Muse

Sometimes you end up getting where you want to go and then find out when you get there that you don't want to be where you're at. And then you feel like this is all just a waste of time. But just remember, if you never got there then you'd always be wanting to get there and you don't know you don't want to be there until you get there. So sometimes you just got to go where you don't want to go just to know that that's not where you want to be. Okay That was super freaking awesome The rest of your day and stuff TBTL

You know I think about this And what about this internet thing Do you know anything about that What is this guy trying to do Is this supposed to be what Bozo's thinking Or saying What guy is Bozo Bozo did it Bozo did what Bozo did the dub he's doing the dub bozo is not a guy chips and dips chips and dips i love chips and dips

can you can you imagine doing a podcast for 10 and a half 11 years i'd feel terrible okay goodbye

say goodbye derrick good bob i hope we same place again very now his brain is wrong

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

Okay, what sweet madness is this?

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

For one thing, I have no shame before another mortal.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center in Portland, Oregon, where it's a gray, kind of a glum day. I think it's going to be nice later on, although I'm about to go from I think it's like 40 in the mid 40s here in Portland to Los Angeles this afternoon. And let me get my weather app on my phone where it is currently 88 degrees. I mean, that is that is warm. It is going to be in the high 80s this week in Los Angeles. Our listeners down in Southern Cal already know this, but I'll be learning it firsthand as I head down there to interview Amy Poehler for a television piece. Before that, though, we've got this little item on the agenda. Episode 3617 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

Interesting story here in the northwest, specifically the greater Seattle area. Folks who drive Mazdas from a certain year have been having trouble with their radios getting stuck on KUOW.

They've turned the radio dial with a snarl.

There's no way for them to move it off of KUOW. And now the local public radio station in Seattle, KUOW, is actually reporting on the topic and apologizing to the people who, Ironically, if your radio is stuck on KUOW And there's no end in sight for this, by the way You also then heard KUOW apologizing to you For forcing you to listen to KUOW

We're getting medium play on three independent radio stations In Central Europe

Which is just kind of a weird Pretty weird moment of life to find yourself in I'm wondering as well Do you consider Bob Odenkirk to be a comedian's comedian. When it comes to comedy, I'm sort of like a little bit of Eddie Murphy Raw and, well, several others. The New York Times has a huge profile of Bob Odenkirk in the Sunday edition of the paper that's coming out, and I keep seeing this headline, Bob Odenkirk was a comedian's comedian, and I'm not sure if I totally agree with that, but I don't know. Let's pick that apart coming up. Oh, and also let's celebrate some Blur's Days because it's a Thursday. And that's when we do that. Let's do all of that with the help of this young man. The longest-running co-bro of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He was sort of born for this job. He's a really charismatic guy. He's funny. He cusses a lot. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

He's Andrew Walsh, and he cannot multitask. This morning, Luke, I already sent you one text message that I was trying to send to my friend Jessica in Ohio. You received that first, which I guess is good. You get to look at the first draft of it. And while you're giving your intro, I tried to send you a link to a house that we're going to go look at later today. But I just sent it back to the text thread where it was sent to me by Genevieve and our realtor, Sarah. So I'm looking at this one. I got it. It is 1030 in the morning, and I have so far sent two text messages to people.

I mean, just thank God I'm not a sexter. Just thank God. I mean, for a lot of reasons. For a lot of reasons. Thank God I am not one who sexes. I'm going to give a lot of them.

Got a new bell sound, huh? I do that a lot as well. Sexting, I mean. That's what I'm talking about when I say that and a lot. Now, I do this – what I do is if I am – let's say that I wanted to text my brother DFTB about a funny conversation you and I had, Andrew. But I was thinking in my mind, I'm going to text David and I'm going to say, oh, Andrew and I were talking about this the other day. But because I have your name in my mind, I then type Andrew into the part where it tells the text message where to go. Like I do that My brain's like I can only think of one name at a time And I'm thinking of Andrew's name So that's now where I'm sending it Now that is a very dangerous That is a very dangerous sort of pathway for my brain Because what if I was Not relaying a funny joke we had talked about But something about you that had just left me Deeply disturbed A secret dark part of yourself That you'd shared with me That I felt like I needed to tell someone about And because of brother Brother privilege I thought I would share it with David because then the cops couldn't make him talk. But instead I texted you and then you knew that I was talking and then you had to come for me.

Wow. I didn't know the cops were going to get involved.

You're tough in the story, by the way. That's the cool part. I know. I do like that.

At first I thought I just had some really gross. I thought I just had like a rotting nipple or something. Oh, God. I'm really trying to. I know. My new thing is trying to get you to throw up before the end of the show. I don't know how that rests with the listeners. Rotting nipple. Let me say one thing about saying the wrong text message because I think that it's very uninteresting. And it's about UI, not you. And it's not about you and I. It's about you. Not you and I. T.Y. as Queen Latifah wrapped about low those many years ago is an earworm, man. I had that in my head from you and I.

T.Y.

What year would you say that was? Ninety four. Maybe I'm guessing.

Probably.

Here's a mistake I almost always make on my phone.

And I don't know if I think Spotify will pull the show because I just said you and I. T.Y.

Yes. I don't know if you're Apple. What do you call them? iPhones do this. But when I'm going to text more than one person and I don't already have like a chain set up, right, this is often with couples. So I'm going to use our friends Kevin and Anita as the as an example of this, because I almost did this to them the other day. I will type in the first name if I'm just using my my chat function on my phone. I'll type in Anita. Right. And then I go to type in Anita, Applebaum.

You got to put me on. Sorry. Everything goes back to 90s hip hop for me today.

And so I type in Anita, but then I assume that I'm still in the field where I can add another name. And so I start writing Kevin. But my phone automatically, after you type in one name, it automatically goes to the message field. It just assumes you want to send it to one person. So I don't think I've done this, but so often I will have –

You'll start your message to Anita with the word Kevin.

It'll just be like Anita and then just send her the word Kevin. Almost like it's a psychological test of what do you think of when I text you the word Kevin in the middle of the day? Don't think. Just say. But luckily I've avoided that. I don't know if it's a smoother experience on your side of the digital pond.

What mine does, we've got to figure out how to bridge the digital divide, Andrew, and then the actual divide. We just need to start reporting things as we see them. Has anyone taken that name, the divide? We should really look into that.

Is that our girl?

That's a show that's already being done out there in the media landscape that's promoted as kind of non-biased. My experience with most journalists or former journalists are people who say, we just have to start talking about things without a bias. It almost always means they were tired of getting criticized for saying things that were coming from the right.

Yes, perfect example. Anyway, what were you saying?

But what happens on my phone a lot is it's always trying to anticipate who I'm texting based on what groupings of people I've texted before together. So if I start typing Camaro Kev's name and your name, it will want to go to the fun-loving criminals. But the problem is there have also been other times where smaller groups of us have interacted. So it'll basically go in and try to tell me who I'm sending this text to. And sometimes it kind of nails it in. Sometimes it doesn't. to either leave someone off or it loops someone in who really this is not relevant information for or whatever or i you know in my phone if i type in you know j a or something like i'm about to text someone and their name is james it's going to try to give me every single contact in my phone that starts with j a and if james is the most recent person i texted with those letters then we're good but if um uh you know somebody named um jackson who i have

beef with i do sort of have low-key beef with this guy named jackson in bellingham seriously well it's a kind of a one-way thing it's that i basically feel like i've never gotten my props from this particular fellow that frustrates me he is a um he's kind of a seahawks uh blogger and he lives in bellingham and uh and i i really you know i thought wow i love the seahawks this person loves the seahawks we both live in bellingham he does a like moderately popular podcast up there about the seahawks i kind of thought maybe we'll have some overlap at some point i was hosting a you know for as much as i i sort of apply um you know self-deprecation to our show i do consider this to be a successful podcast in that we've been doing it for our job for 10 years plus and so i think i thought he would be kind of stoked that there was a professional podcaster living in bellingham who also loved the seahawks there might be some kind of cross-pollination and then i happened to be at a bowling alley i think it might have been for like addy's birthday or something and i saw him and i went up and introduced myself i'll mention this person along with podcasting is also a real estate agent now granted there's probably much more money in real estate than podcasting so i don't know why i consider the fact that i'm a professional podcaster and that he is i'm doing podcast as my uh vocation and he's doing it as avocation i felt like that put me at least equal to him on the food chain and i went up and introduced myself and i don't know if i've ever met someone who was less interested in having a conversation with me and i you know me my fragile ego is um is fragile and instead of him i i think i had in my mind imagined that there was going to be he was going to just be like oh cool you're like a person with some semi-legitimate media standing and we're both in this small kind of quirky town let's let's at least be pals and that didn't happen and so that was like i was kind of like oh that was a little sting to my ego then i was in las vegas andrew like i don't know a year ago i was doing that tv story about legal sports betting and i was in this enormous um sports book at a place called cirque uh this new hotel they just built in las vegas and they have because it's new and and uh enormous they have all these digital screens and not only have all the sports going on all the different games and contests but then they just have this one screen there's like a running live twitter feed and i look up there and sure enough my dude my jackson nemesis has tweeted something about the seahawks because that's mostly probably what he does that and you know real estate opportunities in whatcom county and i saw the tweet and it cracked me up because i was like oh i know that guy so i took a picture of the tweet and against my better judgment because I'd already felt negged by this person once against my better judgment because I just felt like this is funny. I'm all the way down here in Las Vegas, and there's a giant tweet from this person that I sort of have talked to.

And that's being shared. I feel like living in Bellingham together is a bonding experience, right? Because it's not I live in Seattle or I live in Portland. I live in this, you know, not tiny place, but Bellingham is a much smaller community. And it is also an attractive place. So you get interesting people who move there, yourself, yourself included. I was going to try to turn that into an insult, but I turned it into a compliment because I couldn't think of an insult. So that's one way to be. I think that's an okay outcome. It's one way to be nice.

But anyway.

But anyway. Yeah. So I can see that. Like, I just sort of feel like there's a bonding that goes around with Bellinghamians.

