in the city recognize you from elsewhere.
John: But as you move further and further out of a city, you reach a borderland where –
John: Where all the cultures interact, right?
John: And you can be out there in that borderland making alternative theater because you can't afford the space.
Merlin: It's a different kind of stew.
Merlin: It's the children of people who work at Costco meeting with the children of people who work at Sam's Club.
Merlin: And they're all meeting together and it's a great goulash, a cultural goulash.
John: Well, yeah.
John: I mean, especially now that cities are too expensive to live in, right?
John: We're seeing the downtown culture makers moving out as the exurbian children characters move in.
John: And you get into this weird realm where people are vaping ironically and right next to people who are vaping very earnestly.
John: And you go.
John: The earnest vapors.
John: Right.
John: I can't tell the one from the other now.
John: I mean, there are people who vape and it's very cool.
John: They make it look cool and it communicates.
Merlin: Is that the word you want?
John: Well, what is cool anymore, Merlin?
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: You could see Miles Davis doing that.
John: I think that the next Miles Davis is right now probably a 16-year-old vapor.
Merlin: Miles Davis 2.0.
John: Well, probably by now 4.0.
Merlin: Yeah, like Miles Davis X. That would be pretty good.
Merlin: Miles Davis X, that's pretty good.
John: Yeah, I'm sure.
John: I think it would just be Miles X. Miles X, yeah.
John: But, yeah, I think vaping is here to stay, and I think it only looks ridiculous to us, but in a very short amount of time, it will just be as natural to the young people as anything, much more natural than cigarettes.
John: Cigarettes are going to look like some— They're going to make the 1980s— Yeah, they're going to make the 50s look like the 70s.
Merlin: Yeah, exactly.
Merlin: Well, I'm also, I agree with you about people having to move out of the cities.
Merlin: I'm interested in what happens within the next, what, probably two years where everybody cool is going to live outside the city.
Merlin: Everybody who lives in the city is going to be a douchebag who makes apps.
Merlin: What's the opposite of a bridge and tunnel crowd, right?
Merlin: What if we get to where people are going?
Merlin: They're going out to the exurbs because that's where the good skate ramps and the vapes are.
John: You know what I'm saying?
John: Yeah, I feel like it'll continue to be called Bridge and Tunnel.
John: It'll just be people taking bridges and tunnels to get out of the downtown core rather than go into it.
John: It's the whole white flight premise, but not in reverse, but sort of in reverse.
John: Like fleeing, not fleeing from the decline of the inner city because it has become like dangerous and decaying, but fleeing from the inner city because it's intolerable, tolerably smug.
Merlin: Oh, man.
Merlin: That's going to be a trend piece.
Merlin: That's going to be a trend piece in the next couple years.
Merlin: I mean, you already see it.
Merlin: Like, in our local Paper Coom website, there's already, like, there's a huge amount of the front page that goes, can you believe what somebody is selling this teardown for?
Merlin: And then there's, of course, the component piece to that is, but if you move to, you know, Dublin or Pleasanton, you can get a 6,000 acre ranch for $9.
John: Yeah, Pleasanton.
John: Pleasanton, it's on the bark.
John: I think, you know, I think that honestly, right, the last 20 years has seen the, or let's call it the last 30 years,
John: Saw all this, you know, these mega mansions or McMansions, they're McMansions, kind of gross over large houses with three-story atrium.
Merlin: And then the cheaper knockoff version, the Mansion Kings.
Merlin: Mansion King.
John: And they're all out there.
John: I haven't seen Mansion Chef in years.
John: You know, I don't have a TV.
John: But out there in these, like, manicured neighborhoods with these over-large homes, and now nobody wants to live in them anymore, but I think we're going to see an exodus of people from the city who will move out there and find that...
John: they can get these huge huge homes with like seven bedrooms super cheap where the where they sell they sell at way under market value to get out yeah it makes it available goes on the market oh that's super interesting and then these neighborhoods are suddenly going to become vibrant places because these homes are going to have like three different families living generations of different families it's going to become the equivalent of
Merlin: I mean, that would be so great.
Merlin: You could have three different families living in one of these giant, giant houses, and they're really using the pool.
Merlin: They don't just have the pool as a thing to clean.
Merlin: There's like 60 kids in the pool.
Merlin: That's right.
John: It's like an ad hoc apartment building.
John: Maybe nine scream poets will all move into one place.
John: mega mansion out in the suburbs and uh and you know then you're going to start seeing like interesting sculptures appear in the yard i mean those those neighborhoods could are ripe to be colonized by uh by this like by the creative class that can no longer make make a theater in in warehouses
John: So I'm excited about that, and I wonder, I mean, maybe there will be life on those streets.
John: Maybe there will suddenly be kids riding their unicycles or whatever kids ride.
Merlin: Get a recumbent bike or a hoverboard?
John: Yeah, it will literally make the 2020s look like the 50s.
John: The 2020s are going to make the 2010s look like the 1990s.
John: And the 1990s are going to make the 2020s look like the 50s.
Merlin: Oh, man, that's a lot of colons.
John: So, I mean, you know what?
John: As parents of young kids, we might start to think about like, hey, let's go out there, buy one of those mega mansions that has like two gold lions on the steps.
John: Yeah.
John: And, you know, and move in and then suddenly the master, you've got a master bedroom that's like 1,500 square feet.
John: And your kid has their own bedroom, but also their own den.
John: And you can roller skate in the living room.
Merlin: You can make one of the rooms into just like a jungle playroom.
Merlin: Jungle playroom.
Merlin: You could hire a local maker.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Somebody with a hot glue gun and a book, they could come out and they could make a jungle inside one of the rooms the kids could play in.
Merlin: Here's what else I'm thinking.
Merlin: I'm thinking, let's let you take an eternity.
Merlin: You buy a mansion, a former mansion king, and then you trick it out however you want.
Merlin: And then you buy a Google bus.
Merlin: And that way, now, you've got a cheap way, easy way to get people in and out of the city.
Merlin: You can still go to the city if you need vape supplies or work.
Merlin: And it's a lot easier than having to own a bunch of cars.
Merlin: And, you know, it's one thing to have sculpture on the lawn.
Merlin: I think we don't want cars on the lawn.
Merlin: No, that's true, see?
Merlin: But cars are going away, Merlin.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: I know.
Merlin: But one Google bus, especially, you know, you could run it on French fry grease or sun.
Merlin: Mm-hmm.
Merlin: I don't know.
Merlin: I'm just saying there's economies of scale here.
Merlin: Everybody kicks in a little bit.
Merlin: You could buy a Mansion King pretty cheap, probably.
John: Now, you've got your finger on the pulse of e-commerce and entrepreneurship.
John: I would like to think I do, yeah.
