Muse

We like different things and that's okay, cause we just like different things. Me and my mom like our eggs the different way and that's okay. My mom likes them fried, I like them scrambled with cheese. tbtl

i'm going to suggest that we have a little constructive talking time not long at all i mean maybe maybe 10 minutes or um okay or maybe 15 is also good but it'll be so amazing

you'll love it it's gonna be the best ever i love this show do i wish our fans were a little more

hip? Yes. Do I wish they were a tad more on top of their hygiene? Absolutely. Do they have a confused look in their eyes like a dog that's heard a strange sound? Yeah. But strap that dog to a sled and baby, you'll be flying across the tundra. Hey, can we get back to the funny?

Alright, hello, good morning and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be Too Beautiful to Live. That's a terrific title. It jumps out at you like a rat in your underwear drawer. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. He is huge. He is a large, framed man who can knock heads together. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where I'm given today three Denzels up. It is extremely... Didn't know you like to get wet, though. Extremely rainy today. Just large, standing puddles and pools of water outside that I see on the streets of Portland, Oregon. Luckily, though, it's, of course, warm and dry right here inside the podcast that finds itself at episode 3644 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. I feel like I can get a sense for how bad the rain is by how many people are actually jogging outside versus how many people are just hurriedly running from their car to something or walking their dog with a kind of grim look of fatalism on their faces. Like, sometimes it doesn't look great outside. Maybe it's drizzling, but I still see a lot of people out there voluntarily taking part in the outdoor activities. Today is not one of those days. Today is just people outside who have no other option than to be outside in this particular moment. Which tells me I'll be visiting the treadmill here at my apartment building. The indoor... I was... I'm such a bad person. I mean, that's evident to anyone who listens to the show. But, like, we have a relatively small apartment, you know, gym. It's got two treadmills, a couple of, like, ellipticals, some weights. It's not huge, though, at all. This is not a huge apartment building. But I somehow think it's like my own private hangout spot. Like, I went in the other day, and there was someone else on one of the treadmills. There was still a treadmill for me to use, but I spent my whole jog annoyed that this other person had the temerity to use the facilities that we all pay for. Anyway, I am going to try to be a better person, at least for the next, I don't know, hour or so, as we continue on with the program.

Let the fun begin.

Speaking of athletic endeavors, well, the Cleveland Browns football team made a big acquisition of a player last week. You might have heard about it. And what that has meant for my friend Andrew is that he is going to have to take a break from being a Cleveland Browns fan. That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. We will get the latest on that. also another monday another piece of audio from the wheel of fortune we are quickly becoming the go-to podcast for monday morning wheel of fortune takes is this a thing people care about no i don't know i don't know if they've got just a better marketing team working over there at wheel or what but they sure seem to make their way onto our show a lot these days oh and even though it's a Very rainy, kind of crummy Monday here in Portland. I am so ready for spring and summer, my friends.

Ready to party with the best of them.

Thanks to something called my power bear, which will explain what that is, too. All that, plus this guy. Sweet dreams are made of him. He's the longest-running co-bro of the show. He may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships, capturing their grace and power. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now.

the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington good morning my friend good morning luke that

feeling you have on the treadmill when somebody else is in this common area but you're used to having it for yourself it reminds me of and i probably use this analogy a lot but it reminds me of um being on campus i was one of those people who had like an apartment just off of campus it was practically a dorm but basically it wasn't a dorm which meant i spent my summers there as well I summered in Kent, Ohio, at College Towers, where the urine flowed on the elevator floor on Halloweens. It was such a disgusting place. But you really got used to that campus. It was just you and the townies and whatever losers like yourself were just sticking around campus in the summertime. And then everybody comes back, and suddenly there's a line at Chipotle. And you're like, what the hell? Where did you come from? This is my campus.

Yes. that's because i mean maybe during the pandemic because it's a fairly small space this little gym and um you know the rules i believe were that we were supposed to be masked up down there for whatever reason for the first couple months i lived here i literally never saw another soul in that place um and so i did start to kind of think of it as my own little private gym mostly it's just that like i sweat profusely when i'm jogging so what i do not that anybody asked is if it's a nice day i run outside and i run a longer distance um maybe i don't know between five and seven miles but i do it really slowly um and then if it's a crummy day like today i do the treadmill but i do a short distance for me which is three miles but i do it as fast as i can possibly go i consider it to be speed work but the downside of that is that at about mile one my body starts shedding liquid in a troubling sense like to the point where i remember the first time i used a treadmill for this kind of thing i didn't realize how much i was sweating and then at the end i thought is there something broken on this treadmill is there a leak like a fluid leak something with the lubrication of the treadmill because there was there were droplets of water that were on parts of the treadmill that made no sense like the base of it but really far to the front of it like it's it's a situation when i do this and and then of course as soon as i'm done i uh in fact i'm running so hard or at least so fast by my standards that i have to hit the emergency stop like that's how i stop it i can't like go beep beep and then like slow it down Cause I'm, I'm running fast enough that if I try to do anything else, I could like, I'll be in one of those fail army viral videos where like I slip and whomp my head, you know, on the treadmill or whatever. So I just hit the emergency stop switch. Then I immediately go to where they have all of the, you know, disinfectant, um, you know, moist towelettes. I grab like a ton of those, probably too many. And then I go and I mean, I like I wipe down every single square inch of that treadmill because like there's a lot of my sweat left behind. Anyway, this is all kind of my this is OK when it's just me in the privacy of my private gym. But when there's other people in there, then I'm really stressed out about how weird all of my behaviors are. And that's why I've just asked that no one use the gym at this apartment building between the hours of 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Do you like sweating, though? Yes, of course. I mean, I heard somebody say, I believe it might have been Sarah Silverman, who I recently met in a hotel lobby. This wasn't when I heard her say it. But she was talking about her approach to exercise, and she said, I try to break a sweat every day. And I thought, that's kind of a good, that seems like a doable thing to me.

It's not saying one has to run X number of miles, one has to lift X amount of weight. it doesn't it's not any kind of specific thing other than if your body allows for it and of course all of our bodies are different but like if your body allows for it and you can kind of break a sweat every day that's probably a good thing yeah go to a brazilian steakhouse like i do just eat meat sure meat sweats meat sweats count absolutely as long as you're sweating as long as

you're sweating i mean it's a workout for your heart it certainly is yeah no i i mean i first I don't work out as hard as you do and lately it's been rare although this house that I'm moving to is closer to my gym so I'm hoping that this might start a new phase for me but I'm a sweater I don't know if I don't think that sweat is flying off of me and ending up on different parts of the machine that I didn't even know existed

but I'm like a cartoon character from Peanuts or something like if Pigpen was named Sweatpen that would be

me this is gross and I assume you're the same way but like when I'm done with my cardio or whatever I say Like that cardio, um, you know, it, my shirt looks, looks like i i got dunked in a tank somewhere it's like it's really it's gross but you know what's weird is i don't for some reason i don't care maybe it's because you're usually like running out in public or you're in this place where it's just like you or potentially one other person then you got to walk up to your to your take the elevator up to your um apartment but for me like i'm in i'm in a gym that is not super nice and there are all kinds of nasty people in there in fact i see nest i don't i get so full of rage as you might imagine when i see somebody just like i don't care if they're dry as the western wind i hate seeing somebody get off of one of the ellipticals or something and not wipe it down like you're you're working out behind them you know and they're just like job done and they just hop off like yeah no i'm with you not only do i wipe it down man do i make a show of it i'm like everybody i am wiping this down do we have a hose no hose okay i'll make do with this spray bottle thank you that's totally my move because

if there's somebody else in this little gym it's very important to me it's like when you know i would be walking rudy and rudy would would poop in someone's yard i would make a very very public theatrical display of pulling out the poop bag uh akin to like joe bluth doing an illusion with scarves like i want everyone to know that i'm dealing with and the entire time rudy's pooping and I haven't done anything, it's like the longest 45 seconds of my life because it feels like how many eyes are on me thinking, is he going to pick this up or not?

Oh, you're not fumbling with the bag? I figure for sure you're sitting there like making a big deal, like while the action is going on.

