Muse

The world is in pieces, and nothing will ever be the same, but that doesn't mean we can't maintain some sort of normalcy in our lives. Tomorrow is April 1st, which is April Fool's Day, and I am sitting here begging you guys, whatever prank you had planned, please do it. If it was to tell your mom you're pregnant, it will make her laugh. It is one of the most important holidays. It is a worldwide holiday. It is the first holiday. It could have been the first holiday. We don't know. TBTL.

I'm going to fool you.

You talk better than you fool.

I'll fool you up real nice.

You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.

TVTL is the kind of show you listen to because it's like, instead of being able to hang out with your friends, you just hang out with your friends inside your ears, and it makes you laugh.

You see how they go from being so sweet to just wanting to tear your face off, and they can do it like that. And it's like, oh, that's amazing to have that kind of range and that speed.

Okay. It feels weird that I heard all that. Do you want any pancakes? All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Thursday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Two bros, bro-in-it-up! My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center, perched high in the sky above Portland, Oregon.

I'm a professional. Look it up in the book.

We are looking at another beautiful day here in the 503. um yesterday i was out for a walk and i had a sweater and a jacket and i had to take the jacket off and then i had to take the sweater off because it was positively warm out like it was not oh the sun is shining and we can pretend that it's actually nicer than it is it was straight up warm yesterday and it's going to be warm today and i am loving it i'm flying in hot

for that hottie. You're going to be loving

today's episode of the show, episode 3,392 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Which is, of course, happening on April 1st, the internationally recognized day for pulling pranks on each other. How about, like, pranking an animal? We'll look into why we love pranks so much, and also why I think Andrew dislikes pranks so much, based on what sociologists say about the holiday. If we're calling it a holiday Oh, speaking of animals One of the first dogs has apparently Relieved themselves I.e. gone number two In the White House We were talking yesterday about how Major Now bit or nipped two people And either Major or the other dog One of them dropped a deuce in the White House They're asking to be sent back to Delaware right now. So we'll bring you the latest on what's going on there. Oh, and then another follow-up. We've been upset with the Volkswagen company for just straight-up lying to us earlier this week. Lying is like 95% of what I do. Where they said they were changing the company's name to Volkswagen, and we were excited about that. I was excited about that because of some personal reasons. And then they said, no, actually, it's an April Fool's joke. But now the SEC, the Security and Exchange Commission, is going to look into if it was illegal what Volkswagen did. Because it actually moved stock prices for a period of time. You're not really supposed to do that as a company. You're not supposed to lie about things that might actually drive financial markets. So we'll get into that. Plus, it's a Thursday, a.k.a. a Blur's Day. So we'll do those.

It's my birthday today.

Do all of it with the help of this guy. He's a handsome young stranger. He may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. And he and I had like a one-hour meeting before the show involving setting our fantasy baseball roster. Today is the first day of baseball, and he is very excited.

I'm like seriously excited. I'm kind of shy, but mostly excited.

He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend. I am kind of shy and really excited. That is very accurate. Yeah, this kid is channeling your, I would say, your kind of resting state of being.

I'm like seriously excited. I'm kind of shy, but mostly excited.

Mostly excited I am. By the way, sorry I'm a little distracted. I know that the listeners can't say. Yeah, you were going all over the place there. What's going on? What's going on?

Do you see what I'm holding in my hand? I do see. The listeners cannot see that, but we should tell them what it is. It is a PDA. It is a PDA. Weren't we talking about these the other day? I can't remember where life ends and podcasts begin. But I will use this as a little forward promotion for this week's newsletter. I'd been threatening for some time to go through my big box of antiquated technologies, old cell phones and various kinds of recording devices and all kinds of media throughout the years. And I did that for the Hey Dummies video this week. And on this little ride down technologies memory lane, I came across my actual, what did PDA stand for? Personal Digital Advisor. Assistant, maybe? Assistant, yeah, probably not Advisor. And I thought I had an actual Palm Pilot, but I actually have a Dell Pocket PC, which sounds, dude, you got it, Adele. That's exactly, I had to do the video twice.

I actually think that, by the way, is a joke that's been made on this show before. You got Adele? Dude, you're getting Adele, but put it in the past tense.

Yeah, because the computer that I bought a year ago was also Adele. Apparently I'm a Adele man. But the amazing thing about this is I was able to get it to power up. Now, that's not in the video. This is a podcast exclusive here. But I let this thing charge overnight in this big clunky charger that I also found along with it. and I thought that the hard drive was kind of cleared on it or the little disc that it holds, but I found some old notes, which I can't seem to get to now.

Oh, please, I need to hear these. This is from how long ago?

2004, which seems late to me. It seems like PDAs would have been more of a 90s thing, but not really. I didn't get a cell phone until pretty late, and all of these notes are from 2004.

Would you say, though, that you are – I'm not trying to say anything with this statement. But would you say that you're a bit of – outside of maybe the world of audio because it's our job, would you say that you are maybe a somewhat late technology adopter?

Yes, which I think is a very weird thing for me because I love technology. Right. It is a strange thing for me. But I think for my personal devices, it might have changed a little bit. I don't know if it's a cheapness thing. It might be. I am making big purchases like buying this new computer that I have. I really kind of sweated it. Was that when you got it at Dell? When I got it at Dell. Got it. Um, but yes, I mean, cell phones are the perfect example. I did not get a cell phone until very late into adulthood. And I was working in news. Like, that's not the best look in the world. Um, I'm looking for my notes here.

I think it's that you have a deeply kind of held sense of enoughness. And I, we've talked about this actually not that long ago on the show. And I really respect this about you because I have a deeply held sense of not enoughness. And I'm always trying to fill that with whatever the latest PDA is. And by that I do mean public display of affection Right But like I think that you probably are just kind of like Well my life is working okay right now With whatever it is I have And getting the new Palm Pilot Is not going to solve Or make me better at my job Or whatever Like you don't see technology as a panacea for you And so That's true And also you don't like to waste money on things And to some degree as you said Making kind of large financial purchases Creates a bit of anxiety for you Because you don't want to buy the wrong thing Yes And so I think that all probably would lead to you Kind of being later in the game As far as personal stuff goes As far as stuff that would be seen as treating yourself You're never going to be the person out there Wearing the latest Oculus Rift glasses Or whatever

Oh won't I I may have just made a breakthrough here Luke Here we go Here are my Here are my Word documents These are from And so some of this is like apartment information like some of this is some of this is embarrassing I have a feeling I'm going to read something that I probably shouldn't read that I said before the show that I wasn't going to read but I probably I can't stop myself because once the tape is rolling you know me Luke I'm a showman that's right I'm a showman here's one of my favorite things that is very safe territory on April 14th which is you know very close to an anniversary date here April 14th 2004 Veeves and I were apparently taking a road trip from New hampshire to pittsburgh and these are this is a list of things seen on trip to pittsburgh okay ready this into your pda yes and this reminds me of kind of my relationship with what i call dictaphones or the small little recorders that record on um mini cassette tapes i always had one of those like i had my first one of those at a pretty young age and i loved having the ability to record anything at any time but never really knew what to do with it you know so i was always like coming up with stupid things that I

would later delete i feel like that's what i was doing with my pda here like why didn't i just write this in a notebook instead of like tip tapping it out with this tiny little um stylus tiny little stylus but anyway so i decided i wanted to use my pda on this road trip and these are things seen on trip to pittsburgh um oh actually i see 410 2004 was when this originally was written A 12-year-old driving a pickup truck. Don't go to sleep on me. A pheasant or possibly a grouse. A van full of Amish folk. One was on a cell phone. I was just told Genevieve I found this document and she said, I believe she said at the time, 15 years ago, pick a lane. Like, I don't know, should the Amish use cell phones? It's not really for me to say. Maybe I should just leave that alone.

