Muse

Obviously, your kid needs a male role model. Because I'll be honest with you, he's soft. Weak and soft. Because he's four. Because he's your son. No. You spend all your time reading books and looking at numbers and letters like they mean something. They do. Do you know how to read? I get by. All right? What do you know? You know, like... Red means stop. Great. Green means go. Good. Yellow's the other one. TBTL! well you have found my flabbergast button and guess what you've pressed it do you eat chocolate

yes do you eat do you drink soda yes do you eat fatty foods yes and a lot of people ask me are you eating cookies late at night and i say of course i am what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine uh an eating machine it's really a miracle of evolution that must be weird for you Uh-huh. Kimmel's now the new king of late night, and you're still doing a pod card?

They say, you snooze, you lose. Well, we snossed. And look what we lost.

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

Welcome to the Internet.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I feel cute today. Look at my outfit.

I'm going to have to put on like snow pants today and bundle up because I got a message to the weather patterns here in the Pacific Northwest. They just want you to be normal and clearly you're not. It's Monday, April 11th, and I looked out the window this morning to very steady snow that was sticking to the streets and roofs and foliage in my neighborhood. Oh, by the way, I'm at the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon.

What do you got here, a thunder hurricane going on? A thunder blizzard hurricane.

This is apparently the latest in the year. This is the most measurable snow we've ever received here in this area since they started taking measurement of this stuff about 80 plus years ago. So considering that it was 80 degrees on Thursday here in Portland, it's quite a shift. But it just gives us more to talk about, folks, here on episode 3,659 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

I got something to talk about. I was coming back from the restroom overnight this weekend in the middle of the night. And I thought, let's not turn on all the lights. Let's not fully wake our brain up. Let's try to keep this sleep train moving with a very quick bathroom trip. And well, speaking of trips, I tripped on my way back. and really gave myself a real doozy of a cut on my forehead that when it's all done, when it's healed years from now, will either be the coolest thing about me or something that I forever feel embarrassed about. If I lean into my inner Danny Trejo and just kind of want, Like, I'm getting pretty grizzled. But maybe that's just going to be a new lifestyle for me. It's just, like, rugged Danny Trejo type. Maybe that's my new look anyway. We'll talk about that, I'm sure. We'll also talk about the finale of the TV show Severance.

I love television. I've got to have that thing on 24-7. I love the patter.

The final episode of the season aired on, well, over the weekend. And I thought it was great, but I also have one, I guess, I feel like there was something that I thought was happening in good faith between me and the creators of that program. It turned out I think they were operating in bad faith, so we will talk about that. And whatever else comes into our little brains, along with the help of this young man, the longest-running Cobra of the show, may be best known for the depictions, his depictions, that is, of the tall ships.

The world needs to see the madness that is my upper torso, okay?

He is joining us right now from the Sweet Cream District of Seattle, Washington. He's Andrew Walsh. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. Thank you for choosing a drop that talked about how... The madness that is your repertoire.

Exactly. I told you during sound check, I didn't have your drop ready to go. And you said, just play something about me being hot. Yep. And that was the best thing I could find. This, I also would have accepted this, although I don't think you have this drop.

He is very well put together. He is very, very strong and takes care of his body in an amazing way. Do you think, number one, that that describes me well, and number two, do you have that drop? Because I feel like you should play that for me almost every day. Also, I mean, how—I don't know what this fall I took did to my memory, Andrew, but, like, I just said that was the only thing I could find about being handsome. We literally have a trove of handsome-related drops that would have worked great.

This handsome young stranger.

I could have called you a handsome young stranger. I could have done a kid talking about Blair Walsh.

You are handsome. Don't worry.

I could have done handsome boy modeling school.

Mom, Dad, I've got a little surprise for the two of you. I think I might just buy you a 30-room mansion in Beverly Hills, California, complete with push-button phones. Look at this face. What do you see? Look at it, Dad. What do you see? What do you see? Say it. Say it. Well, it's a face. Yeah, but what kind of face? Uh, pale, pasty, psychotic. No, Dad, it's a neatly chiseled, well-groomed, drop-dead, handsome face.

That would have been a long... I know, right? Let's go right into some Prince Paul. Yes. Some handsome boy modeling school. So I can't believe that when you said just play something about me being handsome, my brain skipped over like the 10 different drops we have relating or regarding handsomeness. And I went right to the madness that is your upper torso from Workaholics.

I think and I don't want to make the listeners uncomfortable, but I do think I said something. I didn't say handsome. I think I said like more like hot and sculpted. I think I said something that would lead you to believe I wanted it to be specifically about how majestic my actual body is, which is different than, and again, I realize it's early on a Monday to hear those words come out of my face about this body. I'm trying to build my beef castle. But that's what I wanted, though, and you were delivered, so thank you for that. You're welcome. What's going on with your mug? You really think this is, whatever happened, and I don't know what happened, we're going to talk about it now for the first time, But you think that whatever happened is giving you a permanent scar? Did you get stitches?

No, because they said it was largely an abrasion. So there is a cut in the middle of it, but it didn't quite warrant stitches. But the problem right now is, so I whacked my head on the side of the, or the kind of corner of the nightstand next to where I sleep. uh-huh what did you turn down on my shoes which i always put in the same place when i go to bed usually i kind of have my little like ritual of kind of you know shutting the apartment down and putting things in their place and for whatever reason i didn't do this probably because i was in bed looking at tiktok thinking i'm not fully going to bed i'm just kind of unwinding and then i fell asleep then i woke up at some point i also blamed the design of this apartment because the light switch in the bathroom makes no sense where it is placed and i don't know why it is that my brain because i can walk from the bedroom to the bathroom i don't know why my brain can never learn that it's on the left side of the door but it just i always reach for the wrong spot i always reach to the right which i think speaks to something about how human brains work or if you're right-handed maybe how your human brain works because you've been there a while like

usually you get used to those things and you eventually will and then you'll be broken the other way when you eventually move somewhere else here's the bigger problem though not only is the

light switch in the bathroom on the left hand side it's like two feet in from the doorway yeah there's a there is a there's a sort of approximation or there's that's not the right word but like i think we have been trained over time to reach barely inside the doorway to look for the light switch like it should be six inches max from the the frame of the door right does that just seem like the natural place for a light switch yeah it should be right yeah this one being like two feet in is it was just probably easier when they wired the place but it means that like even if i remember to reach to my left i don't ever reach to the right spot and then at some point in being asleep my brain's like whatever just let's just power through so i made my way to use the uh bathroom did then went back and then tripped over these shoes that were not where they were supposed to be and then bonked my head now what they said was i went to one of those like the next day because i didn't realize really what was going on i was like oh that doesn't look great i got a paper towel i kind of tamped it down and then i went to sleep and which is what they say you should do after a head injury that's the number one advice try to go to sleep if you can

this is your forehead yep so right foreheads bleed a lot right so did you uh like tape the did you like tape the paper towel to your forehead and go to sleep no it just stopped bleeding

which which i figured was was a good sign and i just really did not want at three in the morning to like get on clothes and try to figure this out which is probably not a mature response by me but I just was like, it'll be fine. Yeah, well, I won't weigh in there. Why make everybody mad at both of us? But putting myself in your position. Wait, you're mad at me? Well, not mad. You know, our listeners get concerned, right? And so they want us to take care of ourselves and make the right decisions in these moments. Well, sorry, I won't look like Danny Trejo. Yeah, and so I don't want to. Usually when you say something irresponsible, like, who wants to go to the doctor at three in the morning? I'm supposed to say, Luke, take care of yourself, buddy. We love you. But I'm like, eh, no, I can feel you. Like if the bleeding stops and you're kind of like, well, let's assess this in the morning. I understand that point. Is there a chance that you're out of blood? Have you cut yourself anywhere else to see if you bleed?

Well, it's weird because I don't know if you have seen that episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns has all of his blood drained out and then he's wandering through the woods. It was the X-Files episode. I have seen that. But that was more or less kind of – but I was also like Mr. Burns in that episode. i felt really blissed out once all the blood was gone from my body good no i wasn't bleed it was not bleeding uncontrollably so that was part of it um that i was able to just like put a band-aid on it and then you know i felt okay uh and i just honestly thought i didn't full so the other thing was because of the way that i bonked my head it actually didn't look super bad at the time it was like i said it wasn't bleeding a crazy amount and the parts of it that make this look like it's a kind of worse injury than it is are not they're not a cut they explain it to me they're an abrasion so when i bonked my head a small amount of my forehead got cut a larger amount of my forehead just got an abrasion bruised now it got bruised but it's more like red than it doesn't look like black and blue it looks like a cut but it's not so there's like it's almost like i got a strawberry you know like or like if you're in gym class and you slide in your shorts and you get like a whatever they call that like we called it a strawberry when i was growing up now i'm assuming

but that's not going to turn to a bruise later you don't think it's not the early stages of a of a black we're all going to find out together including the viewers of cbs television um so the

actual the actual part that's a cut is not as intense as what it looks like right now but uh It looks, I don't even want to send it to you because then I feel like you'll want to make it a show pick. And I really don't want to, I just don't want to get, I mean, we're getting into it right now. We're talking about it because, but I kind of don't feel like for whatever reason, putting that out on a public facing thing. But suffice it to say, it's just, it's, it's kind of in the middle of my forehead. It's between my eyebrows. It's like an inch up from my eyebrows. It's almost exactly like I said, a Harry Potter scar, which, depending on how it all heals, could give me a certain rugged handsomeness.

Yes, it's interesting. I was wondering about the picture thing, because there's a famous picture of you, famous in our world, picture of you after getting into a fight. Lo, those many years ago. No, no, no. Not getting into a fight. No, no, you're right. Sorry, you tell the story. That happened after a night of revelry with the James, right?

That was me trying to open the window at my house to lean out the window to do a thing that happens sometimes when people have had too much to drink, and I bonked my nose on the window sash, I guess you might call it. Sash.

What do you call the window sill? Oh, the window sill. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yes. And you took a photo of yourself, and that was in the very earliest days of TBTL being a podcast, I want to say. It was almost like the Empire Strikes Back era where things were a little bit dark, I think. Right. You had lost the radio show. You were still doing the podcast. I think you had an event, you know, and a bunch of people came out and it was a it was a boozy good time. Right.