But, you know, one hand's on the leash. I'm trying to monitor which, like, it's not the thing where I necessarily start with the flourish as she was going. This was back in the days, obviously, when I lived with Rudy. But, like, the period of time in which I am worried about what other people are wondering about my behavior, it's like time stands still for me. Like, the whole time I'm on the treadmill with sweat flying off of me and hitting, you know, the monitor and all these, hopefully nobody else in the workout area. All I can really think about is I hope these people know how well I'm going to wipe this thing down at the end of this. And if somebody leaves before I finish, that lives with me because they never got to see my performance. They never got to see me. And I will tell you this, too. The two rituals around running that I find the most satisfying are wiping down the machine and putting a red X on my big old giant calendar, my big dry erase calendar, and I get a red X if I do my exercise. And I swear to God, those – not the wiping down of the machine, but the red X really is a thing where there will be a lot of days where I don't feel like doing it. But I think about how satisfying drawing that red X will be, and it actually gets me moving. But anyway. You don't feel like doing the task that you're X-ing off, you mean? Well, no. I mean the exercise. Oh, I see. A red X on my calendar only indicates that's a day that I ran or worked out. so that's the only that's the that's the only way i get that i mean i have a i have myriad to-do lists that are you know also being crossed off and and checked out and stuff like that but this is this one particular one is when i have been a good boy and i've done my exercise then i get to put a red x on the calendar and that the act of doing that is oddly important to me or i should say it's oddly satisfying to the point where it will get me to do things i don't want to do so

that i can then have that satisfaction i have something like that it's not i don't have a calendar like you do but um when i don't wet the crate genevieve gives me a sticker it's kind of

similar yeah but i mean that's all positive reinforcement because there's one thing we've learned about andy training it's that negative reinforcement it only creates fear and ruling by fear is not not the relationship you want to have with your andy not whack them on the nose with a newspaper it's all about positive reinforcement and i appreciate you whispering

that information to Genevieve because I'll say I had my nose stuck in a lot of gross places before you finally got that across, and I appreciate it.

Speaking of lifestyles, Andrew, have you ever heard of the power bear lifestyle? I can take a stab at that, but I won't.

You've got some theories. I've got some theories, yeah. I think I saw it mentioned in the back of the stranger.

Uh-huh. I'm friends with some people down at the cuff on Capitol Hill. I know a couple power bears down there. I bought a radio for my baseball listening, and for some bizarre reason, the brand—I want you to know, Andrew, that I drove to a shuttered Radio Shack this weekend to try to buy a little AM-FM radio for the summertime tradition that you and I talk about so much, which is, for some reason, listening to Mariner baseball games by way of an actual physical radio instead of on the Sirius app, which I pay for and which has all of the Mariners games on my phone.

slash on my sonos you know i mean there's so many ways for me to get this information and i'm choosing to do the most antiquated one but i i went to the radio shack and they were in the words of wc fields closed um so i had to buy this online and it arrived and for some reason it's from a company it's called a power bear amfm radio and i've already got it tuned to the Jury-like trial Where they put that guy on the stand Now why the Dan Patrick show Is talking about jury-like trials I don't know Who knows It could be It could very well be relating to Our conversation regarding the Browns I thought so

But then he said something about emails Who knows These are the little old school Handheld size ones Yes. Yeah. Nice. Nice.

For some reason, it has the antenna that comes off. The thing is, I did have to buy this from Jeff Bezos from his private collection. And I know that's a complicated, it's a fraught topic. I want people to know that I tried to brick and mortar this. I really did. But it's the kind of thing that there's no market. There's no, there's, there are not enough Lukes in Portland who want to buy an AM FM handheld radio so they can listen to their baseball and feel some sense of peace. in their life there's not enough people doing that which is hence why radio shack is closed um but what happened by the way there you found it on the map and you went there and the map didn't tell you it was closed it said that well i was on this is the problem i feel like we are living in an age where and you know i guess you could say it makes sense because we're dealing with a we're still dealing with a pandemic a once in a century pandemic i feel like the internet is is more unreliable than it's ever been regarding if something's opened or closed like i think i feel like there was a period of time pre-pandemic where if you you know looked up a business online and they said we're open and you drove there they were typically open or if it said closed they were closed maybe because of staff shortages or just a variety of other things or you know whatever the various rules have been regarding the the you know pandemic i feel like now what here's what i should have done i should have called them because i was on my phone i was running some other errands i had it was a kind of a nice saturday i had the thought oh i can get my radio today i go on my telephone i look up radio shack find store locator find my store and it tells me where the store is i drive over there it's closed but it didn't say that on the version of their website that my phone was accessing but it was closed it wasn't

permanently closed permanently closed it was permanently closed it was shuttered yeah okay gotcha oh that is very strange yeah because i thought it could be one of those things where um you know your map just had the hours wrong but i mean i in a certain way i would have been more surprised if you had told me you had just gone to a radio shack though because i didn't think any of them were open i thought they were just relegated to like i thought somebody else bought the brand and license right like imaging and then on their like kiosk in the mall or something yeah or in like a self i thought a cell phone company owned them now or something so i didn't think there were any brick and mortar stores well that's the thing it wasn't but like the when i got there

i realized it was not it was not in operation anymore but uh but the the internet was telling me that it was still there um which was confusing and also i should have just known like obviously um because we've talked extensively about the demise of radio shack yeah and you know i took

this in the boring place because i did want to tell you i actually thought of you a couple of times this weekend if you could believe it um but i was uh kind of having an ideal radio moment or two this weekend because uh we still haven't moved into our new place but we're getting the place ready and there are we're just trying to take it one room at a time that's what they taught

me in aa just take it one room at a time you got your two room chip yet not yet but i'm close to

getting my first room chip because there's this area the houses when you come to visit you're going to be surprised at some of the weird funky aspects of this house like i have to bend over quite a bit in an awkward way to get into the basement like there's stairs that lead into this basement to get into the crate exactly um and it's weird like this was a house with just a regular basement at one point they kind of finished the basement and turned it into like a mother-in-law unit they could rent out but nothing was done with care at all and it's just and it's just it's so and what i'm i didn't realize until in the past couple of weeks and i think i mentioned this to on the show that oh nobody was living like the owners of this place weren't living here for for at least we realized 10 years if not more than that so this is a place where people were coming and going and i heard already the the neighborhood rumors are churning that it sounds like the person in the basement might have been problematic leading to the um leading to the decision

to sell this rental property but so all of that is to say you know it's different when you're coming into somebody's house who's lived there for a long time or you're coming into a place where yeah there whenever anybody updated this or that nothing was done properly or correctly right have we already had that conversation like there's a light fixture hanging down so you can't open a cupboard like blinds that are hanging on a window clearly say like this part faces back but it's facing out like the hot is the cold and the cold is the hot on at least two sinks i guess just like it's all kinds of stuff like that a real reverse mcdlt situation yes write that down that might be the show title um so i'm going into too much detail here but all of that is to say when you first walk in there's a side door that you can walk in and this is like and it walks into like a little um a little laundry room area but also i guess kind of a foyer i don't know it's just like kind of a the first room you walk into from the side door and it also leads to the basement or the kitchen and there's two big washers and dryers shoved in there and they don't really fit we have to replace those at some point but one thing was like a bunch of the walls not all of the walls but a bunch of the walls in this laundry room area were this um really bright kind of garish ugly yellow color um and they were also just in terrible terrible shape and at some point i just got it in my head i'm like we're painting these before we move in so i don't know when that hit me but sometime uh it did last week and so genevieve got me the painting supplies and i don't think i've ever gone lead on a painting project before but um she was running around she left me with some supplies i found you know in some primer and we're doing it all right right because like how many times do you want to like move a washer and dryer out of the way and disconnect them and do it so if you're going to do it do it right right so anyway i had this painting project this weekend that became more involved than i thought but i was like you know what i got on saturday a Mariners game to listen to and I'll be GD'd if I was going to listen to that on my phone I brought my little boom box like from like the 90s and I I think it might even have somebody else's paint splatter on it because I bought it used a few years ago and I plugged it in and then I listened to the Mariners I listened to the what do they call it the the Arizona report or whatever the lead up to it is and then the uh and then the game and then after that I switched over to some KEXP. I don't know why I wasn't feeling my Kixi this weekend, but I enjoyed listening to some local KEXP, something I don't do enough. And I just loved it. And you know what? Like, even listening to KEXP and that's like, if you're not from Seattle, that's like our AAA kind of I guess alt music station. You've talked about it a lot, Luke. Anyway, there was even a little bit of fuzz on it because the antenna's half broken. So it wasn't even the cleanest signal that I could get with a Bluetooth speaker, but I didn't care. I told Genevieve, like, I don't like to listen to i don't want to listen to my phone when i'm painting i feel like i need to be listening to the radio and if it's am even better as it was with the mariners i love that picture of you

doing you know improving your new home while i mean i feel like you probably should be having a beer while doing it you should probably be hearing that home depot theme music in the

background like where doers get things done is that what what is there yeah something like

yeah spring is here at the home depot we know these we know this house isn't going to paint itself i just like i just love this image of you this is very exciting i'm jealous too because uh i'm i live in this apartment granted i did buy a place that i'm trying to get some work done on but um but i don't have quite the experience you're having where you're like you and genevieve are moving into this place that's going to be your as you've said you've never said this because you wouldn't but if we were on an hgtv show we'd call this your forever home um and just this like it's springtime and you've got the baseball game on the radio and you're doing projects that's i'm very happy for you that this is happening because i remember when i used to talk about mowing my lawn and doing that kind of stuff you you always expressed a certain amount of jealousy because that wasn't it hadn't been your life living in apartments for a long time so i'm glad

you're getting to do that yeah now that i have the paint bug like and i realize that like painting is the ultimate cleaning right when you can't clean something eventually you're just going to paint it that's an episode of spotless and like oh that you know i was rambling before about the rental property i just want to give you a sense of like what we're moving into like when i move these washers and dryers out of the way which are too big for the space like we need to replace them with stackables at some point it's ridiculous to squeeze by from one room to the other if you choose to go this way you have to like kind of stand on your tippy toes and squeeze through the washer and this handrail thing and like it's just not ideal and then I pull these things out to like you know paint behind them and I'm finding old socks a brassiere all kinds of just dust from the ages and it's like it's so gross but and I'm kind of like man it would be nice if we were moving into a nicer place that you know had been you know somebody else

