Muse

Oh, morning, Helen.

Good morning.

I want to thank Mary, Steph, and Michelle for yesterday. So could you send them each a bottle of champagne? Oh, I don't know how to do that. Yeah, me neither. Champagne problems, am I right? Wait, is that what that means? I don't know. Me neither. TBTL. Guess what day it is. Guess what day it is.

It's Friday. Friday. Gotta get down on Friday Everybody's looking forward to the weekend So what if I smell like roast beef This whole place smells like roast beef

I'm sorry, but when I hear an undeserved compliment It makes my ears want to throw up Oh, your ears are always throwing up about something

Maybe he saw his reflection and thought Mmm, mmm, mmm I'm flying in hot for that hottie We'll walk that fine line between cutting edge irreverence And trouble with the Federal Communications Commission

all right hello good morning and welcome to a friday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live intimate conversation self-disclosure and a little music thrown in too my name is luke burbank i am your host hey where's the freaking gabagoo coming to you from the nest broadcast center high in the sky above portland oregon where uh huh it is it's a rainy day which hasn't happened i mean like legitimately rainy like it is actively raining even as we speak didn't know you like to get wet though this hasn't happened in a while there's been a rain shower or two but this feels like a whole different weather pattern And there is a rooftop bar that I have been watching the, you know, I don't know what you'd call them, the maintenance folks, the physical plant people put together over the course of the last week or so. I'm assuming it had been closed because of COVID and stuff, but I've been watching them get it all ready with like, you know, building some stuff for the bar and cleaning things up and bringing supplies up. and I had a plan to maybe try to go over there tonight and enjoy an adult beverage on this. It's very cool because I can basically tell if there are any open tables at this rooftop bar. So if I was sitting here and somebody was getting their check, I could conceivably just stop the podcast because, you know, priorities, and run downstairs and run across the street and then go grab that table. It's one of the great elements of urban life. But anyway, it's raining today, so maybe we'll have to wait for another time. Anyway, it is definitely time for episode 3443 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Oh, and we've got an update on my favorite tweet of all time. Can you verify? Can you give me some 411? The tweet of the Amy Schumer lookalike at the truck stop where they had the sign that said stop pooping in our parking lot. We're getting more information about what's going on with that. We'll share that with you. Also, we're getting more information on Jeffrey Toobin's return to television. Of course, remember, about seven, eight months ago, he was on a Zoom call with The New Yorker magazine where he also worked. And he was under the impression that he was not on camera anymore. He thought he had switched over and he decided to have a very intimate moment with himself. I wish I hadn't done that. and everybody saw him do it and they fired him but he did not get fired by cnn and in fact he has now made his return to the airwaves of cnn but not before they they they grilled him on air about what he had been up to and let me tell you it was uh awkward and we'll play the tape

gonna be very uncomfortable for everybody we'll play the audio coming up plus it's a friday so we got some music for your weekend and we got this guy the longest running cobra of the show Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He finally got Genevieve to let him put up one of those glow-in-the-dark solar systems on the ceiling in their bedroom. So now he can lie in bed and stare at them.

The Milky Way! The Milky Way!

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning. What you didn't mention is I was grabbing both sides of your face when I yelled, The Milky Way, The Milky Way, which I believe is the origin of that drop. Finally, I recognize the drop.

I have no idea the context for that drop.

That was from the Blur's Days yesterday. Listener Summer, who is very interested in astronomy. Big difference. You heard it. You heard the O turning into the L as I thought. Big, huge difference. One, a real thing. One, not a real thing. I hate those words. I wish they weren't so close together because I know the difference. Listen, uh...

Not to brag, but I also know the difference between a prescription and a subscription, but they're just, they're sometimes your brain breaks and you have to elongate those vowels as you sort it out in your head. I wish astrology just had a different name, like science make-em-ups.

The other thing is, and I say this with peace and love to the folks in our audience who love astrology and are excited that it's Gemini season, because Because, hey, anything that brightens someone's day or gives them something to think about, I'm cool with that. For me, I don't find there to be very much compelling evidence that astrology is a real thing. And the problem is astronomy is very much a real thing. Like, it's an extremely scientific thing. And astrology is an extremely unscientific thing. They're too close together in terms of their spelling and pronunciation and et cetera for things that are so widely divergent in terms of if I think they are full of shit or not.

That's exactly how I feel. They're just too – the words are too close together given how different their approaches are. So I think maybe we can come up with a better name.

It'd be like if the word for psychic reading sounded exactly like the word gravity.

Right.

Right. Right. Right. Right. One of these is real and one of these is not. And they need we need to move them further apart in the lexicon.

Well, neither one of these are things that I subscribe to or prescribe to if we're going to go with that.

Well, that's one I can never get, by the way, prescribe, like a prescriptive. We've talked about that on the show, too, like when something is very, very prescribed. It's not like saying your doctor told you to take it. That's saying something else that I can't ever quite remember.

But I think a lot of people cannot kind of in the moment separate Christian science with Scientology. Again, neither one of them, neither one of them deeply rooted in science, which is a third, a third issue there.

Sure. Right. So Scientology is, of course, that's the L. Ron Hubbard thing.

Christian science. Is that the Mary? Yeah. Mary Baker Eddy. Good for you, man. I'm the one who she's a New Hampshire person and I couldn't get there. You got there before me. Congratulations.

And they always had the Christian scientists – they've got the Christian science reading rooms everywhere, which my guess is it's a library that is – heavily leans on the books that are related to that particular religious plan, right?

Yeah, there's a whole – as a matter of fact, I believe there's an episode of Omnibus that looks at Mary Baker Eddy through the lens of the Christian science reading rooms.

Oh, really? Yeah, it's really interesting.

Yeah, I highly recommend it.

If people haven't heard us talking about Omnibus That's the show that our bud Ken Jen And our other bud John Richards That's the KEXP morning show guy Whose sister I used to date And then when we broke up he dedicated Many a mean song to me No John Roderick That is but I also The episode of that show that really jumps out at me Was the one about Marilyn Vos Savant speaking of People who have three names Marilyn Vaux-Savant, who was in Parade Magazine, listed as the world's highest IQ person.

Oh, right. She had a column, right? You told me about this.

I remember being a kid thinking, well, shit, you give me a week to answer a question. I could probably come up with that, too. It seemed like a very – it was a poor use of her genius. Like you could have any person who has a working knowledge of microfiche or in those days, like this was pre-LexisNexis, you could ask them a question and they could go find the answer to that like for her being the world's highest iq person it seems like it should have been more rapid fire she should have been on tv answering questions in real time it should be a challenge it shouldn't be a helpful guide it should be a challenge of her smarts right but that was man parade magazine which i hear is still in

business which i find amazing i wonder if it's one of those things though i don't know i'm just shooting from the hip here but i wonder if it's one of those things where it's just a shadow of its former self like you ever go to like readers digest still a going concern obviously in fact i have one in the the newest edition in the in the bathroom right now i could go grab it if you wanted to uh pull any content out of it i should always bring it directly into my office first so i can just grab it in case we run out of things to talk about which is going to happen one of these days and it's going to be weird you and i are just gonna there's just gonna be silence you got anything

okay it finally happened they finally ran out of things to talk about but i'm confused about the

Reader's Digest website and I'm sorry if I've already talked about this but more another instance of me never running out of things to talk about because I can just go back to the Reader's Digest website does not mirror the Reader's Digest product anymore like if you go to readersdigest.com or I believe it's maybe rd.com it is just like this weird shell of a site that it does have some Reader's Digest content but it's all in the form of clickbait and it has no representation of like this is what is in this week's issue right? It's just like a bunch of random – and also I think Reader's Digest might be owned by some Australian concern these days because I feel like a lot of it is kind of looping back to Australia stories. Like there's a Reader's Digest podcast, but it's like – it's out of Australia with all like Australian people in it.

Interesting.

Was that one of those interestings where when Genevieve sometimes is talking about birds around her friends and they all just turn to her and they say, interesting?

No, no, because I'm just wondering if Reader's Digest somehow resonates with Aussies more than in the U.S. Like if it's if it's something where it's it's a more I mean, I didn't notice it to be, you know, more prevalent when we were in Australia. But I'm just wondering if there's or if it just so happens that like an Australian media company may be an offshoot of Rupert Murdoch. I mean, no offense. No offense is not the term I wanted there. I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if the if like if Rupert Murdoch's media company at some point acquired it seems like it's in their demo. It's for older people. It's pretty kind of non-controversial in that way.

Yeah, I know I'm the one who threw that out there, but I'm looking. It looks like it's held by RDA Holding, which I assume that that is a reader's digest. And who knows what the A is? And it looks like its address is based in New York. So I might be wrong about that. I don't know. We've talked about this on the show. I fumbled my way through this BS before. Boy, that's going to be a drop, isn't it? I don't remember if I ever knew.

Not for a while. I've received word from Lynn that with the Portland Thorns returning to action here in Portland, he is, and a lot of real work to be done at his real job, the flow of drops that are pulled from this show may slow down a little bit. So you may get a little break from hearing yourself played back out of content.

