Muse

It's my responsibility to fix this. I'm going to brighten the mood by telling a few jokes.

Try this one on for size. I don't care for cheese. I'm a curd mudgeon. Well, you're too tired for humor.

All good. Here we all are, together again. What face would your feet make if they could make a face?

I don't understand the question, and I won't respond to it.

I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brain.

I'm going to suggest that we have a little constructive talking time. Not long at all. I mean, maybe 10 minutes or okay, or maybe 15 is also good.

I get out of the shower and look in the mirror. I'm impressed because I look frickin' awesome. The story of this situation is extremely personal.

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

Why now? What are they doing? And how can you steer clear of it all?

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. Me, me! Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center, right here in Portland, Oregon, where my John Prine tattoo has reached the itching phase, I guess.

You know, it's not so much the burning, but the itching. Oh, my God, it's driving me crazy.

I have been applying all kinds of non, I will mention, non-scented lotion to this thing per the advice of the listeners and per the kindness of my girlfriend who actually just put a bunch of, I don't know, some kind of fancy lotion in some kind of a pink bottle and gave it to me. I have been lotioning this bad boy up. Note to self, that's the last time I'm ever going to say lotioning this bad boy up on the show. But yeah, I've been doing what I can to preserve this tattoo, but it's going to be all I can do here during episode 3606 in a collector's series and not just scratch the living Tweedle out of it.

Let the fun begin.

So let's all just focus on me not scratching my tattoo for the next hour or so. While we get to the top stories, including this supposed mountain climbing record.

I'm an ideas man, Michael. I think I've proved that with f*** mountain.

Two guys, according to Guinness, the book of world records, not the beer, climbed the world's tallest mountain but i have some uh i have some reservations about this particular record which i will uh explain here coming up in a few moments speaking of explaining things uh paris hilton explained nfts to jimmy fallon you gotta be kidding me i'm not in the game i don't participate in the paris hilton sucks game i don't play in that space per se But there is something about Paris Hilton, there is something about the soul of a Hilton, there is something about Paris Hilton explaining her crypto-punk NFT to Jimmy Fallon that just feels, as they say, like the darkest timeline. I don't know why that feels like the darkest timeline to me, but it sure does. But to brighten things up, we'll also bring you the tale of a kid in Boise who had a dream and a notebook and turned that into a book in the Boise Public Library. He always be sneaky like how he get chocolate. He always be sneaky like how he get chocolate. So we will get into that as well. Oh, and I did something the other night that may permanently alter my relationship with the residents of this apartment building. I've made a huge mistake. So we'll talk about that as well. We'll talk about all of that with this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's here to party and chew bubblegum. And my friends, he is all out of bubblegum.

I'm ready to party.

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'm sorry. I was trying to text you quickly as you were saying that I have plenty of bubblegum. That was a mistake. Yeah, yesterday it looked like I might have been out of bubblegum, but then I found more. So we're good. We're good. Just keep going.

Okay. I'm looking for a drop related to...

bubble gum and it turns out i don't have any which is that kind of a weak spot for us gum

drops let me check it is it's an achilles heel we don't have any chewing gum this is the closest thing i have and it's just when you put gum into my system you get all i've had today is like six gummy bears and some scotch also not not true but uh yeah interestingly enough i don't have any

chewing gum drops at the ready and i apologize i'm not going to um play them because it would Stop the music, but I have four things that pop up when I type gum into my system. I think you should leave Cosmic Gumbo, which is not exactly gum related. Forrest Gump, stupid. Kimmy Schmidt, Gum Outside Bones. Do you remember the Outside Bones song? Yes, Titus. And then this is the only one that I'm sort of tempted to stop the music for. I have something called Luke-DNA Gum. Do you even want to hear that? I know we get weird. I think we have to. All right, let me just see what this is. Oh, the music's about to wrap up. Anyway, this is perfect timing for everybody involved. Let's see.

I just took a DNA test. It said I'm 100% the guy who put that gum under the thing.

Wow. Good morning.

That is so pitchy, dog.

Can you play that again? Would you like me to delete that? Without a doubt, that's my worst singing ever.

I'm 100% the guy who put that gum under the thing.

See, though, I don't like to, you know, we got to be vulnerable on the show. I'm not even saying that to be funny, even though it's a funny sentence to say. Like, I don't like playing that stuff back because that was just in the moment. You were just, you know, you were just riffing. You were trying to keep a smile on my face and the needles of ping pong in. And that's what we ended up with. It's not all going to be gold. But if I play that back for you You're going to get in your head the next time That you find yourself in that situation

No, what I'll do is I'll just sing it more tunefully Oh, okay, I'm sorry

I just can't believe how out of tune that singing was You're saying you want to redo You want me to just to I want to do over, please

Do you know anybody at the Fox show I Can Smell Your Voice? Because I think I could be out there In a costume Singing that Lizzo song much better than what the recording is that you just heard.

Now, I was watching a show called I Just Crop Dusted You With My Singing. I don't remember what network that was at. It actually might have been InfoMax. I'm sorry, what's the hard right?

NewsMax. It might have been One American Network.

That's right.

I just can't believe how bad that singing was. I'm sorry. I don't mean to fixate, but like, I don't, look, I'm no meatloaf, although I just heard the other day that why Andrew why would I do this why would I go negative on this on this Wednesday when when there's so many reasons to be positive but I heard that he died of COVID because he was an anti-vaxxer oh no really following that that's what I heard on Ask Jeeves no that's what I that's what I heard and it really radically changed my feelings about the guy like i mean i was kind of i i would say i was i was sort of neutral on meatloaf like wasn't you know the number one hit artist of my of my musical catalog but also seemed generally like a good dude and and friendly and all that and you know there were some nice obits uh for him but then when i heard that he was aggressively anti-vax i then felt very differently about his passing and about his whole entire career from that one thing well let's maybe pull the nose up

on this negativity train by pointing out some good news that i wanted to chat with you about either online or off um but you know we do have this spate of of often musicians but then some people in the i guess in hollywood as well of a certain generation now a little bit older than meatloaf but i'm talking about your your eric's clapton your vans morrison and there's like a group of there's a i feel like there's like at least two others that are kind of top of mind that are not clearly top of my mind right now where it's just like you know just not just on the wrong side of all of this but like vocally actively actively kid rock yeah that's yeah but there's just released a song yesterday about anthony fauci but let's just quickly um celebrate when you see Tom Waits in disagreement with Spotify related to something. I'm sorry, not Tom Waits. Sorry, Neil Young. Sorry. Oh, God. Tom Old. But, you know, Neil Young, like, I'm just like, oh, no, not Neil Young. No, of course, Neil Young is on the right side of this. He's saying, hey, listen, Spotify, if you keep on letting Joe Rogan spew.

like, just nonsense and lies about this, then you can take my music off your platform. I could not love that man anymore when I was reading those stories.

I know. It's just like Neil Young continues to Neil Young it as hard as one can. I saw him trending, and I thought, I honestly, like, I know people that know Neil Young, which is, boy, isn't, that might be the saddest brag. Well, no.

Other than drinking coffee right before I go to sleep. I know someone who knows people who know.

You know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Neil Young. No, like I do. I know some people who know Neil Young and they've just always just talked about what just a tremendous human being he is. So I think when I saw his name trending, I didn't get that bad feeling that one gets when someone of that age is trending. But even so, it was relieving to see that, yeah, what he was trending for was calling out Spotify. Although I don't know if he's sticking to that. i i saw a different headline today that he then deleted that tweet or post or comment but even so like the fact that he would draw a line even if it was just for one day is is so great because you're right there is it just turns out that just because you can like jam out on the guitar it doesn't inoculate you from having horrible worldviews right see eric clapton and van morrison and Kid Rock.

Exactly. And Meat Loaf. I almost don't throw Kid Rock in there because Kid Rock's always been Kid Rock. You know what I mean? And again, I'm not some huge Eric Clapton fan. I'm not saying I am shocked and pulled over and I had to burn my Eric Clapton records. I never bought an Eric Clapton record because I'm not a fan. But it just was... And I think Van Morrison, you're the one who told me that he always had a reputation for being a quite unpleasant person. Yeah, if not horrible. So I guess that wasn't shocking, but I don't know, just for a split second, I see Neil Young, and I'm like, oh, no, like, because I do just think that some people break weird late in life, and you're just like, oh, no, and so I was glad to see that he was still fighting on the right side of that.

