Muse

Hey, Cobros. Um, I have exciting news for you. I just moved to New York City, and now I have a garbage chute. Garbage anxiety who? Let me tell you, this is where it's at. I might even take my garbage out for fun when I get back, because it's just that easy. That's it. Power out.

TBTL! I'm sorry, who are you? I was asking myself that same question, and I did not like the answer.

Okay, this one's easy. He's got the freak lips. He can hit the high C all night long.

He was king of the tuk-tuk sound. Is this another jazz guy? I mean, they're an emotionally stunted group of fundamentally flawed people doing a very silly pseudo job.

For the sake of customer service, try to chill out, my mom.

Okay, quick question. The internet, that's the one with email, right?

Yes.

Got it? I'm on it.

You know, I just came here to hit dingers and have a good time. That's about it.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

It is tougher than a set of woodpecker lips, and if you don't know what you're doing, it will burn you a little bit.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Give it a little zhuzh. Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center, high in the sky above Portland, Oregon, Where the clouds have parted And it is nice and sunny I think they're looking at about 75 degrees today Tomorrow we'll get up into the mid-80s I'll tell you what though Out there early this morning When the clouds were out There was no sunshine Running along the Willamette River You could really feel That fall is here As of September 1st My goodness Is it already September 1st? And are we already at episode 3,501 in a collector series? Let the fun begin. Speaking of the return of fall and fall-like weather, football is back. There's no whining in football. But every August, football comes to wine country. Or at least fake high school football is back. as in a high school that appears to be pretty much made up that talked their way onto national television. They played on ESPN recently, and it didn't go great. Speaking of things not going great, the defenestration of Mike Richards' career is officially done. He's now fired as the executive producer of Jeopardy and wheel of fortune we will take a moment to um enjoy the savor the flavor of uh of that latest development and maybe we can retire that story maybe like the tbtl song of the summer by the way congrats to japanese breakfast for winning that yesterday we can take the mike richards jeopardy story we can attach to a couple of cables and we can just raise it into the rafters of tbtl and retire it. Never have to speak of it again because we certainly have talked about it a lot the last few weeks. Oh, and a story that came to us by way of our friend The Stew Bot in Minnesota. One of his friends on Twitter was saying, I need to know all the details of this story. The story being the theft of a number of go-karts from a family fun center in Tukwila, Washington.

Get on the magic carpet and ride.

The photo at the Cairo television website Is really quite something I speak as a person who's been to that family fun center And has also driven on the road Where these go-karts were photographed So we'll get into all that Plus emails and v-mails And this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show Oh! You've garbage your last ghoul He is Andrew Walsh He's joining me right now From the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington Good morning, my friend Good morning

Oh I was going to do something today Luke I was going to do that thing where I talk a little bit quietly And I make you come to me sort of You know it's like kind of that power move

Oh I see you're doing a Bob Ross I now know this because I watched a documentary About Bob Ross Last night on Netflix And I found out that Part of his strategy And why he always talked very Kind of quietly And in almost A slightly seductive way Was because he knew that many of the viewers of his television show on PBS were women and he wanted to create something that he thought would be appealing to them. He wanted to flirt with them a little bit and what I realized was he was basically doing early ASMR both with his speaking style and even the sounds of the brushes and all the...

the stuff that he was applying to the canvas. I'm not the first person or the 1,000th person to say this, but it is so soothing. What was not soothing was the essential premise of the documentary, which was that there was this couple, the Kowalskis, who kind of went into business with Bob Ross in the early days. They were kind of the business side of it, and he was kind of the perm side of it. You know, he used to call getting his hair permed, he used to call it getting his springs tightened. Which I think is kind of genius Anyway, they Through a series of shady moves Just secured all the rights To everything Bob Ross When he died And have made millions and millions of dollars And Bob Ross' family has made zeros and zeros of dollars Off of all this stuff that has Bob Ross So if you buy a Bob Ross Chia Pet If you You know, buy any One of the very many kind of kitschy Bob Ross related things That all goes to the family and the heirs of this family That are not Bob Ross or his family

Let me ask you a question Is this documentary produced or directed or created by Alston Ramsey?

No, it's actually executive produced by Melissa McCarthy And her husband, Ben Falcone

Because I have an art You know that app I use called Pocket Where if you see an article that you want to get to later You just add it to your Pocket app And you can save your long reads there That's not the one app we don't do ads for. I know, right? And the earliest thing that I have in my pocket right now that I have not read is an article from, it looks like, I don't know, sometime earlier this year, Sex, Deceit, and Scandal, The Ugly War Over Bob Ross's Ghost. And this looks like it's like an hour-long read, according to the Pocket app. And at the end, it says, Alston, the person who wrote this, is also an L.A. producer. So there must be some connection here.

Probably, although I will say that that sex part That's clickbaity Because I kept waiting for the part of the documentary Where they said Bob Ross He was a Ross in the streets

But a freak in the sheets Why were you waiting for that? Is the documentary also something along the lines Did they mention sex in the title of that?

No, they don't But there's just A guy like Bob Ross with the open collar And the soothing, kind of sexy voice When he was painting I just wondered, could someone just be that genuinely kind? And guess what? By all accounts, he was that kind. He did allegedly have an affair at one point, but he also very much loved his wife, who passed away later of cancer, and he was devastated by that. They were able to work through the infidelity. The story was not Bob Ross is just out there, you know, kind of going wild. It was just like, you know, that was such it was a very, very minor part of the entire documentary. And unless they left a lot out, which maybe they did, although, again, it seemed pretty accurate. I think if you're trying to describe what Bob Ross's life, I mean, you could accurately describe that his his estate was sort of stolen from his family by these business partners who didn't deserve nothing. I mean, they were fundamental or instrumental, I should say, to his success overall, because he was a guy he got out of the he was got out of the military. He's living in Spokane, Washington, and he's selling paints and doing teaching painting courses in malls. And they kind of took him from that to really kind of building this Bob Ross empire. So they weren't like completely not responsible for the success, but they shouldn't get 100 percent of the money.

Yeah. And I'm I'm doing some cross referencing here. I really thought I'd sleuthed something out, but you're correct. Alston Ramsey seems to be nowhere near this documentary. I will figure out why they kicked him off of the IMDb page and get back with you tomorrow.

Thank you for that. Can I tell you a harrowing story of Survival this morning starring me? Yes. So I already mentioned that I was out on my little jog, and it was – I mean, it's September 1st, so I guess it makes sense. Although in the Northwest, it feels like you get about two more weeks of summer in September, summer-like weather. And I remember this because when I was a kid and I played sports, you would start your sport, your fall sport, whether it was football or soccer or whatever, you'd start it like a week or two before school started. And so for the first week of September, because we used to always start school the day after Labor Day. So if like the first week of September, I just remember being so overhead and sweaty and uncomfortable at those practices. That is why my brain always thinks September is still summer in the Northwest.

I think of it that way as a newbie here. I kind of got used to the fact that summer started pretty late here but then lasted pretty late here. Right. One of my first summers here, I have a photo of me and Genevieve at this demolition derby thing up at the fairgrounds. and in this photo...

photo of Genevieve who looks very glum it is July 4th and she is covered in a blanket and sitting next to my friend and they just look so cold and so I always think of that okay so that's July 4th summer probably began the next day uh but then you know you you have a pretty warm September that feels like summer in other parts of the country definitely you got the makings of a counting

crows song a warm September um but uh so this morning I definitely felt the change in the air The air temperature was so much colder than it's been for a while. And I was like, okay, well, this is the beginning of the fall. But I was approaching something called the Steel Bridge, which crosses the Willamette River. And the Steel Bridge, oddly enough, it's all upcycled CDs.

