Episode 114: A TC Hangout
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Transcript
Time Crisis in a Time of Crisis.
In a FaceTime of Crisis.
We reunite with the crew and some very special guests to talk about everything from Starbucking
to COVID-19.
But of course, even in these troubled times, we take a moment to dive into the tasteful
palette of the 1970s and some of that old wisdom.
This is a Weekly.
Time Crisis with Ezra King.
B-B-B-Beast.
One.
They passed me by, all of those great romances.
They were a threat, robbing me of my rightful chances.
But picture clear, everything seemed so easy.
And so I dealt to the blow, one of us had to go.
Now it's different, I want you to know.
One of us is crying, one of us is lying.
Leave the lonely man.
Time Crisis, back once again.
So this is now our third Time of Crisis, Time Crisis.
Meaning three weeks of lockdown.
Can you believe that the first time we did it, we were actually thinking about getting in the studio.
Right.
You had a slight fever.
Yeah, I had a slight fever for a few days and just wasn't feeling so hot.
What came of that?
It passed, it subsided.
It has subsided!
It felt a little bit crazy at the time to make that call two weeks ago to say, "Hey, I think we should FaceTime."
But that was like right, I think that was like a Wednesday or a Thursday that we were taping that week.
And it was like right on the day when things really started to change.
Yeah, I remember, it might have been earlier in the week, but I remember the last time I even considered like doing something.
She's come up a lot on this show, Kelly Reichardt, my friend asked me if I want to go see her new movie, First Cow.
And whatever it was, it was like early in that week.
It must have been before I went to Florida for that festival, but or maybe I just gotten back actually.
Either way, it was right on the cusp of being like, well, a movie theater.
It's not a very crowded place for like a daytime showing of something.
Although for all I know, you know, LA is an industry town.
Maybe the 1 p.m. show of the First Cow were jammed.
But I was like, yeah, maybe.
And it's also that funny feeling when someone suggests something to you.
I often assume that people are like more rational than me.
So, you know, somebody else is like, "Oh, yeah, let's go see a movie."
You're like, "Oh, okay, people are still seeing movies. Cool."
But then at some point I was like, "Yeah, I think I planted the seed of doubt."
I was like, "Yeah, you're right. It won't be crowded.
And if it's really crowded, we could dip."
And they're like, "Oh, really? You think things are going to get that weird?"
And I was like, "I don't know."
And then I was like, "We could just take a hike."
And then we took a hike instead.
And that was the last time I did something.
That must have been like two and a half weeks ago now.
Yeah.
I bailed on my sister-in-law's birthday the night before we did the first FaceTime crisis.
And I felt bad about that at the time. It seemed extreme.
But looking back, it was like, "Okay, that was the right thing to do."
That brings us up to now, the third time of crisis, time crisis.
Things have been locked down, Jake. Have you been back to Home Depot lately?
I've been zooming by. I should do another drive-by tomorrow. Check it out.
I was talking to a friend today who went to Home Depot this evening.
Yeah?
And they've basically taped off the area so when you're in line, you're basically in your quarantine zone.
So you can't step over the tape to keep people six feet apart.
All right. Good.
Is that in line to get into the building or is that cashing out?
I can't imagine they've got a line out to build it yet.
But maybe they do. But it's certainly cashing out that you have your quarantine zone.
We've seen these images from around the country. I'm sure you guys have seen some of them.
There's one I saw on Twitter of delivery people all jammed outside of this restaurant, Carbone, in New York,
which is a great restaurant. It's expensive. It's a bougie restaurant.
They famously have a $70 veal parm.
Have we ever talked about the $70 veal parm on the show?
Is that a favorite of Ariana Grande's?
Yeah, I know we've talked about veal parm.
It's the type of place that you're often taken out to eat at in the showbiz.
People are like, "Oh, it's at Carbone." It's a fun Italian restaurant.
But the veal parm, I've seen it. It's this giant piece of veal. It's very large.
I think there's something about veal already rubs people the wrong way.
I'm surprised it's served in a fancy, bougie restaurant where people have a pretty liberal sensibility.
I don't think the anti-veal lobby really made all that much of a dent.
Definitely a lot of places have banned foie gras.
I think because there was a lot of emphasis put on the fact that to get this pate thing, they have to really force-feed a goose.
So then you're picturing something being tortured.
I imagine for the average meat-eater, when they think about veal,
somebody's saying, "They're killing a baby cow."
I bet maybe the average person is like, "Yeah, alright."
Maybe that's better than raising a cow to die later. Who knows?
I'm not condoning it. You know that I have strong sympathies with the vegans and the animal rights activists.
I think it's also that the baby cow is kept in a confined space.
Is that part of veal? That the cow can't have a good life?
Something to do with the muscles. You want to keep the muscles tender.
This is a gross conversation, but we're giving that baby a great life.
We made sure that the baby cow had an extra bad life to make sure that your $70 veal parm is extra tender.
I've taken a walk to an African park one day
I saw a sign say the animals have the right of way
Wildlife, whatever happened to
Wildlife, the animals in the zoo
Clearly, this is an image of a bunch of underpaid, although hopefully not underpaid,
anybody who can afford it, if you're ordering anything from the outside world these days,
you've got to be cranking that tip up to minimum 25%.
I think 20%, a lot of people say, "Well, that's what you do at a restaurant."
But I feel like with delivery stuff, what's the lowest option they give you on those apps? Usually 10%?
Which is kind of insulting. It's like, why? Come on.
That'd be maybe a cool move on the part of what are these places called? Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub,
Caviar,
Chow Now,
DoorDash.
If you can afford to order in, you can afford to give a big fat tip.
So anyway, picture this. This image that people are seeing.
A fancy restaurant in New York City, already known as the city of the house and the have-nots.
A bunch of people jammed together, no rhyme or reason, no six-foot organizational thing happening.
Just a bunch of delivery people jammed outside, waiting to pick up piping hot $70 veal parms.
So gnarly.
Which now I'm learning they specifically gave the baby cow a bad life to make it taste good.
I got to look this up.
So anyway, people are looking at this image like, "Good Lord."
And the first thing in my head, I was just thinking, "God, can't somebody... I know it's tough for restaurants.
Can't they hire somebody who... one of their employees that they probably are about to lay off and just be like,
'We'll give you a serious mask and a hazmat suit and you can just be in charge of crowd control outside for everybody's safety.'"
Yeah.
Everybody, six feet apart. I got four veal parms going out to Jake Longstreth.
If that's you, come get it. Everybody else, keep your distance.
Yeah, I'm just scanning the veal Wikipedia page, which is a kind of a bleak document, as you might imagine.
But yeah, they're housed in pens.
Because the better the life, the worse the veal?
Apparently.
This is something that a lot of people believe this about art as well.
The artist needs a very sh*tty life to produce the truly delicious, tender art.
You have to suffer.
You know, I saw on the New York Times today that Guitar Center is keeping some of their stores open, which is an essential service.
Interesting.
And people were going in and trying out guitars and then hanging them back up on the wall.
And it just seemed like a recipe for disaster.
I mean, I can see why they still... maybe people are still ordering music equipment.
I can imagine that for some people who aren't living too close to the bone and just worrying about their next meal,
maybe there's a few weekend warrior, kind of like lawyer type dads, accountants, kind of white collar people,
who are just like, "You know what? Working at home isn't half bad."
Just like going through documents and being like, "You know, now that I'm not commuting, I wouldn't mind maybe getting back into some guitar.
I've been meaning to... I mean, it's crossed my mind.
I kind of want to get some more equipment at the crib while I'm here all the time."
Is your stuff in storage somewhere?
You know, I got a little setup at home.
You know, all of our touring gear is... I don't even know.
Actually, all our touring gear for all I know might be in Argentina right now because that's where we were about to be.
Whoa.
I actually got an alert on my phone today that said, "Get ready for your flight to Buenos Aires."
I was like, "That's not happening."
Yeah, because they moved Lollapalooza to South America later in the year.
I can imagine why people want to still order musical equipment for sure, but yet to have the actual store open, that's kind of strange.
Yeah.
Well, Jake, how's your mental state?
It's pretty good.
We have a nice rhythm going at the house now.
Can't really complain in terms of how things are going.
I got to say, for me, I'm not stir-crazy, which I guess I wouldn't have guessed I would be.
I don't usually go stir-crazy.
I've lived in some real small rooms in my life from college and after college.
I've always been like, "I'm happy to chill for a while."
Yeah, so I don't find the stress of being in one place to be unbearable.
Although, I also got to extend sympathy to anybody who's just riding this one out solo.
That, I'm sure, is a different feeling.
If you're not with friends or family or loved ones, that's going to be a different feeling.
But yeah, the idea of just not leaving the house, I feel like if you told me I couldn't leave the house for a year,
I'd be like, "All right, I'm down with that."
What about you, Jake? If you're under house arrest?
True house arrest? You can't leave the house.
Yeah.
I can't go for a run, for instance.
I usually go for a run almost every day, which is nice because I get out, get some air, look at some trees, look at the light.
Okay, you can go in the backyard. You can be out in the air.
You just can't leave the premises.
I mean, I think I could do a year if I had to.
If I was literally under house arrest and it was like, "You have no choice in the matter,"
I think I could find my inner strength and composure to keep it together.
Even if somebody said I couldn't leave the house for three years, especially with the internet and stuff, I'd really be—
I think I could hold it down.
I don't know about the economics of it, but just mentally?
That would take some fortitude. Three years.
In this current quarantine situation, and certainly in a three-year situation,
what are you guys going to do about haircuts?
You see, when I brought it off air, you seemed not as concerned as I thought you'd be.
What is going to happen?
I'm not concerned about it at all.
I mean, I always get the most concerned about haircuts when I'm going to go on tour, doing something on TV,
because I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to look like a bum."
I care way less at home.
And then the small aspects of a haircut that really make me feel clean,
that's just a little bit of a buzz on the back of the neck, a little clean up over the ears.
I was talking to Rashida just today.
She gave herself a little trim. I don't know if she might have been doing her bangs or something.
She was like, "What are you going to do? You need help?"
And I was like, "Yeah, maybe. Maybe just a little bit here and there."
So I think that'll be sufficient.
What are you guys thinking?
I think I'm going to let it grow, to quote Mountain Bruce.
[Laughter]
♪ I am a rambling man ♪
♪ Me and the boys are a band on the run ♪
♪ When I am home with you ♪
♪ We sit in the shade of the tree ♪
♪ Lie back on the shady lawn ♪
♪ As the birds fly silent and free ♪
♪ We gotta let it grow ♪
♪ Give it time and a little sunlight ♪
♪ In this garden we build together ♪
♪ We gotta let it grow ♪
♪ We gotta let it grow ♪
♪ Whether these weeds are what we had planted ♪
♪ In this garden we build together ♪
♪ We gotta let it grow ♪
- Do you have long hair?
- I've had long hair a few times, yeah.
- What's the longest, your--
- Like shoulder length.
- Oh yeah, I can kind of picture you with that long hair.
Yeah.
- Last time I had long hair was like 14 or 15.
Like not that long ago.
- Have you ever had dreadlocks?
- Hell yeah, man, senior year of high school.
- Nice.
- It was such a sick look.
- No.
- I'm kidding.
(laughing)
I did have long hair my senior year of high school.
When I see photos of it, it looks so bad.
- I had very long hair towards the end of high school too.
- Really?
- Is that some kind of like rite of passage?
- Yeah, you're just like senior year, letting it grow, man.
(laughing)
It was very long, but my hair used to get,
maybe it still would if it was long,
but the longer it got, the more curly it would get.
- Like fro?
- Not really a fro, but like some pretty like big curls.
- Okay.
- As it would grow, like occasionally,
just depending on how it dried or the weather,
I might get like in the front,
like a big fat like sausage curl,
almost like a little girl from like the Victorian era
or something.
- Oh, okay.
- It would just turn out to grow just like,
I don't know, I think that is something, a sausage curl.
It didn't have that like long and straight look,
like kind of like metal dude,
but yeah, that's what I was working with.
And then when I went to college, I still had long hair.
And then at some point I just buzzed it.
- That'd be a tight look for her vampire going forward.
- Long hair again?
- As the band kind of, you know,
continues to develop its jam chops.
- Just get a little crunchier.
- You grow the hair out, stocks and socks.
- I mean, I've thought about that,
is that I don't think as the front man of this band,
I'm really on brand with my current haircut.
I was thinking that when we saw Pigeons playing ping pong
after Goose.
- Yeah.
- Although Goose is like pretty clean cut,
but Pigeons playing ping pong,
there's multiple people in that band
with just like serious hair.
- Yeah.
- Real curly, real long.
And honestly, it's a joy to watch on stage.
- Yeah, I don't think that's as much a thing anymore
with rock bands having the serious hair.
- No, remember what a big deal it was in the nineties
for Metallica to cut their hair?
I think it just doesn't mean anything now.
It used to be like this line in the sand.
- Right.
- You're long hair or you're not.
And I just don't think it means anything.
So if there was a band, like a couple of dudes had long hair,
it just doesn't like read any kind of way.
- No, I remember like in the nineties,
it'd be like, ooh, that band has short hair, crazy.
- Bunch of short hairs.
