Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Real costs extra (False Alarm! part v)

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

  Many of us are struggling with the real and the fake – but if you’re willing to pay enough, you don’t have to worry about it. Your host collaborates with 99% Invisible on a story about the Emeco Navy chair (the real one and the knockoffs).  Artist Sam Stewart introduces us to a creature and his luxuriously useless furniture. Starlee Kine of Mystery Show explains that my real podcasting problem isn’t the real vs fake but ads… and it’s true, dear listeners, because without more ad money, this might have to let my amazing producer Andrew Callaway go! Unless our new ICO pulls in millions! Learn all about it.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called We All Cost Extra. When I decided to do this miniseries on the real and the fake and how they're blurring together and upending our politics, society, art, culture, everything, I knew this was going to be a big one. But I also wanted to make sure that this would be a series that folks could just come and go or arrive and start listening whenever they plugged in. So first-time listeners, don't be intimidated by the part five thing. how computers are getting better at faking us out, or hear about the time I met Stormy Daniels, or how poorly our emergency alert systems are designed

to deal with our new reality, by all means, start from the beginning. After this episode, we're going to move on to what I call phase two of this project. Thank you, Marvel movies. We're going to dive into history, because this is not the first time this blurring of fact and fiction has happened. Things are going to sound different, but it's going to be harder.

You see, my show isn't doing that well with the ad sponsors right now. And to be honest, I'm not that excited about chasing after new ones. But this means I might have to let my producer, Andrew Calloway, go. In the interest of keeping it real, I've decided to blindside him. Tell him right here at the top of the show. He has no idea. Hey, Andrew, can you come here a second? Yeah, sure. What's going on, Benjamin? Well, you know I'm happy with the work you've been doing um for the show ever since i found you for insta surfs we've

made some really great programs i can't thank you enough for some of the work you've done you know going off to sex camps for our utopia series you know fighting trump protesters for our protest episode man well thank you so much But I need to tell you something because this False Alarm series, it might be our last thing together. Wait, what? Why? Well, the ad dollars are going away.

And to be honest, I don't see how I'm going to be able to afford you. I mean, I can't have you work for free, right? No, we already did that. So yeah, this might be it, unless we can find a way to turn things around. Or you can. Hold on.

Is this for real? So I came across this guy, a guy who makes chairs, who believes that one of the reasons people can't tell the difference between what's real and what's fake is because they lack an understanding of design. So I told my friend and fellow Radiotopian, Roman Mars, about this guy with the idea that we could do a piece together, like a crossover between his show, 99% Invisible, and mine.

Roman said yes. 99.pi put out their version of the story. Perhaps you've already heard it. If you want to fast forward, I understand. I know we left you with a cliffhanger or roofhanger. But since you are here, I think you should just listen to the TOE version. I put in a few things they didn't use, besides the roof bit. It's up to you, but let's just get started. This is the Theory of Everything. I'm Benjamin Walker.

And I'm Roman Mars. In the early 1940s, as the war effort ramped up, the Navy put out a proposal for chairs. They needed a chair that was fireproof, waterproof, lightweight, and strong enough to survive a torpedo blast. An engineer named Wilton C. Dinges designed a chair he knew would be perfect. A chair made out of aluminum. Wilton Dinges developed a method, a process, to take this aluminum and bend it and weld it and grind it and heat treat it. All of these elements, they're all invisible, but part of making something that's super strong. That's Greg Buckbinder. He knows this chair inside and out. It's the most

indestructible chair on the planet. Wilton didn't just prove this by taking his super strong, indestructible aluminum chair up to the eighth floor of a hotel in Chicago, where the Navy was holding chair auditions. And he threw it out of a window. It hit the sidewalk, it bounced several times. I am retroactively terrified by this whole story. Someone ran the chair back up, and it was completely perfect. Undamaged. The Navy was impressed, and they gave Wilton Dinges a huge contract. In order to fill this contract, he opened a huge factory. And he called his business the Electrical Machine and Equipment Company, or EMACO. Over the next few decades, EMACO shipped hundreds of thousands of these 1006 Navy chairs