I think you have to actively work against Breaking Weird as you get older, right? Because I just think the—I mean, listen, the world is much scarier to me at 45 than it was at 25. And things are confusing. I only recently learned what Janko Jean stands for, Andrew.

And now you've got Paris Hilton talking about Bitcoin with Jimmy Fallon.

WW this and WW that. Let's WW dot explain it. Like, everything just gets sort of more threatening and harder to understand, and the fashion and the music and the way that people talk, all of it just seems strange and alien and unpleasant the older you get. And you have to really, really work on not becoming basically an angry, old, crusty person. And Neil Young, I would say Neil Young is crusty, but in the best way. Like if I was going to describe Neil Young's physical being, I would say Krusty would be near the top of the list.

About it was before I got my projector, but it was during the time where I was dreaming of getting a projector. And I was just like watching long YouTube videos of musicians. And I was watching your projector phase. Yes. And I'm a pre projector. And I was I landed on some Neil Young concerts just like from, I think, 1970. Like I think Harvest was new or maybe not even released yet. And he's playing songs off of it. And his concerts then are just him and a guitar and a harmonica and a piano. You know, he kind of I think it was maybe theater in the round. Doesn't matter. Or it was a round stage. But my point is that dude was 80 years old when he was 25 years old. He just he came out that way, man.

Uh-huh. I love it. He was just born old, as they say.

Born dusty and crusty. Yes.

Yeah.

um hey i want to do a little audio uh experiment not experiment but experience here with you luke

i'm gonna is it more audio of me singing a song no in fact what i'm making a list and i'm checking it twice i'm gonna re-sing any song you play of me singing today i'm gonna re-sing it better no at some point on i can smell your voice what we're gonna do is i'm gonna delete this

luke dna gum i'm officially deleting it from the library i don't need it anymore what um i'm going to do though is you have like your mac sound to turn on your computer so that when you delete something it makes like that you know i'm sending this file to the garbage bin noise i don't have that so as i delete it i am going to play this noise as i officially delete the drop luke dna gum

it's time for you to stop blowing air up your chicken there it is that is the sound i will Deleting a file And I will echo that with Let's see, this sound Really? No, I had it muted.

God bless America. No, you know what? I was emptying the trash on my actual computer. Oh. Now you have to refill the trash. There it is. There it is. But, yeah, I had to put some more trash in the trash. I'm very nervous about emptying the trash on this particular computer because it has all this Livewire stuff and CBS things and TBTL. It's like a bunch of stuff that I think is fine, but if I were to delete it from here, then it's really deleted.

Yep. There's no getting it back. And that that stresses me out. Yep. I realize I'm pretty meticulous with my files and records and everything. And for every podcast I do, I keep one long Google Doc for each year that collects the show sheets. So in other words, you send me a show sheet every day for TBTL. I add the new one every day to the top of my Google Doc. And it's also where I just do like production work and stuff. And then at the end of the year, that document is like, I don't know, 140 pages long. And I have a record of everything we did on TBTL. I could search, search in the future if need be. I got those going back to 2015. I got that for after these messages and spotless, too. Yesterday, Luke, I realized I somehow deleted the entire first year after these messages. Now, I didn't delete the audio files. The podcast exists. Everything's fine. But I'm missing this Word document, which was actually, it came in helpful, came in handy, I should say, on that show in particular, because Vives and I will sometimes go back and search these documents to see if we've talked about something before or to find an old commercial, to jog our memory, etc. The Google Doc? Yeah, the Google Doc itself.

I thought those were like undeletable.

I know! Yet somehow me, Mr. I'm meticulous, I don't want to hear that coming back at me either. Wait a second, I need to delete what I just said. Oh, never mind. Put it in the Google Doc, delete it. I can't even get my chicken to work. What the hell is going on? It's time for you to stop blowing air up your chicken. Anyway, yeah, it went missing. And then I told Genevieve, and she's equally upset that we've lost this document.

So it's deleted, deleted. I don't find it anywhere. Google Doc is, again, it's in the cloud. I find Google Docs to be endlessly frustrating because, well, one, they're a big part of my work life, particularly with LiveWire stuff. And if I'm reading from the Google Doc And I'm trying to do my little Interstitials for LiveWire If anybody else is in the Google Doc It's jumping around If they're deleting It's like the page keeps moving And they're all called like Anonymous Llama Or some bullshit

And people are making those edits while you're reading it While you're recording Because that should be just like let's not touch the doc while we're recording

Yeah I mean not Like no one's trying to mess with me There's like six people in there And sometimes someone will just be like adjusting one thing. But if anyone is adjusting anything in the doc, it causes it to move around. And again, I don't know who it is because they they're not logged in as their name. And also I have, as you know, about seven Gmail accounts. Depending on the day, I often can't edit a Google doc because it has just decided on this particular day to be Luke Burbank seven at Gmail dot com versus Luke Burbank at Gmail dot com, which is the one that sends you all of the updates on where I'm making dinner reservations.

Yeah, you're probably like seven of those anonymous orangutans in the Google Doc yourself, just logged in at different computers scattered around the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Hey, you and I yesterday after the show talked about this dilemma that you're having in your apartment. I think it's absolutely fascinating as far as conundrums go. Do we want to talk about this now? Do we have time to get into it before the break?

Yeah, we do. So yesterday I mentioned at the end of the show that, well, you mentioned flipping people off or, as some say, flicking people off.

I always say flick, and I've just learned recently that that's wrong, and I'm trying to break myself of the habit.

I feel like that's one of those things that's, if you say flicking someone off, people know what you're talking about, which means it's language. Yeah, I guess. I'd say it's 50-50 between flip and flick. And at this point, I think either is acceptable

But what I'm trying to do is just say flip the bird Because I would never say flick the bird, weirdly Right I'm just pausing because I realize it sort of sounds filthy

I'm pausing because I'm remembering that weird Microsoft project that Carrie and I were in Where the person directing it was obsessed with us flipping them the bird In the video? In the video like the director thought it was would be the funniest thing this was this like bizarro i mean i've told the story many times but just google like luke burbank microsoft fox business news

and you'll see more than enough of this but like it was supposed to be a kind of like a funny video retort to whatever the iphone the apple announcement was uh you know when back in the day i guess this day still continues where when apple like you know announces the latest iphone it's a kind of a big media event and microsoft decided we want to have an answer to it so they hired me and carrie and a director and a bunch of people to like come up with some funny idea that would be kind of a clap back and that was an okay idea but it just got off the rails real fast and ended up with this strange video of us improvising with somebody who Fox Business News thought looked a little too much like Steve Jobs who had passed recently at the time and it went down the down the hill from there but the director was obsessed with me saying flip him the bird and I didn't want to say it because I knew that if I said it on camera it would end up in this stupid video but then I finally caved to the pressure and sure enough it was in the video you saying that but not you doing it it wasn't like a pixelated they cut away from me they may have pixelated and i think they cut away from it it's me like because the other thing was i think this was the version of the iphone where you could use your fingertip to like log into it you know i think it was the first one of those so it was like flip them the bird or i don't know it was just like it was if if somebody came to me with that idea today i would have enough presence of mind to say no i'm not gonna like i just would i would be able to to to use my words to say no but at that time you know all of 10 years ago i was still insecure enough in that space of that kind of work where i was like well i better just do it so no one's mad at me but i learned a lesson which is don't say anything on camera that you don't want to have part of the final project because once you do that it's then And then they have the decision as to if they're going to use it or not.