John: So tell me, are we closer to, I know we're going to get a lot of letters about this from John Siracusa.
John: Siracusa.
John: But are we closer now to the paperless office?
John: Are we closer to people just working from home or do people continue to need to come into the city where they have free Froot Loops in a giant Froot Loop dispenser as one of the perks of their open plan office, beanbag chair office?
John: Are people going to continue to come in for the Froot Loops and the beanbag chairs?
John: Or are the engineers one day going to completely rebel and say, listen, as an engineer, I no longer need to ever wear pants again.
John: And I'm just going to code from the enormous beanbag sex chair that is the only item of furniture in the entire Mega Mansion.
Merlin: And now you've got the Lamborghini poster.
John: The Lamborghini poster and the enormous beanbag chair.
John: And they're just in there just coding.
John: They've got like six screens.
John: They get their own Froot Loops dispenser.
John: Oh, nice.
John: They never need to come into the city at all.
John: Are we closer to that?
John: Or is there something about the proximity to one another...
John: The stand-up desks and the conference rooms that make going into San Francisco necessary for commerce.
Merlin: Do you want the honest answer or the funny answer?
Merlin: I want the honest answer.
Merlin: It has existed already for a long time.
Merlin: There's a lot of people, there are a lot of companies that when they started, that's how they started.
Merlin: They started with people working remotely.
Merlin: One of the big problems with trying to introduce all this revolutionary bullshit into companies is that it works against the principles upon which the company was started.
Merlin: And it works directly at odds with the culture that's kind of, it's been the nascent culture since the place started.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: So it's like it's almost like think of a family, like a passive aggressive Western family, a Midwestern family who like sees a movie where the family likes each other and say, OK, from now on, we're all going to like each other.
Merlin: It's like, well, that's easier said than done, because this is the way we've always acted.
Merlin: It's hard to just you don't get to hit a reset button and terraform your family.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: So I think that's one.
Merlin: So on the one hand, I think it always has existed for some companies.
Merlin: I mean, I've worked with companies where everybody's on contract and all but like three people work remotely.
Merlin: And so, but then there's, then the other part of that is that I think, and this is, you didn't ask for the funny answer, so this is what you get.
Merlin: I think also people like to, I think there's a certain way of managing, there's a certain way of managing where it's definitely easier to have everybody in a room.
Merlin: But honestly, it's also sometimes easier to collaborate with people in a room, even or especially with things like engineers.
Merlin: You get a lot more accomplished when you can be face to face with somebody.
Merlin: So this idea... Okay, let's think about this.
Merlin: But I mean, so there's still lots more to that.
Merlin: You can still have things.
Merlin: You can still have the occasional weekly meeting or the stand-up, but everybody's trying different things.
Merlin: There's nobody who says, I want... There's nobody anymore who says, I want the kind of job I think my grandparents had.
Merlin: No, I don't want a job where I have to go and sit in a big building with artificial light and windows that don't open and just sit around and do this boring job.
Merlin: Nobody wants that.
Merlin: It's just that there isn't any easy way to say what is...
Merlin: If you don't want that, then what do you want?
Merlin: Because there's complexity.
John: That's what I'm saying.
John: What I'm trying to imagine is let's picture one of these exurbs, one of these McMansion villages, and let's say that it becomes a colony, right, where everyone who lives in that neighborhood is an engineer.
John: Oh, yeah.
John: So they're all working offshore for different companies.
Merlin: It's literally a village.
Merlin: A village.
Merlin: You've got a shoemaker.
Merlin: You've got a barber.
Merlin: You've got a mercantile.
Merlin: You've got all these people, and they work together and with each other.
Merlin: You're saying here, this is the same thing.
Merlin: It's literally a village.
Merlin: It's just over here, you've got a pro programmer.
Merlin: Over here, you've got a MySQL person.
Merlin: You've got a full-stack person here, right?
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: XHTML guy.
John: XHTML, exactly.
John: This guy over here is doing ironic 8-bit animations for people who have decided that the cool websites are throwback websites.
John: And then I think a lot of those McMansion neighborhoods, as they were building them, they were trying to create, trying falsely to create a feeling of community.
John: And so they would actually build like community centers where they met that had barbecues and stuff that where they imagine that people would congregate for that feeling of togetherness, completely failing to understand that the premise of constructing those whole neighborhoods was that no one wanted to interact with each other at all.
John: You would park your Lexus 300 in the garage.
Merlin: You don't even want to get out of your car outside.
Merlin: No, no, no.
John: You want to get into the garage, close the garage door, and then get out.
John: That's right.
John: But now we're picturing a colony of engineers all living together, and they do use the communal space as a communal office.
John: And a communal like gathering point where they're sharing ideas.
John: They're showing their stuff and their kids are all around them.
John: And then all of a sudden – and the Google bus only comes – the Google bus comes every day because that's the Amazon Prime bus now, which comes and delivers all the groceries and all the supplies that everybody is –
Merlin: Oh, that's so efficient.
John: That's right.
Merlin: You don't need four different services, you know, kind of trickling in throughout the day.
Merlin: You do a big you do.
Merlin: It's like it's like Escape from New York.
Merlin: The helicopter comes and drops the supplies.
John: Yeah, it's a semi.
John: It's actually a lot like Escape from New York, John.
John: That's the thing.
John: It becomes not a walled city because if you want to come, it's open.
John: Right.
John: But you would never need to leave your neighborhood.
John: And it could become like a think tank, right?
John: It would be like in the original movie Tron where the beam of light of the master control program is beaming up out of these neighborhoods and all of the engineers that do all the engineering for the entire city of San Francisco are just living together.
John: And then you've got your alternative theater neighborhood.
John: Over here, you've got your entrepreneur neighborhood where the entrepreneurs who are self-conscious about their money want to live in a kind of McMansion house that maybe they once upon a time would have lived in as a serious mansion house.
John: But now that the mansion houses are seen as like middle-class collective homes, they actually want to move into them
John: as a way of camouflaging their wealth, but they still want to be around entrepreneurs.
Merlin: You might keep an ironic Mac Mansion.
Merlin: You know, you might want to keep one around ironically.
John: Oh, let's call it a Mac Mansion.
John: It's not a McMansion anymore.
John: It's a Mac Mansion.
John: It's a Mac Mansion.
John: Right?
John: So the entrepreneurs actually still have their 8,000 square foot warehouse in San Francisco, but now they realize that they have to slum out in the suburbs where all the action is.
Merlin: They're mostly – like I saw this thing.
Merlin: Somebody in front of me posted this thing the other day.
Merlin: It's this way of – it's like a pod you can get for your backyard for a home office.
Merlin: It's actually super cool.
Merlin: It's the kind of thing you would see like at a – you know, in the 1970s.