I do think it was up until they had to hustle me out like, you know, Elvis after he was, you know, like maybe I don't know on too many of some things like it was that night was that night was destined for failure for me because it was at Bush. garden like you said i didn't have a sense of how many people were going to show up i went to the restaurant the bar restaurant earlier that week and i said hey um i do this i probably said radio show as a lie and i was like we're gonna invite folks out on friday night could you bring some extra staff on and they said sure what i realize now is like why would they trust me that this was something that was really going to happen i could just have wandered in there i could have been inside some kind of delusion of my own mind like oh we're gonna just bring we're gonna pay two people extra to dilute everyone's tips because this rando walked in and told us that he's coming in with his radio crew so what i realize now is that there was no real effort made on their part to staff up and so a lot of people showed up and it turned into a disaster where everybody was waiting in these really long lines it just kind of overwhelmed the joint and then i started to feel really responsible for that because in fact i was uh there was no one more responsible for it than me and so then everybody people were buying me shots and uh i will say that generally speaking i feel like i have an okay history of keeping it together at tbtl events i don't think it's a particularly good look for us the staff to be into our cups to a degree that where we are like where i'm embarrassing myself i don't think that nobody nobody wants to see mommy and daddy

like that right yeah we have a good time we always you know we'll have a drink with the the tens of listeners i can't say that i've always remained sober but i know what you mean that you don't want to be like messy or out of no no that's not the time anyway the listeners

want to get messy yeah that's on them and and and i feel you and i'm i'm with you and i'm you know i've walked many miles in those crocs yeah but that's not the time for us to get messy and so anyway this was like maybe the one time i can think of where i got messy and the shots got on top of me i remember some folks dragging me up to do karaoke i remember being kind of sort of realizing whilst the karaoke was going on that i was like not really in a great place to be at a thing with a bunch of people who uh you know were there to meet and talk to me and talk about tbtl yeah and so i just remember van and who knows maybe camaro kev some group of people kind of sheltering me in the back corner of the restaurant so i didn't embarrass myself any further and then spiriting me out of there and then that was all well and good until i got home and then was left to my own devices and basically turned into bruce willis in the opening scene of the sixth sense i was like wet naked confused just showing up in the movie like did i time travel here and yeah i bonked my nose and the next day took a picture of it of the results of it i would say this what i'm currently rocking is a i think it's more it's it's it's more gruesome than that really interesting because that not even because it's such a bad injury but just because of the particular way sure it occurred it just it looks not great so okay yeah well i'm i'm

with you actually i don't necessarily need to see that anyway i don't really like i mean you know it wouldn't bother me if you said hey andrew i really need you to see this i wouldn't say ew and throw my phone but i i don't need to see it especially if you're uncomfortable sending it um but it's funny because i do think that nose thing it did am i wrong that that became a bit of a um almost a symbol for the show for a while like were you using that as a marketing thing

or did you have business cards my it's on my current business card that's right you put it

on business cards that's what i'm thinking recently and well yeah in the past five years i'd say

yeah which is that's recent to me yeah what are business cards is what um i know right well that's the other funny thing is like i was like at some point i was like i should just have some business cards and i was just trying to think of a photo that would be memorable and i was like well i got this although now i just feel like that's false advertising because i'm much younger uh in that you know in that photo um and so it's like just if you think like first of all i don't know who nuts are shooting fight club four i don't know who's hiring that guy from that business card let's say you did what's that i missed two and three um they were rolled into the fast and

furious franchise crossover oh it's a fast and furious family story gotcha fast furious fight

club family oh i see um and i don't know why any why that would be appealing to anyone that that like why that photo would cause them to be like i should call this person about business things but if it did it wouldn't even really represent what i look like other than also currently having another injury this has led me though andrew to some important google searches this morning including is sweat bad for a wound healing which the internet currently thinks it's actually really good for it there's supposed to be some curative properties to our human sweat uh in terms of you know knitting our skin back together so that's i'm taking that as a full-on green light well although i'm not going out in this uh snowy slush today i'm keeping it strictly treadmill i've

already had one tumble this weekend yeah no that sounds smart well let's talk a bit about the tv work stuff though i mean you made one quick allusion to it somewhat jokingly but um what is on the agenda for your production schedule for cbs stories and how will this play out

by some kind of extreme luck i am not this is not a week that i have anything that i have to film for national television i have to let's see here i've actually got a little bit of a window here of time for this to sort of heal up but i just don't know how long it's going to take if it's a two-week thing if it's a you know if it's if it's three weeks if it's one week and there will be a point where i mean i will i'm going to be performing in front of folks like i have a i've got live wire coming up in a couple of weeks down in eugene hey on the subject of which if you're And Eugene, come see us at the Holt Center. Come see us at the Holt Center.

see me with a band-aid on my face at the Holt Center um but uh I don't have any tv stuff I have to do but I'm also today have already been emailing with like a couple of producers about story ideas and I keep what I'm trying to subtly do is they keep giving me windows of time to shoot and I keep going like let's go on the later side let's go I'm trying to build in a little buffer so I I just don't know I I can't speculate on how long um I'm gonna have this I guess there's a chance i'll just have to put a like a band-aid over it um and uh just kind of tough it out that way it just depends and it's also like i said there's two different things going on there's this little cut but then there's just this kind of like scrape and if the scrape goes away things will be a lot better that's the larger part of the real estate of what this thing looks like

first of all i i wish that um we lived closer together you wouldn't accept this anyway but i have two very large um aloe plants and they say that aloe when you apply aloe and i think directly from the plant we used to do this as kids too like uh it'll help um avoid scarring supposedly

have you heard this i have yes i'm i'm i'm already like for now i'm putting neosporin on it to try to speed the healing and then once it heals and once it's it's a bit healed up then that's when the anti-scarring uh stuff needs to go on it so there's and in fact they've got you know who knows maybe aloe is the um time-tested mother nature remedy but there's also like something called maderma which is a you know some kind of anti-scar thing that's created in the laboratory which feels to me like they might have even more there might be even more things in there that help me than just um a plant but but it's a kind offer the aloe um yeah i knew that you

wouldn't do that that's not if you can go for something that was created in a laboratory um versus something that nature provides i think you're a laboratory kind of fella i have well

for certain things remember when we talked about cleaning stuff and it's like and i know you've got a whole cleaning podcast and we do lots of ads for grove collaborative and like you're a fan of that service and they have all kinds of cool stuff but when it's the subject of cleaning supplies i tend to want to go if it's something where i want it to be as extremely um sanitary or disinfected i tend to go away from the extremely homeopathic towards the more chemical based which i don't know if that's even the current argument i don't know how the dialogue has evolved with you and hannah on this i don't know where y'all are at with it but they're like you and i have talked about hotel room sheets like i love that the hotel room sheet kind of smells a little bit still like a very strong cleaner yeah or like almost sometimes like chlorine a little bit yeah like chlorine yeah that tells my brain maybe incorrectly that makes my brain think this just came out of a really hot washing machine and dryer where they probably used a little bit too much chemical bleach on it burn it off baby which means there's less of someone else's gross on this for me to come in contact with so just certain things where i tend to go towards the created in a lab and probably i'm going to use this you know mederma stuff or whatever or something like

it i have an idea though and it's it's really and i'm going to swear here sometimes i feel like it's real bullshit that i don't even get like an associate producer credit on your cbs stories because i'm going to give you an idea here that's going to be really good and you're going to use it and i'm just going to be forgotten to history of course but um you just start booking stories that somehow can the the cut either won't stand out as much or it becomes part of the story i think right away as have you done any fighting stories have you like gone and like my day as an mma fighter or something like that and then when you have a cut on your face everybody just assumes it was from like the training or you know or the training montage which i assume we're going to

see in this or a story about like special effects makeup artist yes exactly i mean like who's doing the monster movie makeup right now or anything that involves even just the lab where they make the scar um you know um whatever that stuff is like just somehow make it part of the piece exactly i know that's an interesting idea john and i valuable idea our friend our friend boy somebody's got a mortgage they're trying to pay our friend um john and i are working on a story on pickleball you know and um because it's uh sweeping the nation and we're thinking about entering a pickleball tournament as part of the story he and I as doubles and maybe filming it just as kind of participatory journalism maybe I orchestrate it so I take a pickleball off the face like something to kind of justify or a pickleball paddle to the face something to kind of give this scar a little bit of an origin story or you and John fighting like

you just see maybe it's even unremarked upon like there's a bunch of like kind of not b-roll or whatever it is when there's images and you're doing a voiceover. And there's a lot of images. of you guys playing pickleball but then unremarked upon there's also just a shot of you guys just punching each other in the face. Just rolling around in a dirty alley somewhere. Yeah not even on the pickleball court. Also one more idea and one more story to throw in although this one's going to be a little bit more tough because we just missed Ash Wednesday by about five or six weeks. I thought about that. Ash Wednesday perfect time for you to do a story about Ash Wednesday. I mean I think the Catholics in the audience might feel like it's somewhat disrespectful for you to um use ash on your forehead as a non-catholic but we have to weigh our priorities here that's

probably andrew that's probably the best description of what i look like right now is i look like i did and i really got carried away with my ash wednesday smudge it's about that big yeah if not bigger like it's a good it's a good sized it's a good sized situation um uh but i thought about that i was like because what i've been trying to like i haven't i'm not i'm not even kidding actually i was really struggling with this this weekend like as i was sort of just thinking about the implications for my work stuff and also just the fact that like i'm a i think i'm especially sort of insecure about some irregularity on my face and i was trying to remind myself no one is no one is looking at me i mean i'll tell you this right now if i walk outside someone if they look at me they'll be like oh wow that guy's got a cut on his forehead like it's not subtle but if i were to put a band-aid over it which i was doing when i was running some errands and stuff first of all 90 people wouldn't even notice you have to really like look at it and take it all in and i'm trying to remind myself that most of the time no one is noticing me as much as i think they're noticing me or studying my face or everyone's just living their own life trying to get through and there's a certain narcissism to me being so insecure about having something weird going on but i am i'm like playing out this thing of like doing you know having to do a tv interview and have this like hopefully by then sort of small bandage on my forehead and kind of like say to whoever i'm interviewing oh yeah sorry about this i uh you know took a tumble like and just the fact that for the next i'm get i'm guessing month of my life for the next month of my life probably this is a thing that i'm going to be dealing with every single day in one way or another and feeling kind of anxious about that's something that i've been trying to i've been trying to come to some sort of peace over the whole thing um because otherwise it's just gonna really it's gonna kind of torment me for the until it's you know all better and then even after that depending on how the anti-scar stuff works i will i may have kind of a a noticeable

scar now in the middle of my forehead yeah no you're screwed no just joking i'm just joking I'm just joking. You know what?