- Like, oh, Pavement.
The guys in Pavement have like short hair in like '92.
I was like, whoa, that's cool.
Like that's like an interesting vibe.
- Are you familiar with the Rasta phrase, bald head?
- No.
- There's a lot of like reggae songs,
including some Bob Marley that they use the phrase bald head
to describe like a non-Rasta,
often referred to in a derogatory way,
like a crazy bald head.
But I always thought it was funny too,
because it's like, it's not literally talking about
like a bald man.
It's kind of like any dude without locks
is just a (beep) bald head.
Which is a little bit,
there's something similar in like rock music too.
Or like old school rock metal (beep)
like you don't have long hair, man.
You might as well have a crew cut, 'cause you're (beep)
- I mean, you might play guitar like Steve Vai,
but if you have short hair, not interested.
♪ Them crazy ♪
♪ Them crazy ♪
♪ We gonna chase those crazy bald heads out of town ♪
♪ Chase those crazy bald heads out of town ♪
♪ A high and I build a cabin ♪
♪ A high and I plant the corn ♪
♪ Didn't my people before me ♪
♪ Slave for this country ♪
♪ Now you look me with that scorn ♪
♪ Then you eat up all my corn ♪
♪ We gonna chase those crazy ♪
♪ Chase them crazy ♪
♪ Chase those crazy bald heads out of town ♪
- Wait, Nick, are you gonna shave your head?
- I think that this woman that cuts her hair,
she usually comes to the house and cuts her hair.
She's gonna FaceTime with Amantha, my wife,
and she's gonna try to sort of coach her
through cutting my hair.
I don't think it's gonna go very well,
so I just have to be prepared.
Like I've tried to have Amantha cut my hair forever.
Like I grew up, my mom cut my hair.
Amantha just wants nothing to do with it
and thinks she's really gonna (beep) it up.
So I have to be prepared if I do that,
that it may just end with me shaving my head.
- Would it be like full Rogan style?
- Yeah, I think it would be, I'd go full Rogue.
(laughs)
- I wanna see this.
- I got a question.
So Nick, you're talking about your wife
and then your mother used to cut your hair.
My mom used to cut my hair too.
How come hair cutting in the home,
it's kind of, I guess, traditionally,
with old school gender roles,
it's always like mom cuts your hair,
but then barbershop culture is like always the fellas.
- I have a story about that.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, in my house, it was always my mom cut my hair.
Interesting gender role side thing
is that my mom exclusively drives
and my dad doesn't and really never drove us,
which is again, sort of opposite gender roles.
Like it's always the dad drives the car
and in my house it was the opposite.
- I think that's like the old school
kind of like sexist roll call is just like,
if the father is present, he will drive.
If the father is not present
and no boys in the family have a license,
then the mother will drive,
but only when the father is not present.
- Yeah, but see your dad never drove.
- Wait, why is that?
- I don't know, it's just sort of how it played out.
- I don't think he's a particularly good driver.
I think in some maybe weird other
sort of patriarchal gendered thing,
my dad liked the idea of being driven around,
even though it's sort of the merit,
like culturally it would be the man should drive.
I think he just sort of found his own comfort zone
in being driven around,
which probably played out in a chauvinistic way.
- Would he always go in the passenger seat?
- Yeah, he'd always just go in the passenger seat.
- But would he drive himself around?
- No, no, not really.
- How did he get to work?
- He would take the bus.
- Whoa.
- But then I will say to the going back
to the haircut situation,
I remember being around 13, 12, 13 years old
and seeing "Boys in the Hood."
You know, there's sort of a famous scene where,
do you remember this scene, they're in the kitchen
and Lawrence Fishburne's cutting Cuba Gooding Jr.'s hair,
his son's hair, and he's giving him a fade.
And he's like, yeah, he gives the best fade.
And they have this really great father-son bonding moment.
And I remember going to my dad and saying,
"Dad, I wanna have a similar father-son bonding moment
"with you that Cuba Gooding Jr. had in the movie
"with Lawrence Fishburne."
And asking my dad to give me a fade.
And not only is my dad has no idea how to cut hair,
I can't also get a fade.
I just don't really have that hair.
Like it's, we're working with very different hair.
So we went to CVS and my dad bought a razor
and he tried to give me a fade.
And he basically just gave me sort of a mohawk.
He just sort of accidentally just sort of shaved
all the way in the back of my head to the front.
And then on the other side,
I had this really crooked mohawk
that was just from zero to a hundred on the sides,
like no fade.
- Yeah.
- And it was right before class pictures.
And my mom was mortified.
- Yeah.
- But we also didn't have the bonding experience either.
There was no, it was really tense.
And my dad didn't know what he was doing.
And he just sort of accidentally--
- Your mom was like, "This is why I cut the hair."
- This is why I cut the hair.
- I'm very impressed by anybody who can cut hair.
And I'm very curious about what's going to go down
when you do this kind of FaceTime remote haircut training.
The first thing it makes me think of is like in a movie
when there's like a lay person ends up near a bomb
and then the bomb squad cop has to call them on the phone.
And they're just like freaking out.
They're just like, "Listen to me.
Do you see two wires?"
"Uh, I think so."
"Okay, is one of them blue?"
"Uh, yeah, one's blue."
"Okay, next to that is a yellow one."
"Okay, now up top."
You're like, this is like a classic movie.
It's like, because with hair,
I've always been mystified that hair is,
on the one hand, it's like, it's kind of like simple, right?
Like you would think it's not that hard
to be good at cutting hair.
And yet, as anybody knows,
the difference between a good skilled person
and other person, I mean,
you're talking about your self-esteem for a month.
You're talking about your whole wellbeing,
your mental health.
It's a very serious job.
And I've always kind of wondered,
actually, the woman who cuts my hair, she's great.
Shout out to Candice.
And she tells me about how sometimes she'll give classes
or there's a whole system for training people and stuff.
I wonder even what the language is.
- Yeah.
- Specialized hair cutting terms that we don't know,
but when they're talking to each other,
they're just like, "Now grab the bridle.
Now hold the bridle straight."
- When you look at the hair from the top
and you see these weird things,
is it like when you see one of those posters
for all the different pieces of meat in a cow
and you got your hanger steak and your rump roast?
Is there (beep) like that for hair?
You have your whorl.
Is that how you say it?
Whorl?
You guys know the word I'm talking about?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- It's a pattern of spirals or concentric circles.
So everybody, most people have some type of whorl
in the back of their head.
Like where your hair kind of spirals out.
So I wonder, are there all sorts of like
weird sacred geometries and (beep) people say?
'Cause I've had people cut my hair,
will often say like the back of my neck,
it's like the hair goes in different directions.
So it's very complex to like make it straight.
And obviously people have cow licks.
We know some of these words like cow lick and whorl,
but then I, yeah, I wonder if there's like a true map of it.
It almost reminds me of like,
you know, like in the medieval times
where there'd be like these guilds
that had this very specialized knowledge
about how to make like blue glass and like metal stuff.
I wonder if like with hair. - Steel, yeah.
- Yeah, there's like a whole other language
and way of looking at hair that, you know,
like we just see a haircut and we're like,
"Hey, it looks good on you."
They look at it and they must be seeing,
you know, like beautiful mind type (beep).
- By the way, guys, I gotta go now to go
have dinner with Amantha for her birthday.
- Say what's up.
- I will.
- I also do think maybe,
'cause I've never sort of live streamed or IG'd,
I was like, maybe that would just be a funny thing
to have, to basically do through my Instagram
'cause everyone's doing it now to have the woman
do that through Amantha and then we can film it.
But I do think, I mean, I'll let you guys know
'cause I think there's a fairly, I don't know,
it's more than 50/50, 60/40 that it's gonna really go
sideways and I'm gonna have to shave my head.
That's what I want to have happen.
- Just wear a hat for a couple of years.
- Well, you might see it next week.
- All right.
- I don't think I'm ready for a haircut next week.
I think we're talking in a week,
but we're in a weekly TC mode,
so you're gonna certainly see it.
All right, guys, I love you.
I heard how it's going.
Stay safe, talk to you in a bit.
- All right. - All right, peace.
- Peace.
♪ Darling, don't you go and cut your hair ♪
♪ Do you think it's gonna make him change ♪
♪ I'm just a boy with a blue haircut ♪
♪ And that's a pretty nice haircut ♪
♪ Charged like a puzzle ♪
♪ Hitting and wearing muzzles ♪
♪ Hesitate to die ♪
♪ Look around, around ♪
♪ The second you drop the ground ♪
♪ His telephone is down ♪
- You're listening to
(tongue clicking)
Time Crisis
on Beats 1.
- So Jake, have you been going to the supermarket?
- Yeah, we did a big stock up two weeks ago.
And then I've gone,
there's a little grocery store,
like a block from my house called Uno Market.
And I've gone there three or four times
to buy avocados and beer and chips and stuff.
- So what's the vibe?
You feel comfortable?
Are you suiting up?
You throwing a mask on, gloves?
Are you staying six feet away from people?
- I'm keeping my distance.
No gloves, no mask.
People there who work there are wearing gloves and masks.
The last time I went,
it seemed to be a higher level of anxiety there
than the other times.
- Oh, you feel like it's been ratcheting up?
- Yeah, I feel like it.
And we've had a few grocery deliveries,
which, you know, I have to order out
like three or four days in advance.
We've just been making a lot of food.
- Are you drinking a lot of coffee?
- Yeah, big time.
- It's an interesting one
because I find the relationship to coffee,
I've been thinking about it
'cause when you're quarantined,
you've still got stuff to do,
but you could make the case, you know,
it's not like you're commuting into town
and running to meetings and stuff, you know,
like maybe you need less coffee,
but also the temptation just to drink coffee all day
is very strong when you're just posted up in the house.
- What time are you drinking coffee until?
- I rarely go past 4 p.m.
- Four's late.
- Yeah, maybe it's a little too late.
I haven't been falling asleep as early as I'd like to.
- I'm usually cutting it off around one.
- Yeah, man, I really wonder what it's like out there
because you see these images, you know,
I think for people who are working as delivery people,
working at supermarkets,
these are really hardcore jobs right now.
- Yeah.
- And you really gotta hope that all these places,
whether it's these apps or the actual supermarkets
are treating people correctly.
'Cause yeah, it's funny, like obviously
this is a huge moment in terms of like a lot of businesses
simply can't afford to keep their staff on
and that's why, you know,
hopefully the government will be helping people out
who lose their jobs.
But these businesses that actually are booming,
like supermarkets and, you know, food delivery and stuff,
you really gotta hope that they're like
going the extra mile to take care of people.
- They're probably not.
- Yeah, odds are they aren't.
- Major corporations aren't known for that.
What about you, man?
- Pretty stocked up,
so I haven't been to a supermarket in a while.
- You guys doing some post?
- Yeah, I've ordered in here and there.
- Yeah.
- But even then it's like, yeah,
I have like mixed feelings about it.
Like, I guess on the one hand,
it's like you're supporting local restaurants
and, you know, trying to support the delivery people,
but yeah, it's just like a strange feeling too.
A little bit of stress every time
you bring something new into the house
and you really gotta kind of wipe it down and stuff.
But yeah, I'm very curious about,
I think maybe a lot of people feel this way,
but it's hard when you're quarantined,
you're taking a bunch of information,
you talk to your friends,
but most people I know are taking it very seriously,
but I'm just kind of curious what like,
what it's like out there.
Because, you know, when you're taking it seriously,
you only get images and anecdotes.
So I'm kind of curious, like,
are there still parts of the country
that are like fully business as usual?
- I think, I mean, you saw those images
on like Florida beaches and down South.
- Right, just jam-packed guitar centers.
And then I'm also just kind of curious
what it's like for people who are still going to work
and just kind of what that looks like.
And anyway, it was interesting for me
following friend of the show, Winter, on Twitter,
because he was kind of like out there.
I think he's home now
and we're going to get him on the phone shortly,
but following Winter on Twitter,
you know, most people I follow on Twitter are like,
you know, journalists and people who are probably
locked down in their apartments fairly early on.
And then Winter was the one person
who I felt was like giving me a small window
through the lens of Starbucks-ing
into just like the country slowly closing down.
So Winter was like out there on some kind of journey
and he was kind of reporting like,
well, you know, the Starbucks is like totally open.
Then he's like gets to one where like the manager's
like new policy, you know, things are changing.
And then suddenly some of them are closed.
And so it kind of almost felt like Winter was out there
on the road Starbucks-ing just as this started to happen.
So I feel like in real time, his Starbucks-ing journey,
he was kind of just pinballing
through this maze of COVID America.
This would probably be a good movie one day or doc series.
The last days of Starbucks-ing, Corona Winter.
- Yeah, as the dominoes are falling.
- Yeah, as the dominoes fall, like, yeah,
it's kind of just like somebody's on vacation
just as like, you know, there's a revolution in a country.
- Yeah, we were down in Cuba down in '59
was at a beautiful resort there.
- I mean, that literally happened
'cause wasn't it New Year's Eve?
- Yes, I think you're right.
- So there were all sorts of Americans just like
partying it up at like a Cuban casino in 1959.
- Just like, whoa, what's going on?