Oh, look, it sounds shiny.

It's very shiny. It's actually blindingly shiny when you get to it. And it has like two levels to it. The top level is for cars and the MAX train, and then the lower level is for, like, freight locomotive, just kind of, you know, those sorts of trains. But the lower section actually raises and lowers to let large maritime traffic through. And basically the deal is I have this loop that I do most mornings where I go from my side of the river, which is the east side. I go down to the steel bridge, and I cross over to the west side of the river, and then I go down to something called the Tilikum Bridge, and I go over there. I've got my whole system, and our listeners who are runners will tell you that when you start jogging or running, usually you get into kind of a loop or a route that you do, and there's something about the regularity of that that is very comforting, and you don't want it messed up. Like one of the things I don't like is when I'm somewhere that I'm unfamiliar with and I have to run and I kind of don't know where I'm going and I kind of don't know, you know, if I'm going to get to a dead end or something. It's like it honestly makes the run feel kind of stressful to me because you need your brain to be in kind of an autopilot mode.

You don't want to be like if you're walking like me and you just want to wander around and take photos, you can use your brain to sort of just poke around and navigate. But I could definitely see how when you're running, that's not the mode you're in. Exactly.

You don't want to have to dedicate any thought to the route. You want to just be able to kind of like zone out like you said. In fact, when Becca and I are walking around Portland, she's like, oh, do you want to go over here down this street? I'm like, yes. I love seeing things I haven't seen before. Yeah. Like it's actually the fun of a walk. But so also, as you noted, Andrew, I dialed up a little late. I had a few things going on this morning. I also had started this process of going out on my jog later than I should have. and so I had it in my mind I got to really uh be sort of quick about this so that I'm not my friend Andrew isn't just sitting there twiddling his thumbs waiting for me and as I get close to the steel bridge through my airpods through the Feist album that I'm listening to I hear some weird loudspeakery sound that I'm not used to and I see on the steel bridge the the kind of pedestrian and bicycle crossing part of it i see one of these like a gate that's about waist high to me so it's probably about four feet or something i'm not eight feet tall i know that would mean is waist high is it a given that waist high is the middle of your body like if i'm if something is four feet and it's waist high would that would that imply i'm eight feet tall because

i'm not just for the listeners wait hold on you're not eight feet tall i don't know what the exact center point of the body is i'm trying to figure out if i think that the legs go i would say the The waist is higher than halfway up, but I don't know. Maybe I just have long legs and know how to use them.

Yeah, look at those getaway sticks. Well, this gate starts closing very slowly, though. That is now going to block me from crossing the steel bridge. And I mention the height because this will come in later on in the story. It's not like something that's up to my shoulders or something, But it's not also something I can just step over comfortably. And I realize what this loudspeaker is saying in a recorded message, both in English and Spanish, is everyone stop. Don't cross the bridge. We're about to do something. Yeah, because this is the kind of bridge it doesn't go up like in the classic, like 70s madcap film where a car is going to jump, you know, one side of it. Kind of an upside down V where the two side like the Fremont Bridge or something.

Yeah, yeah.

This doesn't do that. this is the entire section itself just goes up like an elevator and and i've seen it do this before so i know this is what the bridge does and i have this moment andrew where literally my whole day nay my whole life flashes before my eyes because what i think is if i stop here i can't do my loop this is going to take a while i'm going to have to just i guess turn around and jog back home which won't be very far i won't feel the whatever endorphin release that i get from doing this jog. My whole day will be thrown off because I have a lot of stuff to do after this. And then, you know, if today it goes badly, I don't know what tomorrow holds. Maybe my life goes in a totally different direction if I don't get to do this jog the way that my brain is anticipating. Sliding bridges. I love this movie. That's it. Classic. So I make a snap judgment to run for it. So I squeeze around this gate that's now mostly closed, and I just start sprinting across this bridge, which I did not remember it being this long, because there's another set of gates at the other end that have now closed. Because I got through the one As it was closing And again this loudspeaker I'm trying to listen through my headphones To if it's a human On the loudspeaker or if it's a recording Because my brain is doing all these calculations That if it's a human Then that means they're looking at me And they're not going to start the elevator With me on it But also The process of the gates closing has not stopped The gates are now closed And there's people watching me There's, like, the normal people who have stopped. There's a cyclist. Other runners are on the far side. And I am just, like, a 45-year-old, you know, fairly unathletic dude, just like I'm in some kind of a Tom Cruise movie.

Yeah, you do know the Tom Cruise run, I was going to ask. Are your hands, like, straight out and, like, blades? Chop, chop, chop, chop. Yeah, blades.

Just, like, I've got to keep these, like, really aerodynamic. Nice. I'm running faster than I've probably run in, I don't know, 20 years of my life because the stakes feel so high. Then I get to the other gate and I realize I'm still on everything that's on the side of the gate I'm on is the part of the bridge that goes up. Yeah. So, like, I got to get over this gate and I have to do like a parkour move. Right. Which another thing I haven't done for 20 years. I haven't tried to hop over. And I know I said waist, but maybe this is the this tall tale is growing taller even as we speak. But it feels to me like it was even a little bit above my waist. because i had to hit this thing running like jump a little bit grab with both hands and try to like just kind of go you know what i mean like clear it like i wasn't trying to jump it like a hurdle i was trying to kind of like pull myself over it but i i didn't even feel like i had time to like do the thing where you kind of put one foot gingerly on part of it and you climb up i felt like this needed to happen in one fluid motion which again this is not an arrow that i have in my quiver anymore as a human like one one move clearing a gate that's up maybe up to my waist or higher is just not a thing that I do in normal life anymore I'm picturing very action movie here

you're running you hoist yourself up using your arms you throw your body over but then you hit the ground on your side and you roll a few times and you dodge bullets it was like the world's

worst action movie because i'm doing all of the things that they do in action movies but it's me doing it so it's not cool looking it's not tom cruise it's not like the i'm sure the jump just looked absolutely ridiculous like i'm sure there was like no kind of cool factor to it but i did amazingly get over the gate and i and i you know i'm the other side and i'm like i kind of like laugh nervously to the people who are waiting i'm kind of waiting for one of them to like give me a lecture about how that was bad and um so i i i get off of the bridge and now i'm on the far the other side of the river and i realized like that was really a lot like that could be my exercise for the whole day just that thing i just did i'm like very tired and i'm like okay i'm just gonna like jog very slowly for the rest of this because i really kind of that was a that was a workout and on both an emotional and physical level and all my endorphin like i've really like maxed out all my systems on that one kind of 20 seconds of movement so i'm sort of jogging and then a thought occurs to me the other bridge that i have to cross andrew the hawthorne bridge is also a drawbridge and it does the same thing whatever the steel bridge was being raised for is now going to be coming down the river the same direction i'm going and if it gets to the hawthorne bridge i'm also screwed because the river must turn because why would you have to

cross the river twice but the river must have a curve in it right well no because i go across

and then i run like imagine like a long long oval yeah i could just stay on my side of the river by

the oh i see so you're not you're i think i was a little mistaken now i am taking this in a boring place so this isn't like the final leg of your you're not already on your way home you're still like kind of at the beginning of your run so that's why you cross one bridge to cross the river then you cross another bridge to come home okay i thought you were like i thought you were like in the last stretch and you're just racing to get home Can't keep Andrew waiting. Run, run, run. Tom Cruise, Blades of Hands, famous movie. And I was like, why would you have to, if the boat is coming down the river, why would you have to cross it twice? But now I do see it. So you have this loop to make. So you need to make this loop. The boat is coming back, and you need to make it to that bridge before the boat does.