I saw the weirdest thing. We got to get to your story. But I saw the weirdest thing on TV the other day. Genevieve was watching the Wolf of Wall Street on some network that allowed apparently, you know, I don't know what level of profanity they're allowed or that they allow themselves. But there's a scene where somebody is flipping the bird kind of like, hold on a second. I give you like half a sneeze there. I know you want me to sneeze more on Mike, but I can't bring myself to do it, Luke. I'm shy I'm a shy sneezer What did that sound like On your end It sounded like this And you never got Any of the payoff No payoff Hmm I can cut this all out So Genevieve's watching The Wolf of Wall Street And Somebody's like Flipping Almost like the camera Of the bird Like waving two middle fingers I guess it's Leonardo DiCaprio I don't know I don't like that movie I gotta Throw that in there Anyway he's just kind of Waving two middle fingers Do you feel like it just

Celebrates bad behavior

I think it's one of those things where it's like the movie like technically is like, hey, we're not supposed to like these people. These people are villains. But you also know that there's a certain, there's a bunch of certain types of people who also see and admire that kind of decadence. What do you think their opinion on crypto is? Yeah, that kind of behavior and I just find it to be, yeah, a little, again, I'm not saying it's a bad movie. I'm not saying that like you shouldn't watch it or anything. I'm saying I don't personally enjoy that movie. I don't enjoy the speed of that movie. I don't enjoy the speed they're taking during that movie that makes me feel speedy. No, anyway, But anyway, they're flipping off the camera. And they just like the network decided to keep the scene in but cover up the fingers with black boxes that move around and follow the actual hands around. Seriously? And I was just like that is like either do it or don't like cut around it. Like is that really essential or show it like we can probably show gestures these days. But like it was just so it was so off putting. Honestly, I was just walking through the room. I was like, oh, that's disorienting.

Yeah, that is way more distracting than just leaving the double bird up, which is, I have to say, like at the lowest level of swearing. Like if we were in Italy and you did the kind of like under the chin thing. I mean, that's equal to that. Right. But because that's not our move, we're not offended. Like, do you think they would leave in the kind of like hand under the chin?

Right, exactly. That's what I was thinking, too. Like, what what are the gestures that would be blacked out? What about that thing that I've only seen in one movie that was like – I think it was Poltergeist that the teenage daughter does where you kind of like take the two arms and you cross them, right?

Like would that be – would that be – I mean I've told this story endlessly on the show, but that's what got me kicked out of Jesus Creek in the grave was doing that behind the gym teacher's back because I had seen it in a movie and thought I got to break that one out.

Yeah, it's so not casual too. And then you can add the bird to that If you're really angry If you really got caught off in traffic If it's 1989 and you got caught off in traffic In New York City Then you do the whole thing But if you're a cabbie But anyway, yeah

On the subject of vulgar gestures, here's the thing that I told you after the show that I'm not proud of that I did the other day. I was coming home. It was late at night. I may have had a couple of drinks. And as I was in the lift on my way home, I remember thinking to myself, I don't like the fact that as I reenter my apartment, my coming, or in this case, my, yeah, this would be my coming, I guess. my going was earlier my coming back to my apartment will be noted by somebody's camera uh my neighbor and again i'm at the end of a long haul so my neighbor has a little like doorbell camera on their apartment door which only monitors me because there's no there's no other apartment

down here and can i ask you just one point of clarification on that too because i think this is also true like it's not like you guys get deliveries at your doorstep right or at your inside apartment you have to go to a special room for that so it's not like it's protecting any kind

of deliveries right yeah i mean yeah like for amazon stuff you have to go downstairs and even for like doordash stuff and food you have to go downstairs there are no there are no uh you know delivery people that are have access to any of the um hallways in the apartment building so So there's I can say with pretty like a fair amount of certitude that I am the only person other than my neighbor and their partner who's ever down at this end of the hallway. So it just exists to monitor, I guess, each other. I'm talking about him and his partner or me. and as i was sitting in the lift and as i was stewing on this and as the alcohol was corroding my brain as i walked into my apartment i casually just kind of threw up i casually flipped him the bird as they say in various microsoft commercials and that was i want to say couple weeks ago and i woke up the next morning and i kind of had a memory of it happening and i have been stressed about it ever since because as we've uh as we talked about earlier my guess is that they have a push notification on their phone um for this oh the reason that i think there's a push notification is because my neighbor asked me once about the gym in the apartment building and and he said something like well because i see that you come back pretty sweaty sometimes or something about my my sweatiness and so that made me think oh he is getting like it's not just like the camera does what it does and and he never notices it's like it must he probably has it set on like let me know when there's motion in front of this camera and so he gets an update i think and so he would probably have to have gotten an update with me flipping him off for reasons that are probably totally confusing to him and as i said to you yesterday there's like one of four things is possible either one they turned off the push notifications and have no idea this happened probably not the case can you give me that answer can you

it's not all negative i'm gonna i'm gonna lift you up on angel's wings here in a little bit but Keep going.

Two, they saw it and they're deeply offended. Three, they saw it and they feel bad because they realize that what I'm saying to them is please stop surveilling me. Or four, they saw it and they had a great laugh.

Yeah, or just don't care. Or don't care.

Five, don't care.

Here's one thing, too. I mean, it really depends on your demeanor, what your face looks like when you're doing it, the aggressiveness, whether or not you had a mask on arms. But one thing that I've noticed is I feel like flipping the bird has come back into fashion. Oh, right. Like when the other day, yesterday, the peace sign, but more aggressive. I mean, kind of like, yeah, I am surprised at like seeing young people. So you go to their Instagram and you'll always find them flipping off the camera, which seems like I mentioned this just yesterday. And like kind of you'll see old photos or videos of kids in the 80s and 90s doing that because we were like, oh, in the 90s, we were like tough skateboarders or whatever. You know, we were all watching the truth about cats and dogs. Right. Like we're all cynical, whatever. but they kind of just went away and actually, I'll tell this story some other time but like I ruined one of the best photos ever by flipping the bird to the camera, to the person taking the photo one time and it still bothers me because that photo is awesome but there I am flipping the bird, that was in my 20s it just fell out of favor but now we were talking about Machine Gun Kelly yesterday or the day before And I'm on his Instagram And of course like he's of that age and generation Where some of the photos on his Instagram Whether they're selfies or not It's him like kind of giving the bird So it could just be interpreted as Just kind of like yeah this is what we do now We see a camera we give the bird Am I stretching it?

I appreciate you stretching it Andrew Honestly you're doing me a kindness If it weren't 2 in the morning And if I knew these people better I think there is a universe in which that could be The interpretation but i think unfortunately if they have seen it the only way to realistically read it is i don't like them filming me or i don't like them you know they could take it as i just don't like them which is weird because outside of this one thing they're super pleasant people well except for as i also told you yesterday yeah i wasn't sure if we're getting into this let's just say someone who lives in that apartment who shall remain nameless has been is on the um like group forum of this apartment building and was you know what's interesting is like the one of the people who is one of my neighbors i'll just say was upset by something that i was also kind of mildly annoyed at so i guess i give them credit for at least vocalizing it and going on the thing which is there's somebody else on this floor of this apartment building who had these like boots that they would wear when it was rainy and muddy outside and these boots would just be caked in mud probably have a dog and they have to walk it or something and instead of bringing the boots into their apartment they would just leave them outside the apartment which meant they would leave them in the hallway and my neighbor who is the ring camera owner or whatever you call it uh who was on the forum being like this is so disrespectful to this apartment people are leaving muddy boots outside and they don't clean up after their dogs and if there's not punishment when will they learn and the word punishment yeah that that

was so strange to me yeah even repercussions is maybe what what they're thinking of but like even that it just should be like we need to we need to stop this behavior like we just need to

ask the person to stop doing it not punishment punishment is one click over from grady talking

about correcting his family in the shining exactly i had to correct them what i was gonna say how are these neighbors gonna feel when they see you uh peeing on their ring light a la calvin on the

back of a ford f-150 what if i just put up an old like 1920s photo of everyone in the apartment and i'm just in the middle of it jack torrance style maybe that'll i don't you know it's like if i was a more mature person i guess what i would what i would do is i would have a real conversation with him i would not wait until i was drunk to flip off the camera yeah um but now it's out there and now

it's like i just and it's the technology joey we've talked about this before too and i mean you you already alluded to it if not said it outright but having now experimented with those style of cameras myself i told you my dad sent me his old ones and we had hooked him up for a little bit and I caught the cat on the counter and other other fun things Andrew does with spy technology. But like I understand better how deliberate the technology is. It's not like, hey, we you know, it's not like a convenience store in the 90s. And we're just like rolling constantly. Maybe convenience stores still do this for robberies or whatever. But like and, you know, if need be, we can go back and check the log. It's just like you say you get a push notification every time there's a movement and there's going to be zero push notifications except for when you're coming and going and when they're coming and going. So they're somewhere. Now, this is early in the morning.