to the U.S. government from its factory in Hanover, Pennsylvania. It became standard issue for all warships, battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines. This is what the chair looks like. It's aluminum, silver, modern and minimal, not too many flourishes. It doesn't even have arms, just three slats coming down from the back. The top is arched, but it's squared off a bit on the sides. It's a utilitarian looking design, except it has one slightly unexpected enhancement, where you might expect to see a perfectly flat, smooth surface. There's a divot on the seat for your butt.

In the 1970s, Emiko was purchased by a California businessman named J. Buckbinder. That's Greg's father. But by the 1990s, the company was losing a lot of money. So Greg took a trip to the factory to check on things. When he got there, things looked really bleak for Emiko. It was a skeleton crew, and the guys were just waiting for the company to close. The government contracts had long dried up.

Greg started to think, perhaps this place should be shut down. But then he overheard a phone call between the office manager, Paulina, and a mystery customer. She was on the phone. She says, no, we will not ship your chairs. You ship us, you send us the money first and slammed the phone down.

And I said, Paulina, who is that? She said, oh, some guy, Giorgio Armani. And she had no idea who that was. And I started to look through the file cabinets of who we were shipping chairs to. They were shipping chairs to designers like Giorgio Armani and Terrence Conran and hip entrepreneurs like Ian Schrager. Wealthy tastemakers had discovered the beauty of these indestructible Navy surplus chairs.

Greg saw a new future for Emiko. I just felt right at that time, if we can shift our focus from government sales to focus on architects and designers, that would be an opportunity for us to take this thing and turn it around. Greg Buckbinder definitely turned things around. Today, Emico makes new chairs with architects and designers like Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, and Philippe Starck. And the original 1006 Navy chair has become one of the most iconic chairs in the world.

You've definitely seen it before. It's in tons of movies and TV shows. It's the chair you see in scenes of prisons and police stations. It's also a go-to chair for fancy restaurants, art galleries, co-working spaces. It's everywhere. But not all of those chairs are Emiko's. A lot of them are knockoffs. Fakes. How can you tell if they're real?

Oh, you can see the slat at the bottom. It curves. See the bottom slat? Last month when Roman was in town, I showed him the fancy diner filled with real Emiko chairs near my apartment in the East Village. It has nice chairs and wood, and it's full of people. They look wealthy. Then I took him to my place to show him my collection of real and fake Emiko.

So this is the real one? This is the real one. This is the first knockoff that I was kind of excited about because if you lift it up, you'll see that there's something immediately wrong. Okay. That's heavy. Yeah, it's not even made of aluminum. I can recognize this particular knockoff by the crossbar.

It's not curved. It's also everywhere now. Hollywood's even discovered it. I saw it in the new Twin Peaks. In America today, most people think of design as shape. The average consumer doesn't realize that design is so much more than that. To understand what a real Amoco is, you need to understand not just what it looks like, but how it's made. There are 77 steps we go through to produce the Navy chair.

That's why I took a visit to the factory in Pennsylvania. The first step, actual sheets of aluminum. This sheet is the sheet we'll use to make seat bottoms from. One of the most distinctive elements of an Emiko Navy chair is the butt-shaped divot. Legend has it, it was modeled after the derriere of Betty Grable, a famous Hollywood actress in the 1940s. But there's absolutely no evidence for this claim. There are people that sit in this all day and they find it very comfortable and I think it's just due to this extremely comfortable contour. But also from a strength standpoint, if you

take and you contour anything, it makes the structure more solid. Growing up, friends would come over to our house and get the giggles about the butt shape in the seat. That's Jay Buckbinder, Greg's daughter, named for her grandfather. She's recently started working for the company, but she's been living in chair land her whole life. We'd see something in the window, my dad would go, what kind of chair is that? We'd have to go in, identify if it was knockoff or real. If it's a knockoff, go talk to the management

about how they're using bad chairs. Like, full on, this was starting at age six, you know? Oh man. Now we're off to welding. I didn't see much automation at the Emiko factory. Just a number of very skilled craftspeople. This is Walt, and right now he's routing holes into the aluminum extruded tube in order to accept crossbars that go into the tube.