What if, like, now that I feel free that, like, everything I say isn't going to be, like, pulled and manipulated and isolated and played out of context, like, what if I suddenly become good at podcasting? What if I'm just, like, what if I just flow now and I don't second-guess every word I've ever said? And you're like, wow, this is what it's like to talk to – this is, like, old 2012 Andrew back again, not scared to open his mouth.

That would be an interesting experiment. it maybe we can have lynn stand down for two weeks and hear if the show gets like measurably better from your contribution side uh and if so then maybe we have to bring an end to the drops i will

i'll be honest i don't really think it's the drops that get in my head every now and then like in that moment not not to kill the spoof here but just for what it's worth that's actually not what gets in my head what gets in my head is me just always like extending a little bit beyond my grasp of words you know and i hear other people do it too like i can use an easier word but for some reason my brain will lock on to a word that's slightly more complicated and i'm not doing it on purpose i'm not trying to show off it's just the word that my brain chooses but then halfway into the word i second guess whether i'm saying it right or i'm using it correctly and that really has nothing to do with pulling drops that's just i have that disease when i'm

not on the radio too a couple of things real quick one parade magazine i have to give them credit their website is decent it does look kind of clickbaity but i think it's because they've just gone with the particular like web the visual approach of lots of big pictures they probably figure it might be some older folks that are interacting with the site um but it actually is not one of those real super kludgy like websites like a tmz type thing where it's just constantly like ads are pushing in from every side and half the stuff is zerg net like it actually looks like it's a semi-decent functioning website so good for them on that now what you were just saying though andrew about your brain disease this actually reminded me of something i wanted to ask you about that you said very casually the other day on the show you said something about how you're wrong so much more of the time on the show than i am i think it's because we were playing that drop where you said i'm wrong oh yeah talking about yourself yeah i actually think i am wrong much more on the show than you are because the difference is i say things with a huge amount of confidence even when i have no right to even when i don't actually know the like the difference between you and me i think is you might be wrong sometimes but you often kind of tee it up by saying i could be wrong about this or you say it and then you go and i may i could like you you you sort of put a lot of asterisks on things you're saying which means you're not technically wrong or at least if you're wrong you've already sort of said it's possible i'm wrong about this

Well, I do that now as a defense mechanism. I swear it's the times that I'm wrong is when I'm strident with you.

But I'm strident all the time, which following that logic means I'm probably wrong all the time because I just say things with this unearned confidence because that's just a part of my wiring, and then I'm just totally wrong. I think I'm probably – I probably get things wrong on this show more than you get things wrong.

I honestly don't think that's true. I don't know that this conversation really does anybody any good. But just Mary Baker Eddy is the perfect example of that. Like you're – oh, and yesterday, you know what I – I was, you know, putting together the newsletter, and I was including the song we played yesterday, and it was the Postal Service. And, of course, I know it's Ben Gibbard and the other guy. And, like, you always know, like, what's the other guy's name? Jimmy Tamarello. Jimmy Tamarello. And I should know that. I've been listening to the Postal Service for, what, 15 years, right? But it's like those little bits of information are both retained by you and, even more importantly, you know, used at the right moments. And that's something that I just don't have. So I think that you, generally speaking, just have a lot more information that you're throwing out there that is more accurate than mine.

Would it make you happy to know that I was wrong? His name is Jimmy Tamburello. There's a B in there that I've been leaving out there. Close enough. Get over yourself, Jimmy. Come on. I only know. The reason that that guy figures prominently in my mind is because he went to Loyola Marymount with Vanessa. And so I had this weird, like, double connection to that band because our friend Jessica was pals with Gibbard from his, you know, much less famous days of playing music in Seattle. And so she said, oh, my friend Ben is, like, putting this band together called the Postal Service. So then, of course, they blow up and it's a whole thing. And then we went to the – I went to see Death Cab at the Hollywood Bowl and we ended up sitting with Jimmy, the other dude from Postal Service, because he and Van go way back. Oh, interesting. So that's the only reason that I would have that information minus the B at the ready in my brain because I'd had a pretty good experience – not good experience but a pretty like vivid experience with somebody from that band named Jimmy.

Now, usually the Postal Service blew up, but Ben Gibbard was very famous before – Death Cab was really big before Postal Service, right?

Yes, I think, yeah, Death Cab was already pretty popular at that point, but funnily enough, for me, the Postal Service is still probably, it's probably my favorite Death Cab record, is the Postal Service, and I love that album.

It's very special, yeah.

I mean, it's amazing. That was such a great time in my life, too, like just being in my early 20s and just feeling like, you know, I quote this line all the time and I misquote this line all the time from the poet Billy Collins. he has a poem i think it's called like on turning nine or something and it's it's great because it's just this kid who's about to turn like you know a young number but he's already getting wistful the way we do and we're like at 45 and he talks about how everything just looks and feels different now that he's nine let me actually just so i don't make the listeners let's see on turning

it's probably like a unturning while you google that can i stall can i stall for a second here please i did not realize that the album transatlanticism which was the first desk death cab record or at least the i mean maybe there were some earlier ones i don't know about but transatlanticism that came out in the same year as the postal service i had that so wrong because i felt like maybe i didn't discover the postal service until a couple of years after that record came out because i swear that like i was you know i wasn't hardcore uh death cab fan but like definitely i had that record i didn't have the second one plans but i had transatlanticism and i was listening to it and then that's why i was so blown away when i heard the postal service because the instrumentation was so different and i could have sworn they were way more established before that came out but once again andrew's wrong to prove your point luke well if it makes

you feel better i was wrong about the billy collins poem on turning 10 i'll see your error and raise it and you're and see that's another thing that's the kind of thing where that's a classic example of what you might get wrong but and what i might get wrong so you were just like maybe a little off in the timing your your your point was uh death cap for cutie was a pretty big deal before the postal service broke now that's debatable i don't think anyone's going to argue the postal service was a big deal before death cap maybe the timing was a little off from what you were thinking but that's kind of in a gray area i literally got the actual name of this poem that i say is so meaningful to me wrong i got the actual name of the poem wrong so that's more the way i get things wrong um the only thing i wanted to say about this poem and i've brought this up on the show many times before related to this poem is it's such a genius premise because i won't read the whole thing but he says things like um uh you know let me see if i can find but now i am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light back then it never felt so never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today all the dark blue speed drained out of it this is the beginning of sadness i say to myself as i walk through the universe in my sneakers it is time to say goodbye to my imaginary friends time to turn the first big number it seems like only yesterday i used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light if you cut me i could shine but now when i fall upon the sidewalks of life i skin my knees i bleed that idea that it was just light inside of him and that if you cut him open light would just like shoot out i feel like that's how i felt in my 20s like when i was listening to uh the postal service you know it was just i just felt like oh my god i got my whole life in front of me and i can do anything and i can my life can be whatever i want it to be and there's just nothing but opportunity if you cut me open light would just stream out now if you cut me open it's mostly jameson yeah which is sterilizing so good i am

not the worst thing i actually have a couple of things to say about sterilizing things but first i want to say um i really yeah i really do no i i want to talk about this but i um no i again so now i was right in the first time and wrong the second time because transatlanticism is not their first record it is their fourth record it is the one that came out when uh around the same time as Postal Service. That was their fourth record. Their first one came out in the late 90s, and I remember my friend Paul was very into their second record. That was the one where it's like

two people shaking hands on the cover, right?

The very first one. I can't picture the first one, but I will say the first one is called Something About Airplanes. The second one is called We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, and I remember that album cover very well. It's a couple of people running. It's a very iconic looking album, and I remember my friend Paul was very into that when he introduced me to the band so i just want to get that straight for all of the um what do you call what do you call do they say is it just death cab heads or something isn't there a more young hip way of saying to for all the people stands yeah stands was one cab stands i thought there was something else but um yeah i don't know let me tell you about sterilization here my friend bringing the

i hope to god this has to do with like a wound and not some kind of eugenics

Oh, no. What I want to talk about is Genevieve and I are interested in having a baby, but we could use your help, Luke. No, I, you know, we're taking the U.S. population in the wrong direction. Remember, I had that. Of course, you remember, I talk about it all the time. But just recently, as of I think on Monday, I had that contraption pulled off of slash out of my hand that was, you know, kind of protecting my broken finger, that wire contraption. And I told you that one of the sorry, this isn't it's going to sound like this is going to get gross, but it's not that gross. But one of the little, you know, pinpoints where this thing was entering my finger did get infected at the end. And that kind of sucked because it made it a little bit more sensitive when I wanted to have this thing removed. And the doctor has put me on some sort of, you know, some sort of antibiotic, some sort of penicillin thing so that this this one wound will heal. When he pulled this thing out of my hand, I had four tiny wounds where the wires went in. And I was astounded, Luke, at the human body. By the time I woke up the next morning, the three non-infected holes were almost gone. Like, I understand what people say when they have to get a new – when they get their ears pierced and they have to keep something in there. Otherwise, it will close up. Like, I was astounded. I'm like, those things are almost invisible now. Unfortunately, the one that got infected was not invisible and it was not healing. And I couldn't understand why, you know, a few days after getting that thing removed, it was showing absolutely zero signs of healing at all, like around the edges or scabbing up. And I'm like, I'm doing everything right. I'm cleaning it with peroxide every single day because I think that's what you're supposed to do to fight infection. And then on a whim, I'm like, maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this with peroxide every day. I know that when you have a brand new wound, they say clean it with peroxide because that bubbling action will bring any of the dirt or grit or any of the contaminants out of the wound. But you're only supposed to do it like once when the wound is new because this stuff will also kill good bacteria. And it turns out my – this little hole on my hand was not healing at all because every day, twice a day, I was cleaning it with undiluted – I just said it. Hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide. And it was just like killing all the good stuff. It was not allowing my finger to heal. I stopped doing that two days ago and the magic of nature is working again and the thing is finally starting to heal.

