Muse

You're thinking, okay, now that I'm old and boring, will life be as fun? And the answer is, likely no. But, the good news is you can live through your fun friend, Bex, and you can follow me on my Insta or my Finsta if I let ya. It's a lot of secret pictures of me doing all of the drugs. Anyway, I gotta go to a pop-up candy museum, then a hookah bar, and then a party inside a photo booth. So, gotta dip! Oh, I'm sorry, dip means bounce, which means peace out. Which means leave.

TVTL!

How's it all going? You asking me about my podcast? Yes. I'm still trying to figure it out.

Stop laughing. It will scar him for life. Slow down when you're talking. Don't make it an interview. Talk to me like you're personal. I'm somebody now. Millions of people look at this book every day. This is the kind of spontaneous publicity. Your name in Prince that makes people.

all right hello good morning welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live well i guess this is the part where the art gets made my name is luke burbank i am your host coming to you from the hollywood broadcast

center right here in beautiful portland or this song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the

When I say beautiful, I mean still shockingly cold. In a case gone cold, could a podcast bring the heat? It was like 30 degrees or something when I got up today. I think, hopefully, though, by the end of the week, we'll be getting back into some normal April weather stuff. In other positive news, my forehead wound is healing. That's good. it's it appears to be the skin appears to be knitting itself back together the problem is now the healing process has also brought a certain amount of itching you know it's not so much the

burning but the itching oh my god it's driving me crazy i'm like i've taken to putting a band-aid

over it so that i can't itch it but then what i do is i like so i will itch a different part on my forehead a part of my forehead that's totally fine just because what i want to do is itch this this cut that i have on my forehead but i know that's a terrible idea so i'll just itch a different part of my forehead hoping that it just the nerve receptors over where i want to itch will just kind of get a little bit of relief uh you know i wouldn't call it the most solid science of all time i would say this might be the most solid episode we've ever done because It's episode 3,661 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

Although it's also a slightly sad episode because Gilbert Gottfried has passed away.

Holy f*** is this wrong?

At age 67. But I found out a bunch of stuff that I didn't know about him in reading various obits and listening to interviews with him and things like that.

But holy hell, is it erotic?

So we will remember the life and career of Gilbert Gottfried today on the show. Of course, he was famous for playing the cartoon character Iago in the Aladdin movie. Speaking of cartoon characters, today may be the day that we finally get to the story, analyzing the snoring patterns of various cartoon characters. Also, I am considering doing the actual unimaginable. if you know anything about how I move through the world. And when he said that, that shocked me. I'll tell you what that is coming up. Plus emails and V-mails. And this dude, the longest-running Cobra of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Of course, he's got this new home where he and his partner Genevieve are living. It has apparently fences, which I think has him in the mind of maybe getting some kind of a new little pet type of thing. Can I pet that dog? He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining us right now from the Sweet Cream District of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend. Good morning.

You've really tickled my curiosity. While you were reading your intro, or you don't read it, while you were talking your intro, whatever. It's early. I haven't showered. Leave me alone. I was trying to come up with some guesses. Yeah, great. Trying to come up with some guesses as to what the unthinkable is. Can I make some guesses? Can we jump in here? Yes, please. okay are you going to quit twitter uh are you thinking about is that what's going on are you

thinking about quitting no hold on i feel like i need to get some uh like a buzz i have a oh here we go okay sorry i just i'm so disorganized here on my little soundboard okay so am i going to quit twitter no okay no i was originally gonna Thank you.

say are you thinking about buying another big ticket item like a boat or something but you said you clarified yeah i'm thinking of doing the thinkable and then the thinkable happened um yeah because then at the end of your intro you said if you know about the way i move about the world so i'm like okay so no this is against your time are you thinking that you will actually

get a cpap machine oh i mean i may need one of those at some point but that's not what you're talking about the unthinkable that's not the unimaginable that i'm imagining that was my list

but i kind of don't want to give up i feel like i can get there is anything even close anything i said no even certainly okay absolutely not the way you navigate around the world which is how

about this my job stuff the way that i tend to like us as employees of apm and the way that i relate to like our our our parent organization what would be something you're gonna join slack are you gonna join slack that's in the neighborhood it's that's not correct but that's closer that's

you're in you're in the area code okay you're going to sign up for a password manager no that's not it oh my gosh that's your it's you're getting ever closer don't involve me signing up for something okay it does involve you signing up for something are you gonna go back to you you're not

going back to facebook no no no no no signing up for something in a professional sense like what's the what is what's something that i the kind of thing that i'd rather like walk across hot coals than than get involved with in a sort of professional development capacity oh wow man

now i feel like the pressure's on and i'm running i mean are you going to hire i'm not handling this

well i don't feel confident i'm depressed i'm slouching i definitely my energy level has changed

in the past like two minutes i'm very into this um are you thinking about hiring a consultant to tell you how to do your show better uh well that wouldn't be the worst idea for us considering

how much usable stuff we got out of the last time that happened about 15 years ago for you and i

that is unthinkable though the idea of having high of you hiring somebody right that is unthinkable as a consultant to tell you that i'm not thinking of how to produce a show i think i might be out signing up for something how to be how to be unthinkable in unthinkable times

speech um here's what i'm thinking about doing andrew i am thinking about voluntarily signing up for concur training through the cbs television corporation oh wow nerd because so we're switching over to concur over at cbs paramount and um uh they keep sending out these little uh these notes that say these are the various like zoom training sessions that you can take and the thing is so for for many years i've talked about a program called chrome river which is the my huckleberry friend um the it's the expense system that we've used for my cbs tv job where there are a lot of travel expenses that because that are generated because of how frequently i have to travel to these stories and so i'm all i have fortunately i have a cbs credit card so i'm not paying for this stuff out of my own pocket but if i don't deal with it pretty fast there will be late charges and then i'm on the hook for the late charges to amex cbs doesn't pay for those so i have actually gotten pretty disciplined and pretty good with this chrome river system which like any piece of software that you have to deal with for work and i know andrew that you've got like for all the stuff you do related to getting tbtl on the internet and the show pick and the descriptions you just learn all these weird tricks for how to get it done because no one's created like the perfect piece of software for

about anything that's work related no they have we just don't purchase them we make our own people actually have made really easy software to use to post photos to the internet don't interrupt the shocked people please andrew

so uh in like for instance in like chrome river i have learned that when a lot of times there'll be a charge for something that's reversed so maybe uh you have a reservation at one hotel and they hold a deposit but then it turns out we're not going to shoot in that town anymore we're going to shoot somewhere else so you cancel that reservation and now they're going to they they basically give you money you know the they refund the the initial deposit back to the card that money that positive cash flow coming into the my amex card from cbs is deeply confusing to this system yeah and getting rid of that erasing that even though it's not a charge to anyone in in fact,

it's it's money going into the account yeah it is so hard to deal with that i just have i create this whole file that's just where i hide them because it doesn't cost anything it's not like i'm on the hook for any money and it's not even like cbs is on the hook for money but if i don't clear those i can't submit the expense report if that makes any sense so like i have that's just an example of one weird hack that i've just learned over the years in how to just get this Chrome River thing done. And there's about 20 examples of that, just different weirdisms that I have learned in how to make this system work. So I am really not looking forward to starting over with, and I know that you and I allegedly use Chrome River for APM, but we so rarely travel now for this TBTL stuff. No, no, Concur. We use Concur. Oh, Concur. Sorry, I misspoke. Yeah, I know that for a minute I kind of had Concur figured out, but I promise you that information has completely left my brain and i could foresee a situation in which i'm sitting on fifteen thousand dollars of travel expenses that are trapped in concur and i have no idea how to get them out and it ends up you know i i don't know cbs ends up firing me or for for malfeasance or something so i actually saw this email about a concur training session on zoom and i thought i got to figure out which day works for me I've got to voluntarily Andrew take a on online training

course voluntarily I wonder what that session was like the recording session I um I think this is wonderful because first of all i believe concur is the only piece of software that you oh wow this sounds snot i didn't mean this to sound snotty i just know where you're going and i i'm i'm not gonna i'm not taking offense yeah that you have helped me with that you've said hey like i learned this trick i don't know if you learned it from rachel dennis or from our pal uh p fletch but you had like kind of hacked something regarding inputting hotel expenses which are ridiculously complicated maybe not ridiculously complicated but it's ridiculous how complicated the system makes it like it doesn't seem like it should have to be that complicated to you know input a week's worth of hotel uh room stays um and i remember you found some sort of workaround to make that process smoother and i was like haha who's this guy who's this little guardian angel of concur now if you take this um class you'll be you'll be certified you could actually just do all you could handle all of my receipts too i could just give you i could drop off an envelope of receipts after a event and just say take care of it i really need you to see it's a wonderful life