What if I flip the camera off literally every time I walk by it? Now you have to. Until my lease is up. Now you just have to. Right. 7 a.m., 7 p.m., coming, going, no matter what. It's just the move.

Did we already talk about this? What if you do that thing where you get like, would it have been a Wile E. Coyote move where you like you paint like a fake hallway on a board and you just keep pushing it forward, forward, forward until like it kind of cuts off your door. But to them, it looks like nothing has affected the security cam footage.

Well, I could, I mean, to take it back to one of the Ocean's films, I believe we were discussing yesterday. Really, the move is to make a tiny sort of, I don't know what you call it, a pinhole printout version of the hallway and glue it to the camera.

Oh, instead of big, just small, right?

Well, so that it looks at all times like the hallway is just sort of there and no one's in the hallway. but they're just looking at

basically like a fake yeah well that's what i was saying but i was picturing it like this grand big like uh kind of set piece that you're that's taking up the wall across from the camera or you create like you know you create a big um plywood thing that you yeah that takes up the entire hallway but goes between your two doors but you're right is this small camera you just it could be the size of a playing card and you just create a little device until they leave their house and then they see that somebody has a contraption with a playing card with the a recreation of

the hallway on it i guess so i ran into the uh not the the person that i have talked to a few times but his partner the other day and uh it was kind of i was taking the garbage out and it was kind of late at night i'd say it's maybe 10 and because no one's down at this end of the hall except me and them when i opened my door and um and this person was i think taking their dog on a maybe he was so like shocked by me opening the door like and I attributed it to the hour of the night and the fact that no one's down here but now I'm thinking it's maybe because they're like what's going on with this dude like the guy seemed terrified when I opened my door that was that was

after the night question middle finger you got oh you know what you got to do is you just got to have your middle finger out all the time like like you broke it and it's stiff and it won't curl back town you're like hello good to see you and you just like hold out your middle finger for them

to shake maybe get a splint right yes you know speaking of middle fingers in photos and how that's the thing i when i was in chicago for wait wait a month or two ago with becca we went to rossie's and i uh we visited uh my good friend ramon of uh instagram fame and uh actually it was it was Ramon and Des the the two bartenders that I love the most there and again I was you know it was post wait wait and I was having a couple and I was in a good mood and they wanted to take a picture with me behind the bar and I've never been behind the bar there so it felt like kind of an honor but then when I went behind the bar and I think it was maybe another customer was taking the picture or something they were both throwing up the bird and then i felt like i had to do it because that was the social pressure and then the second it was over and i went back and i talked to becca i was like i'm so sad that i put the bird in that photo like that's not me yeah i mean i guess it is my move as i continue to flip off my neighbors but it generally is not my move and it was just one of those things where the social pressure like when you go when you're somewhere where like the mask mandate is non-existent and you're wearing a mask and you go into a bar or restaurant i don't know if you've had this experience when you and genevieve have been traveling but you almost become i've i've become embarrassed about wearing the mask in places where no one's wearing the mask which is the wrong reaction like i'm not in the wrong in wearing a mask but it's insane how quickly i cave to whatever the social pressure is in a particular

situation I don't think I've had that really particular you haven't walked into a place in

a state where like there's no mask mandate and no one's masked and you walk into a bar with a mask on and you start to feel insecure because you're the one in a mask I just haven't traveled I haven't

been in a state without a mask mandate I mean I know I went to Hawaii but there's a mask mandate there and here in Seattle and I haven't really gone anywhere except for I guess just over a year ago now or about a year ago right now Vives and I took a road trip down to the Grand Canyon so we were going through states but like when we were in Idaho I think there was a mandate but nobody was uh nobody was following the rules and we went to this hotel where it was just like a super spreader event of just kids I mean this was like a year ago this was like this was still like things were hot my friends hot and this one hotel was like a pandemic did not even exist it was just like it was like a it was like a a cafeteria in a in a middle school it's a cafetorium just like kids running all over the place swimming jumping like and all the adults like watching it with smiles on their face nobody masked up people writing it was an indoor swimming pool yes and i oh my god i i masked up all the more and i glared at the people not wearing masks i did not feel out of place i felt like they were just terrible human beings i had a moment yesterday that was kind of interesting um that is a slightly more nuanced i guess take on all of this veves and i veves was working from home yesterday and she said hey i'd like to go grab lunch and we can talk about what we want to do on the podcast and i'm like okay that sounds good it's kind of rare that we do that these days um and so we just walked a couple of blocks from here and went to this um vietnamese restaurant that i you know throughout the pandemic have mostly been getting takeout food from uh the guy there is super nice he always recognizes me i always order the same thing um because i'm an adventurous person um anyway i go in there and vives and i are

are seated we've ordered and yeah that's right our food has come because in those kind of places I actually talked to the owner one time when other restaurants were starting to open up and he kind of alluded to the fact that he was feeling a lot of pressure to open up but was still very concerned for his safety and the safety of his staff we didn't get really into it I just knew from talking to him that it was just kind of like this yeah I guess we got to kind of open up at some point But, you know, they'd been doing a brisk takeout business, I take it, and, you know, he had to really say, do we risk our health for business, was the underlying thing. So when I'm in there, of course I'm always masked, and I even do this thing, like, once the water comes, technically you have a beverage in front of you, you could take your mask off and sip it, but I just wait for the food to come in these cases, you know? Like, it's different for every place. If I'm at Teddy's drinking a beer, I'm not taking my mask on and off between every sip. But in a case like this, I'm just sort of thinking about this guy and his staff who may also be his family. And I'm just like, I'll just leave my mask on as long as possible. Anyway, food comes. My mask is now off. Genevieve's mask is off. We're both eating. And then a guy walks in off the street. I'm going to say he's a guy in his late 50s or 60s, kind of a burly looking guy with a scraggly beard. But, yeah, burly, kind of a big guy. And he comes in and he's not wearing a mask at all. And I look at him and we live in this world now where this could be in my head. But when I look up at somebody walking into an establishment not wearing a mask and they make they meet my eyes, I take that meeting of eyes as a challenge from them. Like I could be wrong. He might have forgotten that he wasn't wearing a mask. That could actually happen. You're walking around outside. You walk in. You forget you're not wearing a mask. Who knows? I have no idea what is in the soul of this stranger. But he walks in and I look and I'm a great Camus. I'm slightly taken aback and I look at him and we make eyes and I see his eyes as being like, you got a problem with this could be totally wrong. I have no idea. And, you know, he then is greeted and sits down at a table and order some food. And for I didn't I didn't obsess over this, if you can believe it. But for a minute or two that I thought about it, I was just like I was like, well, the balls on this guy. Right. But also, I'm slurping down far with my mask off in the same space. He is like, there's no logical reason to grow a pair sometime. Him walking in that 20 feet being masked and then maybe keeping his mask on another two minutes while he waits for his water and then takes it off to drink the water at the table next to us. Like he didn't create any more of a dangerous situation for us or the people that work there than we were sitting there with our masks off as we were eating our soup. He was just slightly breaking the rules and we have no idea if he was doing that on purpose and if that's a lifestyle for him or if he just forgot.

But it was like one of those things I was like, well, I mean, I guess we're all we're we're not all doing our best, but I can just do my best and eat my soup.