Wow. So you were just like over-cleaning it and over-sterilizing it to the point where it wasn't able to – your platelets, et cetera, were not able to do their normal thing.

Too clean, Luke. I was too clean to heal, which is the name of my second record. Too clean to heal.

Yes, it's the number two clean, the number two heal. Yeah. You know my mom used to brush – maybe she still does – brush her teeth with a combination of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide? I've heard of this.

it does not sound like a fun thing it um i'm trying to think my mom's teeth are pretty normal

pretty good looking like she should they're i don't know if she's still doing it but i i don't think she has particularly like you know as you get older obviously you're it's hard to keep your teeth kind of whiter and things like that but i think it seems like my mom was like the queen of

weird home remedies when I was a kid. Witch hazel. She would use witch hazel for everything. She would put witch hazel behind her ears and rub it on her pulse points. Bee pollen was a biggie. Any old, lots of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda being used on things.

I don't think that it, I'm not stating that I don't think it works to its intended purpose, but it also is just such an unfun. It just sounds like an un, like people don't love brushing their teeth anyway, but if there's one kind of good thing about it it's that you're minty fresh afterwards right like it just doesn't sound like it's just but it sounds also very susie burbanky you know like you know why waste money on toothpaste right i

have to say that i have gotten into a habit here of i floss now i think when i'm feeling anxious which is actually a very good it's a good habit to get in because i feel anxious a lot so it means

i floss a lot sort of like don't let it become a compulsion i'm not joking like i think of that um scene in girls where she starts having a breakdown we see that she's cleaning her ears too much i do that i think about that all the time because i always like these little things that we're doing to clean ourselves if it's related to a anxiety anxiety become a compulsion

don't get like starting bloody gums or something no no i'm i'm i'm still on the okay side of it but it is like you know what i got into and they're terrible for the environment but i'm sorry i'm i've been using them are those little like the packets of floss that's pre you know it's in a little holder that you can then you know floss with because it's just super convenient so if i'm like walking around the house and i'm i don't know what i got something on my mind i'm like well this could also be a time that i'm flossing so i walk into the bathroom i get one of those little things a little pick right the little yeah like a little pick yeah and um and that's uh i have to i have to say i find it to be very calming and then when it's all i also had that by the way in high school maybe that maybe i do have a compulsive flossing thing going on because this is actually very gross i didn't realize how gross it was but when i was in high school i got i don't know maybe in 11th grade i got very into the idea of flossing and i would just walk around school flossing which is a really loves that which is a very weird affect and uh i don't remember anyone commenting on it but i just remember carrying a pack of floss around and whenever I'd be like bored or I think what had happened was a dentist or somebody had told me if you want to really avoid bad breath, make sure you floss a lot and keep all like food particles out of your teeth. And I've always been very paranoid about having bad breath. So I was like, all right, well, and then once I got in the habit of it, I really liked the feeling of right after you flossed and you just have little spaces between your teeth and you can kind of like almost blow air through it. I really liked that feeling. Yep. The hair dad, it's dirty. I had to get clean. So I will probably after this show I'll probably wander around the house Listening to the postal service on the Sonos Flossing

Sounds like a good way to get into the weekend Let me ask you one last question Because I know that we're probably getting around break time But how old were you when you realized That toothpicks sucked for everything Except for affectation Oh my gosh That's a really great question Right? Because if you ever use a toothpick And you're just like Oh yeah, that's the ticket No, all it does is like the tip gets like kind of bent and worst case scenario you lose some of the toothpick up in there too now you feel like you have a boulder between your teeth and all you did you just need to get to a bathroom and get to some floss and a toothbrush anyway like toothpicks do not work now listen if you're ice man and you're trying to stare down maverick and you got a toothpick in your mouth and you're i guess he chews gum he's not a toothpick guy but you know that vibe sure that works great as kind of a tough guy look but i don't think it really works for cleaning your

teeth yeah it's not it's like the kind of thing they came up with when we didn't have as good of stuff yeah right yeah you know what i mean like if nowadays they're in fact those little floss picks that you're talking about the other end of it is a thing that actually is very thin and you could get into your teeth with if you needed to but yeah toothpicks themselves i um have at different points in my life god i am just it's a lifetime of affectation andrew i think would be what my memoir would be called because i remember along with along with being mr i'm gonna floss all the time for a while i was when i saw sylvester sloan in the movie cobra and he had a match like

a like a oh yeah better than a toothpick holy i was like i'm gonna be a wooden match in the mouth

guy tried that for a minute probably my parents were like you're nine stop doing that um then i think i was i'm gonna be a toothpick guy you did for a while i tried it but i just i just didn't develop a good system for always having a toothpick with me and i and i guess now what i realize is if you see somebody with a toothpick in their mouth out in the in public there's no way that happened accidentally so what you now know about this person is a very conscious decision they wanted people also the whole mask thing really creates some new challenges for that but let's just say pre-pandemic or post-pandemic.

see somebody with a toothpick in their mouth and they're like just at you know costco buying um stuff you know that it's not like they just forgot they had that toothpick in their mouth it's like they made a decision i'm gonna have a toothpick in my mouth when i'm at costco and that kind of trying which by the way i'm always doing all the time but hoping people don't realize it that kind of trying just reads as a little desperate to me i have a theory though i first

of all i mean when's the last time you saw somebody doing the toothpick thing i think that they were way more prevalent back in the day in fact i can almost remember like going to diners as a kid and then afterwards they maybe give you your check and some like pre-packaged little toothpicks and tiny little paper um like tiny little paper packaging can you picture those like maybe even two in there i think they were just a lot more prevalent and probably prevalent and maybe like in truck stops and like different parts of the country that maybe you and i are not living in right now so that like it's more of a you're not carrying around a little tin of these things because like you need to get your affectation on before you go out into the world but you're sitting at the diner uh the check comes you pop the toothpick in it was just more of a thing with a certain type of person back in the day that was probably a little bit more casual than

we're giving him credit for yes i think you're you're probably right about that but but to at this point like i like the idea honestly of like there's something jaunty about it there's something that kind of makes it seem like i'm not taking this too seriously and you know this is a very weird leap to make but for our listeners who like me are very very all up in that tiktok world there's a version of this that happens on tiktok which is people will be doing things it's typically younger people where they're telling a story they're always eating while they tell the story or they're taking a sip of their baja blast mid-story or before they do their dance so let's just say that like there's somebody they're going to do like a cool tiktok dance as the music is queuing up because the way that the tick tock app works is if i'm going to do a dance to a song i can actually like hit play and the phone my phone will play the song to me so i can dance in time with it as it's recording me and then later i think it like syncs it all up so that you're dancing over the music whatever so the person's like their phone is let's just say sitting probably on a tripod on a table they're getting ready to do the thing but the song hasn't reached the point yet they're always like eating one last funyun or like taking one last sip of their whatever starbucks drink there's this whole kind of and what it what it sort of conveys is a i'm not taking

this too seriously kind of vibe george castan's saying it he did that there's an episode he eats an apple i believe while he's asking a woman out on the phone or there's something there's some sort of power dynamic and he decides well i'm just going to eat an apple while i'm doing this

and it works yeah it totally works because it just seems like it reminds me when i was a kid of barry castona chewing on what was left of a um banaca blast oh yeah so he had had i'm just laughing because remember like three four years ago i went through a banaca blast phase on this yeah because i found out that even sugar-free gum has two grams of carbs per piece And I was like well if I'm low carbing it all the time I'm not going to like have a big carb intake Via gum Like that's not worth it So then I was like well the perfect solution is Banaca Blast But I just remember being a kid And Barry Castona who was the Was the ultimate person I wanted to be He was so good at football We played on the Greenwood Boys and Girls Club football team together He was hunky all the girls liked him He had cool like He had cool clothes And I remember him one time Like it was like after practice And he was just we're talking and he's just being Barry Castona and he had a binocca blast canister that all the binocca had been blasted out of. Yeah. And he was just chewing on. He's just sort of like chewing on this binocca blast like tin or plastic thing just kind of without even thinking about it mindlessly. And I remember just thinking this is a guy who is just so effortlessly cool. Mm hmm. And I think that planted a seed that continues in my mind into mid 40s where I'm like, oh, yeah, if I just had like a toothpick in my mouth and I'm like chatting or if I'm eating an apple, I'm just like chatting with someone. It just sends this message of like, you know, I'm just I don't take any of this stuff. It's very McConaughey in a way, like McConaughey making that weird thing out of the can in Time is a Flash.

Oh, right, right, right, right, yeah. I'll tell you what, though, like, that, I always say it wrong, Bananka, right? Banaka. Banaka. That Banaka blast.