andrew at some point because that's my main my go-to reference for working through a bunch of receipts and this came up like three weeks ago on the show is the kind of oddball accountant guy who works for the bailey savings and loan at the end of the movie he's entering all these donations from the Bedford Falls town folk into an adding machine and he's got that visor on that we talked about and he's just like excitedly looking at receipts and checks and like and punching in these you know these digits like with great fanfare that will be me when you bring me all the receipts and I just concurring it up

or I throw a big bag of like a big burlap bag of receipts onto your desk and I say how could Santa not exist if all of these receipts are from the North Pole wrong movie or right movie

wrong movie but in the same season in the neighborhood miracle on 34th street right yeah i haven't seen that either so my my andrew my concur concern is that i will i will use up an afternoon of my of this one wildlife that i have andrew this precious wildlife i will use up one afternoon of it watching this zoom concur training and i will retain none of the information because unfortunately the way the way that i figured out how to float down the chrome river was through trial and error and my guess is that probably that will be what happens with this concur biz it'll just be i'll just have to even if i take the training i just don't know if it will actually help me i don't know how much of it i will retain i just will probably have to do it a bunch of times and have it get rejected and get you know those kind of error messages that won't let you submit it until i finally have it figured out i think that you might have just

answered this question aside from like working through things and trial and error and experience because that's i think that part is kind of obvious and that's what we all need to do when you're learning to do something for the very first time something that might even seem slightly overwhelming to you at at first what is your preferred learning style let me give some examples uh would you prefer to i'm trying to let's just say it's this let's say it's concur If you had all of the options, would you rather sit down with a lengthy manual or book and learn how to do it? Would you rather watch a YouTube video or something along those lines? Or would you rather have somebody, like, kind of show you how to do it and interact with you?

Ideally, I would have a human being who knew how to do the thing sitting next to me while I did the thing kind of explaining the process. But that's a pretty high-touch kind of white-glove situation. So what I do use a lot for things when I am confused, which is often, is YouTube because then I can just pause it, and so I'll find the YouTube video for how to do this on my Apple Watch or how to cut this compression miter cut for putting up a molding in a room or something. and then i just have the youtube video and then i'm just like pausing it i'm doing what they're doing and then i let it go a little longer and i pause it that's just that's you know pretty close

to somebody sitting next to you and just showing you how to do it yeah you know i'm doing more and more of that with some of these little projects around the house no no big deal just like you know again this electric lawnmower we kind of inherited with the house i looked up a little video of somebody kind of setting it up and putting it together i don't know if i needed that but it was a good little backup um but then like here's a perfect example and this is where I'm like I make my life so much harder by worrying about things instead of just like just figuring them out a while back several months ago Genevieve and I both started getting warnings when we put our keys into the ignition of the car it happened to Genevieve first surprisingly because I think I drive more than her but she put her key in the ignition and the car said to her hey your battery is running low on your key fob and modern cars I guess they don't have keyholes I guess, like, when the battery dies, you just brick the car and you throw it over a cliff. Like, there's no key holes.

The cars are actually disposable. The battery is, or the key fob is the real expense. You just get a new car.

Yeah, right.

You keep the fob.

So I started kind of, I was like, oh, yeah, you got to get that fixed. Mine is fine. Good luck with that, sweetie. That's how I kind of talked to Genevieve. It's a real toxic relationship. And then eventually I started getting the warning when I was putting my key in the ignition. Hey, your battery is running low. And then I started getting really anxious. I would be very anxious for about 15 seconds every day when I started the car, and then I would immediately forget about it until I got in the car again, and then I would get that message. I'd be like, one of these days, I'm going to come out to the car. My fob isn't going to work. I won't be able to get into the car. That day will be ruined. Whatever that mission is will be ruined, and then I will be in trouble. We've got to get this taken care of. I've got to take these. This is, again, I know. Roll your eyes now. I kept thinking, we've got to get this fixed. we got to take these keys into the dealership and buy new fobs or have them replace the batteries or whatever and that it just like kind of lived in my brain in this in this mode for probably well over a month um so thanks for the early warning car i appreciate that and then one day vives and i are sitting at lunch eating burritos outside in the roosevelt district of seattle washington if you if you recall that um and v says i'm just gonna make a phone call right now and just see how much it is and i think the dealership said yeah bring your car fob in your key fob in and i think it was i think i was predicting 30 bucks and it might have been slightly less than that it might have been like 35 to replace both batteries and both our key fobs i'm like all right that's not as bad as i thought it was going to be i'll take it there tomorrow just let me do one thing vives when i get home i'm going to just call up youtube and just see if it's possible to replace it on my own i don't know if you've done this before i love the idea of you calling youtube like dialing the number yeah call up youtube hello youtube youtube full 3939 um and i did that i called up youtube for 3939 and there was about 25 second video showing take a screwdriver pop pop this little panel off your key fob go buy a battery for six dollars and put it in there i'm like oh my god this was so easy i carried around this anxiety for weeks and it could not have been i mean and even getting the battery i literally walked across the street to the drugstore and bought it like there wasn't i thought i remember walking over to the drugstore saying yeah but they're not gonna have this battery think i have to buy it online then it's gonna take a day to get here no like it was solved within 10 minutes of me opening up this youtube video those are the

Those are some of the best Ws one can get in this modern life because everything is so complicated and so engineered that the assumption now is that it's beyond the abilities of any normal person. And this is sort of an example of that, which was back when I had that old 4Runner when I was living in Bellingham. I started to get – you know that thing where on older cars when you try to use your turn signal and it's clicking? really fast yeah i thought i always thought that meant that your your bulb is getting low or going out it means the bulb is out usually in my experience yeah so that's like a little that's a heads up to you the driver that everything is not great with that particular turn signal and you know i mean that that forerunner was so old and was almost barely it was like if if it would have been five hundred dollars to replace the turn signal thing it would have almost totaled the car so i was like same kind of thing i was like every time i would drive it and do that i was just like oh this is this i don't want to take this in because they're going to tell me everything that's wrong with this vehicle and like it's going to be expensive and and i did the same i got on youtube and it was like ended up going to oh oh oh o'reilly's buying this like four dollar bulb unscrewing something putting the bulb in screwing the uh you know cover back on and fixed it and it was honestly i've was one of the few times i've ever felt competent at anything in life it was such a good feeling and i had assumed it was gonna be such a hassle i remember

i i did not know anything about working on cars i wasn't and again this is kind of an a bummer for me i was mentioning this maybe on tbtl recently i was talking to somebody about this recently both with some domestic things and also with a lot of mechanical things i was and again it sounds like I'm dissing my parents here and I'm not trying to be disrespectful I had a very good safe upbringing but you know while in some ways my parents worked us to the bone they didn't kind of trust us with bigger things um like for for example you know I would spend Saturdays on my hands and knees either scrubbing the floors inside or picking weeds outside or often both not at the same time my arms aren't that long but never once was I taught like how to do laundry You know, I just kind of became an adult and realized, I guess it's not magic. I'll figure this out.

Was that because your stepmom just did the laundry?

Growing up, I was with my mom. And yeah, my mom just did the laundry. And then, yeah, once I was a teenager, my stepmom, I guess, did the laundry. And then same with cooking. Like, you know me, now I love puttering around the kitchen and cooking. And I learned none of that. And I remember my very first apartment, my very first stove and being like, oh, I guess I can make eggs now. And I was so excited that I knew how to make eggs. And that was all I knew how to make, scrambled. Then you got to more complicated things like over hard, eventually over easy, except you sometimes accidentally crack the yoke and then it becomes over hard. But, you know, I just didn't have that experience. And the same with like kind of fixing things or anything going on with a car. And I remember I had my 86 Dodge Caravan. That was my first vehicle, minivan, fake wooden sides. And the headlamps went out. But it sounds like it might have been a slightly more I may be misinterpreting your story to replace these things. You actually had to replace like the big the whole light fixture sort of. It wasn't just like the little bulb in there. Maybe same with you or on your truck. Was it just a little bulb? It was a rear.

No, it was a rear turn signal. And all I had to do is take the like cover off and then replace the bulb.

OK, gotcha. Because it was a turn signal, not a headlamp. My headlamps went out or maybe they both eventually went out. And I don't remember how I figured out how to replace it. But I remember, you know, my dad saying like, oh, you can just replace it yourself. So maybe he and I did it together or maybe we did the first one together and then I did the next one myself. But it like it wasn't that complicated. You needed a screwdriver and maybe the car manual and a little like the least amount of know-how. And I replaced this thing and I felt like I could do anything. I felt like I could conquer anything. And I wish I had more of that in my life. And not just the skills and ability, but the feeling of of, you know, just being empowered, I guess, to use that word or emboldened to just take a take a swing at stuff like that.