Merlin: It's a very comfortable, like mostly glass thing that can just get dropped in your backyard and you can do your business right in the backyard.
Merlin: I can see people living – I think this is a popular trend right now.
Merlin: What do they call it?
Merlin: The micro house or whatever?
Merlin: The mini house?
Merlin: Micro mini house.
Merlin: Yeah, a micro-mini house.
Merlin: It would be like bunk beds and a gas stove.
Merlin: But you get to find this stuff.
Merlin: You get some horizontal slots so you can dwell it out a little bit.
Merlin: That would be the primary place.
Merlin: You wouldn't live in the Mac Mansion or the McMansion.
John: Now we have the Mac Mansion, right?
John: And then we have all the micro-pod pods.
John: So they start off in the backyard, but then people realize, what are we hiding from?
John: This is our community.
John: So then the pods start popping up in people's front yards.
John: And then the pods become a separate network, a separate network of...
John: Like another connective layer of brain that's within the Mac mansions and then the first one shows up inside a Mac mansion in the atrium inside.
John: In the front entry hall.
Merlin: And you could put them in a circle.
Merlin: It would be, Foucault would call it the opposite of a panopticon.
Merlin: You could have a nonopticon.
Merlin: You could have all of them facing toward the middle of the village where the campfire is.
Merlin: You could have all the little glass facing in the same direction, right?
Merlin: Well, and then it becomes one of those mirrored... Polyopticon.
John: The mirrored solar-powered energy collector where they're all arranged in a circle and they're reflecting the sunlight or the brainwaves to a central hub.
John: To the MCP.
John: To the MCP.
John: So it's generating ideas.
John: It's generating power.
John: It's probably generating bandwidth.
John: It's almost unlimited bandwidth at this point.
John: And we're talking about Mac Mansions now.
John: I feel like this is the trend.
John: This is the way it's going because at that point, yeah, you like the wide open space.
John: You like the boulevards.
John: You like the uniformly tree-lined streets.
John: There's not as much to go awry.
John: Yeah.
John: Unfortunately, those houses are mostly stapled and glued together, so I don't think they're going to last forever.
Merlin: That's okay.
Merlin: That's okay.
Merlin: This is a new generation, John.
Merlin: We don't want to bring our old thinking.
Merlin: This isn't colonial Williamsburg.
Merlin: We're talking about people who have no belongings.
Merlin: They have Spotify.
Merlin: And they maybe have a laptop that they share.
John: So as the houses – They're in the cloud, John.
John: These people are in the cloud.
John: They're living in the cloud.
John: Living in the cloud.
John: But I think there's going to be a magic moment where these homes that are made out of pressed particle substances, right now they're off-gassing, right?
John: That's the phrase.
John: They are off-gassing, meaning that all of the chemical glues that are holding the homes together are still –
John: gassing, they're still turning to gas and poisoning you and your children.
John: But there'll be a moment where they stop gassing because they've off-gassed all the gas.
John: And then they start absorbing moisture, right?
John: Those building components are going to start swelling.
John: All your breath and all of your perspiration.
Merlin: I see.
John: Yes.
John: Yes, there's a lot of moisture in the home.
John: Right.
John: So there's going to be a perfect moment
John: between the off-gassing and when the houses start to swell with perspiration, where they're in stasis, right?
John: It's their perfect state, and that will be the moment.
John: For whatever two years that period is, that will be when to go in there, colonize those spaces, use them to generate entrepreneurship, and then when the buildings start to fall down, when the black mold starts to form in the corners,
John: Maybe you have like a Detroit-style hell night where just one night you just take your beanbag chairs, you take your Lamborghini posters, you put them all on an Amazon bus, and you burn the entire neighborhood down.
Merlin: Yeah, you can have like the purge.
Merlin: It's like Clemenza says, right?
Merlin: You got to have a war every few years.
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: And get rid of the black mold.
Merlin: And then you can just extrude a new house.
Merlin: Again, terraforming.
Merlin: And you can just extrude a new house.
Merlin: Because by then, I take your point, though.
Merlin: By the time you get rid of the deadly part or the poisonous part of the particle board, you're also introducing a problem.
Merlin: The performance characteristics are already degrading.
Merlin: So you've got maybe two years.
John: Who knows how much the gas was holding the whole thing together.
John: Yeah.
John: And then you're like the end of Road Warrior II, Electric Boogaloo.
Yeah.
John: Where you all get into a motley caravan of Google buses and electric cars and you're towing your little pods.
Merlin: Chitty chitty bang bang.
John: Chitty chitty bang bang.
John: And you head off and the homunculus is there.
John: Give us the oil.
John: Head off into the desert to create it.
John: You're looking for the next utopia.
John: The next Mac mansions.
John: We can dream, can't we?
John: I feel like this is the way, and I just want to live long enough to see this happen.
John: Yeah?
John: Because at this point, you know, we're both going to be the old crotchety geezer with the, I forget what kind of hat he was wearing.
John: What was it?
John: Like a Napoleon hat or something.
Merlin: Hmm?
Merlin: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: Is that some Mad Max thing?
John: I think it's a Mad Max thing.
Merlin: Yeah, but we could, you know, also to refer to your program, we could also just be a head in a jar at that point.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: I see what you're saying.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Arguing with Richard Nixon on a shelf somewhere.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: That's a funny bit.
John: I don't want to – you seem a little bit dismissive of the show with Fry and Leela.
Merlin: I like it a lot.
Merlin: It's been banned from the house.
Merlin: Really?
Merlin: There was just a little bit too much –
Merlin: You know, inside words and situations.
Merlin: It's a little saucy.
Merlin: And so in a fit of pique, my wife banned it.
John: I see.
Merlin: I see.
Merlin: My daughter was extremely into it, though.
Merlin: And we still have, you know, we keep a long list of about 60 pet names we keep around.
Merlin: She still really wants to name something Lord Nibbler.
Merlin: Lord Nibbler.
John: Because Lord Nibbler is pretty cute.
John: Sure, he's the little nibbler that eats everything, right?
Merlin: He's adorable.
John: And his poop, isn't that what runs the ship?
Yeah.
John: Oh, right.
John: Right.
John: His little infinitely dense poops.
John: Could be.
John: When that show came out, I was not interested in it at all.
John: But then I saw it in reruns or syndication, they call it.
John: And I did like it for several years.
John: And then I didn't have a TV anymore.
Merlin: It's a great hotel room show.
John: That's right.
Merlin: It's one of those ones like, yeah, there's certain kinds of shows I would never – I wouldn't say I'd never watch, but I wouldn't make special appointment viewing time for.
Merlin: But if it's on a hotel room, it's like it's really good.
John: It's not a thing that you're going to – as you're scrolling through Netflix and seeing one million movies that you never knew existed and never will watch, you'll see the Fry and Leela show and you say, oh, isn't that good?