You know what I didn't screw up?

I was just going to say one thing, though. I'm kidding about that. Obviously, I was just trying to feed into your insecurities, and obviously, I don't want you to do that.

Just because I won't cut you in on the sweet, sweet CBS money. Now you're just going to try to take me down.

I don't even want money. I just want the associate producer credit. There's a movie, State and Maine, where they're making a movie. It's a movie about people making a movie. And you know this movie. Is it Mamet? It's Mamet. Yeah, I was blanking on his name for a second. I used to really like that movie. I don't know if it holds up, but they keep on just throwing around associate producer credits. Tell them I'll give them an associate producer credit. So that always stuck in my head. But listen, I'm not I'm honestly not saying that you should worry about it or that you're screwed. You're not. But I do understand, like, it's a professional thing. I mean, it's something that you do have to consider. And I don't think that you're out of the ordinary to like the idea of walking down the street or going about your business or going to Lowe's. or can you tell I've been going to Lowe's a lot lately? Like, whatever it is, like, hopefully.

Like, going to anywhere, like a Lowe's or also possibly a Lowe's. Right.

I know, man, if you want to know where the white marble stones are, man, I can draw you a map with my eyes closed. But, you know, get out of your head on that kind of stuff. People aren't noticing you that much. And also, if you're at a Lowe's with a scar, man, that just puts you in a higher tier. Someone's going to ask me where the plumbing supplies are at that point. I think, but they're going to ask you very carefully because you look like you're going to punch them. But I do understand. I don't think it's outside the ordinary to think like, well, this, you know, especially a job where you're in front of a camera. This is something you got to think about. You're not weird for thinking about it that way. You'll get through it. Don't don't lose sleep over it. But that's fine. And I think that it's also relatable for almost anybody, no matter what their job is, if they're going into into an office place or they're just have, you know, if they work with colleagues. like just the idea of having to talk about it hey what happened you know like I hate that's one thing I never do to anybody and it's not about being it's not about like trying to follow any kind of rules I think I've always done this with people because I hate when you have any kind of physical change and then you go into the office place or whatever and everybody asks you about it and it's like 3 p.m. you've already told the same story 17 times about why you shaved your beard or why you're wearing a tie. Or why there's a scar on your face Like hopefully people won't ask But you know I understand people probably will Hey hey what happened

Yes I think It's funny because you said don't lose sleep over it I think you're right I think it's Anybody in this situation would be kind of like Ah that sucks we'll see how this plays out There's a normal level Of feeling kind of like uncomfortable And like just Being kind of bummed out about it and then there's like I was having intrusive thoughts All weekend which is also not my move like when i was falling like it was the first thing that were like when i when i then woke up on sunday morning and went and checked it out i was like okay this is really this is kind of a more serious situation than i was expecting and then i went to the place and they looked at it and they just explained what was going on that was like last night i was lying in bed trying to fall asleep and i couldn't stop thinking about my brain was just whirring and worrying and like spinning and spinning and spinning on this. And like, do I need to call CBS and be like, take me off the schedule for two months. And if I do that, like, does that mean then they're not going to like want to have me back? Uh, is it going to make it harder for people I'm talking to on live wire, uh, to like have a normal conversation because like the guy has a bandaid on his forehead. Like it's just, I was re and then I woke up and it was the first thing I thought about this morning so that's i want to i want to work myself away from that level of of again intrusive thoughts on it and i'm sure i will i'm sure it'll be fine i'm shitting you not this was another time i looked at my john prine tattoo and i was like this feels like a full inch of water like this is double the half an inch of water that i often find myself in but i was looking at it and i was thinking okay this will be okay this is a something that you're going to be dealing with and you will you know get through it and life will go on so i was trying to talk myself down from kind of spinning out on it a little bit and so anyway um the thing that gives me some sense of accomplishment in this world andrew is i perfectly described what a window sash is the thing i hit my nose on really it's the middle yeah it's the part of the window where the lock is if you've got a window that goes up and down oh yeah yeah that's called the sash i

had no idea i had no idea actually what i bumped my nose because all i was all i was thinking of was like a sash that pulls the blinds back and or the curtains back and i was like i couldn't i had no idea um so a couple of things first of all you're you're employing something throughout this conversation that i thought again i'm not i'm not even joking here and i'm not trying to get an associate producer credit although it would be nice um i feel like you're employing a real andrew walsh uh tool here in talking about the story which is the use of the word bonk liberally this is something that i used a lot when way back when i was brand new on the radio with the andrew walsh show how did they come up with that name um the very first night as on the air we're in first couple of nights i believe it was a saga we're talking about all of uh cat Williams's exploits yeah down at the uh world uh soccer cafe that's right the comedian who came to uh came to Seattle and got in a bunch of trouble and and and one of the things he did that started all of this the cat Williams rampage was he hit somebody in the audience on the head with a microphone and people were scandalized about this and calling it assault and I honestly to this day I don't I don't know how hard he hit this person or what the what the deal was there or if it was assault, but I used the word bonk because I was a little bit more like, hey, let's all just calm down here about this. And I think bonking someone on the head with a microphone is much less an act of violence than hitting somebody on the head with a microphone, right? Certainly in how we can perceive it. Exactly. And so I've noticed that this is something that you take very seriously, but in using the word bonk, you're also lessening it a bit as well

and rounding the corners of the story. I'm using two words very intentionally, tumble and bonk.

Yes.

Because they're both things that happen in children's books. And as we know, everything's generally fine at the end of one of those. Like the story of the penguin who tumbled down the hill and bonked his friend, but then learned about friendship. Like, you know, it's like, honestly, because fall sounds like, ooh, is Luke okay? Tumble sounds like, yeah, okay. And then like slammed, also not great, bonked. We can live with that. I'm trying to not stress the listeners out.

Should we start saying that I live in the Tumbling Bonk district, by the way?

I love that Rolling Stones song, by the way. Tumbling Bonk. Call me the Tumbling Bonk. All right. Let's take a break. And then when we come back, we'll get into the end of the season of Severance. And also, somebody – maybe this could be saved for the emails and V-mails segment.

segment i might just be dead wrong on something that we did on the show the other day andrew somebody tweeted at us and were very they said they'd never been closer to throwing their phone listening to the show over something that i said and i am fully confused i might i might be just totally off on something so we can talk about that too coming up here on tbtl we was hoping

for some razzle dazzle razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your mark get set Get set Now ready Ready Go Everybody rattle Dazzle

Alright let's thank some dazzling donors These are the wonderful Generous Donors who are dazzling us with their dough Folks like Mark Hutchison Of Burnaby British Columbia I would have guessed Australia I think I ask this now Oh really? Burnaby does sound Like it could be Barnaby strikes me as something from originally from the UK that made its way to British Columbia and that there's also gotta be, also there's that guy

Barnaby. Yeah, Barnaby Joyce

Barnaby Joyce over there in Australia who was going after Johnny Depp and Amber Heard over their dog stuff so it sounds Australian to us, but this in fact is in British Columbia Mark says, I'm dazzling this year to celebrate being a listener for 10 years. I wish I could afford to dazzle every year as tbtl is certainly worth it but at least i can do it on this one very special anniversary as a 10 oh mark thanks that's really nice uh i don't want to use this message for anything else but the simple act of thanks over the years tbtl has been a source of genuine and reliable comfort entertainment perspective and social connection without tbtl my life would be less so thank you with my whole heart p.s the captcha for this form is having me identify photos of tractors is it trucktober already wait that would be tractober i believe wait a sec i didn't know that there was a captcha that's what i'm wondering about listen if a bot wants to donate to our show why is apm trying to stop it well what if a bot didn't donate to our show

but still wants to submit a dazzling donor message maybe that's well okay i see so this

isn't for the donation this is for the message oh my god i'm i'm now i'm blowing it but i'm

looking ahead here at our next dazzling donor and we'll play the music and do it but do you see the next dazzling donor message it says beep bop boop boop bop it's from somebody named robotron did you

see this oh no and then it's a bunch of ones and zeros yeah and then just the sound sound of an early internet dial-up it just is however you spell a screeching a digital screech exactly well I think one of them got through. I think we have to tighten up that CAPTCHA. I know CAPTCHA talk is pretty played out at this point. We've all made a million jokes about it. But it is wild to me the variation of how involved the CAPTCHAs can be. Some of them are genuinely too hard for me. And some of them are genuinely too easy. The I'm not a robot, click here, too easy. The select everything that's showing a bridge. yeah sometimes too hard i mean it's a footpath is that a bridge we're in a we're in some kind of zen garden and i see that there's a footpath and it's slightly elevated but it's going over

land would you call that a bridge right and then oh well here's this is a land bridge i can see the migratory patterns here so um let's see is that a bridge or is that just a part of nature i don't know yeah i'm with you i had to do one the other day where it's like in it i can't remember what i was trying to log into um but you had to do it three times it showed you three grids of not of nine pictures right and it said choose the one each time where the object is right side up but it wasn't really clear what the object was like i was smart enough to figure it out i'm i don't want to play dumb here it was some sort of generic four-legged animal but like a digital version of it so it was like faceless and not quite round you know like early animation like early computer animation it might show you like a rudimentary sort of character with like edges or whatever and it was just like this and it was like 3d and it was spinning you know it was spun around in various ways sometimes it was you know what do you say sometimes ass over tea kettle or am i messing that phrase that might be more a camaro cab but i've definitely heard that but um like i guess i was able to figure it out i got it right in three not to brag but like um i just like choose it when it's right side up what is it it's not even a thing like it started to raise some

pretty big questions and because you know that i'm like an extremely lazy and easily annoyed person when it just comes to any extra hoops like any kind of dual factor authentic authentication kind of stuff or multi-factor authentication the thing that kind of gets me frustrated is when it's something that i'm just thinking what is the bot that wants to scam this like you know if i'm trying to get into my bank account i get it that that's very precious and precious information to me and but then there are ones where it's like i'm just trying to get into 24-hour fitness to change something and it's like are we really hacking that hard although i guess also as financial everyone just please save your i know that like if somebody were to get into my 24-hour fitness account they could maybe i mean i pay them money so there could be some way to whatever and i understand that it's all connected i mean would would somebody who doesn't understand that concept start the show by playing this welcome to the internet in an extremely timely fashion like i just did yeah no but like i guess just there are times where there's something me the 24 hour fitness is a bad example but there are just times where i feel like i'm trying to interact with a very not yeah a very not a thing that doesn't seem like there's any upside to anyone trying to get into it and um and i gotta do the uh the um caption it's kind of uh you know can be frustrating that being said we are so glad mark that you were able to jump through those hoops and send us that message of thanks that was so kind. We really appreciate it. And thanks for celebrating your 10 years with the show by being so generous with your donation. We really do appreciate you. All right, Maestro.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattles.