I think that's a brain thing, like as in I think some people's brains are just oriented towards that and they're just they just have a knack for it. They can fix things. They're not intimidated by, you know, sort of mechanical stuff or computer stuff. interestingly enough my dad is very much that way Walt Burbank like I was thinking about this the other day because you know when we moved to Seattle when I was really little my parents moved to Seattle because my dad I think the plan was he was going to be the bookkeeper for this little small sign company that was like two man operation and when we moved here to Seattle that is the two people that had the sign company which was like part of the church my parents went to they quit they didn't want to do it anymore so then my dad's like huh i got like three small children and uh no job so he just like taught himself how to do all of that stuff which is just it's a weirdly artisanal thing to like learn how to do hand lettering and gold leafing and sandblasting and all of this just like

Thank you.

stuff that maybe you would either go to a trade school for or you would apprentice under someone for like a long time like he just was like i better learn this in the next few weeks and and then there's this kind of computer revolution related to sign and i hope a lot of people today were like please let this be a master class on the evolution of the sign business because those people are going to be very happy andrew um you know in the in the 80s this sort of vinyl graphics thing came into being for sign companies, which is everything you used to see on the side of a truck or a boat or when you walked into a restaurant and were ordering, it used to all be hand lettering. It was painted. And then somebody figured out you could make that stuff out of sticky vinyl letters, and it just completely transformed everything. For instance, those signs we had that flew off of our Delica van that were made by a major chain called FastSign, although don't go to FastSign, go to Burbank SignWorks. Actually, I think my dad may be semi-retired, so leave him alone.

Anyway. If you want to get a message to Luke, fill out the contact us form at Burbank SignWorks. That's actually probably the best way to get a hold of me.

But so those signs that blew off our van, those were vinyl graphics. So this was just like a complete paradigm shift for the business where a lot of the stuff was now computer based and not just like you got to buy a computer to do it. You got to buy a computer and then you've got to learn how all of a sudden to use these complicated programs where you're cutting all kinds of different. I mean, you're not physically doing it. You have a computer that's hooked up to something called a plotter. And the plotter is this series of razor, these two razor blades that are moving on an X, Y axis. It's this very complicated piece of machinery that you're going to feed this big sheet, this big roll of like vinyl that's sticky on the back into. And then if you've done the computer calculating right, involving a lot of complicated geometry, fonts, et cetera, it will then cut those things into the vinyl. And then you can take that off and stick it onto things. But like the complexity of learning this, it just blows my mind that my dad was like, OK, now I guess this is what we're doing. And then he figured that out. Like, you know, for, for somebody that I don't, I don't know. I just, I don't, I don't think I give him enough credit in my own mind for how good he is at problem solving for stuff like this. I got, I would have quit day one. The first time I got out a pouncer, we can't even get into pouncing. Pouncing is where you're, you're trying to, um, basically it was like a stencil. So you would, you would have this, some sort of printout of the thing you wanted to put on a, on a big sign. but if you didn't want to mess it up if you wanted to have basically an outline of what you were doing you had this big metal kind of uh easel this big metal board and you would get a print out of what you wanted to do and you would tape it up to this board then you would get a thing look like a soldering iron called a pouncer and you would trace over whatever it was you were going to paint later and it would burn little tiny holes in it because of the electro shock between the pouncer and the metal and then you take that and you put it over whatever you're going to do and then you you you tamp the whole thing down you pat it all down with black charcoal and then you take the stencil off and now you have this outline and then that outline is your guide

for what you're the outline is your guide okay yeah interesting the outline is your guide so like

that but that was the back in the day that would be the process like oh you want to paint this thing but you want to make sure you you do it right and everything is in proportion so you got to start with pouncing it you're going to start with this weird electrical shock system of creating a thing you can then dust down with charcoal or whatever the black stuff was so you can then get an outline it was so involved every process of this I just can't believe that he was like all right I'm this is what I'm doing now like again I just would have I would have run nobody would have ever seen me again I would have bounced very hard on the family on the business so my long-winded point there is to say some people's brains are like that and some people's brains are like mine yeah well it's

interesting i think like there are some aspects of we'll call it fixery the technical term for the type of tasks we're talking about um i think my brain is pretty my my brain actually can handle pretty well i'm thinking like and then there are some that i feel like uh if there's kind of more of a craft side to it it makes me frustrated you describing that pouncing thing um appeals to me but it also sounds like there's precision work in there. It sounds like a lot of precision work that I think that's where I would fail because it's like things like wrapping gifts. I hate wrapping gifts. I like doing laundry. I hate folding laundry. And recently I mentioned I painted a couple of rooms and one had an accent wall that was up against white walls. And our bathroom, we painted a pretty bold kind of peacock green that needed sharp edges up at the top of the ceiling. And both of these presented various difficulties as far as masking is concerned and getting access to areas, especially this area over over the stairs where I had to kind of mask with my left hand while balancing myself over the stairs precariously with my right hand. and so I knew it wasn't going to be the cleanest line when I took the tape off but like I always think the hardest part of painting is the prep and then second maybe the painting itself and then the easy part is when you take off the paint or the masking tape and everything looks great turns out that's my least favorite part because like to use the bathroom example which we often do on this show we use the bathroom example I'm like this is a good job I feel great about this and then I'm peeling off the paint or i'm sorry the tape that i thought i had put on meticulously and i see the places where the paint might have uh seeped through a little bit or i didn't do quite as good of a job and there's mostly the bathroom is fine where the walls hit the ceiling but there's this one corner right above the toilet where there is about a there's just a splotch of the green paint on the white ceiling immediately in the corner just where the paint kind of seeped through and i'm going to say it's about the size of half a dime maybe less than that it's small yeah it's all i see it is all i see in that bathroom and i was um at some brew pub the other day for it was like middle of the day my friend was having a birthday there and i went in to use their bathroom and their bathroom had white ceilings and kind of similarly green walls and i looked up and it was meticulous the line between ceiling and wall was so perfect and I it made me mad I was like it's doable it's so doable and then I come home and I look at I'm not even joking I come home and I look at my own and I was like pissed off it's like that that stuff that that tiny and especially because I hold myself to high standards when it comes to that contrarily Genevieve was building a new kind of shelving unit thing you know not building it from scratch but she had bought some shelving unit thing that

she was um putting together in the other room and i heard her mumbling and grumbling and swearing like a like a dad under her breath as she's like kind of pounding this thing together and i come out i'm like hey how's it going and she's like oh it's these instructions aren't right like the the hinge on this cabinet door is in the wrong place i'm like well no if you flip it around this way you can get in the right place she's like no look where the holes are if we flip it it was just like one of those puzzles that her brain couldn't figure out but i was like no flip this this way flip this this way and then boom your holes for your joints are exactly where they need to be and she's like she just couldn't see that when she was assembling this thing right and so my brain is kind of good with some spatial reasoning stuff and i'm i'm excited about that and makes me happy to tackle more projects but like i forgot how irritating it is uh when you're like dealing with the more kind of like the the craftier side of things the things that need

nuance and attention to detail you are also very good at solving our audio equipment problems and i am and also computer stuff so you definitely have some things that you're like i mean impressively good at and i think it's because you are very systematic about it you just kind of work your way through it you go through all the logical progressions on it you just the game has slowed down for you you just go through your progression and like that's impressive to me because i'm much more of a genevieve where i'm just like well god damn it they sent the wrong hinge yeah it's like really this is the one this is the one box of this things that where ikea just sent the wrong parts or is it possible like i put things together upside down all the time because i just like i don't want to read the directions i'm kind of eyeballing and i'm just like are you serious really you guys didn't include the whatever and it's always my mistake it's rarely i don't think it's ever been the mistake of the you know large furniture can a concern that does you know hundreds of thousands of these a year but i'm just not systematic about stuff i kind of you know i'm i'm a true artist andrew and um that's that's uh why i go through

the world the way i do this is a little bit of a different conversation but out of curiosity what do you do luke with the extra parts and the little tools that come with these you know furniture assembly kits because Genevieve just put together a little grill for us we got ourselves a new Weber grill you know one of those charcoal ones and it came with a small little plastic kind of hex wrench thing and one extra little hub cap for one of the wheels and then of course you always have the instruction manual and the question of where do I save this stuff now I've gotten real good Luke at throwing away instruction manuals there was a time when we had a manila folder in our filing cabinet that was heavier than me.

