Muse

Hey, hey, son. Oh, my goodness. Look who it is. I was just going to call you. This is, uh... Back in town? Are you, um... Yeah, briefly. You going to the family thing that we're, uh...

Giving to ourselves? No, no, I, uh, can't make it. Yeah, no?

Should I tell them? Well, you know, listen, I wasn't going to go, so don't, don't, don't not go because I'm, you know...

Well, no, you're the reason I would go. Oh, yeah? I just, uh, have some plans, so I can't, yeah.

You got plans, huh? Well, we make plans and God laughs.

that's right right no i always want to make plans but uh you don't want to be laughed at

it is always 67 degrees with a 40 chance of rain always oh that naughty old elf must be one mean

bastard to give us this so early i'm so funny i can't believe my dad didn't think i could make it as a stand-up comedian. Was my underwear

showing when I was climbing down the tree? I wore my Thursdays because my Saturdays had a case of the Mondays, if you know what I mean. I like it.

Each second so rife with information. Go on, please. Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Bad blood, a score to settle

controversy, brutality, pure hostility. My name

is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. What the Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center, right here in Portland, Oregon. Bring it back home, baby. Bring it back home. I had so much fun in Tennessee. I really did. I love that place. But I'm also very happy to be here in the comfortable confines of Portland, Oregon, where we're looking at a beautiful day. It's like going to be, I don't know, 75 degrees or something. No humidity.

Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful.

Well, it's going to be real nice, and we've got a real nice episode in store for you. Episode 3,774 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Last week, I was about midway through the week, I had to make a Hey Dummies video, and I went out to feed these donkeys that lived on the property that I had an Airbnb at. And I've never fed a donkey by hand. Like, I've never put some grain in my hand and fed them. And I didn't realize until, because I started making the video in the house, and then I just, like, walked outside. And then I didn't realize until I was out there that I was kind of afraid of, like, do they, might they accidentally bite my hand, thinking it was some of the feed? Anyway, that video was in the newsletter, which then prompted Andrew to come up with a list of potential names for what the video and what the newsletter could be about. And they were really hilarious.

How funny is that? That's pretty funny.

I believe Genevieve and our colleague James Napoli also deserve some of the credit on that, but we'll read through some of those coming up. Also, a guy in Florida had a couple of hours off recently and decided to go do a little exploring outside of Sarasota and found himself in a truly horrifying situation.

I went down the road and I was scared half to death.

I was reading this story in the New York Times yesterday, And it just kept getting worse. So we will share that with you. And then I don't think cancel culture is quite as cancel-y as we've been told it is by certain people.

They didn't cancel you. You canceled them.

As based on something I experienced last night on my flight from Seattle to Portland, I flew from Nashville to Seattle and then down to Portland. And something happened, which we'll talk about. And we'll do emails and V-mails And we'll talk to this guy, the longest-running Cobra of the show Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships I don't know if it's fair to say that I'm the Frodo of this show I don't think I'm the main character We're sort of co-characters But I do think he has a certain, and I mean this in the best way A certain Samwise Gamgee-ness to him

A little late to be trimming the verge, don't you think, Samwise Gamgee?

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now Good morning, my friend Good morning, Luke Let's talk about this thing that's been happening to me on air a little bit i know we've been talking about it off air and no i'm not referring to the bathroom issues that we talked about before the show i was really shocked yeah i said we're not talking about that to launch into that after you told me very clearly that was not for air no some some conversations are private sometimes you just need to talk to your friends about things but um in this case i mentioned to you um a couple of times last week i don't know how this happened But somebody at Fox News, the national the national cable network, added my email address, my American public media email address to what.

Whatever planning email lists they have out there for production of coverage of the Queen's casket and funeral and the casket, what do you call it? As the casket moves through the country and arrives in Windsor, yeah, or wherever it ends up. But for the past week now, and I keep on thinking, well, it's going to die down eventually, so to speak. I just keep on getting more and more emails. I was like, I don't mean like once a day I get a roundup from some producer at Fox News about the coverage wrap up of the morning for the queen. I mean, on the reg throughout the day, I am getting hundreds of emails from just like from quick notes. Like I got one this morning that just says sailor down and you open it up and it was just somebody blasting the entire list. A sailor passed out outside the chapel. Police are on the scene to you're on.

