Muse

Hey Luke and Andrew, this is Patrick from Portland. I'm calling. I want to give you an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this new TV show that I'm creating. It's for kids, but it's about the mafia. It's called Yo Gabagool. Call me back. You're going to want to get in on this. Power out.

you're here to make friends making friends is the name of this show he taught me how to fish skip stones whittle he was like my best friend you know and my worst enemy i've never felt this

way about anybody before not even bobby sherman who i completely and totally adore but now i realize that that was just puppy love and that this is the real thing well um i think i'm looking

forward to cracking up. I hope I can like, you know, totally crack up. So I haven't like

totally cracked up in a long time. This is literally the most exciting thing I've ever

seen. TBTL. Well, all right. Hello. Good morning and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets my name is luke burbank i am your host you gotta eat that microphone coming to you for the first time from hollywood studios here in portland oregon this is special this is special that's right i am broadcasting from my new apartment here in portland it is starting to feel sort of like home bring it back home baby bring it back home i have most of the stuff out of my old place now it's here now i gotta deal with it but just having it's weird like the little things that make a home or an apartment feel comfortable like i i just brought the garbage cans over like the garbage can that goes in the bathroom so for the whole weekend that i was here if i was using a kleenex or shaving or something i had to walk from the bathroom and throw whatever garbage I had out in the kitchen garbage. It just felt weird. So, like, I got a garbage can now. And let's see what else. In this room, I've got my little various TBTL posters and the like just to remind me that this is, in fact, a real thing. Oh, I also came very close to electrocuting myself this morning.

Oh, I'm afraid I just blew myself.

That is not an exaggeration. I'll tell you what happened with that coming up in a minute. here on episode 3545 at a collector series let the fun begin i've also rearranged some things here in my workspace and what you just heard that little pause was me having to figure out where on this desk my show sheet is because it's moved by like a foot from the the nest broadcast center and um and like i'm so used to everything being exactly where it is uh that for something to move by a foot it threw me off anyway here we are we got this this is going to be a great show because we're going to finally talk about this facebook news from last week about their new

parent company meta my face your face instant face go go talk to whoever you want that does

that stuff i don't know so they changed uh they've created a new kind of overarching company called drunk people are so meta and they are really intent on trying to get us to all live in the metaverse um so we'll try to figure out what exactly that is and then speaking of the mega verse or at least a mega development uh the university of california santa barbara there's this huge dorm that's going in it's very controversial people are quitting the architecture board over it uh so we'll talk about that and we'll do some emails and vmails plus we'll chat with this guy the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships he has invented something he calls taco tuesday i might have tacos when i go home i'm not quite sure yet and he's going to be celebrating it tonight with the best of them he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now from the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington good morning my friend good morning luke i have something on my mind that

taco tuesday reminded me of but i feel it's too sports related it's one thing leads to another leads to another, and then we'll be doing a no-point conversion. And then

we'll just be talking about why it was that they only targeted Travis Kelsey in the last two minutes of the show. Kids and fantasy. Fantasy football.

Let's just skip over whatever my brain was doing there, spawned by a reference to Taco Tuesday, and instead, let's hear about what's going on there. So you have internet.

Where's my bell? I do. You have internet. Just got the internet. That's a good start. Yeah, that was huge. So So we're getting a little bit of a late start on the show today because the only appointment window I could get from the Internet folks here was this morning, the window being 10 a.m. to noon.

And me being a time optimist, I said, OK, so we'll dial it like 1015. And you being a time realist, you were like, think about what would have to happen for you to have functioning Internet at 1015 a.m. The guy would have to walk in here. He would have to fix it immediately and then leave. And then you dial me like it was not realistic. So you said, let's try for 11, which was a much more reasonable guess. Funnily enough, it almost was the scenario that I had been dreaming of. Yeah. The guy shows up, he walks into the apartment, and so what would have been happening was the television was working fine, the cable TV and all that. It's all the same system, but I could not get the internet working, and I kept taking this modem and plugging it into different ports in the apartment and on the phone with all kinds of people. I was talking about this a lot yesterday on the show. So he said, is there a panel somewhere in the apartment? He goes, maybe it's in the master bedroom, I don't know And he said, oh, actually, it's right here, it's in the office, it's in the closet And he opened it, and sitting there was Like a coaxial cable coming in And then a splitter It had three things on it Where you could attach cables And wouldn't you know, Andrew, there was one of these Coaxial cables that was just not screwed in So he screwed it in And then the internet came on He was like, I think that was your problem That took under four minutes I said, is this your easiest call of the day? He said, this might be the easiest call I've ever been on why would it have been unscrewed i asked him that he goes i don't know maybe somebody got confused now here's the thing and this is where i take this short and reasonably interesting story to a longer and less interesting place he did end up futzing around for a while uh because i guess there's something you know with xfinity who he works for where there is a certain frequency of internet that i am supposed to be getting in this apartment and i was getting too much internet i The frequency was off. It was too strong. I know. I was like, hey, have a little extra speed. If a few extra MBPSs fell off the truck, let me get my beak wet. Sure, I'll have fast internet. But I don't think it's about that. He said, well, the problem is it won't let me basically close out this service call until the frequency is exactly right. um and like he's not allowed to leave or at least the the system will not will not recognize that he's fixed the problem until my the harmonics of my internet connection are vibrating at exactly the right pitch so he has to call his boss then he has to put some kind of a like a reducer on on uh you know the the the internet as is in my apartment then that didn't work so he had to go to the like bowels of the apartment building and find the source and slow it down there i can i slow might be the wrong maybe that's the wrong way to describe it although when he said your signal is too strong all i hear all i heard from that was i'm getting the internet too quickly

which just seems great which just seems like what we would all want well strong doesn't mean fast

those are different that's right i don't want to i don't want to get into this because i don't really know what i'm talking about either and i'm already imagining the emails just flooding in to explaining uh the the technical side of this to us which i probably won't read um but i remember I remember one time I was having issues with Wi-Fi in my Wallingford apartment, and it was a very—I promise you, I promise you, dear listener, we are not going to do two shows in a row where we just complain about Xfinity and Comcast. But it was one of those things where I was having some sort of issue with my internet that I had to call them, like, three or four times to convince them this was a real thing, that I'd gone through all the troubleshooting, like, yes, there is something funky going on. And so they sent somebody out who discovered nothing. I called back, and they actually, like, up-leveled it somehow. I don't remember all the ins and outs of this, so you're welcome.

They escalated you to somebody who really knew what they were doing.

Yes, they ended up sending somebody else out who was more on, like, some sort of a higher level of technician. And I was kind of shocked by that. And this person came out. It was actually two people, one of whom seemed like they might have been in training mode. And the person who was in charge seemed really rude to the person in training mode. and it made me very uncomfortable. But they did figure it out. They're like, there's something going on in your neighborhood. And you're right, it had something to do with frequency and interference. And I think that probably the thing that they're talking about with you has something to do with maybe signals interfering and actually creating more problems, either for you or somewhere else. Even though strong sounds like a good thing, it could be a bad thing if it becomes interference. Absolutely.

And the guy was able to get it all worked out. and uh now i'm in the proper frequency and i'm getting the internet and uh sounds good i mean

we have are you hardwired in or is this wi-fi we're talking on no i am i'm etherneted in

my dude i can't really set up my workstation properly i like to call it a workstation so it sounds like this is a real job yeah i'm gonna start doing that i i uh i have my uh sit stand desk and all of that going but i can't fully set it all up and get all the cord management going which by the way that'll be a good two to three hours probably of just i mean there oh andrew i thought you'd say two or three

hours of conversation on the show and i was like licking my chops minimum andrew i thought of you

on i can't remember if it was friday or saturday but whatever the day was that i actually i moved this desk with dftb because it's very heavy but then i still had all of the you know cables and cords and wires and things associated with i got two computers here uh something called a mix pre which is a digital audio interface i've got ring lights a mixing board i'm surrounded by clocks as you know there's a lot and i thought of you because it was just a rat's nest of cables and i just took that whole rat's nest I picked it up like a big ball and I just put it in a box and I just brought it over here and I thought if Andrew could see this rat's nest going into this box you would have fainted you would have clutched your pearls so hard um but my plan was and this is what I'm doing was then when I take the rat's nest out of the box and I start to reassemble it then I will go through and straighten everything out and untangle everything and get it all kind of looking nice and managed and pretty and i've got you know i went and bought a bunch of um command not hooks but just these little things that you can kind of run cable through that are like loops that kind of hold everything tight so i'm gonna do all of that but i can't do that until this window that i stare out of now and you know i like a good stare it's a big deal to me and this window that's going to be my new viewpoint it's it's certainly not nearly as expansive as uh as the nest broadcast studio although ironically i'm now looking at a nest in a tree so i i'm not in the nest broadcast studio but i now have a good view of some nests in these beautiful old trees in this neighborhood um but they have a screen on this window it's a i'm standing in front of a giant window it's probably four feet by not eight feet but maybe four feet by six feet but it has a screen on it so that if i were to open the window i guess bugs wouldn't come in But I'm never going to open this window because it would be kind of loud. And the screen, it sort of obscures the view. It's like you're looking. It's like you're squinting, you know. It's like it's not as vivid as I want it to be. And so I have a work order in. These people at this apartment building are probably already like, what is this guy's deal? He's here one day, and he's like, can you please take this screen off my window? But I can't get this whole thing all set up because the person who comes and takes the screen off is going to have to, like, I'm going to have to move this desk is my point. So they can get to it and do it. So once that screen is handled, then I can kind of, like, move this desk. I can get it all set up. I can lock down all my cords and cables. And then, Andrew, I will finally start doing some quality broadcasting.