I think that probably of the groups of people that we are most likely to offend, Amishers are low on the list in terms of their access to technology, unless they're on Rumspringa, in which case they might – part of their Rumspringa might be to listen to this podcast, in which – if you're one of those folks, we apologize.

But clearly back in 2004, at least one Amish person was using a cell phone. Maybe even to listen to TBTL possibly. Oh, no, no, before TBTL.

They're listening to Day to Day. They were listening to The Front Porch and Day to Day. They were listening to our earlier work because they knew something was brewing kind of in the universe, but they were at the early stage of it. That is a good question, and we've gotten into this before. What are the rules around technology for folks who are – Amish is kind of a catch-all. There's a lot of different, you know, there's a lot of different kind of versions of there's Hutterites. There are there are like a bunch of different groups of people that we all kind of we who are not part of that community together is Amish. But I do wonder, like, how it is that you're allowed to have a cell phone, but but not a car. I think what it is, it's not even like a rule. It's just what the community kind of agrees on. Anyway, that's not what's interesting here. What's interesting are your notes that you kept in this PDA. So what's next on the list?

A glider. I don't even really know what that means. A glider. An automobile junkyard. And finally. I'm kind of surprised that one made the list. I'm going to be totally honest with you. Well, you got a PDA. You got to do something with it. You got to write down what you see. And the last thing rounding out the list here is a hearse pulling a minivan. Now, that's worth writing down in your PDA, I would say.

Okay, that one makes the list. Maybe they were taking the minivan to the junkyard. yes yes right and it's a hearse so it kind of makes sense as well um now you're saying you're saying why would anyone write that down in the pda as opposed to in a little you know a notebook but here's the thing had you written that in a notebook we would not be talking about it on the show today because the notebook notebook would be lost to history it'd be at the bottom of a box somewhere but because you put this into a digital form here it is living on could imagine andrew telling two thousand was it five or four two thousand four imagine andrew from 2021 visits 2004 who is in that car driving from new hampshire to pittsburgh and noting things in his personal digital assistant and like imagine if somebody if you would have come to yourself and said guess what my friend i guess flash forward 17 years 17 years and nine days this is what you're going to be doing there'll be a global pandemic right you will be using a program called riverside.fm to talk to your friend and colleague luke uh from c you'll be in seattle washington and your job Your actual job will be to do this five days a week and put it on the internet.

And literally. And you'll be reading these notes from this PDA. And first, podcasts did not exist in 2004 at all, right? I know TBTL, you were a radio show, but you were immediately podcasting, and that was 2008. And I think there were a few that I was listening to before TBTL. no offense but like some really early like le show i think was podcasting and then that one i can never remember the name of it but it was a very early podcast it was a couple of like former kind of like punks like a couple a young married couple who were punks but then left the city to like kind of live the farming life and they just did kind of daily not or just kind of a more of a rural lifestyle and it's just them talking i don't know if it was daily or weekly um but i really loved that but that I'm gonna say it

2007 maybe I'm trying to look up here I'm trying to remember the first podcast

that I actually listened to like you know what I mean like kind of went out of my way it would have obviously been something that I had to download to an iPod right exactly we would load them up and isn't it funny to think that like how completely streamlined it is now and that it would be insane to download a podcast to some other device that wasn't just your phone but for the longest time that was that was kind of how how it was done and you wonder why podcasts weren't as popular in those days i mean you're asking people to do kind of a lot you know to to put it on to it like some kind of mp3 playing device and then listen to it my guess would be that it would have been something this american life related and it would have probably been for like a road trip or me wanting to be able to listen to the santaland diaries with addy as we're driving somewhere far away i'm sure that that was probably kind of the the beginnings of it you know i'm trying to look up the name of this podcast

that i used to listen to which used to have pretty good seo because you know i think it was popular in a time when podcasts weren't all that popular but now there's just so much i mean you just type anything with the word podcast in it uh in google and you're just going to get flooded with like all luke i'm wondering if we're living in a podcast boom i've heard something to that to that um

somebody saying that do you do the thing i do andrew where you still don't think of a video

podcast as being podcasts this was actually something that came up recently because i was telling genevieve about the i'm really sorry i'm not trying to do advertisements for this technology that we're that we're just experimenting with this week riverside.fm slash tbtl no that's not a thing um but when we were talking about whether or not we wanted to use this and there are the aspects of you and I can see each other when we do the show for better or for worse but then also the ability to capture this video and possibly put it out and whether it's two minutes of us saying something interesting or funny on the show we could share it as a little video it's not something that we're planning on doing right now but it's just the potential is there and that got Genevieve and me talking about how people refer to podcasts these days you know she works with a lot of young people um because of her job at the university and like she was talking to somebody the other day uh some kid who said yeah i'm starting a podcast and generally said how where are you where where can we get the podcast he's like you know i don't know i'll put on youtube or something and he was just like talking about one video that he wants to make and put it on youtube but he considers that a podcast because it's two people talking to each other and that kind of went into some of my um thinking about the potential of us using services like the one we're using now because the service that you and I were using to communicate earlier is based on old school radio principles you can bring phone lines in and other you know things we call ISDNs that we don't have to get into details about but it was a way of bringing in a bunch of old school technologies that you and I are very comfortable with because we're radio guys who you know kind of grew up with that stuff professionally and the way people think about what podcasts are now are just so different like how many times and i'm not saying i want to be one of these people but when you it's almost always you hear some a-hole um comedian getting canceled right because you know whether it's the guy who was um hired to be on snl but then it turns out he was saying a bunch of racist shit on podcasts or there are a bunch of examples like that and whenever you go back to look up what podcasts these guys were on and they're always guys um there's always a video component to it right it's always them and some other guy like sitting and you can watch them do it and i'm just wondering if what you and i consider a podcast right now is even just on the

