Episode 25: "UNIT OF PAIN 2" feat. Mike Pollard *FULL EP ON PATREON*

You're listening to the free version of Cloud Farm for the full episode sub the Patreon geezer. Oh, like a Google Glass app that like removes homeless people from your booth. Imagine like footwork but for the fingers. I don't know if I'm a flub head. Have you ever received a smoky missy email from Thurston Moore? The first time after I had sex. History of the Bulls. Thank you for saying that man. Tech took off all of his clothes but he was wearing like so much clothes. do i literally dilate my anus and discharge feces this just became the best episode host whose mind is not necessarily operating. So apologies to the listener. Apologies to my fellow co-host. Apologies most profusely to our esteemed guest. This is really going to make people want to keep listening. Yeah, yeah. Michael Pollard. No, I'm doing a bit because I actually feel functional. Yeah, do you say Pollard or Pollard? Pollard. Yeah, I've been saying Pollard though. I'm giving a little bit of a European stank. Related to Robert? In name only. Who's Robert Pollard? Kind of by voices. Michael Bob. Michael Bob, yeah. I see, I see, I see. Mike, who are you? Can we start with an easier question? What are you, species style? I am Mike Pollard. I'm 34 years old, live in New York City.

Run a thing called Nina Protocol. Been taken up most of my time for the last three years. Yes. Done a couple other things. You have indeed. We did a little bit of prior research, which is a relative rarity for our venture. And we liked what we arrived at. But first, can you tell us, what defines Tory drip? I learned the other day, it's sambas. Apparently I have Tory drip, so a blazer and a baseball hat. Who was it that told you this? It was an accusation leveled by Ian Kimjad. A little Trouble in Paradise situation there, huh? That's fine. Who else works at Nina? So it's you, I know Ian, I know Cal, I think. Yeah, I started it with Jack Callahan and Eric Farber. And then my younger brother, John, was the first person to join from outside. And then Ian. And then this guy, Brandon Nickel, who I know from music stuff from a long time ago. He used to run a label in the Bay called ISO Underscore. And then Cal Hickox joined. And then we recently just hired a guy, Michael Lorimer, who does design. For the uninitiated, how do you explain Nina? The simplest thing I've been saying recently, it's like if SoundCloud and Bandcamp had a baby. Which would require them doing what? Intercourse. Intercourse. Commonly known as... Fuck it. Whoa! Alright, now we're cooking. This just became the best episode. Before the episode, Dave said that Mike was something of a punk startup guy, and I think he just proved it. Wait, this guy runs a business and says F-bombs. I think it's more common than you think. Willie asks Nilly. No, I've heard people swear. It's alright. I'm actually kind of jaded on it now. What's the working culture like? I imagine...

Yeah, what's it like internally? I mean, honestly, before Nina, I did tons of freelance work for like six or seven years, freelance programming work. So I don't have that much experience with working culture, like comparatively. My first job was like really insane working culture because the company was started by college kids. We lived in a giant mansion and everyone lived in the house and worked in the house. And like some people never left the house. This was in Silicon Valley in 2013. Who was that? It's called Chattis, random chat startup. I think I would say Nina's culture is better than Chattis's. Apologies to those guys if they're listening to CloudFarm. So you've had the full Silicon Valley experience in that respect? Yeah. How long were you there for? A year and a half. Pretty short. Or is that the standard length of service? No. I didn't really know how to code when I got the job. It was kind of like, I don't know, maybe 2013 was a little different. But basically got a full-time iOS app developing job for a company without an interview or resume. And there were people I barely knew. I was in the right bathroom at the right time. Is that a cocaine-style bathroom? Oh, no, this was peeing. Which comes out of what? Come on, come on. Say it, say it, say it. The balls. The balls. Commonly known as? Medically known as? Testicles. I like the idea that I'm like, I genuinely don't know. But I'm aware it's weird to not know. I like the idea of this becoming a history podcast. A biology podcast? No. History of the Bulls. What's it like working with the people that you worked with previously, would you consider them to be normies or were they like extreme basement dwelling autists? I would say the perfect mixture of both. Right. They were like...