Banaka-donk. Honky-tonk, Banaka-donk.

Would that be a show title? I don't know how to spell it. It also seems like something that Animal would sing. Na-na-na-na. Banaka-donk.

It is a real song, though, you know, Honky-tonk, Banaka-donk.

I don't know, but I inferred. But I was going to say –

When you went around doing that, that might have been during your suit phase as well. So I understand why you can maybe look back at it as possibly an affectation. But the thing is, I think that was more powered by nostalgia and the feeling of that. There is no feeling like firing that into the back of your throat. And you even just bringing it up right now makes me want. So this weekend now consists of listening to the Postal Service, flossing, and firing some banaca blasts.

Ordering banaca blasts. Exactly. Can I get it delivered by 3 p.m. today?

Because now I haven't had that in years. I think I remember when you were going through your phase, you might have given me a bottle of it or maybe had me try a fresh bottle of it or something. Because you are not somebody who shares your banaca, by the way. You are somebody who – like we've talked about this before. Like you're talking about your flossing today and how, you know, you're not constantly, but your your oral care is definitely high on the list. Right. Like you are super paranoid about bad breath. You talk about how you're brushing your teeth around the house. And Carrie kind of didn't like you, I think, wandering around brushing your teeth or some aspect of it that was somewhat irritating.

She didn't appreciate us having important marital related conversations with me also mid tooth.

while you're spitting i think she may be corrected or clarified later and maybe it was like the maybe did you ever spit in the kitchen sink anyway i don't know we don't have to know i did not i think that's gross okay yeah but yeah you're somebody who i think that and one time i even said like you know you get to that point with your teeth on some days and it's like oh i just ate a piece of pie and my teeth feel fuzzy i gotta brush them and you're like no i would never let my teeth get to that like i feel like your oral your oral care is a very high priority for you that is true

I am very concerned at all times about having – in fact, sometimes Camaro, Kevin, I will check in. I'm like, do I ever have bad breath? He's like, not like more than like the normal thing of you ate a bunch of garlicky food at Goldie's and maybe – but he's like, it doesn't seem like there's anything medical going on. And then he's like – he asked me, is my breath okay? I'm like, yeah, same deal. You have like generally neutral breath.

Oh, he's kind of – see, I wouldn't – one's breath would have to be really bad for me to notice it. And then if I noticed it, it would be remarked upon behind one's back. You know what I mean? Like, it's so rare that I'm in a situation with someone that I mean, maybe maybe you don't want to tell me this. And that's fine. I won't even ask. Maybe you being trapped in the in the delica with me. Maybe you're like, no, his breath stinks. Did not notice. No, but I don't notice it enough. Like, I mean, I definitely I'm not I've never had a cavity. I'm not like I don't have bad oral care, but I'm also not I don't think it's up there like it is with you where you're thinking about it so much.

The other problem, or a problem with this Banaca thing, by the way, I'm buying a pack of 12. Oh, nice. Unfortunately, you can't have them delivered until June 17th, so we're just going to be white-knuckling it until then. That's a week away, man. The problem is that the breath spray, like actually applying the Banaca Blast to one's mouth reads very like I'm a guy who's on the make in a movie in the 1980s.

You have a black book full of phone numbers that you keep in your inside pocket.

It's 100% a trope in the old movies and TV show when Disco Stu walks in. When someone is a real pickup artist that they're going to go before they go over and drop some, like, you know, some kind of like, do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again or whatever? You know, when some guys.

Are those astronaut fans?

Wait, what's the, yes, no, they aren't.

Are those astronaut pants? Because your ass is out of this world

Wow, I didn't expect you To take it to Banonkadonk Town

Well, I'm free now I can say whatever I want Knowing that that will never be isolated

And you know what? The show is better for you

The show is better, I told you

Alright, let's take a quick break And then when we come back, update on my favorite tweet ever And also Speaking of pickup artists Jeffrey Toobin has returned to the cable airwaves and we'll play his re-entry

to cable TV.

Did he have Banaka? That's when everyone at the New Yorker should have known something was up was when Jeff Toobin pulled out the Banaka blast. Yeah. All right. More TBTL in a moment. Hello and welcome to Top Story. I was very, very excited yesterday by this tweet that I saw Right before the show started of a woman at a truck stop who looked very similar to the comedian and actor Amy Schumer. But this woman was apparently a truck driver who had stopped in and when she was redeeming some of her reward points from this one particular truck stop, the reward points were called crank your hog reward points. She was standing in front of this area. of the of the truck stop where there was a big sign that said stop pooping in our parking lot and she had a teardrop which was explained in a subsequent tweet uh what we have now found out is that at least by way of snopes.com that this is some kind of a parody account andrew and it kind of happened in this weird way that like if the timing would have been any different i think we would have caught this like because if like let's say i would have seen this tweet at 7 a.m and i would have put it in the show sheet you probably would have like looked it up and then already the internet would have been speculating on if this was real or not you might have even done your classic andrew thing which is kind of wondering if it was if this was a spoof or not but because it came in right as we were going on air it got through all of our careful filters and went right on to it didn't get fact checked and went right onto the air and then right into the minds of listeners who then explained to me that no this is all made up i'm not totally convinced it's made

up wow i love this new andrew i honestly i know that snope says it's made up and that is clearly part of a parody account that is linked to another parody account that's you know business is basically selling these spoof t-shirts that are based on these things that go viral but i prefer to live in a world where that is indeed amy schumer by the way of course that's why it look so much like amy schumer i'm assuming they took a photo of amy schumer i like to believe that this is all real that this is a a place where people are pooping in the parking lot and amy schumer has uh this teardrop tattoo actually you know what it was luke and in all seriousness i don't want to claim i'm seriously not i'm going to take you inside my brain here for a second i don't want to claim that after the show i was like oh we've been had i didn't i didn't really think about it that much until like i saw on the slack page you know a few hours after posting the show that people were like, oh, here's the Snopes article. This thing is fake. But there was a moment when I was re-downloading the photo. So this tweet that you're talking about is the show pic for yesterday, and you had texted it to me during the show, but I needed a higher res version to actually use as the show pic. When I was looking at it for the first time on the show, it was very small. Like I couldn't see it that well. But later on, after the show, I'm going to the actual Twitter website, www.twitter.com, and I find this tweet, and I'm taking a screen grab of the big photo, and I'm looking at that teardrop. I'm looking at that teardrop on Amy Schumer's face, and that is clearly Photoshopped. Now, I didn't sit here and think for a long time like, oh, man, we've been had, but I was multitasking. I probably had Cody, you know, sucking the file through the system, and I was doing this, and I was uploading that.

Please explain to people that Cody is a computer system and not a guy.

I was not talking about the computer system, but I –

Too much, New Andrew.

Too much. I had too many – you know, I had a bunch of tabs open, and as I'm sort of doing this process of getting the photo uploaded, part of my brain, a fragment of my brain said that teardrop is Photoshopped. And then because I remember I was like reconstructing this this morning when I was in the shower, like because then I remember like zooming in a little bit on the on the stop pooping in our parking lot sign. And then my brain actually thinking like, this is too these are too many things. These are too many things to be real. And then my brain, I remember my part of my brain said, but how would you how would you fake all of this? Like, I can't explain it. My brain was just sort of like, well, how would you go about and to what end? Like, what entity out there would create a fake tweet like this and establish a track record of a Twitter account that then this suddenly this one, you know what I mean? It wasn't like the first tweet this account sent out. And then I think my brain just wandered from there. So I don't know if I'm just rambling. But, like, honestly, I did not have a moment where I was like, wait a second, have we been had here? But I do remember while uploading this, my brain sort of taking this little daydream detour into, eh, something's not adding up right here. But I didn't take a moment to consider it enough And also the show was done by that point, who cares But like, I just remember Having an itch kind of in the back of my brain For a second while I was multitasking

I'm surprised that no part of my brain Thought this could be satire First of all, I don't think it's Amy Schumer I'm looking at side-by-side photos This is just a woman who looks a lot like Amy Schumer Which is part of the genius Of this I don't know if they picked this woman because of her Resemblance, they've done other things like this where they, like, took a guy who was an actual NHL hockey player.

Yeah, that's why I thought that was really Schumer when I read that part of it, they used him.

Right, because you would think that they have this history of taking famous people and then decontextualizing them. They took the hockey player holding up his puck from his whatever-eth goal, and then they replaced it with, like, a can of, like, you know, Copenhagen, and then they put this weird thing on his T-shirt that said...

