Muse

hi diddly hey homer oh my god this dude does the best flanders you got the mustache and the diddly okay now do wig him homer it's me ned oh right to god dude hey i got a question for you could jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it well sure of course he could

But then again, wow, as melon scratchers go, that's a honeydoodle.

TBTL. Look, I get it. I'm not always fun to be around. I can be loud and abrasive. My breath, the doctors say I have a curable stink tongue.

Right now, I'm only looking for two things. A class on how to make your own papier-mâché pencil holder and an ass to kick. And it looks like I missed the class on how to make your own paper mache pencil holder.

The more attention you pay to these things and the more diligent you are, the faster you'll get better and the better you'll feel. See if I'm not right. Thanks for your time. Have a good day.

All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

Social engineering can take place in person, on email, on the phone, or over the internet. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

As Jay would say, he's got flow. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where I am currently getting a break from a wildcat that I, for some reason, voluntarily let live in this apartment. you know they mentioned burritos in that opening audio i've actually invented something i call the cat burrito that i think could really take off maybe as a kind of um maybe sell it on instagram or uh maybe even on one of those uh home shopping network type deals so um i will um completely torpedo my business interest by talking about that later probably here on this uh actually

kind of lovely wednesday at least so far oh ma pa it's just beautiful some sunshine a few clouds

but mostly sunny and very warm it's been uh especially been warm the last couple of days which is always nice it's also always nice to arrive at episode 3701 and they collect your series let the fun begin i say that like it's ever happened before in history which it really hasn't think about it for this show i mean there have been 3701 things but as far as this podcast our podcast it's the first time that we've ever gotten to this many shows until tomorrow when we will hit a new most shows we've ever done as you can hear my brain is just it's operating at absolutely full capacity right now but i still think i might need to do something like a call like a dopamine fast i'm kind of calling it like a dopamine diet or reset come on brain think of things come on brain

He's smart.

I'll talk about the, I don't even have a plan, but just what's been going through my brain related to how my brain works of late. Coming up, also, speaking of dopamine hits that are of the most synthetic variety, CNN has announced they're going to drop their perpetual breaking news banner. I'd like to point out to anybody watching,

this is really bunk journalism.

If you've turned on CNN at any time, day or night, in the last 12 years, they've been in breaking news. Now, they're not going to do that because I got a new person running the joint, the guy that used to be in charge of the late night with Stephen Colbert, making lots of changes over there, so we'll talk about that. We'll get on our media, probably, plus emails and v-mails. And this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I've asked him to really cut back on his slabjacking during the show, and he's promised to do that, so we're going to let him back on. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Hey, I was doing a little homework while you were waxing rhapsodic there, and I went to Wikipedia. I went to the front page of Wikipedia, something I don't usually do, and then I searched for... I don't think I knew Wikipedia had a front page. Yeah, you ever just do that? Just type in Wikipedia and Google, and it's like, hey, it's just like a website. And I typed in 3701. I wanted to see what is... You said that in the past there have been 3,701 things. I was dubious. Like, have there ever been that exact number of things before? I don't know. I can imagine a 3,702 or 3. Anyway, here's what Wikipedia gave me. 3,701 is the first year in the 38th century. Now, that's interesting because that hasn't happened yet, but there's a whole, there's a remarkably long page dedicated to what.

might happen in that year which is very interesting i wonder if every year unless does that just link to like the future or something they're just like there's a bunch of amateur futurists and sci-fi slash fickers you know it it links to a timeline of the far future so i imagine many dates would link to that and then you have an asteroid jetpacks huh yeah maybe by then 3701 was an asteroid. It was also a two-stroke aircraft engine, the Hearth 3701. I could have seen you getting into small aircrafts if you're experienced. It's the Hearth, huh? Yeah, let's think of it. You're dealing with the Hearth 3701 here. Interesting. I would have thought who was the guy that made the Spruce Goose? Oh, I know who you're. Long Fingernails. That's his name. Yes, exactly. Mr. Long Fingernails. Mr. Long Fingernails. That's Dr. Long

Fingernails to you. Um, I always, I was going to say William Randolph Hearst, but that was the, um, William Randolph Hearst was the guy that basically, uh, the, uh, Citizen Kane was kind of based on. He sort of lost his marbles too, but it was, um, the, uh, Howard Hughes, Howard Hughes was the, was Dr. Long, Dr. Long fingernails. Um, that's, uh, see what my point about, about 3701 was really that, I mean, there was, At some point, there had only been 3,701 seconds, and then there was 3,702 seconds. I didn't even mean things like where the ball lands and stays on 3,701. Oh, that is an interesting question. I just meant I said it in a very kind of cocky way, like this has never happened before. But, of course, it has. There have been 3,701 events already today at some point based on how you measure those things. And then right after that, it went to the 3,700 and second.

Weirdly, the Internet says there was no 3,701 seconds either. For some reason, they skipped over that kind of like a 13th floor situation.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just for kind of bad luck. Very strange.

If I sound cocky this morning, Andrew, it's because I took my. Remember yesterday I was telling you about my my cool new move where I fill up the water from the Brita tank in my refrigerator while I'm pouring my coffee. so my right hand is pouring my coffee my left hand has set up my little um clean canteen water bottle on a ledge and then the water is filling and i'm listening for the change in the sound of the water going it's because the pitch is getting higher and higher is getting closer and closer to filling up the clean canteen today not only did i do it but i added my splenda to my coffee while the water was filling see i'm adding elements i'm upping the danger level By next week, I'll actually be on a unicycle juggling while I hand pour over my coffee, all while my clean canteen is filling.

I can picture you using your feet to open up a package of Splenda and putting that in and then stirring it.

Just to kind of keep it. I'm on a unicycle, but I'm only using one foot because the other foot is balancing like three. The other foot is catching bowls that I'm then throwing up and stacking on my head. I'm basically in what I imagine goes on on America's Got Talent.

at one point you throw a bunch of um ingredients for a sandwich up in the air including a whole chunk of ham which is weird because you don't even need ham and then you slice it all in the air and it all lands together between the slices of bread like a perfect sandwich the sound the fact that you're relying on sound reminds me of something that i'm sort of realizing i don't know why this is becoming more of an issue where i live and cook now maybe it has something to do with the fact that i have one of those well that doesn't make sense i do have an large refrigerator

very i visited my very large refrigerator yesterday yeah it's large yeah it does have of course they didn't hook it up but it does have water and ice to the door which is kind of fancy but again porch fridge doesn't usually actually have the water line hooked up so i don't think

any of that works yeah um anyway with the sound um when i i realized that i often am cooking with my big headphones on right but that can be a problem like I'm starting to realize that I need to hear what's going on in the kitchen like when things get to a certain temperature you can hear like when things are either boiling or when things are sizzling at a certain frequency or what have you it's getting more difficult for me to cook with my headphones on I don't know why a change of scenery would would do that I was gonna say maybe because I have I don't know my stove it it's hard to get used to my new stove it's one of those flat top glass stoves that I don't like it Man, I've already melted, like, two handles of, like, spatulas on that thing. Like, with a regular stove with coils.

Because the entire surface is hot. Well, not really.

No, it's just hard to see where the... It's just harder to see where those boundaries are. They do heat up in, like, specific little circles. So you mean, like, the edge. Yeah, like, you know, you can pretty easily... see that you don't have your handle left on a coil on your stove or over the flame of a gas stove which would be ideal obviously but instead you're just kind of like cooking it's all one flat sheer surface I don't like it I'll be straightforward with you I don't like it

I have many thoughts and responses to what you just said first thing is why is it that you are wearing headphones while you're cooking in your kitchen presumably alone is because what you want to listen to would be annoying to Genevieve yeah kind

Kind of usually if especially if she's like right in the next room watching TV, although that's less of an issue here in the new place. So I think I can get used to like listening to things at a reasonable volume. And we have a way of closing off some doors so that it's not where we used to live. Like if I had if I had the radio on loud enough to hear over the sounds of cooking, then that was blasting into the other room.

