Editing The Pen Addict 400/transcript (section)

== Common Themes and Memes ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' There are some themes and memes that occur on this show. There are pens and companies that we will refer to very frequently. Sometimes seriously, sometimes as jokes. And it's probably worth knowing at least a handful of these frequently referred to terms. So, we will start with three famous Kickstarters. Two infamous, I would say, and one famous. The two infamous Kickstarters. One is called The Visionaire.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, Myke. So, we don't have time to go into all the history of all these projects. These are basically individual episodes themselves if we ever decide to recap all the drama that went on with these various projects. But The Visionaire was a pen that came out at a very strange time on Kickstarter where the pen Kickstarter was a thing. And fountain pens were starting to become popular on Kickstarter. And then this project appeared out of the blue from no one had any knowledge of before. Which is okay. That's kind of what Kickstarter is for. But the problem with The Visionaire is it was this very basic looking pen. And they were charging a very reasonable price. I think it was less than $40 if memory serves. And by the time we got note of it, it had already crossed like $100,000 or $200,000. It went all the way up over $300,000. And it was very quickly realized by anyone who knew anything about fountain pens that this person had no idea what they were doing. So we found the pen was just a basic generic pen that they were essentially buying off of one of the Asian marketplaces like Alibaba or Rakuten or whatever. Their product videos were shown filling the pen with India ink, which is not compatible with fountain pens. It will not flow correctly. And then the marketing around it has prompted one of the most famous phrases or common sayings that we use in pen attic history is this pen was important enough to sign your wedding certificate with or your birth certificate with. Right. So I got in touch at the time with the creator and we started talking because I was questioning like everything about this project. And so there's several podcasts. The first one we'll link is episode 64 where we first mentioned The Visionaire. And then there's several subsequent podcasts where I've talked to the creator of the project, trying to understand what's going on. And in the end, Myke took one for the team and backed The Visionaire. So why don't you talk about the pen itself real quick?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I mean, I have nothing to say. It's the most basic fountain pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's a $2 fountain pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' A scam it was not. But it was, you know, like there are scams on Kickstarter, as many scams. Oh, we're getting to that one. We're going to talk about the most scammy scam of all time in a second. But The Visionaire was just a very, very basic product. Very, very well marketed.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. So when you hear us mention, would you sign your child's birth certificate with that? It's referring back to this whole Visionaire debacle that really, I mean, just lined the creator's pockets with basically a resale of a fountain pen. So it was a travesty. But it wasn't a scam, Myke. This next one was a scam.

'''Myke Hurley:''' The scribble pen. Pen. This was a pen. It exploded onto the internet because the video is so good. Because what it promised is you could touch a sensor on the end of the pen onto any surface. It would replicate the color. And you could start drawing with that color. That there was like an ink mixing mechanism inside of the pen. It could mix the inks together for you. And you could start writing. And believe it or not, this was a pen basically the size of a dry erase marker. Absolute 100% fakery. We spent a lot of time on the show. Because this pen kept coming back as well, which is one of the funny things about it. It would launch onto different crowdfunding platforms. It would launch under different names. One of my very favorite things about the Kickstarter platform is that all of this stuff remains. So I will have links in the show notes. You can go and look at the page even though they canceled the funding because it exploded into... And I really do think that we were partly responsible in exposing this product for what it was. Because it became very bloggy. Very blog-worthy to show this thing. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I was involved in a lot of articles around discussing this and the Visionaire before that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But this one was like... And we took a real stand on this pen because we knew it was physically impossible to produce. Right? That it could not be made in the guise that they were showing it. But this pen kept coming back and the story kept getting weirder and weirder over time. But this was one that is just fake. But you can go and watch the video and it's still fun to see today. But there is just no world in which this pen could be made right now.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I did get threatened with a lawsuit on this one that I posted on the blog. So it was just... It continues to exist. This is a very much what is dead will never die thing. I mean we're years and years on and they continue to take people's money for pre-orders and never deliver anything. And I'm just shocked at the people who continue to believe that this product exists and will actually work as intended. And they keep changing what it is. Now it's practically down to it's a color picker with an app type of thing now. But man, what a mess that project was at the time. All of the product imagery was photoshopped. It was just fake from head to toe. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And it was super fun over time to break down those videos frame by frame. Yeah. And work out exactly what they were doing to fake them.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Good times. The scribble pen. That one continues to live in infamy. The next one was infamous for a while and now has just become famous. It's the CWNT pen type A, which was a pen that I fully supported and fully, you know, loved and everything. But it turned into one of the biggest Kickstarter stories ever just because of the catastrophe that the manufacturing process became. And then which led into like all kinds of bad things happening and all kinds of, I guess, product theft and idea theft and things like that. And in the end, like we all got our pens and it all shook out fine. But it was one of the craziest, wildest rides I've ever had on any Kickstarter project. And in the beginning and in the end, like I became friends with Sewe and Taylor, who are CWNT. And to this day, I continue to be friends with them and support all their projects. But at the time, this was like their first big Kickstarter and it just ran amok. And talk about articles written about it. There's articles about this, like on big, you know, websites and blogs or just about how like the madness of producing a Kickstarter project and all the things that can go wrong. And in the end, they came out better for it in the end. But man, that's that was a crazy project. And it continues to come up to this day. And CWT does because they've they've made some really interesting products since then. But it's worth mentioning the pen type A if you're into this type of thing and want to research it. But we actually mentioned this, Myke. I had to go back and look it up. I was shocked when I saw this. We mentioned the pen type A in episode number two. I couldn't believe that when I looked it up.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, that's wild.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Speaking of wild, another recurring theme. We're off the Kickstarters now and we're just into some common themes that we talked about. Do you want to describe this?