This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John is a lonely orphan doe, referring to MC Frontalot asking John to sing on his album, but John, the lonely orphan doe, was waiting until the last minute to do it although he was excited about it.

The show title refers to products not having a high quality anymore and lasting a long time, but being built for now.

Today it is not too early, it is medium early.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Having many things to do (RL107)

During the time they have been doing this podcast John’s life has been transformed from one that had no schedule of any kind to one that has a moving target schedule that is happening all around him, coalescing in space, crystalizing out of the solution, but he is still John Travolta as The Boy in the Plastic Bubble: He is not really touching the atmosphere. Merlin has been in that bubble and he has put his hands up against it.

When Merlin had a job, there was some sense that he had to go to his job between 8am and 5pm, but now although he does almost nothing he has an infinite number of things to do. The other night after dinner he got three things done, which is like a month of work, but the dopamine hit from that lasts 3 minutes before he instantly goes back into the mode of: ”Oh my God, there is so much stuff I should be doing!” He has a list of 50 things to talk to John about and they don’t have to talk about any of them, but they could, and that makes all the difference.

John has a gig tonight where he is required to do 5 minutes, but it is still a thing that he has to do. He has to get there, stand around, do his gig, stand around some more. He also got a couple of emails today, like: ”Remember that thing that we talked about a month ago? It is due now!” and a couple of more emails where a week ago he promised to get something to some people and they were holding, waiting for his part of it.

There is an almost infinite number of things that Merlin could do for almost no money that might turn into something, and there are all these little micro-things that take 5 minutes to do, but it takes him a month to get it done.

MC Frontalot wanting John to sing on his album (RL107)

MC Frontalot communicated with John 2-3 months ago and said that he wants John to sing on his record (probably on the track Chisel Down), and he sent him everything John could possibly need, like the lyrics, the track he had made, the idea he had in mind, he gave him the entire deck of cards to make it simple and fun to do, and it made John feel like he would be able to do that in an afternoon, but many afternoons have gone under the great spirit in the sky, and here John is, lonely orphan doe, and has still not done it.

Frontalot is a good enough dude that he is not an email hassler, he is not giving John any grief about it but he probably has a contingency plan where he might have sent it to someone else instead. John really wants to do it, he is excited about it and he likes that man very much. Merlin warns John that he might be up against Colin Meloy or Bon Iver, which is the one guy that can trump Colin Meloy in his drop-an-octave-and-say-his-name Sweepstake.

Weather in Seattle (RL107)

It is a beautiful day in John’s neighborhood and he was out in the yard, poking around, living the Life of Riley and he can’t complain and is completely unsympathetic. Merlin had a wonderful 90-minute phone call, but he is exhausted, he got up, laid in bed, looked at Twitter, made a coffee, had a shower, came to work, diddled around, it took it out of him, and John is exhausted by just listening to what Merlin did.

John locking himself out of his office while his daughter is with him (RL107)

John had a meeting yesterday at his new office space with The Roderick Group which now numbers 5 people. He brought his daughter and at one point they had to go to the potty and although John checked the door knob as they were leaving his room when they came back the door had locked itself and his keys and phone were in there, he couldn’t even go to the emergency location because his car keys were in there. They ended up playing in the hall of the office building for a couple of hours while they waited for the rest of the people to arrive, the staff of The Roderick Group.

John searched through his wallet, looking for the exact stiffness of a card needed to jimmy a lock. He doesn’t have the old kind of laminated driver’s license anymore, but he has an enhanced executive driver’s license that is a hard brittle plastic card. He also didn’t want to use his credit card because he uses it 50 times a day and he doesn’t want to be standing there locked out of his office and his credit card broken in half. All the new cards he has received are all either made out of paper-thing cardboard or they are hard brittle plastic and not flexible enough to fit into the door jam.

John couldn’t believe that in an overfilled wallet he didn’t have a single card to jimmy a door, which made him mad and he felt like he doesn’t have a small bag packed. Sometimes in those situations he decides that the adequate punishment is going to be to sit on a cold linoleum floor for an hour. He doesn’t have any phone number memorized anymore and there is not a phone in this building, he doesn’t even deserve linoleum, he should be sitting in the rain and the only reason he is not is because his daughter was there with him as a shield against the anger he was feeling against himself.