You

is forever home although that i guess implies that they didn't make it or make it eventually they were problematic eventually they met forever yeah um but also one of the things that actually got me thinking about home ownership a couple of years ago was kind of looking around this apartment where genevieve and i have been living for a while and realizing this place is really great but man i would fix that and man i would fix that and man i wish that this wasn't just like a bunch of renters living in here before us and now it's like hey we're taking over a place like that and little by little over the course of the next um two or three forevers uh we can just make it ours and know that we uh we can do anything we want we can fix any oh man somebody had put a terrible coat rack like kind of a long coat rack with maybe four pegs on it maybe five doesn't matter i'll tell you later uh on this and part of the wall in this god-awful room where you couldn't even read it wasn't even practical you couldn't reach most of the pegs where it was like over the basement stairs and they had hollowed out the screws that had fixed it to the wall like they were totally hollowed out stripped out so the only thing we could do somebody in putting

it in they probably went to ham with the power screwdriver and then basically made it so you can't get the screws out because they're like you said hollowed out or stripped it was probably a

renter maybe it was somebody higher like i'm sure it was just a renter like whoever painted these yellow walls not only was it kind of an ugly color they did a terrible job with it like they didn't mask anything some in some corners they just stopped like whatever um once you start getting close to something like this you also you just can't stop seeing all the imperfections right but anyway this coat rack leaves and i were like this is going to be our accent wall luke i decided we're going to have an accent wall what do you think of that who's this guy you're talking to What are you going to go with, like French, Canadian, Italian?

I said, hey, I'm an accent-a-wall. Will you just be a giant meatball on it? And if people ask, you can tell them about how spicy it is.

I've got to say, I don't know if it was appropriate for me to do that, so I would like to apologize to all of our Irish listeners for that accent. But anyway, and so I'm going back there. As soon as we're done with this today, I'm going to rush back over there and start priming for this accent wall so I can just, like, be done with this entire room. But anyway, there is no way of taking this god-awful coat rack down. So we're just like, all right, I guess let's start. You couldn't even really pry it without, like, popping a hole in the drywall. So we just start kind of separating it a little bit. And then I just start pounding it with my hand and just getting leveraged up and down. And then I just freaking ripped the thing out of the wall. and we just had to like you know because we realized like that's what we're gonna have to do here like there's no way out let's rip this thing off the wall we ripped it off the wall it was very uh satisfying Genevieve patched it up and now today I'm gonna paint that wall and that coat rack it's like it never existed oh by the way we pull it off and there's a sticker on the

back it was $7.99 at Marshall's ha so you really it's a this is your forever home slash rage room

the rage rooms in the basement we don't talk about the rage room that's where the crate is sorry i just realized i went on it i've been i've been living that world all weekend and i didn't realize how much i wanted to talk about it until andrew pushed

the conversation in that area so i don't i mean i mean you know peace and love to the listeners and we're about to thank a couple of people who are literally paying for today's episode but this isn't about them andrew this is about me and i there's nothing that i am more interested in than real estate slash home improvement talk yeah so keep it coming i am like i thought you were i didn't realize when you said there was no way to to get it off that i thought you were meant you're just gonna leave it there and i was like there's definitely a youtube video that will explain to you how you can remove stripped you know oh sure yeah there's definitely a way to do it i mean typically what i mean it doesn't really matter but if it ever happens again the way that i have had success with that is you get a power drill and then you drill off the top of the screw so you just drill at you basically make it worse you drill through the screw and then when the top pops off now you can take the thing off you can take the the coat rack off because the wider part of the screw the end of the screw is what's holding it to the wall now you have the problem of these screws that have no top on them that are in the wall but you can take a pair of pliers and you can then back them out manually yeah that's a thing that works too for because i have a feeling this isn't the first this isn't the last like situation you guys are going to encounter you and v's are going to encounter where you're like okay what do you even do with this you know

yeah although i do think that this ended up being the faster way like there was a moment where we were just like um and this was actually what was sometime last week and we're like okay we're going to do this right okay we'll do it well what are we going to do about this coat rack and i was like Yeah, as I suspected, these screws are just, like, inaccessible now. I wasn't sure if they were just going to be. be too painted over or hollowed out or what but um honestly once we decided like it's go time to rip this off it was off there in like three minutes and then Genevieve had it patched in another two she's like Genevieve I think that even as a renter she walks around with patching material that's like in her pocket she loves patching walls she loves creating holes then patching them up and being like job done now I'm just saying that all the time by the way you've totally

infected it worked yes it worked all right let's uh let's take a quick break here and then when we come back uh i do want to talk i mean i don't want to i don't want i don't want to bring up a painful topic but i do i do think it's of interest to me and also of interest to the listeners andrew to hear kind of how you're doing over this football stuff for you um and then also uh we'll do some emails and v-mails and uh maybe even some wheel of fortune talk coming up here on tbtl

We was hoping for some razzle-dazzle Razzle-dazzle That's right, man, razzle-dazzle On your mark Get set Now ready Everybody razzle-dazzle

All right, let's thank some dazzling donors These are the wonderful, generous folks who are making today's episode possible with their dazzling amount of dough they're donating Folks like Kathy Backman of Rochester, Washington kathy writes what to say what to say you dummies and tens community have been a lifeline during this weird time when we talk in years to come about what we did during the pandemic i will remember working at home listening to podcasts and learning a lot about how to keep relationships going at a distance i'd like to give a special shout out to job like arrest development job Job's Daughters, a very special youth group that I've been involved with my whole life as a member, as a parent and as a mentor. It's been a lifeline to the old times and a path to the new ones. Keep supporting the things you love and let's find out a way together through 2022. Let's find a way, our way together. I bet you that that word is supposed to be our. Let's find our way together. Kathy strikes me as a very community-oriented person. Kathy is supporting TBTL. Kathy is supporting Job's daughters. I believe Kathy is advocating for us finding our way together as a community through 2022. Totally agree with that, Kathy. I also don't know if I know where Rochester, Washington is.

I was going to ask you that. I don't want to put you on the spot. I was going to ask you as well. Do you think whoever wrote the book of Job is Job? I know that Job is a character in the Bible, but actually there isn't a book. It is a book. Like, okay, do you think whoever wrote the book of Job is, like, kind of bummed that now the reference is Arrested Development? Like, it's like, well, I was the—like, we were the—we were doing the Job thing, like, thousands of years ago. Right.

We—a lot of people don't realize that Job, the biblical Job, his problems really started when he got a Segway scooter.

Yeah, right. He had it down the—wait, no, Job wasn't in a whale. I'm confusing Jonas and Job. Jonah. Yeah, Jonah, rather.