basically their work like their internal some kind of internal email chain that's for people

that are working this story yes i am getting um parking passes that i if i were in england i could use i'm getting parking passes i'm getting uh spreadsheets with the lists of where all of the where all the um uh producers and camera people and tech crew are staying i have i have the addresses of the hotels and uh like i they just think that i'm a producer now at the bottom of

walsh well actually i don't don't maybe don't can i give out your apm yeah i mean there's no reason

there's no reason not to although because everything is a little bit complicated with american public media's tech side of things um of course i don't have one address there it could be an mpr address it could be american public media but how do they think that i mean if your if your

email address was andrewwalsh at foxnews.com that would make sense that is just fascinating that your email address ended up on this list yeah okay here's the email that came from uh

amy i guess i'll leave off uh last names but this is from a fox.com email address uh subject line was sailor down when you open up it says outside abbey appears to have fainted carried off on stretcher but here's the interesting well i don't know if any of this is interesting but here's another note here is i i love this stuff i love even though i don't know what i'm even seeing for a lot of these and i'm not paying tons of attention because they're just coming in fast and furious i kind of like feeling like oh i'm i'm privy to something that oh privy like the queen's privy council uh i'm privy to something that i'm not supposed to be privy to but every single email that goes out is automatically stamped with this disclaimer at the end which this disclaimer is so

much longer than a lot of the emails personally reviewed these contents and found them to be

that's right if you accidentally receive this please put it in a bow tie and mail it um this message and its attachments may contain legally privileged or confidential information it is intended solely for the named addressees if you are not an addressee indicated in this message or responsible for the delivery of the message to an addressee you may not copy or deliver this message or its attachments to anyone talk about it on your podcast exactly like i've already read one person's email right it keeps going on rather you should permanently delete this message and its attachments and kindly notify the sender by reply email any content of this message and its attachments that does not relate to the official business of fox corporation or its subsidiaries must be taken not to have been sent or endorsed by any of them no representation is made of this email or attachments without defect i don't even know what that last part means but they are basically saying hey andrew you're getting these emails you need to let us know and you need to stop reading them but i'm not you realize the irony of all this right um i don't know they take

the secrecy around this email sailor down much more seriously than they take the secrecy of the nuclear documents yeah mar-a-lago that is true as well yeah like hey how about the uh former president, treat nuclear information with half of the seriousness that Fox is treating this email that is completely and totally uninteresting as far as, you know, spilling the tea. Yeah.

I'm looking at, let's see here. Martha has a hit on F&F. This was over the weekend. That must be Fox and Friends, right? Is that Martha Raddatz? I'm guessing, although I don't really know.

I used to work at NPR with Martha Raddatz. Really? is there is that how is that the back door that the hackers use to somehow get you on the list like she used to work in public radio andrew still i guess if we consider this public radio we do get our paycheck from minnesota public radio so is that that the connection you know i

produce something with martha at some point i don't think i did no i i don't i don't know her um i'm i don't know that i can even see everybody that's on the list including myself i'm guessing that it might be my, because I, yeah. Again, there are various email addresses I have associated with APM, and they kind of all go to the same place, which is a delete bin that I don't look at. But it's probably like a Walsh at APM or MPR. It's probably one of them that could be associated with another media organization. It's just initials, and somehow it got slipped in there. They just miskeyed it in.

Also, I mean, it's kind of a bummer it's Fox News because obviously they suck. but isn't it kind of fun to be on a chain on a thread over and also it kind of is a it's also slightly a bummer that it's like i i no offense peace and love peace and love but i am so tired of the story about this lady died yeah yeah like so young so snatched in the prime of her late 90s so young like it's what a just like a candle in a actually not much of a breeze just a candle that just was burning for 90 years 96 years now when when she passed away we talked about it i was in chicago i feel like i probably kind of botched the whole conversation because i don't know a lot unlike you i have not done careful research by watching the windsors while ironing on an on a tablet which is your favorite thing but like i remember more about the circumstances under which you watched the Windsors than I know about the actual royal family, which is a bizarre thing. It was a pandemic. But no, I, so I don't have the sense that as a human being, the queen was unlikable or a bad person or anything like that. But I do think that it is an extremely complex thing, the monarchy, and of course, colonialism, and has been just so unbelievably awful for some, But it's also just like, you know what they've colonized, Andrew? My news feed.

Yeah, they certainly have.