Right. And again, it is worth noting, all of this is voluntary. In other words, I could have also just, if I didn't want to do the steel bridge, I could have just run back and forth on my side of the river. There's a long, long trail. I mean, it goes for miles. It's just, I guess part of the point of this dumb story is how locked into the plan I got. And like this idea of doing this kind of thing that I do most mornings now in the way that I wanted to do it was so strong that it overrode my logic, which was just turn around and then just I have a watch on. It's timing. It's like telling me how far I've gone. There were options for me outside of this situation, and yet I'm just wired so that I wanted to just do what I wanted to do. So now I look over my left shoulder, and there is this giant, like, industrial maritime thing. I don't even know what kind of boat it was or what it was there for, but it's now steaming down the Willamette River. And instead of getting to just kind of, like, lollygag, I now have to also turn on whatever jets I have, which are not very jetty. And I have to basically like run my butt off down to the down to the Morrison Bridge or excuse me, the Hawthorne Bridge to get across it before it goes up. And I did. I mean, that one actually wasn't even that close. Luckily, I actually had some time to spare. But I was just like, how did I find myself in in again, sort of the world's worst action movie this morning?

Yeah, well, I thought your lesson was going to be I should never do that again. I should never try to cross a bridge while it's actually moving. But it sounds like the lesson is you need to find some way to threaten your own life every day, every morning to get better exercise out of yourself.

I did actually probably get a PR, a personal record for, you know, for that loop. That's probably the fastest I've done it because of those circumstances. But you know what? Honestly, I don't think I would do that again because it legitimately stressed me out. Like, I'm kind of joking about it, but it was this kind of thing where I made a split-second decision, and, like, four seconds into doing the thing, I regretted it immediately. How long did it take you to cross that bridge? It probably took about 12 seconds, but it felt like it took about 12 minutes. But it was this thing where once I was committed, now the gate behind me is closed. And every step that I take on this bridge, I'm just going, you know, it's sort of I got into this, like, you know, netherworld where it was, like, I just have to kind of, like, go for this. But I was feeling actually quite, quite not excited about it. And I was just imagining this bridge just because maybe it's I mean, I would be surprised, but maybe it's just some kind of automated system. It's just like going to go up. I didn't think I was going to die.

Yeah, I thought I was just goes up. It doesn't tell. Like you said, I was just thinking about this yesterday because we were stuck in traffic on the East Lake Bridge, which is the kind that opens up, you know, opens up into the sky and becomes like two ramps sort of. And I was thinking, like, I'm stuck in traffic on this bridge. i literally had this conversation with genevieve yesterday i said is this run automatically or is there somebody in that little house there um kind of watching this because how do i know that we're not going to go up in the air if a boat comes i tend to think that there has to be a human it

just seems too dangerous for it to not be human powered and they have those little those little kind of um you know towers that i think on a lot of drawbridges that you've got a person in there making sure that you have to you know um but but i was definitely thinking like i listen if it was a ride they were offering at the state fair maybe i'd go on it because it would be kind of fun to just ride up on that bridge and i could have held on to the to the handrail like i don't think it would have been dangerous to me but i know somebody would have yelled at me yeah i would have been a lot of trouble like because that's the big thing they're trying to avoid with the multiple gates and the messages in english and spanish um and i was doing exactly that so anyway I survived and I think that's the important part Let's take a quick break And then we come back we're going to talk about a story of Non-survival at least of the employment variety Mike Richards by the way I was Pretty proud of that the defenestration Of Mike Richards career yeah not Bad not bad at all right I Didn't have that I wasn't planning On saying that it just came to me in the moment Nice just as your flow state That's exactly right We'll talk about what the latest on that is And this go-kart heist in taquilla coming up in a moment here on tbtl hey let's thank some donors of the day okay oh sorry i wasn't sure when i was no i this is a

partnership and uh you know that was my contribution to the show today i appreciate that no i mean it's

Good, I don't.

want you to think that this is just i'm i don't want you to think that as the gate of this show is closing i just unilaterally make the decision to sprint into the void without you this is you know we both have to sign off on everything that was part of what this is such a sad term but part of what really screwed bob ross was that he and his wife each had a voting interest in this company and then the a couple that was the business side they each had a voting interest and when his wife passed away he went down to one vote he lost half his vote yeah which is crazy like that's

that seems like a bad contract yeah he should be able to bestow the vote he should be able to like

what's it have a proxy vote or something yeah or something but anyway you always have a vote on this show i mean i sometimes override it but you always have a vote oh oh good so you have veto power and i have half a vote that sounds sweet for instance you voted for me to not say connor McCulhey of Verona, New Jersey's name this way. Don't do it. Connor McCulhey. I vote

to not have that happen.

Well, my friend, I've outvoted you once again. Connor, thank you so much for supporting the show. Appreciate you. Brian Smolenski is in Squim, Washington. Beautiful Sequim. The Lavender Capital, I want to say that it builds itself as the, like, if not the Lavender Capital, a Lavender Capital.

of washington that reminds me of the time i asked somebody if they were the jag or a jag wait like judge yes judge advocate general i believe i was unfamiliar with the term i mean i have so many embarrassing moments from doing pre-interviews with people that you know were potentially going to be on a talk show i'm producing and you know my boss has said listen you got to make yourself vulnerable you don't have to know everything in the world in fact you're an advocate for the listener so when you're interviewing people admit when you don't know something i can't remember if my boss has said this or this is how i justified being a dingus all the time but i remember not being familiar with i believe it's judge advocate general and i was pre-interviewing somebody they were not the jag themselves but i think they they referenced the jag and i was trying to suss out whether there's just like one jag in america or if there are many jags and i would you say you were sort of like one jag off I know it's so hard not to say that. But anyway, all I know is my very droll, much smarter friend, Josh Rogers, after I got done with doing a pre-interview in my little cubicle where you can convince yourself that nobody can hear you, part of doing pre-interviews and sounding like an idiot in a cubicle farm is you just have to pretend like nobody can hear you even though they can. And afterwards, Josh just comes up to me and says, did you say is he a jag or the jag and so now in my head all the time i just think are you a jag or the jag it's not a painful story it's just uh i just for some reason that phrase lives in my head

the only reason that i even know that that is a kind of military uh it's an it's a military lawyer right basically that's what that job is the only reason that i know that is because there was like some procedural called jag yeah that's right starring the guy from dharma and greg i think oh really see i didn't know that that's you want to i could also be wrong about that we've established that you're a thing that makes it hard for you to do the show is that you question yourself too much and my problem is i don't question myself enough so it might not be the guy from dharma and greg but like that's literally the only reason like talk about a lowbrow way to get to the information of a thing called JAG existing. That's how I got there. I'm on the Wikipedia

page, by the way, for JAG right now. 227 episodes over 10 seasons, Luke. I mean, that's a... We should thank the donors, but that's way more than I thought JAG was giving

us. I want to thank our next donor, the guy from Dharma and Greg. Wow. It's Thomas something, right? Isn't that what that guy's name is? Is he AJAG or TheJAG? We also have to thank Kelly Sweat, who's in Pawtucket. Hey, Kelly. What up, Kelly? Isn't Pawtucket beer, isn't that the kind of, isn't that the joke beer? I bet you this came up last time we thanked Kelly or someone else in Pawtucket. Is that the joke, is that the duff beer of Family Guy?