Yeah. Job's issue was that God tested him. Yeah. Everything went to heck in a handbasket. And he had the very, very extremely evocative thing about Job that I remember from being a kid was he had boils all over his body at some point and that he was scratching them with what whatever version of the Bible I was reading at that time was described, I believe, as pot sherds, which would be shattered pieces of like a clay pot. oh wow I just remember I just remember I don't know if that was a visual that really stuck with me Job sitting around itching his boils with the broken pieces of a clay pot you know I am

I don't think I've ever talked about this but I think the thing that stands out to me and I don't even know if this is accurate anymore and this maybe really speaks to my personality but and I guess spoiler alert too if you haven't read the Bible yet but like at the end of Job at the end of his story doesn't God just give him like a new family and I remember kind of thinking like that seems crass like I didn't have the word for it but as a kid I remember something about that not seeming necessarily right like oh don't worry about it here's some more gold you got your job back boils are gone also here's a new family they're pretty good even slightly an upgrade on the kid it's just so weird

Let me be honest, if this were Dateline NBC, we'd be looking at Job as a prime suspect I mean, he just, huh, interesting, he just moved right on

He's got a new family now And I know that people restart families, and I'm not trying to But, like, there was something about Job just being handed a new family It's like, okay, sounds good, I'll be over here Yeah, I assume that the Job in arrest development is not related to the biblical job is it george because it's g-o-b it's gob right

but what's the g for george oh you think that job g-o-b stands for something i thought his name was

just job with a g i assume i don't yeah i assumed it was isn't the dad is is the jeffrey tambor character is he george senior yeah he's george senior yeah so if he's george senior there's a jr and it's not michael it's not lindsey so it'd probably be job right isn't the g in job

for george oh wow you're right yeah you're right it's and then you have george michael who's who's michael's character yeah yeah you're right that's how am i sorry my mind is blown but i'm also trying to i'm trying to figure out if i'm missing something here like how have we never talked about that so job is george i believe that g-o-b is some george something blue oh okay

yeah i'm looking up the wiki now yeah oh what are we doing port kathy we're thanking kathy hi kathy thank you for supporting the show kathy thank you for being a dazzling donor we absolutely

wouldn't be able to do this without you maestro on your mark on your mark get set get set now ready

Let's also thank Dazzling Donor, Wes Plate. In Everett, Washington, Wes says, My hobby is running really long ultramarathons. I would say, Wes, the word ultramarathon tells you everything. Are there short ultramarathons? Wes runs the long ultramarathons versus the 3Ks that I've been doing. the 200 mile and longer variety what in the heck fire i am i am amazed at the things that the human body can do andrew like a 200 plus mile ultra marathon is it's difficult for me to wrap my brain around the good news i guess as it relates to us is this gives wes as he writes a lot of time training which i think means a lot of tbtl time luke and andrew keep my ears company as i otherwise run along forest trails before sunrise all right west we get it we get it you are a hundred percent squeezing more juice from this berry than i am it's not even close i've been listening since the radio days and i can't imagine life without tbtl thank you for all the laughs and smiles Power out Listener West Who's probably hearing this, Andrew As he's setting a FKT somewhere A fastest known time As he runs over a mountain or something

You know, when you say You're amazed at what the human body can do That's like on both sides of things, too Like, you know, like You could probably at some point in my life Look at me and be like I am amazed at what the human body can do But it would have a very different connotation You know what I mean? And just like, oh, wow, you really are sweating on your meat. Wow, congratulations. I'm amazed by what the human body can do. I'm also amazed that, yes, of course, Job is G period, O period, B period, the eldest Bluth, and it's George Oscar Bluth Jr. Have we talked about that? Did I know this and forget it, or am I learning this now? That's fascinating. So he was named for his uncle.

His uncle Oscar, yes. I don't know if we've talked about it or not. I must have seen that somewhere I know that I didn't like figure that out With my own big brain But I feel like I Maybe it was just in my extensive reading about that show Which I'm not even kidding you There was a period of time where I was spending a lot of time on the internet Reading about Arrested Development I must have seen his name written somewhere And seen the periods and then figured that out Or something Maybe the one topic we haven't talked about on the show yet Now it's burned Exactly Well, thank you very much to our dazzling donors today for making TBTL possible. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right. Let me just start by saying a little trigger warning. I think we're going to try to be delicate with how we talk about this, but we are going to talk about the Deshaun Watson situation with Cleveland. And there are allegations against Deshaun Watson, which could be upsetting to folks. So just I want to give that heads up. We're not going to get detailed with that, but I don't know where this conversation exactly is going to go. I just want to check in with you, Andrew, and see how you're feeling, because you and I were talking last week and we've talked on the show about how we were both worried that Deshaun Watson, the quarterback who has 22 civil cases pending against him. These are allegations of sexual predatory behavior against women, typically, I believe, who were hired.

to do massage on him and then allege that he you know turned these into sexual situations that they were not consenting to have happen we were both kind of worried that he might come to our respective teams and that if he did we would then have to decide if we could be a fan of the team while he was there and it looked like the bullet had been dodged last week because the Seahawks were never interested and he had rebuffed Cleveland and then we found out that he was going to Cleveland and And, I mean, for people that don't care about football, this might seem like we're over-dramatizing it. But, Andrew, I felt so sad for you this week. And, again, the people who should be centered in the story are the victims or the alleged victims. But even so, it's a big part of your life. And the Seahawks are a huge part of my life. And if I had to contemplate not watching the Seahawks for the next however many years, it would be really intense for me because it's a big part of my life. So I guess I just wanted to see how you're doing.

yeah I mean you hit the nail on the head with all of that stuff like it I wrote about this like I tried not to I tried so hard not to write about this in the newsletter um on Friday but like this was Friday afternoon sometimes I write the newsletter on a Thursday which is really what I should do but I didn't have anything to write about this week I was struggling for a topic and then this this news came down that was really shocking if you don't mind I don't want to get into too much detail on the process of this stuff but I do want to walk you through my emotional journey because you did say like you and i at one point were worried about whether or not we'd have to face a decision about our fandom if this if this terrible human being became the face of our franchise whether it was seahawks or the browns but honestly i think you're not giving either one of us enough credit there because it wasn't a decision that we're going to make the decision was made like you had said i mean in private conversations you and i both said to each other like that would be it like that is the line in the sand like you and i have both and we've talked about this we've overlooked other things we've turned our morality away and pretended we didn't see things or we've rationalized things about you know an industry in a league that is is bad in a lot of ways and i'm not even here to say i'm giving up on football all told but i'm just saying there is something about fandom where there's a rationalizing that goes on and there's something about the browns where it just seems like the ultimate browns thing because for as long as i've been a browns fan it's been really disappointing again went through went through a winless season went through a second season uh right before that where we only had one win um actually i might have those reversed but either way just like you've just seen bottoms you think you've seen the bottom of a team and then somehow they just dig deeper but you stick with them because you say when the time comes when the time comes to celebrate the victories whether it's making it to the super bowl or even potentially winning the super bowl because eventually something like that has got to happen right i mean there's some parody in the league and just the law of averages like eventually eventually the browns who've never won a super bowl would have to win a super bowl it seems like the ultimate browns disappointment for me now not to be there watching the team if they reach these new heights with potentially the best quarterback they've had in 30 years um and so that's it but but you and I had said to go back to my original point you and I had said again off air we're not grandstanding here like no we're not if Deshaun Watson comes to our team that's it and and you said before too like do you put away your your Browns gear for the next five years of his contract and then you come back to fandom like I don't even know that that's I don't know that that's possible because I said before I was going to take you through my emotional journey last week Monday and Tuesday the news comes out that the Browns are one of a handful of teams that are going really hard after Deshaun Watson and there's also implications of the

current quarterback there like you know that the Browns are taking this very seriously they've already done whatever vetting they're going to do their mind is made up early on last week their mind is made up they want Deshaun Watson if Deshaun Watson chooses them and basically of the situation where deshaun watson a man who has not played football for a year not because he's been suspended but just because the team that he's been on doesn't want to put him out there while these internal investigations are pending um he's now basically sitting down interviewing teams to say which one of you teams is good enough for me and the browns is one of those teams and they're putting it all out there we're going hard in the paint for him which is again a famous famous football uh phrase there um and that news breaks on monday and so i spent three brown so i spent all day put that in your shuttlecock and smoke it i spent all day monday and all day tuesday just being like i can't believe the browns are going so hard for deshaun watts and i'm listening to like some of my insider podcasts and they're saying the browns have a

really good chance of landing him over these other teams for these reasons there were a couple of reasons why it might not work but then I think it was Wednesday or late Tuesday the news comes out that Deshaun Watson is going to pass on the Browns he's somehow that information leaks Deshaun Watson's camp lets it leak and again just think about that he's passing on the Browns this man I know that's already 22 accusations already painful because you hope you would hope that your

team would have the morality to not even engage in this farce yeah but then to have them trying and be turned down i mean that would be i guess like again if it were the seahawks i would say well i'm upset with them but like i think they were trying to get antonio brown who's another player who i think should not have been in the league because of sexual assault allegations um but they didn't get him and so i guess that allowed me to continue rooting for the seahawks