John: That's on Netflix.
John: And it strikes you as a positive –
John: But you're not going to watch it either.
John: Like, the whole point of Netflix is to scroll and scroll and scroll endlessly and never watch anything.
Merlin: Yeah, and especially they just dump some new stuff in the last few days.
Merlin: It's kind of overwhelming.
Merlin: You know what I learned?
Merlin: I don't know if this is true, but a couple people have told me this.
Merlin: You said, do you have the Netflix?
John: Well, I did.
Merlin: Okay, but you're familiar with what it is.
John: Yeah, but I was just going to tell a very short story where I kind of got a little bit of a millennial breakup the other day where I logged on to Netflix and my password had been removed.
John: What?
John: Well, because it wasn't my Netflix.
John: And so I got the millennial breakup.
John: Oh, no, I'm sorry.
John: You're disinvited to use my Netflix for free.
Merlin: Oh, the millennial.
Merlin: Oh, you got, you got, oh.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Somebody, oh boy.
John: So you turn on your computer and you're like, oh, I think I'm going to watch Day of the Condor again for the 40th time.
John: And then you get that Netflix screen that's like, would you like to join Netflix?
John: Yep.
John: You're like, what, what, what?
John: No, no, no.
John: And you put your, put your, what had, what had for the last several years been your password, which was your password was someone else's.
John: all of a sudden it doesn't work that netflix returns zero results uh 404 404 yeah and you're like oh fuck i've been i'm so sorry it's like you know no more netflix and chill for me but so i do remember a day those halcyon days when uh when yeah you could scroll for days and days but you were about to say something about the well no no i feel i feel like i'm you know being showy or something
John: Oh, yeah, like you're rubbing it.
Merlin: Well, you know, I just want to mention this because somebody told me this factoid, which is an interesting, empirically interesting factoid, but I'm finding it immensely interesting.
Merlin: I kind of can't stop thinking about it.
Merlin: I was saying to somebody how I was introduced.
Merlin: There's this English comedian, as they say, called Stuart Lee.
Merlin: And Stuart Lee is a...
Merlin: has in the past like two months become like my i'm obsessed with this guy i just i want i want to see everything this guy's ever done and it all started with turning on the netflix and i flipped past this thing i'd never seen and never heard of it says stewart lee's comedy vehicle and you know how the little stars stars work right yeah you got the red stars you know it's nice to see three stars four stars you're thinking this is really good this thing is just a sliver shy of five stars and i'm like wow
Merlin: This sounds like the kind of thing I would like.
Merlin: If the average rating for this is just under five stars, I should watch this.
Merlin: And I did, and I loved it.
Merlin: And then I don't know if this is true, and I'm sure I'll hear about it now.
Merlin: I'm reliably informed that that is their estimation of what you would give it.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: The algorithm knows you.
Merlin: Now, that sounds pretty straightforward, and maybe it is, but for some reason now, I kind of can't stop thinking about it.
Merlin: Right.
Merlin: Because it's infinitely fascinating to me how they're guessing, and so then I rate it, and that's going to change future things, but they don't tell you that.
Merlin: It doesn't say...
Merlin: It used to be back in the day, even back in the DVD days, it would say, okay, four stars.
Merlin: Or when they say, here's stuff we think you'll like, and it would even show you what they think you would rate it.
Merlin: But I don't know at what point if it is true that they changed that over, but that's a very interesting technology.
John: Somebody's watching you.
Merlin: And you get no privacy.
John: Well, this is the thing.
John: We've talked about this before, but it's becoming more and more true all the time.
John: There is no empirical truth anymore, Merlin.
John: There are no four stars.
John: That's what they told us in the 80s.
John: They just didn't have a proof for it.
John: There's no empirical truth.
John: There is only conditional subjective truth.
John: And so four stars doesn't exist.
John: There's only now four stars for you.
John: And I think Yelp is the last place where four stars, Yelp and Pitchfork are the last place where four stars are still like some kind of, I guess Yelp is four stars that are collected from 10,000 people that you would not like to be stuck on an elevator with.
John: And Pitchfork is still some dumb kids in a room telling you what things are good.
Merlin: But everything else, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't read it much anymore.
Merlin: But around the time of the Travis Morrison debacle, it really started to feel like it's somebody who really wants to impress their older brother.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Even though they didn't really listen to the album.
John: I had a Travis Morrison conversation the other day.
John: That was a heartbreak.
John: Well, it was.
Merlin: But well, that still sticks in the craw up there in Seattle, doesn't it?
John: Well, yeah, but now I feel like Travis Morrison's Travis Stan record, the famous 0.0 from Pitchfork, is becoming a thing like where were you when Kennedy was killed among a certain group of people who followed indie rock religiously.
John: And so it's a thing where like how many people were at the Velvet Underground concert in 1966 and
John: Not very many people, but then over the years, the people that claim to have been there grow and grow until it would have been a 50,000-person concert.
Merlin: Only 1,000 people ever bought their first album, but they all misquoted Brian Eno.
Merlin: That's right.
John: That's exactly what I was trying to say.
Merlin: The Velvet Underground is going to make the 1960s look like the 1930s.
Merlin: Yeah, that's right.
Merlin: Except the 1930s are going to make the Velvet Underground look like Stan Kenton.
Merlin: So in the sense of – for the pitchfork angle or the Travis Morrison angle, it's become – I feel like more and more now I'm meeting strangers.
John: This is the thing.
John: When Travis Dan came out, the number of people that were directly affected by that rating –
John: started at Travis himself and emanated out to his label mates, right?
John: The people that were putting out that album and counting on it to be transformative.
John: And then to all the fans of the Dismemberment Plan and all of the larger circle of people who actually bought and listened to that record.
Merlin: And what Travis Moore said and the Dismemberment Plan were like one of those rare bands
Merlin: where like they were really good and they were critically acclaimed whatever and everybody liked them and the people seemed pretty cool like it was one of those like it was one of those like i don't know like grand slam kind of things and when that came along it was like indie rock 9-11 the drummer wore fingerless gloves there were a lot of things about them that stood out
John: And people would dance.
John: People would dance at their shows.
John: They played dance music.
John: They would dance.
John: Their shows were so crazy.
John: But now I'm meeting people in airports that are using Travis Dan as their calling card.
John: Like, oh, you know, hey, nice to meet you.
John: Like, they'll be talking to me, right?
John: And they're like, I know who you are.
John: You're John Roderick.
John: And Travis Dan.
John: Am I right?
John: And then I'll be like, what?
John: What are we talking about?
John: And they're like, you know, Travis Dan, like I'm on your side.
John: I'm on your team because I also thought that that was a tragedy.
John: And it's like, whoa, I'm having this conversation more and more often now.