And she just won't, she just will not stay dead. They keep moving her body. It's a new thing. This morning, I mean, I'm a little hot on this topic because I got up this morning and I turned on Morning Edition. And my very dear friend, and I mean this seriously, Rachel Martin, was hosting from London. And they were just in more or less wall-to-wall coverage. I will give them credit. They did check in with their correspondent in India to talk about what the kind of feelings are there, a place that was plundered by the Brits for many years. But it's just like we get it already. I mean, how many more carriages have to take this person's remains to another place where we then it then dominates a news cycle for another 24 hours here in the States, especially I agree with you.

like all kind of kidding aside and for for people who you know do take this stuff very seriously and the traditions mean something to them and if if we have listeners who truly are for whatever reason in mourning royalists like yeah i don't want to totally dismiss their their feelings about the the death of a human being however like we are in the united states like we are not part of the colonies like i understand that we have a traditional relationship with england but even if they have their traditions i'm not going to be over here throwing stones at what england what England's traditions are when bearing a head of state and again acknowledging the historic moment that somebody has been in power for so long and has seen so many things I mean it's a time that you can reflect on things not just about not just about British tradition but also just to look back at what the world has seen during those times like I understand those things but for it to be the dominant coverage here in the United States those aren't our traditions like we don't right It's not our brick of Ludwig that has to be transferred into the new gatekeeper's throne. I don't know what I'm talking about here. Isn't there some brick that's going around? Oh, my God.

I hope so because that is the most hilarious thing you've ever said.

It's not a brick of Ludwig.

Transferring the brick of Ludwig to a gatekeeper's throne. I love it. That might be from Game of Thrones. I don't know.

Did that happen at Craster's Keep? There is a stone, I believe, that is part of this. a brick or a stone and it gets moved and i don't and then somebody says you sunk my battleship now now i'm being disrespectful again but again like if that if you and we have listeners in england right i don't know how much they care about this stuff but if they do it's like okay that is their traditions but the dominating of it here in the united states is is remarkable well here's what

it is what part of it is you know it's a big story that is unfolding at a predictable pace and And there's nothing the major media loves more than that. A story that feels both breaking and extremely scheduled. Like, hey, we know what day they're going to move the brick of Ludwig. And so what can we do? We can post up the whole production staff for Morning Edition and have them in London ready to go. I mean, that's why a lot of these stories just take on the life that they do. It's because, you know, if they're.

The hurricane that has swept through Puerto Rico and has left that island with basically no power, which is an absolute tragedy, is not being covered. I actually don't really like this line of reasoning because, like, you can always find anything that anyone ever talks about in the news is not as important as something else probably, right? That's, like, impacting people. So I'm not trying to make the argument that they shouldn't do anything on the queen. It should just be all Puerto Rico coverage. But it's like those kinds of dynamic, rapidly evolving stories are much harder to cover because you don't know what the schedule is. But you do know when they're going to take the motorcade with the Queen's coffin from point A to point B, and so you can schedule around that, and hence it's sort of a big deal. I started all that by saying it is kind of fun, though, and it's been a long time since I've been in on something like this, when there is a big news story and you're somehow part of the coverage team and you're getting these emails from producers and it just feels like something's happening. That's just like it's been a long time for I think for both of us that we've been in on something like that. It does get the old adrenaline going from kind of reminding me of what it was like back in the day.

yeah the um i i'm looking at an email here from uh i guess a producer maybe a senior producer named simon i'm going to eliminate last name since i'm not supposed to be disseminating this uh that just said this is from i think over the yeah this is from yesterday evening about um lying in state info um and there's some highlights bullet pointed here her majesty the queen's lying in state at the palace of westminster that's what i meant before westminster opens the public at 5 p.m wednesday blah blah uh then at the very uh bottom after all these like kind of just informational bullet points at the bottom in bold you should dress appropriately for the occasion to pay your respects to the lying in state do not wear clothes with political or offensive slogans so don't wear a jacket that says you mad or what you have right no what they directed that one to the former first lady right exactly yeah isn't that what her jacket said you mad i'm not or

something like that it was something to that effect oh my goodness gracious anyway um yeah

so it is just kind of interesting i mean it is just a i'm not seeing anything salacious i'm not seeing anything that is like newsworthy or you know that uh that i should either be careful with i feel like or that i should um alert the authorities to it's all just pretty boring stuff but it's like behind the scenes and it's kind of like hey listen camera folk you need to show up here outside you know the west gate at this time they are checking badges you know and then somebody will just like kind of fling another email back and being like you know just got here or whatever it is interesting and like i wonder if i will find myself on other news coverage once