In this case, the famous three vertical slats. The back of the Emiko chair is curved like an upside-down U and the three vertical slats come down from the top of this U and meet a curved crossbar. The three slats don't go all the way to the seat. They intersect with the crossbar three-quarters of the way down. It's one of the most distinctive design elements of the Emiko shape. Okay so now we're going over into department three which is grinding. All the wells have to be ground down except of the Imoco shape. Okay, so now we're going over into Department 3, which is grinding.

All the welds have to be ground down except three. We leave these three welds on the back as our signature. And we do that because back in the old day, when you find an old Imoco chair, none of the welds were ground down.

The government didn't require that. But as we switched and started working with architects and designers, they felt it looked too crude. But the guys in the shop wanted to keep some of their welds showing, so we keep these three. After the chairs have gone through all this heavy work, they go through a series of water baths. Five. This is the most amazing view, I think. When you see these chairs underwater, you realize that this is a step in a process that, again, nobody ever has any idea or sees this, but we do it because it just makes for a better quality chair.

After the salt bath and a night in a 320 degree oven, this aluminum chair is three times stronger than steel. It's the ultimate in sustainability and kind of the opposite of planned obsolescence. Many of the designers who work with Emiko want to see this elaborate process and make the trip out to Pennsylvania to meet the workers, like the famous industrial designer Philippe Stark, whose visit was filmed by Greg. I was obliged for myself to meet you because the chair you produce every day is a worldwide icon. It's very famous. You cannot imagine how what you produce est un iconne mondial. Il est très connu. Vous ne pouvez pas imaginer comment ce que vous produisez tous les jours est connu dans le monde. J'aime cette chaise parce que cette chaise n'est pas faite c'est fait par votre esprit, fait par votre cœur, fait par votre souhait, fait par votre main.

Comme un artiste, vous faites une sculpture et vous la reproduisez chaque jour par centaines et par milliers. Et c'est une beauté. C'est pourquoi quand vous voyez votre chaise, vous voyez l'amour. it's a beauty. That's why when you see your chair, you see love. And that is very important because definitely people today need more love than chairs. Thank you very much.

Thank you. According to Greg, when designers visit the factory, they come away with a deeper appreciation of the workers and the value of the chair, beyond its shape. When I take an architect through Emiko, the one thing that they always say is, you should charge more for this chair. A lot of architects must have a pretty big chair budget because Emiko chairs are not inexpensive. A new 1006 Navy chair will set you back about $550.

But you can get an Emiko look lookalike chair for a lot less. There are several websites that have listings from vendors of fakes, counterfeit chairs. That's Madsen Buckbinder, Greg's wife. She does press for the company, but she also has this ritual where she wakes up every morning and scours a number of e-commerce sites for fakes. And those sites are Houzz and eBay, Amazon and Alibaba. To be perfectly honest, we have very good luck if it's an exact copy. I can get those off in a heartbeat. When companies don't comply with their request to take down the lookalike, Emaco can take the company to court. This is what happened in 2012

when Restoration Hardware started selling the naval chair. They even knocked off the name. So when someone is a counterfeiter, that's typically the kind of things they do in order to give their product fake authenticity. Restoration Hardware settled with Emoco before the case went to court. Greg's also gotten other big box companies like Target and Ikea to knock it off with the knockoffs. He can do this because he has trade dress protection. Trade dress protection is designed to protect consumers from the lookalike imitations of name brand products. It's not protecting the function or use of the product.