It's I have that thought so many times when somebody is breaking the quote unquote rules around masking. particularly in like a restaurant environment and i am it makes me so mad if somebody walks in without a mask and then if i start to break it down in my mind it's obviously it's almost indistinguishable from me wearing my mask but then taking it off because my food is there or whatever you know what i mean like what you just said but it still just feels like such it feels so aggressive to me when somebody is walking or in a state like oregon or washington where there is a mask mandate when someone is just walking into a business without a mask it feels like an act of violence against me but what's interesting is i i think i'm more maybe a more directly confrontational person than you are um in that i you know will occasionally get into it with people but weirdly in that case as mad as i am about somebody not having a mask on if my gaze meets their gaze i probably avert my gaze after that whereas it sounds like you kind of lock eyes and

you're like let's do this oh it was just a split second no it was just kind of like i was just taking it all in i didn't i didn't mean to i just looked over and i think i was a little bit surprised and then we just made eye contact for a second and in that second that you make eye contact i wonder like oh is this person like kind of thinking oh this person notice i'm not wearing

a mask because that's all i was thinking about yeah uh it's like it makes me so it makes me so nuts because it gives me I have such an emotional reaction to it and yet if I break down the actual impact of it it's minimal somebody walk like you just said like somebody walking into a restaurant without their mask on is only minimally different than what we the rule followers are doing when we're wearing our mask and then taking it off to eat and drink and putting it on to go to the bathroom but then like you know what it's just like it

Thank you.

so imprecise the system that's going on and yet somebody walking in to an establishment without a mask just feels like they're just like F everyone in this place. It feels not unlike me flipping off my neighbors as I walk into my apartment. It's just an act of aggression. It'll be interesting to see

if, yeah, do let us know if there are any follow-ups on that. Well, like I said, I ran

into one of them and he seemed terrified, so I guess mission accomplished. Was that the first

time you'd ever kind of run into that person though?

it was the second time okay so it's not like and again i think what was really shocking it's you know it's like if you live this is a weird analogy but like so i park in the third floor of the parking garage here in this building and i can't think of it there's like been one time where i've hit the elevator button on p3 and then there's someone in the elevator because it's just like it's out of the way no one's ever so it's like i'm just always in my own world and the one time When the elevator opened and someone was in there I was shocked by it That's what happened here I think it was shocking to him That there was somebody else in this part of the hallway Because it's only me and them Which again also goes to my larger point of Why do we need surveillance

I bet you that that little jump you saw Had nothing to do with The middle finger guy He's back I doubt that's what was going through I'm sure they were just startled in the moment I did that to some So the business that we rent our apartment from that is directly below us, they don't do a lot of property management and maintenance.

That's not – you don't live above property management for less.

Right. But they do have – They hire some guy who comes every now and then and kind of cleans up the kind of sidewalks in front of the business, just like detritus, whether it's litter or just leaves or whatever. And he's out there kind of cleaning up sometimes. And his back was to me like I only see him once every few months or something. He's not like a regular person that I'm running into like daily or weekly. But I think that we both recognize each other. And but anyway, I was wearing my big headphones, which meant I probably was talking a little bit louder than I usually would. He was kind of standing by my gate that I was about to walk through. But his back was to me and I got my headphones on and he's like, I don't know, sweeping or something. And I said hello to him from behind, kind of said, hey, there, to his back. And he jumped out of his GD skin. I felt so bad. And, like, he was just, oh, my God. I'm like, oh, I'm so sorry. I do that, too. Sorry, I'm really jumpy. I don't like to do that to people. He's like, no, no. And he's, like, kind of laughing but also, like, holding his chest. Then he said something at one point. He said, I'm from South Africa. I'm supposed to be the scary one or something like that. I'm supposed to be tough or something. I didn't exactly – he doesn't speak English as a first language, so I don't – so there might have been some sort of translation thing. But I think the point was like he's like, I come from a tough part of the world. I'm supposed to be the tough guy around here or something. I don't know exactly what he meant. But he was just laughing his ass off because I'd scared the daylights out of him just by saying hi too loudly as I came up from behind.

there are a number of tiktok pages that i don't follow them but i let my uh my screen tarry long enough on that that the algorithm is now delivering more of it of just couples where either the husband or the wife likes to scare the other one like startle the other one and it's so mean but it's so funny like where some and it's not gendered in that it's always like women or whatever it's it goes back and forth it's just you either have that kind of you either startle easily or you don't and clearly if you notice that your partner does that and you're a certain kind of bastard uh you'll just start setting your phone up on record in a room before they get in there and then come through and just go and then it is very funny i have no sense of humor about that

when it's done to me like people just know don't do that to me because i jump out of my skin and

i don't know exactly that's weird i've never done well first of all that's not my move yeah But it's interesting, I've never, I guess I just don't really do that a lot, but I've certainly never tried that with you.

I don't know what exactly it looks like because it's never been caught on camera so far as I know. But on the occasion, and usually it's an accident, but if Genevieve startles me, I know that I do something that is funny at first but then scary. Like whatever I physically do when I'm startled, I've seen it my entire life. People are like, oh, I'm sorry I startled you. And then they look at me and they're like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Don't hurt me. My face is doing something that is, like, very rageful and shocked, yeah.

Huh. Well, that's all at that point. It's, like, it's not even conscious, you know? I mean, you're basically in survival mode.

True self, yes.

Yes. Well, my neighbors saw my true self. It's me drunk at 2 a.m. flipping them off. So there you go. All right, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we will do these top stories and some e-mails and v-mails here on TBTF. all right let's thank some donors of the day these are the wonderful generous people making the show possible with their monthly donations folks like john lynn in spokane washington and then this next name on the list which rings some kind of bell Hannah Nelson Hannah Nelson Great view Is this the third day in a row we've had actual family members

Definitely the second day in a row Julia Your sister-in-law from a different Mr. In-Law Yes, indeed I don't think we had any Blood relatives The day before

Oh, Hannah's not a blood relative We found her on the doorstep

Julia, I guess, is not technically a blood relative of mine either but you know what I mean

more or less yeah I saw Grapeview Washington it's funny I look at the cities before I look at the names and I saw Grapeview Washington I thought oh that's where my sister lives I wonder if this person I wonder if this person knows my sister and then I looked at the name and it was my actual sister the mother of Maddie and Mary the two kids who have caused me to rethink every swear and sexual reference on this show for the last four years anyway thanks to Hannah My actual sister, Nelson In Grapeview, Washington And then Mara O'Neill In Shelburne, Vermont Mara is a long time I was going to say a long time first time But no, just long time, long time Mara has been listening to TBTL since the very first episode Because I believe Mara Used to be Mara in Massachusetts And was a listener to the Bryant Park Project She was the listener I knew there was a listener out there and it was Mara.

I was going to say, there's a chance that Mara forgot that she's donating and this has just been writing all this time. But if the address has been updated to a different state, apparently...

Yes, I believe it was Mara in Massachusetts for many years and now it's Mara in Vermont. Thanks, Mara. I appreciate you. Amy Crockett is in San Jose, California. I don't... I'm not related to Amy as far as I know, but you never know. I have a huge family. It's possible that Amy is married to somebody in my family and I just haven't had a chance to meet her yet.

Is Amy a biblical name?

Is Amy a biblical name? That's a great question.

I have a sister named Amy. I should know this. Because a lot of the, is all everybody in your family, all the kids in your family, biblical names, right?

Right. But I don't think that Amy is one of my sisters I haven't met, although that's also sort of a possibility. I think Amy might be, you know, married to somebody in my family. I see. Is Amy a biblical name? What if that was just how I tried to figure things out, but I wasn't typing into a computer?

You weren't typing in. You were just thinking, and that's what you did.

You're just like, is Amy a biblical name? Amy name meeting about Hebrew girl named Amy. It's Hebrew, and it means beloved, dearly loved. So I guess it comes down to which Bible do you believe in? Do you believe in the Torah? Do you believe in the so-called Christian Bible? Yeah.

That makes sense because amo is love in Latin, right?

Agape, right?

Or is agape a kind of love? It's a different kind of love, yeah. But amo, I believe, is the verb. Really? Yeah. Or however you would break it down.

How do you know that? Did you sing that in a choir at your Jesuit high school?

I took some Latin. My sister took Latin. She was really good. She got really into Latin. And her name's Amy, and I think she had a ring that maybe said Amo at one time.