- I bet it was probably really similar actually
to some of the stories you hear during like COVID
because so it was winter.
I'm not talking about winter, the king of Starbucks.
I'm talking about the season.
But so it's winter, New Year's in Havana,
all these people down there partying.
And then you probably, because it's winter,
you probably had some other people up in like New England
or something being like, yeah, we got a trip down
to Cuba planned for when the kids have February break.
So we're gonna go down about six weeks
and then just like early January, 1960,
where it's just kind of like people on the phone
to their travel agent, just like,
my husband says that we can't go to Cuba
until they sort this whole thing out.
And just like, I want a refund.
And like the travel agent just being like,
ma'am, I'm being assured by everybody
that this Castro thing is gonna blow over in about a month.
Things will settle down.
And I promise you, you and your family
will be enjoying the beaches of Cuba
just as you planned by February.
Like, or it just probably got crazier and crazier.
People were like, are we still going to Cuba?
- Is that hotel gonna honor our deposit or not?
- He's gonna reopen the casino soon, right?
- Are they still doing that seafood buffet?
- Yeah. (laughs)
Just like people making international calls
to like the revolutionaries fully taking over
just like some mafia hotel, just like the phone ringing,
just like, hello, is there an English speaker?
I'm scheduled to arrive in about two weeks.
So anyway, yeah, I guess that's kind of a classic thing.
It's like for everybody who happens to be part
of a world historical event
because they're like one of the drivers of that event,
they're a soldier or a politician or something,
or even just somebody who lives in the city
where something's happening.
You're also gonna just get people who are just like,
man, I'm just passing through.
So yeah, I think we should get Winter on the phone
'cause I'm very curious about where he's at now
and what he's seen.
Because everybody I know has been pretty quarantined.
And I wanna hear from somebody
who not only was out there in the world,
but was traveling through the world.
So why don't we get Winter on the phone?
- Now let's go to the Time Crisis Hotline.
(phone ringing)
- Hey folks.
- Hey Winter. - How are you doing?
Good to see you.
- Good to see you. - You too.
- Good to see you, Winter.
- Well, this is different.
- Yeah, welcome to the video chat.
You know, apparently the group FaceTime
can handle up to 32 people.
- Wow.
- I was on one recently to sing happy birthday
to a friend of the show,
Vampire Weekend producer Ariel Rekshide.
It was recently his birthday.
There was a little birthday surprise organized for him.
And it was like, it was total chaos.
Just like 15 people, just like things,
all these like little things moving around.
People just like deeply out of sync singing happy birthday.
That's probably gonna happen for me too.
- Great. - It's Ari's season.
- When's your birthday, April?
- April 8th.
- Okay.
Winter, where are you?
Are you in the Starbucks?
- No, nobody is allowed in a Starbucks,
a corporate Starbucks right now,
except for a handful that are open for first responders,
like firefighters and medical personnel.
But all are shut, all the corporate ones.
Maybe there is a licensed one at a grocery store
that's choosing to remain open.
I don't know, but corporate wide,
they are all shut as of last Saturday.
- So you're out of luck right now.
- Well, I would say it's Starbucks interrupt us
for the moment.
- Starbucks interrupt us.
Now, and I hope this question doesn't offend you
'cause I know you're somebody very engaged with politics
and you're a very moral person,
but you're also the world's preeminent Starbucker.
You pose as a first responder to get into a Starbucks.
- I can categorically say that I would not pose
as a first responder to get into a Starbucks,
but I like the creativity and thinking, Ezra.
- I'm glad to hear that.
That's what I expected.
But how about this?
Usually your day job is computer programming, right?
- That's where I am right now.
That's pretty much the only place I can be in Rochester
and get wifi is work.
- So would you consider temporarily
becoming a first responder for access to Starbucks
or leave it to the professionals?
- Yet another creative idea.
I'll probably leave it to the professionals.
I have thought about changing my job before,
like trying to become a journalist
so I could get into Saudi Arabia
or trying to get into one of these buildings in Manhattan
that are restricted.
But I think during a pandemic,
I need to just back off of the Starbucks a little bit.
- Starbucks pause for the moment.
♪ On the first part of the journey ♪
♪ I was looking at all the light ♪
♪ There were plants and birds and rocks and things ♪
♪ There was sand and hills and rain ♪
♪ The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz ♪
♪ And the sky with no clouds ♪
♪ The heat was hot and the ground was dry ♪
♪ But the air was full of sound ♪
♪ I've been through the desert on a horse with no name ♪
♪ It felt good to be out of the rain ♪
♪ In the desert you can remember your name ♪
♪ 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain ♪
- Okay, so, so many questions, Winter.
I wanna hear about your journey.
So you're in Rochester,
which has been kind of your home base for a minute.
- Yeah, a year and a half.
I can't even believe that.
- I was just telling Jake how following you on Twitter,
it seemed like you were on a starbucking run
just as the US started to really have to deal with COVID-19.
- Yes.
- So where were you?
And can you kind of just walk us through
the past few weeks of your life?
- Okay, well, this trip was pre-planned.
Otherwise I wouldn't have gone.
My mother's down at an assistant living facility in Panama
and my cousins were getting married last Saturday.
So I timed everything around going down to see her,
taking her to the wedding,
buying all her medications and toiletries.
I get down there last, two Wednesdays ago,
Panama just got its first case of COVID
and they locked down the nursing home.
So all I can do is run around,
buy her medications, buy her toiletries.
I'm still going to the wedding by myself.
- Your mom, because she's in a nursing home,
she wasn't even allowed to go to the family wedding.
- Too much of a risk.
You know, she gets out, gets COVID,
brings it back in, it's deadly.
So I'm still going to the wedding up until Friday night,
government cancels all events.
So Saturday morning, I see the writing on the wall
in terms of airport lockdowns all over the place.
I rushed to the airport,
get myself on the first flight back to Orlando.
And sure enough, two days later, Panama locks down.
Nobody's getting in.
So I got in just under the wire.
- Wow.
You got out of there in the nick of time.
Why were you flying to Orlando
and not just back to Rochester for work?
- Because my car's registered in Texas
and Texas is a yearly state inspection state.
Other states are not.
But no matter where I'm working,
every year around this time,
I got to drop everything and drive back down to Texas
to get the car inspected before the registration.
This year also happened to be my 10-year license renewal,
which required certifying that my vision hadn't changed,
which it had.
So I had to get glasses too.
So just a bunch of things that I had to do mandatory
as the country is shutting down,
which turned it into a whole surreal experience.
- And I would imagine that generally speaking,
because you're the world's preeminent starbucker,
a lot of people would probably be like,
"I got a wedding.
I got to go do this.
I got to get glasses and go back to Texas."
A lot of people would be like,
"Oh, this is going to be such an annoying trip."
I imagine that as somebody so dedicated
to starbucking as you,
there's a lot of silver lining
when you got all these errands to run around the world
where you're kind of like,
a lot of people are like,
"How am I going to make this trip fun?"
And for you, it's like,
you're probably kind of happy
because you always have Starbucks to hit, right?
- In normal times, yes, absolutely.
And for the first half of the trip,
that's exactly how it was.
Business as usual,
the only big change from Starbucks
was no reusable cups in the stores,
which meant that I typically go in
with a little sample cup.
I say hi to the manager or the supervisor,
tell them what I'm doing
and ask for a sample, hand them the cup.
Most of the time, they'll take it
unless you're in a place like New York City
where they don't take any reusable cups.
They clamped down on that.
It still wasn't a problem.
The manager supervisor still just went to the back
and got me a little sample cup.
- These first few days though,
you're mostly in Florida.
You just got into your car.
Your car was in Orlando?
- No, no, I drove down from upstate,
Syracuse, where I played in a Scrabble tournament.
I drove all the way down to Florida.
So I was hitting Starbucks in Maryland,
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Florida, until I flew out.
- Okay, so you're Starbucksing
all the way down to Orlando.
You go to Panama.
You have this kind of crazy experience.
Get out of Panama in the nick of time,
back in Orlando.
Once you're back in Orlando,
how much did things change?
- Okay. - 'Cause we've been hearing
Florida has been relatively lax as a state.
- First of all, my flight was delayed for over an hour
because they had to pull a kid off the plane
and his dad, the kid was crying
because they'd heard him coughing in the bathroom.
So they did a medical check and they pulled him off.
So that was interesting.
I arrived back in Orlando around 5 p.m.
and I immediately bolt to as many Starbucks as I could.
At that time, I can still go in them
and hang out, charge my batteries,
charge my computer, charge my phone.
That's critical stuff for me.
Talk to the managers or supervisors.
Everything's fine.
- And in terms of the number of people in these Starbucks,
it felt like a typical day?
- Absolutely.
The very last one that I went to in Davenport, Florida
was completely busy, business as usual.
- What was the date around that?
- This was Saturday, March the 14th.
- So Saturday, March 14th,
you have some people beginning quarantine in the US,
but as far as the Starbucks that you're hitting in Florida,
you wouldn't have guessed anything was happening.
- Exactly.
Everything was normal.
There was an email from Kevin Johnson several days later
saying it was a possibility that stores would move
to grab and go or drive-through only.
But I hadn't heard of that happening.
Kevin Johnson is the CEO who replaced Howard Schultz.
- Oh, okay.
- Well, Sunday morning, I wake up,
I go to my first Starbucks in, coincidentally enough,
Winter Haven, Florida.
And I notice that something seems off.
There's no cars in the parking lot.
There's a white piece of paper on the door.
I go up to the door and boom,
this store is open to serve you for grab and go only.
And they have closed the restrooms.
- Grab and go means you could still enter the store
as usual, just can't sit.
- That's correct.
As soon as I went to plug in my laptop on my phone,
the supervisor told me that I couldn't hang out.
I said, "Okay, yeah, I understand.
I'm just gonna get my coffee."
Unfortunately, I couldn't use the restroom.
At that point, by the way, I'm thinking,
"Okay, all thoughts of asking for a sample are gone.
I'm just gonna have to suck it up
and pay $2.25 for a coffee
for however many stores I go to in the next week."
You know, it's not the end of the world.
It's a pandemic.
So I adjust to the new reality.
- But the bathroom thing,
you tweeted about this a little bit.
Generally, when you Starbucks,
you're not staying in hotels,
you'll sleep in the car most nights.
- That is correct.
So one of the first things I do
to when I get that first Starbucks in the morning,
typically, is I wanna wash my hands.
I wanna wash my face.
I just wanna wash up.
And during this pandemic,
when everybody was telling people not to touch their face
and to wash their hands, I ramped that up.
So I was basically washing my hands
every time I went into a Starbucks.
Basically, anytime I was anywhere and I touched anything,
I was just washing my hands.
And all of a sudden I can't do that anymore.
And I'm like, "Okay, I gotta adjust."
So my adjustment is stop for gas more often
and use the bathroom there to wash my hands.
So two stores were like that.
Third store, further north,
that one was still open for business.
Different district, different region.
So I learned at that one from talking to the manager
who was wearing an N95 mask because she had cystic fibrosis.
So getting COVID for her is a big deal.
- Oh God, yeah.
- So I really felt bad for her
and I understood why she was being so cautious,
but she decided that she was gonna keep the store open
that day, she was gonna go the next day.
And basically I learned that stores had been given
until Thursday to make the switch over, to grab and go.
And some decided to go immediately.
Some decided to go a little bit later.
She explained that for some it had to do
with how many COVID cases were reported in the area
and the proximity.
So that's what I discovered for the rest,
for the next few days.
Some were open, some weren't.
In some cities like Gainesville, Florida,
I actually met up with the brother of Bill Tangeman
who directed the "Starbucking" documentary back in 2007.
So he's been following me,
but I was able to hang out there and chat with him.
Then I go to another store in Gainesville,
it's only open for grab and go.
♪ After two days in the desert sun ♪
♪ My skin began to turn red ♪
♪ After three days in the desert fun ♪
♪ I was looking at a river bed ♪
♪ And the story it told of a river that flowed ♪
♪ Made me sad to think it was dead ♪
♪ You see I've been through the desert ♪
♪ On a horse with no name ♪
♪ It felt good to be out of the rain ♪
♪ In the desert you can't remember your name ♪
♪ 'Cause there ain't no one ♪
♪ Born to give you no pain ♪
So that's Florida and Georgia and Alabama.
Wasn't even able to go to one in Alabama
because it closed early.
Don't know if that was related to COVID
or if that was just a Sunday closure.
Here's funny thing, Panama City Beach was closed
before I got there, not because of COVID,
but because they had a boil water order
in all of Panama City Beach.
So that was kind of ironic.
- Boil water order means that there's something
in the water supply,
meaning that you can't drink tap water?
- That's correct.
So all of the Starbucks in Panama City Beach
were shut down for several days.
So I had to skip that one and head straight to New Orleans.
And that was Monday morning, 16th.
And that was an interesting experience
because the first Starbucks that I went to
did not have a drive-through.
It was completely open,
but the managers were talking about
how they were gonna be switching to a grab-and-go model.
And I was already starting to wonder,
okay, what's that gonna do to the people
who just hang out at Starbucks?
New Orleans has a lot of indigent, of course.
They'll hang out, they'll charge their devices,
they'll use the wifi.
