Muse

Ladders. They can be your stairway to heaven or your ticket to hell. Every year, clueless dolts get up high on ladders while high on beer, wine, and other mind-altering liquors. Sure, our society makes light of ladders. Champion ladder climbers grace our every cereal box. And ladder-themed entertainment keeps our children in stitches. But in real life, these climbing machines can be killing machines. TBTL

Hey, Julia, can you say TBTL? L T B B T L

I'm doing the work. I'm baby stepping. I'm not a slacker. Look, man, you know your stuff, but you're like a crazy volcano. You'd have to show me you can bring it down a notch. I'll bring it down a thousand notches if I have to!

Okay, are we done with the business part? I wanted to start the clown portion of the meeting. Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL. Here we go again. The show that just might be too beautiful to live. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center high in the sky above Portland, Oregon.

I'm so excited about this show. It is weird. It is beautiful. It has a plot that goes in fascinating directions.

And whereas yesterday we were under the very wet thumb of what was described as a 2,000 mile long river of water that was suspended in the sky and slowly divesting itself of that water onto our heads and bodies here in the Pacific Northwest. Today, it is just a gorgeous, mostly sunny Wednesday morning.

Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful.

And I tell you what, it's putting some wind in my sails here on episode 3,336 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. A couple of stories we didn't get to yesterday, but both stories I believe have picked up a certain amount of kind of momentum if you will since yesterday when we were going to talk about them when we were going to be on the kind of leading edge of the story, the movement now that we waited an entire day now we're in the middle to the back of the line of people talking about these stories including the guys who and it is guys by the way who have like millions of dollars one guy it's 220 million dollars worth of bitcoin uh that is locked in an account that he forgot the password to and he has two more guesses at his password before it is permanently locked up in this system that cash can really get me out of a couple of jams so we will get into that plus uh scientists say that the earth is spinning faster which is making the days shorter i don't today with the sun out i don't care we could just call this one 22 hours i'm much more worried about the overall weather patterns than if we're technically at 23 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds which is a thing that's actually happened uh so uh scientists are saying maybe we need to create something called a negative

leap second those scientists better check their hypotenuses dude uh to try to fix all the clocks

But the last time they did something like this, the last time they futzed with the clock, like the world clock, essentially, it messed up Reddit. So we'll get into that. Oh, and the Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers let slip on a radio show the other day that he will be a guest host of Jeopardy.

Come on!

which i'm not into the stunt casting in that position um and so we'll talk about that too we'll talk about it with a guy who's there's no love lost for aaron rogers anyway uh he is the longest running cobro of the show he is known for his drawings of tall ships he is andrew targets targets walsh and he's joining me right now from the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington good morning my friend good morning luke can i tell you why i'm supposed to meet a stranger at a mall yeah later today i mentioned that before the show yeah you've got big plans today you're gonna venture out into the world and go to a a mall which i didn't even imagine those were open in washington state right now i think it's a mall i'll tell you what it is

little bit and you can tell me if it's a mall but here's a little backstory if you don't mind this is gonna take a little bit of unfolding okay do I have the floors that I'm gonna try not to do that thing where I jam a long story into a short amount of time so I just talk faster and faster and make it completely unlistenable so I'm gonna just try to take the correct amount of

time freshly poured cup of broadcast coffee buddy Barry put the feet up and And, yeah, it's a beautiful day here in Portland. I've got nowhere to be, Andrew, so please take your time. The year was 1976.

A young Andrew Walsh was born in Fairview Hospital. No, my camera broke. I've had a good what they call SLR camera for a long time now. Fifteen years, it turns out. I couldn't believe it. Way back in 2006, I was really getting into photography. and Genevieve, along with the help of a bunch of friends who contributed, got me what was at the time a very nice camera, a camera that is called a Nikon D80, and at the time it probably cost at least, I don't know, $1,500, $2,000. Yeah, these cameras are expensive, but I was really getting into one of the best. It's called a Nikon what? That was a D80 for whatever it's worth. But I'm just saying that for people who are... We got some photography heads out there.

Was this the same camera? Did I see you using this camera on your trip to the Grand Canyon in various photos?

Yes, exactly, yeah. But the thing is, that was 2006, and the technology has come a really, really long way since then. As I'm learning, since that camera did break on my trip, it didn't break because I dropped it or anything. It's just a function on it stopped working. It's hard to say whether it's an electronic function or a mechanical function, but essentially this mirror apparatus won't move anymore. And there's a camera store in Seattle that I absolutely love and love supporting called Glazers. And they were a big part of my life when I first moved to Seattle because I was trying to make a little scratch by being like a freelance photographer and I would rent equipment from them a lot. And I mean, it's kind of funny. I was thinking about this today, like right before I met you, Luke, like I was so into photography that it would have probably been a leading character trait of mine but like now like I don't think that you've you one would say like oh Andrew our photographer friend because I've just like really not you know been in that world for a really long time now and I was never really great I was always an amateur hobbyist but I was really into it but as um the years went on and my phone cameras got easier to use and took better pictures like the old d80 stayed in my bag um quite a bit but anyway I I took it on the road trip with us because it seemed like a good opportunity to take some photos. And during this trip, it just stopped working. This is one function of it. And so I took my camera to Glazer's camera and I said, I doubt this is something worth repairing, but, you know, should we look at repairing this or should I be looking at buying a used camera or a new camera replacement? And they're very nice there. They're not snobby at all, but it was almost comical. It was like saying, yeah, I have a laptop from 2006, should I get it repaired? Like, they're just like, the camera technology has come so far since you got this camera in 2006. Like, they said, like, your phone takes way better pictures than this camera does. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, it's like a 12 megapixel. No, it's not even. I don't even know what the D80 is. But, like, the phone megapixels are so much more now. So, I mean, not just functionality, but actually quality of image and size of image and all of those things. So, one other thing to keep in mind here is once you kind of get into this game, the lenses can get really expensive as well. That's what I've always heard is that the lenses are really where it gets spendy. Yes. And so, and I have one, I have a couple of lenses that I really like, but I have one really good lens that I invested in, again, a long, long time ago. But for the most part, with some details I don't have to get into here, like once you have a really good lens, you can kind of optimize for that lens as years go on and just get, you know, cameras that will match that lens, not vice versa. So anyway, all of that is to say I'm now in the market for a camera, right?

And I have been really going crazy looking for the right fit for me because this is going to be a big investment. Whether I get a used refurbished camera with a guarantee or I get a brand new camera, like it's going to be a big investment again. And keep in mind, this is an investment based on aspirational behavior. This is what's getting me. Oh, you mean like everything I buy? Like I'm not.

Would you like to go ice camping with me? I was recently in REI and decided to reinvent myself.

But, like, for a big purchase like this, and again, I don't consider myself a cheap person, but...

with big purchases I do get pretty anxious about it and of course Genevieve and I share finances and so just the idea of throwing you know a grand or two around on a new camera body when my D80 hasn't been mostly sitting in its bag for the past seven years with the very rare occasion of taking it out to go on a photo adventure it's a little bit hard to kind of justify so I've been going round and round looking at my options glazers sells used cameras I have been learning about a lot of the technology that has come along in the past and what will work with my various lenses. And it's just been a whole ordeal to the point where I've been to Glazers twice. Yesterday, I finally decided I was going to pull the trigger on a camera that they had, a used rebuilt camera for a decent price. And I go down there, and it was sold like a couple of hours before I got there. Oh, my God.

But this is, you are, you're throwing gasoline on the faux scarcity fire that burns or smolders within my brain at all times. What do you mean? I mean that when I see something that I think I want, particularly if it's in the used arena. I was getting furniture for this apartment in Portland, and I was going to a lot of places that were, you know, basically like used furniture places, but kind of nicer ones. But these are just – they just have one of the various things. It's not an Ikea. And I had these moments where I saw something and I liked it, and then I became immediately terrified that if I went to a different store to look at other things, I would come back and this would be gone. Like someone would have bought it out from under me. And I fought the urge. There was this couch – sorry to hijack your story. No, no, no.