Harry Potter doesn't like Ohio, which is, I don't even get that joke. Maybe that's an inside joke with the Potterheads of the world. But, I mean, I'm just looking at all these other tweets from this Selena 52 truck stop, and they're like, one talking about sex sounds coming from the shower at the truck stop, and then there's one where there's this guy who, congratulations to Terry for redeeming his trucker reward points today and getting to fill his bucket full of anything in the store. And just like a guy standing there with a Lowe's bucket that he's jammed all this random shit from the truck stop into. And he's wearing a T-shirt that says, this is not totally appropriate, but this T-shirt says, Daddy's Little Slut. He's this kind of bearded guy. It's like a weird T-shirt for him to be wearing. Anyway, I do think that this is a parody account, but I'm surprised that when I saw, I think I wanted it to be true so much that when I saw it, no part of my brain said could this just be somebody using photoshop and being funny yeah

too many too many hilarious things which is why of course it caught your eye but i regret nothing

andrew because you know what the joy that i felt yesterday was real yeah right can't take that away can't can't change my excitement over this thing i mean the other thing like selena 52 truck stop tweeting out a picture of a like a milk jug but instead it just says urine jug it says thanks to the shortage of hey to take it back to your tendies thanks to the shortage of piss jugs due to the violence in israel and toledo ohio we are temporarily limiting piss jug purchases to one per customer the new price is 7.99 for now sorry for the inconvenience signed rick that makes me think

this is probably not a real place yeah they so did you got to that part of the snopes article right like this is also somehow connected to like another fake like racetrack or something like a NASCAR racetrack and essentially both of these accounts are just parody accounts where they tweet out silly things but then they also kind of monetize it by then creating t-shirts that are based on um on the parody so for example like you can buy that that body shirt that the truck driver the supposed truck driver is wearing uh in that in that Amy Schumer photo a you know

quote-unquote Amy Schumer photo yeah um it's a pretty good idea actually to sell merch like just make a funny site up but like don't i was surprised how far they got with the new york post by the way because i read so after i saw the snopes thing and i was like sort of had declared this thing was fake i actually read in the new york post today that the new york post is not fully declaring it to be a fake because they were like talking to somebody at selena 52 and the person there of course because they want to keep the bit going is like saying no no this is real but we have to basically have a made-up account because this is a made-up account that relates to a real truck stop but because a lot of the content that people put up is actually kind of inappropriate we can't have it attached to our actual location because that'll offend people and people will come and you know harass us over what's like this whole convoluted answer that the new york post was apparently buying as being potentially true because they don't want to be

had boy but you're just making yourself look worse post i know like the new york post if you were to

pick up the i mean the funny part is this would only be the sixth most factually incorrect thing The New York Post is posting today But if you were to pick up the New York Post Today in New York somewhere and Read it and you read the article about this tweet They would present it as the jury being Kind of out as if this is a real place

Yeah and that's that's still Current that's something you printed out yesterday

That's no I read it this morning Yeah so it's still where the post But again it's of the things that The New York Post has done that are you know Factually questionable that's Like not even making the top five today All right. I saw another headline today that captured my interest, which was in New York Magazine. I won't say exactly what New York Magazine's headline was because there's no reason to be gratuitous. But Jeffrey Toobin returns from bleep. Wait, I don't have to bleep Zoom. I have to bleep the other word. Jeffrey Toobin returns from Zoom bleep exile. Jeffrey Toobin was fired from The New Yorker for that whole incident that we talked about at the time. But he was not fired from CNN, and CNN has apparently decided that the upside of having Jeffrey Toobin on their network speculating on legal issues outweighs the downside of what he did or what kind of criticism they'll come in for. I actually think this is a pretty interesting story, Andrew, because I think there was a period of time where when the Me Too movement was at its most kind of front of mind, where I think that CNN would have parted ways with Jeffrey Toobin. And I think we're like two months past that where until there's another incident, maybe that goes public. I think Jeffrey Toobin got very lucky that.

that CNN waited for things to calm down to where they decided it was worth sticking their necks out to bring him back on their network. Because I think this totally has to do with optics and with what they think the pushback will be. And they have decided, again, that the benefit of having Jeffrey Toobin on their network outweighs the negatives of having Jeffrey Toobin on their

network. I'm just doing a quick search here to see if there's any old articles about somebody pointing out how jeffrey toobin was the latest latest example of cancel culture i can't find it but i just am wondering if anybody has to rewrite their um op-ed pages although nobody rewrites those things um from you know uh eight months ago or whenever this was or you probably just said was

it actually was it well in the interview he says he spent a hellacious seven months okay yeah so thinking about this so i'm that's i'm gonna use his own timeline on this i feel like he's probably

pretty aware yeah but i don't know how i feel about this i mean i definitely think this idea that like cancel culture is a problem is that is not something that i believe i believe strongly that it is not and that you know a few people i mean we all have some sort of consequences to our actions right and i just don't think that like facing consequences means everybody's can't being canceled and you can't say anything anymore i completely reject that and i i really dislike that argument um i think i don't know how i feel about this one i think that people are going to take this in different ways i think that there are a lot of women are going to feel very i mean i think that because i remember from a conversation or i can't remember where it was it was probably on the slack page like you and i um were talking about this story like there are parts of the story that are absolutely i mean they are just they seemed laughable to us because it's it's ridiculous in so many ways and and i think that we drew a line because he wasn't doing it on purpose which is an interesting kind of thing there you know he wasn't doing this at somebody or to somebody on purpose he got caught making a mistake but I think there were a lot of women who heard our conversation and said like yeah but you don't understand how like how that can really mess up the person on the other end of that zoom and like if I was on that zoom that would be that would be really really disturbing to me in a way that would make me hard to just like kind of go back to my regular job and I think that's a really good argument too like just because you like intent

doesn't matter as much as we might think it does just because he wasn't trying to assault somebody

or do something you know or kind of like you know digitally or you know using the internet um to to purposefully make somebody uncomfortable or or what have you um that we maybe you know it's maybe slightly easier to write it off because of the comical nature of it too but if you really were on that call you could that could be something that really affects your life and your work life And so I don't know. I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I don't know that the offense means that this man should never, ever be able to be on TV again. I think that there are probably a lot of people who are who feel like, hey, I could do that job. And I've never masturbated in a work call before. Like, how about we give somebody else a chance? Just, you know, lower the bar to somebody who hasn't masturbated on a work call. Give them a shot. You know, I think there's an argument there as well. But I also think that, like, this is another example that, like, when people say you can't do or say anything anymore and you're canceled forever, like, clearly not. Like, you didn't even go a year before being back on TV. Maybe I'm coming off more angry about this than I am. I'm just trying to, like, really see it from different angles.

I don't even to me it's like I don't even think of this as being part of quote unquote cancel culture I think like what happened to John Roderick yeah aka John Richards when he was tweeting some silly jokes about his daughter opening a can of beans and then it it rippled out to like is Ken Jennings gonna defend is he gonna stand by his co-host bean dad to me that felt like quote unquote cancel culture at its not best like my basic take on cancel culture is I don't think it's a real menace to free speech. I think there are probably a few select examples where the Internet has gotten it wrong about something and gone way too far. But I don't think that that's the norm. And I think it's a very short list of people who have been wrongly canceled. um so i think it's generally not a real problem but this one is more yeah i guess you could you could sort of like bundle it together with cancel culture but it's just more like just what kind of wildly inappropriate workplace behavior is okay or or at least forgivable if there was no intention behind it or whatever or also just you know when do media companies decide that it's worth suffering through the backlash of retaining someone i mean if you're talking about fox news obviously it's part of their brand like they'd be happy to be retaining someone who made the libs mad like that'd be a badge of honor for them but somebody like cnn or a place like cnn that's which cnn has drifted far to the left um from like my you know our early days of watching it like it's definitely like when the trump administration

And other conservatives started to see CNN as the enemy. I think CNN really did move to the left. Would you agree that you've observed that?

I don't watch enough CNN. I know enough that like, you know, Don Lemon had, you know, like at certain points where it felt like people needed to be speaking out about things. He would he would speak out and others at that network as well. But I didn't have enough of a holistic view of of the network.

It's definitely like there's much more opinion on CNN than there used to be. And there I mean, I think that they probably just took it personally as a group when the current president and his ilk were just constantly targeting them and and physically assaulting their reporters at like, you know, campaign rallies and things like that. So once they decided that it was OK to start saying that the president was a liar or that he was telling lies once once they sort of just said, like, OK, it's kind of us against him and the people that think like he does. And I don't have necessarily a huge problem with it because I would tend to side with CNN and a lot of these issues. But I've definitely noticed that they have they're probably also following MSNBC's lead. Like they realize that, like, you know, there's a little probably more money to be made in having an opinion are already jerk or whatever that segment used to be called. OK, so speaking of CNN, this is Jeffrey Toobin's reentry to the CNN airwaves. He's being interviewed. Ostensibly, he's, I think, coming on to talk about a ruling in California related to assault weapons. California has had a statewide ban on like AR-15s and other so-called assault weapons. And a judge, it sounds like a particularly activist judge in California, basically overruled for the time being, overruled that that state ban. And Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was talking about it. And and so they were going to have Jeffrey Toobin on to talk about this particular legal moment in California. But first, Alison Camerota wanted to start by talking to him about the so-called elephant in the room. Now, here's what I was struck by. I was kind of thinking in my mind, what if I were the person on air having to do Jeffrey Toobin's first hit on a legal question on CNN? How am I going to handle it? Obviously, this was all talked about in advance. They were not shooting from the hip here. But how explicit would I be in describing what happened? How would I couch it what would I want my vibe To be like I wouldn't want to be Like you said Andrew there are elements of this story That are laughable because they're just so deeply Embarrassing they're the kind of thing That most of Us would just we would rather die Than be caught in this moment By our like by our co-workers You know what I mean like it's just not to center Jeffrey Toobin in the story completely and act like The people who saw it aren't traumatized But you know what I mean it's like the tendency Is to want to make a joke out of it because it's so deeply embarrassing but anyway here is here's how this conversation unfolded let's bring

in cnn chief legal analyst jeffrey tobin to talk about this and more hi jeffrey hello allison it's been a while it has been a while indeed i feel like we should address um what's happened in the months since we've seen you since some of our viewers may not know what has happened so uh i

She sounds so nervous. I don't blame her, by the way. Nor do I, but the way she's emphasizing viewers, you didn't emphasize that for any reason other than you are just so uncomfortable right now.