So that's obviously going to affect them.
The next store that I went to
had already switched to grab-and-go,
but the next day it was switching to drive-through only.
So they were getting ahead of the drive-through curve.
The third store I went to was on the other side of the river
in the Algiers neighborhood.
That manager actually got a little bit snippy with me.
I went in, I plugged in my laptop, my phone on the floor.
I wasn't really working there.
I was just getting my coffee, took a picture, went back in,
asked her some questions
about where New Orleans was going with this.
And after some point, I guess I wore up my welcome
and she said, "I'm gonna have to ask you to leave.
"Get your stuff and go."
Okay, well, in the middle of a pandemic,
people's nerves start to fray, so I totally understood that.
My next stop was more interesting.
That was Congregation Coffee in Algiers Point,
a independent coffee shop
that was actually selected by "Food & Wine" magazine
last year as their favorite coffee roaster
in the state of Louisiana.
There, that gave me an opportunity to talk to the owners
about what they thought this pandemic
was gonna do to the business.
And the owner was quite frank in saying
he didn't think they were gonna make it
to the other side of this.
And that was something that I'd been reading already
about how this was going to start hurting small businesses.
And my focus is Starbucks,
but I'm really trying to promote
and talk up the small coffee houses.
I have a keen interest in what's gonna happen to them.
And I feel really bad that a lot of them
are not gonna make it through this pandemic.
So I was glad that I was able to give them
a little bit of business for a while and talk up his cafe.
I hope he sells a lot of beans
because that's how they're gonna have to survive
when they can't actually sell coffee with everything closed.
- You make a good point, Winter,
is that people talk so much about,
obviously this is a very difficult time for restaurants
and especially the people who work at restaurants,
servers and things like that who are being let go.
They don't need the whole staff.
I guess the only thing you could hope for
that at a restaurant, there's still people ordering food
and they can still be preparing stuff,
but a coffee shop, you know,
you're not gonna find a ton of people
putting in big orders for coffee
to be delivered to their homes or something.
So even more than restaurants, I can imagine
that these kind of like cool,
kind vibe little coffee shops, independent ones
are really gonna be hit because outside of selling beans,
what can they do?
So as you're making it through,
you're noticing the tensions rising
with some of the managers, you're noticing things changing.
You barely got out of Panama, you made it to Florida,
you're traveling to the South.
By the time you're in New Orleans,
there must be a pretty big black cloud
hanging over your whole trip.
Do you think about just bailing on the Texas car stuff
and just getting back to Rochester?
Like, did you kind of feel like the doors were closing?
You know?
- Yes, I did feel like the doors were closing.
No, I didn't consider bailing.
It's not an option.
I have to renew my license.
I have to renew my registration
or I'm gonna get arrested at some point.
I wanna see my dentist under the wire
and I need to get those glasses too
because I'm having trouble driving at night.
It's a safety issue.
So I was gonna go to Texas no matter what
and the process was actually stressful.
Typically, Starbucks is relaxing.
It's like, it's great.
I'm getting away from work, I'm doing my thing,
I'm talking to the managers,
taking all these great pictures, posting on Instagram.
This time around, it was just a constant day by day,
how do I adapt to the new situation?
How do I keep my phone charged?
How do I keep my laptops charged?
How do I keep my camera battery charged?
Where do I wash my hands?
All that kind of thing.
And as I kept traveling, where do I eat?
What restaurants are gonna be closed?
That was pretty much the rest of the week for me
as I was documenting the slow rolling shutdown
of the United States for essentially a seven day period,
seeing it from the front lines.
It was quite educational, but it was also stressful
and it was depressing because I was seeing
that all these people were starting to lose their jobs
with all these places closed
and it's just gonna be devastating
for the people who work in the service economy
and I really, really feel bad for them.
- Yeah, seriously.
So by the time you got to Texas,
you were still able to accomplish all of your tasks,
your dentist and optometrist and all this stuff.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got everything done.
I checked in on my dad just to see if he was okay.
Didn't hug him, didn't shake his hand,
tried to stay a little bit away,
but he had his issues a couple of years ago
and I just needed to make sure that he was okay
and not just saying he was okay over the phone.
And then I left Texas, went up to Dallas
and by that point, it was all grab and go.
So I didn't get to see,
go into any of the Starbucks in the Dallas market
and at that point, I made a decision
that in keeping with the whole idea of social distancing,
I was going to put a heavy emphasis
on re-photographing old stores,
stores that I'd been to at night
or stores for which I'd lost the photograph
when my computer was stolen, et cetera, et cetera.
That way I'd go to fewer stores
and I'd go to more remote stores.
So I went ahead and went out of the way
to College Station, Texas,
where sadly, one of your TC fans,
Starbucking fans wanted to meet me,
but I was supposed to meet people in Dallas
and College Station in Austin and San Antonio,
but because of the pandemic,
that just wasn't gonna happen.
Exactly.
And that was sad because I feel like
if somebody's going through the trouble
of sending me an email
and taking an interest in my Starbucking project,
I'm happy to have a cup of coffee with them
and that just wasn't gonna happen,
but this is the new reality that we live with.
I went down from Dallas market
all the way out to Weatherford, Mineral Wells,
down some towns outside of Austin, San Antonio,
all the way out to Uvalde,
and then I decided that I was gonna go ahead
and drive all the way out to El Paso.
And some TC heads probably saw my tweet
where I said that with all the stress
of adapting to the nation shutting down,
the seven hour drive to El Paso
was actually the most relaxing part of my week
because I didn't have to worry about,
I mean, it was about as socially isolated as you can get.
Other than stopping for gas,
it was just driving, driving, driving.
Well, it's funny because anybody
who's been a touring musician or a resident of Texas
has at some point done the kind of epic drive
from the really dense populated part of Texas.
I don't know if you call it East Texas,
but you know where all the big cities
aren't that far away from each other.
They're within two to four hours of each other.
And then you have this huge expanse of West Texas
until you get to El Paso,
which sometimes that drive feels like
you're not seeing a lot of other cars,
you're not seeing a lot of civilization,
there's only a handful of places to stop.
And Jake, actually, I may have done that drive
for the first time with you, Jake,
when we were touring with Dirty Projectors.
And I'm pretty sure this is a,
West Texas to me is a very Jake type place.
And I'm pretty sure, Jake, that you told me
that Cormac McCarthy,
who wrote the post-apocalyptic novel "The Road"
was inspired by driving through West Texas.
- Right.
I remember reading that he had the idea for "The Road"
when he was staying at a motel in El Paso
with his infant son
and looking out on the lights of El Paso Juarez.
And I think maybe having this very vulnerable baby
in his care and thinking about,
yeah, just the barren wilds out there.
- Right, 'cause West Texas is very beautiful,
but it feels very empty compared to other parts of Texas.
And yeah, I imagine even,
I'm sure he probably said it more eloquently,
but I've also had this experience of being in El Paso,
actually with you, Jake,
I remember the first time I ever had Migos
was at an IHOP in El Paso.
- I remember the IHOP in El Paso.
- So we hit an IHOP in El Paso,
a lot of touring musicians have.
But there's something about being in El Paso
and then you look and you see Juarez.
And I don't know if there's any other,
obviously there's a lot of border cities in America.
I don't think there's any cities as big as El Paso
on the US border
where you can just see Mexico quite so clearly.
And you see that big mountain that says,
"La Biblia es la verdad."
And there is something about being in El Paso
and you're staring at another country
that also kind of reminds you too,
how arbitrary and flimsy this idea of like,
these like civilizational ideas of like borders are.
So I can imagine maybe that played some factor,
the West Texas vibe.
And then just kind of,
you're like looking across this imaginary border
that means so much to people.
And you're just like,
a few things change in the world,
this border is meaningless.
You know, it makes you think about like,
civilization and all that kind of (beep)
So anyway, it kind of seems almost mystical to me,
Winter, that you and Cormac McCarthy,
he who wrote a post-apocalyptic novel,
and you who had a somewhat apocalyptic
starbucking journey,
both end up in El Paso.
Like it kind of weird synergy to me.
And it all converged in El Paso.
- His was post-apocalyptic,
mine was pre-apocalyptic.
- Yeah, exactly.
You finally pulled into the West Texas town of El Paso.
What was the vibe there?
- I saw the four stores there,
grab and go.
The partners were all kind of laid back.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa.
- Nope, no bad vibes.
- Wait, there's only four Starbucks in El Paso?
- New ones, four new Starbucks.
- Okay, all right, all right.
- Yeah, I saw them.
- How many total do you know offhand?
- Oh, geez.
Just trying to make a mental image.
I would say about 10, roughly.
Don't quote me on that.
I have to check my database.
- Yeah, El Paso's 20.
- Yeah, I would have guessed easily 20.
Interesting.
- But I managed to clear them all out so quickly.
And the reason that I went so fast
was because either in El Paso or maybe Uvalde,
I think it was Uvalde,
I was told by one of the partners
that they were switching to the drive-through model
starting Saturday nationwide.
- Right.
- So that was my last shot.
- And that's where we're at now
in terms of nationwide Starbucks
is for the past five days.
- Saturday the 21st.
- They're all drive-through only.
- Yes, except for that handful for first responders.
♪ I was born free ♪
♪ 'Cause the desert had turned to sea ♪
♪ There were plants and birds and rocks and things ♪
♪ There was sand and hills and rings ♪
♪ The ocean is a desert with its life underground ♪
♪ And a perfect disguise above ♪
♪ Under the city's eyes a heart made of brown ♪
♪ But the humans will give no love ♪
♪ See I've been through the desert ♪
♪ On a horse with no name ♪
♪ It felt good to be out of the rain ♪
♪ In the desert you can remember your name ♪
♪ 'Cause there ain't no one born to give you no pain ♪
- You raised the question on Twitter,
are they allowing pedestrians to use the drive-through?
- Yes, I was hoping that somebody would chime in,
but nobody's given me an answer yet.
I'm sure that's one-- - Oh, so you don't know.
You're not hearing about it? - No, no, I'm sure that
once this airs, somebody who is a Starbucks partner
and a TC fan will know the answer to that.
- I guarantee you they're not,
'cause that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.
And I feel like, isn't like a classic stoner movie,
like the guy trying to walk through the jack in the box,
drive through at two in the morning,
and they're like, "Sir."
I've tried to do that before.
And I remember being told like,
"Sir, you need to be in a car.
"It's for your safety and to protect ourselves
"against lawsuits."
- I've also done that. - In fact, have you?
- I feel like I have a memory.
My mom telling me some story about me being like a baby
or a toddler.
I can't imagine where, I guess New Jersey, I don't know.
She was somewhere pushing me in a stroller
and she tried to hit a drive-thru McDonald's with a stroller.
Maybe she was thinking, "I'm not just a pedestrian.
"I have a vehicle." (laughs)
- That is-- (laughs)
- But she told me that-- - That's straight up reckless.
- Yeah, that's actually kind of out of character.
Maybe I'm misremembering the story,
but she was not allowed to.
But yeah, you're probably right.
There must be rules that drives through for cars only.
But that's (beep) up.
What if you don't have a car, but you really need a coffee?
- I don't think there's an answer to that.
I guess new times, new reality.
But anyway, I sped through El Paso for that reason.
I was hoping to make it all the way to Santa Fe
so I could still see that store from the inside.
That one was a close, it was just too far.
I made it to Las Cruces-- - That's really far.
- Yeah, I thought it was closer.
Once I plotted it out, it was really far.
So that picture that I posted in Las Cruces
was the last one that I was able to take
from inside Starbucks.
Honestly, like I told the baristas, I said,
"It feels kind of sad.
"It's gonna be my last time inside a Starbucks
"for the foreseeable future."
The only other picture of a mural
that I was able to post during that trip
was in Asylum Springs, Arkansas.
I just happened and put it through the drive-thru window.
They're like, "Oh man, that is a cool mural.
"I really wanna get a picture of it."
And then I thought, well, it's pretty well lit
on the inside.
What happens if I just go up to the door
and shoot through the window?
The picture came out pretty nice,
but I do have to wonder what the baristas were thinking.
- I've had the cops call on me quite a few times
when I've been shooting the architecture
of fast food restaurants and corporate retail.
The one where I was really asking for it,
it was probably a year or two after 9/11.
I set up, it was in the middle of the night.
It was like 11 o'clock or midnight
at a Taco Bell in Portland, Oregon.
And I set up a camera on a tripod,
'cause it was dark out,
right next to the drive-thru of a Taco Bell.
So the people working at the drive-thru
and the customers going through could,
I was like four feet away from them.
- So you're on the Taco Bell property?
- Yes, I'm sort of like, I was setting,
I'd set the tripod up,
sort of like the legs of the tripod were sort of
in and among like the landscaping
adjacent to the drive-thru.
I waved at everyone to kind of indicate
that I was like not like a psycho
and I was like a perfectly like friendly person,
but people were like really weirded out,
which I understand.
And there's a guy with a tripod shooting pictures of you
getting your food from a Taco Bell.
And then the cop showed up and I just was like,
hey, I'm an artist, I'm a photographer,
I'm just shooting this stuff.
- Did you have to like pull up your website?