John: And I feel like, I feel like it is becoming emblematic of a time of a moment where
John: where the critics who formerly were our friends are now our enemies and locating us in a time and space, 2006 or whenever, like it's becoming the velvet underground of our time.
John: Wow.
John: Travestan is the indie rock record that is going to make the 60s look like the 20s.
John: So I don't know what to make of that, right?
John: But you cannot pick your cultural markers in real time.
John: It only happens, I think, retroactively.
John: There are a lot of things where you thought, oh, this is the thing that's going to be remembered, right?
John: This is the Rilo Kylie album that's the tentpole that's holding up this whole era.
John: Yeah.
John: And then it turns out, no, it's Travestan is the tentpole.
John: So, I don't know.
John: Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Merlin: Boy, I got a lot to think about.
Merlin: Put that in your vape and smoke it.
Merlin: Put that in your vape and vape it.
Merlin: Do you forgive him for eating your chili?
Merlin: Travis?
Merlin: You know, Travis is a magical creature.
John: He ate a lot of your chili, right?
John: He just didn't even ask.
Merlin: Well, it was his bandmates.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: The guy with the big head.
Merlin: He looks like he could eat some chili.
John: Yeah, and I think Travis's magical feature was that he came in and he was like, you know, to my bandmates.
John: We are here in the land of plenty.
John: Go ahead and forage for your food.
John: Once again.
John: Give us the oil.
Merlin: Do not become addicted to canned chili.
John: And so – and then he just traipsed off into the garden to eat dandelions or whatever it was that he was doing.
John: And my protest was that these bandmates who had never acknowledged me, right?
John: They had never even nodded at me or looked at me.
John: Now suddenly we're going through my cupboards and like, look, I found a can of sliced pineapple.
John: And I'm like, hold on.
John: You know I'm here, right?
John: You got to at least say hi to me as you troop into my house before you're going through my, like in my office, Merlin, there is a space.
John: There's a space in my office.
John: So there was a guy on my floor that had a big photo studio.
John: And legitimately making some form of art, even if it's commercial photography, right?
John: He's using it as an artistic space.
John: And then at a certain point, he got the entrepreneurship bug.
John: And he decided that he was going to expand his operation to making herbal teas.
John: And there was a space on our floor that was available.
John: And this guy had a very large space and he obviously was well funded either by the profits of his own output or maybe he was funded offshore.
John: Maybe some angel investors or some venture capitalists or his parents had funded his operation.
John: But so he took over one of these spaces and started making herbal teas there.
Wow.
Wow.
John: So all of a sudden on the floor of the place where everyone else is working in encaustics, there is this constant sort of sickly sweet smell of teas being manufactured.
John: And I don't know how that's all going down.
John: But then not only are they exporting these dry teas, but they are making wet tea in there and putting them in giant tea canisters.
Merlin: Is that up to code?
Yeah.
John: Well, I don't know.
Merlin: I don't think you can be in a building full of podcasting encaustics and start making herbal teas.
Merlin: I don't want to be didactic, but I don't think that's not cool.
John: No, it's not.
John: I don't think it is.
Merlin: That doesn't seem hygienic.
John: Well, or whatever.
John: I mean, there's a lot of things about this story I'm about to tell that don't seem hygienic, but they are...
John: Then they're taking these giant sort of torpedo-shaped canisters of wet tea and they're schlepping them down the elevator into, I kid you not, a former Google bus.
John: Like they have three vehicles.
John: They have a former Google bus.
John: They have a FedEx truck.
John: where they've stripped all the writing off of it, but you can still see the shadow.
John: And then they have a commuter bus, like an airport commuter bus.
John: And they're filling these things up with these T's.
John: And these buses are taking all the good parking spots.
John: Filling them up with these teas and off they go.
John: I don't know.
John: I don't know who buys who has a party where they're like, let's get three or four canisters of wet tea in here that are different herbalities.
John: And it's like, I don't know what this business is.
John: But anyway, all of a sudden the.
Merlin: And like, let's just say it's it's it's on the one hand, it does seem kind of like a front, but that's a lot of work for a front.
Merlin: They must have somebody who wants wet tea.
John: Somebody's out there drinking wet tea and they don't get a live one.
John: Yeah, it might be all these places that are that have like Froot Loops in a giant hopper and then also wet teas.
John: But so this place then started to employ people because they're doing a booming business here.
John: And so they're hiring people.
John: Now, these are – this is the next level, the next layer of people that are in and out of my art building.
John: These are not artists.
John: Or if they are artists, they call themselves tea artists.
John: But they are just people working at the tea plant.
John: And they are universally –
John: In their 20s, they're thin people, and they have man buns.
John: Oh, my God.
John: So there's five or six guys with man buns all of a sudden schlepping tea in and out of this place.
John: And to the man, they do not look at you when they pass you in the hall.
Merlin: Oh, that's weird.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: This sounds like what?
Merlin: This sounds like Hydra or something.
Merlin: It's like it's kind of like hipster Hydra.
John: There's something very, very uncool about it.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, that doesn't seem right.
Merlin: This is a building.
Merlin: Whatever happened to saying to give whatever happened to the nod?
Merlin: Nod.
Merlin: Whatever happened to the nod?
Merlin: I'm not saying you've got to sit.
Merlin: I don't like talking to people.
Merlin: Whatever happened to just acknowledging?
Merlin: I'm a big acknowledger.
John: I believe in acknowledging.
John: You've got to acknowledge it.
John: It's a millisecond of eye contact, not enough to communicate anything except, hello, I see you, and then a nod.
John: Crows, cops, man buns, whatever it is.
John: Come on, people.
John: Give me the nod.
John: You got to get the nod.
John: And this building is characterized by long, long hallways, right?
John: So you come out of the bathroom.
John: Oh, no.
Merlin: That's my nightmare.
John: You're walking down this long hallway, and here comes a man bun pushing a fucking cart full of wet tea.
John: And I'm looking at him the entire time, and I'm like, you fucking acknowledge me, you son of a bitch.
John: And so I've started, as they're walking, as they get right next to me, these really thin guys with man buns, I'm like, hello.
John: Hello.
John: and you know like not so loud that it's super aggressive like not hello but like hello and but but with no advance warning just like right when they are one foot from me it's happened enough that that that's a reference it's a reference to how they don't do it yeah i'm fucking mad at them now i'm mad at the whole operation mine is uh mine is great thanks how are you
John: Right, right, exactly.
John: And I'm one step from that.
John: Like, you know, nice of you to ask.
John: And so I'm pouring a ton of bad vibes into this tea room, hoping that it goes into the tea.
John: And then they're schlepping wet tea out there and it's full of bad vibes.
Merlin: It's like a Latin American movie where cooking makes things explode.
