All Your Contractors Are Belong To Us!

Show Notes:
Links:
The Boys in The Boat
Founding Sales
All your base are belong to us
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Full Transcript:
Starr:
I loved Beavis and Butthead so much in the 90s.

Ben:
Yeah, it was awesome.

Starr:
I was prepared not to like it because all I heard was everybody talking about how stupid it was. And then I watched it. I was like, this is amazing. This is just my brand. I was the target demographic. I was, I don't know, 16 17.

Josh:
Yep.

Ben:
Yep. That's a great show.

Starr:
Yeah, so.

Ben:
There was some picture. I don't remember who it was. It was Josh Hawley and I can't remember who the person was. But they had them as Beavis and Butthead. They did a montage, had them in a picture together and it was pretty funny. 

Starr:
I feel like the children and their deep fried memes are the spiritual successor to the spiritual child of Beavis and Butthead.

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Josh:
Could be Yeah.

Ben:
No doubt.

Starr:
Because Beavis and Butthead were pretty deep fried. So, this podcast is just all about giving. We all live in the Pacific Northwest. And this podcast is going to be all about giving our readers, I know, what does it feel like a sense of what it feels like to live in the Pacific Northwest because I've got a guy chainsawing right outside my window. They've got a wood chipper going. And it's an extremely Pacific Northwest thing. I've lived all over the country. And I've never lived in place for about a third of the time, you can hear a wood chipper in the background in a residential neighborhood.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
I think part of that is due to the trend here that I haven't seen anywhere else, of allowing 90 foot cedar trees to grow right next to the houses, right? And so at some point, someone's like, "You know what? We probably should take that down." And repeat that over and over again in every neighborhood around here.

Josh:
Speaking of, I have some chainsaw work to do right after this podcast. So we do live in a grove of cedar trees. And one of them fell in my backyard and took out my fence the other week so I've been working on that-

Starr:
Oh that's good.

Josh:
Slowly.

Starr:
So I learned, a what?

Ben:
You are going to be all set for firewood this winter then.

Josh:
Yeah, for sure. I've been all set for firewood since we moved in here, trees fall every year, it seems.

Starr:
One thing I learned when I started the permitting process for my backyard office is that Seattle has a concept of, I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like there is significant trees or important trees. There's an official designation for if a tree is worth living or if you can just kill it with impunity.

Ben:
Yeah. Kirkland is pretty uptight about that whole tree thing as well. In fact, apparently Kirkland is tree city USA, but there might be, I don't know, 5000 of those in the country. But anyway, for some reason, the people that owned my house before me or maybe the people that owned the house before them, decided to plant a nice Maple right close to the driveway. And that Maple over its lifetime, of course, grew and grew, and its roots grew and grew under the driveway and heading towards the foundation. And I'm like, I got to take this tree out. And the city of Kirkland was not terribly happy with the idea of me taking out this tree that had that designation. I don't know what they call it, substantial tree or something. But yeah, we actually, we have a policy in Kirkland. You can only remove two trees per year from your property. And you have to get special permission if the tree has a particular diameter of trunk. If it's been around long enough kind of thing. So-

Starr:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
That'd be the absolute unit designation.

Ben:
So I actually sent a Google Earth view of my house, my lot and I had to circle this tree and get permits to be able to remove it.

Starr:
And they're like, "Sorry sir that tree is a chonk, you can't remove that."

Josh:
What?

Starr:
That big boy's an absolute unit. You can't just cut him down.

Josh:
So Ben, what's it like living under tyranny?

Ben:
Well, and then tree removal service that, because I didn't want to do it myself. I'm not that manly. They came out and the contract was if you get sued by the city, then it's all you basically, they disclaim any liability of getting in trouble with the law.

Starr:
Oh, that's funny.

Josh:
Do they have tree lawyers or do they hire.

Ben:
They have the tree police that go out every year. And they look for the tress gone missing.

Starr:
Well, actually, I did, so when I was permitting my shed or my office, I call it the shed, but it's actually a pretty nice office at this point. I was originally going to have it on the other side of the lot, but that was too close to the roots of this special tree, which is good. I don't want to kill the tree. So I'm glad that they told me that. I don't care what side I build it on. But there are actually tree lawyers and tree laws. And it's a whole big deal with forestry. Let me tell you a little bit. This is just going to be the gossip episode where I just tell you all about all my family's dirty laundry. So my sister, my half sister, I've got several siblings and my half sister is 20 years older than me. And she got a little weird there and got a little hostile towards the rest of the family. And essentially, the family owns in common this little plot of land in Mountainburg Arkansas, it's just forest, it's pretty useless. It's not even really flat enough to build on.

Starr:
You'd really have to go in and clear it out and bulldozer it to make it a decent place for our house or anything. And so, she is not an owner due to some complications, she sold her part or something like that. But anyway, later on, several years ago, she went and hired a forestry company to cut down all the trees on the land and sell them to-

Josh:
Log it.

Starr:
Yeah, to log it and give her the money, the proceeds which is a pretty shitty thing to do, right?

Josh:
Industrious?

Starr:
Yeah. So anyway-

Josh:
Just take the initiative.

Starr:
So of course, we had to sue her. Just because I don't know it is just out of principle. Anyway, it was such a paltry sum of money, but it ended up being a principle of the thing. But yes, there's lots of laws about cutting down other people's trees. This is something people have really dealt with in the past.

Josh:
Well, if you're going to go into law, tree law seems like a pretty good way to go.

Starr:
Very stable.

Josh:
There will probably be trees in the future. Have you all, back to the Pacific Northwest, have you seen the pictures of the trees back before the whole, the Pacific Northwest was logged, back in the day?

Starr:
It was amazing.

Josh:
Pictures of entire logging crews sitting on the stumps of these trees. That was 20 people or something.

Ben:
Yeah, I was just reading actually, the book, The boys in the boat. It's the story of US Olympic team, rowing team in 1936. And they were from the Seattle area. They were the University of Washington crew. And so there's a lot of Seattle area history mixed in with this book. And they followed one of the members of the crew, his name is Joe and followed basically his life story. And he lived out in Se...