And again, listeners may get mad at me that I'm centering Jeff Toobin's experience, but also I'm just like, God, how much do you think he's been dreading this moment? I'm sure he went in, met with the CNN folks. They said, look, we're going to let you stay on the network, But you have to you have to go on TV and talk about this before we can get into like any legal stuff. Like we're not going to pretend like it didn't happen. Like and he probably did the math and he was like, I would like to keep my television career, presumably my well-paid television career. So I'm going to do it. But, you know, it's just like like when I was a kid, I would I was prone to like all kinds of misbehavior, including like stealing money, like from the church offering plate or whatever. My school The lunchroom Collection

I stole money That's not so bad Where'd you steal it from? Church

But Actually what I stole I stole money from the Ladies Fund Which by the way The ladies fund Was a jar In my parents bedroom Where my mom would put The bake sale money That was for like So called ladies activities Whatever that meant But then what would happen Is I would At some point Become overwhelmed with guilt And then I would go and admit it all to my parents and cry and they would forgive me and they would say Jesus forgives me then I'd have to do restitution and that was the part I always hated I'd have to go around to all the people I had stolen from and tearfully repay them with my allowance money or whatever and admit what I had done and that part just

It was so mortifying. So this is that moment for Jeff Toobin. Anyway, I was surprised that Allison uses a very direct way to describe what happened.

I'll recap. I'll do the honors.

Help yourself. Okay. Also, Jeff, never say help yourself on television again, please, sir. There's a whole list of things that Jeff Toobin really can't say again on TV because they sound euphemistic at this point based on what happened.

In October, you were on a Zoom call with your colleagues from the New Yorker magazine. Everyone took a break for several minutes, during which time you were caught masturbating on camera. You were subsequently fired from that job after 27 years of working there. And you since then have been on leave from CNN. Do I have all that right?

You got it all right. Sad to say.

OK, so let's start there. To quote Jay Leno, what the hell were you thinking?

Well, obviously, I wasn't thinking very well.

I know. That's a bit of a weird segue. I believe that's a reference to when, what's his name, Hugh, who's the hunky guy?

Hugh, oh, oh, oh, Nicole Kidman.

Hugh Downs from 2020.

Hugh Jackman. No, no. You're talking about the guy who's in Four Weddings and a Funeral? Yes, that guy. You know, Hugh Downs. Yeah, exactly. What is it?

So is this the last show? Did we officially do it? We ran out of things to talk about, and we officially cannot remember people's names to a degree that it's actually problematic for the show.

Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant, Hugh Grant.

So anyway, I think that's a reference to when Hugh Grant Came on Jay Leno after he'd had An embarrassing incident where he Had been caught I think with a Sex worker in Los Angeles

I'd forgotten about that I still think That's a I mean again I don't want to I don't want to you know slam this journalist This is an incredibly uncomfortable place but That's a weird that's kind of a weird Way of setting that up

I know I feel like it's not a fair Draw to this particular Host I mean do you think Do you feel like the CNN hosts were looking forward they were hoping they'd be the person who could kind of like re and be part of the re-entry process or were you hoping that were you think they were all hoping it wasn't them because it'll be kind of a notable moment it'll like if it's Don Lemon it means that like a couple million people are gonna see clips where it's like Don Lemon brings Jeffrey Toobin back onto television or whatever so in a way it kind of puts you in the spotlight which is what you're always looking for if you're one of these hosts but on the other hand it means you actually have to have

this conversation that's an interesting question I don't know I don't know anything about this reporter her name is you said allison allison camarota i think she's a host or host rather i know nothing about her background i i would say though the the don lemon example is a good one because i'll bet you don lemon was sure love that i mean that's his god yes if there's like a little bit of uh you know a sexual scandal like you know i bet you he did want to have this interview

or very much and um it was something that was inexplicable to me i think one point i wouldn't exactly say in my defense because nothing is really in my defense. I didn't think I was on the call. I didn't think other people could see me. You thought that you had turned off your camera? Correct. I thought that I had turned off the Zoom call. Now, that's not a defense. This was deeply moronic and indefensible. But, I mean, that is part of the story. And, you know, I have spent the seven subsequent months miserable months in my life i can certainly confess i'm trying to be a better person i mean in therapy trying to do some public service i'm working in a food bank

which i certainly am going to continue with anything is this why you started doing that

sunday homeless feed andrew and not was there an incident i didn't hear not to get too much in my personal life but i'm now volunteering with seven different organizations so let's just say Andy got to have it no I um I uh that is such again like I don't know how I feel about this and I think that a bunch of different positions are kind of valid on this but like first of all if it were me personally we can talk about this more later if it were me personally I just wouldn't want to be in the spotlight anymore like he's a very talented smart man like there are so many other paths he could travel that could be not necessarily in the spotlight but just going on with your life and still using you know your go back into private practice private practice you You know, even write books, even write books and maybe skip the tour. Well, he is. More on that in a moment, by the way. Anyway, I wouldn't even want this for starters. But then, you know, it is what it is. My thoughts on this are it truly was an accident. That is something to consider. It doesn't mitigate everything.

But, like, if there was a situation where you had a computer on in your home and you didn't realize it was on and it was still dialed in some, you know, work call or some work line or something and you were having private times with your partner and it was truly, truly an accident, but it was, you know, shocking and scandalous to those who accidentally saw it, you know, that would be somewhere in this conversation, too. Right. Like people saw something that was a private moment that wasn't supposed to be seen, but it was accidental. in this case like he was in the middle of the work day in the middle of a work practice and

do you remember what they were doing by the way yeah they were doing like a mock trial or a mock election election right it was yeah they were gaming out the 2020 election and what everybody was going to do based on all these possible outcomes like which is a very kind of serious moment at the new yorker for it to have you horned up is really also kind of right and also if you're

on the call you might be also wondering like you know should i should i button one more button on my shirt or something like you really don't know and i understand why that would be upsetting to the people on the call but i i'm just saying that like there is a lot of weird gray area here but this idea that like and now i'm in therapy okay that that's fine like maybe you really do need that and but then and i'm volunteering at a soup kitchen or whatever he just said like now it's just ridiculous this is just like i'm doing these things that like to me these statements point out all the more that he doesn't understand what the hell he's what he's subjected people to and what the situation is he's just doing all of these things that you fucking do so you can get back

on cnn like it's almost more insulting is he he he is he addresses that in a minute when he talks about political apologies and he says he's not doing that but i do i agree with you i think he's doing a very very clever version of it which is he's saying i'm not i'm not trying to justify anything or defend myself but then he's subtly defending himself he's pointing out that he didn't realize the camera was on still he's pointing out that he's volunteering at a food bank like what is that what does a food bank have to do with this at all like i mean maybe the to me the therapy he might need to be and again not to moralize but like he wasn't doing this with he wasn't zooming with his wife yeah right yeah sure right like so that's again everybody gets to live their life how they want and i'm the last person who's going to tell people how to properly operate a marriage being that uh you know i've been pretty unsuccessful at that in my life but like the therapy part let's just say that that he wasn't married or like there wasn't a you know that didn't involve some level of you might say kind of infidelity on his part i don't know if you need to go to therapy for not knowing when the zoom camera's on or not that's more just like you should just go to best buy and ask the good ask the geek squad when's that camera on like it's more like a technical issue but then so him going to therapy like like again that's where the intention question comes into play for me it's like if he if this were something he was compulsively doing with with the hopes that people who had not asked to be a part of this were part of it that's like something you really should go to therapy for more this was more like he was having a private moment with someone and it was being publicly broadcast uh and then yeah the food bank it seems very very to the side of this question unless the people at the new yorker were not able to eat for a series of days after seeing this and so he's trying to somehow do recompense in that area now before you hit play

on that again if you don't mind me saying just reacting to that i mean because i understand the therapy thing like i so far what i've heard of this apology it would be like again i'm so angry about all these like i'm doing community service as if that has anything to do with the offense here like and you said it's a more of a technical thing well i mean it was something that and i I don't know who this person was who was on the other end, but, you know, my I could be totally wrong here. My assumption is that it's, you know, it was maybe some service, you know, might have been some webcam person that he hired. I don't know if this was somebody he was in a relationship with. Either way, it doesn't really matter. But like you might want to say, like, well, if you have to stop down, like during a break in a meeting to do this thing, like, OK, there is a level of compulsion there. Yes, exactly. So maybe therapy for that. But, like, I just think, like, so far, what I would have liked to hear is just, like, obviously, this was, like, super embarrassing. He's acknowledged that. And, like, and, yeah, I'm going to therapy because, you know, that isn't the type of thing that I should be doing in that moment necessarily. And, obviously, there's a lot of personal issues around here, too. This affected my family as well. And so that is why I'm going to therapy. Like, and just kind of, like, you don't have to go into more detail or give anything up. But you can just be more sincere, not just, like, hey, I've been working at the food pantry. Like, yeah. Sorry. I'm just repeating myself You do, working on a new book about the Oklahoma City bombing