Ah, interesting. Well, Amy, thank you so much for donating from all the way down there in San Jose. Also, Shannon Curry is in Federal Way, Washington. Thanks, Shannon. And then James Duncan is in Washougal, Washington, not far from where I'm at right now. Everybody's moving to Washougal, Andrew. Really? Little known fact. Yeah, true story. It's on the Washington side of the Columbia River But it's beautiful over there And at least a few years ago You could get a pretty nice house, I guess Or a pretty nice piece of land I know many people who have moved to Washougal from Portland

Do you think that James Duncan is king of the tuk-tuk sound?

He played the horn with the kink in it

That's right Thank you, James

Thanks to all of our donors of the day I'm only blood-related to one of you but I love all of you equally and appreciate just Hannah a little bit more.

I was going to say, yeah, don't make Hannah feel bad about it.

No, I appreciate all of our donors of the day. Thank you for making TVTL possible.

Hello and welcome to Top Story

Man, we are so close to the river We're five minutes from the river today, my friend

Oh man, we could have stalled

Yeah, I know Well, Stu, you're gonna have to find something else to blow your hair back today I know that's, he lives for that I actually don't even, do you think, is Stu listening on a daily basis Or is he just gleaning information from our Twitter feeds and our, you know, sports texts? My guess is he dips in I think when he was living out there in St. Cloud And commuting into the big twin cities I think he had more time for this

Yeah, exactly

I don't blame him I don't even have time for this No This is the last place I want to be That's not true I'm excited to be telling you, Andrew About these two guys who climbed And I put that in quotes The world's tallest mountain So I saw this headline in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday An article by Christine Hitt Earth's tallest mountain is in Hawaii Here's what it took to ascend it And I was shocked Because I felt like I'm no Edmund Hillary, Andrew

How do you have that at your fingertips?

But I've always just assumed And thought that Everest is the world's tallest mountain Well, technically Mauna Kea is the world's tallest mountain At 33,500 feet Mount Everest is 29,032 feet Mauna Kea is 33,500 feet Now, the thing is Much of Mauna Kea is underwater

I was going to say Because when you look up Mauna Kea I didn't even I haven't clicked on this particular story But I was kind of Googling While you were talking I typed in Hawaii tallest mountain And like the internet Like, you know Straight up listed as 13,000 feet Or almost 14 I'm rounding down there But like, let's say 14,000 feet Because I think more intellectually honest endeavors Like, let's say, Wikipedia Are counting probably the part that is rising above the water

Right, I mean, the part that's underwater is academic

Unless you start down there Which they did Oh, they did

Yeah, but Andrew, they did it in a submersible They did it in a friggin' submarine

Well, then what does that mean? That's like taking an airplane You can take the airplane to the top of a mountain

This is what I'm talking about. Thank you.

I told you I'd raise you up on Angel's List.

As I continue to read this article, I became more enraged. Now, let me just say, what these two guys did is still super hard, and I could never do it. Like, I'm not saying I could do a better job at this than they can, but I feel like the terminology is really misleading. They start, they went, because these two guys, one of them, to a guy named Victor Vescovo and a guy named Cliff Capono they teamed up on this and Victor Vescovo is a underwater explorer as well as a mountain climber so they got in a submersible and they went down to the base of Mauna Kea underwater and then they took the submarine up to the surface which is about 19,000 feet of the climb then they got in kayaks and they kayaked to the base of the you know above water part of the mountain that kayak journey sounds like it was actually pretty hard and again I think they kayaked like seven miles I couldn't kayak seven miles like I could not do this I want to be very clear about that but they kayaked to the base of Mauna Kea then they mountain biked to where it got really steep and then they hiked and then they based they did a base camp and then they finished their hike and that's very i've been at the top of mauna kea oddly enough i drove a car for the record um there's an observatory up there it's quite amazing to be up in the snow while you're in hawaii but um uh so i just find this to be the oddest story guinness uh the guinness book of world records recognize them as being the first people to ever Ascend this mountain Ascend I think is the key word Because it's like you didn't The part where you were just Like I don't know how submersibles Work but the part where you were letting the submersible Just like float back to the surface The 19,000 feet Of this mountain where you were letting the submersible Float back to the surface that feels Like kind of a gimme

Yeah again I'm with you it's not like I'm saying I could do this well yes I am saying That I could do this but that's not the point

You could do that part I could do that part

But it's just like it's a language thing, I think, is what we're getting stuck on here, especially if you're – again, I don't care. I don't know why I'd be invested in whether or not these people – You don't have a dog on this flight? I don't have a dog on this flight. But I almost did say that, but I realized I said that yesterday, so I backed off. That's what you heard in my voice. But, you know, but yeah, I mean if you're –

officially entering record books, I guess language is important, right? And if you're saying, you know, that you ascended the world's tallest mountain, but that puts you, you know, in the same camp as Sir Edmund Hillary. Edmund Hillary. I was blanking on that. Hillary Duff. Hillary Edmonds, as I like to call it.

Fresh Prince Hillary.

Anyway, yeah, if it puts you in that company, it's kind of like, well, yeah, I don't know. I guess I don't care that much at the end of the day.

It's kind of a cool thing that they – I still think it's kind of a cool thing. And I guess I appreciate that the term ascent is what's used and not climbed because that is more accurate. But I think the headline is still – it's misleading. It's – because, again, when I saw it, I was like, what do you mean? Earth's tallest mountain. I've heard of that. We call it Everest. There's a line of people trying to get up it at all times these days. Like it was It felt clickbaity to me The way the headline was written Which again you know I mean what are we trying to do We're hoping people listen to this show Whoever put this headline in the San Francisco Chronicle Is also hoping that people click on it So I guess you know I can't be mad at them But it's still it just It felt misleading to me in some way Yeah Alright the other thing I wanted to tell you about Which is kind of a last minute addition To the program today is This extremely um i don't know annoying to me video clip of paris hilton and jimmy fallon talking about uh crypto punk nft yeah right like avatars are you familiar with this whole thing and not just nfts but the particular crypto punk avatar thing no have you seen these monkeys that are like smoking a cigarette online as an image are you familiar with that yeah it doesn't ring a bell

I'll look for it here and see if it's something I've seen.

Just Google CryptoPunk. There's this whole world now of NFTs that are these particular kind of like, sometimes they're pixelated, sometimes they're not.

Oh, I have only seen this because this has come up on the show before. Yes, you've told me about this, yeah.

So now the way to show off your wealth, a way to show off your wealth online, is to buy an nft a non-fungible token that is one of these like monkeys um and use it as your like i see it on twitter a fair amount but you know i guess wherever you do your social thing um and they are you know supposedly like you're the only one who has it Although I believe they're also on some level JPEGs don't at me tech bros, please, about like, you know, the non fungibility of this token, because if I were to take someone's crypto punk duck or whatever monkey and take a picture of it, I could put it up as my image. I wouldn't be the owner of it, but I could do it, I think. But anyway, it's this way now of of showing off that you have money. And there's also, I guess, as much as I'm disparaging it, there's also an argument for it in terms of if you owned a piece of art and you just put it in your house on a wall, I don't know how many people might see that, whoever came over to your house. But if you put it as your Twitter avatar, many, many, many more people will see that. So if we are if we've decided this art is something that you want to like sort of broadcast out to the world, this, I guess, is a better way to do that. But anyway, this is Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton talking about this.

And you did so in a great way, which is a very hard thing to really explain to a lot of people. But since then, Forbes has named you one of the top 50 most influential people in the NFT space. So congrats on that. You know what you're doing. Thank you. I'm so proud. I love being part of this community and being a voice and sharing my platform and just getting the word out there.

I mean, what better community to be a part of?

I was all proud of the community that has been built around TBTL. But man, we've really missed the boat here. We should be part of the NFT community. Andrew, have you considered using your voice in the NFT space? In the NFT space. I know I heard that too.

I mean, I said this at the beginning of the show. I think I may have just said it a minute ago. I'll say it again. Roasting Paris Hilton is not a personality.

Yeah.