edge of becoming outdated yeah i think you're totally right because i can't remember what it was but somebody i was reading an article about a podcast and something somebody had done on a podcast like you said and then my thought was well if i want to go investigate this i'll need to go to itunes you know apple.com slash itunes slash podcast right exactly html and like you know like because that's where i get podcasts from and then when i clicked on the link it was just a video and i was like i mean i guess that that's that's probably how the majority of people are now thinking of like a podcast just means i guess a little burst of conversation right that is now out in the world and that could be this person that genevieve knows from the university doing one episode or what five minutes i mean is something on tiktok a podcast at this point right i mean like because we yeah we i think of it as being audio content that happens on a certain schedule and has music to start it. etc. Like I have all these very tired, like 40 soon to be 45 year old guy ideas about what a podcast is. And in fact, it's much more this kind of stuff. And you know, it's funny, we mentioned this the other day, we were we were referencing our pal Andy Haynes. And, and he's his wife, Rosebud Baker, they have this podcast called Find Your Beach. I only know about it from Instagram. And I only know about it as a visual event. And I and I'm telling you, like, it's it's delightful to watch they're very funny and it would be way less fun if it weren't a video i mean i'm not saying you shouldn't go download if there's an audio version i'm not saying don't go download it but for me i've only known about this because i see one minute clips or one minute 20 second clips on instagram on the gram trying to pepper in as many youthful phrases as i can that's so cool you just wow on the one hand i have a completely outmoded idea of podcasts on the other hand i i talk about the gram which is i mean that is fresh did you just make that up now i mean that's so fresh no me and my young various young friends that's what we say we're just like man it's all for the gram wow say to each other so new um anyway uh for that particular podcast i only know it has this little video snippet and i really enjoy it and so i guess you know even if i don't realize that i'm starting to engage with the next wave of what this thing looks like right exactly Yeah. And I don't know. I don't really have my eyes set on anything. I mean, for me, the interesting thing is like, how much does it matter what we call this stuff? Because will it do any good? What do you mean? I was like, it does what we call this in any way make any difference? Right. How people consume it, if it becomes more popular, if it becomes less popular. I feel like this thing is going to be what it is, whatever we call it.

For you and I in particular, yes, and not to get corny, and I'm not turning this into another, like, you know, whatever fundraising message or patting ourselves on the back.

That'll be in a month, a month and a half, and you'll be hearing plenty of listeners.

But that to me, like, and I truly do believe this. I'm saying this earnestly in this conversation about technology and what we call things. To me, whatever TBTL is, as long as the community is around it. You know what I mean? As long as we're providing what we need for the folks who are sending cards to each other and, you know, doing everything. Like to me, it's all in this for us. It's all in the service of that for real. But broadly speaking, whether or not we call these things podcasts or whatever, like I think of something that I want to say was Alex Goldman. And not that he was the only person to say this, but he says, like, maybe we should just go back to calling all podcasts radio because I just think of it all as radio.

like it doesn't really matter like i feel like we were doing that for a while i mean we've called it imaginary radio for a long time but also just kind of like yeah we say radio show because we think of it as a radio show but the problem with that is you know now there's a visual component

it's not it's not radio anymore and the younger generations don't have that touchstone of what radio is i mean i assume that you still get in the car and there's a radio there and you know what a radio is but you know I'll never forget Kiki Lolo kind of laughing at me the other day when I mentioned turning on the radio in the bathroom and she thought I was joking that I have a actual radio in the bathroom like that's not going to be a touch point for younger generations as much but on the other hand like so part of me says doesn't matter what we call it but then I'm trying to look this up on the fly and it doesn't matter but I follow this photographer on Instagram Graham, who I really like. He's French-Canadian. He's kind of an outsider artist. He sounds—I really like his work. He also sounds kind of difficult, and he's got his struggles in life, but he will go every now and then on quasi-coherent rants on the Graham, Luke. Oh, right. And yeah, you're familiar. And I'm sorry I don't have his name. I'll try to find it later in the show, but I don't want to talk and search at the same time. But anyway, I find him to be a very interesting character and he was writing one of his screens the other day about how if we just call everything content he feels as an artist artist it really just diminishes all the work people are doing creative work at least for him as a photographer he's like if we're all just calling it content and it doesn't matter where we put it is it a video is it a photo we're putting it on the gram it's a podcast it's on youtube he's like don't don't call your work especially if there's an artistic bent to it just content because that is just not it just he thinks it devalues the

creative process that's a tough one i feel like any conversation around defining what isn't is an art based on how much work it work that went into it or how polished it is or what it's being called that seems like a kind of dangerous territory to me you know because i feel like you can make the argument like look i i look at a lot of tiktok and i'm watching people on tiktok who do, there's a performer, I guess you'd call her, there's a woman named Bella Port. she's like super popular on tiktok she'll do a video which is 30 seconds and it's her singing along to a like a song but it's got some weird like zoom filter like a a filter on her phone which is making the the phone kind of zoom in on her face in these kind of weird and surprising ways and she's i don't know how to describe what she's doing but what i know is that i think she's getting very very very wealthy off of this and i'm watching it and i'm thinking to myself like how is this a job how is this like a thing that you can do for a living and then i'm like i don't know if if 80 million people take enjoyment from something that you did you know how how can i say that's not content and that's not to some degree art and also not a valid way to make a

living for yourself you know like i've had to you're misunderstanding you're but but you're arguing his point he's he just i mean i i don't really care but just to be very clear what he's arguing he would say yes like that woman isn't making content she's making art he would say like he doesn't like the word well and again this is just his opinion i'm not saying that it's right but he's saying that like just calling everything that is made in the creative process just giving it one word of content he feels like sort of devalues it it's not about how much work was put into it and he's not saying there's a bar you have to clear and i'm an artist and you're not he's not saying that at all he's saying that everybody is creating some everybody on all kinds of levels and platforms are creating really beautiful things that he considers to be art and he would probably consider this example of this woman her own artistic creative process but he just feels like the word content as is just a a a big stamp that sort of blends it all together and devalues it so we should call it all art so this is art what we're doing right now i think that he would just say that look at what you're doing and call it what it is and if you want to call it content call it content but in his mind just the idea of turning artists all into just content providers

it seems a bit jeff hansen yeah by the way speaking of outmoded technologies i watched this documentary the other night on netflix called like the last blockbuster oh yeah that's been making the rounds and it's pretty good i have to say it was it was a fun it's not the most my taste in documentary because the area of documentary film has been so there have been so many great documentaries over the last few years and it's become speaking of art it has become to me a real art form where even just the the way that you tell the story is is part of my enjoyment of it is to see a documentary uh filmmaker tell the story of something in a way that i had never thought of before i love that and i would not say that this one the last blockbuster is breaking any ground as far as documentary goes. And, in fact, there's a few parts of it that are kind of, like, I don't know, just I thought a little hokey. There's just one point where they have Doug Benson, you know, the comedian and a podcaster. Artist. The content creator, Doug Benson, I hope you're sitting down, Andrew, gets really high and goes to the last blockbuster in Bend, Oregon.

Getting Doug with high I still think is one of the best names of a show.

Doug Benson seems to be a force for good in the world, and he's very popular, would do us no good to cross him. I've never personally understood the – it's never been the comedy. I think it's just because I don't interact with marijuana very much. It's just never been the comedy that is the most up my alley. But anyway, two things. One, there's somebody who's interviewed. I forget who, but they were talking about showing their kid VHS tapes. like recently and how confused their kid was about the concept of a VHS tape as in. So you're telling me, dad, the movie is physically on this thing. Like, I don't wait a minute. So you're saying the movie is only on this thing. Right. Right. And like this person describing, trying to tell their kid how a VHS, which like just, it just blew my mind thinking about like, yeah, of course there's a whole generation now of people who completely don't think of content as being living on any one thing in one physical whether it's a cd dvd a pda or a vhs tape like i just thought wow i can't believe like it's hard for me even to this day to think about content living everywhere but it's probably harder for that generation people to

think content living only in one place and when you think about the fact that you know a vhs tape is i don't know what five times the size of a cell phone when you consider thickness or you know whatever four eight times whatever and it only contains one thing that you need to put into something even bigger to play as opposed to this thing that is one let's say one fifth the size is in my pocket and it can play literally any song that isn't in a copyright dispute with uh def jam records right right All right.