Okay, sounds good. That's when the show is going to finally just really sing, right?

They always say, you know, it takes about 3,550 or so shows to – you know what I just realized? What is the Malcolm Gladwell thing, 10,000 hours? Yeah. I think it's 10,000. Do you want me to look it up? Well, if you think about it, do you think we've done 10,000 hours of shows? Because 3,500 shows, well, that would be if we just did one hour per show. Obviously, that pencils out to 3,545 hours. But we have done some longer shows. I guess the shows would have to be three hours each to even get close.

Yeah, exactly, on a pretty regular basis.

Well, that explains a lot. We haven't done our 10,000 hours yet, Andrew. that's that's once we hit that point think about how good this show is oh my god that i can't i

almost can't i almost can't contain myself thinking about how wonderful i gotta say yesterday's show i mean i kind of alluded to it a second ago um and by the way before i even say this i'm talking about me here don't take this the wrong way please don't take this personally but like yesterday i gotta say was one of those shows where i was thinking about it later in the day i'm just like i just hope i hope that's not the first show that somebody lands on not that we don't have shows like that every now and then where we just need to gripe about what's going on in our life but i'm just like i want to bring joy to the world today because i feel like somebody who's tuning into tbtl for the first time yesterday is just like so this is a podcast about two guys complaining about xfinity like that's that would that's a that's been covered you know and so i was a little i was a little bit uh cringy about and i told and again i told the same stories that you know i've told a million times on this show about the specific experiences i've i've had with xfinity and i was just like oh man we gotta we gotta bring we gotta bring the nose up on the negativity train today which i think we're doing so far i'm proud absolutely

i'm feeling very good i got a great night's sleep last night i'm feeling uh rested refreshed i'm Again, it's why. how much um not having the internet makes one feel cut off from the world i mean my cell phone worked but it's not the same trying to find things out or like schedule stuff i've just you know i've got a lot of a lot of stuff going on particularly related to the move and when you can't just kind of like open your your laptop and start like typing in searches for things you're kind of on your phone and i don't think i have the greatest cell service in this little particular neighborhood I'm in. So I did feel like a little bit cut off from the information of the world for not having the internet. So that is nice to have that handled. Also, this today, Andrew, could be a podcast about drama in real life and survival under extremely dangerous circumstances. I speak of the experience I just had with the dryer here in my apartment. So when I tried to run the dryer over the weekend, Well, I ran the washing machine. That was fine. And then I threw all the wet laundry into the dryer, and then I turned it on, and then as soon as I hit start, it gave me the letters LF, which I thought was from, let's fricking go, and then the G is just implied.

Implied, yeah, sure.

What I figured out was that was saying lint filter, I think. Oh, yeah. And it would not run. So I take the lint filter out. There's not a speck of lint on it. and so i'm like oh man this is just like maybe this is a setting thing or something so um now after like a day goes by so i call the apartment folks and i'm like hey the dryer's being weird maybe could you have somebody take a look at it and they're like guess what they said they were like uh well we contract with the appliance doctor that was the person who came out and fixed the dishwasher in my old place clearly the appliance doctor runs this town when it comes to Fixing appliances in apartment buildings But they said they may be out Towards the end of the week and I thought well Okay but I have a Entire load of wet laundry now that's just Sitting in the dryer there's no smell That I like less than that Smell of laundry That sat in the dryer without being Dried for a little too long

You get sour laundry we've talked about

I feel like that's the smell of a single man Like in my times Of running into that it's always been uh an adult single male who was not totally you know not to overly gender it but just like that's been my experience it's usually like millhouse's dad would probably have that kind of laundry situation going on because maybe he just didn't know uh that you got to kind of be on it so anyway uh this morning i was like i bet you i can fix this problem i mean i have to be as as quick-witted as an appliance ambulance repair person so i was like lint filter lint filter well maybe it just got confused because i know the lint filter is empty so maybe i just

need to unplug it and replug it that's okay good i almost wanted to interrupt you there i was going to say very first thing like this is you know could be a sensor or something it's just misreading the situation always unplug and plug it back in except for the fact that this is a washer dryer

that it's like the dryer is on top of the washer yep because it's in a closet stacked and i i go i sort of get into the closet and i peer behind the washer and dryer and it is a very narrow amount of space and it's also the plug is one of those i think it's a 220 i'm horrible with electrical but you know it's not a standard like it's not like what you would plug yeah uh whatever a

computer into it's probably round with those weird yes with those three prongs prongs coming

yeah not tongs yeah and um and so i i think well maybe i can just kind of move the washer and dryer like i can kind of just rock them so they're i create a little more space back there and i try that and it's not possible turns out those two things together are very heavy heavier than i can just kind of like shimmy or maneuver out and you got wet laundry in there right well that also wasn't helping so then although now at this point it's like mostly dry so we've now crossed that river so it's like these this laundry is gonna have to get rewashed there's just no two ways about it so i think well maybe there's just enough room for me to pull this out so i get back there and i start wiggling this out and again because it's not the standard it's not a typical plug-in it's very in there it's a very kind of burly plug that kind of you know the plug that we use for a dryer and so i'm kind of i'm sort of maneuvering and maneuvering it but i have to switch over to my left hand because it's i can get further in there with my left hand based on how everything is positioned and i'm like okay it's almost out and i'm rocking it and i guess my finger must have slipped down onto the thing the plug which was at that point partially plugged in and partially unplugged and andrew when i tell you that i let out a yelp talk about the yelp review of a lifetime it was just like Have you been have you been shocked like that in your life at any point?

When I was a kid, once or twice, I remember it happening and being very scared by it. And I'm still not exactly sure what happened that Thanksgiving when I had a bunch of equipment in my kitchen.

Oh, yes. I asked you this. And yet I remember we were recording a TVTL.

Yeah, but remotely. Right. You were in your kitchen in Bellingham and I was in my kitchen in Seattle. But we were trying to record remotely. But I think maybe using like some sort of I don't know. it was before everybody was on zoom but we were like whatever we were just talking remotely down the line so it was a somewhat complicated setup um and at one point i can't remember if we were seeing each other or not but yeah i went to touch the stove and i don't know if something was not grounded i i'm hesitating here because i'm hoping that it might have been something that just shocked me in the moment but really it was just static electricity but in the moment it did not feel

like that it felt like a very strong charge this thing my whole arm went like i basically started break dancing like involuntarily like it just went like like all the way through my arm my shoulder is still a little sore oh god yeah by the way i'm a superhero now just so you know yeah see through walls so i guess that's the plus side but um i just went i can't even exactly reproduce the sound i made but it was just like pure animal i mean animalistic it was completely animalistic it was and then i was thinking like that's a lot of current like i was really lucky that that wasn't worse yeah because it's not like again that was not a standard outlet that would also not be great but you know most of us as a kid you know you probably stick a fork in there at some point because you're a child and you're trying to figure out the world like i've had that kind of thing happen as a little kid but i was like i wonder if that would have been like if i would have i don't know somehow made more direct contact or not been able to pull my arm back or whatever like that could have been a bad scene because that's a lot that's a lot of current but anyway that is really scary man it was super scary so now i'm just like standing there and i'm like what do i do like this thing is like halfway pulled out uh i want to finish the job because i want to try to see if i can reset this but i'm also now terrified to reach back in there and touch any of this sort of apparatus and while i'm sitting there considering my options i look and i realize there's a different lint filter like well i don't know that it's a lint filter there's just this plastic like a triangle of plastic that's on the outside of the dryer that i let go what's that thing and i push it and it's like an additional lint basket uh filter thing so i take that out and i clean that out and i put it back in and i'm like maybe this is the key and i turn the dryer back on and i get lf again and i'm just like i'm so dispirited so then i take that that lint filter out again and i realized that behind it there's another screen a screen that you can't pull out it's just built into the dryer and there's like two pieces of lint on there they're not huge like i think of the lint filter being full as like you have a mohair sweater in there like that's what i remember from you know being a kid or whatever it's like we'd on our old dryer we had as a kid it's like you pull that long kind of rectangular lint filter out and that would be like three inches of lint all through so that to me seems like a problematic amount anyway i take these two little fuzz balls off of there and i put it back in and wouldn't you know it works that was the lint that was triggering the filter now the problem is the power