Although he thought he was completely opaque and wasn’t projecting anything, at one point his daughter said to him: ”Daddy, don’t feel anxiety!” - ”Thank you, little empath!” There are so many levels of sad to that!

The Roderick Group started to trickle in and not only were they locked out, but John had the only key because it had ”Do not duplicate” on it and the member who was trying to get the key duplicated was thwarted and they gave John the one key and he nutty-professored it. They were wondering what to do until the assistant of the assistant manager, sergeant at arms Bailey McCann, disappeared around the corner and five minutes later she came back and said that she had picked the lock.

John was unprepared, she was not, and as he becomes crazier and less useful he is magnetically surrounding himself with office ninjas and doesn’t even need to carry lockpicks anymore but has a lockpicker on staff. The fact that he didn’t carry a lockpicking kit himself not only surprised Merlin as he heard it, but it surprised himself. As he came home he took all of the ID cards from the local swimming pool and the ID card for the local community college that he basically signed up for just to get a student discount so he could buy a new Mac laptop which in the end only was $50 off because the 20% they were talking about was only for desktop computers and we are Apple, so take it or leave it!

John complaining about Apple online (RL107)

John got a couple of tweets yesterday from a guy saying that he doesn’t understand why John is complaining so much about Apple products online when all he needed to do was go to the Apple Store and they will fix it for free. Why is he complaining instead of seeking solutions? John wrote five versions of: ”FUCK YOU!” to this guy, but didn’t send any of them. Merlin saw John expressing his frustration about Apple yesterday and he had to close his computer and didn’t even want to see the kind of replies John was going to get. John had been using the phrase: ”They should be ashamed of themselves!”

Somebody else told him that nobody monitors the @apple account and John doesn’t even need to try to reach someone, except millions of people who like to yell at people like John. John is not even demanding satisfaction, but Twitter is his place, not your place.

John will have to make an appointment with some geniuses at the bar that is going to be two days out at their convenience, not his, he will be able to pick between three times, and they will take his phone in the back and the first thing they are going to say is that it once gotten wet and all of his warranties are void. John just wants his phone to work, and he wants a letter from the US State Department where they are sorry that every war they waged since World War II has been a complete fucking disaster. John is not even asking for reparations, but just for a simple grown-up apology.

Trying to open a business account at Chase Bank (RL107)

John and his mom went down to Chase Bank the last few days, trying to set up a business account with five different credit card and everything, and they met some manager who said this was all very easy, but he didn’t know what he was doing and although the other people in the bank were deferential to his managerial status it turned out he was a manager in training. He doesn’t know what he is doing, but he is the person in authority, the buck-lieutenant who is out in the jungle with his fucking helmet on backwards and he is calling in a fucked-up fire mission and he is getting his own guys hit with howitzer shells.

He screwed up this thing so badly and by the second day John’s mom said she didn’t want to deal with these people anymore although one of the core principles in this family is that they punish companies that do bad jobs, even if this doubles their own effort, even if they have to fall on their sword and never get a bank account, they are not going to do business with Chase that has screwed this up so badly.

John’s mom is of the type who says not to complain to the waiter because he will spit in your food, and she said that the guy at the bank had all her information now, but if this banker had some retribution against them, they would be in a position that John always wanted, where they could legitimately send their family attorney Byron D. Coney, the 80-year old pit-bull of Washington on a corporation!

When John was in his 20s Byron would sometimes offer him to go for a ride in his Jaguar and once they got out John would realize that Byron was serving people with papers and he would give the papers to John and tell him to ring the door bell and ask for Frank Jones because they would expect anything because John looked like a Grunge Rocker, like a bike messenger, and as the guy would come to the door he would give them their blue papers.

Byron is the guy you want on your team although he is now in his 80s, but he is still a ferocious guy, and John has always wanted to have an actual reason to go after some company like Chase with a million lawyers because Byron is underused. He has a pair of glasses on top of his head, a paid of glasses on his nose, and a pair of glasses on a chain around his neck, and he would file papers all day long!