This is good.

there was this couch there's this um place called look modern here in portland which is for our listeners who are into the mid-century game it i've i've literally never been in a furniture store like this the stuff is incredible it's all original mid i mean i think i said this on the show previously but like genevieve wood plots andrew walking through this place it's just really really great stuff but it's also not cheap because very skilled uh artisans have put a lot of time into bringing this furniture back to life there was this couch that was i want to say it was like four or five thousand dollars and it i have no business buying a four or five thousand dollar couch but i was so i was obsessed with it and i was talking myself into it and then i also became obsessed with this notion that if i left the store and went somewhere else someone was going to come back and there was going to be a sold tag on it and i was going to be devastated for a couch that I couldn't afford that also maybe wouldn't even fit properly in the apartment and I had to do some real like self-talk to say there are other couches in the world also you can't afford this couch also like I think it's because of how I grew up like a lot of kids in the family I maybe or maybe I'm just a weird broken person but I get very worried that if I want something or like something it is going to somehow I will be deprived of it in some way therefore I acquire it and if it's something that they're selling just on Amazon I acquire multiples of it yeah there's some weird shit going on in my brain anyway sorry back to you you just lived my nightmare you made the decision on the camera and it was actually sold well you but I'm glad you brought all this up because

actually let's talk about this for a little bit because this might be more relatable we don't have to get into the ins and outs of like camera mechanics and but when we come back we are going to talk f-stop yeah exactly the specs of the 71 the d7100 versus the d7500 which are a couple of the cameras I'm looking at but um what you're talking about is really playing into my mental game here too because that that feeling of I need to get this before it passes us up I see that a lot with Genevieve when we're getting a new apartment now I want to make a couple of things very clear here Genevieve is the person who always like does the apartment hunting find you know finds the apartment sets the reservations like she loves doing it I hate doing it um and she's found us a couple of cool places because of her because of her hard work in doing this kind of thing but as an observer of her behavior in these moments I will say that she has a tendency to want to lock in the first thing because there's this sense of well first of all moving has a has a mental element to it of like well we need you know there's a clock ticking we need to find a place now it's not like I can live without a camera for another month or two but there's a sense of like if I let this pass I will regret it forever if I think there might be something better down the line and it's not as good I'll always think that apartment that we passed up so I feel like she has a tendency to do that the thing about this particular purchase for me is I'm sort of feeling that a little bit like yeah I got to get the 7100 right away and then it was sold out from underneath me but what I need to remember is I've had a camera in a bag that I have hardly used for years and years and years there isn't a clock ticking and this is a mass-produced product this right even though it's expensive and it's a big investment for me there's no rush

here. And in fact, the more roadblocks I bump up against, probably the better because it's making me go back and learn more. Like when I first went to Glazers, literally the first day back from my road trip, I was so hot to trot on this that I woke up early on Sunday morning, ran some errands and went to Glazers the moment they opened at noon on Sunday morning. And or is it? Yeah, Sunday morning. So do you consider noon to be morning or did I just reveal a lot about my

lifestyle um probably left during the morning you probably left at 11 30 actually i left at like

eight in the morning i had a bunch of errands but i ended up with lasers uh anyway all of that is to say like i went in there the first time and i was waiting for us or i was hoping a salesperson would really kind of walk me through what some options are because again a lot of water has passed under the bridge since i've been paying attention to cameras and photography and i ended up with a a salesperson there who wasn't as helpful as you would hope. He wasn't terrible, but he wasn't great. And I don't know if it was him not knowing his shit as much as he thought he did or him not explaining it well, but we got into some issues about whether or not my lenses would be compatible with the used cameras that they have there or even the new ones. I was ready to buy. They had something for a couple hundred bucks that I almost pulled the trigger on until we realized there was a compatibility issue. and then in asking him to explain it he just kind of kept saying the same thing over and over only louder and louder and it turns out he wasn't exactly the reason i wasn't getting it is because he wasn't right about it he was conflating a couple of things so all of this is to say i'm kind of glad i didn't pull the trigger on something quickly on sunday because now here it is wednesday for the purpose of this conversation can we say press the shutter yeah press the shutter thanks I know, I realize I said that like a million times. No, I'm just saying when we're talking about pulling the trigger and it's about a camera purchase,

I would like if the language could conform to the physical object we're talking about.

I'm with you. I actually literally had that thought as I'm babbling along here. So what my point is here is so far it's only been three days, and I've learned way more about what the options are, what the Nikon lines are, and just what's going on with cameras these days. If something happens and I can't buy the camera for another week, it'll probably be good for me because I'll continue to do research and learn more. But I just have this desire to get the camera now. Why am I meeting a man at a mall later this afternoon, you want to know, is because I think there's a camera that I really want. And I'll tell you what it is. I was going to try to hide the prices of these things because I'm shy to talk about money, but I'll be honest. It's a Nikon D7500. I think it's what's going to fit the bill for me the best. If money were no object, well, no, maybe if money were no object, I'd get something else. But reasonably speaking. You'd get a helicopter that can also take pictures. Exactly. I'd get one of those drones you can ride in. The D7500 seems like kind of a good option for me, but knew it's a cool grand for the body. And that's just a lot for something that, again, I feel like I haven't really earned. Part of me is just kind of like you got to earn.

Right, if you had continued with kind of working in photography and taking pictures and that was something you were doing professionally still, absolutely that's an investment in your business. But if it's something that's going to – it will occasionally be slung around your neck as you're walking on the salt flats in a very cool picture that I believe you wrote on Instagram is your favorite picture that's ever been taken of you. And I agree, you look really badass.

Oh, that's at the Utah Toadstool Park. Oh, okay. Yeah, same deal.

That was my nickname in high school. It's fun to bring old jokes back, isn't it? The Utah Toadstool. No, that picture is very badass of you, but don't you have the camera slung around your neck in that picture?

It's probably strapped. Yeah, I probably have a strap around my body.

But you don't want to pay $1,500 for the D750, which is what it's currently going for at NikonUSA.com.

It's going for, is that where it's $1,500? Oh, that's probably with some kit lenses and stuff. I think body only, it's $1,000 straight up, this camera body. Do you mean to tell me all those pictures are being taken by your Ba'adi? By Ba'adi. Who takes the photos of the cameras and what do they use? They probably use cannons to shoot the Nikon. Anyway, I was like, well, maybe I should just, I'm not somebody who ever uses Craigslist. As a matter of fact, I was looking up my Craigslist password, And the last time I used it was about 12 years ago when I bought a lens off of somebody in in the Seattle area. And I went back and I reread our thread after picking up my camera or after picking up my lens and buying it from this guy. He followed up with an email to me. I'd forgotten about this saying, hey, did you leave a lens cap at my place? And I said, no, I didn't. I have all mine. Thanks. And then he wrote back, would you like to hike Tiger Mountain sometime? And I wrote back, I'm not much of a hiker, but.

Thanks for the invite. Is that usually how Craigslist works, or am I just magnanimous, or was I about to get murdered by the guy who sold me a 50-millimeter lens?

I mean, I believe that used to be how Craigslist worked, and they shut that function down. Right. I don't know what climbing Tiger Mountain is, but I didn't think this was supposed to keep this professional. No, but I mean, on the other hand, it's like, how are you supposed to make friends in this world? And if you guys hit it off, and you're an extremely likable person, Andrew, and you guys were probably talking cameras, and my guess would be that this guy just thought like hey here's a here's a person that i vibe with and you know let's be friends i based on just your description i don't think that was a creep move but um uh but i've never purchased anything on craigslist and then had the person want to be my friend after that which means maybe i'm doing it wrong but why did he sign

it harvey danger like that's not it what was anthony wiener's uh online persona name It was something danger, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, Phui, it was something danger. It wasn't the band behind the song Flagpole Sitta. Oh, is that as hard as we go? Which we should go out with.

Wait, isn't that Bean Dad?