But I am trying Also, what? He's just promoting his book I've been working I thought he was going to say I've been working on a new book about sexual compulsion Or kind of like a John Ronson So you've been publicly shamed I thought he was going to say I've been working on a new book And the next thing he was going to say Was something kind of related to what happened to him Or what he did to other people But it just seems so random to me I've worked.

on a new book about the oklahoma city bombing yeah maybe you should be reading some books about people who have like yeah maybe this is a time for listening exactly i don't know like it's just i just i just started channeling aaron goldberg after jake fraley but like that was just that struck me as very odd that he mentioned that he's working on a book about the oklahoma city bombing like again i don't know and i think jeffrey tobin is a very talented writer and i of course I love reading his writing in The New Yorker But like I don't know if I'm ready To read a book about the Oklahoma City Bombing from Jeff Toobin and not And be able to put out of my mind the idea Of him pleasuring Himself in between chapters Writing chapters of the book

Like I don't know if I'll ever

Not think of him in that context now Because it's so Wildly outside of how I would have thought of him before That I don't like I just don't think i'll ever not think about that when i think about jeffrey too yeah he's a verb right it didn't help that his last name almost sounds kind of euphemistic anyway no yeah so i mean that those are kind of the hype i mean this is an eight minute interview andrew really become the kind

of person that people can trust again i'm sure you've replayed that embarrassing moment over and over many times um have you ever thought about what it must have been like to be on the receiving

end of that zoom call um well i i haven't just thought about it i've spoken to several of my former colleagues at the new yorker about it and you know they uh were shocked and appalled um i think they realized that this was not intended for them i think they realized that this was um something that i would immediately regret as as i certainly did and it was then it was that day that I began apologizing and that is something that I have tried to continue to do both publicly and privately you know we've covered a lot of political scandals and we've heard what I like to think of as the politician apology which is you know I'm sorry if you were offended which always sounds to me like I've said the words now get off my back that's exactly what I've tried not to do. I mean, I have tried and I'm trying now to say how sorry I am sincerely in all seriousness. Above all, I am sorry to my wife and to my family, but I'm also sorry to the people on the Zoom call. I'm sorry to my former colleagues at The New Yorker. I'm sorry to my current, fortunately still colleagues at CNN. And I'm sorry to the people who read my work and who Watch me on CNN who thought I was a better person than this. And so, you know, I got a lot to rebuild, but I feel very privileged and very lucky that I'm going to be able to try to do that.

I mean, what do you think of that? It's better. It seems a little bit more sincere there. And again, I mean, both of these people involved in this conversation are very nervous at the beginning. You can tell. So I give them both a little bit of leeway for that. But I don't know, man, I this is maybe why I'll just never be successful is because I just never feel like I have a I don't know how to put this without something strident or maybe putting words in his mouth that are not fair. But, like, there are just certain people who feel like they were born to be in the spotlight or that he and again, it kind of just goes back to what I was saying before about, like, all of these things you want people to say, no, I'm sincerely sorry. I'm sincerely sorry. I'm sincerely sorry. But sometimes just being sincerely sorry is more than just acknowledging that you did something wrong, not making excuses for it, and then saying the words I'm sorry. Sometimes it's saying, like, maybe I don't deserve this spotlight anymore, you know, or maybe that's not the maybe deserve is the wrong word. Maybe the very I just sort of feel like the very act of him crawling his way back onto TV so he can just move on with his career in the spotlight undermines everything he's saying about it being a sincere apology.

Right. Like, like you said, I mean, he's had a pretty good run for many, many years. He was a very famous legal analyst. Nobody's going to stop him from practicing law. I don't believe that having this moment on a Zoom call is something that would have you disbarred. So it's like he's not deprived of making a living. Maybe it's just like – and that's an interesting point that you raised. And I wonder – because I'm somewhere like I might be like – if you're at one end of the spectrum and Jeffrey Toobin is at the other end as far as how much you want to have your face and voice out there, i'm somewhere in between you and jeffrey tobin so i wonder though like you said you'd be so embarrassed you might just be like i'm never going on tv again because the mortification of it all i'm wondering if i would be if i would be the same way or if i would like somehow talk myself

into wanting to get back in front of people or behind the microphone or back on Livewire or CBS or whatever.

And I understand like he's lived a life where he, and also like he does have financial concerns that are not my financial concerns because he has set up a lifestyle where he was making X number of dollars every year through all of his various endeavors. And so therefore that is built into his lifestyle. And I understand like you, and this is where it kind of goes back to, maybe I was wrong to bring up the idea of cancel culture. I just think that like if somebody were arguing with me in the future and saying like, oh, you know, cancel culture, I might just say, well, there is a famous guy who masturbated during a work call in front of his colleagues and he got his job back at CNN. Like that doesn't seem like cancel culture, although you're right, like that I might be kind of creating a bit of a false narrative or a red herring there with that with that whole thing. But I just I just don't there are a lot of different avenues he could take where he could still be doing good work, where he still makes good money in his field of both like, you know, his background in both law and his background in writing, where he could have just taken he could have taken a different road where if he was truly remorseful, truly remorseful, that he could have taken a road that is not just crawling his way back onto CNN, like I said before.

Yeah. Well, I guess it'll be interesting to see if there is a point because I'm terrible at predicting how things are going to be five years from now. There's all kinds of stuff that in the moment I'm like, this will forever be weird to me. And I don't know, maybe in five years, it'll just be not weird to see Jeff Toobin on TV or who knows, could end up back at the New Yorker and could be reading his stuff and it could just all seem like a distant memory. I remember thinking, like, when 9-11 happened and maybe the year after, I was like, this will never not be the defining moment of my time in this country or, like, this country's history during the period in which I'm alive in it. And, like, the anniversary. 9-11 will never be a day where everything doesn't stop. That's a lot of negative spurts. You know what I mean? Yeah. I was always thinking, each 9-11, everything, like, the earth will stop spinning for one day. and now literally we forget that it's 9-11 some of us do or like it used to be that you wouldn't do anything on 9-11 that wasn't 9-11 related you wouldn't release a film you wouldn't you wouldn't do any events you might not play a game like we were all just like kind of blocking it out for for for sort of reflection and now it's you can it can be two o'clock on 9-11 and i'll

remember it's 9-11 i um this is a little bit different because i think you're talking about the passage of time but also i mean having lived through this pandemic is and maybe this is what you were alert alluding to a little bit at the beginning but when i was filling in on cairo radio around the holidays it was like me and aaron mason and a producer named andrew and we were and maybe even the board op whose name was also andrew i think we had three andrews on the air that day it was really something um something for the history books but i don't know when the producer came up with this idea and he told us the day before he said hey i'd like you guys to come up with three things that you've learned during this pandemic and you know i think this This is one of those things where I think I maybe missed the point of the assignment a little bit or maybe willfully. I don't know. Like there was, you know, the other people were mentioning some pretty introspective things about what they learned about themselves or whatever. And I said the first thing I learned was that it turns out 9-11 was not the defining moment of my generation. And that blows my damn mind, you know. And that's not to minimize, by the way. I think everybody knows that, but that is not to minimize what 9-11 did to, you know, families and to our culture and to, you know, ways of life. Like, I mean, you go to an airport now, 9-11 is very much responsible for the way we navigate our way through airports and airport security. Like, it did change the world in a lot of ways, but it's not the – as you just said, it's not the defining moment of my generation. That blows my mind.

I think it was when the Fonz jumped that shark. Oh, really? I thought it was when he wore the blue T-shirt. All right, let's play a little music for your weekend before we hit the, I would say Dusty Trail, but it's raining here in Portland. It is here, too. We hit the Soggy Trail for this week of shows. Andrew, what music would you like to play for the listeners?

I'm going to play a song for you here that surprised me when I stumbled on it the other day. I'm actually going to tell you how I stumbled on this, and I'm going to back announce what it is. But I was looking for a song on a specific topic for after these messages, and this – we're actually doing a little segment about Kate McKinnon appearing in commercials because we just noticed that she's been in several lately, and Genevieve wanted to talk about that. Yeah, she's in a Verizon commercial now, and I'm – oh, and she's with Daniel Levy in some toast. dedos commercials um anyway so i was like okay what's some music we can bump in with for that usually i look for something that's kind of in the 80s that's kind of our vibe on that show couldn't find anything from that era but i did find this i'm not going to tell you what this is i want to back announce it because i was very surprised at who this was and when it came out

I'm so glad that I got her to think of She's fine as any Valentine I think about her all the time Cross my heart and hope to die She sends me silly messages and pictures Directing traffic in the mall Or buzzing with some random shoes She never fails to surprise She makes me laugh

She makes me smile And I could hang out with her all day and night She makes me laugh She makes me cry And I would like to be with her for a while

Okay, so you know why I like that, right? Kind of corny, 60s-sounding pop music.