When you were making your Robotron joke, I got worried for a second. I didn't know where you were going, and I thought there was something we need to be concerned about in the dazzling donor message from one Aaron Zienert in Meade, Washington. But, of course, there isn't.

Yeah, sorry. Sometimes I do that because I'm spoofing, but I realize if I drag it out, I didn't even realize I might be doing that there, that I was giving you true discomfort not knowing where my sentence was going. Sorry about that. I do have a tendency to linger on that sometimes.

No, no, I just was suddenly like, okay, what am I getting ready for? And what I'm getting ready for is Aaron's very nice message. She says, hey, dummies. I'll try to keep the fawning to a minimum. Nobody said you have to do that, Aaron. Nope. But I really want to express my gratitude for the laughter and company you've provided this last year. I served as a school board director in 2021. And let's just say things got. Oh, let me see if I can find this. Andrew voice. Oh, problem is every time I try to play you saying weird, Andrew, I get to the Andrew weird sound. But I think I've got it here. Let's see. Now I got to get the copy in front of me. I served as a school board director in 2021. And let's just say things got. Now I lost the. Here we go.

Weird. Yes.

That was understanding the Internet. That's going to 2022. That's going to seem together nicely. Seamless. I could also pre-read these. I mean, that'd be one way to get around this stuff. More than once, I got in my car after a long evening of being yelled at by protesters. Oh, Aaron. and immediately turned on tbtl to lift my spirits so thanks for being a palate cleanser of the mind and alerting us all to more important topics like what jenco stands for mcgruff the crime dogs album gosh aaron all i can say is thank you for your service uh i i just i i feel like whenever education uh comes up particularly public school education or public education rather uh i have just like have to stop everything i'm doing and just show appreciation because i cannot even imagine how uh trying it's been to try to continue to educate young people with all of the stuff that the pandemic has thrown at you so thank you for doing that and then with protesters throwing stuff at you just well that helps i mean that honestly helps when you're trying to when you're trying to educate a whole you know school district or school remotely when there are different amounts of access that students have to like the internet it's also good to have

people yelling at you when you leave your job yeah absolutely because that helps yeah because you're trying to protect children um so here's one thing i want to ask you luke now i was able to do this without looking it up because we've done this recently now and your brain is much better than mine without looking it up do you remember what janko stands for because i do but it took me about 15 seconds while you were talking to get there judge none wait what's it yeah you're

judge judge judge none choose one choose one

indeed which as we've said before is you are you're inherently judging if you're choosing but whatever choosing one is

a way of judging you'd think but anyway Aaron says as my power out i do have one small request i'm sprucing up my cv and i would appreciate if you too could generate a short statement about me that i can then reference something akin to voted most likely to force people to say things about her by the podcast tbtl consider this my blurbs day wish if you will thanks again boys you're the best okay so we're trying to generate something for aaron's CV is basically resume.

This reminds me a little bit of Friendster. Back when we were talking several months ago about the person who kind of recreated the MySpace experience, which I got a bunch of listeners to sign up for, and then I haven't logged in in like three months. Sorry. I'll log in today. Probably got a bunch of messages stacking up. Anyway, I kept mentioning that you could write testimonials for people. I was wrong. That was not MySpace. That was Friendster. That was the original, or at least my original, social media platform. and that was something i liked about it is like so you'd you'd be going about your day then you get a notification that luke burbank just added you as as a friendster or something and you'd be like okay well here i can write a testimonial for luke and you would go to the testimonial section and you would say you know you could say something more earnest like luke was the best pal a guy could have in college i'll never forget the time he bonked me on the head with a microphone uh it was fun it was only a bonking it was only a bonking and not clarify um but then you could get kind of like weird with it too and our friends would write like you know fake stories or whatever i sort of feel like this is a shorter version of a testimonial that aaron wants from us like we can write something we can come up with something here i should say that will sort of um give her a good feeling and also will make her more employable so you think she's like looking to direct a different school board or something um what okay how about this i'm going to do this first pass at this okay okay okay i don't know if aaron needs this in the clear or not but i will say this aaron zinert is the least likely person to bonk you on the head with a microphone

that's it full stop oh okay um okay i got one uh this is a this is a serious one you can actually use uh aaron's aaron's support was vital to our strategy of connecting thousands of people across the country and the world with our five day a week show tbtl without her instrumental support tbtl would not be curing global loneliness at the rate that it was during the pandemic when we people needed it so much wow that's kind of a lot to put in your like i mean what would that

be like strengths curing global loneliness sure well testimonial aaron zener is amazing at making armpit fart sounds. Ask her to do it. Go ahead. Ask her. Ask her.

That's more like maybe for... See, again, I think where you and I are diverging here, Andrew, is I'm trying to keep Erin employed so we can get more donations next year.

You don't know what kind of job she's applying for. She might be applying for a job... Is she going to work at Archie McPhee's? Possibly. I don't know. See, I feel like you're putting a lot of assumptions on this.

How about Erin Zienert? The original Janko. She judges none. She connects our, and then parenthetically, H, hearts. It's kind of, it's Janko. Judges none, connects our hearts. H, parenthetically. Janko. Aaron, thank you so much for supporting the show. I hope some of that was helpful for your professional advancement. You're very helpful in the, you know, our ability to at least keep doing this for our profession. So, thank you.

hello and welcome to top story uh sorry if you hear randy whirring away in the background i

have he's got a mind of his own what happens is if he tries to start and his battery is not charged enough he will not start and then i'll go over there like what's going on with this thing and then i move it on the charger so it fully charges and then he just kicks into gear like He missed his scheduled window because he thought his battery was low because he had not reseated properly on the charger. But now he's got a mind of his own. He's gone completely rogue.

He's probably worried about you.

I wonder if Randy, I wonder if he has severance. I wonder if his personal life and his work life are, if he has a memory or a connection between the two of them. Because I'll tell you, the TV show Severance really has me thinking about life. Andrew, it's pretty deep. It's on... Apple Plus, I mentioned this last week. I gave it a very strong, positive review. You said it sounded intriguing to you. I'm guessing with all your projects you've been doing and stuff like that, you have not actually dipped into it yet?

Yeah, and I was hesitating about saying this to you because I don't want to salt the game here. But you mentioned before the show that you wanted my feelings on this conversation before we have this conversation. Like when I saw that you want to comment on the end of the series and when I saw that on the show sheet today, I was like, OK, just I was bummed because I was like, this is the part of the podcast where if I were listening to the podcast, I wouldn't get mad, but I would just skip ahead a bit. And I know that you're going to try not to spoil it, but like you set it up so perfectly for me on Monday or whatever it was last week when you're talking about. I was like, that was good. There was no spoiling, just broad strokes, great performances. I'm dying to see it. I don't have Apple TV, so I need to...

No notes for my review of Severance.

Whereas, and I don't want to make you feel bad, but while I'm just on this, there have been other things where I feel like I maybe enjoyed them slightly less because of all of the detail that you gave about them before I saw them. And this is our job. Like, I should be on top of these things, but I have been busy and I haven't had a chance to see it. And it's like, I really want to see it right now. There's nothing you can add that is going to enhance the experience for me. it's only going to potentially take away from what you've set up for me. So I will say that I have been nervous about this. Yes, that's on one side of the ledger. So I have been nervous about this. With that in mind, if you're a listener who's like me, you might skip ahead here, but I can't skip ahead, unless you want me to leave the room for a little bit, which is in some unprecedented territory.

Put Professor Bananas on the line.

Genevieve says I'm overly sensitive to these things, so if you want me to balance out the ledger a little bit, Maybe I am just overreacting, but I would respectfully request that you go easy, Hutch Rimes.