I think they just live in Pawtucket and Family Guy, don't they?

I think they live in Quahog.

Oh, you're right.

But their beer is like a Pawtucket thing or something. Maybe. be anyway thanks kelly appreciate you terry a granillo or granillo is in north bend washington hey rajesh cordy is in sammamish washington and then amaya michalina is in nashville tennessee you want to give that you want to try that one with the soft

ch2 just in case do you want to give us a b michelina michelina michelina i give that three michelina stars amaya out of being in actually it's out of a hundred that's the oh no i didn't want to i didn't want to hurt amaya's feelings but yeah it's the michelina stars is a very different system well yeah there's a lot isn't that crazy that that got started just as literally

like a michelin tire thing it was it about road trips when you're on a road trip to the place

to check out that makes sense but talk about going from you know a pretty like a you know if michelin is sort of the i mean i know they make tires of whereas triple a doesn't really make things but we've talked about your dad getting the trip ticks oh yeah definitely yeah and like if you think of michelin as being more like that than like um you know uh food and wine magazine or something and it goes from like hey here's where you should eat when you're road tripping through europe to this chef recently took their own life because they got taken down by a quarter of a michelin star like it's like damn dude that thing that really grew into like quite the thing

yeah i mean think it could be called goodyear stars right like how different would the world

be if we called them goodyear stars right exactly so anyway thank you so much to our donors of the day we wouldn't be here without you really appreciate you baby but everything's gonna be Oh, right. Thank you, baby. Hello and welcome to Top Story. I mean, I don't know how much more there is to say on the topic of Mike Richards, Although I will say I think our friend – our friend who we text with often on this topic, Andrew, forwarded us a tweet. I think it might have been by the comedian Brody Gupta saying something to the effect of – she was like, I love the – I'm fascinated by the idea of Mike Richards. Here's a person that nobody knew about who just popped up one day to be like, I'm a stranger who sucks, and now that's what he's known for?

I know.

Like, I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but that's – this is just an unbelievable example of hubris and of avarice and of just pwning yourself so hard. Like, this dude, Mike Richards, go back six months. He's the executive producer of The Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune. I assume that is a handsomely handsomely compensated position and yeah you're not the host of the show but it's a pretty good gig and you have hosted other things so if your dream really is to be in front of the camera there's probably a way in which you can pilot some shows Like where you're the host of a show that doesn't actually exist yet, but you're doing kind of the audition period, you could maybe, you know, cash in your chips at some point and go host a show in the higher up number cable channel or something.

Or just the guy. And also just bide your time. Be patient. You're in the industry. You're a powerful person in the industry. Keep on, like you say, find little inroads here and there. Find more places to fill in. And, you know, enjoy the fact that. And when I say you're a powerful person, I don't mean, like, necessarily do anything untoward or outside the lines like he did end up doing. Just, like, take advantage of the fact that you are a major player in this industry and there will be opportunities for you.

Right. He was in such a great position outside of being the host of the most beloved and respected trivia game in the history of America. Television, that is. Other than that one thing, everything else about his life was pretty hunky-dory at that point, and he's well-positioned, and then somehow, through finagling and a bunch of kind of devious behavior, he manages to work his way into this gig, which, of course, we all know the outrage, we all know all the stuff that was dug up on his past, which, by the way, would never have been dug up if he wasn't trying to be— Nobody was digging, and in fact, there was a profile. I'm sorry that I'm spacing on her name right off the top of my head, but the woman who really did all of this reporting.

McNeary?

What's that?

Are you talking about the woman from The Ringer? Oh, McNeary. McNeary, yeah. Claire McNeary, I think.

Nice. Yeah, there was a profile of her in the New York Times that I thought was fascinating, too. Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, she's just.

Man, I mean, talk about just becoming an almost household name overnight with an article about a chapter.

Woodwarded and Bernstein

Yeah

But anyway, you know I don't think that Claire McNary is doing that reporting

around mike richards when he's just the ep it's because he tried to become the host because he tried to finagle his way into this and so i just find it so interesting that he has now found himself not only not the host of jeopardy not the ep of those shows but i would assume considered to be very radioactive yeah like i don't know and again i don't in the slightest bit feel bad for this dude but i'm just wondering like does he just have to go into general contracting i say that with great respect to general contractors i just mean does he have to leave entertainment and just go to a totally different business now because who is out there going we've got to get that mike richards magic no he'll continue to consult i mean we talked about

that he was getting those ppe loans too but like not even being not even being catty about that like i'm sure that was some sort of consulting thing i'm sure that he guys like that will always you know somebody will want to say well we can talk to this guy because he he knows the industry

you know he still knows despite despite all despite this kind of public shame because i feel like yes of course had he not gone through this let's say that he just like decides he makes a shitload of money in his ep job and he decides i just want to step away from the day-to-day grind of running these two game shows i'm just going to hang my own shingle and i'm going to consult then yes i I think there's a line of people that want to overpay him to come in and consult. I'm wondering if him being the guy who had the Jeopardy job for literally one day for five episodes and then was run out on a rail because of all of his kind of like, you know, previous inappropriate statements. I'm just wondering if that tarnishes him even in the consulting game.

I don't know. I mean, Jeffrey Toobin is back on TV. I mean, I just think that like, yes, people like this can get jobs behind the scenes. even if they are like hanging out like you said hanging out their own shingle and I mean he's still a player you know like I just don't he's not I don't think that he has to change industries just to answer your question directly yeah

maybe also you know a year goes by we have short memories exactly and so a year goes by and somebody you know I mean Brian Williams is right back on television I mean there's

a million examples yeah

the Jeffrey Toobin thing is more interesting to me because like I mean And I guess what I would say is I'm not saying this is correct, but I'm saying CNN perceived there to be value to having Jeffrey Toobin like it was like they made the decision. Jeffrey Toobin is so good at legal analysis and improves our network and our broadcast so much that it's worth dealing with the heat of bringing him back on after what he did on Zoom. and with mike richards i guess i just wonder when a company will be like we want him to he adds so much value to what we're doing that it's worth dealing with the heat of people being like oh wait isn't that the guy who got in trouble with the thing you know but again like i was saying in response to what you said i think we have shockingly short memories as a society and i you know i'm sure that if he at some point comes back on you know he goes on a sort of self-improvement kick and uh and and and explains that he's spent the last year really reflecting on his behaviors there's probably always a place for him to be overpaid to give very very obvious

feedback because i'm sure he still has a lot of access that's probably still what his most valuable thing is is his his rolodex and we can explain to the younger uh listeners what a roller decks is which i say a roller decks that was my roller derby name was roller decks you know my grandma used to call roller coasters roly coasters anyway well you call it roly bag though i do yeah like a bag uh i didn't realize that wasn't universal i i don't know that i came up with it i think genevieve did we've just always called called our suitcases because i mean i guess now all suitcases if you say suitcase you picture a bag with wheels but when i was growing up a suitcase was still the thing that you close like a briefcase and when it was too full in a sitcom They jumped up and down on it and clothes were shooting out everywhere. Right. And so I just at some point, again, it might have been me saying that I'm the less cultured of this of this relationship. But it might have been Genevieve who just called her bag the rolly bag. And so we always called it rolly bags. I don't think I realized that wasn't a thing until you pointed it out.