- I don't think I did that,
but I did like get into a bit of an art history talk.
I was like, you know that famous painting by Edward Hopper,
the Nighthawks of the guys in the diner,
like sitting alone in the diner eating?
- Oh yeah, there was a viral tweet
of that picture being emptied.
- That's true, that's true.
- Yeah, right, recently.
So the cops knew it?
- Yeah, they were sort of like, oh, okay, yeah,
I get it, I get it.
It's like, this is like an update on that.
It's just like a Taco Bell.
And then they're like, okay, I kind of get that.
You still have to pack it up and leave.
Taco Bell is, this is private property.
- Yeah.
- Have you had the cops called a lot on you, Winter?
- Oh, Jesus Christ.
If I ever write a book,
an entire chapter is gonna be my experiences
with police and or security.
I mean, just like- - I can only imagine.
- I mean, we could do an entire show,
which is just Winter getting hassled by security.
- Yeah, we gotta have you,
especially during these quarantine times.
We have a lot of shows we're doing weekly.
We can really get into some deeper Winter stories.
I mean, but just real quick, I gotta ask,
there's something about a tripod that is kind of scary.
- Yeah.
- And you probably had like this big camera.
- I had like a big, weird, old film camera.
- 'Cause a tripod, it's like, you know,
there's like those little tripods that snipers use.
- Okay.
- It's, I'm just saying.
- Yeah, it's a knockout.
No, it's dark out.
- It's not a million miles away
from some sort of like military equipment
or, you know, just something like freaky.
But Winter, I mean, I understand that
you're in a lot of different situations
'cause you're constantly traveling,
but you're not, all you're rolling with
is just in your cup and your phone, really.
There's nothing,
you're not carrying a lot of gear with you.
- No, but I do shoot in the US and Canada.
I shoot with a DSLR.
I don't set up a tripod anymore, but you know,
- Oh, you used to though.
- I used to, that drew a lot of attention.
I finally decided that I just didn't need to do that.
I used to do it to try and get
really nice photographs at night.
Now what I do is I'll take the photograph at night,
hold the camera in my hand, it may be a little blurry,
but I'll make a notation on my map to come back later
and take another picture in the daylight.
- You know, it's so funny.
This is how I found your work all those years ago, Winter,
because you had that website, starbuckseverywhere.net,
and you had thousands of photographs of Starbucks.
And I was really deep into that world as well
from my own art practice.
And anyway, it's just funny, like 15 years later,
we're talking about this.
- Yeah, so that, - Crazy.
- We were in, where were we?
We were in Asylum Springs, Arkansas.
That was the, I think the only,
one of two stores that I saw that day
because everything was shutting down.
I also got to see the new roastery
for Onyx Coffee in Rogers, Arkansas.
Actually, one of the, either TC fans
or one of the people who saw the Vice video
sent me an email saying,
"Hey, I noticed that you've been to our old location.
"You gotta come and see this roastery."
But that was towards the tail end of the shutdown.
By that point, most of the places where I'm at
are shut down, even to the extent that Discount Tire,
I had to get my tire repaired
'cause I had a split in the slide wall.
They were only doing critical repairs.
They wanted you to wait out in your car.
They wanted to minimize people in the lobby once you paid.
Like, they didn't want you to wait inside the lobby.
They were slower than usual
because instead of the normal,
they pull your car into the bay,
they didn't wanna get into people's cars.
So they were having people pull their own cars into the bay.
- Wow, this is in Rogers, Arkansas?
- No, that was Clovis, New Mexico.
That was the store that I saw after Las Cruces.
So again, I took a route
that took me through a remote store
just to maximize driving, minimize social interaction.
- Wait, wait, so you drove from Orlando to New Mexico
and then from New Mexico back to Rochester, New York?
- Yeah, I did Las Cruces to Rochester in roughly two days.
- Ouch. - Oh my God.
All right, so just bring us to the end.
Explain those two days from New Mexico
to Rochester, New York.
What's that, like 2,000 miles?
- Yeah, yeah, it's about 2,000 miles.
Just, you know, pretty much all driving
except for that stop in Asylum Springs
and the stop in Terre Haute, Indiana.
I had to skip Festus, Missouri
because, oh, here's something else on the Starbucks front.
Even though they were having their drive-thru stores open,
they could not maintain all of them open
because this is a really great thing that Starbucks did.
They committed to paying their partners for first two weeks
and then they extended that to 30 days
even if they weren't willing to come in for safety.
So because of that, a city like Springfield, Missouri,
where I stopped to reshoot some stores,
only had one store open out of like six maybe.
And then lots of stores in the St. Louis market
were shut down, including the one that I needed to see.
Other stores had reduced hours.
So I didn't get to see Westfield, Indiana
because it shut down early because of the slowdown.
And so then my next final one
was going to be Reynoldsburg, Ohio.
It was supposed to shut down at 10 p.m.
and I would have just barely made it
like if I floored it all the way out there,
but they were gonna shut down early,
again, because of a staffing issue.
So that was pretty much the end of my
"Things Fall Apart" Starbucks tour.
- Crazy.
So my last question is just when you're beelining it
and you're doing an epic drive like that for two days,
how much are you sleeping at night?
- Depends on whether it's an extended trip
or whether I know I'm gonna get a chance to catch up.
This time around, I knew that once I got to my job
in Rochester and rolled in like Monday around lunchtime,
I could just check in, put in a few hours of work
before I got tired and then catch up on sleep.
But if I'm like beelining because I'm going to see a concert
or because I'm going to a Scrabble competition
and then beyond that, I'm gonna keep traveling,
I try not to push myself on the sleep too much
because it does screw up with your immune system.
And right now- - Oh, definitely important.
- With the assumption that possibly two thirds
of the American population are going to get this virus,
I want to have a strong immune system
so I can fight it off if I'm gonna get it anyway.
I'm in New York, you know that New York
is now the epicenter of COVID in the US.
As of yesterday, 6% of all global cases.
I happen to have lucked out that I'm in Monroe County,
which is Rochester, which had the, of the big areas,
it had the lowest number.
But you never know, I just don't want to exhaust myself.
I want to stay healthy, stay stress-free
and just fight off that virus when I get it.
- Hell yeah. - Jake and I,
and most of the people that we're in direct contact with
have basically been staying put,
quarantined the past couple of weeks.
So I can't even imagine being in the situation
where you had to be on the road
and like you're kind of seeing these things in real time.
- Yeah. - It must've been
a very strange time to be out there on the road.
- It was rather surreal.
I'm kind of glad that I got to see it from the ground
rather than seeing all these reports.
And I'm kind of glad that I got to talk to the owners
of some of these independent cafes,
because, you know, I'll say it again,
my heart is really with America's small businesses.
I don't want to live in a country
that's all Starbucks and McDonald's and Best Buy
and Walmart when we get to the other side of this.
- Yep, true words. - Absolutely.
Well, glad you made it.
Yeah, you keep staying safe
and we'll check in with you real soon
'cause we've got plenty more to talk about.
- All right, folks. - All right, good seeing you.
- Have a good talk and you again.
- Good to see you. - Anytime.
- Thank you, thanks for taking the time.
- Bye-bye.
♪ We've been through some things together ♪
♪ With trunks of memories still to come ♪
♪ We found things to do in stormy weather ♪
♪ Long may you run ♪
♪ Long may you run ♪
♪ Long may you run ♪
♪ Although these changes have come ♪
♪ With your chrome hearts shining in the sun ♪
♪ Long may you run ♪
- Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
- This show rules.
- So Jake, on our previous episode,
we talked about you putting together a new playlist
for all the TC heads who are quarantined.
- Yeah.
- Or if they're not quarantined,
they're out there putting their necks on the line
for other people.
So no matter what, people need some good music
and you put together the Old Wisdom playlist.
I can't remember, what exactly was the prompt?
I remember we were talking about that now's a good time
to dig into some of that older music
and try to draw some of that older wisdom out of it.
What did you go into making this playlist with?
What were your parameters?
- Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a little bit
of an open-ended prompt.
I ended up finding music that I thought
sort of addressed hardship and difficulty and struggle,
but at the end of the day was sort of like redemptive
in its own, like the music is not despairing.
- Did you keep it explicitly 1970s?
- No, it's 60s and 70s heavy.
I mean, it's me, you know.
- Oh yeah, I just saw there's some Little Wings in there.
So you made all the way to the 2000s.
- Yeah, there was like a Silver G song, a Little Wing song,
just songs that I just felt like, yeah,
like acknowledged some like struggle and hardship,
but also kind of saw light at the end of the tunnel.
It's a loose prompt.
- Yeah, see, we've got a lot of some good country,
some 80s Bonnie Raitt, Ricky Nelson, "Garden Party."
I got really into that song recently, actually.
- Yeah, that's a great song.
You know, that's a song he wrote
about playing in Madison Square Garden.
- I know, it's such a witty title.
- Yeah.
- I was reading about it, that basically Ricky Nelson,
he was really big in like the, he was on TV
and he was an early rock and roll guy
who was also known as an actor.
So he was really big in the 50s and like early 60s.
- Yeah.
- And I guess by the 70s, he was probably saying,
"Well, it's official, buddy.
"I'm a has-been."
- Yeah, exactly.
- To his personal assistant.
- Very Rick Dalton-ed out.
- Yeah, very Rick Dalton-ed out, yeah.
But so Ricky Nelson, he was a bit of a has-been by the 70s,
but you know, you're still like this kind
of early rock and roll guy.
And I guess he went to some kind of like rock and roll
revival kind of fun nostalgia event
with some really big names at Madison Square Garden.
Everybody from Bob Dylan, John Lennon were there,
some early rock and roll greats.
And he went on stage and at some point,
he got booed by the audience.
- And do you remember the story, Jake?
It's like some people claim that he misunderstood
what the booing was for.
He felt like they were booing him 'cause he was a has-been,
they didn't wanna hear him,
but really they were booing something else.
- Yeah, I don't remember that part.
I remember just having sort of a vague awareness
that the show didn't go that well.
- And he wrote a song about it.
- And then, yeah, he was sort of skeptical
of this whole like retro kind of like revival,
like rock and roll revival nostalgia act.
And he's just sort of like,
♪ If memories were all I sang ♪
♪ I'd rather drive a truck ♪
But like the chorus is sort of like,
you can't please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.
- Yeah. - That's a good advice.
It's sort of like, you have to follow your own instinct
and your own gut and don't be beholden
to other people's opinions.
- It's like saying you gotta roll with the punches.
Like there's always gonna be somebody
that's got an issue with you.
There's always gonna be something in life that bothers you
and you just gotta keep on trucking.
- And just like Madison Square Garden,
calling it Garden Party.
- Yeah. - Great.
- I actually thought of you when I,
'cause I actually read about that song somewhat recently.
I mean, I've loved that song for decades,
but somehow I ended up on the,
well, I was listening to some Ricky Nelson
full-length records from the early '70s,
which are pretty good.
And then I ended up on the Garden Party Wikipedia page
and I was like, oh, that's so witty.
And I totally thought of you.
- Oh, really?
- I was like someone that would appreciate
that sort of like pun.
- Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah, it's so funny.
I really got into that song like sometime in the past year.
Well, maybe if one day people gather in large groups again
for live music and Vampire Weekend plays
Madison Square Garden again,
bring Jake out for a Mountain Brews Garden Party.
One, two, punch.
- That'd be sick, man.
(laughing)
That'd be huge.
- Oh, man.
♪ I went to a garden party ♪
♪ To reminisce with my old friends ♪
♪ A chance to share old memories ♪
♪ And play our songs again ♪
♪ When I got to the garden party ♪
♪ They all knew my name ♪
♪ No one recognized me ♪
♪ I didn't look the same ♪
♪ But it's all right now ♪
♪ I learned my lesson well ♪
♪ You see, you can't please everyone ♪
♪ So you got to please yourself ♪
- Well, you know, I also went out to the TC crew on Twitter
and I included a few suggestions that people had.
- Oh, cool.
- And I think Garden Party actually was suggested by someone
and when I saw that, I was like, oh yeah, that's perfect.
- I've got to give a shout out to friend of the show,
Kyle Field, Little Wings.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause he's got probably one of his most famous songs
is on this list.
- Yeah.
- And I feel like, you know, last time he was on the show,
we talked a bunch about surfing
and we were just kind of shooting the (beep)
we didn't talk all that much about his music.
- Yeah.
- And maybe 'cause we don't want to make him
like feel embarrassed, but he, you know,
he's kind of a, he's a legend of music
and Jake, you've been friends with him
and a fan for a long time.
So maybe you can contextualize
and tell us a little bit about one of his signature songs,
"Look at What the Light Did Now."
- I've been a fan, but also a band member for years.
- Oh, right. Yeah, yeah.
- Kyle thinks of the band as sort of,
'cause there's a lot of local gigs in SoCal,
but he kind of thinks of the band
as sort of like a men's softball league.
It's sort of like, if you can show up and play,
I'd love to have you, but if you can't make it, I get it.
- Practice on Tuesday nights.
- Little Wings is absolutely no practice ever.
It's always just like- - No practice ever.
- Do a little brush up on your own.
Here's the set list, come to the show.
- Yeah.
- "Look at What the Light Did Now."