I always do, Andrew. Okay, so one side of the ledger is—and I hear what you're saying, is that this will not improve your experience with the show. So that's one side of the ledger. The other side of the ledger is my lived experience, which is I watched this on Friday night, and I had a lot of thoughts, and now I want to talk about my lot of thoughts. but they're not which you know these these things are in i guess the thing is my thoughts will still be relevant a month from now but it raises the question how long do we how long do we give folks on something like this before we can talk about it and i'm i have no intention of talking specifics of like who done it or you know was it mrs peacock in the study with the candlestick like i wasn't obviously i'm not going to say anything specific about anything that any characters do so i want just put that out there i just was i was i guess confused as to what the arc of everything was and for me i was i loved this show and i would recommend everyone watch it i was gripped by it and i think i thought it was a single season i guess i thought i don't know how shows work anymore so i thought this was like a i guess i need to look for it to say limited release or limited run series because i thought i thought i was i thought that i was watching to the full end of the story and that was not my experience when i watched the final episode again absolutely riveting i was totally and completely sucked into this show and think it's a great show but i wish i would have just known that there would still be some loose ends you know what I'm saying that was the part for me I thought I was watching like the final episode of a movie basically like the Mandalore some kind of movie project that they decided to release you know on television over the course of nine hours and for me it was not I did not feel like I got to the end of the movie I felt like I got to the end of the season and now I have to wait however long to have some threads tied up and that and so that is happening there is going to be another season there better fucking be like i mean that's the thing it's like it's this is in a weird way this is a high compliment to the series they've totally got me and i i mean i like it's been rare that i'm like okay what day like i saw ben stiller on twitter being like final episode drops on friday and i was like almost about to google what time on friday does severance you know get released or something um so this is all good stuff for about the show and for the show but again i just i think because the way that a lot of stuff gets released has really changed there's a lot of things that maybe at one time would have been a movie but now because television is such a big part of our life and a way that stories get told sometimes something that would have been a two-hour movie gets turned into nine hours that you watch over the course of

whatever and i think i misunderstood what was going i misunderstood the assignment i thought i was going to have every single thing tied up at the end end of this so that it would be like and that's what happened and without getting into any specifics what I realized was this is a multi-season event yeah because you have things like White

Lotus I think is a good example like that was something that was presented as like kind of the modern version of television right a serialized story but it it's narrative arc began and ended within one season and I have heard that I think that he's working on um it's Mike White right and that's the the creator um i heard that i i think i did hear that he's working on or tempted by the idea of making a season two oh yeah yeah yeah because they cast um well it doesn't good story walsh uh that's right they they meant they mentioned some people that they cast in it who i can't remember off the top of my head so anyway so that's pretty cool but the season one stands alone say you know there's a lot of shows like that now um but then there are other things that you know there is still TV being made. And that's where I don't know if there are personalities to the various platforms either. Cause I'm pretty much in the dark on anything Disney plus or Apple plus related. Sometimes I can sneakily get those things the way I get my chocolate, but like, I don't have just regular access to it. So I don't know if there's like sort of a personality where it's like, yeah, well, Apple plus makes these types of things that are more traditional TV series that continue between seasons. And, you know, Disney is more like the mandatorian. And you can watch it all, you know, in one sitting and then let the second season go or what have you.

Right. Well, so like, OK, the White Lotus is a really great example because the White Lotus, like you said, they are going to do a second season. But I felt like the storyline of the first season was at least that phase of the story. I felt like we had some resolution to it because of what happened with the characters. Now, I will totally watch a second season because I want to know what happens to these characters going on. but that was not my experience with the end of Severance. It was some things were very much solved and explained, and that was very gratifying, and some things were less so. And to where it was like, it just literally was news to me watching the final episode that that's not the final episode of the whole thing. And again, maybe that's just my lack of researching the topic, but I feel like they almost need to come with a disclaimer so I will manage my expectations. Like, for instance, when I started watching The Sopranos, I didn't think, like, at the end of the first season, Tony Soprano was going to be like, and that's why I gave up my life of crime.

That's an amazing impression of Tony Soprano. Mm-hmm. I just, like... McGruff the crime dog as Tony Soprano.

So, like, I... Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo? I just didn't have that expectation of the show. I thought this is a rolling story that's being told with these characters. And I'm going to like experience it that way. I guess I just didn't get the memo that severance is also multi-seasoned seasonal. It's going to, they're going to take a while. I mean, or they really like, they took the, they took the end of the Sopranos, the whole, like what actually happened? Don't stop believing things. If this is really the end of severance, it is one of the more bold artistic choices I've ever seen in my life. Let me put it that way.

Okay, yeah. I remember being in college in a creative writing class, but we were also doing some reading. So maybe it was a creative reading class. But I'm pretty sure I'm thinking of the right class. And I remember having a book discussion of something we were reading. Or maybe it was just another student short story. I'm not sure. But I remember just saying, I think out loud to the entire class, like, this is good if it has a satisfying ending. But like you have a certain kind of storytelling where it's like, OK, I'm suspending maybe not disbelief. I'm suspending various aspects of my experience of reading this, knowing and hoping and trusting that you're going to stick a landing on this. Because if I'm going through all of this and you don't stick the landing, if it either is unclear as to what's going on and you didn't answer a lot of questions or if you get too clever by half or whatever, then I will be mad that I spent my time reading this. it sounds like that's not the case here though because you know it's really not by the way is

creative reading is that also because creative writing obviously you taught that or you mentored students that were doing that that's a thing but then you said or maybe it was creative reading

but is creative reading a thing no i was just teasing and i didn't creative i i didn't teach i mean i i was like kind of a tutor for like very basic like structural essay stuff but um

creative writing was more like creative reading i choose to interpret this sentence as the last sentence of the chapter and not

the first. Exactly, right. I'm gonna read this in reverse, but yeah, no, so it sounds like you're, you know, either way you enjoyed it, but yeah, okay, that's, I don't need to. I saw

somebody write on Twitter, before I even started watching the show, somebody wrote on Twitter

every week i feel like is the week that severance is going to go off the rails and it never does which is what's kind of great and i would agree because of the kind of ambition of the show just from a plot standpoint there's a real danger that it's going to just become you know kind of it's just gonna it's gonna go somewhere that's just too out there or too hard to explain or too hard to kind of like you know i don't know just sort of uh believe could happen and it for me never does that in the first season it always like they just do a really good job of not like it doesn't spin out of control and also yeah it's setting up i mean the whole show is is very much setting up kind of questions of okay what's going to happen with this and so far in my watching of it i found the question the answers to those questions would be pretty satisfactory like i i really really think it's a great show again i just wish i would have managed my expectations in the final episode of how many bows i expected because there were a few bows that were on that were left not tied up

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 now how do you feel andrew about if that spoiled anything for you i think you were pretty like i say if that lowered your the possibility of your enjoyment of the show do

i would try to be extremely broad there well no i appreciate you trying to be broad i mean it's not net neutral like i said like any now i kind of will be watching it knowing that maybe that's better in the long run but you know now as i watch the show i will just continue to hear your thoughts about it in my head as i watch it knowing that i'm leading up to this thing so you know i'm very sensitive to those things so like less is more for me just telling me something is really great and weird and somebody took a screen cap of something from severance that i won't even describe here but somebody that i follow on instagram who's a listener of this show too and so i think she probably knows i'm talking about her and i i loved it like it was it didn't it didn't spoil anything i had to look up what it was a screen cap from because it was somebody holding a list of of musical choices and i had no idea what this was from but the screen cap was so good that i had to look up i like googled some of the things on the list that this character was holding and i'm like oh it's a severance thing i can't wait to find out how that fits in um so i'm like really really keyed up to see this so i i have taken in all the information i need to take in to see it now and at this point anything else that i hear is just i will not say anything else put a skin on my exp you know of my viewing experience i would say so i am done talking about the show for a while is the good news um so i have a couple of voicemails to play for you here um or at least one depending on how much time we have here i'm going to start with this one we played uh or i think i read an email from a listener um who apropos of nothing that we talked about on the show forever it's worth although i was glad to get the story um we heard from a listener whose parents or maybe in-laws um saw a skunk in their backyard with a um what kind of container was a yogurt container peanut butter jar peanut butter jar on its head because the skunk went scavenging started eating the peanut butter got it stuck on its head and they didn't know what to do about it they figured the skunk would work it out itself and then later on the skunk literally ended up on the local news with their peanut butter jar on the head and ended up with a uh a happy ending they they were able to i believe animal control people or somebody professional in that field was able to remove the peanut butter jar so we were happy about that that led to this voicemail that we got this weekend from listener margaret hey andrew hey luke i'm just

calling to let you know when i heard the skunk story i needed to tell you that my husband calls me the skunk whisperer because i came upon friends once with children who were seeing a skunk desperately struggling with a mcflurry cup on its head and nobody knew what to do and when they called animal control animal control said nothing they could do or would do so I went out into this this um field and approached this skunk and said hey little skunk I'm here to help you out and I grabbed the cup and the little skunk stopped and I gently pulled the cup off its head but So instead of getting the McFlurry lid with the cup, the cup came off of the lid. And then I've got this skunk staring at me with, you know, it looks like a dog, you know, collar, what we call our dog, collar of shame or sometimes bucket head when the dog has had to wear one of those.

So I think, just to be very clear, because I had to listen to this a couple of times, maybe I'm just thick. I was a little confused whether the lid came off or the cup came off, what was still attached to the skunk. I'm quite sure that Margaret pulled the cup off, but the skunk.

must have gotten into the cup by chewing through or poking its nose through the lid. So now the lid is remaining around the skunk's neck or

that area. Imagine like a picture of William Shakespeare.

Whatever that

thing he was wearing is that

of McFlurry cups. This is William Skunk Spierce. Hey, that could be a showtale, William Skunk Spierce? Skunk Spierce, there we go. Okay, I'm writing it out.

And so then the next thing I did was I looked at the skunk and I said, you gotta help me out, little guy. and I reached over and I helped pull off that little collar off of his head and then he just toddled away and he never spied me and he never looked at risk of spraying me because I know what that looks like in their tail it gets like a big bottle brush, it's very amazing and yeah, I'm very diligent about removing lids from things and about cutting up my Yoplait yogurt containers ever since this event And I tell people that that's what you need to do to keep animals from having these kinds of horrible experiences. Thanks for letting me share my story. This is Margaret at Montanen. See you soon, I hope. Bye.

I love that story, but I worry that it's going to lead to people getting sprayed by skunks. It sort of sounds like Margaret is confident and has a lot of, yeah, and has a lot of maybe experience or at least knowledge of skunk behavior, knew what to look for with the tail and everything. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, that would be the main thing that would make me nervous about trying to help a little skunk would be them misunderstanding what I was doing and just out of self-defense just spraying me, which is an experience I hope, along with falling again in the middle of the night, is another experience I hope to never have again or to never have in the first place. So the fact that she was able to somehow kind of interact with the skunk and the skunk was able to understand that she came in peace and really came from a perspective of helpfulness, that's amazing for her, but I don't know if I trust my ability or the other listeners' ability to pull off the same kind of, I'm trying to think of, I was going to say like Steve Irwin, but he passed away sadly and because of an interaction with an animal, I was trying to think of who's the animal whisperer, who can kind of walk into a situation, and Cesar Millan with dogs, he's really good.