I just can't believe that we were all carrying suitcases for so long. It is – I mean I remember my first marriage going – we went to Italy on our honeymoon and I had just these – I mean they were like out of the 1950s. Like I think I might have had a steamer trunk. Like the worst luggage which I had just like probably gone and gotten from my parents' house like that was just in their basement. And Lord knows my parents aren't exactly lining up outside the Toomey store to get the highest quality luggage, right? If it was something my parents were like, yeah, whatever, take it, it must have been so jacked up. And none of it was on wheels. And this is two weeks in Italy. And I just remember, like, so much of the trip was just spent carrying hugely heavy luggage up and down stairs in sweltering heat of Italy in the summer.

And nobody invented wheels at this point.

That's the thing. We had wheels. We had snow cases. Put the wheels on the suitcases. Hey, speaking of wheels, Andrew. Uh-huh. A dozen go-karts were stolen from the Family Fun Center.

Yeah, what's going on with this story? I've seen the photo of it. It looks fun as hell. My only regret is not being a part of this caper.

I have a few. Wow, and that's rare, I think, coming from you. I think you're generally a rule follower, but I love that you're into my plan to steal some go-karts from a fun center. I think that this photo is actually the police returning the go-karts to the fun center

I'm now realizing it because I just clicked on the video version And it is a police officer in a go-kart driving down a regular road for regular cars But he is escorted with a police SUV in front and behind him You and I have been to this family fun center, by the way

Do you know this?

Oh yeah, this is that family fun center, of course, yeah

Yes, the one down in Tukwila. Yeah, batting cages. I think about it a lot. Yes. And I went on some kind of hammer ride there that was kind of – when I say a hammer ride, I mean it was a ride where you've got two pods, but they're on different independent swinging arms. And each pod holds a couple of people so that they sort of imagine like scissors that were pointed up and down and you were sort of opening the scissors so that they were kind of going out and then back down. They were going out to nine o'clock and three o'clock and then back down to six o'clock. I remember riding on one of those and that being the beginning of the fear, like being on that and thinking, huh, this is. I remember Van thinking it was very funny that I went kind of quiet because of thinking like, oh, this would be bad news if this thing came detached. And I think that might have been the first time that one of those rides started to really stress me out. And ever since then, when I'm on one, we were just talking about this on the Skylift at the Oregon State Fair. But if you start to let those thoughts get into your head, it can be a little sketchy. But, yeah, we've been to that Family Fun Center and been to that batting cage. I guess some buddies, because, I mean, 12 go-karts is a lot, somehow got in there, got the go-karts out of there, and they've been finding them all over Tukwila. They found the first two on a business that was on Interurban Avenue South. They were abandoned in the parking lot. A third go-kart was found near the Family Fun Center. A fourth was found at the Foster Golf on Interurban. Several go-karts were recovered nearly six miles away and rented. Wow. Some of them, they drove them for six miles. I can't believe those things even have enough gas for that.

Yeah, six miles might be pushing it. You know I had a go-kart growing up, right? This is the type of thing that I don't like to say around Camaro Kev because he just rolls his eyes and says, little rich boy. But I had a go-kart out in the country.

Believe me, Kev was sitting on that DOT money. The D-man supervising people out there on the highways. Forget it. Anybody who's not me was rich, Andrew. Haven't you learned that yet?

Yeah, right. But it definitely does feel like a kind of a richy rich move. Of course, I had a small little race car in my backyard that I could drive around and pretend that my, you know, classmates were watching me from afar. And I was like living fantasies where this go-kart made me a cool kid instead of a nerd. Oh, I don't think it made you a nerd.

I would have been stoked about that.

Oh, no, no. I mean, I'm sorry. That was a weird ramble. My point is I had this go-kart. I loved the go-kart. But what I would do is I would ride the go-kart around my yard really, really fast. And while I was driving around, I imagined that if only my classmates could see me now, maybe they can see me now. And they think, boy, he's really cool. Like maybe Amanda Cook is watching me. Maybe Elizabeth Carroll is watching me. And they're thinking, you know what? We have this guy all wrong. He is a speed demon and he is cool as hell. And he has his own go-kart. And I want to go with him.

Did you guys call it going with? Yeah. Because that's what we called it too. Yeah. Like do you want to go with me? Not go out with me. No. Because we were kids. We couldn't go out. We could only go. um did you have like a little was it kind of like um a sort of flat dirt area that had been worn down by the go-kart or would you just be driving it over like rolling hills or no we

our yard was pretty flat we had a lot of we had i mean a lot um by apartment dweller standards but we had like a seven acre plot out in the middle of nowhere some of that was covered with like kind of weeds and hills and that area was not go-kart territory that was we had we also i also had a little motorcycle that i would drive around but no the go-kart was for the flatter parts but most of the yard was flat so i would and we had an above ground pool i know you're jealous of that i would race it around the pool round and around and around so that was a but i would just go anywhere i would just did just yeah then there were long stretches there's one part of our property that was like a long stretch all the way from the road crocker road all the way to the very back of the property and that was where you could really pick up speed and did it run like in other

words was it reliable because i feel like those small engines when i was a kid my dad's lawnmowers and things like that were always just like on the fritz it ran i mean i would have some it was a you

know the type of engine that you would have to start by you know pulling it with like the record thing and back in fact i still have a scar on the inside of my kind of elbow area on my left arm where I was trying to start it after I'd already been driving it for a while and I accidentally hit the exhaust cap. But, you know, sometimes it was really hard to pull, but I just kind of, you know, like kind of toughed it out at all. So that's when I learned about starting fluid. Yes. Yes, where you'd spray it into this little filter area to kind of jump it.

That's like the nasal spray of combustion motors. Like, you know, you weren't supposed to use Afrin because you get addicted. Because like that starter fluid is such a panacea, such a silver bullet that you then, Like you're just always spraying it all the time Because it like helps things actually start Yeah I can't wake up in the morning I'm spraying it in my mouth Oh that's called cocaine

Silver paint I would spray in my mouth in the morning To wake me up

That was another thing about Bob Ross This is not medically verified And in fact the guy who said it was totally up front He was like I don't have any evidence of this I just wonder sometimes But one of the things was All of those paintings that he was doing For all of those years It was this certain process that's kind of like painting. It's like you're painting on paint that's not yet dry. So you're able to do that whole painting in 28 minutes, right? And as part of it, he had to constantly take his brushes and dip them in paint thinner and thwack this paint thinner out of these brushes. He also would, for some reason, just have piles of linsuit oil rags, which seemed dangerous. But this friend of his was just wondering if maybe all that exposure to all that paint thinner over the years, Because it was very sort of like, you know, it was basically in the air because he was always, like, shaking these brushes out and thwacking them on this thing and kind of, like, almost making an aerosol out of this paint thinner and then breathing it all in as he continued to, like, paint these things. So, I don't know. But the point is don't huff starter fluid. Okay.