plug-in is 80 unplugged behind this yeah and it was originally right or no no you you it was fully plugged in and then you fully plugged it and then and now you electrocuted yourself while you were trying to plug it back and yeah so okay so now what so now i fixed the problem of the lint

filter but i've created a new problem a bigger problem which again i'm like legitimately very worried about putting my hand back there because i just yeah don't don't want to recreate what i just did um and so i go to the kitchen well first i try to kind of press on it and i can't get enough leverage to push it back in because of the tight space so i go to the kitchen i get a plastic spatula and i'm trying to think it's plastic it can't conduct electricity so that's good right like i don't know if this is no kids if you're listening don't take my advice on any of this because i'm not sure how this works but i was thinking plastic's got to be good because plastic does not conduct electricity so that's will at least be helpful plus it's flat so it's like i You can get it in there, and I can kind of angle it. And so I reach in there with this plastic spatula, and I kind of do some maneuvering in it. It sort of pushes it in a little bit enough that I can then get my hand back there, and then I slam it all the way in. Oh, okay. And I'm happy to tell you, Andrew, I did not shock myself the second time, and the dryer is working. And it is secure. The internet is working.

It's securely plugged in back there. There's no concerns about that.

It is all the way plugged in. But my arm, I'll tell you what, my arm and my shoulder are still a little tender from that incident.

This could have been very different, man. No joke. It could have been very bad. I have never seen this.

Or I don't know anybody who's experienced it, but you always hear about people who, like, get electrocuted so bad that you can't let go of it. And you're dealing with a big metal unit here. Like, I'm just picturing you. Not to turn it into a joke, but I remember Carrie describing my situation as, like, picturing me as a cartoon cat getting electrocuted where you can see the skeleton inside of me. Like, I just, but in all seriousness, like, I just, oh, God, just the thought of you. like you said this is more than your usual current i think and the thought of you getting stuck to

this thing alone in the apartment is i know i'm at this age now too where you know i've always heard the joke about people being like you know if something happened to me well you know how long would it take people to find me or whatever it's like i'm at the age and we're also between complaining about xfinity and talking about aging we've really been on a hot streak lately but i really did have the thought huh that would be an interesting way to go and how long would it take for like becca is in sedona right now um i mean at some point you would have probably been like something's up with this dude but it's like you know when you live by yourself and you have a close call with electrocuting yourself with a dryer you're like i gotta be more careful yeah

yeah that's scary i will say this and i'm gonna really um lean into even more of what you were saying before about being um you know just old men because this is another i feel like this is to be another very cliche thing to say and and this is even more annoying because it's coming from me and I don't know anything about like I'm not there are people who know a lot about you know how to repair a washing machine or the ins or the outs and those types of things I'm actually not very handy when it comes to those things because of lack of experience I think that I like toying around with stuff and troubleshooting but I will say this I feel like this is the problem with these smart machines good lord i just feel like abe simpson here but like i know that you're describing the really cushy um you've left the the lint catcher in there for way too long and you finally pull it out and you're like oh man there's too much lint on this we should have emptied it uh weeks ago like fire hazard it is a fire hazard and you have to not do that you have to be slightly more responsible but also can't we just remember to change the lint catchers like when you have everything yeah being super censored well then you have another potential problem in the chain and it's the sensor can go berserk you know like it's just it just creates so much more problems by everything being like a smart washer or whatever let's just let's all just agree to change our lint filters and just let the robots do something else let's assign the robots some

other task well the washer i had or the dryer rather had in my old place had its own complication which was it thought that it knew when the clothes were dry based on their weight. I don't know if you've ever used a dryer that does this now. This is, I was actually relieved. I don't think my new dryer does this, but it won't let you just dry the clothes for as long as you want them to want to. It, it senses when it thinks that the weight has changed or the something it's measuring it somehow. When it thinks the clothes are dry, it tells you it. It just stops. But sometimes the clothes aren't dry. They're kind of damp still a little bit. It just got it wrong, but it's real how from 2001 like i can't do that luke no i just need you to dry this stuff a little bit more i'm sorry it's dry well it's really not i'm holding i'm the one who has to wear it i'm sorry my sensors tell me it's dry luke like and i could i thought that dryer was broken too for the same reason because it just kept stopping and then i realized finally oh it's stopping because

it has assessed that the laundry is dry now you don't know me dryer you don't know how dry i like my clothes or how warm i like them or if i'm just i listen or if i'm just tumbling something to get

the cat hair off of it again like thank you i grew up in a house where it was not uncommon for me to be late for school and i'm grabbing because you know when well let's just say we had a fairly improvised childhood it was not uncommon for me to be grabbing some underwear out of the dryer that was not fully dry pulling it on pulling my pulling my jeans on going to school the underwear drying while at school my booty be itching like there's not a more uncomfortable feeling than your underwear drying on your body as you're at school so i would like as handy hains would say that was before you found the golden ticket yes it must have as as andy that is it must have been amazing

for your family when you guys found that golden ticket that is one of the that is one of the smallest details of a childhood discomfort that i've ever heard that's awful oh i'm not saying

it was like a regular occurrence but i would say it's happened to me it happened to me more than once as a child and again there's seven kids it's a lot of kids and it's there's a lot going on so i don't i don't want to i'm not trying to drag my mom sure but it was like yeah in my adult life I'm very committed to having my underwear be fully dry. Yeah.

I feel like that's a modest request. At least to start. I like my underwear to be dry when I start the day. I just took a sip of coffee. What happens after that is between me and my underwear. But the dryer does not need to be a part of that conversation until later.

Oh, by the way, one more thing.

This song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the world.

I love that this new place I'm in has a coffee machine in the lobby that is for real. And you can just go down there. I'm drinking some coffee. They have decaf in there, Andrew.

Are you still sticking with the decaf pretty –

Mostly. I have not been 100% on that, but I have – when it's offered, I will go decaf, and it's great. Now, Becca used it and said – because, you know, it'll make you a latte. It'll make you any kind of coffee you want, but she said that the milk kind of thing was a little funky because it's probably not like milk. Like milk, it's not like somebody got a thing of milk delivered and then they're pouring it into the coffee machine. It's probably some kind of liquid that's in a bag, you know, that's like shelf stable. But because I just like regular coffee with a little dash of Splenda in it, which they also have down there, Andrew. It's so perfect. There's like paper cups. It's just get a little paper cup of black coffee, throw a little Splenda in it. I'm good to go. So I'm really liking it. I'm trying to, as I was mentioning, I think yesterday on the show, So I'm trying to really embrace the things that I like more about my new place because there are a few things that are less bougie than the old place I was in. And, again, I liked being able to kind of look out on the streets of Portland. That was fun for me. But I'm also trying to be very appreciative of the things that are improvements here. And free coffee, 247, is a big improvement.

Yeah, definitely. I think this place is better, generally speaking. I think so, too. I like the service, too. I'm still thinking about – was it Molly? who's your uh maybe you didn't give a name yesterday i don't have to put you on the spot but whoever the person wendy the person who is helping you out uh like kind of you know getting you settled and everything i could get a good vibe there it just sounds so much better great

totally and you know like i don't know why this is a big deal but like i think i'm gonna sort of put all my photos and pictures up now you know like pictures of addy and and like i said various tbtl things that picture of you and i in the boat oh yeah um there's something about getting the walls a little less bare that also will kind of make me feel like I've turned a corner with this place so and I think I'm gonna cook some kind of meal tonight like I'm excited to just get to like live here so I'm gonna get all the pictures put up I'm gonna like probably make me some pasta watch some Chris Hayes and just kind of settle in so yeah I'm feeling good today on this Tuesday have a good coat hook moment that's exactly right oh I need to get a coat hook too yeah you really do you really do one thing that's weird and then we need to take the break sorry i'm just talking about the the minutiae of this but like so there's one bathroom in this apartment and it's giant it's the oddest use of space because like i have to i'm gonna have to buy furniture for inside the bathroom i would think that it would be a better use of space to have like a larger kitchen or like a larger bedroom i don't need that much space in the bathroom i need to have like a toilet that works and a shower which i do and that's about the amount of space i need this thing it literally has like an alcove in it it's the it's very curious design and it's almost like i guess i have to go get something that i then put there like which feels weird bathroom furniture and this is not a huge apartment it's actually much smaller than the one i was living in but for some reason the bathroom is enormous yeah that's a um that's

a bummer like a nice expansive bathroom i've i've been in bathrooms that are too small which isn't great but also but wasted space in the bathroom especially in this kind of circumstance is uh is less than ideal which actually just gets me thinking and i'm not trying to push us not trying to push us out of this segment but i a lot of the things we just talked for us to push out a lot of the things that we just talked about all kind of relate a little bit to um this story about this megadorm that has a lack of windows and i've just been thinking about it since i read it uh earlier this morning and so um the idea of use of space and choices one might make as a college student about windows versus space versus roommates i want to talk about all that stuff too okay good

yeah let's go to this break and then we come back we'll talk about that we'll talk about meta and we'll do some emails and emails so stay with us this here is tbtl all right let's thank some donors of the day these are the people making today's episode possible with their monthly support for tbtl talking about jennifer nutter in ranch