It's just the dress, how it looks. And for Emiko, that means the chair's shape. That shape belongs to Emiko. Nobody can reproduce that shape. So having that kind of protection allows us to be very aggressive when we need to be. But I met a lawyer, Christopher Sprigman, who doesn't think Emoco deserves this protection. So consumers in the marketplace, when they look at this chair, unless they are real

furniture aficionados, they don't think, oh, this is Emiko. They think, oh, that's a chair, right? Or that's a pretty chair, or that chair would look good in my living room. I don't think that the shape of this chair is distinctive. It's an office chair design that's been around. I have pictures of it from the 20s in department stores and offices. If this had gone to litigation, I think that would have become clear. Trade dress protection is really hard to get for design products. And Christopher Sprigman believes if Emiko ever does end up in court, it risks losing this protection. What bothers Christopher is when companies like Emiko and Herman Miller and Vitra turn to the law to take

knockoffs out of the marketplace. To the extent that that succeeds, these designs become the territory of the rich and no one else can access them. I just want to put a fine point on this. So this is a family company, that's their business. And I understand that they care about that. But let me just say that out there in the world, there are a bunch of consumers who want to furnish their homes. And you know, this is this is a country where not everyone is rich. And if you want to be stylish and have a house that's nice, and you don't have a ton of money, you might buy knockoff chairs. In his book, The Knockoff Economy, Christopher makes the argument that these kinds of protections given to expensive things like chairs and clothing is actually bad for consumers. Because for most

people, knockoffs are as close as they can get to the real thing. One of the things that's real about them is they're for the rest of us, right? They bring the rest of us into the world of the artist, right? They allow us to participate in the fashion world, even if we can't afford the stuff that is paraded down the runway. They allow us to participate in the world of industrial design, furniture, kitchen appliances, et cetera, even if we can't afford the super expensive brands. That's democratizing. I think it makes

the country prettier and more enjoyable. But for Greg, Emoco knockoffs also make the country, the whole planet, worse by filling landfills with garbage chairs. All of our product is engineered to be made for the longest life possible. A knockoff is surely made to be sold, used, and thrown away. Greg could probably still make nice chairs for less money, but it takes 77 steps to make a torpedo-proof chair. And a torpedo-proof chair will last 150 years. The goal is to produce something where it has the least impact environmentally,

all the way through, and has the longest life. To me, that's the very best kind of product you could do. Emoco is a very environmentally friendly company. The factory uses no toxic chemicals or processes. In 2007, they started producing a plastic version of the Navy chair out of recycled Coke bottles. Greg genuinely cares about sustainability. I spent just a few days with him, but I know he thinks food tastes worse when it's served in disposable containers and that he travels with his own silverware. If he could, I think he would use the law to go after all the

knockoffs, the lookalikes and the almost looks likes, like the lightweight aluminum delta chair from Crate and Barrel. I showed Greg a photo of this chair. Is this a fake? Absolutely a fake. What they've done here is they've put, instead of three bars on the vertical back, they put four bars. Instead of having a horizontal bar towards the bottom, they take these four vertical bars and bring them all the way down to the seat bottom. But it's the same tube shape.

It's bent the same way. But it's the same tube shape. It's bent the same way. The legs are the same configuration. The seat bottom has the bum dip in it. The front legs have the taper. This is made to look like an MO chair. I took Roman into a crate and barrel in Manhattan so he could see this chair. I think we have to go in this room. I came in here looking for it the other day.

And look what these bastards did with this knockoff. Look at that. They kept the welds. They kept the welds on the top of the slats. Are they really even welds or are they just decorative welds? Decorative welds. So the crate and barrel chair is different enough to avoid a lawsuit, but it retained those signature welds of the Emiko chair to give it that handcrafted feel.