I will stop huffing the starter fluid. So, anyway, so they've – I didn't read in on the story. So, they're finding these all over the place. That surprises me with so much surveillance, especially six miles away. You're not passing any. I mean, I guess maybe you're wearing helmets. You can't identify the people. But, like, I feel like you would have passed so many cameras from the moment you drove it off the lot. I mean, from the moment it was still on the lot. Yes, exactly. I mean, this is in 12 of these things.

I feel like this is an inside job, and they're going to catch. Oh, yes. They're going to ultimately catch them by leaning on some of the employees. I don't know if it was the actual employees who did the thieving, but somebody worked there and told their friend, here's where the keys are. Because otherwise, it's too complicated. I mean, you can't just go in there, presumably start up 12 go-karts. I'm also surprised at how far they got. In other words, that they just didn't get pulled over by police. This had to have happened in the middle of the night, right, if you think about it. Because if it's the middle of the day, there's employees. So it's the middle of the night. someone's just motoring down inter-urban avenue there's 12 go-karts driving on inter-urban avenue and there are no police noticing this and thinking this is off i love it so much i love that image so much it sounds so cool i guess that the people that they're looking for are up on felony theft charges which you know i guess that's how the system works i mean these things probably have a decent amount of value and you stole them and so that is a felony but it also feels like as long as they didn't like completely thrash them i don't want to say it's a victimless crime um but it it seems fairly low on the list of terrible things you could do like can i try

pushing back on that i mean just think about it in this in in because i don't know who owns family fun center and i know that we're famously an anti-capitalist show um no but um you know i don't know let's just assume that you know there are some sort of a family operation or you know like it's not run by Jeff Bezos like these are people that are just like every small business is probably trying to get its feet back underneath them as they you know are trying to get through this pandemic recovery process going outside doing outdoor activities is probably a good thing now that people can kind of congregate again like going and riding on go-karts

batting cages these are perfect things for people to do and now this company that's trying to rebuild is suddenly out all of their go-karts and like not only like to get them back in various you know conditions possibly and have to actually buy new ones like this could really hurt this

company right i i you're right i mean you should not be able to steal somebody's go-karts and also um you know yes it's not like a thing where i think it's i said victimless crime i don't think it's a victimless crime there are victims to it but i guess i just mean if you got them all back felony theft just sounds like you went and you pointed a gun at someone and you said like give me all your money and this seems just more like youthful prankery um but uh i do think that they'll eventually catch them because i just think like you said there's so much surveillance yeah and somebody knows something now i guess the question is what is the priority for like the tukwila pd where is this on the list of things that they want to solve um you know because if they throw all their resources at i have a feeling they'll figure out who this was and i'm guessing it's Probably high schoolers.

And yeah, and I bet you also those charges will be lowered. That's all part of the negotiation process with the prosecutor. Right. Also, I think these cops had an absolute field day. Well, these things. One of them in this video is like waving at the camera and smiling as he's driving it down the street. That's what I mean.

Best day ever to be in law enforcement. When you get to what you get to drive the go karts back to the family fund center, like those are the cops also investigating the crime. I feel like they're going to probably – this isn't going to be the world's harshest interrogation when they bring the people in because they kind of got to have some fun.

Instead, they're going to be like, hey, next time, could you guys steal a bunch of motorcycles? That would be pretty cool too.

Right. Exactly. Speaking of high schoolers or alleged high schoolers, Andrew. Yeah, explain this. I am so confused about this story. So ESPN puts on high school football games. I mean they broadcast them sometimes between like very, very highly touted programs. you have a couple of different kinds of high school well high schools you could say and also high school sports programs there are some real schools uh that have really really good teams historically i think there's a matter day team in california that often has really really good football teams there's um oaks christian i want to say in virginia that has really just like uh super talented basketball teams often so you got some real schools that have really really good teams then you have these prep schools that have been started purely to facilitate athletics oh right yes in other words like and in the olden days like pre-covid my guess was these places did tend to have physical buildings so one of the teams that was playing in this in this game on espn was img academy which is actually a high school that's like owned by a talent agency a talent agency img that actually like you know they represent a lot of pro athletes they have their own school their own high school education which is which is right which is pretty crazy if you think about it they're not even the scammers in this story and that's the thing so img academy just constantly has players on its teams that end up going pro but it's just kind of a thing that they're like yeah i guess that's normal that this ta this sports talent representation agency also has a school my guess would be that there's some certain amount of you know minimal standard of going to school for this you know that you have to do with this place well then the pandemic comes along and now i mean lots of school is online and remote so it becomes even less clear who is and isn't a school yeah and that's where bishop sycamore comes in so bishop sycamore is a school that's playing the img academy in this game on espn and they are just getting routed they are lose they lose the game 58 to 0 but it's so bad that in the middle of the game the espn announcers start on the air trying to figure out what the hell is a Bishop Sycamore and how did they get in this game? Because the promotional material from Bishop Sycamore was that they had a number of high school All-Americans and that they were this really legit team. And then as they're just getting drubbed, as they are being shown to not in any way deserve to be on the same field as the IMG Academy team, the announcers start trying to look up

who the good players on Bishop Sycamore are and they find out there are none there are no high school all americans some of these people appear to be in their 20s this is a this is a some of these prep schools the age range on the prep school is is is it goes higher than a normal high school so what happens some this is so the origin of these places is a school again And I'm... putting school kind of in quotes, where let's say you're a very promising high school basketball player, okay, but you don't have the grades to go to a D1 college. You can add a fifth year of high school at one of these prep schools. They're often in Connecticut. They're in these random places. You go there. You're still in high school technically. You get to keep playing really high level competitive, let's say, basketball, and you get your grades up to a level that you're now ready for D1 college basketball. So that's kind of like, I want to say Doug Wren from the UW might have done that before he got to the UW. He was a noted UW Husky basketball player. It's not crazily uncommon if you look at the resumes of some of these players to see them do a year of what's called prep school. So because it's kind of in this weird middle ground of what is high school and what is college, I guess, you can get players that are older than typical high school players. Well, it turns out that Bishop Sycamore does not appear to have any physical address. It is a P.O. box. The website was non-functional when they tried to go to it. The person who's allegedly in charge of the school said that they didn't want to publish the school's address because their players had been cyber-bullied at some point. And so they had decided to not tell you where the school is. Can I ask a question?

Yeah. Put it on the poll. do you need a physical address to cyber bully someone like well that is a weird argument

yes it's one of many very weird arguments that were being put forward from this school about whether or not it's a real school um the bishop sycamore so now the head football coach has been apparently fired by the line coach who's also the principal of the school who says it's not a scam because his kid goes there and if it was a scam he'd be scamming his own kid

so what do we know who are they how do they end up on television uh there is a there's a company

that's in charge of it's like basically a promotional company or an events company that's in charge of going out and getting these schools to play each other and i guess somebody at this you know this company that was hired to basically put the matchup together they went out and they basically believed they got some bad intel that bishop sycamore was a real thing and so the other thing is bishop sycamore had just played a game the night before they played two games in 24 hours also if you go to the bishop sycamore i think it's down now but at some point if you went to the website for their football team and you looked at their season schedule They had games scheduled at 1 in the morning. They had games scheduled at, like, 3 a.m. Like, it was nonsensical. It was so crazy.