What about I know you love your big headphones, but is there something that's less sensory depriving for you that you could use? like regular old headphones where you would you'd hear your baseball game but you'd also hear the

sizzling of your pork chops yeah i need to look into better um like wireless earbuds i know that's not even new technology anymore that's just standard but like i've always had an issue with earbuds especially the more modern ones they like kind of clog up my ear too much i've never been able to find ones that are comfortable for me and it could be yeah well it could be that it's hard to go out and try on a bunch of different earbuds yeah that's like trying on underwear you try it on you bought it exactly so i and and so i've always been a little bit gun shy i kind of been i got genevieve some early era um wireless earbuds like a long time ago now and they were too big and they didn't fit her so then i sort of inherited to them you ever do that you get somebody a gift and then it becomes yours but like where were they from do you remember the manufacturer there i don't oh yes um jay bird i want to say jay bird run they were advertised towards runners at the time oh okay um but they're pretty they're pretty old models before everything was wireless you know it was kind of a treat at the time so got it they weren't um they they have various rubber components that kind of slip off um i know that all of them have some sort of interchangeable little earpiece

anyway they just well that's they were a fail right there it's very you know it's interesting because it's very person-to-person with these little wireless deals that fit into your ear holes. And not the AirPod Pros, which are very popular, which I have, but the generation before that, that's the perfect ear hole for me. Now, those ones don't have a – they're not like noise canceling or anything. They'd be considered not fancy, but I love them so much. In fact, I just put them through the washing machine accidentally, and they're fine. I used them this morning. The AirPod Pros, the fancier, more expensive ones, which have more battery life and everything, they also have this little rubber kind of nipple on them that's supposed to fit in your ear in addition to the plastic hardware. And I am of the opinion that it is that rubber nipple that is the problem in most design. the ones that i like the the couple generation ago airpods no rubber yeah associated no little cupping yeah and i think what's happening to you when you say they feel weird or too tight or clog too much is because it's it's like you and me doing the show for the minnesota state fair andrew yeah when you get that little rubber cone thing whatever you call it in there it cuts off airflow it makes it feel you know what it makes it feel the inside of my head feels like i'm in a car where all the windows are up except one window is cracked.

Right, yeah.

That worst kind of, the worst sort of like pressurization of your eardrums and just messes with my equilibrium, I do not like. So I'm wondering if maybe, my recommendation to you, not that you asked, would be to consider something that doesn't have, they're not trying to literally seal your ear up against any and all intrusions because that's too much for people like you and me.

Exactly. The kind of earbuds I used to use were similar. Because even when we were still dealing with wired stuff, a lot of the earbuds were going to that rubber situation that I did not like. And so I started buying, like, these from a company called Happy Plugs, which I promise you is just earplug related or earbud related. That's where I got my hair transplant from. But they still sell, like, kind of an old school, like, an old school style, like, if you got literally an iPod in, like, 2005, like, the little, like, can't explain it. They're very basic little rings that you put in your ear. They don't even, they aren't shaped like the nose of an aardvark going down into your ear. They're just like little circles, like very classic earbuds. And those were the only place I could get those. I don't think they make wireless, but anyway, I'm bored of looking at them right now. Do they make wireless? Maybe I should look into that. Air One.

black true wireless earbuds looks like their knockoff of the apple thing you know what i bought the other day uh because i'm not bored with this conversation yet andrew and i want to talk to you about glass top heating elements um uh the other day i realized i had lost the charging case to my airpod pros which were kind of not cheap and even though i don't love them they are okay on airplanes because the battery lasts forever so i will just tolerate it like i can't run with them because they worked their way out of my ear. But anyway, I went on to the internet and I bought a replacement, not from Apple, but I bought a replacement charging little case for them and it works like a charm. Oh, right. It's like $10. It's black, which I actually think is cooler. It's like a cooler color and it completely functions. I was kind of shocked. I mean, I bought it, so I must have had some sort of hope it was going to work out. But I was still kind of amazed that it all works and has been working totally fine now Because it just feels like you buy something very likely coming over from China for $10 that's a kind of part of a, you know, an otherwise very prestige technology like Apple stuff. You just think that's not going to work, but it's totally working great, which is my way of saying you never know. These I'm looking at these products at Happy Plugs. They're all they all look like knockoffs of the real thing, but they probably work just fine.

Yeah, this is still and I guess you must need this shape now to stay in your ear better, but they don't have the classic ones I was talking about. these are still the ones that look like little i don't know they kind of dig into your ear too much i i just i'm an old man i need to get with the times i just i'm reluctant to like just buy another set of earplugs that just don't or earbuds i should say that don't look um comfortable to me but i have a more important question for you before we move on to heating elements so this seems like an opportunity to really burbank something here you're mentioning that you like this um the version of these apple ear earbuds that are like i don't know a generation old or a couple of generations old now you need to stock up on them now right are you kidding me oh have

you already bought like four packs of one okay okay um they do the problem is they do tend to sometimes if you get a bum a bum set they do kind of tend to die out and i'm worried about like i mean just like the battery life gets weird like the ones that i have right now the ones i put through the wash here's what i have to do i i know exactly which i have to take out the right side pod first and put it in my ear because if i take the left side pod out first it goes it makes this chime that's like it's connecting with the watch and then i put the right in and then the right doesn't work the whole time and for the longest time i just thought the right wasn't charging and then i decided let me see what happens if i put the right one in first and then it chimes and then i put the left one in and now i'm in stereo little stuff like that there's just like these silly hacks and quirks that i have to do um but uh yeah no i actually should the other thing i should stock up on them but you know what'll happen at some point the software will update and these things will get bricked which is happening with my sonos stuff god damn it and i am as you would say andrew positively rip shit this was threatened many years ago and We talked about it on the show. Yes, I remember. And I, you know, when I changed everything over here because I was trying to get a 2.4 gigahertz router going along with a 5 gigahertz router so I could run certain. By the way, all of that stuff is working now. I actually fixed it all. Nice. Which I'm kind of stoked about. So the smart lock, the pet feeder, the, actually the Roomba remains a holdout. I have to go over and manually start the Roomba. Or sometimes the cat likes to start the Roomba in the middle of the night. Did I tell you that? No. The other night, two in the morning, I'm like, what is that? Is someone running a vacuum? I'm like, wake out of a dead sleep. But it's just the Roomba is going because the cat has climbed on top of it and hit clean. No, the cat's not riding it around, though, right? The cat is not riding it around. The cat is actually afraid of the Roomba if it's in motion. Not afraid, like, hiding, but just, like, just keeping too... Wary is exactly the word I was looking for. so um but anyway uh i've got everything kind of working again with the um uh with the the home wi-fi uh technology what was it what was i saying about that again um you got everything working again um oh they're gonna up oh the sonos you're they up they're bricking all your sonos shit so in the process of of of kind of changing things around all the sonos went offline and when i was trying to like it was like oh you're offline it's probably because you changed your router settings was like yes i did and they were like okay we'll just update to the sonos 2 app and andrew when i tell you that that was a absolute it was literally a major disaster it was so basically all except for like one because all the sonos speakers i have are like very old like i bought them like 10 years ago and the sonos 2 app will not talk to any of them and the problem is it

updated So what happened was that, like, I have two speakers that are new enough that they can work with the Sonos 2 app. So those ones, they're firmware updated. So now I have, like, so I call somebody, and as you know, or as you might expect, this is a person who was not, like, they weren't in Silicon Valley, as far as I could tell. It was unlikely that I was talking to somebody in Palo Alto who was from very far away who was reading off of a script and trying to be helpful. But there were a lot of barriers there, both the phone quality, some language stuff, and the fact that they are not in Portland looking at my stuff. They're just looking at a computer screen. They're given very limited ways to help me. But anyway, so what I ended up having to do was eventually explain to this person that I really needed to get back to the S1 app. That's the first Sonos app. So I had to uninstall Sonos 2, basically like salt the ground on my computer so it would never come back, reinstall Sonos 1, then go back and hard reboot the speakers that had been firmware updated to Sonos 2 because once I got the old speakers working on Sonos 1 again, the newer speakers didn't know what Sonos 1 was anymore because they had been firmware-ed out of existence for that.

This sounds more complicated than the first moon mission. I swear to God, if somebody from the past just dipped in to this conversation right now and heard you talking about Sonos 1 and Sonos 2 and firmware and updates, they would assume that you're talking about space-age technology.

Only the women from that movie Hidden Minds would be able to figure out what the hell is going on. I know, and you know me, Andrew. You're good with this kind of stuff. You're good at methodically working through things. I'm bad at it. so this was just like extra extra frustrating and and confusing for me and i almost gave up a bunch of times and it'd be this thing where this person would be putting me on hold and then they'd be coming back and then they would be just rereading the same section of script they had read to me before the hold and it was just i just didn't feel but i have to give them credit everything works in this apartment again it took two hours on the phone but it works and so i should trust the hashtag process i guess but uh just on the subject of technological updates and upgrades it's just it was exactly it was exactly what i feared would happen and so with if i ever like because you know all of these products are always trying to make us um you know update everything and i feel like i don't want to update a lot of things anymore i mean there has to be has someone

built a service or an app that stops the updating oh almost like the thing that stops the person in front of you from reclining their chair on an airplane yes just like the defender yes this would be the me defender um that doesn't make a lot of sense but no but i'm with it yeah but yes and is the is the important thing here um what were you gonna say about stovetops what i was gonna say

about stovetops is you know obviously i am i'm gonna be kind of trying to do some remodeling on this house that i bought and i'm gonna be i think trying to set up a different kitchen area because the current kitchen is really weird and tiny and cut off from the rest of the house this um this house does not have gas natural gas running to it so i could get a propane tank you know outside and run the whole house off of like a propane that needs to get refilled every whatever it is year six months i don't know how that works we actually had that i think in um port townsend so i guess i've worked with it before and or maybe it was even i don't know might have even been a natural gas tank that was just a tank that they come out and refill or something i don't know it was it seemed like things were seeing things reminded me of having a gas stove when i lived in port townsend but here's the thing i've been doing a lot of reading about how not great it can be to have basically an open flame in your kitchen all the time like when you're cooking things like there are some actual environmental hazards not just at large but really for the people in the house of having a gas stove.