It became two folders eventually, and it just had – it had instruction manuals for alarm clocks, for computer devices, for vacuums, for installing grills or assembling grills. And we never looked at any of those things. We never went back to it, but I was so afraid to throw those things away. Well, obviously now almost any product that has a manual, you can find that manual online if you were to need it later, which you won't, but rest easy. Sleep easy, Hutch Rhymes. Hutch Rhymes. You can find it online. but what about the extra doohickeys what about the the little you know the specific tool that can only be used if you ever need to take this thing apart again do you throw it away because you know you're never going to take it apart or does a part of your brain say i gotta save this

somewhere ziploc bag sharpie yeah so throw it in a ziploc bag and write on the ziploc bag with a sharpie what it relates to not because you'll ever use it but because it just makes it feel like there's an order to life i had an entire at the burbank springs i had an in like in this mud room that that we had i just had an entire drawer that had those kinds of weird odds and ends whether it was the specific allen wrench that had a ball on the end of it that was so you could do whatever from this you know thing we had purchased this beach or you know pool chair or something just put the extra stuff in a ziploc bag maybe even one of those ones that has the little like kind of opaque part that's meant for writing, you know, pork chop or something on it. Like write the thing on there and then just have a drawer, have a place where all of that stuff lives. It's very satisfying actually.

Well, that's literally what I did with these grill parts. I will take a photo of it. I think I might've even put a little piece of blue masking tape and wrote on the blue masking tape. I could be wrong about that. Oh, no, you know what I did? I think I slipped in a piece of paper. I put the two little parts in a Ziploc bag. I slipped in a little piece of paper that said grill parts and I put the date on it because that's another thing is like moving and you're coming across all these random things that you don't know what they go to anymore. And you don't even know if you own the object it goes to. So I figured putting the date on this thing, like I want to have a rule where if I find some of this stuff five years later and I've never used it, then I'm throwing it away. I want a five year rule.

That's actually a good idea. I wonder if that's covered in the Marie Kondo sitch. um you know if it's like they say that with clothes i think sometimes when you find you have too many clothes in your closet it's like when's the last time you wore this i guess a five-year rule on when's the last time you used this now i will say this really came in handy it's been so much whippersnipper talk on this show of late andrew yeah but the uh i had a again back in bellingham i had a ryobi battery powered weed whacker or whippersnipper depending on what side of the border you're on and um it needed a very specific kind of odd like one of a kind or at least you know it only related to this machine wrench type of deal that was like a circle on a handle and it fit right over the when you were changing out the the thread on it and i put that thing in a ziploc bag and i stored it in the drawer and boy wasn't i relieved like two years later when i finally ran out of that that line and then i was like there's no way i have this like i have to buy a new weed whacker now because like there's and then i just went to the drawer and there it was and again it was so gratifying that that system actually worked out yeah so i don't know maybe some things you should keep for what because what if you have the weed whacker for more than five years i could see oh but if you've used it i guess that resets the clock

yeah right i guess that's true too i'm i'm a little surprised that you are because i could have seen you being like oh i just throw that stuff away like i could see that being part of your personality i'm glad to hear that you aren't just throwing it away though no i have more it's

weird for being as kind of impulsive and kind of in certain ways very disorganized as i am i also have some like you i have it i've had to give myself a pep talk about throwing out instruction manuals following the exact same journey you did which is okay i have this what if i need this later it's going to be online throw it out like i have to go through that process um which you might not expect because of the kind of haphazard way in which i live a lot of my life but there are certain things where i do get a little bit overly um i don't know uh sort of worried about so um we i'm overly worried that if we don't take a break andrew here at about 40 minutes we're never going to get to uh the rest of the show so let's do that let's take a quick break and then back uh we'll talk about gilbert gottfried and do some emails and v-mails 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 get set get set now ready ready go everybody razzle dazzle

Thanks from Dazzling Donors. These are the wonderful, generous people that are donating a dazzling amount of dough, keeping the program going. We had a very, very productive meeting yesterday. A very productive three-hour and one-minute meeting, Andrew, you and I. That's right. Putting together the plan for this year's TBTelethon. We're going to have an announcement on that very soon. I believe even as soon as next Monday, we are going to tell you what is what's in the works for for this year's TV telethon. In the meantime, we want to thank Jojo Moran Douglas in Nakano, Tokyo, Japan, Segoy Jojo for dazzling us with his donation once again. Jojo says, thanks, Andrew and Luke, for all you do to keep us all company all over the world. I look forward to taking you both, or other 10s, to a Swallows game one day soon. If possible, I'd like to ask the 10s to check out my band's latest and last single wherever you stream things. We're called Merry Christmas, and the song is called The Flying Trombone Sisters. Think pavement meets neutral milk hotel adjacent fuzz folk. I can't think about that right now. I'm imagining Pavement. I'm imagining Neutral Milk Hotel. I'm imagining Fuzzy Folk. I like that. Those are all things that I enjoy in the world. Could we maybe go out with, I mean, do we have, will Spotify ding us for playing JoJo's band Merry Christmas by way of promoting the band? because if they're on spotify maybe will one of the spotify spiders identify it and then pull this

episode i think i think we can do that because the reason i think jojo isn't specifically saying hey could you play this is because we put a little note in the dazzling donor form after the captcha luke you get through the captcha you prove you're not a robot and then it says you know we can't play um you know we can't take song requests the way we used to because um you know because of the spotify issue but from from what i know from the thing from the shows that have been pulled it was like very very like kind of major hits that are like 10 20 years old you know it's like all the tom petty music we were playing or some beatles stuff or whatever so it's stuff that someone's

estate is trying to monetize the shit yeah right so um somebody's nephew who didn't do shit is just trying to make sure that nobody misuses some piece of music oh chubby checkers niece is right on us um great grandniece is like got some law firm really pressing it because it's how they're funding their life at these points i don't know why it feels to me like if it's the person who made the music and they're like hey don't i'd be like i respect that you made this art if it's the great grand nephew of somebody who's just like just wants to keep the checks coming I don't know why I mean this is how in what inheritance law I mean this is how the law works I respect that I guess but there's something when it's like the estate of Marvin Gaye is trying to do something I'm like all right calm down everyone but yeah

so I'm willing to take a flyer on this a flying trombone on this if you will and we'll go out with it at the end of the show don't let me forget

though I know I thought that I was like I'm gonna suggest to Andrew that we play JoJo's band, and then I'm going to forget that I suggested to Andrew that we, so I'm going to make a note here. But everybody should check it out.

So again, the band is Merry Christmas and the latest, it looks like, song or maybe even EP is called the Flying Trombone Sisters.

Alright, so we will play that at the end of the show, if we remember. If not, you just have to keep donating for another year, JoJo, and remind us next year. So, thank you for your support.

Maestro? On your mark! On your mark! Get set! Get set Now ready Ready Go Everybody rattle

Hey, who look who this is That's how I say that now Hey, who look who this is Who dat say they gonna look who dis is It's Jamie Julian in Columbia, Maryland Jamie says You may remember me as the instigator of the Tony Kornheiser crossover Shout out to the other littles

um yes we do remember yeah jamie i think you might have brought some more listeners into tbtl i don't know if they're still around i won't get my hopes up but you tried and i appreciate it

i i'm sure that this was a topic of conversation back when this happened when there was some amount of kornheiser fans aka littles that had been enticed over to tbtl because of listener jamie i do feel like there is something in the dna of the kornheiser show and this show that is some shared ancestry um and it's why i've always been a fan of kornheiser's you know largely through pardon the

interruption but also through his radio show that he had for many years i just like that guy and about that kind of world that they built over there with the littles it's got a lot of maybe it's like the tens have a lot of similarities to the littles but um and it's radio roots too

because i know that he's a national figure but i'm pretty sure that kornheiser also had just a local broadcast or maybe like one hour local broadcast that my friend polly would listen to in dc all the time and yeah yeah yeah that stuff's cool yeah he was he was i think he was maybe a

was he a columnist who then had a radio show for many years and then got PTI with Michael Wilbon or was maybe he was always just a sports radio host. But anyway, like I said, I've always been a fan and I appreciate Jamie being a sort of bearing land bridge to help some of the littles migrate to the continent known as TBTL. I don't know if that land bridge is now underwater and such migration is impossible, but thank you for your help, Jamie. And thanks for the donation too. Jamie says, you also might know me as the unhinged caller who squished gum into a bratty child's hair at a movie theater. I do remember that.

Did you say unhinged or did I say unhinged, Andrew? I think I said unhinged. Sorry, Jamie. I think you're – I will not – For the record, I think you're delightfully unhinged. I think you're hinged AF, Jamie.