Yeah, and there was that conundrum that was like, you know, and I do have the timeline perfect because I know it was Monday and Tuesday is when the news is out there that the Browns are meeting with Deshaun and they want to see if they can make something happen. And then I know that it was Wednesday or maybe late Wednesday, early Thursday, the news comes out that Deshaun Watson does not want to go to the Browns. I was ecstatic. I was so happy. Now, there was still the moral conundrum of, yeah, but your team still wanted him. and you're like okay yeah but I can again these are the the bargaining this is these are the bargains we make right like okay sure that's a shitty move but thank goodness Deshaun Watson is not coming to Cleveland I can still hold my nose and still kind of root for this team and it created this whole backlash though because then Cleveland's current quarterback is like wait a second you guys don't respect me I want to get out of here and so there was tons of like Browns news on Thursday and I got done with work kind of early and spent all afternoon moving boxes from this apartment to the new house back and forth. And I had on Cleveland radio streaming on my phone and I listened to probably four or five hours of Cleveland radio live of people like, you know, some people with a moral compass saying, you know, I'm glad Deshaun's not coming here, but everybody basically saying, but now our current quarterback wants out and we thought he was the guy and boy, the Browns really ruined this. I was like, Browns fans were so upset on Thursday because the organization just looked like another goddamn mess. Like, just a total PR mess and organizational mess. But I was so happy because I could still be a Browns fan. All day, Monday and Tuesday, I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. Like, what am I going to do with my Browns shirts? Like, literally, that was something I was thinking about. Like, I was just like, I don't want to stop rooting for the Browns. Like, again, I know football is not important, but it's fandom, whatever. It's an addiction, and it's important to me. And so I was so, so happy on Thursday. And then Friday, there was just this curveball in the news, another football phrase that said, oh, Deshaun Watson changed his mind because, you know, the Browns just gave him just a contract that is so bad for the Browns. Like, it's just so bad, but they just gave him everything. They said, we want you here that bad. and I actually learned about this when the stew bot text put something in our text chain our sports text changes said oh Andrew Browns and I looked and there the news was broken and I didn't have to think about it I was just like I'm out I'm done like I couldn't believe it I couldn't believe how how depressed I was on Monday and Tuesday how happy I was on Thursday and then suddenly like we're out of the woods okay we got through that let's pretend the Browns weren't going after him and move on and then all of a sudden it's like no he's coming to the browns and it's like i'm i'm done i just you can't and i'm not i promise you i'm not grandstanding here i would have been fine not talking about it on tbtl i'm not trying to virtue signal or make a statement or say that if you're still a browns fan for two of you that are out there um that you're a bad

person or that everybody has to make this decision it's not about me it's just i'm of course i'm not going to root for him like it's disgusting it's terrible it's just yeah it's so terrible but i'm also still at this point of just like i don't know man i mean my my personality should not be defined by some stupid ass football team but it is like a weird thing to adjust to and to know that they will probably be better this year than they ever have been since i've been watching them right i

mean it's also just the kind of lifestyle right like it's it's fun to have something to be excited about really you know all year round but like if you're an NFL fan it's fun to it's fun to know that on Sundays and the occasional Monday and Thursday or whatever like there's a big event and it's a big hit of adrenaline and serotonin and oxytocin if your team wins these big games And you get together with friends There's a lot of social Sort of socializing and lifestyle stuff That's around this That I'm wondering for you If as much of a bummer as it is Was it also kind of 5% of relief? Almost like some weird spell was broken no no I'm not there and you know and like um you know I still plan on watching football on Sundays I mean I'm completely all in for the Seahawks now like I don't know if that's weird if people are like boy after all of this maybe you should leave football behind I just want to say like save your emails I know like I know that like and for the people who are like hey listen the Browns have um as Genevieve said hired I'll say signed um Genevieve keeps on saying do you think they're going to hire Deshaun Watson I like I'm going to hire him but um you know again like I know that there's all kinds of moral roads we can go down like why was this okay with you Walsh and not this other thing it's like yeah I know I don't have a leg to stand on there and maybe I should just be done with football I'm not going to be done with football I'm going to root for the Seahawks and uh I don't know exactly what's going to happen like I it'll be impossible not to know what happens and what the what the end game of brown's games are what the score is and you know people covering it and it'll be a story but like i'm not going to take part in it i'm not going to root for them and i'm you know already unfollowing brown's account like the majority of if you look at a pie chart of my twitter follows it's mostly brown stuff and like the people who are like i know it's problematic but i don't care uh lfg you know like i stand by my quarterback I'm just like oh did you see Trevor Bauer a notably good person was one of the first people to congratulate Deshaun Watson with like uh just so like when you're getting those kind of tweets from from Bauer you're just like yeah this is disgusting this is so gross so um I can't remember

what your question was I'm rambly today I just wondered if well no I wondered if there was some kind of if if maybe as sad as it was for you to to decide or you know to realize yeah I just can't engage with this team for a while if there was also a minor relief because it was kind of like now I can do anything I want on Sunday now I don't have to like less of my life you know it's kind of this is a very weird place to take it in a very serious place to take it but you know when people get sober a lot of times what they talk about is how what a relief it was to not organize their life as much around whatever the thing they were addicted to was and I feel like i have a certain amount of football addiction and and also regular addiction so that's the cool part but like you're a chocoholic i could see a world in which i if he had gone to the seahawks and again i don't know this is totally total speculation on my part if he went to the seahawks and i was like well i guess i just can't root for the seahawks well that's the person that is their quarterback then it would just be i would be really bummed but also on some level it'd be like god my sunday's really opened up like if i only watched if i only watched the

browns i know what you're talking about and if i only watched the browns or something happened where somebody said um well that's it we're folding up the league we tried it and you know what we suddenly realized that this is not good for society we have race issues we have health issues we have all kinds of issues you know what let's just call it a day that might happen someday based on everything i know about the nfl that'll probably happen someday and then if it goes away for everybody money yeah exactly well then it'd be like oh okay nobody has football anymore and yeah I actually I know what you're talking about I would have that feeling so it's not like I don't understand that but I'm not feeling that now because I will still continue to watch football on Sundays and talk to you about it on Mondays hopefully and text with the gang about it but it's not going to be about the Browns anymore okay that's interesting I was kind of wondering

if we would still do no points or not I really didn't know I genuinely didn't know kind of what your thoughts about the nfl going forward where i wasn't sure if you were just like i'm gonna just you know i'm gonna walk away from the whole thing for the time being or what but i'm glad to hear that you're still gonna be you know watching the seahawks and and interested in that and there's a weird subplot to this whole thing which is if baker mayfield ends up the seahawks quarterback i mean that's a that's an he this is the person for those that don't watch sports who has been the quarterback of the cleveland browns for the last i don't know four seasons or so and has had some really great moments and some not great moments but has just generally been i think kind of the a big part of the of the resurgence of the cleveland browns and i think a like a seemingly likable person i think he's pretty good in his many many commercials that he does um the idea that that you would you would lose the browns as it were for a while but you would gain you would gain a Baker Mayfield as a Seahawk is truly kind of a weird turn of events if that ends

up happening yeah this is a little bit more of a sports conversation I guess so I'll try to keep my answer as brief as possible something I'm not doing a great job of today but um I well first of all Baker's last days at the Browns days meaning I guess really months starting with the end of last season have been the least I've liked him. I've been a pretty big baker. Porter, both for just like his personality and his on-field performance, really up through the last couple of games of last season. But he was playing through so much injury, but then also kind of having a hero complex about it and a bit of a martyrdom about it because he wasn't playing that well. And then he started to get, we started to see little signs of the kind of obnoxious Baker starting to leak through near the end. Like when everything wasn't roses, you started to see that, oh you're spending all of your energy trying to not be cocky all the time and he went after this this longtime Browns beat reporter who I who I like and respect a great deal and I think she has good sources and he like basically she tweeted something out about his future with the Browns and based on sources and he like basically kind of set his you know Twitter followers on her by calling her a liar and all this stuff and I actually believe her and it was just like kind of that oh boy when the when the well another famous um I guess another famous football phrase when the chips are down like you kind of see who he really is and I kind of didn't love that and also for whatever the other options are for the Seahawks I would be kind of surprised that Baker would be an improvement like I don't know who this lock guy is who's now currently coming to Seattle but like I find it hard to believe that Baker is that much better than him and what you'd be bringing as far as baggage with baker not that it's tons of baggage it doesn't seem like that

would make sense to me but you know i'm no expert in these things here's the argument for it being baker mayfield and then we will stop the super x's and o part of this conversation baker mayfield is relatively cheap he's 18 million dollars a year and he only has one year left on that contract and he has won games i mean he got them to did they get to the afc championship game or the

no but they made it to the they won their first playoff game and then um and that was it so he's

won a playoff game he had some you know before he regressed he had a he had a really good season statistically and and if he's healthy the thought is like if you start drew lock like if the seahawks legitimately start drew lock next year as their quarterback there is a very very limited chance I think that they're going to, I mean, the division they're in is super duper hard. Every team is good. If they go with Drew Locke, they're in full-on rebuild mode, which maybe they will. Just Drew Locke has never won any important games in the NFL. I think he might have like eight wins total. And so Baker Mayfield, I think, is seen as an improvement. It's like if the Seahawks want to actually try to salvage next year and try to, as much as they can, be competitive, I think the thought is somebody like Baker Mayfield would be an upgrade at that position. Yeah, that's interesting. Is the thinking. But, I mean, who knows what will end up happening.