Yeah. Bellinghamsters, some people call them. I never really fully caught into that name. But anyway. So, yeah. So then I'm down there and I happen to see, like, for instance, if it was like, obviously, Andrew, if it was you or me. Uh, or let's just say, if I looked up on that screen, that's just randomly searching through Twitter for sports tweets. Okay. Yeah. And it's grabbing them and it's throwing them up and they're just running on this scroll. If I saw a tweet from you, of course, I mean, that'd be like two days of shows. If I, if I saw a tweet from anyone that we knew, I'd be like, Hey, that's so funny. I'm down here in Vegas and look what they're putting up on this digital board. And it wasn't even like the tweet had a bunch of engagement. I don't know what the, I don't know what the parameters were that they had set their system on, but it just so happened there it was. and i took a picture of it and i like tweeted it and i added the guy and i was something like so and so um representing i forget what i said something to the effect of like hey i noticed this is funny i'm in vegas and look here's a tweet of yours and it's in this sports book no response and i was like really that felt that that felt uh that felt active to me like like there's there's like just there's sort of there's not engaging and then there's actively not engaging and that felt like active non-engaging which i thought was really weird because i was like i am a bigger celebrity than this person like which is not saying much because i'm a micro celebrity of that but i am i'm i mean i am a bonafide more well-known person than this person is and i keep trying to throw them the love and they keep not responding and that's why they're my nemesis Mm-hmm.

Interesting. Yeah. And I am. I am. I didn't know who you were.

And no, we don't have to. I know we don't have to bleep his name out like we had to do with your with your Boy Scout nemesis yesterday. That must have been that must have been a mind scramble for the listeners. Yeah, because we do. We want to. Can we give that just the teeniest bit of context? Yeah, here's the name. It know. And by the way, yes, Andrew, this photo you sent me is yes, is exactly.

OK, let's let's close this conversation out really quickly before we get into yesterday's show. i did not know this person you were talking about but while you were talking i was doing a little bit of um googling around and i know it took all of one google search and um i am um yeah let's just say that i i don't this isn't probably my kind of person either i don't see myself having like a chill conversation with this person either this person has an idea of who they are a very specific idea of who they are uh based on and i guess we all do in a way mine is i'm just a little turd out there, so it's a little bit more palatable maybe. But this person seems to have a kind of different energy that he's coming into the world with. That's all I'll say there. So yeah, good riddance. That's why you had to move out of Bellingham and it was the best move you ever made. The town was not

big enough for both of us. At the very

end of yesterday's show, which again was kind of a long show, almost 90 minutes. We've been really doing, you know, a lot of, well, we're kind of like heroes. We've been doing a lot of work, a lot of long shows this week. And at the very, very end of yesterday's show, I told a story of something that happened to me when I was in Boy Scouts involving a kid whose first name is Sean, who I disliked a lot and we were nasty to each other, involving me preserving my water while on a Boy Scout hike and him guzzling his and then him tattling when I did not offer him my water that I had preserved. So anyway, his name, my entire life I have said his first and last name together. This is a kid that I have not talked to since grade school, right? But he has a last name that, first of all, really fits his personality. Secondly, Sean is a common name. And so I've always just said, you know, we have people like that in our lives, right? You say their full name. My friend Tracy Allen, same way, Tracy Allen. We always say Tracy Allen. And so yesterday during the show I'm just saying his full name, full name, full name And I said it like a hundred times Also, it's a funny last name That really matches his personality type If I can repeat myself there And so after the show I realized Oh, it's also a unique name And you can very quickly Google this person And he's exactly what you would fear he would grow up to be which is a shitty thing to say but like I'm just like oh wow yeah nothing nothing has really changed except age for you and so I didn't want listeners even good-hearted listeners I just didn't want anybody googling him or even accidentally doxing him or letting him know that I was talking some smack on a podcast about something that happened 35 years ago or what have you so I did end up bleeping his last name at the end of the show which really made it sound like it was just filthy it was like that viral video of the count you ever see that thing where the count is um oh yeah singing a song about counting but he they just bleep out every time he says the

word count and it sounds like he's singing a song yeah the kimmel show does that a lot and it is it's it's amazing what a trick on your brain and ears it is when you bleep something kind of unnecessarily it just immediately our brains are really pretty gross i think because it goes from being a not gross sentence to your brain inserting just filth just vile filth into the gap yes into the void but what the reason i think it it'll be confusing to the listeners is because we're talking if this if this stayed in we're admonishing the listeners you might say exhorting the listeners if you went more biblical on it we're basically asking listeners to be cool about this person's name and not go mess with them the name that's been bleeped and the listeners would have no way to actually find the person but we didn't know at the time that you and i were going to make the call to bleep the name so that's why we're that's why we're telling everyone to be cool yeah and i

figured people figured that out i have a feeling people kind of realized what happened that in hindsight i i was like oh you know what let's not put this full name out there i also wonder i mean

we're gonna we have so much to talk about today um and we have been turning in some some fairly epic shows uh of late um so i don't know if we want to bore the listeners with another two-hour jobber but i wonder if part of your if part of your thought about this person that you bleep the name of was that and i want to be really delicate here i've already found myself sounding ungenerous to folks that are working in uh service industries and having a hard time i wouldn't you know are basically have to be physically at a location to work we were talking about rudy's yesterday and i know that my my comments kind of rubbed some listeners the wrong way so i don't want to do that here, but I guess I'm wondering the job this person did was not, let's say, a job that you and I

i andrew would probably be seeking out um they're kind of they're aesthetic on on facebook because i actually looked at at least like the amount of facebook that i'm able to see not being a person who's on facebook i was looking at that this was a person who didn't appear to have gone very far outside of the place they grew up they didn't have they didn't seem like they had a job that i think you or i andrew would really be hoping we would be having in in our middle life things like that i'm trying to be very gentle here and just say like do you think if this guy would have actually been like the fourth founder of google if this person life would have turned out where it was like it just looked like he was just killing it at the game would you have felt more

comfortable leaving his name in that's interesting um that i feel like that raises a different problem for me in that scenario because then i mean it sorry if you change that if you change that factor luke i feel like you're changing too much and then i can't imagine that scenario

anymore does that make sense like if this guy looks like the guy who negged me at the bowling alley are you as worried about our listeners coming for him so in other words not somebody

who's a name whose name would be recognized in most households but just somebody who looks like they're doing really well in life and nobody's heard of them oh yeah yeah maybe sorry i'm not giving you a good answer because i don't know you're thinking about it that's what thinking sounds like this is what thinking sounds like it's awful that's why i never do it

but uh maybe yeah i mean it almost felt like i went on his in a way punching down i guess

this person still lives i mean i think i can say this this person i was talking about still lives Valley City Ohio it's almost one of those things where maybe you're right if I didn't know this person if I didn't have a direct history with this person that is based in you know contempt to say the least from our experiences growing up together and not getting along if you just drop this person's bio on my lap I might say oh yeah I mean that's somebody who you know is in a not super rich part of the world scraping to make it by like i might have a different feeling about it but i i don't know there's just so many there's so many factors but yeah it was interesting when i typed his name and while we were talking and i think i left that in the show right yeah we were still on the air or whatever we call this and i googled him and then just to see him and then um and like you i had a certain amount of access and just like seeing it and like part of me was like and i said something i'll admit this i don't i'm not proud of this but i i did Send you his bio and I said well I think I won or something like that Because you know this is a kid who did In his own way try to make my life Miserable when I was a kid and so That's where that comes from and we carry that Baggage around it was a very as we were saying Yesterday that was a very ungenerous thing for me to say And I might have even said in the Text message to you That I don't feel great About talking about human beings that way But and I didn't but On the other hand when I think about being trapped in the back of a school bus with this little asshole and then at age 45 and kind of looking where we both are, I did have one of those rare moments of like, well, take that, whether it was right or wrong.

But I almost wondered if, and again, this is just especially maddening for the listeners because we're being extremely vague. Yeah, I'm not being good at this. Part of why I'm being vague about his work stuff is because I don't want to get into a thing where we decide that because somebody has a certain kind of job listed on their Facebook page, therefore that makes them in any way less successful at life. So that's why I keep framing it as probably not something you or I would be interested in. So that's why there's there's like I know there's a lot of vagueness around this and I apologize. But I guess what I'll just say to try to wrap this up is it was almost like it was like, OK, we get it. You I don't mean that I don't mean I was thinking this towards you, but it was like you told this story of this kid that bullied you and and, you know, basically strong arms you into sharing your water on a Boy Scout trip. And I'm sure that was one of like 30 incidents, obviously. and just you have a bad feeling towards this person and you are in my experience by the way generally speaking you speak really well of people you really try to give people the benefit of the doubt so when i hear you kind of have a genuine sort of a genuine kind of dislike for someone yeah no when i hear you have a genuine dislike for someone i think you come by that honestly because it's not your default setting i just that is my default setting i hate everyone but not you you're usually like so when i heard that in your voice i was like yeah this guy did some stuff to my friend andrew um to give you these feelings but i guess what i'm trying to say is when i gorgled him and when i got to his page i was like it's not even like you both grew up and went on and you know went on with your lives and had different experiences and everyone's just doing their thing and boy kids can be mean to each other it was like wow this is bleak yeah you know and not it didn't appear outwardly like this is bleak because of mental health issues of course We can't know. No one can know.