Put that on your LinkedIn page. Hinged – quote, hinged AF, Luke Burbank. I will not apologize for either thing, says Jamie. When I found TBTL back in 2019, I just moved to a part of the country that I didn't particularly care for. I was doing a new job that was definitely not the cool lady scientist career path that I'd previously been on. And embarrassingly, I was on crutches due to an unfortunate frozen yogurt-related injury. I'd like to hear that story. Is that a Hamilton reference? i want to i want to as a person who had an unfortunate middle of the night falling over injury this weekend jamie i want to hear the story of this frozen yogurt situation throughout the first few episodes i was mostly bewildered by the occasional bouts of phone throwing take a shot every time someone supporting this show mentions how much throw their phone listening to it um i didn't get the jokes to be honest i wasn't even sure that they were jokes This is really taking a turn It started off so strong And also, I mean I'll be very honest with you I don't know if a lot of them are jokes either I think we're all kind of confused on that topic But somehow I still felt like I was hanging out with old friends Since then, my ankle healed The job got better And TBTL became my constant companion Between the current shows and the treasure trove of old episodes I'm currently time banditing my way through This dazzling donation was the least I could do thank you babies that is really jamie what a nice message and thank you for calling us babies and not dummies even though i know we encourage people to start every email with hey dummies i'm donating this money despite throwing my phone thank you jamie we really couldn't do this without you we very much appreciate the support hello and welcome to top story so gilbert godfrey passed away at 67 years old uh he had been his family said suffering through a long illness i didn't realize that he had a rare form of something that is described as being sort of similar to muscular dystrophy and um unfortunately he he He passed away from complications related to that. I have always really, really loved Gilbert Gottfried. I have always been fascinated with him because he's such a, like, he was so deep in the shtick of being Gilbert Gottfried. I find those kind of performers very intriguing, I should say, and entertaining when they're just deeply committed to a bit. and it feels like there were few comedians who were as deeply committed to their bit, who were more committed than Gilbert Gottfried. I didn't realize he was on Saturday Night Live when he was young and he wasn't like what we think of Gilbert Gottfried being. Did you know this?

I read yesterday that he did 12 episodes, but I didn't know how, I just assumed he was just Godfreying it up.

He wasn't. Like, the thing that we think of as the Gilbert Gottfried, who's the Aflac duck voice or who we, you know, see on TV or roasts or whatever, that was a shtick that he sort of developed and leaned into later when he was on SNL, which was also this weird period of SNL where Lorne Michaels left and, like, the whole cast left.

Oh, yeah. Okay, I've heard of this.

And they had basically, like, a replacement crew, and Gottfried was one of them. He didn't actually get a lot of airtime during his SNL days. He was only on for 12 episodes But what I was reading was He's not like squinting and putting

his hand on his forehead and doing his you know his kind of what we think of as his performance style he was doing impressions he was a pretty talented impressionist he did impressions of like Jerry Seinfeld not on SNL but just generally he would do Jerry Seinfeld Bela Lugosi Groucho Marx apparently when he was younger and there was a certain comedy club that when they wanted to get everyone out of the club like the audience when it was time for people to go home they would have gilbert gottfried go up and do his jerry seinfeld impression as a room clearer because they just knew that it would make like the drunk people just go home which is a very weird detail maybe there's a career for me in comedy after all yes the room ring in the cooler um he started doing stand-up comedy when he was 15 he started doing open mics and then just, you know, sort of progressed from there. I think he was probably, to a lot of people, at least people of a certain age, maybe best known for being the voice of Iago in Aladdin, the parrot. He really, he was sort of a very memorable cartoon voiceover person. He was in The Fairly Oddparents. Like, he just had such a distinctive voice and shtick that that became something, you know, that was very appealing to people that were making cartoons because it really stuck out. Have you ever seen the Disney movie Aladdin? No, I don't think so. Have you ever seen? I know I haven't. Okay. Aside from Bambi, Snow White, the like classics from when we were kids or whatever. Have you ever seen a Disney animated film like the little mermaid or Mulan or beauty and the beast?

Yes, sir. I saw beauty and the beast in the theater with my dad, I believe in eighth grade. Let me check the dates on that to see if that's not a false memory. But, yeah, I enjoyed that movie. Yeah. Angela Lansbury, I believe. Yes.

She's the teapot, I believe. Tale as old as time. So he was Iago in Aladdin, which, of course, that reference was completely over my head to name him Iago, which is a sort of Shakespearean reference. But I just remember thinking that character was so hilarious. Everybody was, like, into the genie Robin Williams. And, you know, R.I.P. Robin Williams, right? But even in those days, Robin Williams' humor was a little manic for me, but I was like, this parrot is killing me right now. I think probably Iago was my favorite character from Aladdin. What I was also really struck by looking into Gilbert Gottfried's life was how not like that character he was in real life. There was this documentary that came out in 2017 called Gilbert, which I started watching last night. Ira Glass tweeted it out. I think Ira worked on it in some. Maybe he's helped produce it or something. And, like, Gilbert Gottfried was so not like the character he played doing comedy in real life. He was very shy, very self-effacing, very quiet. I was watching an interview that he and his wife and the filmmaker, the person who made the documentary, they were doing an appearance like in New York being interviewed about this movie, Gilbert, when it was coming out. And it is wild to watch, Andrew, because they're on stage, three of them, this filmmaker who no one's heard of, Gilbert Gottfried's wife, who's not, as I understand it, a professional performer and Gilbert Gottfried. And I swear The filmmaker and his wife Talk for 20 minutes Before Gilbert Gottfried says one thing

Like

And then he starts talking And he's not holding the microphone Anywhere near his mouth Like So they're sitting in Like director's chairs And they're being interviewed And everyone's talking And then Well this is why I wanted to make the movie And well this is what it's like Being married to Gilbert And then it's finally his turn to talk And he just starts talking And it does not occur He has like a wireless mic Like, his wife, after like two minutes, has to go, you have to put the mic near your mouth. This was in 2017. This is a guy who's been doing comedy and performing forever, and he was that just kind of like not hung up on the details of performance life, it would seem. I mean, I think he was hung up on the details in that he wanted to be funny and put a good act together, but he was just extremely one of a kind. And just there was something about him not even realizing he needed to hold a microphone up when he was talking like that struck me as like just kind of weirdly charming about him.

The one thing that I read a couple of obits yesterday and I saw that documentary being talked about quite a bit. I'd like to see it on Amazon and folks want to check it out. Not one, not one of the obits mentioned USA up all night, which is how I knew Gilbert Gottfried is USA.

The cable channel in the 90s, like I believe on Fridays and Saturdays or something would have like some more like kind of, you know, it was basic cable, but it had more kind of Randy programming on the weekend evenings. And I'm like 14 years old and I've cable for the first time. And so sometimes it was hosted by Gilbert Gottfried. The other time I wouldn't have known this name. I'm just looking up now. Sometimes it was hosted by Rhonda Shear, and they would – it was like that – I don't know if any channel does this anymore, but it was like, you know, we're going to present to you a movie, but we're going to present it to you throughout. Like, you know, around the commercial breaks, I will check in with you and try to make you laugh or comment on the movie. I have a promo here. I'm going to play it. This is a promo featuring both Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear. I have not listened to this in advance, so good luck.

Hi, I'm Rhonda Shear, host of USA. up all night and i'm gilbert gottfried host of usa up all night i'll show you lots of fun movies i'll show you lots of fun movies i do it friday i do it saturday we both do the same thing

only different usa up all night just nothing but like just double entendres that are like more like one and a half entendres like not even quite double entendres i was obsessed