John convinced his mom that they are going to punish Chase by taking their business to another bank, one that is just as reprehensible. Unfortunately there is not an other Apple unless you count all the other phone companies. Merlin wants Apple to do what they are good at, which is make shit that works. He has been the one standing at the gate and saying to other people: ”No, you guys don’t get it!” when they say: ”You can get this thing for a nickel over here, you can get a free phone!” - ”You get free soup! Merlin watched that last night. You got a jew over here! Not me, not me, I do not like racial intolerance”

Companies no longer caring about customer satisfaction, bad-quality products (RL107)

Young people have never lived in a world where the expectation of businesses that were providing you with a good or service was that they did it right the first time, it was a well-made thing they stood behind, and their customer service philosophy was that the customer is always right, ”What can we do to make it right now?”, and in the rare occasion that something goes wrong everybody stops what they are doing and tries to fix the problem as fast as they can because they value their reputation which is predicated on your satisfaction.

There are now maybe even two generations of people who have never experienced life in that world and who have grown up in a world where everything is disposable, and where the mentality is that companies are just going to keep pushing stuff out and if they lose 20% of their customers to dissatisfaction, then 20% more are going to be lining up at the door to buy the garbage that they are putting out there, and the 20% they lost are going to go across the street to another shit company that is churning out garbage and they are just going to bounce back and forth because all they are interested in is what is cheapest.

You can see the same effect everywhere, like for example restaurants. One place near Merlin recently reopened and even before they were open they had already 3 positive Yelp reviews talking about what an amazing place that is.

Or you can see it with shoes, they never got cheaper, they still cost $150, but you don’t repair them anymore but the idea is that you wear them for a year or two and then you dump them. John has shoes that are 50 years old that he bought vintage 25 years ago, he paid to have them resoled, and he still wears them. John recognizes that he is an old man and that this is an archaic way of thinking, but he cannot describe how much better these shoes feel.

New shoes are stone-washed already, broken in already, they are comfortable, light-weight, and fashionable-looking with blue crepe-soles and they are made of suede and they feel like slippers, and you run around in them, but as soon as you get a stain on them or as soon as the thread starts to unravel there is nothing you can do to fix them. John has a pair of boots and as he stepped on a sharp thing it cut through all the way to his sock and because of their construction they are unrepairable, you can’t take any portion of it and change it, you can’t even put a new sole on it. It is built for now.

John is still living in a Red Wing-based dream-state where you buy a pair of boots that you are going to hand down to your grandson. A lot of their listeners understand what John and Merlin are saying, but they don’t have the fundamental feeling in their heart that their role as consumer of things traditionally was a position of power. You were the buyer and the buyer had the power of choice and the power to reject bad products, it was the myth of American capitalism. Merlin still has a bright-red windbreaker that his dad bought in 1970.

Our relationship with brands has changed, see John’s story with North Face (see Demanding Satisfaction) In the past people would use those products to actually do stuff where the weather might change and they might have to make do, and that stuff was made for this kind of wear and tear, whereas today people align themselves with brands based on the way the logo looks until you find out that somebody on the board was against gay marriage and then you look for another logo that more comports with how you feel about the world.

A lot of it has to do with amazing marketing over the last 100 years. You are a Hunt’s or a Heinz family, you were a Coke or a Pepsi family. Kevin Horning’s mom would not drink Coke even if a truck backed up and gave her a lifetime supply of Coke for free. Merlin would not pass a ”Pepsi challenge” for most things, but he knows the difference between Coke, Pepsi, and RC.

Being always ready, keeping a small bag packed (RL107)

Literally every single time John walks out of the door, he thinks: ”What if I never come back? What if this is the last time I walk out of this door?” for whatever reason, because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. If you walk out of the house in your flip flops and you draw-string shorts, what if that just happens to be the day when everything come unravelled for whatever reason, and then you are out there in the world with your flip flops and your draw-string shorts and you have to make it from that point forward, you are the person huddled up in a drainage culvert and this would be hard even in shoes and pants, but you have made it additionally difficult because now the first thing you have to do is go find some shoes.