Have you seen any of this? No, I mean, I guess you do have a little pilot light going in the oven at all times. I guess the stove itself shouldn't have any kind of pilot lights, right? That just sparks when you turn it on.

It's indoor air pollution is the issue. This is from the California Air Resources Board. Cooking can generate unhealthy air pollutants from heating oil, fat, and other food ingredients, especially at high temperatures um self-cleaning ovens da da da studies show um uh that air can be unhealthy to breathe when people cook in kitchens with poor ventilation that's obvious but basically like i just heard this piece a while ago actually on npr about how there's some sort of semi-compelling evidence that you know because i'm from this generation that has totally fetishized gas ranges like we were talking yesterday about how at a certain point you got a brita filter and you put it in your refrigerator to let all your 28-year-old friends know that you were doing well, that you were probably mad. maxing out your 401k, etc. Like, another signifier, I think, for our generation of making it is a gas stove. Like, that's a very—and everyone loves gas stoves because they turn on instantly and because, I guess—is it that they cook more evenly? I asked this question about cast iron yesterday, but, like, is that the sales pitch on a gas stove? I mean, yeah, I think there's a— Or gas range, I should say.

For me, it's—and I'm going to not take offense at this because it's not about status for me. it is just such a more pleasurable cooking experience like you can you the heat will react so much more quickly when you're like heating up the coil and i had an electric you know like a more typical electric coil stove at our old place and it was fine but like you just don't have as much control over the cooking as you do with a flame like we had a great gas stove in new hampshire and it was just like in incomparable incomparable to um the electric stoves and i know they make you know technology has come a long way and maybe i know induction is kind of a cool thing that people talk about but like trust me i don't i don't long for a gas stove because it's my new

brita filter right i'm not saying you i'm just saying wouldn't you wouldn't you agree that generationally there are the people that are our age i feel like ushered in this idea that it was a vastly superior thing like because everything our parents what did you grow up with a gas stove in um in ohio no i don't think so i certainly didn't in seattle it was i don't think anyone had gas stoves very few people probably had gas ranges i keep saying stove but i think that's probably the part where you bake a cake right that's the stove so i should say range top or something stove i think oven is where you bake a cake right nobody i didn't know anyone with a gas uh you know stove as it were in the growing up in the 70s and 80s like that was just not a thing everyone had that everywhere you went that was like the church kitchen at gospel average christian fellowship my friend's houses our house it was all that electric range and then at some point everyone was like no the cook's kitchen the chef's kitchen you got to get the you got to get the gas going like i feel like that was something that came into popularity probably late 80s early 90s And then really, I just know that every house that I've ever had, it's been like, we got to get gas if it didn't have it. Like, we got to have that gas stove. And again, I'm not saying I'm not saying your motives are impure or driven by trends, but I'm saying I think our generation made this really trendy.

I think our generation just cares about food in a different way than our parents, at least speaking specifically for me. Like growing up in the Midwest, in the 80s as a middle class family, like we just weren't, you know, we were the furthest thing from foodies, you know, with the exception of like kind of really geeking out over like maybe some like my dad's ribs on the grill or various things like my family. You know, it was the 80s. It was a lot of like there was so much emphasis on convenience that I think began in the late 60s and probably ran through a lot of the 80s. That was like not how can we make food better, but how can we make everything easier from, again, TV dinners to microwave ovens to electric stoves to all that stuff? It was like such a such a focus on that kind of thing. I think the difference is the younger generations kind of came up and said, like, these Brussels sprouts don't have to be gross. like there are good foods to eat let's cut those things in half and let's broil them let's make foods good again and i think that they and i think that you saw my hat and so i think that that is like part and parcel of the whole thing and again i'm not a foodie but i think it's more than just

kind of a signifier well i think i i agree but then i also disagree because i agree with you that it is an outgrowth of us caring about food more but then i think it becomes a signifier why because I don't know shit about cooking, but it was always important to have a gas stove in the beautiful homes that I was living in. And that's because it was a signifier. And anytime you pick up Architectural Digest or Dwell or Better Homes and Gardens, you're sure as hell not seeing electric cooktops in those beautiful spreads of those homes. So I agree with you that it is probably because we do just think about food in a different way, at least if you have the privilege of thinking about food in that way, right? Because that's also part of it. um uh but then i think at some point for people like me it just becomes like like oh that's what you have now because that looks like like there's this thing that also became very in style a while ago called the pot filler do you know about this it's basically having a um above your presumably gas range you have a um a faucet that so let's just say your your sink is in like a kitchen island or something and so when you go over to the stove to boil water for your pasta or whatever you have a pot filler over there you have another spigot or faucet yeah right that fills your pot so you don't have to fill it in the sink and then like liz lemon it i'm just taking everything you yesterday and improved.

it today. No, I'm picturing it. So that's now a thing that if anyone's putting a kitchen in on HGTV or if you're looking at any kind of high end, like if you're really doing it up, you'll see that pot filler now. Now, I don't know how many pots of pasta I'm going to make in this house that I'm working on. Probably none. But my guess is it's about 80% will be a pot filler in there. Because, again, and this is me roasting myself, much like a Brussels sprout. um like that there there are these things that that start out i think a thing that is functional and then at some point they become popular to people like me that see them as signifiers yeah

you were described i have never heard of that before and you were describing it and the first i'm like oh that's that's smarter that's interesting but honestly well again like i live a relatively i don't know if lowbrow is the right word but simple life so like that would be pretty far down on my list of of things to get excited about in the kitchen but like also listen if i moved into a house that had that i'm not saying i wouldn't use it but it is very very specific for one thing because really i'm still thinking like well do you have a drain over there too because the more right the more clumsy thing is once you've boiled your pasta then you got to get it over to the sink to then strain it and that's always the moment for me

for me i don't worry i'm gonna have a pot strainer too i'll have a separate in the same island yeah Yes, it'll just be a strainer that lives undermounted in the quartz, and I just dump my stuff. That would be great. And then a little parakeet, a little pterodactyl lives underneath it, and he picks out the stuff from the strainer.

It's somehow both modern yet somehow prehistoric at the same time. So, yeah, that's kind of intriguing. But, like, for me, like, I'd go gaga over just having, you know, ice and water in the door of my refrigerator, which, you know. Well, I've got the giant refrigerator for you, my friend. The thing is, I think I'm too, when we end up getting a new refrigerator, which will not be, I would like to state, from your front porch. Well, I've been talking to V. But I don't even think that we will get one that has an ice and water maker, because that means putting in, you know, physically putting in water lines into our kitchen.

But can I, may I, just humbly submit, the Bellingham house had that, and actually, you know what? it didn't even have yeah it did have water in the door i think somehow we involved carrie's brother taking two hours of an afternoon you know we'd hired him to run this water line to it it's a

game changer yeah i don't like it yeah it's not that big of a deal right it's not like hey i have to block off a month to have this construction on my house you just hire somebody

doesn't involve the foundation of the house it's like it would take the right person honestly under two hours to do it it'd probably cost you two hundred dollars of labor and parts and it would i think it's pretty it's pretty much as somebody who doesn't have it in their current apartment it is pretty um convenient to have for what that's worth but um the thing i want to say about about uh electric uh stovetops too is because this place that i'm working on doesn't have ready access to gas i am going to go with so becca's mom who had her kitchen redone at some point and has a very lovely like right out of better homes and gardens kind of just beautiful kitchen with a great island and everyone just comes and gathers around the island while she or becca cook incredible meals she has one of those induction cooktops and it is a marvel now it's i'm sure a lot fancier than the one in y'all's house oh we don't have an induction one

an induction one those don't even get hot to the hand right no no yes the problem no we just have like a shitty like flat top of a stovetop it's not induction that's a i don't know if i would want induction but that's a whole different i've never even seen that that fascinates me this you

get the special pans right yes i believe so now now wait like um i am now wondering if i overstated it by saying induction i need to try to find a picture of this i think it is induction um because i was marveling at it and i guess you do need a special kind of pan to activate it but it's pretty cool i have to say and the food that they cook there uh seems to coming be coming out great you know what i mean as far as i would also guess that some part of this also makes it slightly more reactive than the standard um kind of electric range or even what you're dealing with although i don't know if that's possible they may just have to do with you know like what thermal units and watts like if you heat up a piece of metal it can only cool down so quickly or if you heat up a whatever like the thing about the flame is it's on or it's less on and so you've change the heat immediately but if you're heating up something and then cooling it down that is going to change how kind of uh quickly you can change that scenario can i ask you a question

because i'm not 100 sure like i know that we don't have an induction stovetop we just have a glass top like you know electric stove um but the induction am i right that that's the type of thing that like the heat will only conduct between the the stovetop and