But even if they mimic the welds, according to Greg, there will always be one key difference between the Emiko chair and this one. It won't last. It's not designed to last as long as our chair is. Greg is fairly certain it wouldn't pass the original test of being thrown off that eight-story building. Of course, there's really only one way to find out. That helicopter. We're going to wait for the helicopter to go away. Now that I have you on my roof on the seventh floor with the knockoff crate and barrel, I kind of think the ultimate test is throwing it off

and see what happens. No way. No way. No, you're on your own for that one. You do that on your show. There's no way I'm taking responsibility for that. Absolutely not. So to hear what happens next,

you're going to have to go to the theory of everything. Go to the theory of everything. You're not suing me. All right. So I'm here on the roof of my place now. Roman's gone home to the West Coast. There's no way my little chair is going to hurt him unless it bounces all the way to beautiful Oakland, California. But my roof is basically on the eighth floor, maybe seven and a half, but close enough. It's not like this is a scientific study. I've got the Delta chair here, and I'm just going to heave it over the parapet.

Fuck yeah. And TOE's Andrew Calloway, he's going to go down to the street and yell when it's all clear to make sure I don't accidentally, you know, hit anyone. And you can record the impact, you know, from being on the ground too. Yeah, totally. But, you know, I just need to find something to hide under down there with the mic. All right, whatever. Just go downstairs and yell when you're ready. All right.

Sounds good. Hello, this is Lauren. How may I help you? Hey there. So are you the right person to talk to about buying an ad on a podcast? That's not my department. Let me trust you. Well, just let me give you my pitch.

See, my name is Andrew Calloway, and I work on a podcast called Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. And I think I have what could be a pretty great advertising opportunity for creating... Let me transfer you to PR. Hold on, hold on. It's a real nice knockoff company you got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. Excuse me? Fuck, I'm sorry. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. Excuse me?

I'm sorry. My boss just really needs me to sell an ad. You know, um, is there any chance you could just transfer me to the right person? Goddamn. Alright Benjamin, I'm ready. All right, all clear? All clear. All right, here goes. Whoa!

Whoa! Oh, wow, it doesn't even look like a chair anymore. we're standing at the kitchen and the um the kitchen is divided from the rest of the space by these yellow vinyl curtains and the plastic is infused with citronella and piercing those curtains is a treadmill and the treadmill is basically almost half and half in the living space and in the kitchen. So whenever anyone comes into the space the treadmill is on, it's running and it creates the scent of the citronella from the curtains because the curtains drag on the actual belt itself.

This shower curtain treadmill is a piece of furniture that artist Sam Stewart built for his first solo exhibition. Sam took over a commercial slash residential space next to his gallery, Fort Gansavort, in the former meatpacking district in New York City. And he filled it with art pieces and furniture that he made for a fictional client. A client he calls the cryptid.

Like all the other artists we've met in our False Alarm series, Sam Stewart works with both the fake and the real. But most of the stuff he makes is for real clients. I actually design functional furniture for private clients. It's more like portraiture that takes the shape of a piece of furniture than it is related to design in the traditional sense of designing for someone's home. I mean I really I don't have to explain it so much. There was a time when I kind of had to because clients will they'll ask you and they're like what do you call yourself you know and and I wouldn't want to answer in any other way than like framing it it as an art practice.

Some of the things that cryptids had Sam make are difficult to understand or make sense of when you first look at them. Like the dining table slash daybed that sits in the center of the room. The table has a burled wood top and thick tree trunk legs which are covered in white leather. The daybed mattress is covered in the same leather, but its legs are burled wood. Obviously the two pieces go together, but the bed

has been placed directly underneath the table, so both pieces look unusable. There's about a space of an inch between the bed and the tabletop, so there's no way to actually use the bed in its current position. And the bed fills most of the space, leg space underneath the table. So there's no way to really pull up a chair. But within the realm of the apartment, within the realm of this client that I've created, it's a very functional work and they can both use it for sleeping and for eating so what do you mean like it might be limiting for you and me but this is a client who can sleep and eat at this object right right and it and it's very similar to the sort of um like hospital bed and tray table that slides over the hospital bed design in In my mind, the spacing underneath the table,