I mean, I put it on the old wisdom playlist
'cause it's like, what's more wise than sort of like
taking a second to acknowledge the beauty of the world?
A lot of the lyrics of the verses are like
pretty trippy, like Kyle lyrics.
It's not like a super specific story,
the way like "Garden Party" is.
- He's having a lot of fun with language.
Gotta let go of that girly gleaming.
- "Taste the taste I taste till it's tasted."
- I love that.
- To me, it's sort of like, when you like step out,
let's say you're in a Starbucks
and then you step out into the parking lot
and it's just like, just a beautiful hour of the day
and the light is catching the trees
and like the light is catching the like windshield
of this like SUV in this like really beautiful way.
- Yeah, really thing about this song,
it's interesting 'cause yeah, when you look at it,
you hear these verses that are very strange
and impressionistic, but he's always alternating
with "Look at What the Light Did Now."
- Yeah.
- And this song, it's like, it's really like a beloved song
for like the people who know it.
It's not just like, oh, that's a cool little wing song.
It's like people who like know this song,
it's often like one of their favorite songs ever.
I've been to a wedding where this was performed by,
I think Feist was at the wedding.
I think she sang it at the wedding during the ceremony.
- Oh, wow.
- And she, so Feist has a well-known cover.
There's another cover that Flo Morrissey
and Matthew E. White.
- Oh yeah.
- That's a more recent cover, "Racking Up Some Streams."
And it's interesting because yeah,
you pull out some of these lines
and they're interesting language,
but it's hard to know what to make of it.
And it's not a song that's straightforwardly about like,
you know, the songs like a lot, you know,
a lot of our favorite songs of all time
often are about like the ones that really cut to the core
of what it means to be a human being
tend to be about like heartbreak or something.
But this is, it's, yeah, it's very zen.
It's very haiku-esque.
There's no one line that's like a perfect yearbook quote
that's just like, man, see, this is what life is all about.
But taken as a whole, I love your interpretation
that it is just kind of like pausing
for these like beautiful ephemeral moments of life
and kind of realizing like, sometimes that's all it is.
- Yeah.
- There's not always a grand narrative
and sometimes you're in a weird mood
or you're in pain or something.
And then sometimes life is just,
the meaning of life can feel as simple as just like,
oh, oh yeah, look at that little thing,
the light bouncing or something.
So I definitely think it's a very appropriate choice
for the old wisdom playlist.
- Yeah, and it completely relates to sort of my own art
making over the last 20 years too, which is, you know,
the core of what I do is basically like
just beautiful daylight against the facade
of like a Toys R Us or something.
- Right, I mean, for a painter, it's all about light.
Yeah, you think about light in a way that
we all care about light, but you have a whole like language
and you have to really analyze light for your work.
- Yeah, exactly.
I think it's like the most beautiful thing you can do
in art, the people that have done it really well
over the millennia are my favorite.
So, you know, anyway, so that song was always had
a real kind of personal connection for me.
- It's also a great quarantine song because it's like,
obviously we're comparing it to like a Zen way of thinking,
but a lot of us who maybe, you know,
don't like this idea of being stuck somewhere
because there's nothing to do here
and I'm missing something else.
You know, obviously there's a lot of meditative practices
that are kind of about like,
man, everything you need is inside.
Like you can go real deep without going anywhere.
And in a way thinking about like these small things
that might be happening in an apartment or a house
or a backyard or through a window,
if you don't have a backyard,
that literally are just like these little small things
with like light and these tiny things that on a day
when you have to go all over the city
or all over drive somewhere,
you wouldn't think about these small things that happen
over the course of a day through a window.
So it's also really good, just like stuck in one place song,
'cause there's not that much to do.
You might as well look at what the light did now.
♪ Hair like a pounce upon a pico ♪
♪ Look at what the light did now ♪
♪ Barret like a bounce upon the beco ♪
♪ Look at what the light did now ♪
♪ Land and water and bird or beast ♪
♪ Oh, look at what the light did now ♪
♪ Shiny little band or golden fleece ♪
♪ Oh, look at what the light did now ♪
♪ Look at what the light did now ♪
♪ Look at what the light did now ♪
♪ Look at what the light did now ♪
- Great song and also shout out to Kyle
who made it onto From the Freezer,
which I'm sure most TC heads know about.
From the Freezer is a great Instagram account
that showcases a lot of fan made bootleg T-shirts
and art objects and things like that
related to time crisis, Vampire Weekend, Jake, Mountain Brews.
And there's these great pictures that Kyle took,
or somebody took of Kyle wearing
the Mountain Brews long sleeve shirt
that's in the style of the Patagonia logo,
which I think From the Freezer actually made himself.
And I was like, that's definitely one of the
best things I've seen.
I love seeing Kyle.
It looks great on him.
Everything about it is perfect.
Well, anyway, everybody check out the Old Wisdom playlist.
It's on Apple Music and Seinfeld,
you'll get this to the people.
- Yes.
- Thanks Seinfeld.
Seinfeld's diligently crunching numbers.
He's got himself on mute for most of the show.
We appreciate that.
So now we're gonna have a little check in
with another friend of the show, Kazzy David.
Seinfeld, you've been in touch with Kazzy much lately?
- Not a whole lot, just reached out to her
to invite her on the show.
But she wrote something recently about being a germaphobe.
It seems very apropos.
- So she's been a long time germaphobe.
All right, let's get her on the horn.
- Now let's go to the time crisis hotline.
(phone ringing)
- Yo.
- Friend of the show, Kazzy David.
Welcome back. - What's up?
- So Kazzy, how long have you been quarantined
and are you taking it seriously?
- So I started quarantining a week earlier
than everyone else really did
'cause I wanted to stay with my dad.
So had to start early, you know, just in case
if I went over the line, would never be able to see him again
you know what I mean?
- Right.
- And I've been here for about 17 days.
- And it's just the two of you?
- It's me, him and his girlfriend.
- Okay, three people.
- Yeah, it's three of us.
But I am, let's just say I'm doing
most of the household chores.
- Well, somebody's gotta be the team leader.
- Exactly.
- And are you ordering in food much?
- We're trying not to at all.
We did it once.
But you know, you have to disinfect the containers.
It's a whole thing.
- It's a whole thing.
But Kazzy, you wrote something recently
about how you're an OG germaphobe.
Have you always been like a hardcore hand washer?
- Yeah.
- Pureller?
- I stayed away from Purell, you know,
but I always remember everything I've touched.
I never touched door handles,
never touch anything that other people have touched.
And if I do, immediately remember until I get to the sink
and then I can forget about it.
But yeah, it just seemed like, you know,
everyone just like hopped on board my train.
That was, you know, we've been doing this forever.
- I know some serious germaphobes
who feel like the world finally caught up to them.
- Yeah.
- I know a decent amount of people who always were like,
it's annoying, you got to spend this extra money on wipes,
but every time you fly, wipe down your seat, wipe down.
And it'd always be like, really?
And they'd be like,
there's so many people coming in and out of those,
they don't have time to clean the planes in between.
And some people always do that.
And it definitely felt for a long time
was considered very extra to be the person.
- Oh my God, the plane, of course.
I would have loved to wear a mask to an airport.
Like to wear gloves to an airport, I mean, I wish,
but I also have deep shame.
So it's either one or the other, you know?
- Do you have any advice for people?
'Cause I found this like,
washing my hands so much these days,
my wrists are all messed up.
Yeah, they're like all like kind of red and like,
what's good for that?
- I've been putting aquaphor, yep.
- I never used to be somebody who like,
like I was very annoyed when I'd go into a bathroom
at like a fancy restaurant or hotel,
where they would have the soap
right next to the hand cream by the sink.
Have you guys ever had this experience
that you're at like a bougie place that has hand cream,
the water's running and you put this on your hands
and you're like, oh, this is hand cream.
Obviously there's nothing disgusting about hand cream,
but it feels a little bit gross when you're expecting soap.
And then you got to double up on the soap.
But anyway, now I kind of realize, yeah,
like your hands and your wrists
can get dried out like crazy.
- I took out the garbage today and I was so freaked out
that I washed my hands with a dish washing soap,
like palm olive.
And it like burned off the outer layer of my skin
on my hands, it was so rough.
- I thought palm olive was--
- Something's gonna happen to human evolution,
like with all this.
- No, seriously.
Not only are you throwing this new virus at humanity,
you're throwing a whole new set of protocols
at people who normally don't do it.
There's gonna be all sorts of weird, unexpected things.
But Seinfeld, I thought palm olive used to be marketed
in like the '50s to housewives and being like,
and it makes your hands feel amazing.
Didn't there used to be like women's hands
on the labels of palm olive?
- I think there still are ladies' hands
on the palm olive bottle.
Oh no, no, it's a woman's hand holding a glass,
but it still harkens back.
- Is the hand look attractive or is it kind of red
and bleeding and looks like it's been dipped in acid?
- There's like a bone sticking out of one of the digits.
- It's like a zombie hand.
- No, it's a zombie hand.
No, it's like a beautiful, it's a beautiful hand.
- You're saying that a dish soap that's marketed
literally on the label has a beautiful woman's hand
holding a glass.
For you, it burned your hands.
- That's correct.
And actually I'm zooming in here on the bottle
and it says tough on grease, soft on hands.
I think that's false advertising.
Maybe you bought their April Fool's Day edition
hit shelves a week early.
That's tough on hands, soft on grease.
- It's just pure acid.
- So Kazzy, as a germaphobe, I got to ask,
'cause we were discussing earlier that for me,
what I find stressful is not being at home.
I'm stressed out for the fate of humanity,
for all the people worrying about money and their jobs
and getting sick.
That stuff really stresses me out.
But being stuck at home, it's just-
- Who gives a (beep)
- I mean, look, if somebody's like,
I hate being stuck at home because I'm stuck with somebody,
I got a real problem with,
obviously that's a different category,
but yeah, just the idea of being stuck in one place-
- I'm talking about the people who are giving suggestions
for what we should be doing with our time, like online.
Like watch movies, read a book, FaceTime with your friends.
Obviously, what?
- Yeah, well, to me, it's not even about not being bored.
It's like, the real question is,
what are things you can do to not be stressed?
- Right.
- Because it's a stressful time.
And yeah, if you spend all day reading the news,
especially via social media,
you might be a little bit harshed out.
But so I guess for you,
does being kind of like a homebody and a germaphobe
go hand in hand?
- Listen, always been a homebody,
always been a germaphobe, always been anxious.
This is just like a day, you know?
There's nothing.
My lifestyle really hasn't changed
besides being more stressed for the fate of humanity
and everyone who's in so much worse off positions, you know?
But otherwise it's like, yeah, just like welcome chaos of-
- For you, it's not personal stress
because you're already been a germaphobe and homebody.
It's stress for everybody else.
- Yeah, that's how I feel.
- Do you guys struggle with a pressure
to feel quote productive?
- You know, I think I'm also lucky on that front
because I always have the same feeling
because as a musician and a songwriter,
there's always this feeling of like,
well, I could be like writing some lyrics right now.
I could be like listening to music as research.
So basically I feel like the low level stress
that I have constantly at any given moment being like,
what's the next album gonna sound like?
Which old demos do I have?
Do I think have legs?
That never goes away.
So I feel the exact same that I would have felt
one month ago, six months ago, three years ago.
If anything, I'm probably pretty soon,
right now I feel the same as I always do.
Pretty soon I think I'll probably start to be like,
you know, I think a lot of people already feel this way.
Things that seemed important a month ago, a year ago,
seem less important now.
So I have to imagine that.
- It also feels like every person's productivity level
has been put to a halt, you know?
So we're like people who have always worked at home
or like written or whatever are kind of fast forwarding
through while everyone else is, you know,
furthering their careers.
Everyone's kind of been put to a stop right now.
And then everyone who writes and you know,
is a songwriter, does something like that,
gets to continue on with what they would normally do.
Do you feel like that at all?
- I think I'll still get my little ideas here and there
and just like on any day I'll go work on a little bit,
but I definitely feel to some extent like,
for better or for worse,
when I think about the album format
and to some extent the song format,
I feel like it's like a snapshot of a moment in time.
And we're all taking in so much information right now
that I kind of feel like,
yeah, maybe scribble down little ideas,
but I think in the future I'll have a better idea
of like what to do with it.
This kind of seems like a time to like chill,
think, observe.
There's something like pretty funny to me about like,
you know, we know that whatever happens,
there will be a better time than right now.
Whether it's sooner than we hope,
whether it's later than we hope,
we know there'll be a better time than right now.
And at that time we'll want just like funny,
lightweight comedy.
And we'll want like feel good songs
about like going down to Dino's Bar and Grill
or some (beep) like that.
But the idea of like sitting down
to like write them right now,
which seems like kind of hilarious,
just being like, you know, a year from now,
people just want some feel good (beep)
so like I'm gonna work on a song that's like about like,
you know, really about like part,
high five and everybody at the bar,
you know, like, I think it's okay to just chill and observe.
And if you get ideas, cool.
- But the amount of quarantine content
that have come out in the last two weeks.
- Oh my God.
- It's like a race.
I mean, everyone has already an Instagram live show.
They're making quarantine songs.