the proper cookware but like if you were to put your hand down on it you wouldn't burn your hand

am i right about that i think you're right about that um because that was one of the things it's built into the island this is at becca's mom's place it's built into the island so it's not like a stove like you're i'm presuming you have a like a stove where you would put your stuff you're baking and then on top of it is where this glass yeah it's right this is this is like in this kitchen island there is this thing that is black a big black square and i think it's like induction to where you can't you can't hurt yourself on it yeah kind of deal which is pretty slick that is

very that is very slick yeah and i yeah there's some somebody was explaining this to me i didn't even know i didn't know until a couple of years ago that these were different things you know like somebody explained it to me i was like oh i don't think i realized till you just said it on but yeah no i think my friend kent mentioned that to me i was like oh okay because he's talking about getting special pans i'm like i don't know what you're talking about and then he explained it's like it's about magnets and i famously i don't know how they work i don't know boy those

are some drops that have not i know made their way onto the show for a while get ready for a swear wow you found of all of the things that got lost to time you had that at the ready i've got yeah well it's a pretty specific search term yeah but um there's also that whole song was really uh was like well that's so this is weird what is going on with this there was also so that was that whole rap that they did and it was talking about like seagulls and stuff but then when i put seagull in golly do i have a lot of seagull related audio that cannot be from that icp song i have something called seagull mew seagull alarm seagull choke seagull copulation Should we listen to what Siegel copulation sounds like?

Sounds like this must have been a segment, yeah.

It's all Robert Siegel. That's the dark part. On Wednesdays, we talk about sports and the business of sports. Stefan Fatsis is here. Fatsis isn't still around, is he? Is he still doing that? I don't think he's doing regular hits on ATC, but that, I want to just explain, I mean, if you know, you know, but I want to just tell the listeners, this is the only podcast today that arrived at episode 3,701 that also just did a mashup of actual seagull copulation while re-enacting an All Things Considered intro from 2004.

I don't know why that just got me so hard. I said, I don't listen to All Things Considered hardly at all anymore. I'm just like not, if I'm listening to anything, I'm probably listening to a Mariners game when it's on or something along those lines. And, like, I miss it, actually. ATC is a great show, or certainly was. But, man, there's something about the Stephen Fats has dropped. Sports and the business of sports. Because that was, like, a regular.

I think it was, like, on Fridays. Yes. There used to be, I mean, whatever. God, we are just such stereotypes of old people who are, you know, nostalgic for just the thing that we remember being how it was. But that was a really, that was a sweet, sweet time in my life when it'd be like Fridays would be like EJ Dion and David Brooks coming on for the round table and whatever day it was, Stefan Fats is coming on to talk about sports and the business of sports. I just, I really, really loved all of that stuff. I was wondering about this. We should go to a break. We're almost at 40 minutes here and we haven't even gotten to my dopamine diet. But I was wondering that about you the other day, Andrew, because you are up on the news, like you know your stuff but you also don't strike me as somebody who's consuming a lot of like public radio anymore like morning edition or atc or kind of i'm curious what your news diet looks

like where are you getting your info from yeah honestly and i'm yeah i'm not as up as i used to be or should be really like i oh first thing i always do is i open up the seattle times in the morning like on my phone and kind of pick and choose there and then i i'm not even really getting news from Twitter that much anymore either like because so much of it especially during the Trump years was just like it was just like an echo chamber of awfulness you know whether it was the straight news or just a bunch of people all who I agree with just echoing the same outrage over and over not that they shouldn't be outraged but it just became oppressive so I kind of cleaned out a bunch of that stuff so yeah I'm mostly listening like I say especially now that it's baseball season like i feel like you can just constantly listen to the baseball games take up three and a half hours of listening right in their three hours or what have you and then if you listen to the pre-game and post-game and like the leaning into this the baseball i i'm not really answering your question but let me ask you you a question is there something no matter how big of a seahawks fan you are i hate football segments that are on right now when you're Thank you.

listening to sports radio maybe you don't listen to as much sports radio but like i just don't care and maybe i'm a bad seahawks fan but it's like i only i only want to hear the same stuff about baseball even if you're repeating it like i just don't want to turn on the radio in the middle of a sunny day in june and hear you talking about otas for me i don't listen to any sports radio

right now what i listen to is public radio until it i'm overwhelmed with the drum beat of intense news and then i switched to the stern show um because maybe it's coctober and uh you know we also need that in our life sure yeah but um it's like october in june yes it really is but um uh so i don't listen to a lot of sports radio but i will tell you this were the if the seahawks were coming off of a super bowl victory and they were only real they were they were only adding to their powers like let's say they went out let's just imagine a some real russ in the high castle kind of counterfactual history the Seahawks won the Super Bowl last year they didn't trade Russell Wilson and in fact they're adding Cooper Cup because the Los Angeles Rams are falling apart after you know after another lackluster year so now if we if the Seahawks seemed really good and if they were adding really good players I would personally totally be there yeah for OTA talk it's that they're not going to be great this year and how drew lock actually i do find the question of how drew lock looked in practice kind of interesting but it's i think i'm just generally um bummed about the seahawks prospects for the next couple of seasons and so that's why that would not be interesting to me were they promising i think i would have more of an appetite for it

yeah you know and that's probably part of it too the fact that i'm you know just really mad at the browns but also like really like i almost got emotional the other night i was probably drunk um but like thinking about my relationship with the browns and like i was just thinking about our goddamn sound machine right like the browns have an appearance on the sound machine and like i don't want the browns to be that big of a part of my personality you know what i mean i didn't see it that way but like sorry to totally shift the conversation here but like the truth is you're right like there's so much going on with the browns right now and they're building such an amazing team with one notably terrible person um but like if i weren't mad at them and into it i would probably be more interested in what's going on in this football season because they're building towards something so you're right it might have something to do with just like where the seahawks are right now and honestly even though i don't advocate for this and now we're getting a little bit into sports talk even though i don't advocate for this because i don't think it's the best move for the team if they did end up bringing baker mayfield formerly of the browns and the last quarterback who's like playing this game of musical chairs but never found a seat like if he ends up coming to seattle which i think it's not off the table i think i wouldn't bet on that happening but it could happen i would love that i think that i would get so much more into the narrative again because then it really would be like oh wow the seahawks with my old quarterback now i want them to just destroy everything and leave the Browns burning, you know? It'd be like, oh, Theon Greyjoy is actually now trying to be good again.

Oh, my God. I wonder if Baker would like or loathe that embarrassing. It's not wrong. Like, think about how he was playing, like, all the injured last year with body parts hanging off of him.

And, like, not to say that, like, Baker Mayfield was, for a period, evil. But, you know, that redemption narrative is very powerful. somebody has got to make and i'm not putting this on our listeners you got enough to do but i give it 10 minutes before this hits the internet before whatever you're about to say

has actually been executed somebody has got to make a mashup of baker mayfield as reek that is like so weirdly a perfect analogy

oh see you never know what's going to get us to the one the one listenable part of any particular episode and that turns out apparently was it so all right let's take that quick break and then when we come back uh we will uh talk dopamine in a moment here on tvtl we was hoping for some

razzle dazzle razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your mark get set get set now ready ready go everybody razzle dazzle we've got another dazzling donor to thank

from Last Go Round. This is Amy Shepard. Long time friend of the show. Heck yeah. From Memphis, Tennessee. Good old Amy. We love Amy.

Can I tell you a little story? Before we give Amy all the spotlight, come on. She only dedicated like half of her annual income to TBTL. Can I tell you how this one got long?

lost or more importantly what I learned about this dazzling donor message that slipped through the cracks today because Amy emailed and said hey I never heard my message I'm like gosh I remember seeing your your message in there but I keep this document in Google Docs where I'll like kind of take the original form and then kind of edit it and put it in broadcast shape for us right and for some reason Amy's message was missing from our doc but I was talking with our friend John he's like i know it was in the original i like me too so do you know how on google docs you can go back and look at your version history like going back to the very beginning of the document i have this

document i want to um say this in a way that doesn't sound dismissive or mean but do you realize how ludicrous the question you just asked me oh i thought you were just going to totally dunk on me for even doing this to amy's message which i apologize no i'm saying like i find it really heartwarming that you think I would know how to do whatever that is you just said in Google Docs. You can go back. I can't even get into most Google Docs. I'm usually like an anonymous chupacabra hiding in the background with zero edit access. That's my profile in most

Google Docs. Well, I'm embarrassed because this is kind of a boring story that I'm interrupting Amy's message for. But basically, yeah, if you and I started a Google Doc right now and then we worked on it for a few days, we could go back and kind of look at every single edit that was ever made but what we're dealing with with my dazzling donor doc is a huge document that's like 90 pages long and goes back to the very first dazzling donor message we read so what i did today in trying to figure out why i accidentally deleted amy's message i don't know why i think it was just a copy and paste error but i can tell you that it happened exactly sometime between 10 49 9 a.m. and 1252 p.m. on March 18th. That is when, that is specifically in that two-and-a-half-hour period, that is when this went missing. So my apologies, Amy.