having that barely one inch of space is the perfect amount of room for their client to extend out and rest. And it would be impossible for any human to do that. So what kind of creature is the cryptid? And why is he or she or it pushing Sam to create these surreal objects? One of the reasons why I called it cryptid was that, you know, a cryptozoologist is someone that investigates beings like the Yeti,

like the Loch Ness Monster that aren't necessarily real and they're not necessarily fake because neither has been, you know, it hasn't been proven one way or the other. And if they were to solve and to find out with, you know, scientific method that the thing exists or it didn't exist, then it would eliminate the need for their jobs. For Sam, the cryptozoologist's dilemma is one the artist faces as well. I can relate as much as I'd like to resolve this whole thing with the real and the fake.

I'm not sure I could or should. Resolving it would render you useless. You would no longer be necessary if you resolved your art practice. There has to be this open-endedness to it. Originally, Sam was going to build an apartment-like staging inside his gallery. But then this work-live-like space next door opened up. So one thing we can say for sure about the cryptid is that he, she, it has enough money to afford the rent in one of the most expensive areas of the city. According to Sam, the cryptid is just as wealthy as his real clients, maybe even more.

And we can see this just by checking out the chairs. We're looking at a, what is a traditional Appalachian stick furniture chair. Okay, the only traditional thing about this dining chair is that it's made out of sticks. But these sticks have been charcoalized, so if you or I sat in it, it would break. Also, the chair is wrapped in plastic, smoky black vinyl. Doubt that's traditional either. The plastic's there to protect it and in a very kind of pragmatic way, but it also, you know, is meant to give it this kind of sexualized sort of BDSM quality with the black

leather piping and the sort of the way it conforms to the shape of the chair. In a similar way, you see these clear vinyl pants that people will wear. It kind of is a bit of a turn on to the type of client that I'm imagining. The signifier of, like, a certain level of wealth in a city like New York is to possess things that are not polished. It's almost like you return to this sort of, like, this level of folk or of artifacts that isn't, you know't a highly produced object.

It doesn't belong to the environment that most things in the city belong to, the sort of sleek glass, steel. Welth has this kind of sort of material code. Sam's work both reflects and magnifies these material codes. I came away from his show with a much better understanding about our obsession with status and opulence. But there was also something about the cryptid's non-functioning furniture that unsettled me. It took me weeks to figure out why. The revelation is even more unsettling.

You see, the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us has opened up so wide, it's become like a portal to another dimension. This is how Sam's cryptid got here. What other unreal monsters have slipped into our world through this rupture? With Mystery Show, what I really wanted was a show that was all true. So true. Because it had to be true for it to work. All of it.

And it had to be like the tiniest detail had to be true. And I had to approach the truth with utmost seriousness. But I wanted it to sound like fiction almost. I wanted it to sound like a movie. And I wanted to create a better world than we think we live in. When I decided to hit up some of my fellow podcasters for help with my dilemma about what I should do with my show, now that everything has become a blurring of the real and the fake,

I knew I had to talk with Starlee Kine. Because Starlee is very good at helping people. That's what she did on her amazing podcast, Mystery Show. It turns out she's been thinking a lot about why so many Americans are having problems with reality and the truth right now. There's something that's happening where there's a decision that's been made to not believe the truth anymore, right? And the reason people are making that decision,

like the Trump followers, is because part of it is they've gone too deep in, right? Once they signed on, they couldn't really come back. And for them to accept the truth would have to be reckoning with stuff about themselves, right? Stuff that makes them uncomfortable. It's just too hard for them to confront themselves. So after Trump won, the closest I got to making a show was because I do not believe in how most coverage was done,

where it was all about finding the farmers and hearing their stories. And all I wanted to do was go around the country yelling at people. Because it felt like that was the only answer. I would support that show. I know. Yeah, I know. I would really support that. I would be your first backer. I think it would work, too. I actually think it's how we should be talking to each other.