know what goes on inside of someone but i was just like this is at this point this isn't even close maybe we should start a go fund me yeah like yeah and and not go fund me because this i'm sorry i keep footnoting everything and asterisking everything but you know you get a few negative emails from listeners you have to really get in your head andrew i don't know if you've had that experience but it's like i don't mean that this person seemed like they were you know unhoused or mentally ill or something they just it just looked like a life that i would absolutely not want involving a whole bunch a whole variety of things and i was almost just like walk away andrew you won he is just he's lying there in the rubble of his life he's not worth it man he's not worth it

and that's why we bleeped his name yeah and and this is let me just take it a step too far let's just say that you take one look at just like a quick snapshot of again what we had access to on the Facebook page and you could just see this person taking a huge hit off of a giant vape battery exhaling it and then explaining to you why Donald Trump was probably the best president ever like you could just right those were the vibes you know what I mean and again very very strong vibes of that and then and then seeing that it look you know and again now and that's repugnant but also I'm not trying to dunk on people who haven't had the same opportunities as me either this is getting too much into detail here but like one thing that i did not fully realize until i was well into adulthood was like the kind of the context of what put me in valley city ohio and you know i remember those times as mostly being picked on and you know that and again i'm not i feel like i talk about that too much on this show but as something that really kind of defined me as a person for better for worse it is it is important to know that like if you i basically did not feel safe you know what i mean for like yeah i don't know the first 15 years of

my life or whatever that right you feel like there's always a chance that someone's going to try to kick your ass or or embarrass you deeply right and those are bad feelings or get in trouble

and then you know and i wasn't like you know so anyway it was just like you know i'm very happy as an adult and maybe part of that is because i don't ever have to go go back to the to the 1980s schoolyard that i grew up in but one thing that i never and so that was always the perspective I had was a little bit of a poor me but looking at it now I realize well my family actually like you know my dad and mom they didn't grow up in Valley City they were more they were a little bit more city people who had a notion when they were in their early 20s to go move out to the country and my dad drove an hour to work he got up super early and drove an hour to work every day and worked his ass off and because of that we were better off than most of those kids around me you You know, I didn't think about this as a class issue when I was growing up, and I don't think the other kids were either. But as I'm an adult and as I look up people like this guy we're talking about and I see, oh, you're still there, like you haven't moved. And that's the case, I think, with probably a lot of those people who were kicking my ass and doing things. They're still there or they're still in some version of that. And it's a very different version of adulthood than what I'm experiencing. And I now sort of see whether or not the kids realized, hey, we're beating up this kid because he has more privilege than me. I don't think that's what this guy Sean ever said. I'm not. You got to give me your water. You have more privilege than me.

I don't think that came out of his mouth in 19. Did he at any point as he was pummeling you? Did you hear him utter the term? Check your privilege. I don't think so.

But anyway, so so all that is to say that's something that I kind of come to later on in life. And I realize, oh, well, that was probably it. it was unsaid and maybe it was not understood fully by us as kids but that's part of it too so i don't know how i've painted myself today if i just sound like an asshole dunking on hillbilly

elegy or like what the hell is going on here i think we can all agree that jd vance is deeply dunkable at this point is deeply dunkable yes indeed although everybody will think it's about

your basket your hoop dreams but um my hoop dreams have died although you know what with

the mask mandate about to go away meaning i could exercise indoors without a mask again i may maybe i'll try to recapture my hoop dreams here in a bit but um no i've jd vance my goodness gracious i mean what did maya angelus say when people tell you who they are believe them like like everybody was like oh hillbilly elegy he's like writing about you know a way of life that that so often the the coastal elites don't understand and it's flyover country and i mean a lot of that is probably true but boy that guy take a heel turn yeah yeah exactly yeah okay well we've done a lot of good here so far we've um and that's the kid by the way that jd vance is

actually well now you used his last name sorry i'm gonna beep it why did you make why did i have

to be so vague when we're just gonna say his flipping name what if we just beep vance you know what's funny is there was another kid who and the and hill in hillbilly

elegy which is a billy elegy so we're like people probably won't figure it out there was a kid who

absolutely tortured me named vance too another kid who's it's hard to say just his first name and i looked him up on this years ago when i was actually on facebook i remember not just looking him up but i think for some reason oh you know it's one of those things where somebody sent out like a class photo and tagged a bunch of people in it so it kind of became this almost like digital reunion sort of and so me and this guy vance were um friends quote unquote friends on facebook for a while and i saw him and he like he was like you know he was obsessed with the military as a kid he probably again like i don't know what his home life was like but it was i'm sure pretty rough and i knew his dad was a military guy and this guy again grew up exactly into what you'd think which was just like a kind of dangerous looking um uh you know very like ex-military by the time i was friends with him on facebook but also just like seeming kind of unhinged why am i blanking on the name of the guy from Taxi Driver. Oh, Travis Bickle. Yeah, heavy Bickle vibes.

He's going to show up at a karaoke bar by himself, already kind of too drunk, menace people, and then sing a song by Stained way too seriously, and then just everyone's going to be like, checking the exits.

Maybe, or just stand outside a local politician's election headquarters. Like, I don't know, man. But that's exactly, again, you could draw a straight line from childhood to adulthood there.

Well, it's good. I mean, I'm not even kidding. I think it's good that you are also bringing that perspective to things. I mean, I don't know if that helps you deal with the trauma of that part of your life. But, I mean, I do think that that's generous of you to also think about some of the privilege and kind of various factors that have people behave in the way they behave in certain instances, you know? Yeah. So, anyway, well, we're definitely going out with a song by Stained today. I think we can agree on that much.

That's what it says.

It's been a while since I could. I mean, we probably have a bunch of Stained fans in the audience, and now they're going to email me tomorrow as well. So, that's fine, though, because I won't be checking my email because I'll be in La La Land talking to Amy Poehler. By the way, she made this new documentary about Lucille Ball that's incredible.

Oh, wait, documentary or biopic? Is there also a biopic there? Documentary, yes.

I don't know what's going on. it's the it was the winter of lucy i think that's how they'll refer to this because there's the like there's the biopic that was nicole kidman and javier bardem i think he was actually nominated for an oscar for that um and then there's uh this is a documentary and it's really interesting because remember when we did that story i know we got to go to break but remember when we did that story years ago about the really regrettable lucille ball of course statue statue in cellar on new york which is right on lake chautauqua um well a lot i mean the early part of this film takes place in Celeron because that's where she's from that's why that's why they wanted to make the statue there and I guess it's funny because that story was just a story about a really like unfortunate looking statue but now it's kind of getting into sort of what life in Celeron New York was for her and her attachment or her association with that place and it's very interesting and it kind of turned it into more of a real place to me than just the place where they had a shitty Lucille Ball statue for a minute that's really interesting you know I um

i've said this a million times on the show i don't know if i'm really passionate about anything in life because i'm an interesting person but uh i love other people's passion for real like the idea of um being able to sit down with amy poehler and specifically say like tell me why you wanted to make a documentary about lucille ball seems really interesting to me

i am um yeah i'm very excited to talk about her i've talked to her rather and talk about lucille ball with her i'm a very very very big amy poehler fan as i'm sure many of our listeners it is funny i want to be i'm going to whisper this part and i'm going to bleep out most of the details okay just tell me i did have let's just say through various back channels or whatever somehow the somehow it became the case andrew that i was on a conference call the other day wherein the conversation was some folks and i'll be vague here some folks associated with various parts of this project we just wanted to let me know that i probably wouldn't be well received if i asked amy puller the question can women be funny i mean really what it was was it was sort of a debrief on like hey you know various there's the amy puller is a big enough star that there are like there's there's a lot of different people involved and different camps and everybody wants to make sure that you know they're doing their job and this you know this this pr company talks to this other place and they all everybody wants to be on the same page so it was generally a conference call about like hey what's the conversation going to be like but what i think was really at the core of it was making sure that i knew that i shouldn't ask are women funny or uh why don't people think women are funny or some other version of that and i just as you might imagine that Thank you.

had not occurred to me to ask us a question although now I'm going to be fighting the urge

to start with it that's so so I I apologize you know I misheard that at first I thought that you were I thought you were saying you were spoofing with somebody off the record saying nope wouldn't it be funny and cringy if I if I asked Amy Poehler if women could be funny because that's a funny concept right but I also know that obviously you're you're not going to do that because you

you're not close that'd be too big of a roll of the dice exactly the gambler that i am exactly

in fact like i remember one of the nicest things you ever said about me was you me and veves were talking a long several years ago now and um i remember you saying that the thing that we probably the three of us have in common is we like to you know you and i are not edgy our i wouldn't say our humor is edgy but we all get an appreciation for kind of rolling a little rock of a joke out there that could really that could really sink and just see it just like you know just kind of pushing the edge like and maybe in a social situation or something like that and yeah and then because the payoff when you when it could go either way the payoff is so much better right it's not like betting um and again we're not talking about this would be by the way this would be probably like

Plus $47,000. This would be like one of those three-leg parlays that if it paid, it would pay huge. But if it didn't, it would be catastrophic to the interview.

So just to go on my little journey here of you telling that story and me listening to it, I'm thinking like I thought that you were saying, hey, you said to somebody, hey, wouldn't that be funny if I asked her if women could be funny? And then somebody said, hey, don't even joke about that or what have you. That's not appropriate. So you're saying that there have been enough people in the same way when we get like ad copy for some brand and there are some rules set out at top, like, do not mention the competition and do not talk about any bad experiences with this brand. I'm like, yeah, did you think I was going to talk about bad experiences with this brand that I am advertising for? Are people doing that? Like, who needs that? Who's taking a toaster oven into the bathtub? Why do we need that warning, right? But it actually now, this seems more... Well, bath toast, obviously.

You've never had bath toast?

But this is now kind of making me sad. So there are a bunch of people. Paul, do you think that it's that warning is there for people who think that they're being edgelords and they're going to go in there and try to make her laugh with a ridiculous joke?