But, okay, so you know when it went missing, but it disappeared from the dock then, or what?

Yeah, so I know it was just a mistake on my part because the way these come in, they're formatted terribly. They're like in a table or something. that is it's just it's hard to explain but it's just like formatted in this way that is very unwieldy and so what i do is i take each one and i copy it and then i paste it into a different part of the document i basically just move everything from the bottom up to the top and i and i delete the other one and somehow in all of this copying and pasting and arranging and formatting and editing i cut hers but i never pasted it again if that makes sense but you were

able to go back and see where the within like a three hour window when the mistake was made exactly from one place but it was never pasted to another exactly so on march 18th my fat thing

is it fascinating i apologize i'm interested in this is basically i mean are we talking about the blockchain now is this how the blockchain works exactly there's accountability but amy my apologies for that and old andrew on march 18th apologizes too absolutely we love amy we

We love Amy's long, long, long time support of the program and long time work as the person behind the Earbuds and Earworms podcast, which Amy's been doing for a long time. Although she mentions we're currently on hiatus, so please check the archives. I bet you if enough people went and listened to Earbuds and Earworms and the numbers shot up like a rocket, might get Amy back in the game of getting off of hiatus. I'd also like to use this space to request folks to donate to their local nonprofit adult hospital. Children's hospitals tend to get the majority of hospital-related donations. Kids are much cuter in general than adults. No shade. But the past two years have truly strained our local adult hospitals to the max. So toss a coin to your local one. That's a really interesting idea, Andrew. I hadn't thought of that. I mean, obviously, children who are suffering tough medical circumstances, that's such a heartbreaking thing, and that's something that's obviously very worthwhile as well. But as I think about it, all of the campaigns are around raising money for those particular hospitals, which, again, are very deserving of support. But you don't see as many for adult hospitals because it's like somebody who's, you know, my age and dealing with a health issue, but something that they're not probably able to pay for or maybe the care isn't what it could be because of lack of resource at the hospital. It's not as convenient or as heart tugging of a narrative. Yeah. You don't think that Russell Wilson is going to appear at your bedside, Luke? well um not after uh the counterfactual history that i was spitting right before the show uh we never we really did not follow through on our uh attempt to sorry about the cat by the way i don't know if you can hear in the background what's going on in my apartment right now is there are like I noticed that the other day sorry Amy I'll get back to this and and well Amy says no mountain too tall and good luck to all get your boosters y'all oh that's cute that's very Memphis yeah no mountain too tall and good luck to y'all I mean good luck to all get your

boosters y'all yeah I like that also probably Amy sent this in during a time when boosters were maybe even a little bit newer so again my apologies back to probably hey bubbles yeah what's going on

bubbles bubbles is really destroying your studio no she's not she's not even in here she's down the hall but the problem is my um i don't know what's going i think there's just like annual inspections of everyone's apartment which sounds sinister but it's actually not it's just like you know they want to make sure everything is working yeah um and uh although maybe it is sinister maybe it's like they want to make sure i don't have a grow operation in here i already had mine and it was literally so fast i opened the door like i said does everything work And then I said, yep. And then he said, okay. But I noticed the other day when I walked out in my hallway that not my apartment, but a lot of the other apartments had a little piece of paper slipped in their kind of mailboxy little mail holder thing. And my guess is that those are folks that are just getting their annual inspection because they haven't had theirs yet. So the fine folks from the maintenance department here in this building were knocking on my immediate, the people with the security camera.

Oh, yeah.

were knocking on their door and are maybe even still standing out there but it has just put the cat in a full-on state oh that's interesting at the front door meowing under the door to try to get uh attention from uh from those folks and then i'm over here i'm down the hall and i'm in this room but of course i also have to keep the sliding door slightly open to the studio because the cat also doesn't like it when that door is closed no cats don't like a closed door yeah do not like a closed her i will say this about bubbles and for as much hey leave my foot alone buddy for um for as wild as she can be at times the one thing that i feel extremely grateful about her although she did destroy my headphone cable so andrew just let the listeners in to my personal pain today i'm doing this whole show only hearing about half of what's going on because one of my headphones is dead why like because she loves to chew on this headphone cable when i'm not here i'll come back sometimes and the headphones will be on the ground because there's a very long cord for them so I can wander around the room but she also likes to chew on it but the thing that I feel grateful about with her is that she is totally okay with me shutting my bedroom door both doors the door from the bathroom and the main bedroom door and just like doing like getting like sitting literally sitting on my bed with my laptop and working or sitting on my bed and looking at TikTok and hiding from her if I need like a half hour break from her I can go in my bedroom I can shut the doors and she just she'll me out like two times and then she'll just go on with her life so that is very lucky yeah because if her if her personality was to stand there outside that door endlessly meowing it would i would be stressing about yeah that is a very stressful sound too i have a total so we have a we have a system me and her it's like i hang out with her and then at some point if she just is being extremely wild or not letting me type or whatever i'm just like okay i'm having some uh me time and then i just go and then i like shut the door and then she just basically wanders around goes and lies on the couch like she's very good at recognizing that for what it is so for what it is so i will take that as a win can i just clarify one thing though

because i didn't realize you're only hearing about half of the show um if you heard me go on like a long story that sounded uninteresting about google docs and the way they work um There was a bunch of really interesting stuff in there. My guess is you might have only heard the boring half, but you need to hear both halves to understand why that was a fascinating story. So maybe go back later with other headphones.

So it was actually twice as long as that, but twice as interesting. But just fascinating, like edge of your seat radio. Interesting. Got it. Okay. The stuff that Amy's paying for. Yes, exactly.

All the way from Memphis, Tennessee. Get your boosters, y'all.

Hello and welcome to Top Story. How to Feel Nothing Now in Order to Feel More Later. It was a piece by Nellie Bowles. And it was sort of profiling these three startup guys in San Francisco who would do...

Do this dopamine fast every, I don't know, few months where, and these seem like the same kind of guys, peace and love, but they seem like the same kind of guys who probably, a profile was written about similar dudes who were only eating that, you know, soylent like food. Like there's a certain kind of like hackathon Silicon Valley dude who's just kind of interested in, I mean, Jack Dorsey strikes me as one of these people, one of the co-founders of Twitter. He's very into intermittent fasting and just, I don't know, pushing the limits of the human existence. It's like they've made a bunch of money and they've mastered the art of crypto and now they're trying to figure out how do I biohack myself, right? So I don't know if I find these guys to be the totally most sympathetic people to be profiled. But basically what these three roommates would do every so often because they worked in these very high stress startup type deals was to do a dopamine fast where they basically get up in the morning and they do not engage in any social media. They, of course, don't drink any alcohol. They don't have any sex or pleasure themselves. One of the guys says he was out on a walk And ran into an old friend And his brain started flooding with dopamine And he had to say to the old friend I'm sorry, I'm on a dopamine fast I can't talk to you

Oh, come on You know

I wanted to be into this But that's bullshit That's life

That's natural life Well, exactly Yeah, okay, sorry to interrupt

So I'm not proposing for myself or anyone else that That's why I'm saying that strikes me as kind of silly Yeah But what I do think what i feel like i want to try to do is is kind of basically i think what happens is i go through these cycles where i get very into i start to really take what i'm going to call dopamine shortcuts so what releases dopamine in our brain which is obviously a chemical that makes us feel good and happy you know um love makes it releases that chemical um post going on a some exercise does that eat having a delicious bite of food does that um there's a lot of kind of parts of normal life that release that and they release it at a certain rate and a certain amount but then things like slot machines and shots of whiskey and likes on twitter those also release dopamine but they release a lot of it and they release it very quickly and you get to that very quickly and i feel like i have cycled in the last i don't know six months into taking too many dopamine shortcuts and i feel like the and i'm jumping between real science and my own just theorizing here but like um i feel like what happens is when i fall into too many patterns of just constantly getting taking dopamine shortcuts when i have to take the long way for some dopamine it feels like forever like i told you that i met my dad out at this house um yesterday or two days ago and we were supposed to meet at three o'clock but my dad was dropping my mom off at the airport because my mom was flying to philly because she's never not flying to philly and my mom lists her residency as an airplane on the way to philly but um so the timing was such that he basically dropped my mom off and then i wasn't able to meet him until like three in the afternoon but he just like texts me i'm here and it's like 120 and he doesn't have a key to this house he doesn't have a i mean he has a smartphone but i don't think he's like he's not on there looking at you know tick tock or anything he's just sitting in his truck and i was like i felt immediately terrible because i was like i had told him we were going to meet at three but he just you know he's from a different generation and when he dropped my mom off he didn't like do a hot lap or go to a we work space or like go do he didn't he didn't use an app to find where someone was doing a boot camp in alki and do it you know what i mean like he just was like okay i dropped my wife off at the airport and the next thing i'm doing is going to meet my son at this place and so he drove to that place and got there an hour and a half early and i'm like i'm doing live wire but i'm texting i'm like okay i'll i'll see you through it he's like no problem and i get up there and he's just sitting there and he's totally fine and he's just been like kind of taking a look at the outside of the

house that's exactly what i was gonna say he probably wandered around the property probably kicked some stumps probably thought about his next um lord of the rings bumper sticker i love

this yeah yeah and just uh like he just is like calmly and in an unperturbed unhurried un um almost like the word i'm looking for is desperate fashion was just being there for an hour and a half and it was no problem for him and like to me the idea of being somewhere i don't being somewhere an hour and a half early without all of my distractions is would be so hard for me right now and it's because my dad I'm sure my it was a nice day and there's a pretty view my dad was probably getting a shit ton of dopamine out of just sitting there and just being and like I feel like I have had that ability at times in my life and I have also I it's like a muscle or it's like anything it's like you build it up or you kind of lose it at times and I feel like I've kind of lost it a bit of late and I want to try to get it back and I feel like the way for me to do is not a dopamine fast which seems nuts but I want to try to cut back on the things that are shortcuts and basically force myself to be bored more and to have like a little less stimulation in my life so that my kind of levels reset a bit so that normal stuff feels more fun to me and I don't have to just go right to the thing that's just the main lining and the most synthetic experience of getting the good feelings.