Rancho, Palos Verdes, California. You know what that is, Andrew? That's south of cheese. That's south of cheese right there. Cheese being, I don't even know what we established cheese was. Maybe like Santa Monica Boulevard or Venice Boulevard or something. Some sort of generally east-west point down there in SoCal. And, of course, I lived north of it up in Echo Park. and my buddy Cotter lived south of it down in RPV, Rancho Palos Verdes, an absolutely beautiful

part of the world. You know, I don't like cheese, Luke, but it's okay because we can like different things according to the new TV show. Yes, we can! My new favorite song! Exactly. God, that was so adorable.

Thanks also to Deadly Patusik there in New Haven, Connecticut. Thanks, Deadly, for sticking with the program all these years. We appreciate you. Joseph Sullivan is in Seattle, Washington. I almost said Washington there, and I don't know where that came from. Although there is a contingent of Washingtonians who call it Washington. Like people from the state of Washington who call it Washington.

Yeah, because that to me seems more like, you know, I have family in Wheeling, West Virginia, and that seems more like an Appalachian thing. They would say, like, you know, get the worse cloth or what have you. I don't think of that as a Pacific Northwest thing.

But there are some old school people. And again, my experience is they're often from kind of more rural parts of the state. And they might call it Washington. I bet you, I don't know what Joseph calls it, but he is in the state of Washington in Seattle. Thanks, Joseph. Also, Mafio Appia Potty is in Vienna, Virginia. Always makes me hungry for a Vienna sausage.

Or a pretzel.

Is that associated with Vienna as well?

I thought so. Maybe it's just Germany. I don't know.

You know what I was thinking yesterday? We really, really need to get better with the vegetarian hot dog situation. Like, for all of the advances that we... I forget, who was I talking to about this yesterday? What was yesterday? Monday? yep time stands still andrew when you're in the middle of a move um i was talking to somebody about this and uh and just how like i really miss i love the the good snap of a hot dog of all the things that that are in the meat category that i kind of um you know that i would would not mind having on the occasion oddly enough hot dogs are pretty high on the list and it's they can't they have not figured out how to get the snap going and they really need to do that somebody get on that please maybe maybe um mafio apia potty in vienna virginia i mean it

seems like you're well you're well positioned to do it there if you're in vienna so yeah exactly

you're already in the sausage district yeah not to be confused with the sausage fest right hey look who it is barbara aerosmith is in indianola washington our old friend barb arrow babs i like

I call people named Barbara Babs. I don't know if they like it, though.

Mm-hmm. I think that Barbara could roll with it. Barbara has been a, I mean, we're talking, like, Barbara might be in the first 20, the batch of the first 20 10s.

The 20s of listeners.

Yes. Barbara was a very, very early adopter of the show, and so it's really fun to see Barbara's name on this list all these years later. Even if it's just because you forgot that this was auto-deducting, Barbara, that's fine. We'll take it.

Barbara's moved on to other podcasts at this point but that's okay. Absolutely. Nobody tell

Barbara. Yeah, right Danielle Gaudreau is in Nashua, New Hampshire Do you know this person?

I believe this is one of the lawyers we keep on retainer, but we're also actively suing, yes I believe this is Danny Lawyer number one, who is helping us sue Danny Lawyer number two, who is helping us sue Danny Lawyer number one. It's all a little bit complicated, but I'm still

optimistic that you and i are going to come out ahead on this has your podcast recently been sued for stealing someone else's intellectual property i fight for you i'm daniel gaudre the law offices of daniel gaudre law tigers and then there's an animated tiger yeah and then the phone number is like four four four four four four four that's right the last four is for i fight for you

oh hey one thing i wanted to um let me switch over i think that those are the six donors we wanted to uh thank today and also i i rarely do this but if you don't mind i'm gonna retroactively go back and thank listener theresa truex who we thanked recently on the show long time donor you probably recognize that name except we i do

Oh, I thought it was Trou. Exactly.

I thought we were going with a kind of like a French pronunciation of the X.

It's spelled T-R-U-E-X. I think it's okay for me to say that. Nobody stalked Teresa. But, yeah, we've been saying her name incorrectly for years and years, and she wrote a very, very nice email in saying, listen, I don't want to be kind of small about this, but I took my husband's last name, which was Truex, and I lost him a few years ago, and it's heartbreaking. and just to honor him let's like you know if you could maybe get the name right i'm like you know what and so i wrote back a really scathing email um as you do asking her how her podcast is but then i deleted it and i said it's not a small thing of course names are important so uh it's not a small thing at all to ask for that and of course i'm so sorry to hear about your loss and we will remember that your last name is truex teresa truex thanks for supporting tbto that's

actually like a much cooler pronunciation it is yeah exactly yeah like i mean that sounds i think i'm a budding superhero since my electrical incident but truex definitely sounds like like somebody who's got some kind of special powers yeah absolutely like maybe they're like they can tell when people are lying oh like that's their character and eternals yes truex oh truex is here truex knows when people are when people are not being completely honest yes now the thing is now

Now, it's on us now to remember this going forward, assuming that Teresa will continue to donate going forward, which I, you know, I can only hope that if we really continue to release long episodes about Comcast, we're good.

Andrew, I'm sorry, I'm not negging you, I'm not negging you, I'm not negging you, I promise you. No, I don't feel negged, I just want you, I want you to remember that we're not, we're like a third of our way to our 10,000 hours. We're mere babies. If there was a way to, if there was a way to actually, I mean, there probably is a way. If we could just figure out how many actual hours of TBTL we've done. I know we've tried to do some like back of the envelope stuff or back of the nap. Can you go with back of the napkin or back of the envelope?

I think I usually go, I picture a napkin. Because I picture people in a cocktail bar, like a small little round table. There's two people with a little lamp in the middle of it, not throwing off very much light. There might even be a jazz band playing on a small stage, and they're going over. They have an idea. They have an idea, and they're just going to go over some. We're just going to spitball here, and we're going to write some things down on the back of the napkin. The question is, why does it have to be the back? What's on the front? Aren't napkins usually blank on both sides? It just feels.

The rumors that the Space Needle was designed like that. What? Not the full design, but the original drawing. you imagine a couple of people they're probably having a drink and then somebody again it's a great question Andrew because the napkins probably blank on both sides but it's like they flip the nap they're so inspired they flip the napkin over and they sketch something out and then that becomes the kind of prototype for it because of the just that inspired moment now envelope

you picture a more business setting right like everybody's gathering to have a meeting but And you had the meeting in the conference room But then after the meeting ended About three people Like kind of hung back

I think of the envelope as being like at my house Like I just have some mail And I'm just But see that to me doesn't feel as inspired Like back of the envelope is more just like Okay I'm just writing on the other side of this thing Back of the napkin is like We're having a real brainstorm Anyway my quick back of the napkin We tried a quick back of the napkin On how many hours we've done of TBTL I guess my point in this is it would be really funny if we actually could do a show celebrating our 10,000th hour. Wow. If we are still doing this, I mean, I would guess it'd be at around episode 9,000 or something, which would be like 20 years from now.

Oh my goodness.

Is that right? I mean,

am I doing the, I'm trying to, I'm actually trying to do the math. I'm also trying to figure out like, is there a way to do this?