Or Tommy Boy Records, rather. But, yeah, I mean, it's just like, why would you have this big clunky thing? But, anyway.

That movie, there was one other thing that I thought they did that was genius. So they're interviewing a bunch of, you know, they got a lot of really great guests to kind of talk about blockbuster culture. They got a bunch of people who had worked at blockbuster and who are now pretty famous, kind of in their own right, talking about their days working at blockbuster. um but they they interview a guy named lloyd kaufman who is the founder of trauma films you know this is like the toxic avenger um and like tromeo and juliet these real like i don't even know how you would describe the genre other than just kind of like super campy super ridiculous like intentionally poorly made films the kind of stuff that i have never had any interest in outside of the room Tommy Wiseau's masterwork I just am not I'm not into this kind of stuff I know people are in fact we probably have listeners who love those trauma films they love all the toxic Avenger films and they those have provided great joy for them and if so you know via con Dios but here's what the film did it was clear that this guy Lloyd Kaufman is just a grade a asshole and so the reason they wanted to interview him I think was because of talking about his film studio this very small studio that he's running making these kind of silly films that film studio's relationship with blockbuster because what they really get into some part in the documentary is the way that blockbuster's relationship with the film studios was a big part of their success early on they figured out because they had enough stores that they could get a better price on each copy of a film from the studio so if you know die hard three was coming out and people were all diehard three jingle all the way was coming out and people were very excited if you were running a mom and pop video store it might cost you eighty dollars per copy of that film well blockbuster was able to negotiate much better deals from themselves and they were able to have 30 copies of the movie so when you went in on a friday night all excited in the new releases they still had copies of it so they clearly the makers of this documentary hated this dude lloyd kaufman he was so rude you hear the filmmaker who's off camera saying to lloyd uh can you tell us your name and um you know your name and and and kind of like what you do or something which is by the way something i always ask when i'm doing a cbs interview one because i want to make sure we have it from their mouth on tape so we just can refer to it make sure we're describing them right and also because sometimes it's a fun way it's very um you know radio labby way now to to start any kind of interview is the person saying who they are this guy lloyd kaufman is like why do you need to know my name you don't know my name and the producer's like oh i know your name but we just like to have it you didn't do your research did you this is what the lloyd kaufman guys oh my god you didn't do your research you don't know who i am do you and the guy's like no i i know who you are just some of the viewers might not know who you are he's like oh well i'm gonna find out if you did your research when we get going with this and basically the whole conversation they call it like i think called

like 120 seconds with lloyd kaufman they literally bracket it as like get a load of this oh i love it just this lloyd kaufman guy who now part of my like clearly like very kind of derisive tone right now is because these are not films that speak to me anyway and so the idea that this guy would be so unpleasant and so kind of like thinking he's somebody when what he has made To me is has very little entertainment Value again I will say for me For my taste It was very I like I was I like I like That they because my first thought was you should just Drop him from the film just don't put this idiot in If he's going to be rude to you but like no Let's let's give him just Enough rope to hang himself with By putting in whatever it is 112 seconds With Lloyd Kaufman where he just comes Off as so unpleasant yeah No kidding it's almost Oh go ahead sorry I just thought that was a clever way to use the tape but also let everybody know that this guy is not very nice and it's almost

like the exact opposite of your um of your experience as an interviewer with Wayne Coyne I mean this is a guy who you appreciate his art so much and like you could have gone into that you know even wearing a little bit more sycophancy on your sleeve than you would have wanted maybe and he could have been like you know another fan or whatever because you you respect and love his art so much but instead he's just the most gracious gracious appreciative human being that anybody even cares about his work which a lot of people would describe as just genius i think it

may have been a dead giveaway to him when i pulled out a photo from 15 years ago that i had printed out and was carrying in my pocket of us that may have been the first indication that i was

fanning out pretty hard when you pulled out your wallet to show him a picture of your kid but you I had to flip through four photos of him just to get to Adelaide.

Well, no, it was a picture of Addy, but I had to.

glued his face it was addy's seventh grade photo but it's just a picture of wayne by the way what was that song that you played his brand new song off their brand new record we played it on the show for music for your weekend two weeks ago man did you watch the video for it it is splendid it

is very psychedelic bright i don't know i don't think i've actually seen the video i just have heard the uh what's it is it will you come down i think is the name it's off of um it's off their latest album but no i don't think i've seen the video i'm but i will now i'll watch it right when i get done watching the entirety of the trauma film library will you return slash when you come there you go all right let's uh let's take a quick break and then when we come back we've got a lot of updates it's a lot of just a lot of rapidly evolving news stories from the tbtl universe so we'll get into those coming up in a moment here on tbtl on your mark on your mark get set

Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dazzle.

All right, let's thank some dazzling donors. These are the wonderful, generous, kind, smart, beautiful, handsome, strong, above average. Can we use that now? Above average, but not in a show-off-y way. Above average, but in a quiet, kind of keeping it to themselves way Because they don't want to, you know They don't want to be off-putting to other people Those would all be attributes that we could attribute to our first dazzling donor today Cheryl Cherchik of Corvallis, Oregon I can almost see Cheryl's house from here in Portland Cheryl says, hey friendos I just want to take a moment to express my gratitude for Luke, Andrew in the TBTL community of tens that have continued to support the show. I feel as though every year I talk about how a TBTL has helped me get through some tough times, but it's never been more true than this last year. Thanks, as always, to my ten and a half Lance. That sounds like an improvement. That Lance is at a ten and a half. We can get Lance down to maybe a 10.2 by next year. That'll represent some real promising growth in the getting Lance to the 10 status initiative that we've launched. We've had many meetings with Lily Kim and our other supervisors at 8 p.m. about this project. We call it Project Lance.

Oh, I was calling it Operation Lance. Oh, no. I have to clean up some paperwork.

We've got to redo the deck. The deck that I've been working off of is called Project Lance. Anyway, Lance agrees to donate part of his salary to this utter nonsense every month, only to be tormented by my relentless recitation of random audio drops and stories about, quote-unquote, the guys and what they're up to. I also want to recognize my fives turned tens, Julian and Irene, who both donated to the show for the first time this year as well. Wow. So these are Cheryl and Lance's offspring, right? Fives, kids.

Or at least Cheryl's, yes.

or Sheryl's, Sheryl's kids that are now donating to the show, have donated to the show?

I think I remember when this was happening live last year when we were in our secret location doing the TBTL-a-thon. I remember seeing photos and videos of the kiddos becoming donors, which is really mind-blowing. Kids becoming donors, wolves becoming men. It's like taking money from babies.