This is very specific and not to your broader point, but just one thing I was sort of thinking about, you sort of introduced this topic the other day or teased it and i didn't really know the details of it but from a digital perspective you mentioned that like these fellas that were profiled like were fasting from social media and i most think like social media brings various aspects of the experience to me and not all of it is dopamine some of it is just like i'm reading other people's stuff that's not usually a dopamine thing it's like the i've put something out there how are people reacting to it and i might misunderstand I might not be correct 100% here on this but it's just how I think about it because like I don't think that I have necessarily like a bad relationship with like oh I certainly don't but like with Twitter really I spend more time on Instagram anyway I think I'm maybe more of a visual person so I like to flip through and I follow all kinds of stuff it's not all just like fancy photographers or whatever I follow all kinds of stuff on Instagram and I just will kind of flip through it. That's probably closer to my Twitter experience than yours. But it's those days where I don't know, I'll go like two or three weeks without posting something and then I'll post one photo or a collection of photos. And then it's like the dopamine comes when throughout the day I pick up my phone and says, you have this number of likes, you know what I mean? And it's like that's the aspect that may be one. And again, I'm trying to say this in a way because I don't have any advice for you or really I don't even really kind of want to weigh in because this is everybody's personal journey. But I am fascinated by it. And even for me in a certain way, it's like, oh, yeah, that's a I think I'm much more like your dad than you are, clearly, which sometimes also, by the way, makes me feel bad, too. I feel like I should be doing more with my life. But but also sometimes I just like people watching, you know, like I've told you before that sometimes we live in a world where if I'm outside standing and I'm not smoking a cigarette because I don't smoke anymore and I'm not looking at my phone. i feel like i'm committing some sort of a crime i feel like a creep or something it's like why is that guy standing there not looking at his phone he's just looking at people but like um there is something kind of nice about being able to do that like just keep your phone in your pocket

every now and then yeah i think that i'm sure for me it probably tracks well it's hard to know does it am i doing it a lot because i'm feeling depressed or am i depressed because i'm doing it a lot you know like i don't feel i i think that to the degree that i have probably some low level depression it's pretty low and pretty in the back of my mind like i feel really fortunate that i'm not somebody who sort of struggles typically to go out and engage with the world um etc or whatever the kind of more classic hallmarks of somebody who's dealing with a depression but i do know that i will cycle into these modes where i just feels like i'm mostly just i'm i'm kind of altering my kind of mental and emotional state a lot with and it doesn't have to just be gambling or drinking all of those tend to be you know kind of things that pop and the sports you know my my draft kings thing that now that's not the thing about draft kings that's interesting who it's funny i'm doing ads for them even though i we had a conversation where i was like let's not do ads nobody was you know pushing it hardcore but it's funny that i talk about them so much but i also wouldn't do ads for them now it's not a lot of money most of the time we're talking five dollars or something but there's definitely a point in my day sometimes where i'm thinking you know what would be really fun would be to have a to have some excitement extra excitement around this thing now you know me andrew let's just leave the gambling let's leave the alcohol let's leave everything out of it i'm already going to feel too much about this baseball game i am not lacking like if you know when when julio rodriguez hits a home run you know right after the bench is clear against the houston astros i'll tell you what my brain is just i mean it's the it's the goddamn hoover dam of dopamine being released into my brain so i don't need to also have a weird prop bet riding on it but i think there's something that goes on for me emotionally where i'm like boy that's gonna if i have a funky bet on this game and then they do it or i jump in when they're losing and then they win. so it's like that's gonna be so great but it's like there's also a version of me that likes that used to like listen to the baseball game on the radio while mowing my lawn and that was it that was the extent of the experience or maybe was sitting in a chair after mowing my lawn listening to the baseball game kind of just staring out at the nice tidy lawn right that is also that can be enough like to me that's a good that feels for me and i'm not talking about anybody else that feels for me like a good it's a saturday you put in some hard work you get everything nice and tidy and then you kind of relax and then take it all in and enjoy it and maybe listen to your baseball game that feels like that's healthy for me uh having seven bets riding on the game while i'm like double fisting jameson and like maniacally texting the criminals less healthy way to consume

that baseball game if it's something that's happening on the frequent you know so i guess my point is i'm not i'm certainly not trying to go back to like not doing anything pleasurable but i think i'm i want to try to get back to doing the things that are pleasurable in a way that doesn't leave it so that when that's not happening i just feel like completely untethered or like what am i going to do with myself and i do think that this project at this house that i have is going to be a i hope a big help because there's a lot of tedium involved with what i'm kind of getting into there's a lot of just like and i was thinking about this the other day i felt very emotionally centered and satisfied when we were redoing that house in bellingham even though it was really stressful because there's a lot of money at play and there's a lot of decisions to be made and i was in a marriage that had certainly its ups and downs we're currently on kind of a

down i think called legally divorced the also and just the chaos of that too although you are not somebody who um I think is is as uncomfortable in a chaotic situation as I am like for me like when we start one of our little projects like I'm very much into like okay well let's contain this project let's get these projects done and then do this one and for a while I think I had some pretty high stress levels here at the new house because it sort of felt like I was con there was never a corner to go back to it sort of felt like there were and this sounds like a small thing and I said this to Genevieve and I don't mean it like I mean Genevieve is I mean just taking care of so much stuff around this house like i looked around the other day i'm just like she bought that chair and problem solved the leg problem on that she hung that she hung that like i'd still be surrounded by boxes if it weren't for genevieve um but there was like a period where it sort of felt like every i was living in a rolling project sort of you know what i mean every surface had some sort of a toolbox on it that's not true but it's just how it felt you know and it just sort of and i didn't and like now it's like perfect like i love like we have little projects that are going on but they're contained i spent wednesday or today's wednesday i spent monday um in my backyard like mowing and then just like puttering i mean i literally at the end of the day like the feeling that i had the feeling that you're describing luke after a long day of like mowing the lawn listening to the game and then you just get to a point where you're just sort of beat but you're just sort of walking around the house just like picking a little weed here picking the weed they're just like doing the rounds like a dad like i had strong dad energy It was great. I was going to ask you, all of that is to say, I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who is pretty much against the idea of changing a environment means changing yourself or saying like everything is going to be better when I move here or do this or I'm going to make this change and I'm going to be a different kind of person. And like, I don't put a lot of stock in that. I think that that can help in some cases, but I think it's dangerous to put too much stock in it. Having said all of that, I did want to ask you about this very personal about you've been living in apartments like you haven't done in a really long time, but you've been doing that for about two years now. Is that about right? Like you've been living in the city and living in apartments that I envy, you know, like or certainly at a certain time in my life, that would have been perfect for me. But you don't have any of those trappings of like having a home where you can kind of, like I say, jump in your pool or mow the lawn or just sort of literally kick a stump. Like, do you think that that is part of it as well, along with a whole bunch of other stuff in your life?

I think it is. And I know what you mean. I'm definitely more given to this thinking, you know, in the words of Jeff Goldblum, change your apartment, change your world. Right. Like I I tend to think, oh, if I if I move to this place or if I'm living in this kind of a thing or whatever, I will be or if I'm training for this 100 mile race, I'll be a different person. And really, it's you know, you're going to a person is going to be who they are wherever they're sort of at. But I do think also my external circumstances do have an impact on kind of how I tend to behave and feel and think. And like, I think living in apartments in the densely packed urban core, unsupervised. I mean, part of why I got this.