this story passes huh yeah right i kind of doubt it on the list because i'm only getting this could you use that if you are if you're on the list could you eventually use it to bring down that network what if what if that ends up becoming my legacy i'm the that would be a worthy legacy

in my opinion from the i'm trying to um i'm trying to connect the dots here how one man's accidental addition to an email list leads him to bring down fox news from the inside i'd watch

that movie if you just create uh there is a stand-up comic named jay and i can't believe i'm forgetting his last name because he's been on livewire and he's awesome and i've actually hung out with him after the show but he has this great story that i think he told on this american life where he was just in his car and basically somebody dialed his number by mistake and it was a like a work call and they said you know uh you know the budget's been slashed from 24 to 18 when did this happen and instead of saying you have the wrong number he decides to just play along and he just ends up in a series of phone meetings over the next week where he's just like completely, he's just 100% winging this but with total confidence and ends up driving decisions and policy within this company over how they're going to handle things even though he has no idea what's going on. That could be you but in a Fox News context.

Can I play, I think I found this, Jay Larson, I think I found this. Why does the name come back to me when it's not important anymore? Let me just see if this is the right one or not. I mean, the man, I'm sure, has many, many clips online. But let me just see. This is the first one that popped up. It's really good. And I've seen whatever you're talking about before or a version of it. So it might be this first hit. This is from back in 2013, apparently.

Question. Your cell phone rings and you don't recognize the number. What do you do? Ignore it.

Don't answer it. Okay. This thing is like five minutes long. I remember it being funny. Luke, you tell me when it's time to stop. Otherwise, I'm just going to let it roll. I think it pays off. Okay, here we go.

Not me. I like life. The other day, my cell phone rang 917. That's a New York number. I didn't know who it was. I picked it up. Anyway, I hit talk. I said, hello. Guy in the line goes, hey, Bruce, what's going on? My name's Jay, not Bruce. So I said, nothing much, man. What's going on with you? And he said, I'll tell you what's going on. I just got an email about the budget. It's supposed to be $15,000. Now it's $10,000. And I'd like to know what's up. I got excited in my chest. I grabbed the steering wheel. I was like, OK, focus. Your name is Bruce. There's a budget. It was $15,000. now it's ten thousand no one's happy about it that's all we know that's all we know so i just repeated back to him what he said to me and i go ten thousand it's supposed to be fifteen thousand he goes yeah i know well i just got an email and now it's ten i go listen man i don't know what to tell you i've been on the road all day you know i haven't even seen it and he goes did you send this out i've given some attitude to bruce i didn't like it i said listen man the budget was 15 000 we had a couple extra expenditures it went up to 16 too i reworked it got it down to 14 7 i had 300 to play with so i called it 15 and i sent it out and he goes yeah well now it's 10 man and i was like oh my god that worked that worked

i should probably stop it it's great everyone i think jay's touring so everybody go see jay larson if he comes to a town here he's really funny yeah that way we're promoting him we're not just stealing exactly not just stealing his content but yeah that's great no he's great he and i actually had a really fun night after he did library we went out and hung and he's

he's that's exactly him like that's not i had 300 to play around with i got it down to 15

okay uh let's um god i'm really tempted i i don't want to i want to be careful that we don't descend into football talk but did you see this tbtl breaking news tbtl breaking news did you see that gino smith has filed the paperwork to license they uh they wrote me off i didn't write back no this is a bad day for that news to come out though i know and that's why i'm trying to like you know i'm trying to uh be careful because we don't need to descend into sort of like a football talk about you know the seahawks played really badly yesterday against san francisco but i just think that's interesting that he's trademarking it meaning i thought that that was maybe just like a thing like that was out there you know what i mean like i thought maybe somebody had said that or that was a phrase that people you know that was on a motivational t-shirt

somewhere when they before he said it in this press conference you figured he was just kind

of quoting a bumper sticker or something yeah like couldn't you see like a nike shirt that some kid is wearing that's like when they write you off don't write back slay all day rise and grind like every kid in america is wearing a shirt about how much ass they kick all the time right it's like meanwhile they're eating a cotton candy the size of their head at the state fair or something yeah you're slaying all day rodney but um anyway i just figured he was repeating some kind of a sort of sports bromide but i guess not i guess he made that up i don't know if it was in the moment or if he was planning i it felt pretty um spontaneous to me but now he's trying to