No, I'm with you. I'm with you. It's like I am – I actually am – like first of all, we could even go out with Stars Are Blind, Paris Hilton's pop song that I think legit thumped. Like I'm not anti-Paris Hilton generally speaking. This – and I'm also not anti-Jimmy Fallon. This just came up the other day on the show. I'm sort of pro both of these people. what i'm anti is them talking about the nft space in a overly somber way like they're you know raising money for um you know the shriners or something it's like get over yourselves

it's just such an incredible thing to be a part of yeah i i got i i just jumped in i know i heard i'm so happy i taught you what they were you did you taught me what's up and then i bought an ape i got an ape too because i saw you on the show with people and you said you got a moon pay so i went and i copied you and did the same thing you did this is your

this is your ape what are they are they showing it on the screen or are they yeah jimmy founds

holding up a picture of her ape but like again not to be mean to my boy jim but like he said he He was sounding foe's surprise. Oh, you did? And then he also has a picture of her ape. Right, yeah. So that wasn't a surprise to you, James.

That's why I hate this format. This format has just been ground into the ground. I've hated it for decades now.

Like, I'm more inclined towards this format than you are, but this one, even for me, it's an ape too far, my friend. You did?

Mm-hmm. This is your ape.

Like, I feel like Jimmy realizes in this moment that he's oversold the surprise as he's holding, obviously, a pre-printed thing that indicates that he's not being surprised by this. And so then he's trying to kind of, like, figure out in the moment how to sort of back it off. Like, just listen to this. You did? It is? Oh, this is it?

I did the same thing.

You did?

Mm-hmm. This is your ape.

Yeah, Jimmy, it's her ape. Yeah. A producer fucking gave it to you.

You did this in rehearsal, bonehead.

You did? This is, you did it? This is your ape. I hate this shit so much, man.

It's really cool. Like the hat, the shades.

Why does this get an applause break? Why are we clapping for Paris Hilton?

Because it has a hat and shades, man. It's actually kind of a cool little image. I will say this. You were telling me about this, and I was Googling, doing the image search, and I actually really do like the aesthetic of these things. I actually like the pixelated little faces.

What do you think would happen if I just take a screen cap of this And then I just make this my Twitter picture How long before Paris Hilton ceases and desists me

You know what you'll have to do though if she catches you

It's time for you to stop blowing air up your chicken

You'll have to delete it

God it's so I have too many tabs open I wanted to do the I wanted to do this in response to your WMMS tape. Anyway, I don't know if there's any point to being negative, but that was rough. Those two talking about NFTs.

This turned out to be much less about Paris Hilton to me than just like the schlockiness of generally late night television and this idea that there's any surprises at all and that like everything isn't like, I mean, all of the conversation. I mean, we just know that. I mean, for how long? I mean, from just watching the Larry Sanders show. that famous documentary the Larry Sanders show like we just like it's part of our culture to know that nothing is surprising on these shows it is so meticulously planned out and then but then you and then Fallon is like again like I don't I don't watch a lot of this stuff so I don't I don't watch any of this stuff so I don't have context for it and maybe I'm missing something but yeah that's why just like listening to that makes me cringe so much and that is why I've never been interested in this stuff and why I think he represents kind of the the worst Of this it's got to be the worst Of this that's out there right now right The Jimmy Fallon show

I mean I get there's Not that many of them as part of it you've Got Colbert you've got James Corden and you've got Fallon am I forgetting yeah You're missing Seth Oh Seth right so I mean

I like Seth Meyers and I you know Stephen Colbert is a genius I think Seth Meyers is really funny I just I think the format And I don't I don't know again like I guess you can you can play around within the formats and i haven't been watching a lot of these things so obviously some are doing it better than others i trust colbert to do it the best probably um but still though there comes the point where you have to you know trot out the guests and the guests have all been vetted and it's been through so many layers of pr and planning or whatever and like there's no there's just there's no surprises there and that's fine i'm not saying that everything on tv has to be a surprise but let's not like oh you did oh and wait am i holding it oh my gosh Jesus Christ

But more critically Andrew Do I dare use Paris Hilton's NFT monkey as my

Oh yeah I'm sure you're not the first to do it Sure just do it Is that what they're all doing they're using it as their actual profile pic

I think so I don't know I just did it Oh my gosh Is this what it feels like to be alive Here's what's going to happen Somebody's going to notice it And then somebody's going to get mad at me online Not that it's even Paris Hilton's But someone's going to be like, that's amazing. You have hat monkey or whatever that thing is called. And then they're going to be like, and someone's going to be like, actually, that's that is an NFT that belongs.

belongs to here's the blockchain on that you think that'll actually happen well we'll find out i guess if it doesn't happen that's actually worse for me because it means i don't even i'm making zero my q rating is so low oh that is a cute picture i'm looking at it now right yeah it's cute monkey that's a cute monkey my friend all right speaking of cute things tomorrow i want to tell you about this kid who snuck his book into the library and i also look forward to all of you hating

andrew after you hear his take on it yes we'll do that tomorrow play the heel 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

i'm already super regretting this decision to change my avatar because beyond just the question of if people will think i'm stealing paris hilton's nft property I don't like this monkey thing means I also rode up to Twitter on one of those one wheeled power things like it's a whole lifestyle that I'm not really a part of oh I'm sorry I didn't know what you're talking about at first I know I know you know I'm talking about those tech bro wheels sure yeah everybody in South Lake Union is on right like that's how you that's how you got that's how you arrived at Twitter today that's I rode up to Twitter on a one wheel thing in a tech vest you know eating Soylent and Mansplaining to my tinder Girlfriend about nfts like That's who that's who has This ape avatar like No one's gonna get the joke You know yeah

I mean I think it'll I mean if I were to see this If we didn't just have this conversation I wouldn't have I would have no idea even what It was I think it's gonna wash over a lot of The people that probably follow you And also it's not like twitter is one of those apps Like there are some apps I think facebook would do this and i can't remember what other social media places would do this but like if you update your um your profile pic or whatever like it becomes a post that people can yeah luke just updated it but like i don't think twitter ever does that it's just you know you're not tweeting out look i have a new uh profile pic you can tweet it out if you want to but it's not automatic so it's not giving people aren't it's not giving somebody a direct space to comment on Anyway, it's fine. It's a cute little monkey. Anyway, I want to play a voicemail for you here, Luke. This is from our friend Maggie in Pennsylvania, who is a chaplain. And as with most voicemails that we play from chaplains, there is a language advisory in this voicemail. And Maggie is responding to something you said yesterday as we were sort of musing about where we are in the pandemic. You said something about, you know, humans can deal with almost anything, but we just need to know, like, what the future holds. Actually, I think what you were talking about was your calendar, right, and how the uncertainty of not knowing what's going to happen for you and for everybody else on this globe to look at a calendar and just not know what is around the corner as we enter year three of the pandemic is just like it's a real, well, mind F. So anyway, Maggie wanted to talk about that a little bit from her perspective.