Is that where this phrase came from, by the way? No, horse whisperer came before dog whisperer, right?

That one, the horse whisperer, that was a book, right? It wasn't Redford in the movie, Robert Redford? I just call him Redford, that's what his friends call him. Oh, really? I call him Bobby. Oh, okay, well, I guess... When we're at the campfire together. Uh-huh. Sure. But then how do you know if you're talking about him or Bobby De Niro? Because that's why I started calling him Redford.

Oh, my gosh. You're so out of the loop. Those two never are in the same place anymore. You don't know about the falling out. I've embarrassed myself. You are. This is real. Hey, speaking of embarrassing myself. Yeah, good. I think I know where you're going because it just occurred to me that I have some audio to help you with something. I got a voicemail related to what you're about to talk about, I think. Oh, boy.

We had a donor last week who was donating from an island in Michigan. and the first the way you spell the island is m-a-c-k-i-n-a-c and i had remembered hearing about this island somewhere and you had said oh is that in the northwest somewhere i said no it's

in michigan and i yeah by the way you didn't say this i said it because it was a blurs day and i because i said the name of this place and then i asked you if i said it right and you said yes but it was actually on me for whatever that's worth it looked right or i mean the way it was

written in the way you you said it that sounded right to me because of it turns out i think a different island that sounds very similar that's also in michigan so i called this place mackinac

island or i did i called it mackinac okay but i confirmed and if you would have if i would have

read that donor i would have called it mackinac island um now i think i have the pronouncer here Do you have it?

I have something. Well, I want to say that I, before this tweet came in, our friend and apparently listener, I didn't know that Anna listens to TBTL that much, but I just got a, on my phone, I got a text message that didn't have any context. It just had this audio message. I don't know how you iPhone people were. Is this called a voice memo? I got this four second voice memo that I'm going to play from my phone here.

It's pronounced Mackinac.

That was it. It took me a long time to figure out what the hell that was even referring to until I remembered, oh, the Mackinac Island thing. Apparently.

It's pronounced Mackinac.

And Anna has roots in that part of the world. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

So it's spelled Mackinac, but it's pronounced Mackinac because there's also, I thought there was two places because there is a, I'm looking at Mackinac Island, city of Michigan, that's spelled the way that it was in the Blur's Day message. And then I'm also seeing, because what I had heard of were these things called Mackinac peaches. I had in my mind transferred Mackinac peaches into Mackinac peaches. and so when i saw mac what i thought was mackinac i just thought oh there's mackinac and there's mackinac which would kind of make sense like you know these are similar names but they're a little different so is it the case that the place that i have heard of referred to as mackinac like where the mackinac peaches are from is actually spelled m-a-c-k-i-n-a-c and is pronounced this way mackinac island that's what the internet says but where are we getting the different are there two different

spellings of this i oh because mackinaw peach is spelled n-a-w so that's that's where the confusion

is here so i see so there are all these web there are these websites that are like this is what's adding to the confusion so i'd never seen the obviously i'd never seen mackinaw um written out i'd only heard it and i in fact i remember watching one of those like house hunter shows or something and someone was thinking about moving to mackinac so obviously i didn't realize that that mackinac is spelled mackinac but then when i googled it later there are a lot of like t-shirts that say mackinac but it's spelled like m-a-w or n-a-w like so there's it's probably some joke where there are like t-shirts and things that are made like if you google mackinac peaches A lot of stuff comes up that's not spelled Mackinac. It's spelled more like what we would think of phonetically as how you would say Mackinac.

And you're absolutely – so putting aside the T-shirts, which I'm looking at now, I'm confused. Are you sure that the peaches have some sort of connection to Michigan? Because I don't think it was Michigan as being a hotbed of peach growing.

All I know is that the reason that I knew that it was in Michigan was because of hearing about Mackinac peaches. and if you google Mackinac peaches you'll see like people selling Mackinac peaches I think it's I think it's a thing although now I feel very unconfident around the topic of this place I just don't think I I had never I had never gotten the memo that it's one of those places that's

spelled one way but said another way um yeah so I didn't know that either I mean I've heard Mackinac Island I'm thinking now you know once I heard Anna's voice memo I was like oh okay yeah that sounds about right I don't know why it's looking I think it's probably comes from a native american word that was shortened at some point and maybe that's that's i'm trying to figure out what the deal is with these peaches and apparently i will never be able to find out what's going on with these peaches because they figured prominently into an episode of seinfeld and so that's all i'm getting on that but it's probably not related to michigan though probably it's probably just a different it's a different strain uh well why don't we listen i've got that episode right here well they're in what's it the mackinaw peaches jerry the mackinaw peaches right the ones uh from oregon that are only ripe for two weeks yeah that's right yeah okay

so i think it's a strain of seed so it started out in mackinaw and it's been you know the seed is now like you can grow mackinaw peaches you know anywhere that a peach will grow um so i guess that was i guess that's the i'm just just what the internet is telling me okay but that's the only reason i'd ever heard the word mackinaw and then also i watched that like i said i watched that house hunters or some or you know what it was maybe it was building off the grid and they were building on mackinaw island or something but like between the seinfeld episode with the peaches and me hearing about or watching a show where someone was doing something on the island i had this like vague sense of the place but obviously did not realize that it was spelled kind of like

looks like the word mackinac okay so you have confirmed say i i think that maybe i was talking past you and not listening enough so there is no doubt that the origin of this mackinaw peach is from michigan i had i was doubting that and i didn't realize that that was that you have

confirmed that i mean unless there's a a different like mackinaw tribe that uh had also named like Like, I mean, what the Internet is saying is that the Mackinac peach is, I can actually go back to that page.

I'm actually looking at this here. As we're talking, I'm finding, not on Wikipedia, but something, it's a tree website. Oh, how about this? Oikis crops or something. But it does say that even though the famous line from Seinfeld refers to it as being from Oregon, that actually is a northern Michigan and Canadian heirloom peach. It comes from northern Michigan.

This is really funny. This is now from Urban Dictionary. The fictional Mackinac peach from. oregon which is ripe for only two weeks a year according to kramer from seinfeld the fictional mackinaw peach from oregon meaning if urban dictionary is to be believed the seinfeld writers someone decided it was funnier to make the mackinaw peach from oregon from instead of being from you know i guess mackinaw in michigan or maybe not at all i don't know this is the i'm i'm now more confused over this story than i was when we started i think i would avoid taking

and i'm not even saying this is a joke but like i would trust the urban dictionary less than anything else because that is just people like spouting off and nothing is edited and or corrected um but on this website for something called oikos tree crops i guarantee you i'm spelling pronouncing oikos wrong too probably there's a backgrounder on this uh like the like the yogurt oh maybe i'm not sure um but they'd say here a quick update on what we published earlier The Mackinac peach, again, spelled with a W, the Mackinac peach is an heirloom peach generated from seedling peaches. Some seeds came from a fellow seed collector who lives near Madison, Wisconsin, but the majority are northern seedling peaches originally from Canada and northern Michigan. So this website is definitely saying, like, listen, like, this is the origin of the Mackinac peach. It is northern Michigan.

So maybe that range, maybe not just maybe not even the island, but maybe that part of the world. But then further complicating the topic is that there's this episode of Seinfeld where they decide for whatever reason to reference this kind of mythical thing and set it in Oregon, which just seems like it's kind of a total red herring, but is also the way that probably most people in America have ever heard the word Mackinac.

Right, and that is the reference point for a lot of people. Now, I'm going to play something for you here that I was not going to play for you. But while we're on this topic of mispronouncing things, I am going to play this, too, because this might serve us well. And, you know, we're just going to have to come up from this muck at some point anyway. So we're already here. Let's play this voicemail. I can't remember if this person left their name or not.

Luke this is not a phone call criticizing your pronunciation of etude as etude like I'm sure you probably have gotten lots of people criticizing in fact I love it unironically and as a violinist I'm going to start referring to my etudes as etudes or etudes and I love it don't stop don't ever stop don't let the haters get you and i love that you are appreciating

classical music so nice work now here's something i find interesting about this this musician is saying etude not etude um ironically the very very angry tweet we got about our mispronunciation of mackinac island it looks like came from our resident musician who um Garrett, who often weighs in on these things, he didn't mention anything about etude or etude.

He said your pronunciation of Mackinac Island on Thursday was a joke, right? Yes, Garrett. Yes, it was a joke.

This is all an extended spoof. Huge joke.

I've never come so close to throwing my iPod. Also, are you listening on an iPod? I love that, yeah. That's pretty dope. Now, here's the reason I was calling it etude is because all I can do in this world is, when i don't know how something is pronounced go to the pronouncer from the internet and this is how the internet is saying this word etude so i'm not saying that it's not etude but i'm saying really that listener's issue which she didn't have because she's a violinist and she loves the wacky way that i was saying etude as etude really we've got to talk to whoever runs this site etude the go-to place where anything that we're trying to learn how to pronounce

uh is said yes and not i mean listen and this is how i think we need to approach this as the people who are talking in the microphones we got to remember that it's always it's just simply about etudes and latitudes dude right like that's we got to take it as that famous phrase goes so So let's just kind of approach it with that.

Wow, Andrew, hold on. Yep. So this is very, very – the plot – I mean, man, the plot is just thickening up like a rue today on the program. The deeper we dig into any of this, the more complicated it gets. So if you Google how do you pronounce etude from the learn to pronounce whatever – I don't even know who that is, if that's Google, if that's someone else. But it's like it's kind of the official thing that comes up. And it's usually got a it's got a little speaker and then a kind of a cartoon of a human mouth. So you click on this one. Etude. Now, if you click on learn to pronounce, you get a different one.

that goes like this etude so again i guess what we can't trust the first version of this how to pronounce thing that comes up you can also listen to it on slow let's hear what that sounds like

that's interesting etude i like that feature by the way that's a relatively new thing that i've been seeing that like how to pronounce and then slow it down i really like that so again uh i i

don't want to sound defensive but in the case of etude versus etude which i know the listener was not was not roasting me she was finding it charming that one i feel like i guess i could have cross-referenced the pronouncer but we have to admit there is a pronouncer that is the first

one that comes up that is incorrect can i play for you one more quick voicemail that will um kind of take the focus off of us for a moment um this is a short voicemail from listener cat and um Actually, Kat sets this up, I think, perfectly well. I don't think you need any more context from me. It's a follow-up to another voicemail we played last week.