trademark it well i never thought that it was like a an expression although i it totally makes sense that you would like now that you say that i'm like oh yeah i could totally see that but i got the impression that he came up with i got the impression that that was the type of thing where he was thinking about what he might say if he could win that big game against the Seahawks former quarterback. Talk about last week's game. And so to me, it was the type of thing that he's kind of thinking in his brain, ooh, I hope I get to use this line. And then he does get to use the line because he's victorious and he's wearing a very sharp sport coat. Do we ever talk about how good he looked in that press conference too? I loved that jacket he was wearing. But I don't think he said that in the press conference. He said it on the field. Oh, no, I thought he said that into the did he oh did he say that in the sideline like immediately after like literally

it was like the you know he's talking to the sideline reporter oh okay um which is why i think i actually maybe he repeated it in the post game or something but like i uh you know in the more formal press conference but i'm kind of as we're talking about it i'm wondering if that wasn't totally improvised because for it to be not improvised he then has to hope that they're going to use the specific just think about all the stuff geno smith had to think about before that game like from a like technical standpoint of the plays for him to also be using up some of that bandwidth being like if they say they wrote you off i'm gonna say and i didn't write back oh did

that did somebody prompt him did somebody say they wrote you off oh okay i see the direct quote here was they wrote me off i ain't right back though um which does in in that like saying it like that does make it sound a little bit more spontaneous if i remember right and i wasn't a state of euphoria and also a state of vodka for you um my memory was it was right in the like immediate like he's on the field he's still in uniform and the person um interviewing him said people wrote you off and then he said yeah and i didn't write back and then maybe he kind of like liked the ring of it and so maybe he went when he did his next press conference he he he said it you know he said the complete thing himself don't say that based on me because i don't know that

that's true the thing is i remember seeing bits of his post game press conference but i was talking with friends and then as this quote was going around my brain just sort of connected the image i saw of him after the game with that line i didn't hear him say that line live so don't don't let me you're right i'm sure it was if you saw him say that in the sidelines that's what everybody's

talking about yeah here you go actually have the original i've got the original uh whatever you want to call it here context the folks you said had written you off maybe what do you say to them

Yeah, they wrote me off. I ain't right back, though. That's the problem. I ain't right back. Let's go. Yeah, no, you're right. That sounds more spontaneous than I was giving it credit for. Right?

I think he made that up in the moment.

That makes me like that part better. But you said that he doesn't have bandwidth maybe to be thinking about good things to say after the game. Well, now he's using bandwidth to try to sell T-shirts of this.

Well, listen, I mean, I think we can agree after yesterday he needs a different stream of income than quarterbacking. Yeah. No, I mean, that was that was the full scale that was an across the board meltdown at basically every every single level for that football team.

Well, I do think. Yeah, I actually have a very I went dead there because I actually have I have questions and thoughts and I don't think we have time to do a no point today. But like I didn't want to follow up with what I was thinking in my head right there because I'm not I'm still I'm not as down on him as maybe as I should be after yesterday's game. I'm kind of more down on the team and I don't know if I'm right to have those feelings. And it seems like a good Andrew asks Luke how to feel about it as of right now. Last week, I think the answer was feel how you're feeling. Right. So anyway, but I don't want to do that here. And so I think we have. Why don't we give it? How about this?

Because, you know, yeah, today is a pretty busy day for both of us. And then you're going to be heading to bend tomorrow for the show and a couple of TV tales from down there. Why don't we do this? Let's give it another week. Yeah, let's let's let a little let's get a larger sample size. And then we'll check in with another no point when we've got a little bit more to go off of if this team is as good as they looked at times against Denver or as bad as they looked at times against San Francisco. Yeah, exactly. All right. Let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, I do want to just run through the newsletter from Friday because it was very, very funny to me. I was laughing out loud when I was on the airplane last night. Oh, and also, I want to talk about cancel culture ever so briefly. Coming up in a moment here on TVTL.

You know, a brief conversation about cancel culture.

All right, let's thank some daily donors. These are the wonderful, generous folks who are keeping the show going with their support. Folks like Ann Plummer in Silverdale, Washington, and you may see Susie B down at the Y swimming her laps as she likes to. That's where my folks live. Danielle Roberts is in Oro Valley, Arizona, Arizona. I was trying to think of an Oro joke.