Like there are,

we have more interesting things to talk about, but I am just remembering that, you know, like when we transferred all of our files over from and if you're I assume you're counting the radio show here uh which you know I don't get to count those hours but the show does but remember we lost like all the hour threes of the radio show when they got transferred over but I now have tracked them down and they live somewhere online um but I have them on hard drives I mean I guess it is technically possible for me to take these hard drives I have where every existing show is there and like i guess i could hover my mouse over them and would it don't tell me how long each one is i'm not going to but i mean i'm just trying to figure out if it's even possible we have 20

years to figure this out yeah good point i would say the longer i wait the harder it gets well there'll be some kind of ai program for that by the time if we're doing this show 20 years from now I just laugh at the idea of us in our mid 60s still having this conversation. You know, yesterday I had to do the show from Becca's because the Internet wasn't set up here as well yet. And I was giving her a lift to the airport afterwards. And she said, you know, having just kind of like listened to half of that conversation for an hour, it struck me. I don't know how you guys have been doing this. I mean, I guess you and I, Andrew, what, seven, eight years, if not longer. And I was like, yeah, I know it is crazy that this is a job and that there are still people listening. But the idea of us doing this 20 years from now is it literally makes me laugh. Like it sounds it's comical as a premise. But if that happens, I'd say in year 18 from now. Right. So like you're like that'd be like year 29 of the show. In year 29 of the show, we will probably have to figure out how many hours. And then if we hit our 10,000 hours, you know, we should celebrate that. I'll tell you one thing.

I want to get a raise before that happens. just one ways at some point yeah you and me both thanks donors

hello and welcome to top story um you sound like you want to talk about this um megadorm so let's start there this was a story that i saw in the independent written by tyler hayden uh the santa barbara independent i believe by the way um the uh you university of california santa barbara's design review committee has apparently approved a project there at ucsb for something called munger hall munger hall is going to be an 11 story 1.68 million square foot structure that could house up to 4 500 students 94 of whom would not have windows in their small single occupancy bedrooms the idea was conceived by a 97 year old billionaire investor turned amateur architect named charles munger who donated 200 million dollars to build the building on the condition that his blueprints be followed exactly he maintains that the small living quarters would actually force the students out of their rooms and into larger common areas where they could interact and collaborate he also says the off-site prefabrication of standardized building materials would save on cost the entire proposal would actually cost something in the range of 1.5 billion dollars which is okay just that little detail that back of the envelope i guess that's more front of the envelope like i don't know how much did sofi stadium cost to build in la yeah i don't know i think that was a billion dollars when they built it 1.5 billion dollars for this dormitory that's shocking to me that it would cost more than a football stadium um but anyway that's what they're saying it will cost he's donating 200 million of it as long as they build it exactly as he specifies. I mean, I don't know this guy. Maybe he's awesome, but he sounds like sort of a crank to me. Like he's got this money and he probably believes very strongly in his architectural ideas. And so he's going to, as opposed to just like giving the money to the university because they need it to build more housing and saying, hey, it would be cool if you did this. He is making it a quid pro quo. I will give you the money if you build this thing exactly the way I'm telling you, you have to build it.

Yeah, I mean, there are so many different angles to the story. I don't even know where to begin because you have the money influence over true architecture here, right? So I think you said he's a Berkshire Hathaway chairman or vice chairman or something. He's just got very, very deep pockets and a passion for an industry that he's not trained in officially, which is architecture. and so now you have him pushing this through because he has so much money and is putting up so much money and you have um uh you know the reason this came to light and actually i want to give credit to the um although i don't have it in front of me oh here the the daily nexus is the student-run newspaper there at the university and they're the first person they're the first organization to report this and then it went to the santa barbara independent so cool cool on those student journalists um but you know this um architect who is supposed to be on the advisory committee quit over this said no i'm not i'm not doing this like i'm not going to rubber stamp this like everything is rubber stamped and like not only could you make the argument that this

is a bad guy by the way is named dennis mcfadden yeah a well-respected southern california architect uh with 15 years on the committee he has stepped down off of the design review committee because

he thinks it's such a bad idea right and so if this guy munger charlie munger does not have money are they still considering this design that absolutely not under any circumstances of course not so right there i mean that's just whatever you think of this building and whatever you think of like maybe possibly rethinking architecture into the future this is not the person who should be delivering that message just because he's really rich and he got his money in different ways but then the idea of the dorms themselves is you know they're trying to like kind of solve this issue of of you know how to get a lot of people into a smaller but usable space and using technology instead of just like windows is interesting like these little rooms are supposed to have like digital recreations of windows right do they all have that i believe that's part of this design yeah and you know they use this now i think

in some really futuristic airplane design um the i forget who was doing this but i don't know if this if they've actually made this plane or if it was just sort of a concept idea but basically nobody would have windows in the airplane but there would be cameras pointing out of the airplane and there would be a digital screen that you kind of almost didn't know wasn't a window

i remember talking about that and i think you how did you feel about that i feel like you were not

into it you're very into windows i am i am super into windows it turns out i guess it would come down to how convincing was it so if you got if you were able to have a you know a screen that had enough pixels that when I looked at it my brain read it as a window I probably would be fine with it maybe even in these uh you know these dorms I actually have thought about that too for doing this show because as I was kind of looking for different places to live and stuff I thought well what if I end up in a place where there's just nowhere for me to put my desk that I'm actually getting to look outside and I thought well maybe what I if that that's just the only option maybe i set up a screen a tv of some kind and have it on like you know one of those channels that's like just shows you i don't know what if you're in vives's tv at some point defaults to just like pictures of like a hot springs in iceland and then like a some somewhere in like you know tierra del fuego or whatever those like amazing just like photographs of nature do you

guys have that i think in some modes it does that i know my computer my microsoft computer one of them does it um certainly and so i know the thing you're talking about i was thinking that maybe i

would do that just for my eyes to have some stimulation i also i put this on twitter the other day but i was thinking when my screen went over to that the other day on my tv and i was thinking about how many like long you know intense marital conversations i've had while watching a screen cycle through photos of beautiful places while also occasionally just putting the same news item up like oh yeah okay prince harry and megan agree to a deal with netflix or whatever just imagine the most inane news that you don't really care about flashing every 83 seconds over and over as this screen cycles through its 12 pictures as you're discussing the future of

your marriage or whatever that is that is some raymond carver shit right there if raymond carver

had lived long enough to see that technology that is so fucking bleak man the thing well this is what i put on twitter what it used to be when i was in college was the dvd screen saver that would bounce around the screen yeah that was the thing that was always playing when you were having like an intense breakup conversation you had watched the movie or something or maybe you paused the dvd and now you were in like hour three of this long emotional draining conversation and the tv had just switched over to the words dvd as they bounced around the screen yeah that is that is bleak for

me a different version of that i actually want to come back to something in the story but a different version of that is um for a long time veves and i did not have cable tv um when we were living in new hampshire but we did have a decent collection of tv shows did i say we didn't have dvd i'm sorry for a long time and you have cable we yeah we didn't have cable you said cable i think oh i did say that sorry i just got in my head there um but anyway we didn't have cable for a long time but we did have a pretty robust collection of tv shows that we loved on dvd right and uh and one of them was strangers with candy and you know the beginning of strangers with candy like but i can't i can't sing it right now i can hear it in my head but the the still screen for that or the holding screen or the menu screen was just the first I'm going to say like I don't know five notes of the theme song over and over and over and I cannot tell you how many times Vives and I have had fallen asleep on the couch or in the room together and waking up and realizing for like five hours we've just this is the song you're That's it, and then it ends there, and then it just repeats. Oh, wow. You might get the first two bars. so that you get the little change up at the end. I don't know. But it's just, I almost wonder if anybody, if you could just look up DVD menu screen for this. It just repeats over and over and over.

There has to be a whole YouTube page.

You wake up bleary-eyed on a Saturday or Sunday morning or middle of the night, and you're like, oh, God, I've just been sleeping and listening to that loop over and over and over. But one thing about it, so here's what I think. There are so many different, like I say, angles of the story, I don't want to feel like we're missing the main point of what they're getting at with this sort of argument over architecture, but just putting those broader arguments aside, one of the things I find interesting here is the argument is you can have a bunch of people who are living in their own space, a very small space, most likely without a window, but with some things that are supposed to make up for that, various technologies that kind of recreate the feeling of daylight and even potentially some digital windows. and I have no idea what those look like. But you're a college student. When I was a college student, I didn't really have a choice. I think you could maybe apply to live in a certain dormitory building, but it was really up to them. And it was certainly up to them who you ended up living with. And I don't know if I was moving into an apartment right now what kind of bargains with the devil I would make or deals with the devil I would make. But if I was a college student and the question on the table was, you can either live with a roommate that we will pick for you randomly, and you can get a window in that situation, or you can live by yourself in one of these little pods, no window, but you have your own space to come back to with a bed and a door, I take that.