Well, my goodness gracious, again, Julian and Irene, thank you, and Cheryl, thank you, and Lance, thanks for tolerating this whole ridiculousness. Cheryl finishes up by saying, this has been such a tough year for all of us, but especially the young ones, and I'm so proud of how you've persevered and shown growth despite all of the difficulties. I love you both to the moon and back. Do you think that part is to us or to Cheryl's kids? I assume us. Right, obviously. She probably likes her kids, though, too. Yeah, no, they're not bad.

Maestro, on your mark, on your mark, get set, get set, now ready, ready, go, everybody rattle down.

We've got to also thank Dazzling Donor Sharon D'Aleese of Texarkana, Arkansas. Sharon is keeping it short and sweet. Now, as you know, if you're a regular listener to the show, folks that are kind enough to donate at the Dazzling level, we say hey if you want to send in a message if you want to promote something worthy if you want to promote your business that you're doing on the side or whatever or you want to just tell us that we're great you can send in a message is there a time limit is it just kind of like try to keep it I think we say to about a minute or less and then we have some When the form goes out, I believe Emily and I came up with some sort of structure.

But, yeah, we try to keep them somewhat manageable. Well, Sharon of Texarkana, Arkansas, has probably achieved the platonic ideal of brevity when it comes to the dazzling donor message. Because if I read this right, Sharon DeLise has said with her time, with her allotted time, one word, kindness. Why did I say the word kindness weird? You had one word, Luke. I had one word to say kindness, and I said kindness.

I only say that. I only am laughing at you because I think that's what we call pulling a Walsh. I did too much buildup. I think that pressure got to you there. I did way too much buildup about this one word.

Sharon typed one word. Kindness. you know what part of it was i went down i was reading your parenthetical note i was trying to kind of like scan that ahead to to make sure i got nervous all of a sudden that like this wasn't actually sharon's intent and then your note clarified very helpfully that you emailed sharon to make sure this was her full message and not a glitch and she wrote back thank you for checking every week my mindset changes so i decided to simplify with a word that might remind everyone what's most important, and that word is kideness.

That word is money. The second, no, that's really sweet. Yeah, I did. I reached out to her because I was like, oh, well, that's really nice and I wasn't sure if she was being kind of poetically brief on purpose, so I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a glitch, but yeah, that's what she wrote back, which is a really sweet thing to now, I mean, I do think that if this does become a competition and I like to turn everything into a competition, I think that right now, Sharon has the shortest dazzling donor message of all time, but it is still two syllables.

Let's see.

Somebody can beat that. Let's see. How many letters is spread she?

These messages start getting just super abstract. It's just like someone, their dazzling donor message is spread she. My dazzling donor message is. like the singer from the knife when they won some kind of award back in the day and if i remember right i think that she just went up she had this very kind of i would say slightly an upsetting mask on and um could we go out with heartbeats today by the knife since i don't think we have any suggestions from the dazzlers i love that song so much but um i she won they they won an award and then she just went on stage and i think she just sort of made that sound that you just

made inside she's wearing a mask that was her like acceptance speech and i would say that's art not

content agree to disagree thank you so much to our dazzling donors thank you for um making the

show possible and for showing such a great amount of kindness hello and welcome to top story all

right uh a little follow-up from yesterday's uh top stories we were talking about this volkswagen situation and it turns out when volkswagen decided to float a fake story in the quote unquote spirit of April Fool's Day on I think it was Monday that it hit the hit the news maybe was Tuesday but anyway it was well before April 1st which which you know as we said yesterday it just makes it lying the Security and Exchange Commission will now be looking into whether or not this actually qualified as you know a crime by Volkswagen because you are there are a lot of rules around what you're allowed to say as a company if it will in fact move stock prices and volkswagen's stock prices in the immediate aftermath of the announcement i believe they went up i want to say i don't have the number right in front of me it was something like uh 10 percent right after the announcement and then by the end of the day it had returned to the previous level so there was this little uptick which my guess would be knowing very little about stocks my guess would be that that was some kind of high frequency trading you know people are day trading people are doing all kinds of things it's like the whole the way you make money if i understand it right in stocks or one of the ways is to sort of like jump on information like that within the first two minutes of the information being out and you've already jumped on it you've made your money and you're now out of it by the end of the day you know So So the stocks went up, but then they went back down to their regular levels by the – oh, yeah, here we go. On Tuesday, following the name change statement, Volkswagen's stock briefly jumped almost 10% before closing flat. So there was a move in the stock, and the question will be if Volkswagen was trying to mislead people so as to affect their stock price. I don't think they were. Like, first of all, I think it's going to be This is what it says in the article I'll mention this article was written by Well, somebody writing it for CNN For some reason when I use this program Print-friendly, Andrew It always loses the byline And I always feel bad for not crediting the person Let me see if I can come up with that here The link is in the show sheet I sent you Anyway, it's Claire Duffy Thank you Claire Duffy writing for CNN You know, pointing out that It's unlikely that the sec will be able to find there'd be hard to prove that this was an opera this was an attempt by volkswagen to drive move their stock price it was an attempt by them to get attention

and it's working and and an attempt to you know publicize their electric cars though right so i mean is there a difference between trying i'm trying to get attention but also like actually trying to like do some advertising in a way or kind of get that free press that is essentially trying to i guess not it's not trying to manipulate its investors it's trying to manipulate the the marketplace consumers yeah yeah right and that's an i mean that's another interesting question is

like if you tell a big lie so as to generate attention for your company but it wasn't to move the stock price it's just to get attention and it works i mean is that illegal i don't think it is unless you're by the way they've done this before i think that they um they announced uh at some time back that they were gonna change the name of a town in germany i think it was going to become wolfsburg which is like an addition of um of you know one of the um cars that they oh sorry they were going to change this town wolfsburg to gulfsburg oh to promote the release of the gulf right um they also another so they've done stuff like this before where they make an announcement that they don't really mean just to try to generate attention this article also points out that like elon musk had to settle with the sec for 20 million dollars after he tweeted about um about wanting to get the company's shares to 420 dollars a share boy this was a long time ago whatever tesla is trading and i promise you it's more than 420 a share he was making a weed joke so he basically said i want to take this is what before tesla had gone public i believe he said i want to take the company public and i want to get the stock price to 420 which is just a stupid 420 joke right but it ended up costing him 20 million dollars to settle with the sec because he was tweeting about something that was going to move markets 420 jokes are

never good anyway when it costs you millions of dollars to make a dumb 420 joke that must hurt

i mean it's i mean if there's somebody who can i guess afford it at this point it's probably old elon yeah i this is off topic but like i saw um this story the other day that they're trying to do i mean spacex his company is just constantly launching rockets and this one that they're trying to do and this is where i'm short on details and so i apologize to people that are really into this stuff i'm going to get a lot of it wrong but the other day they just like shot up another huge one i think it's it's there's something about it that's it's a more like a shuttle i think and it it it crashed back to earth like it it's i think it's the third time they've tried to do this and like it didn't work and it was really very foggy day and they can't quite figure out what happened but i was like homeboy is just out here crashing spacecraft yeah right and it's not even above the fold right as news like i was like far down the list of news sites I check where I happen to see that a guy recently crashed a spacecraft on like

Monday. I mean, it really feels like we're living in a real Marvel Extended Universe, right? We just have all these like just billionaires who are just like in some cases just like controlling the world like Bezos or we have this other one who's just like a playboy and he's just like firing rockets into space and they come crashing down. Were you disappointed? I have one more question about the stock implications of – or the FCC implications of April Fool's Day. But really quickly, were you disappointed? I assume you did not get to see that space debris that came hurtling back to Earth. I think you were still in L.A. when that happened, right?