This is the premise behind keeping a small bag packed and behind having that bag in you car, and behind having a lock-pick in your wallet. You can never know where the soft spots in your scheme are unless you are always probing them. If you have a house full of survival gear, it is going to really benefit whatever mutants end up colonizing your house because you are living in a culvert somewhere! The premise of readiness is that you need to always be ready and for John it is a fun game that is not based on paranoia because our systems largely work.

If John were in a wheelchair the world would look very different. He would have a motorized wheelchair, but he would never use the motor and he would be pushing against the additional weight of the motorized wheelchair all the time. Still, he would want the motor to be there in case he needed it. That would probably require that wheelchairs be redesigned. Wheelchair design seems like a really unexplored area. If should be a place for startups. Why has Elon Musk not built the uber-wheelchair? The precursor to the Segway was this amazing wheelchair that could lift you up in the air. Also, how many people do you see on Rascal Scooters because they just don’t want to walk? It is a huge untapped market!

John’s vision of the future being inspired by Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, jumpsuits (RL107)

The other day John had an insight about a business he does actually want to get into: The TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century with Erin Gray really influenced his idea of what the future was going to look like, in particular two things: Whenever there was a gathering of people, whenever they were meeting a new culture, they danced in a circle holding ribbons with one another while somebody played the weird synthesizer oboe, which is the best way to say: ”We are not a threat!” John has yet to see that be part of Hipster culture, but it could be next.

The other thing is jumpsuits and unitard outfits. John’s orange flight-suit was a big part of his pre-teen / early teen years (see RW137). The onesie is the one thing of the 1970s that has not been re-introduced initially ironically and then earnestly, but there is nothing better! You can make them out of sweat pant material, out of fleece, out of anything! Half the population have just surrendered and they believe that everyone in the world should see their asscrack if it makes them 1% more comfortable on an airplane (see RL105), it is their right as an American.

A large percentage of the youth population and people who live in John’s circle have gone all the way to a new era of fashion that is so form-fitting and tailored that it cannot possibly be comfortable under any circumstances. The stove-pipe pants and the super-tight shirts and the really tailored jacked are close-fitting everything to the nth power, and unless you are spending $6000 on a suit you are wearing some ludlow off-the-rack J.Crew suit and you are just barely holding it together and you are definitely not going over a fence in that outfit.

Unitards, boiler suits, and jumpsuits of all kinds make our mind leap to the image of someone at a Fury convention in a suit that their grandmother made that is a lion with little polyester pills from having been washed so many times to get all the semen and santorum out of it, but it doesn’t have to be that! John’s unitard idea is to make it out of modern comfortable fabrics that people love so much, but we tailor it so that it is very becoming, you can put a row of double-breasted buttons on it, you can put a little patch that says: ”Gone fishing” on it, it is a movable feast, you can put epaulettes on it, you can put a foe belt, some of them have bell-bottoms, some of them are pegged, some of them side-zip, some of them middle-zip.

We need to get ahead of this comfort-style division! Jump-suits appeal to the jammy crowd, they appeal to the cosplay crowd, to the fashion people crowd, and it absolutely appeals to the vision of the future that John had as a kid, where everybody was coordinated and sleek. It is in keeping with the increasing militarism in our society where everybody is in a uniform of various sizes and shapes. 15-20 years ago nobody would have expected to see co-eds with tramp-stamps walking around in suede slippers. Jumpsuits are democratic and not costly to make, and you can custom-make them, like if you want a back-flap.

The girl with the Nike swoosh tattoo (RL107)

Back in the 1990s all the gals in Seattle, particularly the lesbian ones, were all wearing wife-beater T-Shirts on hot summer days. All the girls who loved girls switched to white-colored Frank Norton (?) style tank top T-shirts at a certain day in the summer, and that was what they were wearing. It might still be true, but John is less up on contemporary lesbian summer fashion.