I was 23 when I was working there and they were all like 21 to like 17. Okay. Like my bosses were like 21. They were like still in school. They were all at Stanford and it was like a class project that turned into a startup. Yeah. And that was like really extreme kind of like people wouldn't change their clothes for like days. Yeah. I would just see all these people's feet all the time constantly. But I feel like given your musical history, you're probably kind of desensitized to grime and filth. Yeah, but when it's like a kind of aggressive, like Stanford startup guy, it's a little different than the kind of music grime and filth that I'm used to. Right, a different sub-genre. You're used to a kind grime and filth. Yeah, there was a lot of aggressive energy constantly. Yeah. Kind of like... Limp, nerdy, aggressive energy or like lifting 300 pounds, aggressive energy? Lifting 300 pounds, aggressive energy. Oh, shit. One of the guys who started that company, he was a childhood chess prodigy and he was like very highly ranked. Do you mean like he was good for a kid or as a kid he was good? He was good for adults as like a... Ten-year-old. Got you. Jesus. And then when he was in high school, he ran like a biology lab that like should have been like a post-grad would run. That was aging blood stains. So he invented some blood stain aging thing. To what end? I don't remember. I don't recall. But then he got really into weightlifting. At about the same time. I think when he got to Stanford, he got into startups. The perfect body, the perfect mind. There was this video on YouTube from an account that he had lost the password to that I imagine. I've tried to find it recently, and I think it's gone. But the username was unitofpain2, and the video was called noobtraininglog. And it was him with a pre-smartphone phone flexing.

In the mirror. But, like, holding the camera, like, with an arm that's also flexing sometimes. Unidapain is a sick name. Unidapain 2. Unidapain 2 is... Noob training log. Yeah. And there's, like, trance music playing in the background. Hell yeah. It's, like, 40 seconds long. I agree. Unidapain 2 pod title. Fuck yeah. Yeah. Or noob training log. Also a strong pod title. How does it feel walking into a... professional environment knowing you're the most underground mf in the room oh pretty good yeah right yeah secret knowledge right they don't know how much of a genius i am you kind of know about um uh stuff they could only dream of yeah um you can't fake the funk have you ever like fucked up like a like a company event or whatever and like ran the aux and had it not land you get to run the aux at a company event There's not just a stock Spotify playlist here? A lot of the time there is, but I've DJed company parties and whatnot, which are mad fun. Yeah, yeah. When I was at this other, in 2013, when I was at that company in Silicon Valley, we had a really big Christmas party, and I was tending bar at a certain point. And every time someone ordered shots, I would just pour them water. And, like, watch them pound the shots and then be like, yeah. Like, they were too wasted to know. That was me trying to have fun, I guess. Secret knowledge. At no point, no one said this. Did you tell them it was vodka? Yeah, they, like, asked for vodka. And I was, like, just poured water under the thing. Not being able to tell the difference is, like, incredibly dweeb-pilled. I was, like, honestly doing them a favor. Yeah. That's so funny. Dweeb-pilled. Mega drunk-pilled. dream okay i i had a a friend of mine this is like only tangentially related a friend of mine's dad um would have to go to japan for business a lot and as part of the the traditional like deal closing um you're kind of like obligated to meet them halfway and just and just get you know absurdly obliterated i mean i'm sure you're well aware of like the japanese corporate like drinking culture um i should do business with japanese you should indeed um and uh