No, it's not Roderick. That's Sean Nelson. Oh, okay. I've told this story many times, but he was the editor of the arts insert in the UW Daily newspaper. It was called The Glass Onion, and Sean and this guy Evan Salt, who were both in Harvey Danger, they were the kind of like two people sort of running this, the cool part of the UW Daily Newsroom. And I was over with Danny O'Neill and Hans Rugemer writing about swimming and football, and I was so envious. Like, I was a kid who, I was into sports, but I really wanted to be over at The Glass Onion and be a cool guy like Sean Nelson. And then at some point, while we're all just kind of in the same world, they have, like, the number one song on MTV, just, like, out of the blue.

I do love that song, too. And for some reason, I don't know why. When I filled in on one particular show on Cairo Radio, they would bump in, like, that was my music that they assigned to me. And there was a reason. Tom Tangney assigned me that song as, like, my walk-on music, and I still don't exactly know why. Well, you're famous for your flagpole sitting. Yes. It is Carlos Danger, by the way, is the joke I was trying to make. Carlos Danger. You were pretty close. It was close, but I just really feel like when you say Harvey Danger, it just has totally different implications. Henry Darger. Outside artist Henry Darger. I want your real, real opinion on this. Okay. So, a camera that I want is $1,000 new, but I feel like I shouldn't be spending $1,000 on this. I found the same exact camera on Craigslist. Somebody's selling it. It seems like it's very lightly used. And I do believe this person, from a back and forth of a bunch of emails we've been sending about various lens-related issues, this seems like a responsible person who is well into photography, has some other cameras, thought he would use this one more, is not. As a matter of fact, this whole time I've been assuming it's a guy. I have no idea if this is a guy I'm talking to. This person, if it's a girl, you should ask her to go on a hike. Either way, I'm going up Tiger Mountain. um but um but this person is um you know i'm getting all good vibes from this person because i said something like you know my very first email to this person was hey uh what you know do you still have this camera i'm really on the fence this is kind of a lot of money for me and i'm wondering if i should get this used or a lesser camera new and i was the reason i gave that much information in my opening salvo was because i wanted to start working the refs right away right like i don't have a lot of money let's negotiate on this i didn't want to seem like very eager um this person wrote back with a very a lot of information saying yes it's still available but if you are on the fence here are the pros and cons of different cameras you might want to be looking at the 3500 series blah blah blah this isn't somebody who seems like they're trying to sell me like a hot camera or somebody who's not trustworthy right and then i wrote back something i'm like i think you're incorrect about whether or not it's got an autofocus motor and here are the reviews I'm reading and he's like you're right or they're like you're right so anyway a lot of back and forth going on I'm getting generally good vibes but I and and the price listed is $640 which is significantly less and I feel like if you're listing at 640 you know that somebody's going to negotiate down to six right I feel like that 40 bucks is just tacked on there so that there's some wiggle room this person probably wants $600 for this camera which is a significant savings but there's something about the wild west of craigslist like there's no guarantee if i buy a used camera from glazers or another store i'd like to support there's this there'll be a 30-day trial period if anything's wrong they'll fix it you know what i mean there's some responsibility there i still don't know this person's name the only contact and from

information i have is via is via craigslist So

So that will go away once the deal is closed. And so this person wants to meet at a place called, I'll just tell you this, and then I'll get a bunch of tens to come back me up. Yeah, that's what you do. You set them up. It's like the Lake Forest Park Town Center. Do you know that?

Oh, sure. Yeah, Lake Forest Park Town Center. Is it a mall? It is a mall. There's a third place books up there, at least there used to be. it's just a stone's throw from dory monson's house so you could pop on by um and just shoot the shit um yeah no that's a that's a real place that's a mall that's uh listen let me just let's cut to the chase on this yeah i think that you should well you're planning on going and meeting this person and my sense is that this person sounds very conscientious and i think photography is the kind of thing that draws in typically draws in people who are kind of detail oriented, they're passionate about it, and they acquire a lot of equipment, and sometimes it's not the equipment they need. You know what I mean? This person, there's probably a reason why the last person you bought photography stuff from wanted to go hike Tiger Mountain. It's because you guys are of a sort of of a group, if you will of a tribe, and I bet you this is just a nice person who's very uh interested in photography the fact that they were willing to not sell you the camera but give you information on other cameras that might work for you tells me that this is not someone who is

just trying to unload this piece of equipment but it's not necessarily this is the other thing to keep in mind in the back of my head and i'm i am listening to your advice but there's two there are two things you can worry about in a transaction like this that somebody is purposefully trying to bamboozle you which i don't think is going to happen here but things break you know there is a chance that this camera that i'd be buying from a stranger at a mall um has some sort of malfunction that will rear its ugly head two weeks into me using it and even if it's not their fault and this person wasn't trying to rip me off i have no recourse then then i just have given away six hundred dollars and then have to invest more money in getting it fixed which could get me back up to the 1000 which you know this is maybe the loop where i think you would you would maybe agree with me there's something about getting something in a new fancy box right that has all this stuff

love a good unboxing yeah um well what you have to do is figure out what the dollar amount is for the secure like how value how what is it worth to you to not feel anxious about if this camera is going to break and you will not have recourse if that's four hundred dollars then just buy the new camera you know what i mean like you need because if you're going to save six or you're going to save four hundred dollars by buying the camera used but you're going to feel four hundred dollars worth of anxiety about this camera's reliability and what your possible options would be if it were to break then it's not worth buying it used because you know what i mean you're you're losing essentially um but on the other hand if you can kind of just like take a case or a sera approach and say, hey, I'm buying this camera. This person seems reliable. The chances are the camera will work. And if the camera doesn't work, then we'll just go from there. If you can be in that place mentally, then I'd say, you know, you probably buy the camera from the person.

And $400 is a lot of money to me. So I don't want to downplay that. So let me ask you this, though. And I'll take that all into consideration. We can wrap this conversation up. But to broaden it out for a moment to talk about personality types. You know, I've been going around and around with all of the details of this with Genevieve too, you know, with every, every little movement in my discovery phase and negotiation phase, I'm running to her and telling her about some other like detailed, she's not even listening anymore. I don't think I'm talking about F stops and doodads. Um, but our gloves, I'm the type of person who, and again, I'm not going to spend $400 just for the unboxing experience, which sounds like what I'm saying here, but especially when it comes to electronics you know me i'm a i love i love a new computer i love new cameras i love technology like this there is something so fun like there's nothing better to me than getting it brand new factory fresh opening up having you know taking all the plastic off and knowing that nobody's touched this before whereas genevieve i don't think that she's just a smarter shopper than me i think she gets more of a kick out of finding a good deal on craigslist or something Like for her, that's it's yes, it's about the money, but it's also just a personality difference. Like she's like nothing makes her feel better than getting some, you know, going to a mall and getting a one thousand dollar camera for six hundred dollars. Where are you on that?