Hi, Luke and Andrew. This is Kat. I was listening to a story from the ten who went on the Nile sailboat cruise, and they played Macarena. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, and my parents came to visit, and we were down at Vic Falls, and we went on a sunset cruise on the Zambesi and they kept playing Who Let the Dogs Out? over and over and over again until my dad not super politely asked them to stop. So, yeah. Job done. Power out. Bye.

Etude. Etude. Yeah, so there you go. What's worse? Which is worse? Because I found myself this weekend doing some chores, and it was one of those things where I didn't have my headphones on because I didn't think I was getting into much chores, but then the chore lasted a little bit longer. Do you ever do that where you're like, at what point do I go in and just get my headphones or get a radio or something, but you keep saying, no, I'm going to wrap this up. I'm going to wrap this up. I can't remember what that chore was, but whatever I was doing, I had Macarena still going through my head, I realized. And I think it was because I saw another reference to that podcast. i was listening to or something the next thing you know i'm just like i think who let the dogs out

is way worse i think i think you're right i think you're right the macarena has as it's underpinning a fairly innocuous kind of rhythm or a kind of tune you know although that sounded like i was setting you up for faith by george but you know what i mean or really in the hand jive a little bit it's very that it's very like synth or some kind of like you know computer generated noise um but i find that to be generally more pleasure than pleasurable

than who let the dogs out god you're right i don't even know why you know um so i would i would say

that uh i think that kat and her family had it worse uh and i understand why her dad wanted to um wanted to shut it down by the way i think she said on the vic i assume that means or uh victoria falls is that what that is but maybe i don't i've my confidence is really shaken on this monday because of how wrong i was about mackinaw i was trying to lift us up with that

voice i didn't i didn't want to end on this note of us fretting it's it's all it's all good

i would just like to say to the listeners you know andrew when when when i start a sentence with

that i would just you pay the price to the listeners i'd like to remind all of you that luke's email address is luke and tbtl.net and luke does not see the text messages that come in

go on no i don't so no um you know i there are a lot of places on this big blue marble and it's hard to remember what all their names are or no so just if it particularly like i here's what i guess i would hope and i love listener garrett and i think he was you know having some fun he's also very regular contributor to the show in a variety of capacities but i guess what i would say is like where uh where we live you know the puyallup comes up a lot squim which looks like sequim when it's written out there's lots of examples of that if somebody in in new york is doing a story about squim washington and they were to call it sequim my brain would go oh they don't know what that's called it wouldn't shock me like it's to me it's sort of like it's not is it shocking that we don't know how to say Mackinac having neither of us having ever lived in Michigan

is that is that a shocking fact I wonder if it is because Anna you know Garrett being in Michigan and Anna I believe growing up there if I'm wrong on that I'll get another voice memo I wonder if it's the type of thing that is so so messed up so often but maybe it is maybe it's a better known example

than squim i'm not sure like is is mackinaw island more famous than squim i'm guessing that

probably yes thanks to seinfeld yeah at a minimum yeah but again the confusion there is is that it's not they're not even really describing the actual universe at least as far as i was able to tell from that you know what i mean like i guess what i mean is when you hear us make a mistake about a thing you know a lot about it's probably because we don't know about that thing and sometimes it's a really big one sometimes it's it's like a national thing that it's surprising we i don't want to drag you into this it's sometimes it's something that's everybody knows about except me and in those cases i do feel kind of embarrassed that i've you know messed something up but every every listener to this show has a base of knowledge that they have developed throughout their life of you know living in some region of listening to a certain band of eating a certain kind of food or of rooting for a particular team or whatever or loving a certain actor and you have this just cloud of knowledge in your head that's not the cloud of knowledge that i have so sometimes i don't know what's in that cloud i just think i wouldn't personally find it shocking if somebody else didn't have the same cloud knowledge than me the thing that i think is getting you here that

you're kind of addressing is not being corrected but and listen we're the ones who kind of created this in a way so and again like all of this with a grain of salt of course because what we're doing is just silliness and fun and we're so lucky to be able to do it but i think it's this um because this has gotten to me before too this is not getting to me right now because whatever whatever mood i'm in right now and maybe you feel more targeted but um sometimes it's the it's the characterizing this of you getting angry at us like the whole phone throwing thing and i you know there is i think i've come to peace with it but there was a time when i was really done with this whole like phone throwing thing this is and it's like it's it's literally part of like the way we talk about the show i mean i don't know if it's literally in marketing packages but like it is so synonymous with the show that it's something that we talk about and it's just meant in in as a fun thing but there was a time where i was kind of like i'm so sick like i'm sorry that we'll just go with mackinaw in this case but like um you know in the past feeling like okay i didn't know that it was called mackinac you're throwing your phone you're angry at me why are we why are we angry and i think that's what you're kind of addressing here it's like not the being corrected but this idea that like it's actually causing anger where probably i guess it's just called it's causing frustration and i hear it sometimes in shows i'm listening to too i think your squim example is a good one or just something that i know about radio i'm like that oh whatever this person is talking about does not fly but you're just like well that person isn't in the same field as me or what have

you i have it constantly when i listen to the stern show which is because they're also talking for hours and hours a week and there are lots of times where they don't really like howard and robin the main two folks talking they just don't have all the information at their fingertips and i know that you know gary the producer does or john hein or one of these other characters and i'm always like please one of you jump on jump on the line and like bring this thing into some alignment with reality like i know that feeling as a listener so i totally understand the listeners of this show having that same feeling what i try to tell myself in those moments when howard and robin are like going down the wrong path or misinformed on something is this may not be a thing they know about like there's a lot of things they know about that i don't know about a lot of things i don't know about that they don't know about and i think sometimes and this really ultimately is a positive about the show is that we've managed to develop this world with the listeners where we all feel really close to each other and like i think something about us messing something up sometimes is more shocking to our listeners because they relate to us really closely they feel like their friend is just kind of like being unnecessarily moronic as opposed to a media personality or something something where there's a little more remove um so you know we're doing we're doing our best but like the to me the mackinac one i'm just like like i'm just surprised that it i'm surprised that it was as shocking to listener garrett than considering that it's an island in michigan that i've never been to here let me put myself though in the listener

that is spelled weird let me put let me put the uh put myself in the listener's position though so that i can be um kind of maybe a little bit more transparent and not act like hey listen when i listen to things and somebody gets something wrong i just roll with it everybody it's about etudes and latitudes um where the truth is i was listening to a spring training um i was listening to a spring training baseball game a couple of weeks ago right and the broadcast booth it was it was rick riz and um goldsmith aaron gold

i believe and um i'm a huge fan of goldsmith um but they were joking around about a minor league team called the trash pandas and they were joking but they had no idea that a trash panda is a um like kind of a slang i think we've talked about this on tbtl a nickname for a possum right not a possum but a um i was just trying to do that oh i was actually trying to come up with the word raccoon and then you said that I took that seriously sorry but like it's a that's a nickname for a raccoon is a trash panda and I think we've even talked on the show before maybe in a summer game or something about minor league teams about these trash pandas as a minor league team and it's based on you know raccoons whatever but in the booth during this minor league game they were going on quite a bit like probably you know two or three minutes all about trash pandas and totally not knowing what they were talking about and i was listening kind of thinking guys guys guys guys guys come on just get off this get off this um and then i heard somebody say oh we're getting a message from our buddy brent stecker in the booth now brent stecker is somebody who i think i met briefly but we are we're twitter friends um and i didn't know that brent stecker is one of the producers of the mariners broadcasts i knew he worked at the sports station um and they our buddy brent stecker is explaining that um apparently trash pandas are uh raccoons and like everything just started to click into place for them at that point and i gotta say i tweeted at brent i was just like thank you so so much for sending that message to the booth man because i was really hoping that somebody would so i will say that there are and listen i wasn't yelling at the radio i wasn't throwing my phone i was just kind of like guys trash panda raccoon please get there please get there please get there and then they got there with the help of the booth and it was somebody whose name i recognized and so it absolutely delighted me so i think i understand

the feeling of it yeah i guess after my whole my whole rant about like you know we can't be expected to know everything i will i'll just wrap it up by saying i also completely know the feeling that the listeners are having of like how how maddening it is when when a couple of people who you generally enjoy their talking are just just a hundred percent they're just loud wrong on something right and they have no idea it's just like you're watching i don't know what it's like you're watching a slow speed crash or maybe a high speed crash where it's just like it's more like you're watching these people canoe down a river that they don't know is connecting with a

waterfall and then it's not called the mackinac river you just are like pull it's the mackinac

river and also pull over because there are falls ahead and you can't and i mean it's even worse with tbtl because this is all recorded yeah even like a real time thing it's like we've already screwed it up by the time you're hearing it it's already it's already messed up so anyway well i feel better um i don't know if the listeners do but what about i keep thinking there's got to be some way to do like attitudes and latitudes but those i mean that's i know well i did write it's

It's all about etudes and latitudes. We also have William Skunk Spear. We could call it Mackinac and Me.

That's kind of good. I vote for that one.

Let's do that. All right. Sounds good. But thanks for the input. Yes.

Thank you, everyone. Hey, I want to talk about this thing tomorrow, Andrew, that I saw on my favorite, Mel Magazine. What?

Oh, yeah.