So they kept pounding shots, and my friend's dad asked one of the waiters to, every time they ordered a round, give him water, while the rest of them drank whatever it was, like sake. And at a certain point, he won their respect for being... In their eyes, he was just this absolute fucking shot-obliterating monster. That's kind of fucked up, I think. What's that? Stolen valor. Yeah, I agree. Well, you have to. They would have respected him if he got... really fucked up too. Exactly. Yeah. He betrayed their respect. If he got slopped out. Undeserved. I didn't realize you were a man of honor like this. Oh, yeah. Bushido. I can't lie. You can't lie. Catholic guilt. Way too deep. Because you're a Catholic from Chicago, right? Yes. Oh, you really did your research. I have my words. You're listening to the free version of Cloud Farm for the full episode of the Patreon user. Do you think we should bring back the term posing? Why... I think no. I think it can be brought back, but I think it wouldn't have the same bite anymore. Like, posing is pretty natural now. The world's just suffused with phonies? No, but people who are posing. I think posing is like a default mode. Do you consider us to be real ones, real MFs? Like right now, this is pretty real. If I were to say, yo, Devo, let me take a picture, you'd be a poser. All right, all right, all right. You don't have to document me if you choose not to. I just recently observed the... I can't remember who we're having this conversation with. Oh, please undo it. About posing? Mike's taking a photo and thus turning this into a pose-based charade. I guess we're not filming this, so it doesn't really matter. Yeah, there's that. Yeah, who the fuck are we talking about that with? Blake? Was it Blake? I think thinking about poses is probably necessary. Like, we talked about authenticity earlier. Probably the only way to turn the authenticity argument back around is to start having...

The poses and the not poses. Right. Figuring out what's legit and what's not. To bring back the hard dichotomy. I just think that there's been a real change since when poser would have been a more used term. And I don't think that it translates to the current situation. What year do you think that is? 2006? Okay. 2007? You're talking about the death of subcultures? Yeah. Or just like the... Ability to, I don't know, they're kind of like, I remember like this moment when it was like people were like having records put out by like Mountain Dew or like Red Stripe or something. And like, yeah, that's kind of like sellout or like poser style. But it's also like not like people have really been able to like sell enough records to make money that way or something in a long time. Like... I don't know. They're just bands that nobody really remembers their names, but they were probably able to sell 10,000 records in the 90s. Do you remember that time in that weird phase? I think it would have been maybe mid to late 2000s where that car company Scion started putting on a bunch of metal events and releasing metal albums. I don't actually know that. It was bizarre and completely inexplicable. I think Scion's a subsidiary brand of some other bigger car company. I forget which. Like Toyota or something. I remember the trancy ads because the car was shaped like a box and the people were doing box dancing. I haven't seen that. I think that you guys got metal ads in the UK or Netherlands or wherever you were growing up or China or wherever you're from. And in the US, we got trance. It wasn't ads, though. That's the thing. They just started legitimately for inscrutable kind of... I guess, like, marketing reasons. I guess they wanted to, like, it was on some, like, grassroots, like, authenticity purchasing thing. They decided they poured tons of money into, like, genuinely, like, underground metal. Not some, like, whatever, like, Slayer, Anthrax, Metallica, like, stadium shit. Not some poser shit, but just, like, brutal, like, grindcore power violence. Just extreme metal. They were going after the people who would buy the same record.

10 different colors of vinyl. Exactly. And they'd buy the same car in 10 different colors. Was that what you were about to do? I'm so sorry, Mike. I'm so sorry. No, no, no, it's all good. As long as the idea got out there. Wait, David, so what's your read on that situation? Like, why do you think that happened? I think it was just, I think it was like the pet project of some, like naive, misguided, and ultimately kind of like well-intentioned marketing manager who couldn't divorce his own kind of like masturbatory vanity project impulses from what actually works. Because there's, I mean, they cut the cord after like a year or something. Tons of bands were getting flack shot on for taking the check. Did the bands get cars? It would be really funny having a band pull up to the gig. Have you heard of the band Magrudergrind? Oh, a great band. You fuck with them? Yeah. That surprises me. I went to see them with Ed in 2015. Seriously, I bet they were fucking sick. It was great, yeah. They drove Scions. Yeah, they pulled up with the Scions. But there's literally a Sion-sponsored Magrudergrind EP that has the Sion logo on it. It's a truly bizarre moment in culture. Wow. Do you think anyone's done that right ever? Maybe the Red Bull thing? Red Bull thing's definitely kind of close. Close enough. Yeah. I mean, that's also an interesting thing. That's actually a really good example. Because then people are like, oh, like... sellout or corporations or something and then you get Red Bull and maybe people were like it's kind of weird but then everybody liked it and it was kind of vital and then it goes away and then like everyone's sad and all these kind of like interesting jobs and interviews and stuff's all gone yeah it's something weird happened definitely I really would I'm so interested in getting like a really like thorough post-mortem I've been thinking about it I've been thinking about it in relation to, like, the Pitchfork stuff and all the journalist stuff. Like, there were all these super vital blogs that people were doing, like, just for fun. And then they all kind of got sucked up into, like, corporate journalism. Well, didn't Pitchfork buy all the blogs at one point and then kind of turn them into a feed? Yeah. What was that called? Was it Altered Zones? Yes, I believe that is it, yeah.