This is what I think. No, I don't think. I think what happened is that there have been probably a lot of interviews where somebody like Amy Poehler, I'm sure the same applies to Tina Fey, any other person who's a woman and who's been very successful in comedy. i think that the probably uh reporters that are trying to be thoughtful like as in they're trying to like really kind of get at a larger view of the world will want to talk a lot about like women in comedy yeah and that being the kind of like the the centerpiece of like for instance amy poller's entire existence my guess would be having never met her that she would say i'm a person who has worked really hard to build this career and production company and do these projects one element of my experience is that i'm a woman it is not the defining characteristic of my life it is not the you know and i think a lot of people probably ask questions about being a quote-unquote

woman in comedy especially given especially given the topic of we're now talking documentary about another woman who broke down a lot of barriers in comedy yeah exactly yeah exactly and so but

what i think more contributes to this so it's some of that my guess would be at no time has amy polar had a conversation with anyone in her team about like please get ahead of that question my guess would be that somebody what happens i mean why am i doing this we're supposed to go to break i'm just going to get into the most like this is just a word cloud of media experience that is so unrelatable to most of the people listening to this but i'm just going to do this this is my like biannual harangue about all of the layers of handlers and people and things so i uh did an interview with kamau bell w kamau bell and katie king who worked on this well we

got to talk about cosby yeah documentary you did the interview about the so this is a recent interview about the cause yeah this was this week so you have you watched it i want to watch the

whole thing it's really really really well made it's obviously a really really serious topic with a lot of trauma and a lot of triggers but it's an excellent excellent uh piece of journalism and i guess you could say filmmaking what's funny is because it's at the level of like i think it's on showtime when you work on when when me when i as the interviewer am doing something with when i'm interviewing someone who is on like a major network when we go to do the zoom there will be 12 people who i've never met interacted with and they will be the people from showtime they will be the people from

the production company they will be the people from the pr agency that showtime has hired to represent the project there will just be like a brady bunch of names on zoom tiles none no one's camera is on i don't know who anyone is they're all just there because they have these and again we have listeners that have versions of these jobs and i don't much like your old friend from valley city ohio andrew i don't want to i don't want to sound like there's no value to these jobs because there is value but my experience with them is so i'm talking to actually before kamau got on the line so i'm talking to the executive producer katie king because she was also part of the interview and we were going around on this very complicated question of if we could call the women who accused bill cosby if we could call them his victims or if we could call the uh what they uh allege happened if we could call it allegations or crimes and this is the weirdest thing because a judge technically reversed his conviction in pennsylvania he was he's not been convicted of these crimes so if we're going by the letter of the law the people who say that bill cosby and again sorry if we just jumped right into this and if this is triggering for folks but basically you have to say accusers because the conviction doesn't stand anymore which is just feels very wrong very extremely wrong because it sounds like there's some kind of a shadow of a doubt about whether or not these were crimes and i don't think that that realistically is a shadow of a doubt anyway so i'm talking to uh the producer i'm saying well what are we how are we doing and then all of a sudden one of these tiles pops up and says well uh when we were doing the um press release for the whatever again i don't know who this person worked for exactly but then they came on and gave me an unbelievably unhelpful description of what they had been doing on their side of things that was like did not answer my question i mean it wasn't like they were rude or anything it was just they basically threw up their own word cloud of nonsense or of of kind of non-committal copy i guess it was i guess what they were trying to do was give me another way to talk about it but it just didn't really like it didn't really help with what i was trying to do and it just was kind of like it was i was like oh i i didn't even i didn't comment on it but i just remember thinking man there are so many people on this call right now with so many different jobs and and kind of responsibilities and what what am i trying to say with all that my guess is that somebody on a similar zoom call somewhere on a tile that was buried somewhere heard someone say something about how too many people were asking amy poehler about women in comedy and that then got typed up into an email and then that got sent to somebody who then forwarded to somebody and then it got to cbs and then a conversation and then just to honestly just to err on the side of caution a conversation was orchestrated and it was you know this conversation took all of 10 minutes it wasn't like it wasn't like it was a huge lift for me or ask it was just funny that

it was funny to me the notion that i in any way would ever think of asking that question and then again now what i have to fight is the urge to open with that question can't you see

I mean, I know that you're obviously incredibly closer to all of this than I am, but I know what you mean. Sometimes, like, even I will get a glimpse at some of the stuff that is put into, you know, some sort of a PR push or a marketing thing. And you're like, yeah, that's definitely somebody who's just like kind of trying to justify their their role in all of this. Like some I've seen that. But I also can very much picture her like just saying, like, I'm sick of all of these interviews being about what's it like to be a woman in comedy. I mean, I can see her just like even just exasperating, getting into an Uber after another even like well-intentioned public radio interview or worse after a well-intentioned but very awkward Joe Rogan interview. No, I don't know. Interview with somebody who maybe is is not as skilled or smart as an interviewer is as your Terry Gross is your Terry's gross. But like I can just see her plopping into a car and being like, I'm sick of this. Like, I don't want to talk about I don't want to raise this mantle of like every conversation has to be like, it must be so hard for you. You're a woman. And like, that's something that she can talk to. And we should appreciate because there are barriers, but it's not her everything. Sometimes she just might want to talk about her career of making people laugh or what have you. I can see that very much being a real thing.

Absolutely. So I was going with the most ungenerous kind of speculation on what the events were. It's totally possible that there was a formal conversation where, you know, she said, can you just like – before I'm going to do these sit-downs, can you just let people know that I'm kind of tired of answering that question? So, yeah, I don't know. So I'm – again, I just have had enough experience now with how many cooks – I guess this is what I'm trying to say. There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen when you're doing something like this and – A lot of times I feel like the cooks want to kind of like, if they're not the chef, they want to at least explain why they're in the kitchen. So they'll be kind of like, I'm over here. I'm over here dicing onions. Second day in a row I've made an onion dicing reference.

What's going on with that? Can I ask you what?

Do I have Serengeti on the brain? Onions, onions, onions.

Let's go to break, but I'm going to ask you one question, and we can answer it after the break if you want, or we can just do it now, or we don't have to answer it at all. But do you think that men can be funny?

maybe that's the question i opened with hi amy um it's great to uh great to be with you here thank you so much for taking the time and by the way this this film is really it's a great piece of of work and just illuminated the world of lucille ball in this way that i just hadn't been aware of before and so i guess if you don't mind i want to get the kind of obvious question out of the way first do you think men can be funny that might actually work again i don't know her enough that's the thing and the problem is if i open with all the dice if i open with i mean that would be a better that would be like a plus that'd be like a plus 3500 instead of a plus 47 000 in terms of like that's hedging a little bit in a good way because i mean she's not going to hear there's no way she's going to hear that joke and not understand it's a joke yeah but it also just

might fall flat she also just might not think it's funny and you just don't know where you're catching her you don't know this person at all i don't know this even if she wasn't even even if she wasn't famous like you just don't know this person and like again that's the type of thing where even if you're a party and you meet somebody for the first time and it doesn't have any of this professionalism or fame surrounding it but you just go for a joke that you hope is going to be a little bit disarming but like if it doesn't work man you're really you're really in a bad

place to carry on that interview as a starting point i will say this was also kind of funny and then we really got to go to break but one of the people in this uh in this conversation that i was involved in said um i forget it was this actually was a hilarious like they weren't even how do i put this they said something like well we did see the sigaros interview so we just figured we'd check

it or something somebody said that yeah and i was like awesome that's i know right yeah i was dying

i was totally dying i was like you know what honestly we should have to have one of these conversations before i do any interview ever based on how bad sigaros went so this is somebody i mean

I know Sigur Rós looms very large In your memory And in the memory and history of kind of This show and your career and everything but like I don't think of that as something that is like You know I know it went viral at the Time but I'm just I feel like this is somebody who is maybe Keeps closer tabs on your career or Just is a huge NPR person who Is like listening to that show when It came out but that is I'm very Impressed I hope I laugh the win out of your

Sales here's what sucks no no I laughed The problem is it was a conference call so you could Things were cutting in and out. So I couldn't hear that they said Sigur Rós. I heard what I thought was that. And so I was like, oh, my God, that's so funny if that's what they said. And then I got clarification. I said, did you say Sigur Rós? And they said, yes. And then I laughed. But you know how you miss that half second of comic timing when there's a technical glitch? But anyway. That's great.

Kudos to that person.

Absolutely. And, boy, this has been the vaguest of the vague. The most general of general Thursday conversations. Because we've now talked about, let's see One, the person who you didn't like from childhood Two, the person who I don't like from adulthood And three, the people in the various professional capacities that I deal with for these interviews We've talked about all three people or groups of people without wanting to really put anyone on blast Yes, exactly Which means this has been deeply unsatisfying for the listeners Or, as we like to call it, Thursday

I wonder if there's any chance that the person who asked you that question in the conference call was Sean I thought that beep was going to be longer

That is a pretty good spoof Alright, let's take a break And then we'll be back with more TVTL in a moment

Alright, let's thank some donors of the day

He's wonderful, generous, kind-hearted nice people are making today's episode possible folks like lisa mcgowan and albuquerque i knew it here comes the bugs that's right well i don't have the drop ready to go that would involve me looking at this this list before well this very moment police is in albuquerque new mexico that's interesting because the bob odenkirk interview the times which is by the way a really nice piece is in New Mexico because they're shooting the final season of Better Call Saul there. But maybe we'll talk about that coming up too. Michael Pasafiumi or Pasafiumi is in Brooklyn, New York. By the way,

the reason I left you hanging on the Albuquerque thing and Bob Odenkirk is because I was sneezing at the time.

Oh, okay.

I was going to say that I saw that, yeah, because they shoot Better Call Saul there, they actually have a, I think Bob Odenkirk and the rest of the cast have a real, like, kind of commitment to the community there. And I saw that they were doing, like, they were supposed to do a fundraiser, him, and I cannot remember his co-star's name on that show, but she is amazing. But they were supposed to host a comedy night that raised money for local businesses, I think in Albuquerque or some surrounding town. I thought it was very, very cool. Very good look for people who kind of roll into a community and potentially change it by shooting there all the time.

Yeah, this gets into it in this article about how kind of like into the town he is after all these years now of shooting Breaking Bad and then also Better Call Saul. He's actually legally changed his name to Bob Odenkirky.

Wow. Oh, that's commitment. Start your polar interview with that. Long set up, but worth it.

Can Bob Odenkirkies be funny? Anyway, thank you to Lisa. Thanks to Michael. Thanks to Katie Porter in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

A lot of Hillsboroughs around this country of ours.

I probably said this last year, and I was probably wrong, but i feel like carl castle might have been from hillsborough north carolina he was definitely from north carolina and could have maybe been hillsborough we know who is for 100 from

hillsborough and that's katie porter how thank you how many hillsboroughs can you name because now that i know that there's a hillsborough north carolina i can name three wow uh i can name one

Hillsborough, North Carolina

Isn't there a Hillsborough, Oregon Or am I making that up Because I know there's a Hillsborough, New Hampshire But I thought there was a Hillsborough out here Either in Washington or Oregon Am I wrong? I am

I'm typing it in

Yeah, Hillsborough

Yeah, Hillsborough

Oh, slightly It's spelled slightly different So, yeah

No, but you're right And that's outside of Beaverton I should know that That's not far from here Yeah

I should be able to figure these things out So at least three Hillsboroughs in this country That's right

How many Willits can you name Because that's where Robert Burton is He's in Willits, California Willits Blend That's what they're known for The Letterman segment Willits Blend

I kind of get a Gollum vibe A Lord of the Rings Willits Donate?