I'm I'm oddly enough, even though I think Genevieve and I are super similar in a lot of ways. I'm I enjoy getting something new out of the box. And I think it has to do with growing up without getting a lot of new stuff. Yep. I've talked about this before but you know my sister Hannah got a doll and it was new the box and that was so unusual in our family that the doll was named brand new that was the name of the doll for its entire existence brand new because uh which i know it sounds like i'm i didn't grow up in an you know orphanage or anything everything was fine but i generally and like i said a lot of the stuff that i have in this apartment is stuff that was technically second hand but it would have been cheaper to go to like ikea and buy something um and i i like all of it and i think it has a nice history behind it but it it helps that it's like mid-century stuff that's legit and has been kind of restored and uh like that's that's the level of like used stuff that i'm kind of into what i would be less into would be getting something that was kind of dinged up and just saying well that'll work for me like i just don't and i'm not saying that's Genevieve does because I think Genevieve has done a lot of projects where she gets something kind of a diamond in the rough yeah then kind of like spiffs it up which is that's a whole fun thing too I guess although I've never really successfully pulled anything off like that yeah but I am generally inclined towards liking to get things brand new and not not not secondhand because I yeah for whatever reason that's kind of what I tend to go towards I mean I think that this I think you should just buy the camera listen I bought a subaru outback on ebay circa 1999 that i had shipped to seattle from stormville new york i drove it for two days and the engine exploded and i'm still here i'm still alive i cashed out a 401k andrew to buy this like a very like it was a it was like a 401k i had had at kuow for probably like seven months but like so now just imagine you cash out a 401k to buy this camera and two days later it literally explodes that's the worst i mean that's the worst case scenario right i mean other than you losing your life in the car or from the camera that's the worst case scenario that happened to me and i'm still here and life you know the earth continued to rotate

you know you're right i should buy a car instead yes now that i think about it i'm glad we had this talk thank you i'm gonna ask this person if they have any cars for sale and if they could bring

them to the mall i know a guy in stormville new york that'll get you a screaming deal on a subaru

outback how about talking about my sexism for a second though man i i just this entire time i'm just picturing myself talking to some dude which it might be a dude i don't know but like there's literally nothing in this email exchange that says i'm talking to anybody of any gender yet i just have a picture in my head of who this person is and it was not a woman is that is i mean we should

go to the break yeah usually is that sexism is a really that's not like a 20 second answer yeah generally speaking is that sexism um or is that you making a kind of educated guess based on your experience around this particular topic and i'm not that's not me trying to say that it's not sexism i'm i'm just trying to kind of like explore this like i guess the downside of you thinking of you assuming it was a it is a man is that if there are women or gender non-binary if there's anybody who's not a man and they're into photography they would be less seen because the assumption would be that this is for men I mean I guess that would be the downside of your

brain going there yeah I mean I don't know that the I don't know that there's a bad result in me thinking that but more like this is a bad a symptom of a bad uh i don't know of how i look at the world if i just assume that i'm always talking to a man when i'm buying a camera online

yeah i yeah i that's a tough one i think because also it's i mean i think that what we should all do is what i was going to say is the the the utility or the the practical implications of generally basing our thoughts on what the previous information is that we have it does simplify things and it usually speeds things up like if we go well i've done this thing and it's been this most of the time and so the chances are it's going to be this again that speeds everything up and there's a certain efficiency to that but i guess what we should all try to do is take the extra three seconds to consider that it might not be the way it's always been because those little moments are what open things up for for different experiences and different people doing things yes even though i would bet a thousand i'll buy you a new camera if it's not a dude it's gonna be a guy i don't i don't want to i don't want to play in this space but i could use the cash but that being said the idea that it wouldn't be a given and that we would all just like try to take our previous experience with whatever the topic is and try to kind of like start fresh and say like i don't know what this person i'm gonna

interact with is going to be all about and that's what's that's a good thing that's how we that's how we start to that's how we shake the etch-a-sketch up a little bit as a society right yeah yeah um don't lie and say it was a woman so that you can get a free camera although i would kind of respect that that game yeah right uh all right let's take a quick break and uh then when we come back uh we'll do our top stories we'll thank some donors of the day and maybe even squeeze in an email or vmail. Stay with us. It's TBTL. Alright, let's thank some donors of the day. These are wonderful, generous people who donate to TBTL. That's how we're able to do this. Five days a week, 52 weeks a year, is because of folks just like Nick Jeffries who's in Bothell, Washington not far from where you're going to be today, Andrew. In fact, it would be crazy. Maybe you're about to buy this camera from Nick Jeffries. Ask the person if their name is Nick Jeffries. I'm going to

send this person a list of all of today's donors of the day and ask if they're any one of them.

Okay. Also ask if they're Sabrina Richter of Spokane, Washington which is a long drive, but maybe Sabrina wants to unload this hot camera. Yeah, exactly. Who knows? Philip Brock is also donating to the show And Philip is in North Chesterfield, Virginia Philip, thank you so much for helping us do this Elizabeth Jacobson is a Takomi down there in Tacoma, Washington By the way, as we were talking about Craigslist For some reason, I was doing maybe your version of Hex Empire Which I just, sometimes I'll go on Craigslist I actually don't do this very frequently Even though I find it very kind of mesmerizing I'll just go on Craigslist and put in mid-century for furniture just to see what's out there. And so I put in like – I also need a nightstand. I don't have – right now the nightstand for my bed, Andrew, is the box that the 8 Sleep Special Temperature Control System is in. Yeah. Because it's a perfect square. And it's – it works, but it still feels a little bachelor arms to me. By the way, somebody mailed me a poster of a Lamborghini Kuntai. Somebody figured definitely, you know, the cat's out of the bag, I guess, about where I live. I didn't know people could figure out my specific apartment number. Wow. But I got a, when I came home from my trip to Texas, I had a poster. It was a Lamborghini Countach, which thank you to whoever sent that.

Are you going to put it in, like, just the cheapest frame possible and hang it in the wall and have it be a little bit tilted?

I'm going to hang it right above my cardboard box nightstand. Uh-huh. No, but anyway, I plugged in mid-century nightstand, and then it was like telling me, I was looking at something that looked kind of promising, and it was in Tacoma, where Elizabeth Jacobson is, and I thought, let's work on this algorithm, Craigslist, like, that's pretty far from Portland, and I was logged into the Portland version of Craigslist.

Oh, yeah, you know, I'm sorry, I was thinking Seattle, because Veeves and I drove down to Tacoma for a Craigslist purchase.

Get that table you're broadcasting from right now, which I'm in love with. You saw me down there checking the oil on that thing.

You actually got down on your hands and knees were looking underneath this table. This was a classic Genevieve Craigslist find.

Anyway, Elizabeth is in Tacoma as well and supporting the show. Thank you, Elizabeth. And then Ann Richardson is in Edmond, Oklahoma. Thanks, Ann. And then Sondra Vasquez is in Seattle, Washington. Sondra, thank you so much for making TBTL possible. We really appreciate all of the wonderful, generous, long-suffering tens of listeners who help us do this day in, day out. Thank you so much, babies. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Let me say one more thing on just that, like, impulse to want to acquire something quickly because one is worried that you'll kick yourself afterwards. If you don't jump on that once in a lifetime chance, I can't think of one time where buying something impulsively has been something that I was very relieved to have done later. And I can think of about a thousand examples of where buying something impulsively is something I have regretted because literally a day later there was something much better. yeah yeah like I know that intellectually but my uh emotional damage is such that I it feels like this is the last this is the last chance I'm ever gonna have for this I mean I was just looking at this this like on Redfin this house here in Portland it's like a mid-century house and it's very cool and kind of quirky like it's so mid-sent like it's it's anyway it's a cool quirky

place um and i'm in a lease in this apartment i mean literally just got moved into this apartment i'm not really in a financial place to buy a house in portland but i saw this thing on redfin and my brain like during the break i went to get a cup of coffee and my brain literally had a conversation about could we go find the money for a down payment on this house that i've never even

looked at yeah you and i are very different i think you would already have you would have this cameras strung around your neck you like you'd have two new d7500 well you gotta have an air

and a spare speaking of money problems although what takes a little bit of the a tiny bit of the kind of air out of this story i'm about to tell you is that it sounds like the people involved are wealthy anyway but there are a number of people this is a piece in the new york times uh there are a decent number of people who own large amounts of bitcoin but cannot get to their bitcoin because they can't remember their password also known as an iron key i guess the hard drive itself is called the iron key but they cannot remember their passwords and so it profiles this guy named uh stefan thomas a programmer in san francisco he owns 7002 bitcoin that he cannot access because he lost the password to his digital wallet um he uh years ago lost the paper that he wrote the password down on and iron key this thing this this encryption whatever you call it and and everybody in our audience who knows about computers and cryptocurrencies just just know that you're gonna be very frustrated with how i try to describe this stuff because i don't know blockchain um from a i don't know a box of legos what is a block what what could i

not know blockchain from um yeah like a a kid's block i mean i see what you're going for there

yeah i know blockchain that was bad anyway and that wasn't even the most annoying thing i'm gonna say in the next five minutes anyway i'm gonna mess up a lot of the details but But this Iron Key thing that his, by the way, $220 million worth of Bitcoin is in, it gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations to no avail. He tells the New York Times, I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy and it wouldn't work and I would get desperate again.