I saw a video of it, and I had two thoughts. One, can we please turn our camera to the side?

please you want the can i get landscape the landscape no i'm with you get landscape the

person was i mean god bless they are the ones who documented it so it is what it is but like i thought that was incredible the footage even though it's just somebody with their phone holding their phone straight up and down inside their house also i was like i don't know why i'm being mean to the person who documented the thing that i'm fascinated by but immediately my thought was

there is there better footage of this it's because there is though there's a whole bunch our boy our boy hauser uh who do you call you call him j-dog he had some yeah oh i i only saw this one thing

that the seattle times i think had linked to that then other media organizations tended to link to and it was like an okay piece of tape i'm glad to hear there's more out there and i should go look at it because i what i watching this i thought this is cool i'd love to see i'd love to see somebody on a rooftop really capturing this the video i saw was someone inside their house they don't even go outside they're literally like filming through the kitchen window i i mean i

could be wrong my because i mean i wasn't following this super closely and i think i saw the one that you're talking about but i feel like just in my social media stream i thought that i just saw a bunch of people like that are that i follow just kind of posting it too it is it was remnants of

one of those elon musk rocket projects right yeah i think so yeah i think it was a musk project and

it wasn't dangerous apparently i mean it looked startling i mean it was like i wondered about

this thing he crashed the other day obviously there are rules in place of where you can do this but i just thought i mean is that what is there no danger of that shuttle coming back down on like right and hitting people like right it went up it turned around and then it you know it's one of those ones that like lands in reverse oh yeah until the day i die my brain will not be able to understand how that works like how that's possible that seems to defy every law of physics that i understand but i also just thought yeah is there any danger to the population that you're just crashing space shuttles over like i don't know texas or something and literally who is

regulating it i mean is it nasa like who is actually regulating these projects well the other

thing too this is the part of the show where i just start freestyling on a variety of stories that i half read but i half read something the other day about all the space junk all the like i mean thousands and thousands and thousands of things that are now up in space and they range in size weirdly like old dead satellites are the least dangerous because you can plan for them if you're like if you have a satellite or you're the international space station what's really dangerous are the things that are smaller than the size of like a bolt where there which are there are so many little pieces of things that are out there and those ones you kind of can't see on whatever it is, the radar, and those things could go right through the wing of your satellite or space station and do real damage. So they're like building these space nets they're trying to use to like... Ooh, space nets. Imagine a space net that's there to just collect up space garbage and then... Or else, this other thing that they're doing, this is where I'm really pulling from the back of my brain, but they were developing some kind of system, and I forget the exact mechanism, but it was some kind of way of basically capturing space junk and flinging it towards Earth so that it burns up as it re-enters the atmosphere. Like, the way you get rid of space junk is you throw it at the Earth fast.

Because the speed will burn it up.

Yeah, you basically put it on a trajectory that it will get destroyed by the atmosphere. That's how you get rid of it. I guess that's like space's garbage disposal.

Yeah, what does Dark Helmet have to say about all of this? I don't know who that is. Isn't that the character in Spaceballs? this all just sounds like Rick Moranis like yeah it sounds like I might have that wrong I thought he was called Dark Helmet I haven't seen that in forever probably so but it just sounds like I've never seen Spaceballs oh that's interesting I think that you've probably missed your moment there that's my guess I mean you might love it I don't I mean I kind of

if I ever do get into weed I'm gonna give it a day in court

is that weed is that weed

I feel like if I was high I would laugh at Spaceballs yeah maybe and if I'm not high I don't think it will work for me in 2021 you know

I had a glancing thought when you're talking about getting Doug with high, where the whole point of that show is Doug Benson would like get high with his guests. I was I didn't really ever get into that either. And I think that was me. I think that was a podcast and also maybe a YouTube series. But it reminded me is like, oh, yeah, that's kind of like what we were talking about on Monday. That show that I'm embarrassed that I'd never even heard is called Hot Ones. Oh, yeah. It's like basically it's like it's just getting people off their game, getting them into your world and trying something different. so you don't get the same interview over and over again. Okay, so if you don't mind, I'm going to take this back to Boring Town. And I know that we have a little bit of a limited time because you have a meeting you've got to get to. But this idea of if you're making claims, a.k.a. lies, for April Fool's Day because you just think you're a fun, flirty company, and your stock price goes up, like, couldn't...

Couldn't that have happened to Google? Because Google, I think they stopped doing this. God bless their heart. But like I think of Google as one of the companies that early on started making this a big trend and tradition of telling lies about new things they were going to roll out. I'm on a Wikipedia page here. And like in 2008, like Google announced all these changes to their platforms and new silly, you know, Google related products and online services and all that. Like and I just looked it up like Google was a publicly traded company by 2008. Like if all of these if anybody believed that Google was going to roll all this stuff out and then they they started investing, couldn't couldn't all of these be, you know, potentially corrupt for lack of a better corrupt is the wrong word, but potentially criminal or whatever under the FCC.

You know, I am a lawyer, but SEC stuff was not my area of expertise. SEC, not FCC. Well, you know, the FCC, though, is the Federal Communication Corporation, so they may have a role in it, too. I knew I was getting that wrong. If you said FAA, we would have been far off.

First of all, I was thinking FTC, and that is also wrong. God damn it. You were thinking FTD floral. I was thinking about Sherry's berries, actually, for some weird reason.

You were thinking FERC, the Federal Energy Regulation Commission. I was thinking Space Force. I'm not an expert, but my guess would be that part of why it's very hard to prove criminal sort of intent is because companies are allowed to try to hype themselves. They are allowed to try to say, we're going to do cool new things. Usually they hire common to kind of talk rapid as there's like a like some kind of solar field of like solar panels behind him that's in an area that was once war torn. You know, companies are allowed to hype themselves. So the line between hyping yourself and and kind of overstating the potential of what you're going to do and something that actually jacks a stock price up that you then benefit from, my guess would be that's really difficult to prove. What you probably can prove and how, you know, people like Martha Stewart end up going to jail. I'm just going to say this. I don't necessarily, I don't, I have a lot of privilege as a person who's, you know, not had contact with law enforcement. I'm not somebody who, I'm not somebody who has to live life in a community where I fear the police and I fear talking to the police. That being said, I don't know if the like don't snitch, to me the idea of don't snitch seems like a bad idea because I feel like if you can help find the people who did stuff, it seems like a good idea. Where am I going with this, Andrew? Somebody wrote the other day, like, Martha Stewart refused to snitch and literally did jail time. And, like, you know, Takashi69 absolutely snitched on everybody he was involved in. And somehow the side-by-side of Martha Stewart being ride or die and, like, not snitching, like, Martha Stewart being, you know, snitches get stitches like her being that hardcore compared to somebody like takashi 69 who you know claims all kinds of you know street cred or whatever i don't know why that just made me laugh but the point is i think what they can prove more easily is like if somebody at a company knows that there's news that's going to move the stock price and they do something with their stock before the news comes out that seems like something that's more provable than is google