I think that for me, the apex of my Gilbert Gottfried kind of love was when The Aristocrats came out And I don't know if, I'm sure listeners of our age are probably familiar with this Because it was a bit of a phenomenon at the time that it came out But for people that are maybe younger or didn't get a chance to see it So The Aristocrats is this joke that's actually been going around since the vaudeville days and it was one of those like friars club roasts of hugh hefner and it was like not very long after 9-11 and this was still i think kind of in the time period where it was like the question was going around will we ever laugh again which all these years later just seems so absurd but i mean i remember that actually i remember that being a real conversation like is comedy over because of how you know upset we all were about what had happened on 9-11 so it things are very sensitive and very touchy and Gilbert Gottfried gets up at the roast of Hugh Hefner and just tells an incredibly long involved version of this joke the aristocrats which basically goes I'm not going to obviously tell it because it's extremely dirty and like transgressive but a guy walks into a talent agent's office and he is trying to get the talent agent to represent this family that does this family act and then he goes on to describe what happens in the act and the what happens in the act is just extremely um uh you know inappropriate and upsetting and involving all kinds of like i said sort of transgressive acts between the family and scatological thing or whatever what the family does is where the improv comes in one time the story goes gilbert godfrey was he was at a comedy club and the crowd bothered him in the first few minutes of his act so he told a one-hour version of this joke the middle of the joke i mean so it kind of like a guy walks into a talent agent and says i've got this act for you and then the talent says what do they do and then the end of the joke is is two words imagine 59 minutes and 30 seconds of the description of what the family does that's the whole that's what he did for an hour to this crowd he just improvised an hour of the most out there upsetting weird things that his family act could do to each other and to the audience and whatever and then of course at the end the talent agent asks what do they call themselves and the joke is the aristocrats like so him telling that joke at the Hugh Hefner roast kind of reignited I think the interest in that particular format of joke telling and then i think it was like paul provenza and um somebody else made this documentary called the aristocrats that was kind of a bunch of people's riffs on that joke but i just like from a comedy standpoint loved that so much and um and really loved him what i think i loved a lot

about gilbert godfrey was the legends of how cheap he was like that was one of the main things that like every time he was on the howard stern show they would talk about this anytime you got somebody talking about gilbert gottfried it would take about two minutes for them to get to the part of his like almost pathological frugalness so he was famous for any green room that he was ever in doing a show he would take all of the snacks and bottled water anything he could get his hands on he would take he would also um i was listening to stern this morning and the producer gary alabate aka baba buoy said that one time he was flying with gilbert godfried and they happened to be in business class and they got pancakes because it was like an early morning flight and of course this was like the 80s when they would like cook you some fresh pancakes on the flight and they had these like little sealed syrup packets and godfried got like 10 extra syrup packets from the flight attendant or when they checked into the hotel his his move was he would go down to the front desk and ask them for one of those you know like if you forget your toothbrush and your toothpaste they'll just give you that little like teeny tiny one tiny toothpaste and toothbrush he would ask for one of those and they would of course give him one and then he would say do you have any more back there and then they would give him another one and by about like toothbrush toothpaste number four they would have to cut him off but he was just the accumulating all this stuff he would take the bus this is in the documentary he would take the like greyhound bus to his gigs sometimes i mean this is like in the modern era like when he's pretty famous and i'm sure making pretty good money doing his comedy stuff he would still take the bus because it just seemed silly to him to spend money when he didn't need to um i thought that the the story about oh this is a great one i also heard on stern this morning so uh gilbert godfrey was doing this show the alan combs show a comb show remember there was that show hannity and combs i think before that there was just a show called alan the alan combs show or something and gilbert godfrey is there to be a guest and i think this was del abate was there too for some reason and the producer comes by and goes can we get you anything and gilbert godfrey goes insulin now gilbert godfrey was not diabetic he didn't need insulin so they thought he was joking and he was like no i really need some insulin so they were like okay so they send a producer out to like a pharmacy to get insulin and bring it back to gilbert godfrey who it turned out was going to visit his sick aunt later who needed insulin and so he was like well i'll just get some free insulin from the alan combe show that I'm going to take up to my relative who actually needs it. And he probably said, it was like, insulin. He said, insulin or I'll be up all night looking for it. The other thing, too, that was in his obit in the New York Times that I thought was just like a classic, just this little passing line.

He was at some event and he picked up some food that was on the floor that someone had dropped and he started eating it and this woman looked at him the woman who dropped the food looked at him with total shock and that woman ended up becoming his wife who he had two children with and they were very much in love until his passing like that was how he met his wife picking up some food that she had dropped on the floor at an event and then

consuming it that's quite the move i wanted to just rewind a little bit though because you were you were talking about the aristocrats in that movie i mean it's just i feel like worth noting that when i think of that movie i think of two people him and bob saget i think we just talked about the aristocrats not all that long ago with the untimely passing of bob saget and so you know i'm not trying to do that thing where you're drawing lines through everything but like it does seem like with with norm and i mean especially with norm and saget and um and and of course louis as well and now gilbert but like now louis is a little i mean they all died in their 60s right and i mean that's part of i mean first of all they all died too young obviously but we're just kind of at that age where the people that we saw growing up are passing away and some untimely but there's something specific about norm saget and and gilbert that they're all kind of known for pushing the edges of of the comedy right of making you uncomfortable and saying things that all you walked right up to the line or in some cases crossed over the line like Like that's – well, Saget, that wasn't his public persona, but we learned from movies like The Aristocrats that that was his reputation among comedians and then he was, you know, filthy. And so there's – it's just – I don't know, man. It was just hard for me not to like kind of group these untimely deaths together in my mind.

Yeah, I saw a photo circulating on Twitter that was a picture of Gilbert and Saget and Norm Macdonald and it was just like, yeah, those were really –

Actually, I think that was Louis. Are you talking about the one where it was like a picture of them taking a selfie together? Wasn't it Louis in the middle? Maybe.

I mean, there's probably a few pictures of all of these people at various events. But, like, you know, I do think that it's—and certainly it doesn't do anyone any good. It certainly doesn't in any way—honor is the right term. But I don't I probably don't need to turn the Gilbert Gottfried R.I.P. into a conversation about like what is it is an appropriate in comedy. But it certainly was interesting that he like kind of would regularly get, quote unquote, in trouble or like he lost his Aflac gig because he made a tsunami, you know, after the tsunami in Japan. He he made a joke on I think on Twitter. Right. Yeah. That went over really poorly or a few jokes. And he lost that gig and he, you know, he made 9-11 jokes, I think, pretty shortly after 9-11 that people were really offended by. Like, I think he just, I don't know if fear, I mean, fearless, I kind of think he was fearless. Like, and by that I just mean he would make a joke and then people would get really mad and then he wouldn't be allowed to say Affleck anymore and get money. And then he would just keep going out and going to comedy clubs. And like, I kind of have a certain amount of respect for that. Like, I mean, and I'm sorry to the people who are offended by, and if he had made a joke about something that was offensive to me, you know, I would have been offended. But like, it's kind of like the thing that, that, that you've talked about, Andrew, which is that like cancel culture is, is pretty overstated because what really happens is somebody says something and if it offends people, then they say something and then the world just keeps spinning. And if enough people are still buying what the person is selling, then their life and career goes on. And that seemed to kind of be the Gilbert Gottfried model. Like he would say something, there would be criticism that that was not appropriate. And then he would just sort of plow forward and, you know, find the audience that didn't, you know, decide to walk away from him over these jokes. Like, I don't know. There's just something kind of something about that that I admired of him just being like, and I don't mean it's like he was just willing to go there. I just mean, you know, I don't think that he was really super worried about what people were going to say about his comedy. And I also probably don't think he was really that mad when people said, you know, that wasn't cool, Gilbert. Then, you know, and it's not for you. You know, he just kind of kept going.

Well, the interesting thing, though, is the Aflac must have been money, though, right? I mean, that must have been pretty good damn money to do a gig that probably wasn't that hard. So I wonder, you know, all the free bottled water. he had think about all the sitting on a fortune free insurance he got um so you know i wonder how

he felt about that it's not insurance andrew it covers what your insurance doesn't cover

wow somebody's so the insurance councils got to you too eh um but yeah and what you were saying too about the uh about the kind of cancel and you know i don't usually use the word cancel unless i'm kind of quoting somebody else or paraphrasing how other people look at it but i i think what we are living through is a world where people hopefully have to just you know be accountable for i just like we all face repercussions that's what we're all talking about here now sometimes when you've done really really terrible things and ruined women's lives you get you go to jail as we've seen with harvey weinsight in prison sometimes you lose some gigs and then you go on and sometimes you lose a tv show and then you win a comedy grammy you know like all of these things are these are all repercussions that you know and sometimes they match the the offense sometimes they don't everybody can have opinions on those but like you're not seeing a lot of people who's just like careers were just totally destroyed and they they can't do anything anymore because they were canceled there might be some cases of that but um i did want to say i you know when the when the um aflac thing it'll come up on the show from time to time him losing his gig and i remember a couple of times luke you have said to me oh that was because he made a 9-11 joke right and i was like no i think it was the tsunami um and then we would verify that but i i just realized yesterday why you thought it was a 9-11 joke because he also did that apparently he as the new york times or wherever i was reading this put it like he was kind of the first comedian to make the first nine they get the first like big headline for making a 9-11 joke and i think it was within a week or two and it was you know i won't repeat it here but it was just like it was about air travel and like kind of a course joke about his upcoming flight and uh and so you know and he got slapped down for that a little bit but as the article I was reading said and then he just