Yeah, that's a good – that's a really interesting kind of decision to make. I, I had a, my college roommate was somebody I went to high school with Rooney Narayan in. So like, I didn't, I was not like dreading my, my dorm situation because I kind of knew who I was going to live with. And I, I seem to remember us being cool. Like I don't ever remember. And it was a teeny space. I actually, I did have a window, but other than that, I almost went to college or when I lived in the dorm, which was for like most of my freshman year, it was almost a version of this because the u-dub had this thing they called the cluster system in the place i lived which was called mcmahon hall and the idea was you had four really tiny rooms each room had two people in it and then those rooms shared like a living room area and the idea was everyone would be forced out of their rooms because their rooms were so small and they'd hang out in the kind of common area of their cluster and that's what and it actually touts as well trying to create it actually worked yeah like i you know i i didn't stay super tight with with uh with too many people from the cluster but i was legit friends with my buddy dan gaitian who had the same birthday as me uh and was born in northern california not too far from where i was born so we had that in common brian so i lived with these guys when i got my own apartment i lived with a couple dudes from the cluster yeah um you know and luckily it was brian and dan and luckily they were very chill when i told them oh also i have a baby yeah after we signed the lease on our apartment i was like there's gonna be a kid here about three days so that's interesting that's cool you were in high

school when you when when your daughter was born yeah um and so they knew you all through college did they must have known that you had a young daughter but they didn't know i didn't tell

anybody at college knew huh well what i found out later was more people than i thought knew like remember i think i ran into somebody from nathan hale who said oh you are the guy with a secret baby right like i had so like addy was born like midway through my senior year and i did not because i had transferred schools i did not bring it up with anyone there because i was very embarrassed about the whole situation i felt like i had enough working against me between having combination skin wet underwear wet underwear senior transfer i was like this is already not great and so i you know i would go and i would visit addy on on the weekends and things like that but i was not very like public about it and then I kind of did the same thing when I got to college where I just was I just didn't want to be like oh hi I'm the guy who has a child I don't know it made me feel awkward and and weird which I wish I would have been a little bit more um you know mature about it but I just wasn't and so I didn't really talk about it much in college and to be totally honest with you it was a real danger of me being an absentee father when I was in college because Because I was living in the dorms And I was all excited about this new life I'm having And because I'm not telling people that I have a baby It's like I'm visiting Addy But then the visits are a little bit more infrequent And then a couple of weeks goes by And then it's been like a month And now I'm like embarrassed to go back and visit because i haven't i've missed my visit you know a couple of times and you're still a kid here yourself i mean let's let's remember yes i'm 18 so like you know yeah but it was i could i could feel i could feel something happening where it was like if if i don't rectify this situation very soon this is going to get out of hand and there's going to be a real distance you know um and so i sat down and i wrote her mom a letter like hand wrote a letter this is how long ago that was and she responded and said all right this is your one do-over like well let's meet at the red robin at northgate mall in the old location not the new slick one but but um back when it was on the other side of the mall i'll bring the dvd screen exactly i'll set it up in this red robin we'll stare at it while we cry no and um you know we we had a meeting and we worked it out and everything was fine after that but it was definitely a thing where it could have gone either way you know and if i if i would have let another two months go by it could have really become a totally different story of my life and of addy's life and you know everybody involved um because it was just right there was a fork in the road and it was either like i'm going to be an absentee father or i'm going to actually like do what i should do here and uh luckily uh it kind of ended up working out okay but all of it all that is to say when i was working it out was when i had now already signed the lease for this apartment everything comes back to apartment living for

me on this show andrew and uh and so by so then i'm like moving in with these guys but i've also now reconnected with my daughter and i'm gonna start having her stay over and i'm start having her in my life much more and that was when i told them oh hey i've got a kid and they were shockingly chill about it wow they were like that's totally they were like cool man sounds

awesome i was like thank god you're nerds now if i had a choice of living in a dormitory with a baby and a window or i could have my own artificially lit pod to myself i think i would go

no baby no window hair up glasses off um but what does it even matter andrew what your dorm is like if you're living in the metaverse oh my god do we have any sound on this can i be honest

with you um so we're you know we're coming to this meta story kind of late now um which is fine but the story's been out there for a while zuckerberg you know had made a lot of announcements about changing the the name of facebook or the parent kind of company of facebook not the product facebook uh to meta because of this idea of the metaverse is coming where we're all going to live in a quasi virtual or augmented space but he released a whole bunch of videos or at least a video that's been chopped up into a whole bunch of different parts that have been floating around and i will watch one like somebody will be like isn't this part corny i can't luke it's like it's like watching one of those movies like you know how i can't watch a lot of um of the larry david show curb your enthusiasm because it's like so cringy like the embarrassing parts are so embarrassing like i can't watch more than like three seconds of zuckerberg trying to describe this space and like trying to sound like off the cuff when it's like extremely scripted and stiff and weird like it is painful for me to watch this so i've barely watched any of this metaverse stuff i've just seen like the little bit where he walks into some virtual space where everybody is wearing like virtual cosplay and they're like oh hi mark um but like that's basically all which is hilarious

See if you think about it, because Oh, hi, Mark, is also an issue with the room.

Yeah, of course.

I'm trying to, what I, I didn't actually load this in advance, and what I'm trying to find is the original video as opposed to, you know, somebody's, although the original video appears to be on Facebook, which, which, like, I don't have Facebook anymore. I don't have it until once a year when I sign up for it. So let's see here. I've got it kind of booting up. I'll see if I can find it. I'm with you, though. like the video is is what i'm kind of the most obsessed with because it just strikes me as so poorly done and um let's see if this is now see once again i'm um i'm getting lots of news recaps of the video but the original video is a little bit difficult for me how about this i have a

little bit piece of tape here this is um okay so this is retweeted by somebody named barry malone And it says, just two human beings having a perfectly natural conversation. And this is Zuckerberg. And then somebody else, I don't know who this is, but somebody else who's part of the project in some way, I assume, sitting at a table in some sort of a quasi-augmented space, it looks like. And in fact, your co-host on Livewire, Elena, right? I said her name wrong one time.

living in my head on that she tweeted out something wonderful about the hand gestures that they're using here she has a special name for these kinds of hand gestures like something about uh i don't know they're just like the most unnatural hand gestures you've ever seen as these two i guess humans talk to each other and us about the metaverse creating now deb from our studios team

is joining me deb do you want to take us through some of the exciting games in the pipeline for

quest absolutely over the years we've had the opportunity to work with incredible developers like vertigo games the studio behind fan favorite arizona sunshine i love arizona sunshine that game

basically got me and my friends through the first few months of the pandemic that's awesome oh my

gosh i hadn't i hadn't watched this far and i think that may i don't know how this is translating to audio but like the hand gestures are like a skit like it's like somebody said the joke is keep on using your hands in ways that don't really make sense based on what you're saying there's a lot of energy here do you want to hear more or did you hear enough well the part that again i should

have uh spent more time prepping this but the part that really amazed me is and this was the initial like the first video that he put out where he was explaining the metaverse and how we're all going to live in a world where you know digital like our digital life is is is not going to just be something that lives on our computer or our phone but we're going to almost live in it and you're going to walk around your futuristic apartment and you're going to talk to you know things and and he he basically it's the moment where the video is now making a turn to him in the metaverse and the whole screen goes blue and he looks so sinister and then he turns and he walks over to this like avatar of himself and is like clicking through possible outfits to wear

and then he lands on the one that he always wears right which i i understand that they meant that

as a joke like that was i mean to think about the amount of money like and listen let's be honest i work sometimes in this space right like not for facebook but i do work for microsoft and these are giant companies and they are very well financed and they really don't want to mess up So it's there are a lot of cooks in those kitchens. Right. I can't believe this was the soup they made was Mark Zuckerberg, who is a charisma black hole, awkwardly talking to the camera. And then at some point, the whole screen goes blue and he turns and I'm like, this is what the bad guy does in a sci fi film.

Take a listen to this. Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space. it has parts of your physical home recreated virtually it has things that are only possible virtually and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever you find most beautiful hey are you coming yeah just got to find something to wear

listen to the music change yeah he's clicking through the outfits perfect he chooses just a

you know blue t-shirt and black jeans by the way home space yeah you know what we all call

Well, I don't even think unless you made this connection before I did, but we were just talking about virtual windows. Right. And like what is real and what is not. And he's in this augmented space that it looks like, you know, there's some obviously some real physicality around it. But then also all these like very sci fi looking fake windows that can look out on a scene that is so much more beautiful than what is potentially actually outside your window. Right. Right. I we are not the futurists to tackle this topic, probably.