Yeah, like Altered Zones was like independent and aggregating that stuff. I didn't realize that's what they were doing. And then I think that then that thing got sucked up. Yeah, it didn't last. Yeah, and then everybody goes to like Pitchfork or Vice or something and then get used to like the corporate structure and the bureaucracy. And then like, you know, the 10-year period goes away where these companies are like... These are things that make sense to do. And then it's like, oh, a lot of stuff's left in the wake. Yeah, and the culture has to reconstitute itself somehow. Got to get that vital on the ground stuff. How do you feel about, I mean, the timing wasn't, with Bandcamp going down, Nina starting the editorial thing felt quite... Serendipitous. How does it feel to be the last remaining bastion of worthy journalism? The one that starts, like, right after the... I would say that... Is that real? Yeah. I would say it's scary. I think, yeah, like, part of the initial reason for, like, doing Nina in the first place, like, the platform was just really feeling like SoundCloud and Bandcamp are both, like... Great things, but maybe they've kind of reached like a saturation point or like an end point. Just thinking like, I think that SoundCloud and Bandcamp both started in like 2007, 2008. And, you know, like the check engine lights on, you know, they're like kind of a little rundown or something. And so it's kind of like maybe there's like a... the need for a new generation of places to put your music online. Just, I mean, you're comfortable with the idea of Nina having a 10 to 20 year lifespan rather than a longevity that goes further than that. Oh, I mean, I think it, if we were to get into like, I think like longer is better. There's just something about like the way that the music and stuff is stored on Nina. It's not dependent on us. So it's all kind of still.

The primary functions and all the data is all open source and accessible, which isn't the case with Bandcamp or SoundCloud. So if Bandcamp or SoundCloud is sold to someone who doesn't care about the things as they are now, then they'll just flip a switch, servers will be off, everything's gone. So when you use the phrase check engine, you mean quite literally the engineering behind it rather than maybe the culture around the platform? Well, I think they're both like the people who started them are no longer there now. Kind of. Okay. And I think that they have, yeah, legacy kind of engineering problems or, you know, you just switch hands a couple times and then there's just kind of no guarantee that the way things are will be how they'll continue. And I think that's like sort of been clearer for a while, but it just becomes increasingly clear kind of each. Yeah. It's so interesting to me. To me, there's like parallels. The ethos that underlies Nina, I see like a comparable dynamic between Silicon Valley being, like early Silicon Valley being influenced by this kind of like post-hippie idealism. And just, I really like the idea that you get a bunch of like grizzled uh not to say you look grizzled you look you look radiant but like grizzled like trench proven like noise heads like diy people like underground people place them in kind of like a quote-unquote disruptive tech context and see what comes out of it um is that like because i feel like everyone that works in you know has like a background in music yeah yeah i mean it's it's pretty we've never like advertise the job and it's always just been someone that someone at the company knows introduces someone who has a skill that's needed yeah and then they get hired so there's no the yeah is it safe to say that everyone who works in you know has at one point filleted a contact mic uh that's not no i don't think so do you want to fillet a content mic we that's kind of a segment we're considering i think my brother is the probably only one who has it yeah

I definitely have. Respect. Respect. You want to listen to the same version of Clyde Tom? For the full episode, sub the Patreon, geezer.