Merlin: Aren't there movies where, like, depending on how, ooh, she's mad, so the food's going to make everybody, or now everybody wants to have intercourse because she made her tortillas.
Merlin: Like, you're going to send those bad vibes into the wet tea.
Merlin: This is like a Los Ameros Peros.
Merlin: Yeah, sure, sure.
Merlin: That's dogs in love?
John: Dogs in love, except the one dog kills all the dogs.
Merlin: Oh, spoiler alert.
John: No es bueno.
John: But anyway, yeah, right.
John: The tortillas are full of love and it makes everybody have sex.
John: And then there's a hundred years of solitude.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Yep.
Merlin: Yep.
John: This is a situation where I'm filling this tea with as much bad vibe as I can.
John: So the people out there with the, uh, the fruit loop hoppers are like, Oh man, I'm not ordering this tea anymore.
John: It's full of bad vibes.
John: And then the business collapses and the guy has to go back to making photography for a living.
John: And all these man buns are then like spurted out into the world like spores to create their bad vibes, their like shitty no-nod culture.
John: They can take that into the streets and see how well it works.
Merlin: Right?
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: No, no, no.
Merlin: I like the way you put the shitty no-nod culture.
Merlin: That is a shitty no-nod culture.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: If you have a no-nod culture, then like take it back to the farm or whatever.
John: Don't, you know, like if you're out of the farm.
Merlin: It's not like you're like a Mexican drug lord.
Merlin: You know what I mean?
Merlin: You went to UW.
Merlin: Relax.
Merlin: Yeah, or you didn't even get into UW.
Merlin: No, no.
John: These are people that are used to being out in a place where I guess you don't nod at the cows.
Merlin: They might have gone to community vaping college.
John: And they're not even vapors because they seem, by their thinness... It's only vegans.
John: By their work in the tea community, that's exactly what I think.
John: I think they are vegans.
John: And the thing is, the man bun...
John: The man bun, it arrived.
John: We all mocked it mercilessly.
John: And then it persisted.
John: And then there was that moment where everybody was like, well, you know.
John: There was the blowback where people were like, stop mocking man buns.
John: We get it.
John: We get it.
John: All right.
John: And an attempt to make man buns, to make them serious.
John: Because they have persisted.
John: They have lasted through our scorn.
John: And so now we're meant to we're now we're meant to be like, oh, OK, I guess, you know, I guess I'm the dummy for mocking somebody else's style.
John: I guess I'm I guess I'm the one that's not real monster.
John: Yeah, I'm the one that's not inclusive enough.
John: But in reality, no, they are still dumb and mockable.
John: They are, you know, like I like I said the other day, there are too many top knots and not enough samurai.
John: You cannot just fucking wear a top knot.
John: It is cultural appropriation.
John: It symbolizes something, which is samurai.
John: Oh, I like the way you took that one.
John: That's good.
John: You know what I mean?
John: I'm not the one that's insensitive.
John: You are insensitive to samurai.
John: So fuck you with your top knot.
John: It's no good.
John: And if top knot is symbolic of no-knot culture, then I say burn it all to the ground.
John: Right?
John: You're not going to be in my art space where I was formerly making an encaustic podcast.
John: It doesn't cost anything.
John: It doesn't cost anything to nod.
John: To nod.
John: And I don't understand.
John: I do not get, and this is what I feel like is a component of the shyness arms race.
Merlin: And this would include things like the medium post on how to handle the introvert in your life.
John: Yeah, that's stuff where it's like, oh, no, you're not an introvert.
John: I'm an introvert.
John: Oh, see, you guys.
John: Yeah, I'm so shy that I can't exist in the world.
John: And that is like not a handicap.
John: It's a handicapable.
John: And you're not allowed to scorn me because nodding at you takes so much of my life force.
John: that I collapse into a sobbing heap.
John: So now you have to live in a world where people don't nod and smile at you, a common courtesy, a basic human interaction, because it impedes my ability to be as shy as I think I am.
Merlin: You need to get back in there.
Merlin: You need to walk in there and you say, look, what exactly the fuck is going on in here?
Merlin: You need to go into the wet tea house and just part the man buns and get in there and say, who's in charge of this joint and what exactly the fuck is going on here?
John: Okay, so here's what happened last week.
John: I'm sitting in my podcast space.
John: I'm getting ready to record some vocals on these vocal tracks that I'm working on, which is a whole separate conversation.
John: This is my private, my normal private time in the art studio, right?
John: All the people that are there during the day go home.
John: And then the only people that are there at night are people working in the encaustic arts.
John: And so I can sing in my little wing and there's nobody else there.
John: No, you're not bothering anyone and nobody's randomness is getting on your track.
John: That's right.
John: That's right.
John: There's nobody over there using a power tool.
John: And more importantly, I'm not bothering anybody.
John: If you come into the space at 9 p.m.
John: and you hear somebody singing, you recognize that you are the one who is arriving late.
John: You are the interloper.
John: Someone's there making music and that's their right.
John: Whereas if I'm singing at two o'clock in the afternoon and you're sitting at your computer doing graphic arts, it's within your rights to come over and knock on the door and say, seriously, what are you doing?
John: But so I'm in there.
John: I'm getting ready to lay down some vocal tracks.
John: And then all of a sudden I hear a band practicing.
Merlin: Oh, dear.
John: And this space is very much like no band practice.
John: I use my space to make music, but it is not a band practice.
Merlin: Is that understood, John, in terms of being there?
Merlin: This is not like a storage shed type situation.
John: That's one of the things they say right when you walk in, like no band practice.
John: And so what I realize is I go down the hall, put my ear to the door,
John: And I realized that this is a situation where the man buns have now colonized this space within the tea operation where they have no connection to any of the art people there.
John: They are now, they're two layers of being a tenant away from ever having spoken.
John: to anybody involved in the building, and someone at the T-joint has said either, yes, you can band practice here, or what I really suspect is one of the man buns has a key, and he's like, you know what, there's nobody down there after nine.
Merlin: It's an off-the-books kind of operation.
Merlin: That's right.
John: And so I'm not somebody who's going to pound on the door during a band practice, even if it's one that I am pouring scorn
John: through the door at them.
Merlin: Did you get a sense of what kind of music?
Merlin: I know it's not relevant necessarily, but did you get a sense of what kind of music they're playing?
John: It felt like there was a person in there that could actually play the guitar.
John: I was impressed by that.
Merlin: Was it more jammy or like Trans Am?
John: No, no.
John: It actually kind of felt like an amalgam of some sort of hard rock plus...
John: Lumineers-style stomp folk.
John: You know, it's one of these things where nobody has any jumping off points, so it's just a mishmash.
Merlin: Is that one of those modern songs where everyone kind of does a chanty thing on it?
John: Yeah, they all say, hey.