Well, can I answer your question? Then let me take another stab at your question, knowing that context that you just gave me, just on an emotional level, to take it back to that. And, yeah, like even though my relationship with Baker – Baker doesn't know he's in a relationship with me. But while my relationship with Baker did sort of sour in the past couple of months and accelerated in the past couple of days as he was kind of being a bit of a drama queen in Cleveland, although understandably so in some ways. I got to say, if the narrative does become like Baker comes to Seattle and I'm rooting for a Baker-led Seahawks team and I'm just actively rooting against the Browns, and if there's any situation where it becomes like this schadenfreude thing where somehow the Seahawks with Baker Mayfield are more successful than the Browns with Deshaun Watson and his 22 accusations. By the way, I keep saying 22 accusations, more than 22 accusations, just 22 civil suits. There are other accusers out there who've spoken on the record who are not filing suits. So anyway, yeah, that is actually a fun narrative for fun is maybe the wrong word to use, given the context of this. But that is a more interesting dynamic yet to root for the Seahawks. If there's any situation where that would actually play out where I'm rooting for the winning team, which that doesn't really usually work out for me.

i mean to me the thing that's so i mean and i'm not trying to pile on um about the browns and and again i could see a world in which the seahawks i mean the seahawks were were pursuing antonio brown who was had similar issues if not maybe i don't i'm not going to get into ranking what's the what are the worst of different kinds of allegations but like it's so morally reprehensible to me what the browns are doing and it's such a weird calculation it's like they have decided that winning will make everyone forget about all of this other stuff I mean that's a very obvious and the way that that contract is structured it's so much guaranteed money and also there's a really good chance I hope anyway if the NFL has a shred of decency which it hasn't ever indicated it does have they they will they will keep Deshaun they will suspend Deshaun Watson or continue his suspension or for whatever was he suspended

Thank you.

by the texans or by the league i don't know but like he hasn't been suspended well he wasn't playing for the text yeah he was just benched yeah yeah he was benched yeah but it's like if the nfl has any scintilla of of morality and dignity by the way weird little interjection here but i just have to tell you a guy just zoomed zoomed down this street that's outside of my apartment on one of those one wheel power unicycle stand-up things yeah while just ripping the hugest vape i've ever seen and did you look like steve howard that might have been the most 20 22 thing i've ever seen in my life was dude just like hardcore zooming on a wheel just with a massive massive vape cloud trailing behind him oh my dear lord in heaven anyway i just i just think it's i think dftb was saying this in a in our in our text chat they've just traded they've they've traded everything they've traded all their picks they'll ever have for the rest of the team's existence they've traded i think their honor and i mean the nfl might say you're still suspended until this is i mean again if the nfl doesn't want to Make it even more clear that all they care About is winning and they don't care about Victims if they want to make that abundantly More clear Then they'll just let him play but you know They could still suspend him like they could Cleveland could spend all this money and Deshaun Watson could not even Play a snap next year which to your Point it'd be very interesting if the Seahawks End up having a really good season with Baker Mayfield and the Browns are in the wilderness Because they paid all this money For a guy who the league isn't even going to let play I mean

The ironies are just layered here First of all, the league isn't going to They might do a slap on the wrist There might be a few games Certainly no more than eight games Which would be about half a season But I think that eight games of a suspension Would be I don't think they would go that far And I also think the Browns Because it's a club The Browns, I heard that there was actually Even something in the contract that Somehow it would mitigate fines for Deshaun Watson in some way so like the Browns are already clearly they're having all kinds of conversations around the league and one of the team's owners, Dee Haslam she sits on the NFL's conduct committee Luke, she sits on the committee that would be doling out any kind of punishment. How do you think she'll vote though? I'm sure she'll be fair and balanced. Also I mean you just want to talk about the Haslam's? Like I don't even know the details of this but like the ownership of this team has been investigated by the fbi for shady business practices regarding their trucking industry and that's going back decades now like it's and again like me raising all this it's not like oh suddenly i'm a moral champion i'm still gonna watch the nfl i'm not i'm not trying to again i'm talking to you honestly about this in the same way i would um if we were having a private conversation um because i'm not trying to make it sound like i'm making some sort of sacrifice but But I mean, yeah, of course, like, you know, the I mean, it's just it's just this the organization is just so rotten.

Like, yeah. Anyway, well, I'm sorry, Andrew. And again, I know that like the fans who don't get to watch as much football or feel as good about their football is not the story of this story of this victims. But I don't know those victims. I do know you. You're my friend. And I know that this has been a big part of your life. And so to walk away from it is a big deal in your life. So I'm sorry that this is the call that you're having. Well, it's going to be interesting. Would you consider becoming a huge Wheel of Fortune fan? I would. What if I – I don't know if you – have you looked at this story?

I did, yeah. So I'm sorry you can't squeeze me in. It's been bouncing around, yeah.

This was kind of shocking to me. Well, shocking might be overstating it. This was interesting to me, Andrew. Now, for whatever reason, we have gone from zero Wheel of Fortune stories in the first 10 years of the program to one Wheel of Fortune story per day for the last month. We had another feather in your map. We had Pat Sajak dragging one of the contestants needlessly about his story of lacerating his toe.

Well, yes, you kind of missed a beat, too, because there was a day two story of the of the feather in your map. So we had one day was feathering your map, and then you had the Pat Sajak defending the people who didn't get that right and kind of finger-wagging the rest of us for making fun of them. Then you had the next puzzle, which you were just describing, right?

There's actually even one more thing you're forgetting. Then we learned that Pat Sajak's Twitter feed is actually pretty interesting. Yeah, that's true, too. Not his Wheel of Fortune, not Pat on Wheel, which is his Wheel of Fortune one. But the regular old Pat Sajak has got some decent jokes. Yep, exactly. Anyway, so now we find ourselves at the latest A Wheel of Fortune story. This was Dan McQuaid. I love Dan McQuaid's writing. He writes for Defector, formerly Deadspin. He's a Philly guy, and he just has a great eye for silly stories and stories that are seemingly silly but have larger kind of ramifications. I really like his writing. But anyway, he highlighted this thing that he had seen on Twitter. where so the the clue is it's it's like it looks like it's renting a something boat so and the something boat is p blank d a blank now the thing about these wheel of fortune reveals is that obviously if you're sitting at home or if it's the next day and you have time to think about it a lot of times there are words that we think would go somewhere that really don't fit if you're looking at the number of letters or what's available etc but i think most people if you say to them andrew if i said hey you know what the next beautiful sunny day lets you and me go down and rent one of those boats at green lake i would i would call it a paddle boat yeah i grew up i grew up right by green lake i grew up sometimes renting those boats seeing people out there i swear to gosh i have only ever heard those kinds of things referred to as paddle boats we always called them paddle boats well that's apparently not what they're called as we learned on real i'd like to buy a vowel oh there is an oh yeah anything else so she's getting the o in boat so now we have you know we have renting a something boat has now become pretty clear i'd like to solve okay Renting a paddle boat. No, that is not correct. Now, again, I'm looking at this. It's a Monday morning. I'm not on Wheel of Fortune. I can tell that it can't be paddle boat because the way the letters line up. But I'll tell you this. If I were in this person's shoes, I would exactly say the same thing. Yeah. Because we've all called it a paddle boat our whole life. That's what I've called it. And your mind wants to, you know, sort of bend reality around what it thinks of as being the thing that this is called. so now we've got the t in renting and the t in boat i'd like to buy an e There are two E's

And no more vowels

So now we are down to I mean We are down to The puzzle is solved Renting is all You know It has been revealed A is revealed P-E-D-A-L Or P I should say P-E-D-A Blank And then boat Is all Boat is completely revealed So it's renting A P-E-D-A Blank Boat Yeah don't rent Don't rent a pet a boat, though. Right. Exactly. So that's again, it's easy to do this from this perspective, but you're looking at it and there's only one word that makes sense there. I mean, just from like words that are in the English language, it's clearly the word pedal. But I don't think anyone has ever heard of a pedal boat. I hadn't.

No, I'm with you on this. At this point, though, at this point, even given the, you know, the first person to maybe get it wrong, like, OK, you're flustered. The letters don't quite line up, although you are supposed to be the best of the best at this. You are on TV, but not like I was playing at home. But I understand there's some nerves. Maybe you've always said paddle boat. But by this point, yes, you should you should know that it's not paddle. It is clearly pedal.

Yes, it's clearly not paddle. but pedal for some reason i just i'm looking at this and i'm i'm imagining i can imagine a universe in which i would still be flummoxed even at this point which is which is wild to think about because it's the only thing it could be is pedal and it's right there for the taking but

this person does not take it yeah renting a paddle boat no that's not right now that's i have to say

somebody already said that bro and he's looking at the word p-e-d-a blank yeah he just his brain just fails him there because again the pathway is so the groove is so grooved for us for anybody that you know probably grew up in the united states during a certain era paddleboat a thing paddleboat not a thing most of us have heard of michelle you have three thousand dollars you can spin again, but you don't have to.