That was because I was like, I need to have another alive thing in this apartment that I'm responsible for that's, like, something I got to come home for and something I got to, like, think about and account for and make plans around. You know what I mean? Stuff like that. Like, that's kind of good for me. And living just within walking distance of all kinds of different places with, you know, most of the time not having to really get up super early the next day if you don't consider seven super early or whatever. It's like I don't think all of that is necessarily the best thing for me just and I do think that like I was starting to say that I think when when we were redoing that house in Bellingham, I felt really again, there was a lot of stress around it, but I felt on some level very emotionally balanced because I would get up in the morning. I would do the show with you, and then I would just spend the rest of the day tearing down some wall somewhere and then just carrying, like, chunks of sheetrock out to a dumpster. Like, there's something, I think, for me that's very grounding and good for me to just be doing sort of a physical task every day, which is funny because I've spent my whole career avoiding. I mean, I really have the soft, soft hands of a podcaster. Like trading places.

You're like Dan Aykroyd in trading places.

Exactly. And that's how they'll know. But like I so again, I don't think that doing this remodeling project I keep talking about now is going to change who I am. But I do think it's good for me to have something that I have to do that is on one level, you would say boring. But on me, I think for me, I think kind of mentally therapeutic and kind of like I think that's going to be sort of good for me. And even just being up there the last few days because it's, like, a very pretty environment and just, like, sitting. I have one—the only thing associated with this house is one chair. I have one outside chair that I got from Bellingham that I brought down with me.

One of your camping chairs or, like, something more substantial?

No, it's a camp—it's, like, a—it's made by a company called La Fuma, and it's kind of a designy, like, little lounge chair that you would have maybe on a patio or by a swimming pool. But it's it's it's just it's light and it's kind of mesh. So it's not anything really substantial. But I have that chair. And what I've been doing when I go up there is when I'm done with whatever little thing I'm trying to install or get set up or meet whoever I meet with. I just sit in that chair and I stare at the river and I don't have my phone out and I don't even I'm not even listening to music. I'm just staring. and i swear to you doing that for 45 minutes a day the last two days has emotionally regulated me in a way that i haven't felt in a while because even the running the running feels good when i'm done with it and the act of running is feels healthy to me but it's not it's like when i was living in bellingham and i would take the dog on a really long walk in the woods most days that was also very emotionally regulating for me there's something about being in the woods and just the sounds i mean i'm not saying anything that people don't know but there's something about being in the woods or maybe being near the ocean being really sort of surrounded by nature and those rhythms and the sounds and the smells and the vibe of it that just causes you

know that is um we're just that was so such good timing i mean that is andrew

those are the guys that are at the house to mow the lawn trying to facetime me to talk to me about

the lawn oh i hope there's no issue with the septic tank they called right in the middle of your henry david thoreau moment i mean that could not that could not andrew have been more perfectly

timed to point out the contradictions in my life me talking to you about my just communing with nature and then also have because i don't have a lawnmower yet to mow the lawn at this place and the lawn is like it's like a jungle now that's that's my dude juan up there trying to facetime me probably to say hey do you want this part mode or not like so there you go this is the this is the complexity of life in 2022 i guess is trying to get away from all of this but then also wanting the lawn to be mowed like i don't want it to be completely out of control so i got to get a guy to do this before i get the you know it's all a thing um yeah and also are you looking

forward to mowing your own lawn once you're up there as well i mean that is absolutely that's become like my favorite god i understand i'm not trying to very excited about that but it's

definitely something that is going to well where it was where it's at right now it was so long and wild that it was like it could not be tamed by yeah by a by a mere a mere mortal like myself yeah you need like a bush trimmer or whatever. Some kind of big semi-industrial equipment so I'm going to have them knock it down and then once it's

manageable, then I'm going to handle it from here. Also, because it ain't cheap to get your lawnmower. And I was doing the math. I was like, if I do this 10 more times, I could just buy a

riding lawnmower or buy a house with a lawn where the grass never grows. This is a corny thing to say. But again, like I don't have any regret about my journey to get where I got. Like I've loved living in apartments and I loved our last apartment. And, you know, every now and then I will pull up with my car with a few grocery bags in it and pull up right outside my front door and walk in and i do think like my god i loved our old apartment but jesus every day coming home from the grocery store was like i had to park across the street cross two lanes of car traffic and a bike lane um you know frogger my way across the street deliver the groceries i could carry in one load go back unload some more then park my car around the block and there are so many things i do love about our our new house experience even though i do i have loved the places i've lived before but I had a moment that seems relevant to this conversation like I think it was yeah Monday I spent the afternoon and evening kind of working in the yard and again to diminishing returns like I was mowing the lawn then I just started to get mad at all the dandelions so then I just started pulling the dandelions like out of my actual lawn not even out of the beds or whatever just like I was like you don't belong here and you know it and they're getting out of hand and those roots go super super deep but the the it had been raining so it's like the perfect day to like really go dandelion hunting and later on that day like you know did i get much done it was just like puttering and whatever but it felt satisfying i'm listening to the ball game i think that was one that the mariners won um but then later on that day i was washing my hands and like i was going to take a shower anyway but i was washing the dirt off of my hands i'm just like i love this i just love washing the dirt off of my hands after like basically let's just call it what it is playing outside for five hours you know what i mean right and i think again i i think that

that's kind of that supports this idea that while we can't change who we are fundamentally by just moving by up and moving locations i do think locations begin to seep into how we live and then sort of how we feel and what we're doing you know because and again i don't want to like rope you into my own whateverness but like a day that you're playing in the dirt at your house might have been a day that you if you got your work done toddled up to teddies yes and and that's not making any value judgments about how you spend your time but those are you didn't have a yard to do this in before and so you know if if two days out of the week you're doing that instead of teddies that's a different lifestyle for you you know so i do think that it's it would be overstating it to say that it can fix everything but i think it would be not giving it enough credit to say it

has no impact yeah definitely although i do feel i i have leaned even more into my anti-socialness i realize like there's so many people that i have not seen you're gonna say semitism save that for our other podcast um but uh yeah no it's just it is like i i don't feel guilty about not going to teddies but there are people like my friend chris who i kind of met there and that was kind of the backbone of our relationship and like i have not been in touch with chris since he gave me a plant as a housewarming gift you know what i mean it's like i need to also not just spend my time in fact i got a notification while i was with my dirty hands on monday all of sudden my phone said meet john i was supposed to meet my friend john from kow to catch up over some beers i had totally forgotten it was already a half hour after the time we were supposed to meet And I texted him, I'm like, dude, I made these plans before the TBTL-a-thon. Are you waiting for me somewhere? He's like, no, I'm sick. I forgot about it, too. So I was very glad. Oh, good.

That's the perfect crime. That was almost the perfect crime. But the perfecter crime was you text him and you go like, are we still meeting? Dude, where are you? Don't even go that far. Just because you got to leave it vague. Andrew, listen, from a professional scoundrel, I will walk you through this. you you have to say are we still meeting because you now have you can you can play that either way afterwards you're not saying where because where are you he's like i'm here where are you now you're screwed but are we still meeting is vague enough that then he goes oh my god i totally forgot i'm so sorry beers on me next time and you're like then you're like free beer suck it john o'brien just wait you first of all you got to wait like about 10 minutes and then let him just absolutely twist in the wind and then you go like okay cool man hey well yeah well definitely soon and then it's just like and then you just mentally destroy him just mentally destroy i'm fun to be friends with it sounds great also i think you know

john he's just like the sweetest guy in the world i love the idea of just like me taking up just mental emotional war on him i know right of all the people i will tell you my dude juan and eddie

They're sending me. They're sending me.

phone videos of the work they did getting the yard under control and everything looks fine. Now I'm sad I have to go to Chicago tonight, Andrew. I don't want to go to Chicago.

I want to go sit in your chair.

I want to go sit in my chair in my yard that now just probably smells like fresh cut grass. I want to listen to some day baseball, but you know. You got time. Summer's young. That's right. Thank you.