Yeah, it definitely sounds like it's straight out of 1969 or something.

Yeah, and you haven't heard the song before. I wasn't sure if maybe you had known about this. What this is, is this is The Monkees, but this is an album that, and I'll bet you a lot of our listeners know this, and I just didn't see the headlines, but The Monkees released an album in 2016. What? They had released one in 96, which sort of rings a bell to me because there was a lot of nostalgia going on in the 90s. And then they, you know, went dormant for 20 years. Davy Jones passed away in the intervening years. But then the Monkees, in 2016, released this record. And I think about half the songs on this record, which is called Good Times, were written by them. And the other half are written by, like, kind of, you know, big names in the indie world. This song, She Makes Me Laugh, was written by the Weezer guy, Rivers Cuomo. Is it Cuomo or Cuomo? I could hear, I've always said Cuomo, but I don't know. So, and Ben Gibbard has a song on here. I was going to play that one. Jimmy Tamburello on there? I'm not sure I'll have to look it up. I should say that he doesn't have a song. He wrote a song called Me and Magdalena, which is a little bit more of a, it's a bit of a slower song, so I wanted to play the more upbeat one. But I'm going to be listening to this full record this weekend. It's kind of cool because I do like the, you know, like that kind of weasery sound combined with the monkeys. And also, you know, it doesn't sound it doesn't sound like grasping at something. It's not like Kokomo, you know, by the Beach Boys, which is like I always found to be pretty embarrassing. Like I legitimately like that as a, you know, corny little pop song.

God, I loved Kokomo when it came out.

Did you? Were you really into it? Loved it. Yeah. As a kid, I was probably like 10 to probably actually.

I remember just thinking like this is an absolute banger. I don't even know if I knew that the Beach Boys were famous for other stuff at that point. Uh-huh, right. I think I did. How's that for a generational thing? It's like maybe thinking that Kokomo was the main song by the Beach Boys at that point in my life.

Right, right, right. I think I definitely knew them because our family listened to oldies a lot in the car, so I knew the Beach Boys. But anyway.

um my music for your weekend a selection is a little uh a little outside the norm of what we play usually on fridays just in that it's um it's a kind of a different sound it's a little bit more on the um aching on the aching side of things like there's a little bit of we've been talking about loneliness on the show this week so this song is a little bit more a little there's some more longing woven into this music but i just found it to be so beautiful i think i had read a passing review somewhere of a singer named Aruj Aftab and her latest album, which is called Vulture Prince. And the song that I want to play is called Mohabbat. And I guess this is like this singer, she was born in Pakistan, but she's based in Brooklyn now. I guess that this is a song that's actually kind of like a well-known song in Pakistan. it's been covered a number of times but she sort of put her own spin on it and I mean the song is like eight minutes long so of course we won't listen to the whole thing but just I find her voice to be so unbelievably beautiful and arresting so yeah I don't know this is what I want to play this week it's Mohabbat it's by the singer Arouj Aftab can you play that Andrew? Yeah here we go

Aruba Jermaine

Wait, did I play the wrong song?

No, no, just let it keep going. It starts off a lot like Kokomo.

Okay, I'm sorry. I shouldn't mess with your music for your weekend. I couldn't help myself. Here it is, the real song.

We're creating new moments for the Drops of Stupider 3. That time Andrew played Kokomo instead of Aruj Aftab. Oh, it's slayed.

The people who do not be free Love will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become the one who will become As I'm staring out the window, Andrew, it's like we've already established it's like raining.

There's cars that are just like stopped on I-84. I'm just like, this is a perfect soundtrack to just kind of like a glow. I know it's supposed to be summertime, and so, like, we should be getting all summer vibes on it. But this is, like, the perfect sound for what I'm looking at out of my window at this moment.

I am not joking. When you started talking there, I remembered that we were doing a show. I'm not even joking. Like, this automatically, I was even thinking at first, I'm like, oh, wow, this. I find this immediately calming and almost putting you in, like, kind of a trance-like state. And, Luke, I was sitting here listening to this song, staring out the window. It's also drizzling here. I'm watching the rain turn into little bubbles on the roof outside, and I just got lost in my thoughts, and then you started talking again. So, good song.

The listeners would argue we forgot we were doing the show long ago.

I believe so, yeah.

But there you go. So, that's my little recommendation. It's really beautiful. For Music for Your Weekend. I'm actually looking forward to checking out the rest of this album, Vulture Prince. And I even actually forwarded this info to the Livewire producers to see if maybe we can get the singer, Arouj Aftab, on Livewire at some point. So we'll see what happens with that. All right. The suggestion from our listeners, from Listener Nick. Now, Nick must have sent this email in. By the way, I can always use more Music for Your Weekend suggestions, so please send them to Luke at tbtl.net. Put Music for Your Weekend in the subject line so that I can put those all in the same folder. this must have been sent a while ago by listener nick because it says the weather is nice today so this is coming from a different moment you think this is from last summer it might have been from three summers ago nick sent in the weather is nice today so i'm going to recommend one of my favorite sunny weather songs it needs no introduction you can't not love shonen knife at least a little god i love shonen knives i wonder what's happened to them i wonder if they're still playing music if they're still touring around japan or whatever um uh nick says um i can't wait for the pandemic to end so i can finally get wine drunk with my uncle rob and we can geek out on how great this record is that's awesome well that's i think that's just can't be too far off did you see seattle of course you saw you live in seattle i am legitimately jealous of seattleites andrew that you guys are the first city to hit 70 i did see that vaccination yeah that's great Forget the Trailblazers and Sonics or, you know, the Sounders and Timbers. Forget any of those I-5 rivalries. Y'all got us on vaccination. I'm jealous.

Yeah, definitely. And I don't I think well, it doesn't matter. I think that the state is still on track to open at the end of the month, though. There was some there was some talk that if the state reached 70 percent vaccination rates for adult populations, it would reopen before June 30th. But I just don't think that's probably going to happen. What's going on with Portland? You guys on a similar timeline as far as.

Yeah, we're a little bit behind. I think that the plan is to open the state at the end of June. Maybe it's whether or not we get to 70 percent state statewide. But we're just we're a little bit behind you guys. I don't think Portland has hit 70 percent yet as a city and the state overall. I mean, much like in Seattle, you've got like these big cities like Portland and then, you know, like Eugene and stuff where there's pretty high vaccination.

And then you get out into the rural areas, and it drops off pretty fast. Yeah, in the places where they have Kill Inslee bumper stickers, like I saw on a road trip.

For instance, or like, this mask is as useless as my governor. Right, exactly. Or other such fun, friendly, flirty things to put on your mask. Anyway, all of which is to continue with Nick's message. He says, this is really the kind of music you want to play while driving a red Mazda Miata on a day like today. or a day like whatever it was when Nick sent in this submission.

Is this the kind of music you want to listen to while you're driving a Mitsubishi Delica? By the way, can we address this for a second here? So another podcast is already just wants to do exactly what we're doing. Hodgman and Thorne just want to do the same exact thing?

Judge John Hodgman apparently has been on about something. I think it was listener Wendy in Ohio was listening to the Judge John Hodgman show and they're apparently on about some kind of a trip they want to do as a show in a mitsubishi delica now i'm i've been thinking about this

for real because i think that sometimes we get into a little bit of a mutual admiration society and i'm not trying to do that here but obviously i think that you are very well plugged into trends and stuff uh well obviously you are i mean you're you follow the stuff way closer than me but don't even compare yourself to me because i don't follow this shit at all but like i truly believe that we chose that Delica mostly from the route of as I said on the show recently we wanted something that we could sort of create a stage either inside or next to and it served that purpose but clearly Delicas are clearly having a real I mean you sort of told me this several times on the while we're on the road but I mean how zeitgeisty is it that like this other podcast

literally wants to do a delica tour yeah it's it's it's weird i we landed on this particular vehicle because we wanted a food truck and that was like impossible to pull together and also most food trucks don't go they're like slower than a delica because they're not really meant to be they're not you're not really meant to be driven very far they're meant to be driven to a parking lot next to my apartment and then endlessly flacked in the email sent by the management company that's what they're designed for so then we were gonna do an ice cream truck but those are also not great as far as driving far like really long distances and so we landed on this kind of by happenstance but i was texting with this is not not to name drop but my buddy misha misha collins and i told him what we were up to and he was like oh my god i've been like i've been like internet stalking mitsubishi delicas wanting to buy one tell me all about it and and then yeah apparently jesse and john have been into them i don't know if this is just some weird coincidence or if there's a whole thing going on with these vans that we weren't aware of. But it's definitely very much, as you said, in the zeitgeist.

Well, once again, Luke, congratulations for having your finger on the pulse of cool America. Absolutely.

And your bell. That's right. So that's going to do it for the show this week. We'll go out with this song by listener Nick. Even if it's raining where you are, just imagine yourself in a red Mazda Miata tooling around in the sunshine. It's a little shonen knife. All right. Thanks for listening this week, everyone. Thanks for being part of TBTL. We're going to be back here on Monday with more Imaginary Radio. Until then, have a great weekend. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

We'll be right back. You're the sniffing, food, and baguette Get the image of communication Hello, hello Power out.