Merlin: Like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
John: It's all like a post-Mumford music.
John: Oh, dear.
John: It's pre-Mumford and post-Mumford.
John: Yeah.
John: And I think really it was that band from Canada, from Montreal, that started it all.
John: The one that David Byrne and David Bowie, all the Davids.
Merlin: Oh, was that Vampire Weekend?
John: uh no that they came after uh then they had a different style the one from uh the one from uh from montreal where they were waving flags on stage and somebody had a typewriter and oh no i know who you mean the uh i know who you mean the uh yeah they play drums on their heads
John: Yeah, and somebody's got a horn and somebody else has a horn.
John: Arcade fire.
John: Arcade fire.
Merlin: Yeah, and they do a lot of that.
John: Stomp, stomp, typewriter, typewriter, honk.
John: And then David Byrne comes out and is like, I like this.
John: And everybody goes, I'll buy it.
John: You know, it's like LCD sound system where there's a collective feeling like this is the thing.
John: Yes.
John: And then everybody buys it and celebrates it.
John: People said that about Falco.
you
John: Right?
John: That's right.
John: So Arcade Fire is the Falco.
John: Arcade Fire is going to make Falco look like the Velvet Underground.
John: Did I ever tell you that I was on tour in Canada with opening for the tour of Not a Surf and Death Cab for Cutie and after the show some French Canadians came up and handed me a CDR
John: and said we really loved your show and i can't even do a french accent anymore it's been so long since i've been out of the united states i can't even do any of my accents yeah but then they came up we love the show and they handed me the cdr and it was the arcade fire oh come on really and yeah and i'm and then two years later they're the biggest band in the world yeah and i was like
John: I had that feeling of proximity to success where I was like, oh.
John: Yeah, you're Rory Storm.
Merlin: I don't know.
John: I don't know if these kids are going to catch on.
John: Yeah, this is the problem when you are that proximate to success, right?
John: If you were like Ev Williams' college roommate, it's not like it matters, right?
John: You can't say –
John: Oh, you're going to be successful, and so I want to be your wingman or something.
John: Like I couldn't have in that moment said, Arcade Fire, I would like to invest my current net worth, which is 40 Long Winters t-shirts and a box of kazoos –
John: I would like to get in early and buy 30% of your business for this nominal fee, right?
John: Like the graffiti artist at the Facebook campus that ended up being worth $200 million because they gave him 0.1% of the company instead of paying him $5,000 to graffiti their office.
John: I couldn't do that with the Arcade Fire and say, here's a box of Long Winters t-shirts that you don't want or need.
John: But now I own 30% of your operation.
John: People tried to do that to me back in the day.
John: Like, I took some band photos for you, and so rather than get paid the $500 that it cost, I would like 20% of the Western State Hurricanes.
John: That's complicated.
John: That's a complicated arrangement.
John: It was very complicated.
John: Anyway, so it's all post-Arcade Fire, post-Mumford & Sons, Stomp Rock.
John: And I'm hearing this through the door of the tea parlor.
John: And let me tell you, Merlin, I sent some emails.
Merlin: Oh, did you go right back to your Garrett and send some emails?
Merlin: That's right.
Merlin: I went all the way to the top.
Merlin: You closed out logic.
Merlin: You shut it all down, back it up.
Merlin: Time to write some emails.
John: That's right.
John: I sent a letter to the mayor's office.
John: I sent a letter to the governor.
John: I sent a letter to Elon Musk.
John: And I said, this will not stand.
John: CC Elon Musk.
John: Say, this will not stand.
John: I have suffered through these non-nodding mad buns enough.
John: I want this whole operation shut down.
John: I want all these people out of the building.
John: And it's going to be rats leaving a sinking ship, and I don't know where they're going to go.
Merlin: I bet they won't even say goodbye, John.
John: They won't say goodbye.
John: They won't give you a nod on the way out.
John: I will say, as I'm walking right past them, I'll turn and I'll say, farewell!
Merlin: I said good day, sir.
Merlin: Good day, sir.
Merlin: Did Elon Musk or the mayor get back to you?
Merlin: No.
John: Well, the mayor right now has complicated feelings about me.
John: And Elon Musk never replies to any of my emails.
Yeah.
John: Uh, and that, you know, that feels like, that feels like an insult because I feel like I should own 20% of what he does just based on the number of times I've mentioned him on this podcast.
Merlin: That's a good point.
Merlin: I, you know, there's a lot about this that doesn't exactly add up.
Merlin: I mean, there's the part that adds up, but first of all, like making tea, I don't know.
Merlin: Is that, you think it's a straight up business?
Yeah.
Merlin: Do you think it's a weed thing?
John: You'd smell it if it was a weed thing.
John: The thing is, weed's not illegal anymore in Seattle, so you don't have to mask it.
John: Oh, and now you've got to make tea.
John: Yeah, you can just manufacture weed all day and just be like, ha ha.
John: But no, I feel like people are trying to, like the photography guy, he's not satisfied.
John: People just aren't satisfied.
John: Right.
John: So he's like, I've got to start, I've got to start a separate operation.
John: It's going to be this tea company.
John: It's going to be like the man by wet tea.
John: Yeah.
Merlin: And then it's going to be in whole foods all around America.
Merlin: Here's the thing.
Merlin: That's this whole, this hanging me up a little bit.
Merlin: And, uh,
Merlin: I just know this mostly from watching TV and seeing things around town.
Merlin: But, you know, you got the whole, like, artisanal butcher thing.
Merlin: You got the small batch thing, right?
Merlin: You got the whole, like, guys who suddenly grew beards and started wearing plaid thing.
Merlin: I know this is already, like, a five or even ten-year-old trend, but that's a thing.
Merlin: And it's, you know, clearly there's this whole, like, locally sourced this, locally sourced that.
Merlin: The thing is, though, the thing that keeps a lot of those things going is that there's a huge...
Merlin: Somewhere between performative and transparent component to it.
Merlin: So on the one hand, there's the transparency of, no, I can tell you for sure that this pig came from down the block or that I know this is fair trade, you know, sparkling water or whatever.
Merlin: So there's that transparency part of it, right?
Merlin: But then there's also the performative part of it, where we want you to see us making—we want to give tours of where we make the whiskey.
Merlin: We want you to come in and be able to take classes on how to butcher a pig.
Merlin: There's a whole big part of this.
Merlin: What we don't want is some kind of, for the sake of argument, like a place that makes wet tea in an encaustic painting factory.
Merlin: That would be an unusual way to make an artisanal tea.
John: Oh, you're so right.
John: Why aren't they in a storefront?
Merlin: Why aren't there tours?
Merlin: Why are the bands practicing here?
Merlin: This feels like a jam-up.
John: Well, see, that's the thing.
John: They could be in a storefront.