And I am somebody who generally likes things to be convenient and easy. And so I am on some level a fan of the idea of integrating the technologies in my life so that everything just kind of like, again, just makes my life easier. And I'm also old. So maybe I'm not the target demo for this. But there's something about the idea of the metaverse that leaves me feeling very kind of uneasy. like the idea that every window you looked at would just be a video projection i don't know if that's even the terminology but a video representation so i could just be like i'm looking out on you know granada spain right now instead of portland or whatever and that i walk over and then my digital mirror selects my outfit for me or shows me all my outfit options as my friend i have an earpiece in and my friend is talking to me and i'm just over there now there's a way to look at this too which is if it actually works and is seamless it connects people more because now my friend who lives in granada spain we can be talking it's almost like they're there because i also assume part of the metaverse would be a hologram of them so now maybe we feel closer because i can talk to them and see them and they can see me and it's as if there's no distance between us i guess that's the best interpretation of it but this idea that eventually i mean here's what it feels like is that the eventually what you're in is the matrix like you're just in a tube Like you're in a stainless steel tube in room temperature water with something hooked up to your brain that's just telling you all the time that everything's great around you. I mean, the metaverse is really the matrix, right?

I mean, I guess so. And I mean, but here's the here's the deal. I don't want to get too bogged down in any of these specific promises of the future or what it means in some sort of a, I don't know, ethical or sociological perspective, because. Because I mean, well, I'll do it for one example you threw out there. But like you say, I guess it could bring people closer together because if you have a friend who lives in another country, but then you can be in the same virtual space together and I can see this person. So we're closer together. I'm like, yeah, but the whole point is you can also look like a robot or a space fighter, space fighter, I think, you know, and so you're just making up what you look like anyway. Why is that better than a phone call? Is that bringing you closer to your friend if you're just two avatars in a room together that don't actually look like yourself? But again, I kind of don't, I kind of don't care about that. Like if it works for some people, great. And if it doesn't, then don't use the technology. For me, though, I just also think that, and again, I could be very embarrassed about me saying this, you know, in the future, how things play out. But Zuckerberg knows more about what the future of technology and society is going to look like than I do. Like, obviously, a million people know that better than I do. But from my perspective, like this is laying out some vision of the future that may or may not happen based on the way things are going right now and some technologies that people are working on and that this now the meta corporation is working on with their virtual reality glasses and what have you. But, like, I also think that even with technology, the future ends up being more organic or it comes about in a more organic nature than what we're seeing proposed here. I mean, the iPhone truly changed society forever. And there were people who were saying the iPhone is going to change society forever. But other people just thought, hey, that's a cool new cell phone, you know. And then literally what you and I are doing right now is called a podcast because somebody made something called an iPod, you know what I mean? Like because Apple created something called an iPod. I don't think when Apple released something that was basically like a digital version of a Walkman, they were thinking that we are going to upend what people think radio is and create a multibillion-dollar company or industry called podcasting that is going to change the way people receive information and communicate and all these things. Like it did happen, but I don't think anybody was putting that on the digital Walkman, a.k.a. the iPod. And I think that different technologies will pop up and have various degrees of influence over the way we do act as a society. But what we're seeing here from Zuckerberg is like this. If everything fits together and everything that they're investing in works, it could be something like this. But I also think it's just like we don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about this particular thing. little technologies will come and go and some will have more effects than others right the technology

will then drive the behaviors and change you know how we live because because the actual you i don't know if you call it the hardware but but certainly the apps or whatever it is at that point if something works well enough that it's more convenient and fun and whatever then that's will just all start doing as opposed to sort of creating philosophically this future version of the world and then building the equipment to make that philosophical or theoretical place i guess you might call it um theoretical or hypothetical i i really i feel like i i switch back and forth

between those but um yeah and again some of this stuff may end up being real i i don't want to be necessarily on the record saying this is all bunk and it's not going to happen but like i don't know I'm not getting super in my head About this thing that Zuckerberg is talking About and you know You don't you you have zero Interest in like one of those oculus things Right like the virtual reality headset

Based on how Camaro Kevin Roden looked while wearing one You're too vain I would Describe I would describe my I would describe my Interest as low no you know what that was Kind of a fun thing one night pretending To be a bird flying around Paris But I mean for me it's much more The thing that I am still just Every day I wake up and it's a battle To not buy the Facebook Ray-Bans Because to me it's like and that's different Because that's not augmenting my reality It just makes it so I can take pictures and videos Easier and I guess listen to music But like I'm not so fascinated with the Oculus thing of wanting to go to a different World myself but I think I'm intrigued by the idea of being able to Document my world super Easily and conveniently, like if those glasses are as advertised or whatever. So, yeah, to answer your question,

question i'm i'm not champing at the bit over oculus type stuff yeah and like you know i'm

with you i it's funny to see the commercials i'm thinking of a um oh i can't remember what the brand is but it was some sort of communications company that had a commercial running in pretty heavy rotation i'm going to say maybe the football season before the pandemic um and they were showing various people enjoying various aspects of technology and one of them showed a group of young people on a train for some reason and one of them is wearing like a big virtual reality headset and looking around and being amazed I don't know why they were on a train with that but I said like that is going to be one of the technologies that I think we will continue to see virtual reality and augmented reality more and more as a more kind of regular thing in our society but we will look back at these glasses I mean even more than we look back at the giant cell phones of yesteryear like we're gonna be like what but i mean i'm also if we were living in a world where there were like less clunky glasses that you could just pop on and actually you know honestly like you know the the dream was always you walk down the street you have this technology that can you can kind of look around and say oh there's a little bar there the reviews are good or you look over here or i never really even got into the um pokemon thing but i still Still, about once a month, I'm tempted to download that app. Are people still Pokemon going? I think so. Yeah, I mean, just from a technological standpoint, I still think it's cool. I'm not against it by any means. I just don't think that we're going to be leaping into this world where I walk into a room and some robot says, hi, Mark, to me.

I agree with you, by the way, that of the things that will be hilarious to whoever's alive in 50 years, the Oculus glasses will be. I mean it'll be like I don't know almost like the stereoscopic yeah like movement when people would wear something that was actually or at least look through something that was eerily similar to oculus but the more you know steampunk version where you would have these two photographs that would be set up in such a way that it looked three-dimensional and like that was the height of technology at the time and now it's so kind of victorian and and and antiquated like there will be way better systems for doing that kind of augmentation, probably involving some kind of eye implant or something. Oh, yeah. You know, something that probably is, I would guess, more like, you know, what's the term for that when it's like nano, more nano and more bio, kind of like more integrated into your body somehow. But those things will look pretty funny in 50 years, even though right now they're very whiz-bang technology.

Yeah, and at the end of the day, I just hope that whatever our technological and whatever our technological society looks like, I really hope that it's not Zuckerberg that is going to lead the way.

I mean, I guess if it's your company, you get to do what you want, but I really think he would have done himself a service by not starring in the video. Yeah. Because he's just so awkward.

But then the other people that they have in the video are awkward too. It's like...

Those people I feel bad for because they are employees of Facebook who probably felt it was a great honor to be tapped to be in this video. But then every single word that passes their lips has been scrutinized and parsed by various levels of Facebook to make sure that it's accurate. That's probably part of why he has to call it home space. Right. You know what I mean? Like he wanted to say like the first version was they said house and then they were somebody came back with a note. Actually, it could be a home because we don't know if people are going to live in a house. And then people then it came back with we're going to modify it to home space. Yeah. because of some kind of a thing that you know for whatever it's like it's just there's like zero chance of this of this coming off as something that's naturalistic but the chances get even lower somehow when it's zuckerberg delivering the yeah yeah and i just have a general distaste for

all these guys and you see bezos you know wandering around like the space cowboy and just like all these guys with their zillions of dollars and their giant companies and just like and just i don't know we are definitely living in another another time of these these huge barons that's just so strange i don't know if i use barons there right you know you can really get trapped

in that web of beepers and zenith televisions and walkmans and diskmans and flappy discs and

nintendo power glove 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 sir uh i know you've got a couple of uh v-mails that you

said are a nice companion to each other yeah i was gonna say i got a text message today by the way no no i'm just i'm gonna play these voicemails but i got a text message i'm just looking here if i can identify the person quickly on the fly but i got a text message from a listener who said i have oh it was sarah on bainbridge island who said um i uh i have a shit ton of work to do and And I need you people to do a super long show. Please, please, please make it a super long show today. So in that spirit, I will play two voicemails here, both on the same topic, both referring back to the story you told last week about showing up late for your taping with Cal Penn, which is reminding me of another thing. That thing has been published by CBS Sunday morning now, right? And did it air this weekend?

It did.