And it's just, it's counting down. He's used up eight of his 10. This is a better story than I could have imagined He's used 8 of his 10 tries He has 2 more tries I can hear the tense music in the background As he wakes up in the middle of the night And goes over the computer And it's all dark except for the white blue glow Of the computer screen And he Types the last one and hits return And you now have One more chance Yes

I know right isn't that stressful like i said what they don't tell you until the end of the article which by the way was actually smart i don't have the byline of who wrote this piece i apologize but uh what they don't tell you to the end of the article is that this guy is actually just rich anyway uh he managed to hold on to enough bitcoin and remember the passwords to give him more riches than he knows what to do with so this i mean this is one of those weird basically what he has done because he's fabulously wealthy from bitcoin and other something called ripple um which is in that world is he has taken the like hard drive i guess that has this information saved on it and he has sealed it and he has put it away in a secure facility in case cryptographers come up with a new way of cracking complex passwords in the future oh my god keeping it far away helps him try not to think about it he said i got to a point where i said to myself let it be in the past just for your own mental health so he's got 220 you know by the way how he got these bitcoins is totally crazy um uh let me see if i can find it in the article here basically somebody gave him this bitcoin uh here we go in 2011 when he was living in switzerland he was given the 7,002 bitcoins by an early bitcoin fanatic as a reward for making an animated video called what is bitcoin dude made a video explaining bitcoin some bitcoin enthusiast was like hey that was good uh thanks for doing that here's 7 000 bitcoin nbd and that's 220 million dollars andrew oh my god

you know how many cameras you can buy with that one or two um something there's some more dazzling details in the story so i don't want to make this all about me by the way the um the writer of the story of the reporters nathaniel popper in the new york times oh thank you yeah um but i And I always thought there's always a way to get a password reminder or change your password on something, except I have been locked out of something. Now, there is no financial ruin for me here or even financial interest at all. But it was right around the time that I – that's right. It was right around the time I moved to Seattle. So back in 2009, I decided I was going to start keeping a diary again, something I do kind of off and on in my life. And this was probably my last attempt at it. And I decided I was going to use some new, it wasn't an app. We didn't call everything apps then. It was just some, you know, website, right? And I signed up for it, and I started journaling again. And I really liked it. It was a good experience. But they made it very clear that, like, don't forget your password on this, because, like, this is a diary website. Like, we take this seriously. Like, if you forget your password, you are screwed. You forgot your password. I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. And that website, I can't remember what it's called right now, but I've looked it up from time to time since. I'd love to see what I wrote. That was an interesting time in my life. I quit my job to move across the country where I didn't have a job. I thought I was going to be a photographer. And I would love to read those entries, but they're not effing around. I can't get in. Like, I'm just locked out. I've written emails to the company. They did not respond. The website just makes it clear. Like if you don't know your password, you are SOL, which I used to think meant shit on a log because I misunderstood my uncle. But anyway, yeah, so I kind of know the feeling. And it does kind of even this this thing that does not matter at all. In fact, it's probably better that they're taking it so seriously so that whatever dumb things I wrote never will see the light of day. But if I think about that too much, it really hurts my brain. And I'll go in every couple of years and try to think, like, what are some common passwords I use? except my system of common passwords has changed probably five times since 2009.

Because we live in a world where the assumption is everything is possible, particularly when it comes to the digital, that there is just no, that idea that, no, I'm sorry, that's just a door that is closed and locked and cannot be reopened. That just doesn't make sense to our brains at this point because everything can be unencrypted and code broken and password reminded and all of that. You're feeling the same feeling that a guy named Brad Yasser is feeling in this article. He's an entrepreneur from Los Angeles. He has a few desktop computers that contain thousands of bitcoins that he created or he mined during the early days of the technology. While those bitcoins are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he lost his passwords many years ago and has put the hard drives containing them in vacuum sealed bags out of sight. i don't want to be reminded every day that what i have now is a fraction of what i could have that i lost he said like because if you remember the i mean and this was even back then something that my feeble brain was not able to really understand but you could make your own bitcoin like you could mine your own bitcoin if you had the right computers and were willing to pay the uh you know electricity bill that was part of the whole thing you could make these and it was arduous but or it was time consuming and hard on the computers but it could be done this guy mined thousands of bitcoins and can't get to them now part of the whole the reason this is the case of course is because the idea behind bitcoin is that it's a sort of place that you can have what currency would you call it a currency yeah um that can't be touched by any governments it's international you know it's not regulated in the same way and so in order to really keep that kind of uh in place there is no service at bitcoin that remembers people's passwords for them and in fact there are some services that have now popped up to try to do that and some of those places have lost people's passwords oh my god can you imagine if you like uh if you hired a company well i mean i yeah oh there was a crazy this is slightly to the side of it but there was a crazy lawsuit in seattle in actually bellevue i believe there was a guy who had his bitcoin account like hacked and hackers took a million dollars of his bitcoin which this was a year ago so i bet you would have been like five million now they took a million dollars of his bitcoin and he was trying to get this company that was i think bellevue based to basically secure up his account and no one was responding to his emails or his calls as he's watching money drain out of his bitcoin account and i believe the judge ultimately sided with the company that it was this guy's fault because or at least wasn't the fault of the of this company

that was i mean that's the thing like we talk about this on the show semi-regularly but Thank you. what's i guess good about the u.s banking system is that it's fdic insured you have a lot of recourse if somebody you know steals your information and takes your money out of your bank account of a typical bank you will get that money back because of the federal deposit insurance corporation but this you know cryptocurrency doesn't have a lot of that stuff it is really kind of the wild west and i guess the upside is you could make millions and millions of dollars but the downside is if you forget your password there's just no way to get it back luke you probably can tell i'm slightly

distracted and it's because of course i'm on the website now that i've been trying to track hack back into did you just get in well i just had a moment over here like i my heart just raced because i figured out the name of the website i'm not going to say what the website is but i figured out the name of the website and i clicked on it and of course i did not use this way back in 2009. But in the past five years or so, I've started using a password manager called Dashlane. Literally started using it because they advertise on TBTL. And this is one of those things where if you ever wonder if we believe the shit we say about the things we use, we do like Dashlane has been a huge improvement in my life. And I'm still using it all these years later. But I was not using it way back in 2009. However, when I went to this website, Dashlane said, Oh, yeah, you've logged in here before and it automatically opened and it says Andrew's journal. And then I said, Oh, can I see past entries? And I'm looking, I have entries. Um, uh, uh, April 20th, 2009. I wrote an entry called the last days of Cleveland. Uh, three days later, I wrote an entry called rock and roll tears. I would love to know, um, Mel visits on the 26th of April, 2009, The problem, Luke, is that each one of these is locked down. I was giving it double encryption. So even if you could get into my website, I have a little lock symbol on each of these entries. And I can't get into them because I don't know what the individual entry passwords are.

What are you, Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy figure who founded Bitcoin?

Because of my security Because I don't want anybody to know what happened The weekend of Melanie visited Seattle

Or Rock and Roll Tears I want to hear what that's all about

I want to know what Rock and Roll Tears is too And again I've been all over this website Looking for like loopholes But they're just like no if you've locked something down Like we take security Which again like you want a journaling Website to take it seriously Right but damn I would love to know I wrote way more of these entries than I thought I mean, it only went on for about five months before I gave up again.

Wow, but good on Dashlane for getting you sort of in there, but then even Dashlane's powers hit some kind of wall, I guess, when you're in the interior of the system and you've locked up each diary entry.

Yeah, probably what happened was at some point, whatever the last time I got obsessed with this was, I probably was able to kind of change the password like you would with a traditional website. They probably let you into the mainframe, but they don't let you unlock them once you're in there. So here we go.