I just think it's, well, yeah, exactly.
I do think it is a time to chill and not be,
I don't know, it kind of is overwhelming
the amount of stuff that we're,
that are being thrown out, like the podcast and the.
- Internet radio shows.
- Internet radio shows.
Well, I'll tell you one thing I like about this show
is that no disrespect to the TC heads,
'cause we do care about you
and we hope that this show brings you some joy
and sense of community when you listen to it.
But even before it goes out to you,
just us recording it, it's kind of just,
this has always been the case with "Time Crisis".
When we just hang out and talk,
I do kind of stop thinking too much about like
some of the mundane problems of life.
'Cause you're just like hanging out.
We're hanging out, just enjoying each other's company.
So even if after we recorded this,
the producers dragged the session to the trash can.
- We're gonna take out the garbage.
- Come say it, come say it.
- We're gonna take out the garbage.
What happened?
- Come here.
- Huh?
What's that?
Your glasses are on the floor.
- Okay, all right.
- I stepped on them.
- All right, we have a special, special guest.
- Who are these people?
- Hey.
- Hey, how are you doing?
- Can you see me?
- Yeah, this is "Time Crisis".
This is a, don't worry, it's not live.
This is an internet radio show that's gonna air on Sunday.
- Who's talking now?
Which one?
- This is him, that's, he's talking now.
- Oh, okay.
- This is Ezra.
We were just talking to Kazzy about being ahead of the curve
as a germaphobe in the pre-corona times.
I couldn't help but think actually,
watching this season of "Curb" with the Purell on the table,
you also were a bit ahead of the curve.
- Yeah, just a bit, right?
I know, a lot of people have mentioned that to me.
- Purell's become like a symbol of the era.
- You know what's really funny is,
I'm sure people have said this to you too,
a lot of people cooped up at their houses,
were watching old movies, old TV shows.
Like I was telling them,
I'd just been watching "The Apartment",
the Billy Wilder movie,
where Jack Lemmon has like a cold through the whole thing.
And you watch it and this time,
and he's going to work with his cold
and everybody's shaking hands and it's like disgusting.
It looks like, you're like,
what is this savagery I'm watching?
And then the only thing that in these quarantine times
that actually seemed like correct
was "Curb" with the Purell on the table.
Everything else seems nasty.
- Well, I've been talking about it shaking for a long time,
how wrong that is.
There was a time when I was grabbing people's elbows.
I thought the fist bump was a good new development.
There's just,
you know, there's too much contact between people,
even sex, it's enough.
People gotta do something about the sex.
It's not cool.
- How early were you anti-sex?
- How early were you anti-handshake?
Like, are we talking like 90s or even like-
- Yeah, 90s, yes, for sure, yeah.
- People have a real, well, this is one thing.
This is a huge game changer 'cause-
- This is Ezra.
- Ezra, okay.
How come you're the only one doing the talking?
What are the other people doing?
- You know, this is really, it's a delicate balance.
So, you know, it takes a while to hear.
And then you have to wait for it to be, you know,
everyone, everyone-
- What's your last name, Ezra?
- Koenig.
- K-O-E-N-I-G?
- Yeah.
- There was a shortstop on the 1927 Yankees
named Mark Koenig.
Are you a relation?
- You know, my family's from the Bronx,
but I think I would have heard
if somebody was on the Yankees.
So probably not.
- Could be, 1927, look it up.
- Yeah, but no, you're right.
I am doing most of the talking.
I should also introduce you to my co-host,
Jake Longstreth.
- Hey, Larry.
- He's an American painter.
And then you probably heard of Seinfeld 2000,
as Kazi explained.
Seinfeld 2000.
- Yes, yes, I've heard of it.
It's updated for texting and things like that, right?
- No, no, he's the good one.
- Yeah, there's some bad ones, for sure.
- Okay.
Well, it was nice to meet you guys.
- Yeah, you too.
- Great to meet you.
- Okay.
(laughing)
All right.
I'm a real teen right now, you guys.
- So he just came into your bedroom
just to see what was going on?
- He loves a pop-in,
especially from the hours of eight to 10.
- Are you guys doing any kind of set,
not for creativity or anything like that,
but any kind of set schedule things
just for the order of the household?
Are you guys doing,
let's all sit down for lunch or dinner,
is there anything like that?
- We always have dinner together.
I forgot about this,
'cause I haven't lived here in so long,
but his disposition is really surprising.
He's always in a good mood.
He always is a great greeter in the morning.
And I'm a teenager,
I'm always moody, walking around, moping around.
But it is surprising,
he's just always in a good mood,
really excited for the next day.
- Well, that's great.
I mean, and also, famously,
people revert to their child or teen vibes
when they're in the same house as their parents.
Do you feel like you become more of a moody teen?
- That's just my permanent state of being, I think.
So no for me.
- Oh, forever a moody teen.
Well, what do you got lined up for the rest of the week?
Doing any more internet radio shows?
(laughing)
- My favorite thing I've been doing
is watching the excuses of
how people are posting photos right now
and what excuses they're using to post
and how that's gonna change and evolve
over the next few-- - Oh, that's interesting
because I found like-- - Wait, what do you mean?
- So everyone's always desperate to post Instagrams, right?
- So desperate.
- Of course.
So right before corona hit,
everyone was getting their last post in
knowing that they weren't allowed to post during corona
and it was probably gonna be their last time ever.
Now you're seeing a lot of,
"Miss these times with my friends.
If you guys social distance soon, we can do this again."
Stuff like that.
You know what I'm talking about?
- Yeah, the posts that are kind of like,
"Oh, remember when we did all this?
Miss you guys.
Can't wait to see you."
That kind of thing. - Yeah.
We'll be able to do this under the guise of
alerting the public, helping people.
- Yeah.
- So it's just interesting to watch that happen,
watch all these celebrities kind of unravel
and that's kind of what I'm doing with my time.
Just watching it all now. - Yeah, no.
Absolutely.
I think this is a great time to just observe.
Observe and report.
- Totally.
(laughing)
- And totally with the celebrities thing too,
is like, it's only gonna get weirder,
but I've had the thought seeing one or two
kind of strange celebrity things.
It is a very strange time when
everybody is just on their phones.
So it is a little bit like--
We're all civilians now.
There's no going out and getting your photo taken
and being in outfits.
Everyone's just a person.
I've noticed that it's started to drive some people crazy.
- You know what, guys?
We used to joke to some extent about how
this isn't a podcast and it being an internet radio show
made it a very ethical form of content.
But it especially feels that way now.
I don't know why.
(laughing)
- It feels like we're FaceTiming.
- Well, I'm glad that when your dad came in
and was like, "What the hell is this?"
that we could say, "It's an internet radio show, sir."
(laughing)
I feel like if we had been like, "It's a podcast,"
he would've been like, "Ah!"
- It really did make it feel like a...
Like a student.
- No, but I like that it was an internet radio show,
but it's not live.
It's a pre-recorded internet radio.
Also, it's--
- It's very confusing.
- It's for school.
This has never happened on "Time Crisis"
that somebody came into their daughter's bedroom
and said, "What are you talking to?"
We could say proudly, "Sir, this is a pre-recorded
"internet radio show on Apple."
All right, well, we'll check in with you again soon.
- Okay, thank you guys.
- Keep observing and reporting.
- Absolutely.
- Bye, Kazzy.
- Thanks so much.
- Bye.
♪ I won't say I love you, babe ♪
♪ I won't say I need you, babe ♪
♪ But I'm gonna get you, babe ♪
♪ And I will not do you wrong ♪
♪ Living's mostly wasting time ♪
♪ And I waste my share of mine ♪
♪ But it never feels too good ♪
♪ So let's don't take too long ♪
♪ For you're soft as glass ♪
♪ And I'm a gentle man ♪
♪ Without the sky to talk about ♪
♪ And the world to lie upon ♪
♪ Days up and down they come ♪
♪ Like rain on a conga drum ♪
♪ Forget most, remember some ♪
♪ But don't turn none away ♪
♪ Everything is not enough ♪
♪ Nothing is too much to bear ♪
♪ Where you've been is good and gone ♪
♪ All you keep's to getting there ♪
♪ Well, to live's to fly ♪
♪ All low and high ♪
♪ So shake the dust off of your wings ♪
♪ And sleep out of your eyes ♪
- Well, that was a cool call.
Friend of the show, Kazzy David,
an unexpected Larry David pop in,
but that's just what happens in these quarantine times.
You never know who you're gonna get.
We got one more call to check in
and it's friend of the show, Tim Heidecker.
So why don't we get Tim on the horn?
- Now let's go to the Time Crisis Hotline.
(phone ringing)
- Yo.
- Tim, welcome back to Time Crisis.
- Thank you for having me.
- Good to have you back, man.
- Good to be back.
- So Tim, I wanna get first the headline,
your new show, Beef House.
You pulled some strings to get it bumped up,
which I really appreciate as a fan
and a quarantined person.
You got pulled some strings to get Adult Swim
to bump up your and Eric's new show to be streaming now.
When was it gonna stream originally?
- This Sunday.
So we put it out like a week ahead of time,
which I feel like was not, you know,
we tried to do it earlier,
like sort of that first week
when stuff started going downhill.
But now I feel like all we did
was give people like a hit of heroin.
And now they have to wait.
- Oh, now we gotta wait even longer.
- Now they have to wait two weeks.
We didn't put the whole thing out.
We just put one episode out
and now it's gonna be two weeks before the next one.
You know, so it's a bit of a lateral move, but.
- Well, I appreciate it.
I've watched it a few times. - Did you enjoy it?
- Oh, I loved it.
I watched it three times.
Well, you know, it's a short episode.
One thing that I was thinking,
which was very strange.
I don't know if this crossed your mind,
if anybody said it to you.
In the first episode of "Beef House,"
it opens with, it takes place in a beef house
and it opens with an Easter parade.
And the whole thing is about how much you guys,
and especially Eric's character, loves Easter.
And it's such an important holiday to him.
And then, so I watched it a few times
and then a day or two later, Trump gets up there
and is like, "We need to open America by Easter."
Easter is a very important holiday to me.
And I was like- - I know.
I can't believe, like, there's been a few of these things
in my recent work that keeps strangely,
coincidentally predicting the future, or we do stuff.
You know, obviously we shot that in the fall.
And yeah, there's no way you know.
I mean, I guess it makes sense that our idiot
is gonna say something dumb like that, but-
- But the idea of being really into Easter,
it's already such a funny thing to be really into Easter
because as far as the famous Christian holidays go,
I think 99% of people's favorite holiday is Christmas.
It just towers above them.
So the idea of just being super hyped on Easter
is already strange.
- As a lapsed Catholic, as I am,
Easter is actually the most,
the holiest of holidays for the Catholics.
- As far as the real religious importance goes.
- The religious side of it, the resurrection,
the birth is not as big a deal.
You have to have them both, I guess,
for the whole thing to work.
But for some reason, as a kid,
Easter was the most important religious holiday.
- It's the conclusion.
It's the Avengers ending.
- It's the fulfillment of the prophecy, big time.
- Yeah, when you put it that way,
maybe this is less of a Catholic thing,
but the idea that this kind of epic resolution
of the story of the son of God coming back from the dead
is somehow became the pastel holiday is so bizarre.
- Well, it's spring.
I mean, it's renewal.
It's all pagan.
It's all coming from pagan traditions.
I mean, the chocolates is garbage.
If you ask my six-year-old what her favorite holidays are,
it's Halloween 'cause of candy,
then Christmas because of presents,
and then Easter because of candy.
There's no other real association besides candy.
- So as a father with young children
who obviously are gonna be very excited for Easter,
is it difficult getting supplies?
Do you have enough peeps and things like that?
- You know, we're gonna, we have not.
We have much more pressing issues at the moment.
We have not stocked up on Easter.
Although we did like sort of a,
we were cleaning out a closet
and we had all the Easter, the plastic Easter eggs.
So we did kind of a dry run of an Easter egg hunt
in the house, which took up about 25 minutes of time,
which was, you know,
we're trying to just fill the hours here.
I mean, I don't know how much
of this quarantine business you wanna talk about,
but it's all about filling the hours.
- Well, actually, I do have this question.
Like, how old are your kids?
- Three and six, but one is in first grade.
The other one is in preschool.
- That seems very hard core to have.
Like, well, the one who's in first grade,
are they video conferencing their teachers and stuff?
- Not yet.
That should start next week.
This is so boring, but we were on spring break for,
they were on spring break in Glendale
and they extended the spring break a week
so that they could figure out what the hell to do.
But this morning, I mean, listen, I love my kids,
but I was like, you know, my wife is busy with her stuff
and I've got a lot of stuff to try to keep going,
keep balls in the air.
I'm like, I'll do the kids all morning.
I'll do them like all, you don't have to think about them.
I'm just gonna be with the kids all day
until like, you know, lunchtime.
And it's hard, man.
I was in a tent with them.
We put a tent up in our front yard and it's like, you know,
you just kind of run out of stuff to do.
And I was really exhausted.
I was, and I'm just, you know, kind of depressed too.
So it was just kind of like, I don't know, man,
what are we doing, camping now?
Camping in our front yard?
- Were you just like, I'm not into this, guys.