rolled on and emerged later in various gigs yeah and I guess that's what I was trying to say fairly inelegantly a moment ago which is what I kind of appreciate about his style of comedy now I don't remember exactly first of all I didn't know Gilbert Gottfried so I don't know how he was in private in terms of like the aflac thing right because you're right that was a lot of i'm sure that that paid really well and it's you know seemed like a pretty easy gig you just yell aflac um so i don't know if he was privately super duper like mad or like thought that the world was out to get him but i don't remember a big gilbert godfried reaction to losing that gig in other words my sense of it was and i could be misremembering someone may send me an article where he's like woe is me but it just kind of seemed like he made a joke it didn't go over well they pulled the gig and he just kept going like it wasn't like he didn't like do a louis ck stand up at madison square garden with a neon sign behind him saying i'm sorry like you know what i mean like he just it wasn't like he didn't go on a he didn't go on fox news saying you can't say anything anymore. Like he didn't launch as far as I remember, some count counter assault on afflack over free speech or over you know what i mean yeah like he said a joke he wrote a joke it was a it offended people a corporation was like we don't want to we don't want to have that associated with our brand it's not good for us he lost the gig he probably went to tampa the next week and did stand-up like that seems like it's how it should work he didn't be again as far as i was aware of gilbert godfried in the public space he didn't become this like victim of cancel culture as far as how he described himself he wasn't going around all the time saying you know you can't say anything anymore it seemed like he kind of understood i'm gonna make a lot of jokes that some of them are gonna offend people there's probably gonna be some fallout i'm just gonna keep kind of doing my thing which sort of seems like the how the system should work he didn't go on the martyr tour he didn't go and joe rogan right exactly he didn't like it didn't again maybe in private maybe his real friends were like he never stopped nursing that grudge but as As far as anything I ever saw him talking about, it was never just like he he just it wasn't like he thought his free speech had been violated because a company didn't want to be associated with someone who made a joke that that that offended some people. It seemed like he kind of understood how that worked. And I don't know. I feel like that that's really how the conversation should go. Everyone gets to make the jokes they want to make. And then everyone gets to have their reaction to the jokes that those people made. Yeah. And then everything will just sort itself out in one way or another.

Yeah. And if people want to publicly, because everybody can be public now with their opinions, and I'm not saying that in the way I said that was kind of dismissive, but because we all do have access to platforms where we can publicize our opinions and you never know whoever you are. I mean, your opinion posted on Twitter or any social media could randomly catch an updraft and suddenly your opinion could end up being, you know, retweeted thousands of times or millions of times. Like there is a chance that the quote unquote repercussion, as I'm putting it, is a bunch of people are mad at you for a while on Twitter, you know, and that's and that's also that's their right to say what they want to say, that their that your jokes hurt their feelings. And I'm not saying that, like, I would still encourage comedians to be respectful. I'm not saying, hey, comedian should be out there like making jokes at the expense of gay people or whatever. And then if you can't take a joke, get out of my audience or complain on Twitter. I still think people should respect each other. But I also think that, like, yeah, people can have, everybody can have their opinions on all sides. Like, we have the technology.

It also seems like his jokes were, the ones that offended people were what we would call in poor taste, which is different than, say, transphobic or specifically anti-woman or something. Now, somebody could go find maybe a joke that he did that, you know, belies what I just said. And that's possible. I don't know every joke he ever did. But his jokes were just always like they were offensive, but they were offensive around a topic like 9-11, like a tsunami, like Hitler. He had a joke about how Hitler's Hitler had a some like nephew or grandson who also was trigger alert here. I'm just basically paraphrasing Gilbert's joke, who was someone who was a, you know, a sex predator, particularly towards, you know, young people. OK, and Gilbert Godfrey's bit was imagine being the member of Hitler's family who Hitler's embarrassed of. Like, imagine you're in Hitler's family and you're the one that no one talks about. You're the black sheep. You're the one that they don't bring up. And you're in Hitler's family. Like, it's just stuff like that. that that's probably in poor taste but it's not like the same kind of joke that i think now sometimes people will make that's going towards a particular person or group of people i mean maybe in this case nazis maybe he was taking on nazis but like i don't know just like his his jokes seem to be like i said quote unquote in poor taste which is sort of feels like a different category than jokes that just make people potentially less safe by you know what i mean diminishing them as humans or whatever flattening them out to one dimensional people which by the way i still think people have the right to make those jokes too but i think the pushback on some of those jokes makes a lot of sense to me because it's like if we normalize or if someone's out there just creating a worldview or promoting a worldview through comedy that that that gives people a certain sort of thought that could lead to the endangering of certain folks in our world those folks and the people who are sticking up for them saying that's not cool also seems totally fine to me um yeah i actually think i didn't mention this at the time because i didn't want

to necessarily be that guy but um you know i was a big fan of norm mcdonald and not like we need to trade bona fides here but like i i was watching i remember being excited that norm mcdonald was hired on snl and shocked by it so i was like you know i'm not saying that i was watching him in the underground clubs i was just seeing him on like the shows i would watch on vh1 and mtv there was a lot of stand-up. in the early 90s on those venues but i remember like kind of being an early fan of norm mcdonald when he was doing his early tv gigs i loved him um and you know when he died everybody uh mourned him and celebrated his life and his approach and again but he was an edgy comic and i will say going back and watching some of his stuff around the time of his passing and reflecting on it like people are like oh legend you know i gotta say i was offended by some of it like and i thought some of it definitely was not cool and like at the time he had just died and so you weren't hearing the people like calling for his head because that was irrelevant at the time and so you had everybody including us you know again celebrating his life because there's a lot of good things about norm mcdonald but i also sat down and watched him like on was it the arsenio show some show like that you know telling like oh this i can't even i really don't remember the premise of a joke but it was basically a gay joke right and i'm sure you know he's the exact type of guy who would say like listen I have gay friends I'm not really you know I really I have no bad feelings about the gays or whatever I'm sure he would say that and maybe that's true but there is still harm in telling some of the jokes he was telling because they play into stereotypes and like you said Luke like you can't always draw a straight line but you are potentially making the world a less safe place for people and that is a reality so the funny thing is is like we're having this conversation about these comedians godfrey now and godfrey does see i'm with you by the way i think he was different i can't think of times where godfrey was like cashing in on i'm gonna get really close to saying something that's kind of racist or kind of homophobic like i don't think it was that it was more about world events i don't think he played into stereotypes as much as far as

i know well he played in the stereotypes that he like as a jewish person was allowed to like he had a character that was a rabbi who'd become a vampire um which was you know he he played he he played with some stereotypes but again they were typically if i'm remembering right the ones that he i guess you would say had the latitude to as a guy who himself was jewish yeah okay but yeah you're right it wasn't like i don't think he had a character that was as we would say you know swishy like he didn't come out and do like a you know a voice of someone who seemed effeminate the joke being you know uh i'm a gay man and that's where the comedy is you know and yeah with the norm mcdonald stuff it's kind of interesting you'd say that because um on tiktok somehow my algorithm i has has you know he norm mcdonald had a um like a i don't know if it was on uh netflix or if it was on i don't know exactly where it was airing at the time because i wasn't really aware of it but it's been it's been sort of like not dissected but it's been cut up into these little like 40 second clips now and it just shows up on tick tock all the time it's kind of like a tv set and they'll have like andy dick there or fred willard or you know um judd apatow i'm trying to think of some of the other people and one of the bits that they would do is they would write they would write a joke and make the the guest read the joke and the jokes were i mean i think part of the bit was that the jokes were always supposed to be very offensive and now you're forcing the host the guest to read a joke that's kind of really edgy and i have to say you know they're mostly just homophobic it's kind of too bad because it's like like it's a little tired and it's also just like you know it was like even if it was a meta joke even if the joke was who would think this and the joke is and i know i say on this show all the time we have to remember who the joke is on and i still i think i stand by that but in this case even if you're making the argument this is a joke about making that joke if you make that joke long enough even if it's a meta joke what it ends up doing is just creating more jokes that just are you know ridiculing someone for the fact that they would like have sex with a man like a man having sex with a man that that's written that that's mockable and i don't think i mean i just it just seemed it was kind of too bad because i've kind of gone on the same journey like i think norm mcdonald obviously was very funny and i liked a lot of the stuff that he did uh we we did eulogize him on this show and play some of his better stuff but there is also a lot of other stuff floating around there that's kind of doesn't doesn't hold up as well to me long term yeah yeah definitely this is totally

this is an exam i've told you this before probably too many times but it's like when the joke stops being the joke and just becomes the thing this is an innocent example of this that I found myself doing when I was kind of new and nervous at KCRW. I don't know if you know where this is going, Luke, but you've met my friend Monica before who I met at that station. And she was like a digital producer at the time, I think. And I had known her because I had heard her on some Dana Gould podcast or something. So I was kind of excited to meet her. I guess they were just buddies or something. And I thought she was funny. I'm like, oh, I heard you on Dana Gould. and so

We kind of hit it off. But then in these tight office quarters, like there was this thing where she would pass my desk and we kind of started off by joking about office humor, like how bad it is. But then eventually I just made a joke that was like it was another joke about office humor. And she just stopped and said, you know, eventually we're just doing it or something like that. Like, eventually it's not funny because we're just the people who are doing the thing that we're making fun of. I'm like, touche, Monica. And I wish I could remember, she said it in a way that, I mean, she was kidding, and she wasn't trying to hurt my feelings, and she didn't, but she said it in this hilariously cutting but very clear-eyed way that it really, really stuck with me, and I appreciated her calling it out. I really did.