But who's playing? So are these just – these are things that they make it look like they have a schedule? No, they had opponents. They're not playing these games at 1 in the morning?

Well, here's what I actually think. I think that probably they were using a piece of software to input the times, and then it wasn't accounting for maybe time differences or something. But they did now four teams that were scheduled to play Bishop Sickenmore have all said, no, thanks. We're not going to we're not going to do that now. Basically, they had kind of cobbled together a football season of sorts. But it appears that this is just kind of a random a football team made up of a bunch of people, possibly older than high school age, who are allegedly in school. But there seems very little evidence of anything happening with that. And they're just trying to play football. They're all probably people who have dreams of, you know, getting to the next level, but they are clearly not very good at it. Although I saw an interesting piece in Defector that said really the issue here for Bishop Sycamore was they weren't good enough because like IMG Academy, these schools that are more or less fake high schools that are good at football. No one's like going, hey, is this a real thing? Like if Bishop Sycamore would have come in and been respectable, like if they would have scored 35 points and they would have lost 47 to 35, no one's asking what's Bishop Sycamore. We're all just buying it. It's because they were so clearly bad that then the announcers and everyone else started going like, what's going on with this? But had they just been a little better at football, they'd just still be going along their merry way, being basically a pretend high school.

Well, that's where I feel very naive here. I guess I'm still a little confused about what the grift is. If this is a grift, like I understand this idea of creating these schools that are basically kind of like parking lots or that's the wrong way of putting it. But like kind of training grounds for athletes who are elite in a certain way, but in between phases, everything that you just explained. I get that and how there's an industry around it and how people are making money off of that. And also these players get to find ways into various leagues. Right. What I don't get is what the end game is if you're terrible. I mean, do they. Are they trying to be good or is it just – is it straight up money? Are they just like – is the grift that they're just taking the money from these kids? Like kids and ghosts.

I don't think it's – right. I don't – I think it's door number one. I think that the hope is from the coaching staff and probably from whoever is running this high school that only has a P.O. box so that its players don't get cyberbullied. I get the sense that it's – their biggest sort of crime or grift is probably over-optimism. like the idea is it's been my biggest biggest crime too let's get let's get these players together and let's build the team and this team can be really good and these players can get a look from college coaches and can maybe then you know um progress in their career and maybe make it to the nfl someday i mean i don't think that there's i haven't yet seen an allegation that the people running the school are just trying to fleece people for money i actually think it probably this one it's probably more about hope you know being overly hopeful than anything um but it also just raises this weird not a weird question but it it's just another chance to talk about the weirdness that is amateur sports yeah yeah and how it is that like if i was a really really good prep cook at mcdonald's let's just say i'm the best maybe i'm top 20 in america are you really good at being a prep cook because you went to prep school um i wish i went to prep school i would see previous comments everyone was richer than me uh let's say i'm the best prep cook i'm the top 20 prep cooks in america and for whatever reason the mcdonald's franchisees have just decided that like we gotta have that luke burbank prep cook magic so i've got various mcdonald's here in portland they're vying for me it would be perfectly legal for a mcdonald's to pay me 40 bucks an hour because my prep cooking is so great. Why is that different than me running a football? Why is that different than me shooting a basketball? Like, it's strange that we have this idea of, particularly in college sports, although that's changing a little bit. Now, I think, you know, because of a recent court decision, I do think that players can make some money now. But we've created this thing around this idea of amateurism, which is, first of all, kind of seems like it's a bit of a lie. I mean, You have lots of examples of where players end up getting paid anyway, getting paid under the table. Sometimes it's dumb shit, too. Like, players, I remember players, I forget the college off the top of my head, but they were getting free tattoos. I think it was Ohio State.

It was Ohio State, yeah.

It was like, and they were in, like, a huge amount of trouble. Like, because, and here are these guys, they're putting their bodies on the line. Their entire life is football. Like, you know, you play college football, and this goes for, I'm sure, most college sports, but I think particularly with football. you you almost can't be a student because of the amount of time that the football requires and yet you're not allowed to get any remuneration for that i mean again that's changing a little bit but still you just get this weird world where or like where you can't go into the nba until you've either done a year of college or you've waited a year and that's all just to try to keep ncaa basketball propped up right like a lot of the really good players would like to just go from high school to the nba that's like saying you can't go work at mcdonald's until you've done one year of college or waited a year after graduation it's just we've it's weird that we have these specific rules around this one thing but anything else i want to do if i'm mowing lawns or flipping burgers or anything else i mean as soon as someone's like you're good at this you can come do it i'll pay you x amount of dollars that's all fine for everything that's not sports

yeah i mean you understand i mean obviously you can see where this came from how these sports evolved like before before the major sports leagues were just you know huge billion dollar machines trying to protect kids from you know like losing perspective when they're going to school and you know like all of all of the obvious reasons why years and years and years ago we were trying to separate the idea of cash and our children when it came to their talents early on, right? It sort of sounds like what they've done, and I'm really getting into territory that I do not understand, so I'm just teeing this up, and you can swat it down or hit a grand slam with it, Luke. But did I tell you, by the way, that I am operating on almost no sleep? I went to bed at like 2.30 last night. I went to a Rainier's game yesterday down in Tacoma, went into extra innings didn't get back until late anyway um uh anyway point is i'm dumb i'm tired but also i was going to say it sort of sounds like what they've done with these new laws that open up um possibilities for players to get paid in some way it also sounds like what they've done though really is open up the floodgates for people around those players not unlike these prep schools to get rich around these players and hopefully the players get some money too but it also just sounds like they've opened up the floodgates of of more corruption in a certain way.

Well, I kind of think those people were already potentially getting rich. The people in the orbit of the... I mean, that's where most of... A lot of...

of the scandals that have unfolded have been these people that kind of go around identifying promising athletes and then sort of getting money to shuttle or funnel those promising athletes towards particular programs. It just seems to me like the rule should be you can play a sport professionally if you're good enough to do it. If you're not, go play college. The colleges should at the very least be able to pay the players like they're doing a job because they're doing a job. but we have to also deal with the fact that college sports will just be less good we can't force the best players i mean this is also the thing in baseball though right sorry we're just doing sports talk now but like in baseball lots of the best players they just get drafted they don't go play college baseball which is also part of why college baseball is not as big of a thing as college football is like you can't go directly from high school to the nfl that's why college football still has the audience it has because the best players are forced to go play for lsu Or Auburn or something Not the UW We've somehow managed to stay to the side We've stepped off of the winning continuum

As a program That's not true, Luke I know that a lot of students pledge Their loyalty to the UW And then they change their mind later But still, they do pledge Yes, well, it's the boundless W

Yes But anyway, I just think that the whole system Is kind of screwy And I think it ends up, you know, really And I just feel like there's got to—I don't have the exact solution, but it seems like there should be a better way than made-up high schools playing each other where 20-year-olds are playing and getting destroyed by a different high school that exists basically as a sort of wing of a sports management agency. That just doesn't—I mean, that's a long way from old Friday Night Lights, whatever it was we were seeing.