I thought you meant the town of Willits Made you think of Gollum And I was like I don't think any towns Really want that to be there Willits donate that's my Gollum imitation we may have driven through Willits or at least I think we were near there because we were driving yeah we were we were cruising down the 101 there in northern Cal Andrew when we went out to the um Trees of Mystery and all that stuff and then just a little bit inland from there just uh just south of Longvale California and north of uh uh let's see ukiah that's where you'll find willits california and listener and supporter robert burton thank you um tamara stubblefield is here in portland oregon what the heck places full of tens now and or again i just maybe or again i just said or again that's amazing i'm i'm basically eminem right now door hinge door hinge orange door hinge i mean i'm in a flow state I just, without even meaning to, made one of the more clever kind of references we have on the show in a while. Is it that we have more listeners in Portland? Or, again, it could be that I'm just noticing it more because I live down here now. Anyway, thank you. Tamara or Tamara. I'm not sure exactly how you say your name, but appreciate you. Jessica Hamblin is in South Kingston, Rhode Island.

They have a rivalry with North Kingston. Don't even get me started on East Kingston.

West. They call it the Battle of North Kingston Aggression, too, which I don't think is fully accurate.

Yeah, I know. That's revisionist history. 27, by the way. 27 Hillsboros. And that's when it's spelled B-O-R-O. So I don't know if this includes things like – yeah, no, it's including New Hampshire, too. So that's quite a bit. I want somebody – I feel like this could be a trivia question. what how would you how would you phrase it what city name is used on the most locations in the

united states does that make sense oh sure like in other words what is the most common city what's

the most common city name in america that is that you know what thanks for cleaning that up a little

bit for me um my way was better i would like it if you bleep that out um Um... I Springfield's a good guest Don't you think Yeah But maybe it's just because We can think of the most I mean You know I feel like Johnson comes up a lot Everybody calm down Everybody calm down I'm not making a big Johnson joke

Just filthy This is saying that Washington is number one And Springfield is number two When I say this is I'm at What's number three I'm at worldatlas.com So I'm not sure And then it looks like Franklin is number three.

Those all. And I guess that all kind of makes sense because now I'm looking at this list, too. And a lot of these are named for presumably like Washington is, you know, George Washington. Yeah, right. And, you know, Matt, like Madison is a big one on this list. I'm looking at Madison is number five.

Oh, you're looking at a different list. I got Madison.

Most common city names in the U.S.

Yep. I have. That's funny. I'm at worldatlas.com. World Atlas. Georgetown.

We the best music. Georgetown. We the best Atlas. That's also a show title. We the best Atlas.

What was the other one? Oh, deeply dunkable. Yeah. But Georgetown is also George Washington. So you have Washington on the list and Georgetown.

But see, the thing is, U.S. place names could be counties, could be cities. I feel like place name is general. Oh, I see. Most common city names in the U.S. from, you know, Yahoo.com, so I don't know if we can totally believe this, but they're saying it's Franklin is number one, Fairview is number two, Clinton is number three, which predates, I would imagine predates the president, Clinton, Greenville, Madison, Marion, Salem, interestingly enough, and then Arlington coming in at number eight. But, again, I don't know if this list is any more believable than any other list.

Yeah, I'm on another list here, too.

From Yahoo Finance. I mean, I don't know.

Oh, yeah, I think I'm on the same one now, too. Yeah, Marion is on here. Marion. Sure, that is. That's one of the things. It's on there. I don't think of that as a common name. Go ahead, Luke. Let's do the show.

Thank you to our donors of the day. Thanks for making the show possible. We wouldn't be here naming nuts without you. hello and welcome to top story ah yes 55 or so minutes into the program let's get into the top stories happening again um so uh this this story is um is actually getting a fair amount of attention i thought it was people tweeted at me the other day but i thought it was just because like you know we talk about public radio a lot on the show and we both used to work at kuow but this interesting thing has happened in the northwest which is that people that own relatively new mazdas a number of them have found that their car radio is glitching out and when it comes back on it is fixed on 94.9 kuow and they cannot change the channel all they can do is turn the volume up or down and this is doesn't seem like it's just one or two uh Mazda owners in fact uh for GeekWire the um the kind of tech news website and media platform I don't know GeekWire does a lot of things now they started off as just kind of uh you know sort of a couple of a couple of dudes kind of just writing about you know tech and Microsoft yeah that they've really grown that into a thing yeah Todd but anyway GeekWire was first yeah Todd and um oh boy clicking on his partner geek is the other yes todd and geek um boy my my my my theories around the term geek

really changed after seeing nightmare allen i remember being a kid and we would call people geeks like nerd you're a geek oh we would too and then somebody's like do you know what a geek is it's a circus freak bites the heads off of chickens and like i think i just forgotten about that and assumed that if i were to hear that today that that was just something kids said in the 80s but

But no, no, it's I called people geeks and was called a geek and we threw that around and I never I had no idea about these the like carny implications until I saw that movie.

So you didn't so you didn't have the same experience of me as remembering kids like no laying laying down that knowledge back in the day.

No, that knowledge was never laid down for me. Anyway, GeekWire was originally reporting on this that there was, I think, like a subreddit or something where people were commiserating. Mazda owners were commiserating about the fact their radio was getting stuck on this one radio station. The Seattle Times picked it up, and now it's getting reported pretty widely. Even KUOW is reporting on it, the very radio station in question. They put Casey Martin on the case, who did a piece about it, which, again, I said this at the top of the show, but there was an irony that some number of people were forced to listen to the piece on KUOW about how their car radio was stuck on KUOW. Yeah, that is interesting. They had no choice in the matter. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm still pretty embarrassed about messing up some of those, my media literacy when it came to that Alec Baldwin story earlier this week. But I read the Seattle Times write up of this yesterday or the day before. And it was my understanding that it's not like you might be listening to Move in 92 and then you turn off your car and then you turn it back on and suddenly it's public radio and you're in a world of public radio that you don't know or like and you can't change it. I understand that it was people who were already listening to KUOW, and then it's looking like, although they're still investigating it, that KUOW, something happened with that signal that scrambled these computers. So my point here is you're probably already somebody who's got public radio on the dial at some point if you're in this dilemma now. It was the listening to KUOW, presumably, that caused this glitch.

Correct. Correct. So in other words, this did not happen to KISW listeners as far as I know. Seattle's best rock. So this was something about the way that the KUOW frequency or something about the KUOW stream, if you will. The problem is if I say stream, that's technically not what it is because it's a radio frequency that's going to the antenna on your car. But then they're also sending other information so that you get like certain things like a picture. maybe it'll be updating you you know we all know now in a newer car if you're listening to the radio you're also getting a lot of other information you're probably seeing the station you're probably seeing what song is playing or maybe if you're listening to npr you're seeing what story is playing there's just a lot of other visual data that now comes along there's something about that whole bundle of information specific to kuow that was causing or that is causing these radios to get stuck on it and then once they're stuck you can't get off of it um both uh casey martin and the um seattle times and i think maybe even geekwire all called some mazda dealerships where the person answering the phone was like are you calling about the public radio thing so like it's not like it's not like five people it's apparently a pretty significant chunk of people to where they're and and uh this um the casey martin piece let me see if i can just find this on the fly um said uh let's see um mazda let's see when did it when smith okay this is actually reporting on what one of the people whose radio stuck said when this certain person named Smith a Mazda driver called his dealership for an estimate on the repair the service employee put his name down on a list so that's the level it's at like nobody really knows what's going on and they don't have like oh we need to swap this particular part out they just are like we're just making a list of everyone who's stuck on KUOW again you're

right though because it's more than that too it's fried their entire like kind of anything that you see on that little like digital console I should say, because for me, it's like the fun headline is public radio. And I like to make fun headlines less fun. It's the Andrew Walsh promise. But, you know, one thing that I was reading about, too, is it's just annoying because it basically shuts down all kinds of functionality of that little screen that is in the console of new cars, newer cars. And so like and it's just like flashing constantly. And it's like somebody is driving and the KOW it's stuck on KOW and this little TV screen in your car just keeps on restarting, restarting flat there in the times. They said that one driver just like finally cut out a piece of cardboard and just taped it over his dashboard because it was so distracting.

Right. And it's also I mean, this is we've already entered the world where our technical expertise is is is failing us. We really I just don't understand technology enough. You know, I was like, I just, during one of the breaks today, I would like threw some clothes into the, into the dryer. And I was looking at the washing machine and I thought, I can't believe washing machines work. Like, I can't believe that works. Like, we figured that out. You can put a bunch of stuff in there and it can have dirt and grime and mud and what have you, running clothes. It can have sweat. And then these things actually work and they don't destroy your clothes. They just get the bad stuff out and then your clothes are fine. I was like, that's amazing. So that just kind of gives you a sense of where my technology brain is I'm still marveling over washing machines Sure, yeah In 2022 So Lord knows I'm not going to be able to explain the difference between 5G, 3G And over-the-air radio frequencies But I have a new sequence I've been working on Would you like to see it? I would Hat wobble I Yeah, like To me it's interesting that Something that KUOW is sending Over-the-air either digitally or through the radio frequency is able to actually like upset the inner workings of this radio slash uh video display console like how are they like that's it's incredible

to me that that can even happen yeah it's um and it's confusing and i i don't know if i don't know if i need to start being careful now or we'll beep this out too but i am interested in knowing if there's

any scenario in which KUOW is responsible for this because one of the theories out there that I believe some sort of a techno geek put out there like a professor or somebody said that it you know and again nobody knows for sure but it's a possibility that KUOW while sending out this HD signal as you were kind of alluding to before sent out some sort of a file type a file extension or something we all know that when we're using computers and somebody sends you something and it's like it's just not the right fit for your computer or your setup or it confuses your computer for some reason like there's a chance that kow in sending out a radio signal with this other metadata attached to it included some sort of file that is scrambling these things and if that is the case could kow as a radio station be held responsible for this because you are entering you're trusting that when i turn on whatever radio station it is it's not going to break my car and cause a 1500 problem for me right the other thing because have i mentioned

andrew that today is the official episode where we subtweet everyone and anyone in our life just

but we try to be as vague as possible here for the listeners if in fact this is something and

again we don't know and kuow is it says that they're checking in with some third party that they use like there's another there's like a there's like another layer or another kind of i don't want to call it just another another process that somehow this goes through from where like kuow sends out whatever they send out then there's some other thing that happens before it like starts playing out of your mazda yeah by the way i think we need to go back to

calling them mazdas that's more fun somebody did somebody did that i feel like when i was a kid

You would hear people say, oh, yeah, I got a Mazda. People would say Mazda sometimes. But anyway, KUOW, I think, is trying to – the technical team that's having technical times is trying to, I think, kind of say, like, this might not have anything to do with us. This might have to do with this other, like, third-party service that we're using for some part of the process.