There's one last little moment from this Bitcoin password article that jumped out at me. Of the stories of people who can't get to their money, this one is maybe the one that will haunt me the most. Somebody named Gabriel Abed, he's age 34, an entrepreneur from Barbados. He lost around 800 Bitcoins, which is worth $25 million, when a colleague reformatted a laptop that contained the private keys to a Bitcoin wallet in 2011. This is stressing me out so much. I know. I mean, think about reformatting a work laptop and thinking about the worst case scenario. Yes, right? Maybe you have to re-download iTunes. no hey um has anybody seen um that um that dell computer of mine that was sitting here near my desk oh yeah i reformatted that um because i wanted to use it to run this other spreadsheet program and it was kind of out of memory did you back it up you got dude you got a debt dude you're getting a debt yeah dude you're getting dude you're getting the killed like hey uh you know what was on that computer were the pass was the password to my 25 million dollars that one is crazy and also i it that gives me a little well i mean this makes no sense because i i don't really own any bitcoin although i did find out yesterday or two days ago that i do have a certain small interest in the whole thing of Thank you.

to the tune of about $180. But I'm going to reformat, or what did you call it? This computer that you are hearing me talk to you through, the one that we run IPDTL. You're going to wipe it to a factory reset? I'm going to do a factory reset because all I use it for is talking to you and Zoom. And as we're talking, I'm getting an error message. It says, your disk is almost full. Save space by optimizing storage. And I've already optimized, in the words of Newman, RIP, I've optimized this to whatever degree it can be optimized. Everything's being stored in the cloud. I don't know why this – I mean, it's a relatively new MacBook Air, but it just seems overwhelmed. And I just needed to do two things. I needed to be able to get on Google Chrome, and I needed to be able to get on Zoom. So I'm going to basically wipe everything else from it.

Oh, that's such a good feeling. I got to say that these stories about being locked –

It makes me nervous because what if I have a Bitcoin key on there that I'm forgetting about? Well, I think you would know.

But these stories sound both biblical and obviously not biblical because they're so digital. You know what I mean? But there's something about it. Yes. They're like a parable. They're like a parable. I feel like there was a – didn't I recently say on the show to you? I always thought it was a parable about a man in a desert with a bunch of gold, but he can't carry the gold out of the desert. So he, like, dies in the desert with his gold because he couldn't let go of it, which you told me is not actually from the Bible.

I don't remember that being a story from the Bible. But, I mean, it could have been buried deep in the book of Daniel or something.

Maybe it's from one of those cool AA tapes I listened to when I was 14. But, like, there's some – because I'm trying to think of, like, what's an IRL version of this? Has somebody ever, like, just locked themselves out of, like, a – well, they've lost the key to their safe deposit box. I mean, I guess, but even then you feel like, well, there's some sort of fail safe. Yeah. Or like, I think the bank itself or the institution would be able to get you in if you had your birth certificate and other, you know what I mean?

Like, I'm just trying to think is retrievable at some point in this society, except these Bitcoin. And my fucking journals. okay uh i don't think we have to talk about the earth spinning faster the negative leap second except to say um uh you know i it's too complicated and also it's it's a it's a sort of uh i was gonna well the reason you heard me pause there was gonna say it's a sort of a purely like abstract idea but it's sort of not because it turns out there are a lot of computing systems that need very very very accurate timekeeping and when you they added a second like i think it was like 15 years ago um because they put in a leap or i guess a yeah leap years and you add a day to february they added a second because we were running behind on seconds and it screwed up actually a bunch of computers and it messed up reddit for some reason now we're go we have the opposite problem which is the earth is spinning faster which is uh which makes the day go by more quickly so it's shorter So they're, I guess maybe they took a second away before and that messed it up and they're thinking about adding a second now. But anyway, enough about that. Let's talk about Aaron Rodgers. I was legitimately bummed. I don't dislike Aaron Rodgers the way you dislike Aaron Rodgers, Andrew. But I was legitimately bummed out this morning to wake up to the news that he is going to guest host Jeopardy. And that's not because of me disliking Aaron Rodgers because I don't want there to be a parade, whether Ken Jen gets the job or not. I don't want it to become just stunt booking I don't want it to just be like You know Just like putting in people because they're well known As a way of trying to draw more eyeballs towards Jeopardy That's not to me what this game is about

Yeah well I haven't read up on this Luke I mean is this But I mean Jeopardy is not above doing like special stunt weeks Right whether you're bringing back the all-time champs Like Ken, Jen and the gang Or you have the college weeks and you have the Celebrity Weeks and all of that stuff. So is this really like kind of part of this exploration process of finding a new host? My gut says no, this is just more of one of those star-studded special events.

Yes, and also in fairness, Aaron Rodgers freaking loves Jeopardy. He was on Celebrity Jeopardy and he won. And he gave this quote. He was on something called the Pat McAfee Show. Pat McAfee is an interesting character We could talk about him sometime

That's the internet guy?

No, that's John McAfee Talk about crypto Crypto crazies No, Pat McAfee was a punter For the Indianapolis Colts Who was kind of like a rock and roll punter Like he was, you know He was sort of like a cool guy punter And had a lot of, like, he was funny And they liked interviewing, you know, the media liked interviewing him And then when he left Football, he got really

big on twitter and now he has a um he has a show on like serious satellite that's like a daily sports talk show which i tried to listen to i couldn't quite get into it it's no levitard but um i think he and aaron rogers are buds because aaron rogers is on the show a lot and he just let slip recently that he was going to be guest hosting jeopardy and um and then he said something like i'm hoping that i'm hope i don't get in trouble with the producers i don't know if i was actually really allowed to like say that or not like yet um but what he also said then when he was asked about it during i think there was like a a press conference like a midweek football related press conference and then people asked him about the jeopardy thing and he basically said look i love jeopardy so much i've been watching since i was a kid every night at my house for the last 10 years in green bay at 6 p.m i sit down and watch jeopardy and try to get as many answers right as i can like i do like that there was a picture of him when he was on jeopardy and he is it was like a you know like a like a selfie type picture and he is clearly geeked like it might be a bigger deal to him to guest host jeopardy than to win a super bowl i don't know but at least he's into it so that's kind of cool but i guess it just gave me you're right this is a probably a one-off but it made me nervous because i don't want it to become i i don't want jeopardy to start chasing these like temporary ratings boosts by doing weird stuff by doing stunty stuff because Once you start going down that road, next thing you know, it's the Double Jeopardy category is top ten signs your booty be stankin'. Which I would watch. Which we established yesterday is usually the sort of, you know, that's when I start to lose interest in a show.

That's what we turn to Family Feud for, certainly. That's exactly right. What do you think? It's weird that they're making him the host. But I was thinking about this. would if they i hate asking you this question because you have so much experience of like you know well being on game shows filling in as a host on a public radio game show like you just are on stage a lot like your experience is different for me more of the common man which is why people tune into tbtl for the common man um stories about buying expensive cameras um if they turned to me and said do you want to be you're going to be on jeopardy next week you can either host or be a contestant i think i choose hosting and i say that with the full oh wow acknowledgement of how hard it is and i'm thinking about our conversation i believe yesterday about um ken jen's uh kind of debut as the interim host for a few weeks uh and you were saying as a close watcher of jeopardy you were saying how much you appreciated the the job he did because of all the ins and outs and small things that you have to know in order to uh you know slip into that role He made it seem probably a lot easier than maybe it actually is. And I'm not somebody who studies Jeopardy closely, but I'm also just, you know, dumb. And I just think that I'd get eaten up so bad. I mean, you see my brain freeze up on TBTL when I'm trying to think of a celebrity's name. Like, I just I would just be frozen the whole time. Whereas I feel like as a host, I'm not saying I would do a great job, but I would have all of the resources there. I wouldn't have to rely on my own cunning.