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 rightily some emails or v-mails and i hope this

audio level is okay again andrew i can only hear out of one ear so that i can hear you but the

music is just faintly in my i would say pull the music down a tiny bit although i always tend to err on the side of caution with that stuff anyway but um you know what i'm looking for here luke um and i don't have it in front of me but i saw that you had put this on the show sheet earlier in the week an email that we got from our friend listener lee who is our um cascadia cycling cycling correspondent but he was also he's become my um i think home improvement guide uh correspondent guy as well he's been emailing me with all kinds of advice uh much of which i forward on to genevieve as well and we found it very helpful but i don't have the email in front of me so i will just paraphrase here maybe you can find it but I mentioned to you that I went to the dump last week up in Shoreline right which is the closest transfer station to my house and you know you go there and recycling and yard waste compost that's all free but I also had like a bunch of old fence that I needed to throw away and just like a whole bunch of just like junk that couldn't be recycled so I paid like the $28 flat fee up into like a million pounds or whatever it is and dumped my stuff off there and it was very satisfying. Now, I had been on my phone kind of quickly scanning a few times in the weeks leading up to this dump run. I don't like the phrase dump run. To make sure that they could take the things that I wanted to throw away, right? Like, do you have a place where I can put a couple of empty but used paint cans, right? Because that's hazardous waste. And so I'd scanned their website a couple of times And I did see that this dump is for residents of King County only And you might have to show proof of residency So I was like all ready for that And that sounded good to me I had my ID I have the email here by the way Okay good Any dazzling deets Yeah maybe you can fill in But I'll just finish my thought Which is like when I showed up at the dump The guy said I said to him hey do you need my ID And this is kind of critical I said do you need my ID And he said no just give me your zip code And I gave him my zip code and he said okay great and he didn't check my ID or anything and then he gave me a little sticker and he said here put this in the window that way we don't have to ask you every time if you put it right there in your little corner window we love that we can see it and we can just like let you drive right in I'm like okay that sounds great so I got the little sticker and I told Genevieve about it like a little pass well maybe this is where you can read Lee's letter it turns out it's a really good thing I didn't show him my ID with my old address on it because it turns out my zip code

was the key here hmm so in other words okay i may have misread this email in the first place so you were allowed to use this no i thought i was here i'll just i'll skip to the part

the thing is i didn't look closely at the website it's for residents of king county except people who live in seattle and so my zip code that i live in now covers seattle and parts of king county outside of seattle got you so my id would have put me back in my old apartment and he would

have said get out of here you so you gave him what was effectively a shoreline zip code because you live north enough that it covers both but had apparently but i just find it strange that this so this is that dump is only for people who live north of 145th i think it's anybody in king county

except for seattle and one other big municipality in king county because i think that seattle has its own facilities and this is a king county operated thing so they're like if you're one of those seattleites you got your own transfer stations use those if you're anywhere else in

king county then we're for you right but i say 145th because that's the boundary right of seattle and shoreline so yeah you could come up from kent but right like why would you but it's basically that's for the folks i had no idea they had such tight rules and obviously they aren't that tight because, like, the guy just said zip code. So just memorize that zip code, I guess. Well, it's my zip code. Yeah, I wasn't lying.

Yeah, so anyway, but I'm so glad he didn't look at my ID because my ID would have been my old address. So now Lee was saying hang on to that sticker because you got away with the past one. Yeah, do you have a sticker?

That's your window to dump runs.

Yeah, he gave me a little sticker. It's in the car right now.

Okay, good. Well, that's gold.

now otherwise you have to go over to wallingford the other thing i'm sorry if i'm just like hijacking your um your observations here in your life because i have the email lee says i've also been hollered at by the watchman of the recycle area i made the mistake of placing styrofoam that still had tape on the styrofoam bag and he pulled it out and placed it back in the bed of my truck and said clean styrofoam only wow like that's pretty i mean look i'm glad that it's being taken seriously um because clearly that will present an issue down the road and as far as the processing of this styrofoam but man it just it does feel i like in my little apartment building on here on the floor of the apartment building on there is a room it's the where the garbage chute is and Where there's some recycling bins And I swear every time I go in there I stare at the list of what can and cannot go In what area Like it's the first time Like I just am like Samantha Mortensen in What's the future crimes movie That Tom Cruise is in Where he's Oh right where he waves his hands around It's Minority Report maybe Yes it is Andrew It's an Andrew W Wednesday I am like you know how those people Or those precogs or whatever are just in a swimming pool floating in amniotic fluid, seeing pre-crimes, every time I look at the list of what goes where, it's like I'm Samantha Mortensen and they just pulled me out of that swimming pool. It is completely new information. I am totally mystified. So I guess my point is, yes, it's good that we have rules and it's good that people are careful, but I am always confused by those rules. And if I were to be throwing some styrofoam away at the dump and it had a sticker on it And the guy was like, no stickers. I'd be like, do you see the person throwing out a freezer that had been turned into a kegerator that was later used for cold fusion over there? Do you see that? Is that good? Where's that going? Right. Right. I feel like so much stuff at the dump, it's like that is just absolutely destroying our world. I don't know where they're putting that. I don't know how deep the hole is. They have to dig to bury that. but my thought would be the sticker on the styrofoam is not the biggest threat to our world at this

dump yeah they do make it and i was thinking about this on the way to the dump because again i looked at the website a bunch and it's like it's all the information's there but it's not super clear and it's like well can you take this type of thing can you not take this type of thing and it's like they've and and with the curbside pickup as well in the city and again i know it all comes from good intentions and you use that drop i think today social engineering like that's what it is When I had to downsize to this smaller garbage can that we have now for curbside pickup, I was like, there's no way this will hold all my trash. But now I'm so meticulous about what I'm throwing away, when I'm throwing it away, if I'm putting it in a garbage bag, which takes up more space because there's a bunch of unused air in there versus just dumping my trash directly in my bin. And, like, they've social engineered me to probably be a more responsible discarder, right? But it can get to a point where you feel like, I don't know, this is so confusing and so difficult to do that you could almost start being less careful. Like, is this recycling? I don't know. But if it's, well, maybe I'll err on the side of throwing it in the recycling bin because I don't have any room in my garbage bin, which is that's not good either.

I also think that there is just maybe one way to approach this would be to do some more public information campaigns about what actually happens to this stuff because what I don't understand is – part of the problem for me is I do not understand what the actual recycling process looks like for these products after they leave my life. In other words, if a pizza box that has grease that is non-recyclable, what would happen if that was in with the clean cardboard? Where does that oil do? Also, what happens to these plastic bottles? Do they get melted down? How is it that plastic and aluminum can go in the same thing? Those seem like natural enemies. Like, I don't, I just, I feel like a bunch of interesting short films, Mr. Rogers style, about like, here's the conveyor belt where all of this plastic is going. And here's the person who's pulling out X, Y, and Z, and this is why that can't be in there. Like, I just, it's such a black box for me of, like, I have this stuff. They're telling me how to sort it. I'm really trying to do my best based on the rules. And then it's gone, and I don't know what the, do they put it on a rocket? Do they fly it to space? Does it go to China? Is it on a barge? You know, because there was that story a few years ago that was quite dispiriting that was like China had stopped taking our shit, literally and figuratively. So now a lot of the stuff that we're meticulously sorting is actually just going to the landfill anyway because we can't send it abroad. It's like that story, I mean, I'm all about transparency and sunlight, but boy, that story didn't do me any favors in terms of my commitment. If I'm holding a plastic cap from a Diet Pepsi bottle and I'm staring at different things and I'm like, you know, throw it in the bottom of the garbage can. I mean, you know what I mean? I feel like if I understood more what the process was, which I guess I could just educate myself on it. But if I understood the process more.

Yeah, no, I'm with you. And there is a role for public information on that stuff. I mean, an actual like not just information, but actual like I mean, propaganda has a negative connotation to it, but it shouldn't always have a negative connotation to it. Like just like, you know, I guess a type of advocacy through information and saying, listen, this is what it is. This is why it's important. And this is how you do it, I think. And also in this day and age, like you can make that stuff so consumable on social media.

I mean, look, I was watching PSAs about don't drown your food Saturday mornings. like at some point the biggest threat to america was putting too much condiment on your carrot or french fries is what's the what's the recycling version of that but again the one that's an explainer that just goes like okay look like somebody doing a really simple breakdown look there are three kinds of things that can be recycled and they're this kind this kind and this kind and this is why these two kind can't go together because this one becomes this and this one becomes that and this one becomes that like somebody i think if i could just understand the processes better it wouldn't be like every time i'm approaching the recyclers it's like i'm approaching a wild stallion that i'm trying to like break like uh-huh i'm like got my hands up

i'm crouching i'm trying to read their moves i wish somebody would do an update i'm sure they have i could seek one out but that that you referred specifically to i think it was a new york times story might have been the post that like really you know went into detail because i had heard that oh china isn't taking our recycling anymore because you know it's not worth it to them financially and it's and also we were sending them some pretty unclean recycling but like that story went on to say that like they weren't advertising it but municipalities like there was they use the example of some huge i believe baseball or football stadium where at the end of the day all of the recycle bins and all of the garbage bins just all went into the same place because the city couldn't recycle anymore and that's terrible that's tragic we need to fix that but it like you said like that lives in my mind in two different ways like sometimes you're like well gee does it even really matter what i'm doing on my end which is terrible because i mean we are the first generation that grew up with this messaging of recycling like we had to retrain ourselves and our families like throughout the 80s and 90s to be the first generation to do this and that article which again was a good article and we need to know this stuff but like it was so it just seemed to set the clock back so far as far as how i think about this i mean no that's not true i i don't i don't i honestly still follow all the rules but i always think about that and i every time i'm at a baseball game now i look around me and i just look at all of the garbage being processed or uh produced and i just think my god every every homestand how many truckloads of garbage just leaves this place and that's just the mariners reliever hey we covered a lot of ground today i don't know if it was good ground but we covered a lot of ground today man We've come a long way. Yes, we have.

All right. That's going to do it for today's episode. We will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. I'll be checking in from Chicago. So we'll see you all then from the Windy City. Until then, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

We'll see you next time.