Hey, guys. This is Maggie from outside of Philadelphia in Swarthmore, and Luke is talking about how hard it is to not be able to plan the six months of your life, which is really where we've been in the pandemic and where we still are. And it makes me remember a line that a friend of mine said, we were back in seminary and everybody was heading out on internship. So everyone was going to go and work at different congregations for a year. and some of them were great experiences and some of them were not great experiences but what my friend Peggy said was you know what you can stand on your head and a bucket of shit as long as you know when it'll end and one of the hardest things about the pandemic is that every time we think it's going to end it doesn't and I work as a chaplain in a hospital now and then things are better this week than they were last week and you know things are better in the ER. There's not 30 people lined up in the hallway to get in the ER. We don't have a million people coming in trying to get tested for COVID when they should go other places to be tested for COVID and all of that. But the ICU nurses still have all of these unvaccinated people, some of them very young, who are not doing well and are likely to die of COVID and whose families are being horrible to them and it's really hard because we don't know when this is good it's gonna end and I keep trying to tell them that two to three weeks from now it'll be better because already it's better in the ER and we tend to I see lags two to three weeks past and all of that is just to say yeah it's really really hard that it's right now we don't know when this is gonna end and it's so we're

a bucket of shit and we don't know when it's gonna end and it's hard to do that's all i'd say

so anyway power out so it's a good perspective i yeah i don't um i'm not sure exactly what maggie is referring to when she says that like families are being horrible to the people who are in the icu i don't know if that those are just disagreements about about vaccination status or

what i took it to mean that the families are being horrible to the staff oh oh oh of course

That's exactly what she means You're right

Which has to just be An additional layer That's a really interesting First of all I'm flattered when somebody Who went to seminary listens to TVTL I'm just going to be honest with you Anytime a person who's Bonafide empath and smart It's like I choose this For my listening I'm like okay We don't completely suck But also that's A really interesting way to put it that you can, you know, you can do a headstand and a bucket of shit if you know that there's an expiration date on the experience. And that's really true. I think, I mean, what's so tough about a lot of things in life is the feeling that this is how it's always going to be, whatever it is. Um, and I'm just so fortunate that my health is, is pretty good. And that I also am not a frontline person. I'm not somebody who's working in healthcare and seeing this. And it's easy to forget that because, you know, Omicron is peaking in most places now or has peaked. And, you know, like we're doing live wire, you know, with a crowd and I'm flying places and it's like life is returning to normal in some ways. And what we've learned about Omicron is that for most people, at least people who are vaccinated and boosted, it's it's not life threatening for most people. And yet there are still all of these folks who are working in health care who are just every single day is a battle and they're in the trenches of this. And it's a good reminder to think about those people and to spare a thought for them, because that's I mean, whatever my petty sort of quibbles are about our job. Andrew it's just it's a real perspective it's a good perspective to to have and a good reminder to think about the people that are out there just working their literal asses off well I hope that's not the case literally you got you you got what you're like a dump truck I just what's that I just hope that the their asses aren't literally you hope they're not losing you hope they're not losing that that dump truck of an ass that's my believe that was the nature of Maggie's call Magli, a chaplain, a hospital chaplain calling to talk about the donk-a-donk.

I think we got to the spirit and the heart of what she was getting at.

And also with you, Magli.

I'm going to squeeze in one unrelated email here only because I've been wanting to read it for quite some time now. And the original topic is slipping ever further into the past. But you had mentioned very briefly something about dog fitness trackers or fitness trackers for dogs. Do you recall why that came up?

Somebody created a Fitbit for your cat.

Oh, that's right. We were talking about some of the new technologies coming out of the Vegas technology show. CES. That's right. CES. Yeah. Anyway, we thought that we were kind of just, I don't know. I don't know if we were totally dismissing it or just kind of tossing it around a little bit. But Allie, our friend and listener Allie, has some kind of accidental experience with this and wanted to weigh in she says i thought i'd chime in on the albeit brief conversation about dog fitness trackers i bought a gps collar for one of my dogs after she escaped our yard twice and it comes with a lot of similar fitness and health tracking abilities and it's actually been a godsend because she's highly sensitive and super weird she's a rescue dog from taiwan and it helps me track these repetitive cycles of when she chooses not to eat or chooses not to drink or when she's generally less active and maybe just feeling a bit sick. It's a great gadget to learn your pet's patterns and can help determine whether or not you need to take them to the vet for something serious, and it gives you data to back it all up. It tracks how much activity they get, how much they eat, drink, scratch, lick, and I need one of these for me, and aggregates monthly and weekly wellness scores. I find myself looking at my dog's scores daily. Anyway, just thought it was funny to hear about these things. Love the show. I've been listening for 10 years. Keep eating Wild Mike's pizza Of course

Oh it's Wild Mike's

Big pizza We got an email here from Big Pizza Actually by the way I do eat Wild Mike's Whenever I am buying a frozen pizza at the store I am now Wild Mike's loyal I can't catch it

I'm out there I'm in the Wild Mike's blind I have the Whatever you call it The pizza call What do you call it that you blow when you're trying to get like It's a pizza call I believe I got the call

I've got the Wild Mike's Call, but I just haven't gotten one yet.

Yeah. Anyway, yeah, so that's from Ali. Actually, it's one of those things where it doesn't sound like something. And, again, I don't even have a dog. But I just mean things like this seem like superfluous. But then you're like, once you have it, you're like, oh, this is actually interesting, especially with the way everybody is kind of – I know this is different. It's not really gamifying it. But everything is sort of gamified in our tech culture now in this way of, well, it's just interesting to look at a weekly or monthly. report of of a dog's habits or of your own habits or of you know if you have a ring light of your neighbor's habits right or ring light i'm sorry i meant i meant a ring security uh what you learn

about your neighbor is they like to flip you off when they're drunk um you know we were sponsored for a hot minute by tile i think yes that was well years ago when i was in port townsend well I think we got some free tiles

I want to be careful about the brand I don't know if it was the tile was the actual brand well

whether it was sponsored or not I had a tile that I put on Rudy maybe I just bought it online it's very possible I just because I remember I put one on the boat like I glued it inside the boat and this is you know now like these Apple you know Apple whatever they air tag things are everywhere and raise some kind of ethical questions but this was the the early version of that this thing called tile and i put one on rudy's collar when we lived in port townsend because we didn't have a fence and rudy would sometimes get away and i remember rudy was missing for three hours and we were freaking out and she was in a closet in our house and she had gotten locked in and was just sitting there in the closet and it was the tile was how i was able

to locate her in the closet in our house you know the only reason i was being somewhat skittish there i don't mind saying this is i'm i don't remember what the actual brand was i don't know if it was tile that's why i want to be careful but we it was one of the very rare instances where we were advertising something on this show they sent us some um some of the product it was some sort of tracking thing for like i think it was wallet was it actually tile and whatever it was like i mine wouldn't work and i heard from some listeners i said i can't get these to work and my and they sent me a new one and it wouldn't work right and i was like i can't i can't do this anymore i can't tell people to buy this thing if it's if it literally doesn't work that's why i thought it was i thought tile was the main brand and this was a different brand oh maybe this yeah

you know what i think that i think it was a different yeah i don't want to besmirch them

because i think that some work more effectively but it was one where i just said well i appreciate them sending me a product so i can test it but i've tested it twice now and and they're also it's funny that you put it on the dog too because i think those things all say like do not use on humans or animals right oh really because they don't want to be responsible for you know life

right well and those things are all i think i think the one that we did ads for maybe tile works the same way or used to it's crowdsourced so it's not like the thing itself is sending to a satellite at least in the olden days it was if you also had the service on your phone then when you went by like if someone lost their bike if someone's bike was stolen and it had this whatever this tag was on it if you walked past the bike that had been stolen and you had the thing on

your phone your phone would tell the system right i'd forgot that this thing was announced of this

yeah huh well it worked to find otherwise rudy would still be in that closet in port townsend

which would be a tragedy for everyone yeah i'm looking i was looking through old emails to see if i could find any anything related to tile or tracker or relator and i could or related and i couldn't find anything but i did it was called relator that was relayer relator but i came across a uh an old tbtl newsletter i wrote that i named reddit and weep and i don't remember what's in there but just laughing at my old joke from when was that 2017 from march of 2017 not bad still making myself giggle with my own jokes how can we go out with that paris hilton song stars are

mind i got it right here not bad right i feel like now that i've roasted her and also stolen her nft again i don't know if i'm going to be more offended if nobody notices this or if somebody notices this but i guess i'll just leave it up until at least tomorrow and then we can yeah check in on how it's going with my stolen nft of parasitans yeah let's see what happens all right uh thanks everyone for listening we're gonna be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you uh so we'll see you then until then have a great wednesday stay safe take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all hanging here with you cause I don't find too many guys treat me like you do

Those are the guys that want to take me for a ride But when I walk they talk to suicide Some people never get beyond their stupid pride But you can see the real me inside And I'm satisfied Oh no Even though the guys are crazy Even though the stars are blind If you show me real love, baby, I'll show you mine I can make it nice and naughty Like a devil and angel too Got a heart and soul and body Let's see what this love can do

Baby, I'm perfect for you

Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a god dang hot dog Power out