Right. Right. You're reading a script. You have the answers. At no time are you being called upon as the host to try to remember the name of the person who painted this particular piece of art, which is the thing that stresses you out about it. Now, for me, I would be stressed hosting it because, again, I think I wouldn't realize until I was into it how many little things there are that Alex Trebek did seemingly effortlessly because he'd just done it for so long. And hosting is interesting. I have a feeling Aaron Rodgers will be not great at it because it's one thing. I mean, Aaron Rodgers, when he's standing on a football field running around throwing a football, my guess is he feels zero nerves because that's and he could be in front of 50,000 people and he could be on television in front of millions. i don't think that that stresses him out but it's very different when tom hanks guest hosted wait wait he was nervous before he walked out there and he said that and i could tell like i mean like he did an amazing job and the crowd loved him um but when we were about to go on stage and there's like 350 people in the chase bank auditorium it's basically like a conference room with chairs in it and he was nervous because I think when you when you go into a sort of arena if you will that is not your normal thing all bets are off and I have a feeling that when Aaron Rogers hosts it'll be harder than he thinks but yeah let's get to the real meat of this story which is Jake from State Farm could beat up Aaron Rogers at this point right like I wrote this on Twitter I'm not just trying to rehash my Twitter content here but I was noting this weekend during one of those commercials jake is more buff than aaron rogers he's incredibly buff

He definitely is, yes. He is much stronger now than the professional athletes that are in the commercials with him.

I think a good question would be an arm wrestling competition, right? Not even close.

He would tear—Aaron Rodgers' arm would come off at the rotator cuff.

Yet the whole basis of two of the Jake from State Farm commercials with Aaron Rodgers is how strong Aaron Rodgers' arms are, right? One, he's playing fetch with his dog, and he overthrows the ball because you can't stop that rocket arm. God, I hate him so much. And then the golf one where he just leans into what an asshole he is. He's probably not even an asshole, by the way. I'll bet you – I don't know why I hate him. I mean, I have some ideas that they're not worth getting into. In fact, I went on a tear about him after these messages yesterday that was not articulate, and I'm literally embarrassed about it. So I don't have to rehash that or relive my low points.

I liked it if we just like, if we put a hot mic up to you at any time, there's about a 50-50 chance you're talking about Aaron Rodgers and what you don't like.

In my sleep. Just go check. But, yeah, what about that commercial, though? And Genevieve, I think, will allow me to mention this here because we already discussed it on.

Yesterday, before we even started recording this program, you and I were casually talking about something, and it sounded like you were maybe talking about commercials. And Genevieve hollered from the other room, no, no touching.

I know I'm trying to get my door open a little bit more in my studio here before I start recording so that Theo can like Theo this whole time has been he's just like sleeps behind me in this chair now in the office. But if I close the office door too quickly, he doesn't like a closed door. So I try to like leave the door open while you and I are doing our pre-show conversation so Theo can feel safe and then eventually fall asleep and then I'll close the door as we begin our show. So all of that is to say it's created a new dynamic where Genevieve, for the past two days now, has just been sort of lingering in my doorway when she hears me talking to you about something that she finds interesting, which is somewhat disconcerting.

Although it's good that we are still capable of talking about things that seem at least semi-interesting.

That's true. Hearing one side of a conversation. She probably just wants to catch me saying something that she can fact check me on from my personal experiences. But, yeah, what about that commercial where they're on the golf course and Aaron Rodgers is just, like, really leaning into, like, the asshole character now? Like, he thinks that Jake from State Farm has given him the special Aaron Rodgers discount. And so he's so happy about that. He says, I might just let you win today to Jake. And then Jake's like, listen, Aaron, it's not a special discount. Everybody gets it. And then, like, Aaron Rodgers is like, oh, really? Then I'm going to use my driver, which I don't understand enough about golf to know that. Would you really switch up your club in this situation? But apparently he was going to pull his punches by using a different club, but now he's going to use the driver. And he just, like, Billy Madison-ly, like, hits the ball into a hole-in-one and just kind of gives Jake, like, this real just, like, asshole face.

I, again, I wrote this on Twitter recently, and I know this has to have come up on TBTL because it is now the dominant theme in almost all television commercials is just the character thinking they're getting a deal because of their specialness and the person who works for the company saying, this is just the price. Now there's one of those, oh, phooey, is it AT&T? I forget the particular wireless carrier. They have one commercial where you have like a Ron Funches lookalike.

Oh, that guy, yeah. Actually, he's really good in it. He's really good in that, yeah, yeah.

But there's another commercial from that campaign where a guy comes in they just started airing it where he's like thinking he's just the best shopper he's getting the super awesome ted deal and they're like no that's just the price and i'm like didn't you guys see all the jake from state farm ads yet also jake from state farm is in another commercial where he's moving his autonomous vehicle so that the meter maid can't put the ticket on his car and i don't want to solve that commercial no it's the same actor and i don't want assault his game but he is so iconic as jake now to me that seeing him in another context i wrote on twitter it's like seeing your teacher at the store it's unsettling wait how many tweets have you written about jake from state farm it's the only thing i tweet about now he is hot he's very hot and could beat aaron rogers in a fight and is in this other commercial that i actually wonder about the legality of you know how kind of i mean you would imagine like these car commercials any big national commercial the legal on it as far as what they're allowed to show and not show i mean there's an ad running right now i don't even know what the product is but it's these people on a lunar rover and they're listening to that song uh cruising and they're about to jump their lunar rover they're on the moon and the but to jump the lunar rover like off of a cliff because there's like zero gravity and they're just vibing and they literally have to put on the ad, do not attempt.

Luke, okay. I can't talk about this right now. Well, a couple of things here because we did just do a whole show about fine print in commercials, which is exactly what you're talking about there. We got into like people using that comedically, but also the legal aspects of that. I think we called the show The Little Prince, which I was very proud of. That's solid. Um, but I, but we are now talking about commercials that have not been discussed on after these messages. You were saying that right as I heard Genevieve coming down the stairs, she's potentially outside my door right now. Oh no. I, I live here, man.

I mean, like, you do what you want, but I can't, I can't respond. That's fair. No, but what I was going to say is the Jake from State Farm, uh, the, the, not the Jake from State Farm, but the guy who plays Jake from State Farm, he's in this other commercial. I forget which car it's for, which maybe makes it an ineffective ad. but I'm a bit surprised you haven't seen this so he's sitting at like an outdoor cafe this is probably in LA or something and his car is parked at a meter and the time has expired and the meter person do we say meter made anymore I mean this does happen to be a woman who's giving out parking tickets but anyway she's parking a tent what's that she a photographer unclear but the person giving the ticket you know pulls up to his car which is about to get a ticket And then he, without leaving his perch where he's sitting having some lunch or coffee or whatever, does something on his, like, fob that moves the car down one parking spot. Yeah, I've seen this. And it's like, and then, you know, she, I guess, can't give him the ticket. And I was really surprised that that didn't run into some sort of legal trouble for for that carmaker, because I bet you you're not allowed to move the car around public streets without anyone in it, even something minor like moving a parking space. Still, I'm sure that there are laws on the books that say you can't move your autonomous vehicle around without being in it on a public street.

and also I don't know what the law is surrounding um like moving a vehicle one spot once you're already starting to get the um once you're starting to get the ticket by the way I did find it so this actor's name is Kevin Mims and he's most I'm doing a search on him on iSpot which is the commercial website we use he's mostly in state farm commercials but has been in a bunch of other stuff too a Panera Bread commercial a Jersey Mike's commercial other things involving bread a slim gym commercial and this is the one which i after you described it i'm sure the sound is not even worth playing here but i will anyway yeah will you the 2020 hyundai sonata i always say that wrong how do you say it hyundai hyundai hyundai here yeah it's not a

hyundai it's a hyundai hyundai gotcha you're going down this is the meter reader now the car

is moving on its own. Introducing the all-new Sonata with remote smart parking assist. And that's Jake. Jake is sitting at the outdoor cafe and he was one movie and then she just sort of gives him like, you win this one, a Bugs Bunny look. I wouldn't have recognized him, yeah.