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not from a female

all right uh an email or v-mail before we get out of here before you go back to bed what do we got

here i know i did think i was like well i can do the show do a little bit more work taking a nap then i forgot i got a doctor's appointment i would be lying if i told you it's like a physical therapy appointment i was tempted i was like is it too late to cancel but i was like that's not me that's not you do it on zoom uh no she's got to bend my finger back and forth a lot um let's see here what oh well here uh do we have yeah we have time i'm gonna play a longer voicemail today this is a um well this is just a whole journey i'll let katie explain it herself hey guys i'm calling

because i just solved a mystery and i think you would find it really interesting can i just take

a moment and say, if you happen to have a pen and paper around you, you might want to take notes on this because it's a complicated story.

Hey guys, I'm calling because I just solved a mystery and I think you would find it really interesting. This is listener Katie and I had three packages stolen from my apartment building. Now, a little background on my apartment building. It is one, two, three, four, five units total. No doorman, no package room. Deliveries are typically left outside underneath our mailbox. Delivery people do not have a key to the locked building foyer. So, on Thursday, August 19th, three packages were stolen between the hours of 11.30 a.m. and 7 o'clock p.m. Two of the packages were clearly from clothing companies, and one of them, importantly, was an envelope.

Is this an Encyclopedia Brown mystery? I know. It's very. There's a lot of ins, a lot of outs. So, here's what I got. Three packages. The apartment building has five units. The delivery was on August 19th. The things went missing sometime between 11.30 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. The delivery people are not allowed to bring the stuff actually into the building. Two of the items appeared to be clothing, I think.

One of them, importantly, was an envelope of photo prints with do not bend photos enclosed printed on the outside. So the packages are stolen on Thursday. I run all over the building looking for them, notify building management. My packages have been stolen. It really sucks. so over the weekend on saturday august 21st i installed a camera in the foyer of our building which is visible to the outside to deter future theft of more packages yeah yeah yeah yeah

is she the super of the building you're allowed to just install a camera in your building i mean i listen i'm i'm a proactive fella so i'm into this but i'm just surprised that somebody wasn't like the management wasn't like let's do less surveillance in the common areas of the building unless it's by the management.

Yeah, I know. I'm curious about that, too. She also says she put it there to deter, not to gather more evidence. So it must be kind of maybe an auspicious camera, or it's like something that she wants people to see so that they know that they're on camera. Right. Got it.

This is where it gets interesting. So my camera works perfectly Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

But on Tuesday, around 11 o'clock, it stops recording. Now, we were busy Tuesday, so it wasn't until today, Wednesday, August 25th, that I have a chance to go around to the front of the building and look at the foyer where the camera is around 7 a.m. I discover that the camera has been broken. It's in two pieces on the floor of the foyer. Now, remember, the last recording was yesterday, Tuesday, August 24th, around 11 o'clock a.m. So when I enter the foyer to examine the broken camera, I discovered the envelope containing the missing photos. This envelope, which was allegedly delivered on Thursday, along with the other two packages that had gone missing, has now magically returned to the foyer somehow. So we are presented with the possibility of a simple solution and the complex. The simple solution, my packages, were stolen by an unknown thief on Thursday, August 19th, and the envelope containing the photos was simply delivered late. But according to the tracking code on the envelope of photos, it was indeed delivered on Thursday, 1130 a.m. And so we must consider the complex. The possibility that someone with access to the locked building foyer realized after stealing my packages, that the envelope of photos was of no value to them and returned it, breaking the camera to prevent being identified. And why wouldn't they want to be identified if they are indeed a stranger to me? Very curious indeed. Anyway, I thought you guys might enjoy this little saga. Curious what you would do in my situation.

Power out. Okay, here's a question I have. This is great.

We can do this the simple way or the complicated way, Andrew.

Do we think that the camera stopped recording the moment it was broken? And if that's the case, wouldn't we have footage up to the moment that the camera was broken? And in that case, we would be able to identify this person or at least see if it was like somebody hiding behind a mask.

Unless the person was able to approach the camera from behind. In other words, if it's I don't I need to know more about how the camera was installed. was it like my guess is it wasn't like screwed into the wall because again that's probably where the management would say hold on but maybe it was placed sitting on like a table or something you know what i mean like that we had one of those up in bellingham that was just kind of like it would i could move it around actually it's snake cam so my guess is that when the listener says she installed a camera she probably placed a camera somewhere near an outlet and plugged it in so i need to know was it possible for someone to approach this camera without the camera seeing it you have approached it effectively from behind and then snapped it in two yes so in that in that

scenario this person at some point just going about their innocent looking business sees the camera take makes a mental note goes to their apartment and then says i'm gonna go break that camera but i gotta sneak up on it in a way that it can't see me break it and then return the

evidence in this case the photos you've got to yeah it really the the big thing here is to what's the last footage that was saved you know to the cloud from the camera that'll tell and even if it's just somebody walks by and you can see on their face a look of recognition of oh shit there's a camera there because another thing that might have happened was the person who stole the photos realize like they saw the camera and they don't know if that camera's been there the whole time or if it was new, sometimes you'll notice something like, oh, has that always been there? Because otherwise, why do you break the camera? I feel like you just if you notice the camera and you think oh shit, I better bring those photos back, and again I'm imagining a world where you can bring the photos back without being detected you just throw them back down. The breaking of the camera makes me think that somebody is trying to destroy evidence from a previous thing, like maybe they thought oh, this camera's been here the whole time it caught me, I'm gonna, which by the way isn't how any of that works, breaking the camera should not stop you know everything that the camera was recording should have been going to the cloud

anyway yeah yeah that almost seems like a trope in an old movie or something like break the camera well we've already got the recording though in the back room um anyway if katie has any updates you know how to reach us i'd like to know if there's any more clues any more evidence any closure to

this case yes please keep us updated katie i love it and spare no detail so much info in there we of the dates, the times. Also, how were the photos? Were they nice? Did they turn out the way you wanted?

Also, let us know if you have any idea who took our magnetic signs off the Delica van because that's another mystery that is still not quite solved. Although, I think it's more solved than I want to admit, frankly.

I'll tell you what, Andrew. When I drive down I-5, I still, because I actually go down that road fairly often these days, I'm still looking over in the side to see if I see our special podcast delivery signs. You know, I know those signs probably did blow off. I'm convinced now that they blew off because of the wind. I've heard from enough experts on this. But I still think somebody stole those fog light covers off the front of the Delica.

They did. Those absolutely were stolen off, which is weird because, like, those are a very specific item. But, no, they were on the Delica in Arizona. When it was picked up by the towing person, I took photos of it right before so that the owner would know kind of what condition this thing was in. in at least from the exterior uh so we didn't get in trouble for for something happening to it and i guess i'm glad i did yeah because they're on there in that photo and when it arrived here in oregon again those were missing yeah that's a bummer yeah it's a bummer all right what do you

want to go um what should we go oh well there's this is a little bit rockin this is a little bit rockin but there is a super chunk song called package thief that seems kind of perfect i love

super chunk good let's do this then okay all right thanks for listening everyone we're gonna be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you uh i might be in minnesota or i might be here in the nest broadcast center it's tbd right oh that's right i'm excited i was supposed to be going to minnesota but now i've got a got a few calls i gotta make afterwards because the story might be evolving so anyway uh we'll see you from somewhere tomorrow until then have a great wednesday stay safe and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

We'll be right back.

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