Which would make sense, actually, yeah.

Could be totally true. Could be 100% true.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But what is kind of funny about this is that, again, because this is Vendetta Thursday. V is for Thursday. We got a bunch of good show titles today. I wear a Guy Fawkes mask the entire time I do this show. People don't realize that because it's an audio product, but I'm wearing one of those.

It's rigged, though, right? It's like a COVID. It's a proper COVID mask, but it's also a Guy Fawkes mask.

Yes, exactly. So, what's funny to me about this is that if it is, in fact, KUOW's fault, which there's no evidence as of right now it is, there's a certain person within the hierarchy at KUOW who I always had beef with, and that person would be central to all these conversations. And I just keep seeing little things in the reporting And I can picture this person Because I worked with them And we never got along And this person once made me apologize I had to apologize to this person In front of a group of people Because I had apparently said something That this person found insulting And they wanted me Not just to apologize to them But to apologize in the same public setting That I had apparently insulted them I will mention also I don't think I knew that Yeah, because I know this person too. This is a cis white male, I will just mention. The reason that's relevant is because it's not like I said something that could have been insensitive towards somebody who's from a marginalized group or something. I mean, this was a person who had much more power than me and outranked me by about 20 job classes, but who didn't like me and who found kind of my way of being in the world insulting and offensive and then forced me to apologize in front of a group of people. Anyway, that's as specific as I can get about that.

I would love more specifics when we are, I don't know, driving somewhere or drinking somewhere. Yes, exactly.

But anyway, what's really funny to me is that this person who's been kind of a long time – I mean, they're not a burr under my saddle anymore because I don't work there. But when I worked there, I never got on well with this particular person. They would be at a critical point of like this kind of stuff. And they also are a person who, in my experience, was extremely defensive. Nothing was ever their fault It was always It was sort of like always the It was always the fault of the small minded broadcast team That didn't understand what was really going on You know From a certain sort of technical aspect And I can kind of, I'm imagining this But I don't think I'm imagining incorrectly That this person is just like Their hair is on fire and they're running around Trying to tamp this down For instance Casey Johnson's, excuse me Casey Martin's piece

on KUOW's website

Thank you.

has a correction at the end of the piece. Correction. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that KUOW switched to a 5G signal. Station operations staff later clarified that a 5G is a mobile service standard and bears no relation to broadcast terrestrial service.

Which makes sense. Why does that keep, why does this 5G thing keep sneaking into the conversation? And especially Casey who works there. I also think that there's always There's always some friction when you're reporting on your own company in a different department in your own company. But, yeah, like why would 5G have anything to do with this? Why does it keep sneaking into these stories? Are we all just like freaked out about 5G now?

The only way I could see it happening would be if somebody had their phone going. Well, that's not true. because the way that i think 5g could be related would not be specific to kuow but if i can take off my podcasting hat and put on my radio operations manager hat andrew i feel like those these fancy like i was already saying all of this information that is now being displayed on our screens if we have a newer car that's not all coming from radio some of that must be coming through some other like cell means right like use actually using cell phone technology and so i guess there's a boss i'd read in one of the earlier articles that the change from 3g to 5g had impacted some people's car like navigations and things like that to the degree that someone's car is using a cellular network to do some of that whether it's the gps or that map thing that'll show up or whatever there is a possibility that in some cars the switch from 3g to 5g the car didn't know what to do with it but that's more like sounds more specific to the car than the radio station that's sending the thing to the car you know what i mean yeah but i mean i don't think it's like it definitely has nothing to do with the frequency 9 4.9 fm that's that's a radio frequency that have nothing to do with 3g or 5g so they're not wrong the clarification is not wrong but it just this just cracks me up because it just is like this is just like one of the main things you would like to not have happen with your radio station is that you basically i mean the good news here's what i would say the good news is like you said andrew the people that got stuck that are currently stuck listening to kuow we're already listening that's how they got stuck on it so at least it isn't like they're kuow listeners and all of a sudden they have to listen to, like, the conservative talk radio station.

Right, exactly.

Like, that would be worse.

Yeah, they're just stuck where they were. They didn't get thrown into something else.

But how long will it take before this is a segment on Tucker Carlson?

Ha, that's interesting. I was actually wondering, has this been caught? I mean, it sounds like this has been caught in the updraft of national news at this point. I do wonder. I don't see Fox giving a...

No, I don't think so. Just the fact that it's public radio and they don't they don't they like public radio has figured out how to drive up their abysmal ratings by forcing people to listen to the radio station. You know, I just can hear his smarmy ass saying that, you know, wait, wait this week, are you?

I mean, this is a wait, wait story. I mean, this is the ultimate wait, wait, don't tell me story because it's about public radio. It's meta. It's kind of like the audience. I can hear the tittering of the audience.

Yes, I'm not on wait, wait. But if they're not on to this story by now, they should be because it's perfect for them. I was going to say, why am I? We still have like blurs days to do. We were going to talk about listeners. Tierra's workplace dilemma. Maybe we can talk about that tomorrow. It'll have to be tomorrow.

That's actually a really good Friday conversation, actually. Good. And we have, by the way, you keep saying, oh, yeah, I guess people aren't interested in blurs days anymore. That was apparently a challenge because we have we're blurs out.

Oh, wow. I was going to say what the what's actually getting some media attention is the in this like Seattle media that's now getting wider attention is the firing of this Kraken beat

writer oh I didn't see this have you seen this no no nothing this has got like so the

the the Seattle Kraken which is the new hockey team had hired a a reporter to cover let's See, I want to get her name exactly right here so that I am not just stumbling around. Her name is Marissa Ingemi, and she was hired to cover the Kraken for their inaugural season. And she was on a, like, I don't know how many months probation. But there's a period of time that I think that the union contract states that you can be fired kind of like for no cause because you're still in your kind of like probationary period. And I think very, very shortly. like a week or two before that was going to expire for her, they like let her go. And the Northwest newspaper guild and a bunch of other reporters at the Seattle times are very upset that this happened. And there's no, I haven't seen any details about what supposedly went on, but that is actually getting the defector is writing about it. And like the guy at barstool sports doesn't like this person because I mean, he's just bad news all around, but I guess she wrote something that he was offended by back 10 years ago. So now he's like delightfully, you know, exacting his revenge. It's like becoming a pretty big sports conversation around this Seattle Times writer.

And it seems to be more of a contract is up type of thing. I guess we don't know. I have a million questions.

Her contract had just started. It was the probationary period of the contract. So like you get hired, but you're not like 100% hired until you clear the probationary period during which you can be let go without a particularly good reason. And once you get past that, then it's much harder to fire you because of the I think the union contract.

Yes. I'm being I'm being terrible here because I'm both trying to read into this and listen to you at the same time. So you said that and I my brain was just scrambled there when it was time for me to talk and I'm going through old tweets here. But, yeah, I want to dig into this, figure out what's going on. That's all I can offer right now.

The thing, though, that's – this is what I saw somebody saying on Twitter last night that's interesting is I guess there are two – there are sort of two Kraken writers maybe or two beat writers on this and – or at least a pretty prominent – I'll let people dig around on Twitter and find out for themselves. But a fairly prominent sports right – so there was a big signature-like drive, like a list of people who signed on who worked for the Seattle Times that said, we don't support this action or we have a problem with this or we want to know more about this or whatever. I don't know what the exact language was, but that's the kind of thing that happens at workplaces where you sign sort of a letter of support or a letter of protest. And there's like a sports writer that's not on there, and now everyone's – so everyone's gone through the list and figured out who's not on there. And now they're like, well, what's up with that person? What's going on with that that they didn't sign on to the list? So quite the Seattle sports media scuttlebutt going on.

I told you there's a lot of blurs to blurs today.

Are you looking at this list? I am. Is this a direct response to you saying that the somewhat, I guess I would say. Paltry. Paltry. Scant. I like both of those. Thin. Thin. Spotty. Spotty. Keep going. No, go ahead. This is your thing now. Do it.

Tepid.

Actually, tepid is what I think I was looking for. I think that's what my brain was kind of glitching on there for a second, the somewhat tepid response. Yeah, we have a lot of blurs he has to get to, so let me.

You know what this proves, though, by the way? Yeah, I'm sure you're going to take it somewhere dirty. And this is the weirdest way for people to figure this out. This proves time travel is real. Oh, yeah. Because what basically has happened is the last couple weeks have been kind of a little bit scant on the flur's days tepid and so a number of listeners who have harnessed the power of time travel or even more interestingly I guess their parents have traveled back in time back in time between 10 and 70 years had sex birthed children who otherwise didn't exist raised them to love podcasts And those people are now listening to this and are having Blur's Days this week.

Do you think that any of these people made the mistake of introducing podcasts to the past? And are we going to start to see the repercussions of that?

My hand is disappearing as I try to play Earth Angel.

Wait, everybody's looking around. A microphone is appearing in my hand. What's happening? My hand is a microphone. Shit. It's a microphone.

We shouldn't have done that.