John: They could be selling brass tea pipes.
John: And the man buns could all be behind a counter.
John: Then there'd be flames and stuff.
John: But they can't buy it because they won't acknowledge anyone.
John: But they wouldn't have to.
John: They could hire one personable person.
John: to stand at the front and be like, welcome to the tea shoppy.
John: And look behind me as the man buns all work the forge.
Merlin: They're like hipster Oompa Loompas.
Merlin: Talking is not their strong suit.
Merlin: They might sing a little bit when somebody dies, but apart from that, they're mostly just there to tend to the pipes.
Merlin: Exactly.
John: Somebody gets zooped up into a television set, and the man buns all go, doop, doop, tea.
John: Wet tea, wet tea, where did you go?
John: Yeah, I feel like that's, it is a missed opportunity.
John: And I don't, maybe it is that the San Franciscization of Seattle hasn't been, isn't complete yet.
John: I think of it as a, you know, obviously the joke still being like a Portland thing.
Merlin: People take that super seriously.
Merlin: And, but, so, but the weird part is, so there's the one thing of like, okay, let's add value by doing something, something, repackaging tea.
Merlin: There's that part.
Merlin: But then the whole, like, they're making like tubs of tea to sell somewhere is weird.
John: The whole operation stinks, but I can't find anything about it that's illegal except for the band practice.
John: I feel what's illegal about it is that it's aesthetically illegal.
John: If they would just nod, how hard is it to nod?
John: If they nodded, maybe I'd be their best friend.
John: Maybe I would buy a fucking jug of tea a week.
John: You know, a jug of tea a week.
Merlin: That could be their slogan.
Merlin: Oh, see, that's good.
Merlin: They could use that, but they're never even going to get to hear that because they won't even acknowledge you.
John: Yeah.
John: I mean, I have a friend in San Francisco who is co-owner of a restaurant.
John: It's a brew pub.
John: Sorry, brew pub.
John: A brew pub's different from a gastropub?
John: Yeah, well, absolutely, because this is a brew pub where they also give lessons in home brewing.
John: So it's more of a brew resource.
John: Hmm.
John: Brew Resource Pub.
John: Brew Resource.
John: And when they were talking about opening this thing, this is the modern day, right?
John: They put up a Kickstarter or some kind of crowdfunding thing.
John: They sent it out to the neighborhood and they said, don't you want a brew pub in your neighborhood?
John: You guys right now living in this neighborhood without a brew pub?
John: Who's with me?
John: Who's with me?
John: And they raised the money to open the brew college, the brew pub college.
John: Through crowdfunding around the neighborhood.
John: So it's like – but it's the neighborhood.
Merlin: That's such a different way of handling it.
Merlin: My goodness.
John: The neighborhood doesn't directly profit from it.
John: They profit from it by having now an interesting thing in their neighborhood.
John: But it's this idea of like collectively why don't we open – collectively why don't you help us open this thing that will profit for us?
John: but you'll reap the benefits of having your neighborhood smell like cooked tomatoes or whatever that smell is when beer is brewing.
John: It smells like tomato soup.
Merlin: Oh, right.
Merlin: Beer brewery has a very distinctive – I think it must be hops.
Merlin: It's the hops.
Merlin: It's a high –
John: tangy smell i remember going to bush gardens as a kid i mean you never forget that smell yeah if it were me and i got a and i got a flyer under my door that said go to our kickstarter and help us fund our brew pub in your neighborhood i would start an alternate kickstarter send me the money to keep this brew pub from happening because i don't like the smell of tomatoes i call it a i call it a kick stomper it should be a way a kick stomper it's a way where you go in and you basically pay to have something not happen
John: A kickstomper sounds like how Mumford & Sons funded their first show.
John: Yeah, it's like, exactly.
John: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
John: One and four, one and four.
John: Kickstomp it.
John: Kickstomp it.
John: Kickstomp the shit out of that brew.
John: Make it viral.
John: I don't want... The thing is, is there anything worse than homebrewers?
John: And I know I'm going to get a lot of letters now because I feel like there are a lot of beardos listening to this program that are also making growlers full of their own beer.
Merlin: Making growlers.
John: But when you stand around in a group of homebrewers...
John: It's like if a bunch of farmers from the 30s were on a space station, the level of – a bunch of farmers in a small cafe in a town of 2,500 people –
John: That level of conversation, but on a spaceship, that's what I feel like being in a group of homebrewers is like.
John: Because it's both very retro and also very unnecessary.
John: Very specialized.
John: But transported to a world in which future shock is...
John: is a big component of it, right?
John: We are making our own homebrew now for some reason because of this, because we have created an alternate future.
John: We have gone back in time and we have created a world in which cowboys had rocket ships because of steampunk.
John: And now we're living in a world where we don't need to buy beer because we can pay 40 times as much to make it ourselves.
John: We can spend 40 times as much to have the inconvenience of making it ourselves.
John: And it feels like I'm on a spaceship made out of steam tubes.
John: And I don't have – there's no point of entry for me.
John: I did not want – I did not want cowboy brass rockets.
John: I do not want homemade beer.
John: And I don't want to live in a future where the present was homemade beer and artisanal teas because what I'm imagining is that it's going to create a future –
John: Where the 2040s going to make the 2010s look like the 1860s that didn't happen.
John: That's a lot to process.
John: And I'm still trying to figure it out, too.
John: I live in an exurb.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: I'm waiting for the first group of engineers to come out here and take over our community center.
John: And I'll be there celebrating my new squid overlords.
John: But I'm trying to figure out how I can get 20% of the company.
Merlin: Yeah.
Merlin: I think you got to take a whole party down there.
Merlin: You got to take a group down there.
Merlin: Can you get common cause with anybody else in the building who doesn't like these T-bonners?
John: Well, they're artists, right?
John: So they're all suffering from a case of the shies.
Merlin: Yeah.
John: Nobody wants any confrontation.
John: And that's why I sent those emails instead of pounding on the door and saying, who the fuck are you?
John: Yep, yep.
John: And waving a copy of my rental agreement.
Yeah.
John: You know, I don't want to be that guy.
John: No.
John: Because everybody else is in their space, you know, like painting with a screwdriver.
John: And nobody wants any problem with anybody, let alone a bunch of skinny man buns.
John: But...
John: But there should be a movement, and maybe, you know, maybe I'll have a march with the mayor at the head of it.
John: Elon Musk is there on a hoverboard, and we're marching through the streets saying, take your reprehensible culture out to the exurbs.
Merlin: You could also take what you learned from being so steeped in hip-hop culture.
Merlin: You bring your crew.
Merlin: Like, you bring all of your like-minded people.
John: Like, you bring your posse.
John: And we'll have a dance-off.
LAUGHTER
Merlin: That's exactly it.