But again, I can't believe that when like the agency wrote the ad, because, you know, whatever big, giant, you know, national advertising agency has that account for Hyundai and they presented them with like 20 possible ads they went with the one where somebody is going to be manipulating like moving the car around without being in it on a public street like and that that wasn't like somebody didn't go um actually as they pushed their glasses further up their nose if you look at the civil code in Los Angeles number 503.25 you are not allowed to move your vehicle without being in it like I'm surprised you didn't get nixed for that there's also the other part and this is 100% the least interesting element of what we're talking about is I don't think there are that many major American cities where parking meters take money anymore by that I mean where you can pull up to a parking meter that has time

left in it yeah that is interesting like having the app on my phone here in Seattle has been a I was very late to adapt to it. You know, when I first moved to Seattle, we were already past the kind of feed the meter with coins thing. It was like you go to the little kiosk, you get the sticker that says that you're clear to park on the street for an hour, and you stick it to your window.

Isn't it funny how antiquated that now feels?

Now that's antiquated because it took me a long time to finally just download the app because I kept thinking, I don't know how it works. It's not going to work. In a weird way, as much as I like technology, I'm a very slow adapter to some of these things. But, yeah, now that I just park my car in the street and I pull out the app and I tap, tap, tap and I say I'm going to be here for an hour. And then the best thing about it is the Apple hit you up, you know, as your time's about to run out and say, hey, you want to extend this? And as long as you're in a place where you can extend it, you're like, yeah. Also, a little quick thing that's been on my mind a lot lately that I don't know if you can shed any light on. But ever since the shutdown began, they first of all, parking in Seattle was free for a long time. And now, you know, I don't know, for the past eight months or so, six months, they have they've gone back to metering the streets, but they've drastically, drastically reduced the cost of parking to the degree that I don't understand how they're not losing money. Because I feel like the system – I feel like – you know how, like, back in the day you'd go to use your debit card at a store and they'd say, you know, we're going to charge you 50 cents because otherwise we're taking a loss on that? Like, how – when it's 50 cents for an entire hour of parking in the university district, how is it not costing 50 cents just to process me paying that fee?

It probably is. This is – I weirdly do know about this. that's the lowest amount legally they are allowed to charge for parking based on city law

well they did shut it down and completely for a period of time and then what they just i think

they were getting complaints from businesses because people were just parking their cars and just sort of blocking and and you know so i think and because a lot of businesses are doing takeout and pickup and curbside yeah so i think what happened was they decided that they needed to sort of start to reassert the rules of parking but because it's a pandemic they didn't want to charge people you know the going rate in Seattle probably would be like four bucks an hour on the street or something I mean it had gone way up they reduced it back down to the lowest amount per hour they are legally allowed to charge based on like the law in Seattle that actually makes sense did you read about that or were you doing something when I was in Seattle doing that work for a large software concern on the east side i was staying at the graduate hotel and i didn't want to pay for their parking and so i wanted to know if i could park on the street in the u district and i looked it up and they are charging you know the meters are in effect but they are charging and it literally said the city of seattle website said this is the lowest amount per hour that we

are legally allowed to charge oh that's interesting so i did you know i've been trying to avoid i I think you and I made an oath several years ago to try to stop asking each other questions on the air that we probably don't know the answer to. But in this case, what are the chances of the right guy?

Well, you know what? Once every probably 2,000 shows, one of us knows the answer to something. Yep.

Here I go once again with the email every week. I hope that it's from a female. No, man. It's not from a female.

uh any emails or v-mails uh that are of interest today before we get on out of here yeah yeah i

got a bunch of emails and it's a bunch of emails from a bunch of listeners who just want to take my joy away luke and it's a whoa it's a real bummer because you know we got an email the other day from a listener who wanted to make me feel better about myself who wanted to bring joy into my life by pointing out when I was taking some online 20 questions quiz slash game some artificial intelligence game with the computer and I had messed up when the computer asked me is your instrument the secret instrument I chose was a trombone it said is your instrument a wind instrument and I answered no to that and then later on the computer when it didn't guess my instrument in 20 questions said well one of the reasons we didn't guess it is you said it wasn't a wind instrument and the majority of respondents said a trombone is a wind instrument and i felt like an idiot because i used to play the trombone and i should know that it's a wind instrument um i got a listener email the other day that i read on the show from leslie who's just wonderful leslie's just such a wonderful person who wanted to tell me that i was correct because you have woodwinds and you have strings and you have brass and you have percussion and the brass section is where the trombones belong and that was what I was thinking in the back of my head I was like yes you have woodwinds and you have brass and the trombone is not a woodwind it's a brass well got a lot of emails I haven't even opened most of these I just see subject line wind instrument families sharp shot click click kapow that's from listener Aaron listener Jennifer has an email here instrument classifications Emily our buddy Emily in Minnesota brass instruments are wind instruments these are What are the chances that our listeners who were in band and orchestra for years lugging, lugging it? heavy equipment to and from school would have thoughts on this i haven't even opened any of

those i'm literally just reading to you that the subject lines now i did open the first one i got i believe yesterday from uh listen oh oh uh san jose barbie i believe this is um who says music teacher here i hate to be the bearer of bad news but trombone is indeed a brass instrument but it is also a wind instrument you blow through it it is not a woodwind instrument but brass instruments are still wind instruments. I could go on about aerophones, but that is boring. Still, you shouldn't feel bad about the mistake. See, Barbara knows how to handle me with kid gloves. Still, you shouldn't feel bad about that mistake. It's easy to make because of the word woodwind.

Thank you, Barbara. Can I read one to you that I think will make you feel better? It'll make you feel seen? Yes, please. This is from listener Marta. Hi, Luke and Andrew. I just listened to Monday's episode. I wanted to validate Andrew's experience with the Grand Canyon. My spouse and I went to the Grand Canyon a couple of years back, and even though I am not afraid of heights, it was pretty scary on some of those trails. The height and sheer vastness of that landscape is dizzying, and trails are super close to the edge. I don't know why some of those trails don't have handrails, LOL. And then she includes some pictures of her cat, and then she says, P.S. My spouse Casey is finally a 10. Nice. All it took was me listening for eight years, him coming to several in-person events and a pandemic, LOL.

This email came in literally in the past, I'm going to say, two minutes because I had my email open. I was reading this and then I refreshed and here it is. The amazing thing about Marta's email, who, by the way, Marta is the person who came to a listener event in St. Paul, I want to say, and made actual cat rolls. She made some sort of like cinnamon rolls. I don't think they were cinnamon, but she made rolls that were shaped like cats. Was that at the that was that the one we did at the brewery at the at the well at the pub after your live wire event. Oh, OK. OK. Yeah. But anyway, what was I going to say? Oh, Marta cat rolls. Oh, it looks like this email was sent from the future because it's time stamped as eleven fifty seven a.m. even though it's only eleven nineteen right now.

So I wonder if it's a different time in Minnesota.

Yeah, but don't you think that the email Go daddy Go away daddy

Go away daddy Is that the show title?

I don't know I don't know what the click return is on that

I like it, I think that's a good place to wrap things up today Can we What was the song at the beginning of the show? Harvey Danger, Flagpole Center Yeah, baby Alright, we'll go out with a little Harvey Danger here On a Wednesday Oh man I love this song I love this song and I love that it's not raining right now Andrew I am just looking I'm looking at the blue sky and it is just giving me life right now so anyway hope everyone has a good rest of their Wednesday thanks for listening we'll be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you until then take care of yourselves take care of each other and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

I was looking into the mirror To see it a little bit clearer The rottenness and evil in me Fingertips had memories I can't forget the curves of your body And when I feel a bit naughty I rhyme it up with like one C Who salutes but no one ever does I'm not sick but I'm not well

And I'm so haunt

Cause I'm in town Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding The creedans cloning and feeding And I don't even own a TV Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me You told them all I was crazy They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee God damn you

I'm not sick but I'm not well And I'm so hot Cause I'm in hell I'm not sick but I'm not well

Power out

You