One day John was sitting outside a bar called the Wildrose, the women-who-love-women-bar, and there was a gal sitting at the table next to him with a big Nike swoosh tattoo on her shoulder. Since that time John has seen thousands of instances where people put sportswear logos tattooed on their body, but this was the first time he had even seen it and it took him a minute to fathom that this really was a Nike swoosh and not some kind of Rorschach Test. He did not know what she meant by that! The brand is meant to differentiate this pair of shoes from that pair of shoes, but to put it on your skin?

Neighborhood stick fights about brand-affiliation (RL107)

As the years go by, what are the great brands? Nike, Apple, Levi’s, Coke, also Judaism, Christianity, the moon of Islam, the American flag is a killer brand, the Hammer and Sickle of the Soviet Union is a great brand that is being underutilized right now, the rising sun flag of the Japanese in World War II is a great brand. Ultimately the Swastika was an amazing brand. In the future eventually there is going to be a situation where the Nike-people and the Christians have some beef with each other.

Right now the religious brands are all in contention with each other and we are increasingly seeing religious brands attached to national brands. If someone from the Middle-East thinks of the United States they think of the American flag and they are subconsciously attaching Christianity to that brand, and even though there is no cross on the American flag that is what they are seeing. It is a misunderstanding, but maybe in some ways a hyper-understanding of it. When we look at the Arabic script we are also seeing the half-moon of Islam.

These brands are going to start bleeding into one another. The Israeli-flag with a star of David on that powder-blue is an amazing brand, and when that starts getting attached to commercial products as these ideas start to blend into each other we are going to have an international league of neighborhood stick fights with people in unitards with these various brands: The Hammer and Sickles against the Maytag Washing Machines at the giant stick fight league, the different jumpsuits are going to have different colors with different patches and brands on them like Nascar racers.

This is going to be the United Nations of the future: We are resolving these things on the game field, and there is a certain amount of dead and mayhem involved to satisfy our human blood lusts, but really it is going to be brand against brand, and John wants to get in on the ground floor of those jumpsuits.

Now there are Ralph Lauren shirts where the polo pony takes up a quarter of the front of the shirt. It is the genius of branding where they made it so big so that people would think it is fresh, and now you can see from space what brand of shirt you are wearing. Eventually that polo pony no longer needs to be attached to something as small as a shirt, what matters is not the garment, but what matters is the polo pony. You could put it on a jumpsuit that was manufactured by anybody!

The little brown hands in China that are making Nike shoes are the same ones that are making Adidas shoes, it is not like really the product itself has any differentiation at all, but it is just the swoosh vs the stripes, and eventually they will figure out a way to just sell you the swoosh and dispense with this stupid business of manufacturing garbage shoes that blow away in a year, but they find a way to just sell you the brand. Your jumpsuit is going to be immaterial, but what matters is that you paid $100, $1000, or $100.000 to have Bugatti on your suit. It is the licensing of the brand that you paid for!

You no longer need to bother with stupid manufacturing of stuff and shipping it back and forth across the oceans on giant ships, but we can go back to a situation where locally there is some dumb mill churning out unitards one after another and then you customize them with your own brands: a Star of David, a BMW logo, a Filson thing across the middle, your favorite porn actress, whom you voted for in the last election, all in a Nascar patchwork, and everybody out in the world knows where you stand and for whom you are rooting for in the upcoming stickfight.

You could also lease those logos for a certain amount of time and when you go to a big party you can fork out the money to have your unitard switch to Louis Vitton branding head to toe for the next hour and a half, and at the stroke of midnight is going to turn back into an Arco suit.

John wants to get in on the ground floor of this so he can profit from it. To produce a rough white unitard is not expensive, they could be doing that in Washington State right now and the only reason they are not is that they got convinced that we don’t want a locally made thing, but it needs to say Ralph Lauren on it and therefore it needs to be shipped across the ocean. It is ridiculous, people don’t even give a fuck about the product, they just want the logo, and it is just schlepping!

Those brands deserve our respect, they have done an amazing job building that brand, why are we forcing them to continue to make things and schlepp them around? As long as they are compensated through appropriate licensing agreements it is good for everybody. This is where drones come in!