bragging about all of its new functionality it wasn't i think you misunderstood though these are these were made up things that google did on april fool's day oh google started this tradition i don't know if they started it but they were at the end of the tradition on april in the early 2000 yeah maybe i didn't make that clear but they they announced all these fake platforms and fake services and silly things like i i don't i'm gonna make one up like google dog talk where we're gonna help your dog you know uh translate his barks into words for you like they would release these thing i'm making that's not real yeah sorry i would be very into that um so anyway i'm just wondering if there are implications there although my guess with the volkswagen one is that the way they set this up if i understand it correctly was through like a fake leaked press release as opposed to just on april fool's day saying hey we're google releasing all these things and then five minutes later you're like ah google you got me again instead this is like three days Before April Fool's Day And they're pretending to leak Inside information That's probably where Space Force comes down on you

I mean I have to say On some level you've got to kind of tip the cap To them because The whole we accidentally posted this And we didn't mean to And then we pulled it down But CNBC saw it before we pulled it down I mean that's pretty genius To go to those lengths You've got to kind of give them credit on that

From a prankster perspective

But then again it's a lie That's the thing So of course you got away with I mean, of course, like you didn't do it on April 1st, so everyone's guard was a little bit down because we know that our guard should be up on April 1st and, you know, as the media, just to whatever degree you and I are still in the media, Andrew. But like, yeah, that was kind of it was pretty clever of them, but I guess we'll see what happens. I'm speaking of trying to read the mind of a dog. What is going on with the first dogs? Do they not like living in the White House? What is happening? we were talking yesterday about major biting or nipping at staff at the white house and then today or really late yesterday news that one of the dogs and we don't know which one it is yet it's either champ or major one of the dogs apparently dropped a deuce in the hallway outside the diplomatic reception room just off the south lawn on wednesday there were um reporters that were waiting around i think to do some kind of a press thing and it was just noted that there was a giant dog poop pile in the white house i should say we hope it's dog poop i mean the story could be way darker you see those videos they're often from grocery stores for some reason where people just walk down an aisle and they just drop their pants and do something i didn't know about

that of course we've covered the um the pooping principles why is it always school administrators that seem to me what about the jogger in colorado that i believe is still oh right on the still on

the loose that's right right the only thing that are loose the jogger is still out there yeah not

to um be overly serious about this but here's my thing when i read this story which i didn't know about until you sent it to me today um part of me wonders you know how much of this is just normal pet behavior in the white house but now that there's sort of a story around this idea of misbehaving dogs the media is sort of amplifying them more you know what I mean like who knows if previous dogs might have had an accident it just didn't get any news because it was you know the internet wasn't the main news source and it wasn't going to get a column in the New York Times right and now like things are just different and we have two stories of a misbehaving dog well then when you see a little poop then that's going to suddenly get more traction so that could be one thing if i'm wrong about that though and this is a very rare thing i would say as somebody who's never had a dog and doesn't know about dog behavior yeah maybe this isn't the right place for the dogs like this could be stressful you know what i mean like this is stressful acting out and i think you said in your intro maybe this is the dog saying like i don't want to be at the white house anymore and maybe sometimes we have to listen to our pets i wonder what their actual

day-to-day life is like there like do they just lounge in the oval office are they like who who is their main human contact because being president uh or being the first lady that's a pretty busy job like so the presumably joe biden and dr jill biden are out working a lot meaning that they're not just like chilling with the dogs like is this one of those things where the dogs are like raised by a nanny mostly they're mostly just being and then is that is there a full-time person assigned to them is it just whoever like is there is there a moment where somebody i just imagine it's all being like veep yeah we're like right right somebody's just got to deal with the dog and like people are trying to like quickly rewrite a speech that the person's about to give and somebody's like has anybody taken major out you know like no one's like it would seem that if you have a full-time person assigned to the dog that would not be a great use of taxpayer money yes but on the other hand if it's kind of no one's responsibility like i would very quickly shirk all of my real white house responsibility to just be the person kicking it with the dog yeah me you know what i mean yeah that would just be more fun to me than than whatever my real job

was there do you think i'd be better as a dog sitter considering that i'm somewhat afraid of dogs or a speech writer considering that i'm somewhat afraid of speeches i think you'd be

great at both thank you that was the right answer i know because no because you're a good writer and also you are very good around dogs um even if you're tamping down some deep deep fear of them it doesn't come off that way you love dogs so no i think you'd be great at both of them i think you would gravitate towards the dog stuff though because you're empathetic you'd be like someone's gotta take these dogs outside i also learned in this article um that the uh that darlene superville wrote for the ap now i don't want to drag darlene because i assume it actually is not darlene's job to write the headline for this piece but so i am assuming darlene wrote the piece for the associated press and then somebody else somewhere assigns the headline the headline rut row biden Pooch drops Dougie-Doo in White House Hallway. I almost started channeling that guy channeling Donald Trump.

Yes.

They call him Scooby-Doo, but Scooby doesn't do. Fred, he doesn't drive the plot, and he doesn't drive the van. Anyway, I don't love this headline, but Darlene.

I also don't like the use of the, on second reference, I believe they refer to it as the brown stuff. We've talked about that on the show before. We've already said snow too many times, and now we're going to call it the white stuff. I'm pretty sure early on in this article, they refer to it as the brown stuff was spotted in a hallway.

Thank you. Darlene writes in this piece, though, that apparently this is not the first known incident. And by the way, to your point, Andrew, I'm 100 percent with you that the reason this got written about is because this other kind of story about major nipping people is in the news. If there were none of those stories, these reporters that I think were about to go shadow First Lady Jill Biden somewhere, they would never write, hey, guess what? there was some poop in this hallway like it just wouldn't you wouldn't have and there would not be enough there to write about that standalone incident but when you take it in the totality of what's been going on but anyway uh in this piece it's pointed out this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened apparently michelle obama had told someone that sunny the obama's dog liked to sneak off and poop in the white house as well really yeah i hate to say it But it's Democrats What's the What's the constant here What's the through line Yeah right Yeah I think we figured it out

There's a right way to rock And a wrong way to roll You can't just listen to your soul Just remember that life Is number one You can't be having so much fun Just remember that life Life is much fun All right, Luke, I'll get us started here with today's Blur's Days.

Do you have the list in front of you as well? You know it. All right, fantastic. Now, we did prerecord Thursday's show last week, so we missed out on some people who turned in Blur's Day messages at the last minute. So my apologies for that. a couple of belated blurs days here actually luke why don't you read the first one because this is

a fellow who's come up on the show recently yeah man we have had uh we've spent a lot of time talking about old rold who's our dazzling donor the other day we learned a lot about the special mommy and daddy time in that household um some of it we wish we could unlearn but anyway rold It says, I'd like to wish my daughter Hayden a happy 14th birthday and an official third TBTL Blur's Day. Would that mean the third year that Hayden has had her birthday blurs? I think so, yeah. To the coolest, smartest, and funniest teen I know, I love you, happy birthday. Signed, your dad rolled the sex monster. Oh, my God. I was about to say, because, you know, I'm actually going to skip. Why did you let me read it if you were afraid of what I was going to say?