But that guy, Brian Van Hooker, who is just like – Brian Van Hooker is the guy, if I remember right, who, like, tried to find out if his Domino's pizza – the Domino's pizza tracker was accurately tracking where his pizza was in the process. So he went to the Domino's and surreptitiously ordered from the store so he could just see where it was as he was getting these updates. He just has – and there was another piece that we just talked about that he did recently, like, just always has really clever ideas for pieces as far as I'm concerned. He has gone through and analyzed the snoring patterns of cartoon characters and then had a sleep expert try to figure out how this could be helped in each particular case. So it's a very interesting – I'm getting close, Andrew, to thinking I've got to get some kind of a – I've got to do a sleep study or something. I don't know because I've got the sleep apnea.

Yeah. That's no fun. Listen, I think you and I both know that we probably need those machines. But that's the one, if you get a, I don't know why we're getting into this now, if you go to a sleep study, are you going to, the reason I don't ask anybody about this is because I don't want to know the answer. I know that's stupid, but like, for me, it's like, I know what they'll tell me and I don't want to hear it.

Well, I guess I was hoping, because I lost a little bit of weight. I was hoping that maybe it was a weight thing. I'm sure, you know, drinking doesn't help because I think that kind of softens up the back of your throat.

so i don't know less drinking and more weight loss i would love to find a uh you know as i started the show by saying andrew i always try to go with the most naturopathic solution to things so although oh my gosh we can get in this tomorrow there is an ad that runs during chris hayes's show that is for some kind of surgical solution to um snoring and sleep apnea And it's a guy who shows up. The commercial is the guy shows up at a CPAP, like the mask, a CPAP support group. And everyone has their CPAP masks except him. And it's because he got this procedure.

I don't think I've seen this.

And I was like, hmm. I Googled it. I looked into it. It sounds a little bit fishy. Like they won't really tell you what it is. They're like, it's an outpatient procedure that takes only a few hours and is covered by most major insurance. And I was like, is this severance? are you going to do a severance on my brain? Because I'm not ruling it out if it helps me not have the snoring and the sleep apnea.

Well, let me ask you this, though. If I had a desk chair and it was on one of those old plastic roller things, is there a better solution for me? Are you following me at all? There's a commercial. Now, I haven't seen Chris's show in a couple of weeks since I haven't had cable, but there was always a, I feel like it was his show, maybe I'm wrong, that there was always a commercial for those, like, solid glass office chair pads that you can put under your desk instead of, like, rolling around on a cheap pad. You can roll around on this thing that is made of just, like, super hard glass. You haven't seen these commercials? Oh, no. I swear it was during his show. Maybe I'm wrong. Well, no wonder that joke went over so well.

So the idea is the more, like, the more solid the surfaces, the smoother that your rolling office chair rolls, I guess.

I think so, and they just show, you know, business people who have you know high paying important jobs at their home offices with because they probably started rolling these commercials out a lot during the pandemic and so but they're like very well appointed home offices with people who look more important than me and you in their office in their herman miller chairs or whatever but their car but their office has carpet for some reason which is interesting well i think it's also you can just protect your wood floors as well i think you would want it no matter what yeah i see yeah i am i'm very happy to have

carpet in this room i'm doing the show from i think it's probably why it's not more echoey um so i don't think a harder surface also do you know i mean i know i've told you this but like i've been standing for the show ever since i started doing the show from the hollywood broadcast center yeah i wish i did like i don't even use i have i have a you know a I have a sit-stand desk that I'm standing I'm not saying this to be like Go me, but it's just funny how once you kind of like Form a habit It's just kind of in your brain like I just I didn't even think about it until we're just talking but yeah I just I always do this show now standing and then Depending on what's going on with live wire I'll do it sometimes sitting down sometimes Standing up but I like that I think I don't know oh Speaking of Don O'Neill Do you know that I had a Don O'Neill sighting during a this american life episode two weeks ago no wait and by citing i mean hearing in an episode of this american life they did a story about a guy in seattle who got kind of famous i don't think either of us was living in seattle at the time so this is why it missed us they called him the bike batman and he was a guy who started doing this thing where he would go he would he could figure out if someone had had their bike stolen by he would go on craigslist or offer up or one of these places and if you saw a bike that seemed like it was kind of too nice for what the price was being asked there's another thing called like bike index where people could list if their bike had been stolen and in cross-referencing this he was able to figure out basically which bikes were stolen and then he would just kind of go out and just basically he developed a system where he would just drive out to meet the people to allegedly buy the bike and then he would just say i know this bike is stolen you need to give this to me and then usually they would just run away and he would like give the bike back to the rightful owner um but they'd have this little montage of local seattle news tape about the batman of bike can you think of a story that's more up don uh ron and don's alley you're right no they're calling him the bike batman like and i'm just on the treadmill and i just hear don o'neill go ah they're calling him the

bike batman i'm just like what is happening in my ears right now i'm squeezing my wrists with my index finger and thumb as we say that that's kind of a bit of a that's a Don O'Neillism. Here, take a quick listen to this because this is the commercial for Vitraza glass chair mats and it starts with a guy, I'm going to put him in his maybe, he's completely shaved head bald wearing a sport coat, open neck collared shirt. It's called the what the Vitraza?

uh vitraza i believe and he's talking directly to the camera and i think he says something funny at the beginning of this commercial or like funny to me if you're like i was you're tired of worn

out plastic mats under your office chair yeah they dent and crack and they're uncomfortable

like i mean there's something about if you're like me like we have a kind of a throwback

has this ever happened to you open cupboard have the all of the tupperware fallout kind of oh if

You're like I was. You're tired of worn-out plastic mats under your office chair. They dent and crack, and they're uncomfortable to roll on. I found a premium alternative, a glass chair mat by Vitrazzo. I liked it so much, I bought the company. I'm George Pardo, president of Vitrazzo. There you go, George Pardo.

That's why he's the guy doing the ad. That's an interesting thing that I think you're exactly right. I bet you that with the pandemic, they saw an opportunity to move a lot of product because so many people were starting to work at home.

Oh, it's got a nanotech coating, by the way. Yeah. Oh. And they're showing it on nice wood floors.

For playing in various home office spaces and other hydration events.

Exactly. Oh, it's NFT-powered. I didn't realize that.

NFT-powered glass mat for your floor.

Great. Awesome.

Okay. Okay, that's got to do it, because I got some live wiring to do here, Andrew. I got a whole new set of people to impress with my forehead wound.

Oh, yeah. We don't hook up a video camera for this show, but you might have to be explaining yourself.

I'm just going to put a Band-Aid on, and I'm going to just not. I'm going to get really close to the camera, and I'm just going to stare. No, I'll explain to my friends over there on LiveWire what's going on as well.

Just say you cut yourself shaving. I think that's always a funny answer when it's not on your shaving part of your face.

I really, that actually is a pretty funny idea. I really, we do have to go, but I really was like thinking, you know, tripping in the middle of the night is not a very, is not a cool way to bonk yourself. But I was just thinking over the course of my life, if I do end up with a, you know, fairly noticeable scar, I'm actually not, the scar aspect doesn't worry me a ton because I do feel like it's just kind of like, I'm not super worried about having a scar on my forehead but i do think if it's noticeable it will now become a part of conversation for the rest of my life which is interesting to think about and then what is my story because i tripped coming back from the bathroom is kind of lame but i like stopped a terrorist attack and um someone swung a machete at me something in between maybe really you think i just maybe sort of yeah

like i don't know i stopped a terrorist attack with my forehead is there any middle ground there

do you think not that i'm aware of i'm not big on middle ground and um don't don't forget the

best part of the movie jaws or one of the best part of the movie jaws is when um richard dreyfuss and the old uh sailor guy are on the boat and they're in their um you know trading scar stories quints yes so a mac mac quint i believe is the name mac and me exactly so well that's what i'm

saying like it could also play out and then i'll stop because this is i'm boring myself back to death and i'm already dead like i mean that's the thing too right now i'm feeling pretty bummed about the turn of events but i also have in the back of my mind well that could have been worse i could have i could have actually injured myself as opposed to injuring my pride yeah and also you know i mean when i'm 60 and if i'm out you know and the eastern seaboard hunting a shark is anyone gonna care in fact it might be an advantage to have kind of a rugged scar like this could all be fine in a matter of a few months the problem is there's some embarrassing few months in front of me which you know that's the that's the part that i'm not as keen on but like long term this

could really be this could be my calling card that's right and also sharks are scared of scars or people with scars so it gives you an advantage there yes and i need one because i'm very scared

of them you are even in swimming pools and i keep i told you i let this thing tarry too long on tick tock the other day i know that's a lot of tease dude that's fun but like it was i told you about that video of the kid that was surfing this guy clearly what he does is he goes out and he flies a drone over the water but it allows him to actually see what is in the water under the people who are swimming and surfing and it turns out it's a shark a lot of the times and probably has always been and probably those sharks generally don't not interested in the people this was a woman who was open water swimming and there's a shark underneath her and she's swimming and the guy with the drones like hey you got a shark by you and she's got goggles and stuff you can tell she's probably she looks underwater she's a shark and she just kind of swims a slightly different direction than the shark i'm like if that happened to be once i would never get in the bathtub again yeah like that's my living nightmare and everyone involved in this seems pretty kind of unfazed like okay well don't

go bug the shark but we're just because like the surfer kid was pretty chill the problem is this is my nightmare fuel this is the kind of thing that stresses me out is this i had a i've had a recurring stress stream about this so i gotta i gotta teach the algorithm to not give me any more

of that yeah i know you watched it now it keeps on popping up exactly really that too long i know i sound like an old but that is one of the things i dislike them well i shouldn't say one of the things i dislike the most about tiktok i'm hardly on tiktok and i don't have a list of things i dislike about it generally it's fine um but uh the the only complaint i would say and maybe one of the reasons i'm not on it is the inability or you know the fact that there is not a tool to help help at least set up your own curation thing or or maybe there is though i'm not on there

probably is and we just don't know about it just say if you block people it might teach it but anyway i sound like an old who cares okay well let's lean into it um uh because i ain't getting any younger um let's uh call that a day here on this monday but the good news is we are going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you please do join us for that until then have a great monday stay safe uh stay off the slippery stuff if you're in the northwest and uh please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all Hey, guys, you ready to let the dogs out? What? Do what? Let the dogs out, you know, like, ooh, let the dogs out, ooh, ooh. Power out.