As we say on the show far too often, one version of that is if you stare into the void long enough, the void stares back, and the other is if you wear the mask long enough, the mask starts to fit. I think maybe that was Jeff Garland. It was. Famously unproblematic Jeff Garland, speaking of not being able to say anything anymore, who said that. And you're right. There's a point at which if you're doing a shtick long enough and you're committed to it enough, at some point the shtick is what you're really doing. And then that's just what it is. But it's reasonable to point out that the mask is now fitting. Yes.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female.

oh man it's not from a female all right here's my official this is what i'm officially declaring on this cartoon snoring story it's evergreen it's mostly about cartoons from the 50s i'm taking it off the list because we cannot get to it but if snoring ever comes up on this show organically

i'm going right to it okay here's what i think we should do because i watched a few of the clips that are in that story i think that should be one of the quizzes in our next i guess our next games would be the summer games right so the next time we do a two-week show of summer games we should have a game where can you recognize the snore the cartoon snore can you love it identify the character that the snore belongs great use of the content because i do think it's

a really fun story but the problem is it's so completely unrelated to the events of the world or our lives we can just never get to it because every day something more current and that's the thing about the show andrew we always are on the current events people know that yeah that's why

they tune in um usually four months later weeks months maybe years later i'm just having an idea i mean i think we've talked about this off air but i'm gonna be bold here luke so we're talking about being bold earlier um the technology we ran into a technological hiccup on my end which is why we haven't been able to take phone calls lately but if i can get this ironed out i would love to play summer games with the listeners next time around like you and i have both read this snoring story but what if we get a listener on the line what if we get dazzling love it dazzling donor jamie on the line and she's gonna identify finally let them touch those things they've never touched anything in their lives exactly so in the meantime speaking of listeners i have this voicemail from listener scott luke and um this is regarding the um the gap by the way how is your head you said in the intro of the show that it's itchy now you're in the itchy phase aside from that how

are you doing your forehead gash it's it's i can see that it's healing um it's a lot better than it was a day or two ago the abrasion uh that start that part is healing faster than the uh you know the cut although that's also healing now i'm just like really curious about the scar like what is it gonna look like two weeks from now and um you know but but it's it's definitely it's definitely

on the mend so that's good okay i'm glad to hear that well scott knows what you're going through because he had a similar forehead injury but he got it a different way andrew hey luke it's scott

in seattle and i really felt for luke after hearing about his forehead injury story uh mostly because i had one of my own like 20 years ago and uh well i was at a party and somebody uh was doing a cool guy move and threw a can of beer across the room and not even to me but i turned and looked and it hit me square in the forehead uh right down the middle and just the narrow edge of it perfectly landing on the bridge of my nose and the ridge of my eyebrows that's a way to kill a cool

guy move right there by the way that quickly became an uncool guy move that went from cool

guy to fool guy real fast put a deep cut in there in a perfect half circle um he was really apologetic but it was so bad i had to go get stitches and had this really nasty looking bruised half circle stitch on that portion of my face um and the doctor had to ask you know in the emergency room

what happened and i was too embarrassed to see i got hit in the forehead with a can of budweiser so i i told him i just wrecked my bike and hit my forehead and i obviously he didn't believe me

um but accepted that and because the injury said bud on it

the doctor gave it and said i set up bud light

obviously he didn't believe me um but accepted that and you know i went home But the real kicker was the next day I had to go to a magistrate hearing for a bike ticket that I got for not wearing my helmet and riding my bike. Oh, no. And I had to decide which story to tell the magistrate. Was I going to tell him that I'd crash on my bike and mess up my forehead or got hit in the face with a can of beer at the party? And so I chose the latter and told him I got hit in the face with a can of beer at the party, which is only slightly better than crashing your bike when you've got a ticket for not wearing a helmet. And, you know, those things stick around for a while. So for the next several weeks, I had to decide which lie I was going to tell folks when they asked about the very embarrassing and public injury on my forehead. So I feel for you, Luke. You should invent a good story to tell people if you don't like the one you already have and just roll with it so i hope it heals and i hope you uh get better thanks guys power out

what about a sword fighting accident luke have you thought about trying that one out in minecraft somebody hit me with a minecraft sword what was that listener's name again

that is scott in seattle okay because we have it turns out thank you scott for checking in on that we have a lot of um so far i'm noting it's dudes who have sustained embarrassing face injuries because we got this email from kevin listener kevin who says i was listening to monday's show i had to get stitches down the right right occipital lobe of my face back in 2016 and then he includes i don't know if you've looked at this email andrew but boy oh boy i don't know what happened to oh kevin clarifies it was the temporal process not the occipital yeah occipital is at the back right that's that little bump at the base of your our skull in the back um anyway so he had this scar boy oh boy i don't know he doesn't say what happened but he says what really helped him was to get rid of the scar after the thing healed was something called bio oil and he included all these photos and he really you look great well first of all kevin you're a handsome guy we all get it stop showing off but definitely by the final photo that kevin included it's you can't even see the scar at all so that might be an argument for uh that bio oil Although listener Brian here in Portland also wanted to check in on face scars and dealing with them. He said, sorry, this is our friend Brian, who's an amazing musician, pedal steel player, etc. He said, sorry to hear about your mishap. And then he goes on to tell the story of at the beginning of the pandemic, I was working out at home with these resistant bands. The bands come with a little anchoring device you can close in a doorframe. and of course as he's working out pulling the bands smack the anchor made of foam and heavy webbed material like seatbelt but thicker popped out of the top of the door and hit me in the face just above an eyebrow it caused a huge lump and opened a cut he says he used that mederma scar treatment that I also have now come into the possession of and he said it worked great so that's going to be my plan thank you Brian for checking in too that's going to be my plan when this thing is healed I'm going to go crazy with the mederma. And if that's not working, I'm going to go crazy with the bio oil.

Did Kevin, the person with the big scar on the face, I remember seeing these photos. I think he sent them in when it first happened because I can picture him in his hospital bed with a bloody face if I'm thinking of the right person. And did he say, did you read and I blanked out? Did I work out? Was this a, did he crash into a glass coffee table? I want to say crash into a glass coffee table.

I don't remember that, but I'm guessing that if that's what your memory is telling you, that's part of the story. I don't think it's in the email he just sent us, so I can't really confirm or deny that. But I heard someone threw a microbrew at him.

I heard someone threw a hazy IPA. I heard he bonked his noggin on a coffee chap. I don't know why I said chap there, but all right. Well, that just sounded. Hey, Andrew, I just remembered something. We're going out with Listener Jojo's song. Oh, my God. I'd forgotten. Actually, now that I'm opening up Spotify, I had it set here, so maybe I would have remembered. But either way, you get the win. Thank you. Circle gets the square.

All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. We are going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. Please do check in for that. Until then, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Watch yourself around those coffee tables, those cool guys, and those nightstands. And please remember, no mountain too tall. luck to all. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la trombose the earth is sang with the spit and bacteria until it's not filled up with love Oh no!

Jamie Julian writes to us. 18 months ago, I started listening to a podcast called Too Beautiful to Live. Within days, I had my first David Aldridge moment. The host mentioned listener Dr. Garrett Schumann, and I yelled, hey, I know that guy. He's the little who composed the main riff for the Fibonacci song on the Diane Kruger Effect album, Small World Podcast Colliding. A couple of weeks ago, I saw Leanna DiNardo interacting with Too Beautiful to Live on Twitter, and again, I hollered, hey, I know her. She's the Little who beat me in the Little's Fantasy Football Championship a couple of years ago. My interest was piqued. I had to know what the Venn diagram of Too Beautiful to Live and TK looked like. So I took to Twitter to find out. Turns out there's one very notable Little in this crossover universe. One of the hosts weighed in and said his good friend listened to Tony all the time. That friend, the one and only, Gretchen Wu. The connective tissue of your podcast just keeps going and going, and snaring other podcasts like a fun-filled spiderweb of joy or something.

Power out.