I think we're spending too much time yelling online and not enough time yelling at each other's faces. Because I think you have to have that kind of jolt in order to actually move the needle. And it has to be sustained, like hours of yelling. I am definitely not the only person who wants Starlee to come back to podcasting. But she's pretty nonplussed about how things have developed over the past few years. For her, podcasting has become less an art form and more an extension of the ad industry. The way she sees it, this is my real problem. I actually feel like there's like a crossover between like podcasts now.

I don't know if facts and truth matters as much in what's happening now. What do you mean? Don't you think the truth in the fiction with advertising in the middle of shows comes into what you're saying? That's like stealing your beat. Oh, man. I did not expect us to be going down there, but this is a topic near and dear to my heart.

Well, first of all, I don't know how this happened. I feel like ads started happening, and no one seemed to question them. There was no pushback, and no one even did a full-on analysis or like a brainstorming session about, is there another way? Because ads should be what you, like the last resort, right? It should be like,

oh, we have to have ads. Shoot, there's no other ways to make money. There's no other way to put this out. Maybe it's just because our world had so little money for so long. But as soon as like the ad truck showed up and dumped some money out everyone just like lost their mind but um and so quickly like you're right like the truck pulled up and before they even like opened the doors they were just like

we'll we'll throw everything away that we ever believed in like there was this one episode that i was working on that wasn't quite done and i needed a few more days and the reason i couldn't get a few more days to make it what i wanted to make it was because of the advertisers waiting it had nothing to do with it wasn't you know what i mean like already it was it was like they were the ones that had to be heated and that's not that is really really not good oh man in the same way that like network tv is it just feels like content to wrap around the ad right and the flimsy stuff getting rewarded as much and often more so because more so because there's then you if you do flimsy stuff getting rewarded as much and often more so because if you do flimsy episodes, you get more and more ad dollars, right? And that's what matters now.

But these shows with all the ads, they're like setting a model for what a real podcast should sound like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it is a given. Now it is not considered a real podcast unless there's ads in it because value equals real. But, yeah, so I've been kind of struggling with it and I am starting to feel bad about myself that I'm not having. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That I am kind of failing and I'm internalizing this failure. It's like I'm not doing a good show. Yep. This sucks. That's crazy. This sucks. That's amazing.

What do I do? Well, what you should do, what you should actually do is listen to a bunch of shows that have ads and see how bad they are. That would probably help you. It won't make you feel like life is more fair, but you'll stop feeling like your show isn't good. I could send you a list. Ha ha ha!

I knew Starlee would come through with some good advice. And she's right about the ad model, too. There is a better way. And you know what, dear listener? I've found it. The theory of everything coin. Oh yeah, we're having an ICO. The TOE Benjamin Coin is the world's first edible meta crypto podcast coin.

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Unlike other podcast hosts, I'm not asking you to sustain us. Let me sustain you. You'll find all the information you need including a buy button that you can click on and order your coin now. I'm going to let TOE's Andrew Calloway fill you in on a few specifics. The TOE coin

is one and a half inches of pure milk chocolate and we took the illustration cartoonist Jordan Crane did for our S-Coin episode and transferred it to a hand-printed golden foil. You can see the Benjamin coin in action in a video I made, which is also available to watch for free

at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. But if you want the real thing, and trust me, dear listener, you do, well, that you're going to have to pay for. Go to theoryofeverythingpodcast.com right now and get your Theory of Everything edible meta crypto podcast coin today. This is not a crypto scam nor a blockchain fraud.

This is 100% for real. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called We All Cost Extra. This episode was produced by me and Andrew Calloway. It featured Sam Stewart

and Starley Kine and an original co-production on the Emoco chair with the team of 99% Invisible. Special thanks to Mathilde Biot, James Burns, Mitra Parina,

Samantha Birkenholz and cartoonist Jordan Crane who did all the original images for this series. You can find all the info you want, including a picture of the chair I threw off my roof, at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.