All right. Here we go. I'm going to kick things off with Dave, who said, Happy birthday to my wife, Kate. Kate is a longtime TBTL listener and supporter. She's celebrating her birthday this week and would love a shout-out for her. So here it is, Dave. Kate! I get it.

Happy birthday!

I get that. Shout-out. It was awful. You'll do the next one. It'll be better.

I don't know. That was going to be my bit for this one. I can't believe you stepped on my bit. Laurel in Burien says, Hello, I'd like to... to wish my sister Monica in Burbank a very happy Blur's Day week slash month. I love her very much. Stretching it out there.

I'm on Burbank. Aaron says, I'd like to wish Terry a happy birthday. You are the nicest person I know. God, that is that is one of the best compliments I think you can offer somebody. You are the nicest person I know. Yeah. An awesome grandma and my friend also sorry i lost your email address expect rapid correspondence forthwith have a great day aaron you lose your friend and i can't tell if terry is aaron's grandma or just a grandma but aaron let's keep track of those email addresses i do think this also represents

tv chill's i wouldn't say descent but maybe evolution into just being How people talk to each other Aaron doesn't have Terry's email address anymore So Aaron knew Well I'll throw it up on old TBTL And then Terry will hear it And that will take care of it Very Prairie Home Companion Coming back from the break Exactly

It's also very much how I communicate With my extended family these days too

Aaron said to Terry We lost your email address Why does my Garrison Keillor sound like Bill Clinton

It does sound a lot like Clinton

Sure does Alright Jesse in Cincinnati Could you please wish Maggie in Delaware a happy Blur's Day this week? Thanks so much. Job done. I forgot that I'm trying to make job done a thing. Job well done. Not well done. Job done. Job done. Job done. That's the British way. Remember I was saying how the guy I follow on Twitter, the pool guy, or TikTok rather, where he cleans up really gross green algae filled swimming pools. And then when they're done, he goes, that's job done. And I heard that somewhere else And I thought maybe that's a thing they're saying in England I don't know if that's even true Maybe it's just two people But I do like saying that's job done That's my new thing I've been trying Except I forgot to try it

I feel like we heard from some Brit 10s Who said they don't think that's a thing That's not common So hey I'm going to mix things up a little bit here Luke Which will probably mess us up later But I just remember that we have another We might even have a few sprinkled in here But I know that we have another Maggie in Delaware shout out here So let me skip to the end of this list and say Linder is sending this greeting to Maggie in Delaware. Her birthday is on Saturday, by the way. Linder says, I hope she has the best day in recent memory. Just kind of controlling your expectations there. I'm so glad she's in my life. I'm so glad that her name isn't Eric like my boyfriend or Eric like my best bud since high school. I'm so glad Maggie is Maggie. so I never accidentally text her a photo meant for one of them because keeping those conversations straight for years takes up a lot of my brain space, but I digress. Happy birthday, senpai, from your imaginary pale blender.

That's interesting that that's where that email went considering where we started the show, talking about accidental texting of people and things and stuff like that. All right. Kara says Megafan birthday alert Rob A devoted listener since the early days of TBTL Turns the big 4-0 this Saturday A happy birthday shout out From Luke and Andrew Would be amazing So there you go Rob As I always say on the show Job done

I am going to offer a correction Not to embarrass you Luke But just because I think it's an interesting distinction Rob is not merely a devoted Listener but a devout listener Which I believe that has like religious Implications does it not Like if you're devout aren't you like dedicated To a religious cause or am I I might be wrong about that

No you're right the term devout Devout is never applied to things I rarely hear it applied to something outside of the world Of religion you wouldn't say he's a Devout Seahawks fan Unless he had made the Seahawks I don't mean Rob I just mean a person had, like, made a Seahawks-based religion where then they could be devout. But devout is almost always associated with some sort of religious thing. So that's impressive. Thank you, Robin. Well? That's news.

Makes me kind of want to start a religion. Mm-hmm. I don't know. Let's think about it.

I am an ordained minister. I have performed... I performed one wedding. It didn't last.

I'll bet you that's not... I'll bet you that's expired.

Are you kidding me? You think the Universal Life Church is just trying to get money from me?

I bet you you've got to give him another $60. We're digging it. All right. Nick says, happy Blurze to Lacey in Seattle. She's been listening to you guys forever. TBTL is her favorite podcast, and we listen to it on any road trip longer than 15 minutes. It would make her millennium, as she is fond of saying. If she got a happy birthday, shout out.

On the show, this is it. Nick, Lacey. Happening. Job done. This is the shout-out. Happy Blur's Day, Lacey. And thanks for liking the show. I know it can be tough at times.

Maggie says, now wait, there's a lot of... Yeah, is this, yeah, are we... Is this also, is it not only a Blur's Day week for a listener named Maggie, but a different Maggie has a kid who's having a birthday, or the same Maggie, who knows? Happy 16th Blur's Day tomorrow to my amazing son, Isaac. he's come back strong from pandemic zoom school and is a thriving student singer and all-around smart caring kid i'm grateful for you especially on the nights when you offer to make steak and caramelized onions for supper boy wow that is way more involved from a culinary standpoint than i was ever able to uh in in my when i was 16 years old tell you what andrew the only thing i was

making in those days were babies babies don't get any ideas isaac isaac unless you know i don't know isaac be responsible i don't know isaac's life try messing around with some mushrooms too a little side of mushrooms with the steak do you like that can't recommend oh you don't like mushrooms i'm

not a mushrooms are my cheese right cheese is to you andrew mushrooms are to me which is a bummer because you're a vegetarian i know we've had that conversation before i know i did not i did not Basically set that up very well Since it's like the number one thing they use In lieu of meat stuff But anyway, we're not here to talk about that We're here to honor Isaac as his 16th Blurs approaches Maggie says, your dad and I Can't wait to see where life takes you Aww, that's really sweet Happy Blurs Day, Isaac

You're a good kid, Isaac Don't be like My podcast, partner Don't be like my podcast Louie spelled L-O-U-I-S but pronounced like Louis, like a French king, says Louis. So not Louis like yours, not like Andrew Louis. Right, because my name is spelled the exact same way, but it's Louis, my middle name. But this is Louis like a French king, so I will do this in my most regal voice. I'd like to wish a happy birthday to the love of my life and my 11, CJ. It's been a rough few years, but I love you all the more. Happy birthday. That's from Louis. Very cute. And I'm doing this from memory, But I'm pretty sure Louie also included a really nice note saying that they're a relatively new listener, too, and has been enjoying the show since the pandemic. So that's always nice to hear. Thanks for the kind words.

Louie, welcome. Cameron and Asha would like to wish the happiest of Blur's days to the best mom slash mother-in-law. We are so glad we got to celebrate in Port Angeles with you And see you working at the new Buena Luz Bakery On your actual birthday Sounds like a nice little beat up Now, I don't think that the name of the mom slash mother-in-law is here But I'm guessing they know who they are

Yes, good point Yeah, there's no name involved here

If you were working on your birthday at the Buena Luz Bakery in Port Angeles We're probably talking to you

Maybe, or ask your co-workers Just see

I'd say there's a 99 Nothing is ever 100% in life But I think this is, I could say 99.99% Possibility that we're talking to you Yes, happy Blur's Day I have a scone

Hmm, Catherine says Not what I would go for in a bakery by the way I don't know why I said it, scone is kind of fun to say

If you hit a scone If you warm it up And then put some butter on it It's decent But really what you're trying to do In my opinion is Make up for the fact that it's a scone

Yeah I think I'm a It's been a long time But I think my solution It's been a while To dunk them Don't you dunk your scone in your coffee

Yeah but see to me It's like scones and biscotti And the idea that they're dunkable What did we say today It was deeply dunkable

Deeply dunkable

Again my problem with biscotti is Biscotti are edible Only after they've been submerged in coffee long enough that they stopped being biscotti or gazpacho as marjorie taylor green referred the other day to um no really nancy pelosi's gazpacho tactics oh my gosh that's did you hear that no i did not hear that that's wonderful isn't that just wonderful she was doing one of those ridiculous conservative i don't even think it was like fox news level conservative you know they're just like constantly on these different like internet web type shows that are increasingly more unhinged and she was decrying Nancy Pelosi's gazpacho tactic

that actually makes sense though because I don't know if you know this but if you're expecting something to be cold but it's actually room temperature when you bring up to your lips it can burn pretty bad and maybe that's what Pelosi is doing to the country once again

you've gone far out of your way to try to make what Marjorie

Taylor Greene is saying make

some amount of sense um

Um, what does he say? Where is the nutcracker in that same?

Where be, where, where be your nutcracker? You know, it's funny, Andrew, the way that I even found out about this Marjorie Taylor Green thing was a bunch of, I think you should leave Tim Heidecker means where he's talking about gazpacho. I just kept seeing that because like, that's who I follow on Twitter is people who get that joke. And I didn't even understand the context. I was just like, this is a lot of the Tim Heidecker, um, charades character talking about gazpacho, and then that was when I finally figured out, oh, there's something else happening in the news that this is a reference to. You know, that

reminds me. I was putting together today's little intro package with the montage of the sound, and I love using the Bozo did the dub drop, but that makes zero sense. Almost every drop I use, it should stand on its own. It can be funny even if you don't know what it's from, but I am just so in love with that show and just the idea that Bozo did the dub like I just like to say Bozo did the dub like well you know they're fun words to say and so I threw in that and it's like that's only funny if you know that TV show I kind of broke my usual rules for it well what's what's funny about that is you and you and Vives would say Bozo did

the dub kind of a lot I had seen the sketch but I had forgotten about that one line basically what's going on for why am I gonna explain this because I am what's going on is like the Tim Robinson character this is from i think you should leave is he everyone's there's like a work meeting but before the meeting it started people are kind of talking about their favorite viral videos of the moment of course he doesn't know any viral videos so he basically makes one he goes next day yeah and makes it and brings it to work the next day and it's terrible um and he clearly doesn't fully understand viral videos or even what the kind of how it all works the jokes and the stuff like that and so it involves this bozo the clown and like a a different like voice talking over it but yeah At some point, he just says, no, Bozo did the dub.