600. What letter do you want?

M. No.

Crystal. Now... again i don't know what i would do in that situation but i do feel like pedum boat would not be a thing yes pedum like what are you even thinking there yeah like m that's a very odd that's an odd guess i i can i can understand being overwhelmed and not maybe being able to solve but at that point what you're saying effectively by guessing the letter m is your best guess is that this is renting a pedum boat just like a word that you don't know i'm just trying to think like

what letters are left i'm so used to playing wordle i'm trying to figure out like what letters are still free that haven't been used that you can put there like r you know it's not pet r boat like because r is used in renting so and the thing is like our boat even even if you've been thinking like i don't call them pedal boats like you are so close with paddle and pedal and paddle are not that far away you've already right kind of said the l why why is your brain not at least trying an L over an M there this is where I start to turn I'm 100% with you by the way I've never heard them called pedal boats if you type in paddle boat into Google you will see ads for the things that we call paddle boats that have pedals on them like I've never heard pedals so I'm with you on that but at this point in the game pet them I barely knew them pet them if you got them

yeah That's a spin. 900. W? No. Sean?

Lenting a pedal boat. Here's what I think happened. She knew that somehow, again, there's the nerves of the moment. And having paddle be out has somehow made her think that pedal is also out. Like her brain is her brain is not separating those two things out as two separate ideas, I think.

Yes. Or she has forgotten that the word pedal exists, because also I will say this pedal is pedal is a little bit confusing because it's not pedal like, you know, on a flower. Yeah. And like, I don't think I see the word pedal written out this one as in, you know, something that you drive with your feet. I don't think I see that word written out a whole lot. and it's it's a is it homonym when a word sounds like another word but they mean different things um like there's a different word that is pedal that we see much more rose petals things like that so it is a little bit but peda is not a word and i think we can all agree on that peda pedem and peda are not words i like to solve go ahead renting a pedal boat yeah there you go Now, here's the thing, Andrew, as Dan McQuaid points out in his piece in Defector. So the difference between a paddle boat and any other kind of boat, a boat is a paddle boat if it is propelled forward by a paddle. like think about a you know mark twain style riverboat that big circular thing with flat spots on is a paddle that's what's propelling it a uh so any other boat that's propelled by like a motor like a you know a turning basically blade that's called a screw that's not a paddle boat but this here's the thing i think pedal boats are paddle boats the the pedal boats at green lake the thing you get in and you pedal with your feet i believe that what's actually propelling it forward is also a paddle underneath the boat sure some sharp it's not an out it's not an inboard uh or outboard blade yeah i think you're right so i mean this is the kind of thing that if it were jeopardy they'd come back from the break and they'd say uh we are going to adjust our score because when this when this person guessed pedal boat a paddle boat can also be a pedal boat i mean i guess that's not exactly how this game works but i mean i think that when we're talking about paddle boats that are maybe technically called pedal boats they're also

paddle boats i mean the one thing that i will say here and again like i i'm i'm so wishy-washy on this because i think i'd be very bad in these situations you know me like talking on this show i will forget people's names i'll forget my own parents names because suddenly i'll be like i'll just get weirdly nervous and i can't think of something that i could think of if you and i weren't recording right um so i think i'd be terrible in this situation and so i i don't want to go too hard on the contestants but again they made it to this level by the way see i didn't i mentioned when all of this when all of this wheel of fortune stuff started coming up i mentioned it to jenny i'm like do you watch wheel of fortune she's like i hate wheel of fortune it's so those people are so stupid. I hope it's okay that I repeated that.

Hope none of our listeners were ever on there, but she just sees it as like kind of one of the dumbest kind of the lowest common denominator of these kinds of like games where you're supposed to use your brain a little bit. So I didn't realize that she had so much contempt for this anyway. But like at this point, you're on TV like you can see the number of letters there like one mistake with paddle boat. But then after that, it should click in your brain for for several of these people like it can't be paddle. It couldn't have even been paddled the first time they said it if you just look at the number of letters there.

There's definitely a little Jeopardy wheel animus, I think, as far as like being a fan of Jeopardy versus being a fan of wheel. We've kind of been talking about this over the last couple of weeks as there have been more and more wheel stories. I think the question that you raised the other day Andrew was is it possible that the wheel of fortune folks are intentionally picking hard questions or questions that are known to sort of like because we talked about oh you know the other thing we forgot about sweet dreams are made of this yeah yeah I don't think when we were giving I don't think you mentioned it and then I had already when I was giving the rundown of jeopardy stories I forgot yeah like the question is is jeopardy wisely or excuse me is wheel of fortune wisely starting to pick things that they know people are going to get wrong because they're things people don't really know like that it's sweet dreams are made of this or that it's pedal boat so that people will look silly so that it will go viral so that hit podcast like tbtl will discuss it i'm usually one i mean again i think

it's smart of the show to try to leverage whatever social media they can get even if it appears to be even somewhat negative or controversial, quote unquote, controversial in an answer like this. But I also think I mean, so hopefully you have marketers and social media people who are doing their best to take advantage of these moments. I sort of don't think that the writers of the show are coming up with more ridiculous things. Maybe my guess is even if there is a little bit of that, I also think there's a lot more of, well, we're all just focused on this now. this just sort of happens like once you're kind of you know like we were talking about it so now more people are are noticing it and so it's just in the zeitgeist sort of and i just think that this moment will pass i'll bet you there's been bullshittery on wheel of fortune like almost every day for the past 40 years it's just like right now there's just a moment of people talking about it and it will pass i could be wrong no i bet you're right i bet you're right just because

everything is captured now um you know we like it's easy to it's easy to like secure the content and then cut it down into a digestible bite and then tweet it out it's just there's just more eyes on everything and there's more record of everything happening and specifically we're

talking about wheel though too you know what i mean like even when the technology i just think this phase will pass like you know we've had the ability to capture and tweet about wheel of fortune for the past 20 years no how long has Twitter been around whatever but I think that it's I just think that like right now we're I mean it's the same with weather events too you know what I mean like the or maybe not weather events so much as like but like supposedly real news will get on this too like you'll hear about some sort of phenomenon in one part of the country and then suddenly it seems like oh my gosh this is happening all over the country it's like well you guys just didn't have an interest in these stories before everybody's just focusing on this now

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man! It's not from a female.

All right. An email or V-mail before we get out of here on this Monday? Let me play a quick one for you here, because I know that we went a little bit longer than your schedule allows for, and it was my fault for blathering so much.

No, no, no, no, please. This is, you know, this is the show, Andrew. I don't know if you've heard TBTL before, but it's us. Just talking about coat racks and football fandom and a certain amount of wheel. Like, that's just what it is. And so do you have nothing to apologize for?

Okay, well, thank you for that. I do just feel a little bit like, Mondays are not my most articulate days, I guess. But anyway, we did get this voicemail that I'm going to play for you from our friend Ben.

Luke, Andrew, listener Ben Quick here. I recently decided to do a listen-through of the Lord of the Rings audiobooks, revisiting them. A certain phrase stood out to me in my re-listen. I will read it to you here. I shall not walk. Time presses, said Gandalf. Then, lifting up his head, he gave a long whistle, so clear and piercing was the note that the others stood amazed to hear such a sound come from those

Old, bearded lips. Love the show, guys.

Of course, of course you would select a voicemail supporting your use of the absolutely disgusting phrase bearded lips.

I don't think we knew that, though, right? Because that phrase has reared its ugly head from time to time over the course of the years. It's reared its bearded head. It certainly has, as has Lord of the Rings. And we even have a Lord of the Rings scholar in the TBTL family, and in your case, your real family, Luke, of course, with David. And this has never come up before. The bearded lips is part of Lord of the Rings lore.

I don't know why. I thought that where that was going was he was going to say the sound was too beautiful to live. I knew that it was going to be some kind of reference to the show, but I think I guessed wrong. Now, what's weird is, I don't know if it's just Tolkien, because Tolkien's mind wasn't in the gutter, but it doesn't seem gross when Tolkien writes it. Why do you think my mind is in the gutter? It would be your mind that's in the gutter if you're interpreting it gross coming from me. Well, yeah, I was. But the fact that you assumed I meant you tells me your mind is in the gutter. I was talking about myself. But the fact that you went there, you doth protest too much, Gandalf.