And our buddy Phyllis's favorite podcast. Well, I assume TBTL is Phyllis's favorite podcaster. If not, we can't be friends anymore, which would really kind of break my heart. But apparently your entire thing was excerpted on her podcast, Who Weekly. You know how Phyllis loves the podcast, Who Weekly? Apparently your feature is featured in Who Weekly this week. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah.

Can I tell you something kind of funny about the Hollywood publicity machinery or I guess maybe the publishing machinery was. So we were so part of the I guess you could say news or something that was that was in the profile that we did of Cal Penn was that he's gay. And that's not something that I think he has been really public with. I mean, I think if somebody were to ask him on the street, he would have said, yes, I'm a gay man. But it was something that was kind of a little bit towards the back of his kind of public identity, I guess you could say. Like, I just don't think it was something that he that a lot of people knew about him. and it's in his memoir he talks about his his fiancee and I remember I was talking to Cal at some point we were chatting in between like shots and I was talking about his fiancee Josh I was talking about Josh and he said oh yeah my fiancee we're talking so then when we go to write the script I write in his fiancee and then our producer says I don't know if it's his fiancee I think it's his partner so the our producer Amal he reaches out to Cal Penn's handlers and says like is is josh his fiancee or his partner and they say partner so we go with that in the script and then what do you think the news is that drops yeah on sunday people magazine exclusive cal penn is engaged his handlers i don't even put this on cal his handlers intentionally led us mildly astray so that they could dangle this exclusive for a different publication which was hilarious to me i mean it doesn't matter one way or the other

Oh, you think that it was on purpose, not just one of those things where handlers kind of misrepresent the wishes of the person they're representing?

Oh, I don't think that Cal or Josh had anything to do with this decision. I think the publicity people wanted to get People Magazine to write something. And so they said to People Magazine, we're going to give you an exclusive, which is the announcement that Cal Penn is engaged. And so when we were trying to figure out what his status was, so we would accurately describe it, be it partner or fiance, we were kind of given not up to date information so as to preserve the exclusivity of the other outlet and their big announcement.

Oh, wow. That's interesting.

Which I thought was really funny. And the funny part, too, is that like now Cal and I are like, you know, we text and I was like, you son of a B. you held you you just you double crossed me for people magazine what do you say he laughed yeah right right right i mean i i i figure he understood i was joking but i was just it's just hilarious because like that's how the and i you know what it's like game recognized game tip of the cap to the pr people because they they got in what they were able to do is is manufacture another bit of news coverage yeah right yeah yeah that's their job and they did their job effectively so it's like not even a big deal but it's just it's funny to me that that's how that game works yeah that

is interesting now when you were doing I think probably the final taping of this segment that's when you told the story about you oversleeping right and like kind of massively oversleeping and waking up and almost exactly an hour after you were supposed to be at the shoot yeah and that we all we've all had some experience like that and it is a terrible terrible feeling and And I got a couple of voicemails from folks who've had similar professional experiences, all of them involving Cal Penn, interestingly. No. Here, this first one comes from listener Lou.

Hey, dummies. I'm time banditing and heard about Luke's nightmare of a story in New York about sleeping through all the alarms. I have a similar story, which is that when we were moving from Mississippi to Virginia, I had taken a job, and I thought it started on one day, and as I have my entire house packed into a giant moving truck and my car packed to the thing and a two-year-old, I get a phone call in my driveway in Mississippi that says, oh, hey, where are you? Your class has started right now.

And I was literally three states, four states away. So the dean had to go down and, like, get the attendance for everyone. And I was mortified. It was a terrible way to start a new job. It's one that still gives me, like, a physical reaction, even though it was nine years ago. It's a real-life stress dream. But my boss did the same thing, which is after the, like, fifth time. I profusely apologized. She was like, please, you were forgiven. Let's not ever talk about this again. And I will say this, knock on wood, I have never missed the first day of class like that again. Power out.

Man, that's a bad one. So that was just a calendar issue. Yeah. She was just unaware of the day that she was supposed to be starting, it sounds like.

The first time I heard this, I automatically started blaming other people. Like, all I know is what we just heard from Lou. But, like, I was automatically like, well, they should have made it more clear. Like, why are you not going down there and having, like, an HR meeting or something? Like, why are you just supposed to show up for your very first day of work and just have that be you standing in front of a classroom? There should have been some sort of a sign-in, some sort of a what's the word I'm looking for when you're not initiating. Onboarding. Yes, some sort of an onboarding. Maybe even a hazing. No, but like there should have been something. I just automatically got very defensive on Lou's behalf when I heard that. I feel like there should have been more professional.

I'm with you on that. If ever our listeners run afoul of something, I assume it's the other people, not our listeners.

Right, exactly. So we have smarty pants professors calling into the show. We also have smarty pants lawyers calling into the show.

Hi, Luke and Andrew. This is Joanna from D.C. I just wanted to call in and say that I loved Luke's story about being really late to the interview with Cal Penn. And it reminded me of the time that I was very late to a very important event. It was about 10 years ago, and I was new in my office, and I had my first oral argument. And oral arguments were really rare in my office of lawyers, and so everybody was going to come, and the judges, obviously. So I actually woke up early and got ready early. But I took my dog for a walk and lost my keys somewhere along the way. So I got home. Everything's completely locked up. No one is around. And I got really frantic and eventually just ripped the AC unit out of the window. I lived on the first floor. And just shimmied right in that hole and got the dog inside and got my stuff. And all in all, I was like about an hour late. I was dirty and I was dusty and I was like bleeding a little bit. No! Everybody was really nice about it, but it was horrible. And I think about it probably daily. So thanks so much. Love the show. Power up.

I mean, here you have colleagues, but you also have judges. judges are involved for your first oral arguments with a firm that doesn't even kind of do this that

much that sounds like it's out of a movie it really does like where she just shows up in court bedraggled and it's you know it reminds me of like the there's a movie called one fine day that i think is a very underrated it's michelle pfeiffer and george clooney and it's like both of them have really busy where they're both single parents and they both something happens where they they basically think that the school goes on a field trip and they miss it so they are trading their kids off throughout the day because they're both having like the biggest professional day of their career their respective careers and so it's like one of them is supposed to watch both the kids for the first half of the day but and you know hijinks ensue but it's that kind of thing where it's like i think michelle pfeiffer is an architect and she's like making a presentation but she's wearing a t-shirt that belongs to one of her kids or her kid because of some mishap that I think her outfit got ruined. You know what I mean? That sounds like what the listener was going through. And then also you have that kind of like, you know, when a mom can lift a car because her kids are under it. That was her just ripping the A.C. out of the window. Yes, I know.

Hulk strength. And then you're coming into this not just professional, but legal professional setting, somewhat bloody, somewhat dusty, He's somewhat sweaty. That is a nightmare.

I wonder how did the case go? Yeah, good question. Or there's a trial, I should say. I'm guessing it was civil, but I don't know why I'm guessing that. But I wonder what the outcome was.

I looked it up. Joanna has been disbarred. Okay, sure.

Well, there's always a home on the TBTL legal team.

That's right, because we need more lawyers to sue our lawyers. Yeah, exactly. Hey, I had an idea for a song to go out with, unless you have a better one. I find it hard to...

I don't believe that you'd have a better one. But how about Wiggle It by Two in a Room? Because you were-

Wiggle it just a little bit. That's it. Let me see you wiggle it.

I don't know. Why? I just remember this song from- So this is from 1990. You were talking about trying to get your washer and dryer out, and you were talking about wiggling it, and it's been in my head. Just that part, though. I don't remember anything else about this song. So if it's grossly inappropriate- It might be massively inappropriate. Exactly. My apologies. But I do have something here called Wiggle It, the radio mix. So let's hope that we're okay.

This was good enough for Cube 93 during my youth. Yeah, right, right. So I'm assuming it's okay. All right. Well, listen, thanks for hanging out with us today, everybody. Appreciate you all. We'll be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. Until then, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

As it grooves, your body moves Your body starts to get the feeling And what you're feeling is happiness Let your body go as you listen Let it flow through your system It'll take control of your mind And make you move your behind As it grooves, you feel the tension in the air And now you're hyped

You're getting down because the sound is just your type G-M-N-D-O-S-E's kicking it to you right So come on, come on and party hardy all night

And wiggle it just a little bit

I wanna see you wiggle it just a little bit As it grooves Wiggle it just a little bit I wanna see you wiggle it just a little bit As it grooves

Once the DJ lets it spin It'll penetrate your skin It'll penetrate your soul And make you lose control The C-O-S-E's coming at ya Invading y'all like a body snatcher Whether if you're drunk or sober

Were you just using a synthesizer? Nope. So you mean to tell me that all of those sounds were coming from your body? Yup. I'm the president of rap music and I need to work with you right away. Power out.