Well, because what I realized was I have another Rold-related message here. I'm going to skip to the very end of the list here, Luke. And so let's not read this again when we get to the end of the list. But Zach and Queen Anne sent in a message this morning that says, I cracked up about your dazzling donor message for Rold yesterday. We worked together for a while at Safeway, And we didn't know that we were both tens until years later. I wanted to make sure he got a Blur's Day shout out. Any excuse to get Luke to make awkward jokes about his sex life. Roald is a great guy. And I really miss working with him. That's really sweet.

There you go. Happy Blur's Day. How about Jen in Virginia who says, I want to wish a happy Blur's Day to Barb in San Jose, a.k.a. San Jose Barbie. We met way back in the day when I lived in the Bay Area and have kept in touch on the Internet ever since. I hope you have an amazing birthday and that we can get together in the near future when it's safe to travel again. Thank you for being a good 10 friend, man. Barb in San Jose has been listening for a good while to this show and has been very supportive and very active in the 10s community and on Twitter and all that. So, Barb, happy Blur's Day, and thanks for sticking with us all these years.

Also, Thomas says, happy Blur's Day to listener Lisa. Lisa, again, a longtime listener, very, very involved in the TBTL community, I will input there. And Thomas says, Lisa is all goodness and light and deserves every happiness. Adored by a lucky few, admired by many. Lisa has the sharpest mind The biggest heart A universal soul And the outer beauty Of a Botticelli painting If there was a Last Supper painting Of T

she would be one-third, she would be the one-third from the left. Oh, I can picture that. I can absolutely picture who that is. It's Lisa. It's Listener Lisa. Oh, right. Yeah, now I can picture that, too. She's a time lord. She actually traveled back to be in that painting. Wow, that is, that's, you know, that's real will-they-or-won't-they territory there. That was a very, very complimentary Blur's Day message from Thomas. Yes, amen. What's going on there? Well, you're really turning... This is just what Blur's Day is about now. Adored by a lucky few and admired by many. Andrew, that's poetry. I know. It's very... As a matter of fact, I would say, Thomas, you're laying it on a little thick, aren't you? Just joking. Wait till you hear what Tricia says, also about Lisa. I would like to send a very special Blur's Day message to my TBTL recruiter, Lisa. Ooh, you must like that, Luke. I hope that this year brings Lisa open doors, new landscapes, and a great deal of happiness, possibly with Thomas. I know my life is better because you are a part of it. James says, I want to wish a happy Blurs Day to my co-bro in life. April, we've crisscrossed the country together, had many adventures together, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Love you. That is to April from James. Cute. Emma says, happy birthday, Mom. There's no one I would rather drink dunks with and talk about our coworkers with. love your favorite five. And I am, she didn't say her name, but I'm 99.99999999% sure that that is Ann in New Hampshire who's receiving that one. Happy Blur's Day, Ann. I've been emailing with Ann for years now, and you couldn't ask for a more delightful person. Nice. I think the Dunks thing indicates it's probably happening out in the Northeast somewhere. Exactly, and also, yes, whatever there's a lot of clues that that's we have exactly six minutes Andrew yep to blur to blurs through these blurs days so I'm going to go quickly here by saying oh you know what Tim says happy blurs day to Alex and Cam Loops my ex-wife baby mama and TBTL child while our marriage did not work we will always share two things this podcast and our nine-year-old in that order thanks for being an excellent co-parent and an equally good friend happy blurs day I'd love to see the grown up mature approach to the twists and turns of life and I'd love to see people be very very specific about what their relationship is to the person that they're blursing because that way you can't invent some sort of love triangle I'm just wondering if that door is totally closed it sounds like there's still a lot of sorry the music is getting louder Jamie says, I want to wish my wife, Kira, a happy Blur's Day. She is turning 30 this year.

Oh, you kids. Despite the belief of certain pod cart hosts, she is a person and not a robot. So she does indeed have a Blur's Day. Boy, now I'm suspicious. I wasn't before. I love you, Kira, and I hope 30 is even better than 29. That's from Jamie, and that is lovely. Cute. God, to be 30, Andrew. Back when I was 30, I didn't have to, like, late night, I didn't have to stay up memorizing words like gram to be cool. I just was cool. Right, right. I was just totally connected to the youth culture. I was just cruelly making lists of things that I saw on trips to Pittsburgh. Dear PDA, today I saw Junkyard. Brian in Portland says, I'd like to send out a big Blur's Day shout out to my co-bro Nate in Tacoma. We met through TBTL low those many years ago, and we've truly become like family. We have even had occasional pandemic Zoom dinners together with his family, including one where we sent he sent us food from Pollo Bravo. Oh, nice. There you go. Keep supporting the extended Burbank fam. Nice. Very good. And he also sent in I don't usually play audio in this segment because I like to keep rules tight, but I couldn't resist. He also sent in this audio. That's good. Oh, man. Beautiful. Happy Blur's Day. All right, two more. All right, I got three more. Here from Christy in Belleville, Ontario, it's my birthday today. I know Blur's Day should be a happy time, but as I write this, I'm also learning that Ontario is going into yet another lockdown. I'm sad and I'm frustrated, but today I turned 38, a little wiser, a lot more depressed, but to echo...

my dazzling donor message thank you christy 100 times more grateful for you and all of the tens out there i wouldn't want to spend my blurs day with any other pod cart thank you christy yeah thanks i think christy was a dazzling donor like maybe this week and also so sorry to hear that that's what's going on up there in ontario yeah uh happy blurs day to everybody uh and zach and queen anne we already did that we already did that so we were down to one that was it that was it all you said to me was four times let's not accidentally read the final message that you're jumping to and that's exactly i tried to just that's why did you see i suddenly tried to not have that conversation i was like hey happy blurs day to everybody i was just hoping i thought you were messing up which is really sad that my initial this is what i do with everyone which is a very bad look and could be why no one wishes me a blurs day i wished you a blurs because i I assume if there's like, instead of looking at it and thinking, Andrew has a plan, Andrew's saying, and that's everyone's blurs days because you were trying to guide me. You were trying to protect me from my mistake I was about to make. Instead of assuming you know what you're doing, I assume you're making a mistake. And I have to clarify. But in fact, you were right. And I was wrong. You blursed it. Okay. What knife song did you want to go out with? Heartbeat. Heartbeat? Heartbeat. There it is. Heartbeat. Got it. Yeah. By the knife. That's how we'll wrap things up today. Nice. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks for being part of TBTL. Tomorrow we'll be right back here with another installment of this here Imaginary Radio program, so please do join us for that. Until then, have a great Thursday. Stay safe, take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

One night to be confused One night just beat up truth We had a promise made Four nights and then away Both under influence Power out.