Because what he does is like Tim, I'm sorry, Tim Robinson, right? Yeah. Tim Robinson's character basically took old footage of Bozo the Cloud and then overdubbed his own voice saying ridiculous, I think, filthy things. And it's just janky and stupid and not funny. But then they get into this big argument of like, I don't understand what the premise of this joke is. And like Tim just keeps saying, or Tim's character just keeps saying, no, Bozo did it. bozo did the dub which makes no sense but delights me but like you and genevieve clearly like locked

in on that because you would say it a lot i think or i would hear you referencing it and i didn't even remember what you were talking about and then i went and rewatched that at some point i was like oh that's what bozo did the dub now it also fills me with delight and do you know why um i especially

find that i mean we're so we're we are so far deep here that i'm just going to continue this train of thought while I actually look for what I'm about to reference but you know how you have those signs especially around places like Seattle that says like in this house we believe that science is real and Black Lives Matter or whatever somebody made a yard sign that is basically that but it's a bunch of jokes from I think you should leave and so I found one version of it here I don't know if this is the one that we were passing around a year or two ago but it says in this house we believe Bozo did the dub the door goes both ways. Roy Donk is a household name. The bones are their money. You can't skip lunch. Triples is best and you gotta give. Oh, Odenkirk. Yes. Oh, Odenkirky. Oh, by the way, yeah, this is an updated one.

Do you think he's a comedian's comedian? Do you think Odenkirk

is a comedian? Do you want to actually have that conversation now or do you want to hold it for tomorrow?

I say we skip the rest of the blurses. No, let's do this. Let's power through the blurs and then let's just put one minute on the clock.

Okay, that sounds good. We are getting dangerous I'm two hours again. We need a race free podcasting.

You're welcome, everyone. And by free, I mean many of you are paying for it. I know I just went with the last one, but I'm going to go back to back, Andrew, because I'm in I'm in the zone. Catherine says happy second birthday to our Logan girl. Oh, we're so grateful for your silly faces and your belly laugh. And can't wait to celebrate you today with Luke and Andrew on day four of birthday week. Don't get carried away, Logan girl.

Day four.

I mean, having a birthday is not a personality, Logan, okay? Let's just do it on the day, okay? And we honor that.

Well, that's like Monica and Burbank going a whole week or a month.

Oh, believe me. That's really who I'm talking to now by way of Logan. Your special donut party will be so fun, and we will make sure you have lots of sprinkles. Love you to the moon and back. Our favorite, tiny and big hogging noses. Love, mama, and bugger. Oh, my gosh. your silly faces and your belly laugh

and a donut party with lots of sprinkles

Logan is a pot belly pig by the way I love this Rob says, can I do this one, Luke? Or did you want to do three in a row?

I'm going to go triples or best. Rob says, please wish a happy blurs to my darling wife, Kate. She's a Valentine's Day baby. Baby. How would you? I mean, are we going with a. Is that kind of like a biggie? Tonight, someone should be having my baby. Baby. Oh, oh, I see. Because it's written twice. She's a Valentine's Day baby, baby.

I know, I think that's how you say baby sometimes Baby

She's a Valentine's Day baby Baby I can't wait to spend the day with you in New York Visiting museums and eating foods I smooch you

That sounds fun

Visiting museums and eating foods Smooching Kate Well that, I mean Rob and I have talked through that We've talked through that And everybody is fine. We're all mature adults.

Garrett says, I was actually turning you down on this one. Garrett says, I'd like to wish a very happy second Blursday to our oldest son, Isaac. Shannon and I are so proud of you and amazed how much you've grown and how quickly the last two years have passed. You are a wonderful older brother and a terrific son. Hopefully you like the Funfetti cake we're making today. Oh, yum. Nice. Happy Blursday, Isaac.

What do you think about that, Andrew? Two Isaacs, two different Isaacs, being wished a happy birthday on the show today. And you don't believe in God. I believe in Isaac. Anne wanted to pass along a Blur's Day message to her sister, Kelly B., who celebrated her birthday yesterday. All of the good things I could say about her would make this a Stubat River episode. Well, Anne, we're emailing into the right episode of the show because we're over the river and through the woods and hurtling towards the two-hour mark here. So I will try to keep this short, and I will say that there is no one who makes me laugh harder and think more deeply than she does. Can't wait for the next get-together, lots of love. Signed, Annie B. To Kelly B.

From Annie B. That's really sweet. These are some quality blurses.

Yeah, that was solid. I think the blurs days are back, baby.

Yeah, they are. They came back with a vengeance. And as we all know, V is for blurs days.

That's right. All right, that is going to do it, I guess, for today's episode. But we will tomorrow, I promise, because we've been promoting. I do want to get into this email from listener Tiara in Baltimore. I want to talk about—well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Back it up. Stop the show.

You want to talk about Odenkirk?

Here's the thing. I feel like it annoys the listeners when we talk. No, I feel like it's annoying when I promote something we don't talk about, And then I promote it the next day and we don't talk about it I'm trying to do less of that And so we don't have to belabor the Odenkirk thing I think ultimately I've come around to the idea That Bob Odenkirk could be described as a comedian's comedian When I first saw that As the kind of It's not even the headline in the Times piece But it's what Times social media is using To promote it If that makes any sense And I thought to me comedian's comedian means It's always to me meant It's been very specific to the world of stand-up And it's meant a stand-up comic Who is not as popular as some other stand-up comics And not having, you know, HBO specials necessarily But other comics really respect That's always what Comedians Comedian has meant to me I've never even known it to apply To people in film and television Have you?

No, I mean, listen I want to be very clear I haven't read this article This is all filtered through you And also, I'm not a comedian And I don't know Bob Odenkirk's relationship

No, but you are a comedian's podcast

I am not I've always considered you that But I guess the only thing I would say is, I mean, my gut reaction is yours. Like you think of people like I don't even know would maybe I don't know if Sam Kinison is an example. Like I just think of like a certain kind of comedian that has a certain onstage persona. But then all of it. I mean, I think Bob Saget was a good example. Right. Didn't weren't we saying that Bob Saget was a comedian's comedian that like he just other comedians just adored him like kind of on the circuit. And as they came up together, I don't get that impression with Odenkirk. I mean, he's very well respected. He did. I mean, he and Dave did come up through a stand up background, I believe, as you know, or at least dabbled in and as so many comedians do, as most of them do. But you're right.

You mean David Cross, like when they made Mr. Show?

Yeah. What did I say?

You just said Dave. I just wanted to. I assume that's what you're talking about.

David Cross. Yeah. So anyway. Yeah. So I'm with you. knee-jerk reaction it does that doesn't seem like the right designation and it just sort of seems like the type of thing that this person who is tweeting this kind of heard before and just thinks right a compliment when

It's supposed to be more specific than that.

I think it's almost always associated. This is good, Andrew, because you've gotten me back to where I believe my initial hunch, which is this is wrong. The reason I started to kind of a little bit slide over into the camp of believing it is because the open of this piece is very interesting. The writer is writing about basically Bob Odenkirk took the Better Call Saul or like the Saul Goodman role on Breaking Bad because he needed the money. And then the writer kind of sets it up by saying basically point because I think the reason I also thought it didn't apply to Bob Odenkirk. is because I thought Bob Odenkirk is beloved and pretty famous. Because he is to me. I mean, he always was. Even pre... Because he wrote on SNL. He wrote some pretty iconic sketches on SNL. He was, of course, on Mr. Show. He was just in a lot of things. To me, Bob Odenkirk was not toiling in obscurity in comedy. Bob Odenkirk was really making it happen. But this writer of this New York Times piece kind of sets it up like, Bob Odenkirk took the job of Saul because he needed money. I mean, that's actually a quote from Bob Odenkirk. and then also um that he had written it saturday night live but had been eclipsed his fame you know other people there the people that were in the sketches had all kind of like become famous but not bob odenkirk and that he had directed projects that had been kind of met with you know hit and miss success and so i mean the argument is kind of like bob odenkirk was not really killing it in the comedy game as far as name recognition and financial remuneration when he took on this role of Saul which then changed his life and has now made him have all of those things that's kind of the premise of the profile hmm interesting yeah and that had me thinking how how kind of not super great it was going for Bob Odenkirk that made me reconsider whether or not I considered him a comedian's comedian because maybe I was the only one who had him up on this pedestal before better call Saul but I'm back to trusting my initial hunch which when you say comedian's comedian you mean stand-up comedy that's what most people who use that term mean yeah I think

so or just somebody who's like who might have a reputation maybe even a good reputation with the public as a comedian but there's something that like other comedians will just adore this person

and like sure you know the bob saget is a great example because bob saget was also famous like right he was super famous from his shows and a comedian's comedian because when he was in at the laugh factory he was dirty and making his comedy friends laugh so you're right it's not even about how famous you are it's really about like your uh kind of uh the sort of type of comedy that you're doing and who's impressed by it yeah exactly so there we did it knock that off job done

job done that's job done i just do like it as an all i didn't think of it the first time you're talking about job done as i kind of a power out but i do like that it's not job well done you know it's just you're right done we could never say that at the end of one of these shows It would be very inaccurate Whatever you think of it, it's done And there's no arguing that

Yeah, last job done Alright, thanks for listening everyone We'll be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you I will be checking in from Pasadena, California Why Andrew? Why am I in Pasadena When I'm interviewing Amy Poehler in Culver City, California Well, because it's the Super Bowl in Los Angeles This weekend and I didn't consider that what terrible planning i didn't consider that when we agreed to go film in los angeles this weekend so i'll be out there in beautiful pasadones which i actually love so what are you gonna do all right thanks for listening everybody we'll see you tomorrow got real kairiz doll on that good as always to have everybody we get the whole anecdotal thing and we will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you so please do join us for that until then have a great thursday please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Boys can be funny.

I don't know. I've never found a boy funny.

Well, I think boys can be funny, okay? I just think maybe they haven't had the opportunity to be funny for as long as girls have.

They were always raised to be like, oh, you look so handsome. It's like they never need to be funny.

Exactly.

I just think it's biological. Guys are not funny. It's just because they're just not.

Power out.