But we have two people saying it. we have Tolkien saying it and that hits your ears fine then when I say it it hits your ears in a different way so it sort of seems like the onus is on me

well okay here's the thing because I don't know Gandalf or Tolkien and because Gandalf's I mean he's Gandalf the Grey right is that because of his hair because of his beard because of something non-hersuit related like I think of a big part of Gandalf's personality as being his beard So the idea that they would talk about his bearded lips Just kind of like It sort of just doesn't seem out of place to me Because it's such a big part of his whole deal in the book

Yeah, whereas my beard serves a purpose It hides my face But it's not like My beard is not a big bushy beard That's a big part of my personality I'm not always rubbing my beard Or pulling knickknacks out of my beard And surprising children with it I don't know what Gandalf does

We did not call you Andrew the Red Because of your beard Or something like that you know andrew the brown speaking of beards oh i you know i always want to try to be careful when i'm talking about any physical appearance stuff um you can tell me i'm hot because it's it's it's just good to be this way but i was pulling into the parking lot of my apartment building yesterday and i saw a person who i thought was wearing a very intense mask like i was like wow this is hot because you're more or less outside you know it's it's a very open air kind of thing it's it's underneath the apartment building but regardless it's it's pretty um you know ventilated i was like wow that guy's wearing a mask that goes up under his eyes and he's but he's not covering his nose that's weird and then as i got closer i realized no it was the thickest beard i've ever seen in my life on a human being now not the longest beard he didn't have it grown out gandalf style it was probably a maybe a little a teeny bit longer than your beard andrew but just think of basically that but it was i've never seen a thicker beard in my life on a human being i'm not kidding you and covering a lot of real estate it sounds like it's going up past his nose almost up high in the cheeks it was a high up his cheeks almost like pretty close to his eyes and like so solidly hair so thick that it didn't look it did not i mean i live in portland i see people you've seen some beers all i've seen some beers it's not like i'm confused when i approach someone who has decided to grow their facial hair out that's a very common practice here this was something entirely different this was like i just have never and by the way this person looked like they were very i guess you could say conventionally handsome person they were you know it wasn't like you know i i don't know why i need to give that context but this is when a person who's like appeared to be experiencing homelessness or something else it's like who didn't have access to shaving like this was a dude who lives in my building who was just had a level of thickness to his facial hair that was notable i have never seen anything like i did not recognize it as a human beard when i saw it from 20 feet away i thought this is something else and then i got up close and i was like well this is something else this is unlike anything i've ever

seen what do you think gandalf's beard smells like for some reason i get leather pipe smoke pipe smoke and leather hints of pipe smoke hints of leather and i don't know why leather because I don't think he wears a lot of leather, but I just see him as, like,

I don't know that he wears any leather, but I just sort of see him as having kind of an old, but you're absolutely right. Pipe smoke is the main thing. Mead.

Does he drink? Probably not.

In those things, if he's a wizard, do you feel like you probably,

I feel like a drunk wizard would be really dangerous. Oh my God, that's so dangerous. You cannot get, you know, is being a wizard sort of like being, actually, I was going to say, is it like being a priest? But actually, priests drink a lot. The vow they take is of celibacy, allegedly. um trying to think of what another kind of job is where you i mean maybe an on-call physician something where it's like part of the job is you're not you can't drink oh pilot pilot's a good one that was a terrible ding sorry there we go that's better yeah maybe a pilot or something like i wonder if when you become a wizard if if part of the deal is with great wizarding power comes great responsibility or at least great teetotaling like you're not supposed to be because again a drunk Gandalf it's very dangerous

definitely and you just might not need it like it might just be more of a human need or you know a human defect maybe to feel the need for that stuff and maybe even you know struggle with it potentially whereas a wizard like I don't know I just sort of feel like they have magic on their side they don't really need magic in a bottle

just cast a spell

right exactly you know Like oh you want to numb out

Just cast a numbing spell

But don't use a spell if you're addicted to spells That's the one thing you have to remember Addicted I'm sorry I've been allergic I ruined a tear That joke wasn't going to be good if I delivered it properly Sorry What do you want to go with for show titled

I have reverse McDLT Situation and then You said you were going to write something else down

I wrote down and I like this one I would vote for this pet him if you got him P-E-D-A-M Like the erroneous I will agree with you

The beginning of that word always Catches me a little nervous Yeah be careful But I think people will see it as People will understand it for what it is Or at least they won't think that we're writing about Something else that starts with PED that's not great

Or if they want to be upset about it They'll have to listen to the show to find out Exactly what we're referencing

The Howard Stern principle People who like us listen for one hour Per episode and people who don't like us listen For 1.5 hours Is that something they talk about That's the big story in like in private parts Which I watched recently oddly enough Yeah and I actually didn't I didn't think it was as good as I was The whole story on that movie was It's Howard Stern It's gonna be bad because he's Howard Stern And he's just about shocking people but then I think The movie exceeded a lot of people's expectations So now the narrative has become Hey private parts is actually really good And the truth of the matter is it's actually not it's just well first of all paul giamatti is quite incredible in it and um and and then you know there's some other some people are better at acting than i was expecting i feel like robin quivers is actually pretty good at acting um so it's not it's not like a total disaster of a film but it's not it's not the greatest but i decided to watch it because it comes up on his radio show all the time people call in they talk about it i thought let me just go ahead and actually watch it um but one of the things is when he's you know at some station in new york and basically the the people that are in charge of the station don't like him and don't like his show but then they have a real kind of epiphany when they realize that the people who don't like howard stern are listening for more time yeah than the people who do like howard stern yeah i don't think

we have that i think we just grind the haters down just until they're just they don't have the will to listen anymore ha that's that's uh that's our approach that's well that's my approach in fact that's what i'm doing to you i don't know if you realize that this whole thing has been a bet can i sink tbtl it's gone way too well frankly it's a that's a long con i hope that you i hope

you really um i hope it's it's been worth it because what are we how long have you been on

the show now eight years uh something like that permanently no actually maybe a little bit more than that because it's we just had our seventh anniversary just of 8 p.m and i was with tv a few years before that so our friend p fletch just like hipped us the other day or the other

week i don't even mentioned it on the show that it was like what was it i was our like

eight year anniversary seven year seven eight p.m or something yeah march like early march was our seven year anniversary of 8 p.m but yeah no i actually you know what somebody told me this And it's so embarrassing that other people know this better than us, but I believe my 10-year anniversary has passed or is coming up this year or something, because I think I joined you in 2012.

Oh, wow, because we were doing, right, because I forget that we were also doing the show post-Gen with you as the full-time, every day. co-host before we got to APM of course for a few years oh for quite some time yeah I mean back when we were doing when we were doing Cairo together you and I and I remember the the pitch was hey how about you were just like listen like you know I have guests I can do a couple of guests a week but I don't want to do it solo like all week like how about you come in on Monday Wednesday and Friday and I'll pay you x number of doll hairs and I said you can just pay me those doll hairs but I'll be there every day I like this show it's fun so I'm so glad you said that by

the way yeah i don't really think i don't think this show would exist if you hadn't if you hadn't said yes because and then i remember what i do remember was the first show i don't remember what we talked about but the first show that you ever came and sat in as the official co-host or maybe it was even i don't know i wouldn't say a trial run but there was i just remember the first show where you were sitting there and and at least i was thinking this is going to be how it's going to be this will be the the new setup i remember just thinking this is going so well like really and truly for all like you're so self-critical and you always you're always really hard on yourself but like i just want you to know that the very first show that we ever did together where i was thinking of it as like this is the new combo me and andrew i was like so happy with how the show went and at the end i was like that was the most natural thing ever this is gonna be fine like that was my overriding sense that makes me feel good yeah no now i'm now i'm starting to

feel very nostalgic too i don't remember the very first time i was on um to actually come out and talk with you and jen i was like a guest but i was like working at cairo so i just like popped in the studio with you guys i think it was when when my mom found my runaway note and sent me a scanned image of it from fourth grade or it might have been to talk about my experience telemarketing there were two times i remember yeah it was one of those two times that i was on as a guest with

you and Jen yeah well Andrew I'm really glad that you're on the show thanks me too only because I don't know how to post the show to the internet like so if if for no other reason than I want this I want this to get to the internet I'm very glad you're here yeah no and yeah I guess the we

got on this topic because the original plan was Jen handpicked me Jen was like ah I don't know if I want TBTL to go on without me but I can't really dedicate my time to it anymore so I'll handpick this guy and he'll just he'll just drive the show into the ground in in a year or so and

i'll have no fomo yet here we are yeah you messed up andrews not you i'm not talking about like multiples of you that's just jen's actual last name which is confusing i understand this yep all right uh let's go ahead and wrap things up here on this monday but the good news is we'll be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio i'll be in los angeles um checking in from uh culver city california so i forgot about that that's tomorrow due to be i think about 85 degrees or something tomorrow in la so that'll be that'll be fun anyway uh we will see you then until then have a great monday take care of yourselves stay safe and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

And listen, I know that there are way more important things in life than football, but you are supposed to be our pleasant distraction from those things. But all we do is pay you money to put us in a bad mood every week. You are a factory of sadness! Power out.