- I don't wanna play, I don't wanna play this.
There's all sorts of rules.
I had to listen to how grim it got.
According to my daughter, we had to get married.
You know, she said, listen, what if you were not my dad,
but we were in love and we had to get married
and this whole scenario that she invents.
And then I become the husband to her.
It becomes a whole thing in her head
that I've got to play along with.
- It's crossed my mind where I was thinking about people
with kids your age, where I'm like,
to have a kid where you gotta worry about school issues
or where the kid is asking you questions about like,
wait, so I really can't go see my friends?
Wait, when's school gonna start?
Like, that must be this whole other thing.
- My kids are so great and I had like,
because I was a little like,
my attitude wasn't probably as chipper as it could be.
So tonight when they're going to bed, I was like,
are you okay with not seeing your friends?
I know it's hard.
And I tried to have like a little chat with them,
but they were just like, it's fine.
We're having a great time.
Like, they're very chill.
And they're like, we could call.
My daughter was like, I could call my friends if I want.
I'm fine.
She wanted me to like, not worry about it, which was nice.
- Yeah.
- It's so easy and good and sweet.
And I'm not, I'm very lucky.
And I hate complaining about it, especially to you guys.
- No, that's good to hear.
But, but so you mentioned that you were feeling depressed.
Is it just because of the state of the world?
- Today was tough.
I just, you know, I don't know how you sleep.
Do you sleep well?
- I've been sleeping okay.
I started to worry about reading the news
too close to bedtime.
Like I had one or two nights where I was like,
something bouncing around in your head,
some real dark article.
- Sure.
I sleep pretty good in general,
but last night I was up at like four
and I couldn't go back to sleep.
So I kind of got up and was like doing some work.
And it was just one of those days where by the time
everyone else got up, I had already kind of lived
like a half a day, you know?
- Right.
- And if you want to get real boring,
I'd had terrible internet issues the past three days
at my house.
- Oh God.
- And I'm trying to do this.
- That's deeply stressful in this moment.
- The third cable guy came over today,
which was already stressful because I'm like,
should you be coming to my house?
The first thing he said to me was they needed to bring
a different kind of technician to the house.
This is the third visit.
And I nearly, I swear to God, I nearly started crying.
I was like, I got choked up.
I was like, I don't know what to do anymore.
I'm sorry, I need your help.
I need you to help me.
My job requires me to be on the internet.
And you know, I'm just trying to,
like I'm trying to do my office hours podcast from my house.
- Right, yeah, so one thing,
I caught one of your live streams the other day
and had some people send me messages about
certain Vampire Weekend songs or the last album
and hitting a little different in the context of this.
There's definitely a few songs on the last record
that reference staying inside and not going outside
and people referencing Harmony Hall a bunch.
But I can't think of a song that seems more on the nose
to reference this than your song,
which you were performing, Work From Home.
The crazy thing about it is other people have some songs
about working from home,
but there's something about the fact that you're just saying,
I'm gonna stay in bed, stare at the ceiling
and wait for the sickness to just go away.
There's something about like,
when I caught you on the live stream,
I was like, oh yeah, Work From Home.
I remember this song.
This is a good Tim song.
And then when you hit the part about,
and wait for the sickness, I was like,
did he change the lyric for like the Corona times
or was it always wait for the sickness?
- It was all like, you know, hung over,
that kind of sickness.
That's what I was writing about.
I got a Google alert from Billboard.
You know, listen, I don't chart like you.
I don't make, I'm not a big famous rock star
with number one records and Grammys,
but I got like a Google alert that Billboard was like,
this song jumped 60% in the streams category.
- Oh really?
- I think it went from like 25 plays
to 35 plays or something.
- You know how in England,
- It was exciting.
- In England, they always get obsessed at Christmas
with what's gonna be number one.
And there's like, you know,
there's actually, there's a whole plot point
and people are always like, there's campaigns.
Like let's make this number one.
I think for the TC community,
let's make a campaign to get Tim Heidecker,
work from home to be a Corona number one,
number one on the Billboard charts.
- Well, it would be a nice,
I mean, you always hear about these stories,
don't you?
In rock history about like,
it was a nothing record, it disappeared.
And then some DJ played it and it blew up overnight.
I never really understood how that works,
but maybe this will happen.
(soft music)
♪ I'm low ♪
♪ Low to the ground ♪
♪ Well, I don't think I'm getting out of bed today ♪
♪ How one of those nights ♪
♪ One in a million ♪
♪ One too many drinks, I guess you'd say ♪
♪ So I'm gonna work from home ♪
♪ Call if you need me ♪
♪ I don't think I'd be much use anyway ♪
♪ Yeah, I'm gonna stay in bed ♪
♪ Stare at the ceiling ♪
♪ Wait for the sickness to just go away ♪
- Have you canceled stuff
or were you naturally kind of winding down for a little bit?
- We have a decent amount of stuff booked this year.
A lot of it's kind of touch and go.
I mean, it was funny.
I got a alert from my airline app today
that was saying like,
"Get ready for your flight to Buenos Aires."
I was like, "Oh, yeah, that's not happening."
Yeah, Lollapalooza South America,
that was our next big thing,
which was starting this weekend.
And they pulled the plug on that a couple of weeks ago
and they rescheduled for later in the year.
- Our person was, first of all,
we were doing Australia like a couple days after you guys.
- Oh, right, yeah.
We talked, you got there right when we left.
- Yeah, this has been a crazy time
that we're touring Australia during the fires.
- Yeah, we're like wondering
if those are gonna get canceled.
And then we come back
and do our Tim and Eric tour of the States.
And we ended on the Saturday
before like the Monday
where things started getting really canceled.
The plan was, first of all,
if anyone that's listening saw our show,
they know that the last bit in our show,
20 minute long kind of extended sketch
that sort of becomes the finale of the show
is literally a sketch about a disease
that becomes airborne in the theater
that we have to close the exits.
And literally we say the words like,
we have to quarantine, we cannot let anyone leave.
We've all been exposed to the disease, I swear to God.
And we wrote this show last year.
So it wasn't anything connected to this,
but, and it really wasn't,
people weren't really talking about it
until like the last two weeks of the tour.
And then it became like the second week of the tour,
people were like, oh man, I heard about this.
Like, that's pretty smart, you know?
And then the last few shows
where people were kind of squirming
'cause they were just like, what is this?
How are you even talking about this?
And then we got done with the last show
and you could tell it was like,
we got out of this in the nick of time.
Eric and I were supposed to go to New York
the next week to do Jimmy Fallon
and Stephen Colbert for Beef House.
And by the third day we were home,
Eric was like, I don't think we should go.
I was like, really?
Like, he wrote me, he was like, do you think we should go?
I'm like, listen, it's gonna have to get bad
for us not to go.
Like a day after that conversation was like,
how could we even imagine going?
- I know.
- You know what I mean?
It was so quick and crazy and scary.
- It was really like waiting for the dam to burst
'cause even the week when we were going
to this festival in Florida, Okeechobee,
a few days before we left,
we're hearing that a festival in Miami had been canceled.
And we're like, why did they cancel that one
and not this one?
And then we're from the company being like,
well, the other one that's an EDM festival,
it's more international crowd.
And I was kind of like,
that's the kind of thing you get the call
and you're like, well, yeah, that makes sense.
And then you stop and you think about it
and you're just like,
some people coming from all over the country,
like, does that really make sense?
- There's all these judgment calls being made
like by people that maybe aren't that informed.
- Yeah, very strange times.
The final time you did the virus bit
must have been weird energy.
- I mean, it still wasn't even that bad,
but I did want, like, I think it was in San Francisco
or Portland, it was like Portland.
And it was like that last week
before it would not have been,
like we ended when it was still funny,
but if it would have gone another maybe four days,
it would have been not funny.
It would have been like, we have to rewrite this.
- Yeah, it's too uncomfortable.
- It's too uncomfortable.
But I made one crack where like,
there was a joke about the CDC is aware of the situation
and they're coming, they're gonna save us.
And I usually would say,
but we're a low priority
because of the kind of comedy we do
and the kind of people you are.
I was like, the joke I would say,
but one night I just said, the CDC is coming,
but we're a low priority
'cause they're dealing with something else right now.
I don't really know what it is.
And you can feel the room being like,
- Right, too real.
- I don't like this.
Yeah, I don't like this.
So, I mean, anyways.
- One last question.
- Yeah.
- While you're quarantined and you got more time,
do you think maybe now you'll get into the dead?
I saw a picture of you wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt
recently and I was like, I bought Tim's not a pet.
- I really liked that shirt.
I bought it at a truck stop on our last tour,
the tour before this one.
And I wear it ironically, I guess as a joke.
- What do you mean ironically?
Just like a little (beep) to the dead heads?
- Yeah, just to mess with your heads.
Just to mess with your heads.
Just to confuse people.
We played the Warfield, okay?
Like two weeks ago, we played the Warfield.
- Iconic dead venue.
- One of the dressing rooms says Jerry on it.
And so I put on, like I searched like,
the Grateful Dead Warfield live, you know?
And in my dressing room, I played it.
I was just playing it.
And there's things that they do that I do,
I can enjoy to some degree.
I just think in general, it's, I can't understand the,
I don't, like I've said many times,
I don't enjoy the way they sing.
Listen, everybody can like, I was on Twitter,
there's this guy that writes back to me all the time
whenever I do say anything musically.
He goes, you have the worst taste in music.
You have the most middle-aged, boring, white music tastes.
And I just go, who cares?
Why do you care what kind of music style I have?
What does it matter?
He's like, you act so middle-aged.
And I'm like, what the, I'm 44 years old.
Wouldn't it be weird if I was like, acting like a teenager?
I mean, I like Paul Simon, whatever.
Who gives a (beep)
- I wonder what that dude's story is.
Like, that's-
- I really want to, like,
I want to have a whole show with this guy.
I want to talk to him every day, being like,
what is it that you want from me?
Like, he's like, you should be working on your comedy
instead of this music.
And he's all mad and you're my, how white I am
and how boring my music tastes are.
It's like, who cares?
Why would that interest you?
What kind of music anyone likes?
But I always retweet him and be like,
I think I'll start acting like a teenager
to make you feel better.
Like, what are you talking about?
- You should ask him to make you a playlist
of non-white teenager music.
- Yeah, I mean, it's just,
you know what, it's that,
there's a band that people always tell,
they go, you should listen to Death Grips, right?
That's the music,
that's the music when, if you're real,
that's the kind of music you like.
Those people always say that.
Like, that's advanced stuff.
That's next level.
But I can't get into that.
I like, I put on Paul Simon, Graceland.
- It's a great record.
- You know what I am kind of digging?
I'm listening to like that mid-70s
or early 70s Miles Davis.
- What, like Bitches Brew and Live Evil?
- Yeah, yeah, that one after that,
that's on the, what's it called?
- On the Corner. - On the Corner.
- Oh man, when I'm in like dark places
and we're in a dark place right now,
I like listening to dark music.
And that to me is dark music.
Like, it's like scary. - He does this sick (beep)
He's like playing through the wah-wah pedal and stuff.
- I also realized like for me growing up in the 90s,
when I started getting into that, those records,
I was like, oh, this is the (beep)
that the Beastie Boys were obsessed with.
'Cause I can hear like that weird, noisy,
like funky Beastie Boys stuff.
And you're like, I think I understand
what they're referencing.
And then I heard that (beep)
and I was like, all right, this makes sense.
- Yeah, like before that, before Miles was doing that,
it didn't exist.
But it's like in our culture,
it's coming from like, as like through another source.
It's weird to think that he kind of invented some stuff
that we got the second generation of.
- Absolutely, fascinating man.
And also he's a cool visual artist.
- Oh yeah, well, you know.
- His like drawings and stuff are pretty sick.
- Yeah, I watched the documentary, which is on Netflix now.
But yeah, he's a great example of like how to be an artist
and how not to be a human, you know?
Like just one of these guys that's totally reckless
and drug addict and all that kind of stuff.
- I gotta watch it.
Actually, I had a buddy who just told me he watched it
and he said that there's a part where he went crazy
on his wife because she said Rashida's dad was handsome.
- Oh yeah, that is part of it, yeah.
- Somebody was like, yo, there's a whole plot point
about Quincy and I was like, oh my God,
all right, I gotta watch this.
All right, well, thanks so much for checking in, Tim.
I hope you do it again.
- It's great to talk to you guys.
- We're going weekly now, so a lot more opportunities.
- Use me as much as you like, I'm around.
- We appreciate it.
I'm gonna ask you about fish next time.
- Sisters.
(laughing)
- All right, have a good one.
- Take care, bye.
- Peace, bye.
Well guys, this is a real star studded TC.
- Deeply.
- We'll get back together in a week.
We didn't really do any fan emails or questions,
but please keep them coming 'cause it really,
we always read them and it really helps us.
I'm sure next time we'll probably dig back into the mailbag.
All right, fellas, thank you to Jake, Seinfeld, Nick,
Matt and the whole team.
And thank you to Tim Heidecker, the David family
and Winter with his epic story.
We'll see you in a week.
- Time Crisis with Ezra King.
Be-be-be-be-be-be-beast.
(roaring)
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