Didn't quite get there.

are they thanks Danielle appreciate you Megan Vogt is in Denver Colorado hey we love Denver um I did hear Joel McHale the other day like a clip of him for some reason randomly popped up on my TikTok and I didn't realize that he also did stand up sometimes or has done stand up in the past I think of him more like a TV host now and he was just doing a riff on how unbelievably remote the denver airport is and i was like i know i was like easy buddy i have been i've been haranguing on that for years now let's give me my space on that you've got so much joel mikhail and i have so little i have the only thing is my riff about how far away the denver airport is from everything uh thanks megan appreciate you so much also chase wiseman in los angeles california thanks chase Kristen Corley is in Wilmington, North Carolina This is a really nice distribution It is, I like this We've got North Carolina, Arizona Donna Yarling is in Janesville, Wisconsin We've got the Midwest, we've got the Mid-Atlantic I'm loving it Feeling good about her Packers I feel bad about our friend Chris Hayes' Bears I would

So I was on the plane last night and I was listening to his Why Is This Happening podcast. And I was doing this thing that some of our friends will sometimes do to us related to TBTL, our friends who listen, which is you're listening to something and you feel you know the person who's doing the talking. And so you're kind of like sort of having a bit of a almost a dialogue with them. But because you have their because I have Chris's actual text, like his cell phone number, I can just be going like, and then what do you think they meant when they said this? And I found this interesting, and I'm just like, I'm just spamming him with reactions to his podcast about public education.

Luke, if you're going to text, they were talking about the elderly. If you're going to text about public education, you had to do it the week before.

And then I just realized, like, after about 45 minutes of this, that this is the exact moment that his beloved Chicago Bears were just getting kind of pwned by the Green Bay Packers, by Donna Yarling's team. And I was like, oh, dude, I'm so sorry. he was like no problem and then we just shifted into bears talk but i was like there's just like nothing worse than when you're like already feeling bummed out about uh your sports thing not sporting out the way you hope and then someone's just like hitting you with a bunch of

unrelated conversation yeah i really and again i have no desire to get into sports talk and i think we were very restrained a moment ago but yes we can talk about sports lifestyle talk my god did i lean into like i mean it was sunny outside yesterday it was a beautiful day it was the perfect type of day that i should have gone on a long walk maybe carried a stick in my hand and kind of twirled it around like breathe the the newish fall air but instead i came down into my basement i went to the grocery store and i bought every kind of frozen junk food that i could carry i had meatballs wings cheese sticks uh totino's party pizzas which were small i genevieve really wanted one of those um it's not an air fryer it's got air fryer functionality it's like i always say it wrong it's like food ninja or ninja food or something like that genevieve really wanted it and i didn't really want it but like whatever we got it costco or something we ended up getting i did this whole elaborate thing where our friends got it online at costco before we were costco members and it was like a birthday gift that i got for genevieve when we first moved in here because i was like okay now we have room is gonna buy one and then she almost bought one she's like hey i'm at costco i'm about to buy one of these food things but it's about the size of that box that's all wrapped up on our front on our front table should i not buy this i was like yeah happy birthday but anyway she's like used it twice to make like um hard boiled eggs and like other than that just and she says the hard boiled eggs are really good but i was like you know what why am i so scared of this thing it's one of those things it's like a it's like also a pressure cooker and those definitely scare me um and it's like a slow cooker a fast cooker yeah exactly it's all these things but i was like it can't be that hard to use so i'm just like so i just decided yesterday i was just going to really lean into the air fryer-ness of this thing and just cook all of these just heart smart snacks that i bought while i started drinking beer about 130 and like i just closed the blinds like when the sunshine was coming in i was like no that's not who i am today today i am the man who just like totally leans into football culture not necessarily football knowledge but football culture and to me football culture is just like adding 20 pounds in

one day packing up now were the snacks delicious having been air fried they were um they were

better air fried most of them were i would say that the frozen mozzarella sticks are better air fried the meatballs are um the pizzas even though i got small party pizzas they didn't fit in there so i did use a traditional oven for that that was much later um but what was the one thing oh i mean we could do a whole show on frozen chicken wings now i know that you weren't a big chicken wing person even when you did eat meat because you're chewing off a bone they're messy whatever i love chicken wings and they i have so many thoughts on on how they should be prepared when you're buying them from the frozen food section you only have so much control over these things but i will say this to all of the chicken wing manufacturers of the world let's stop giving these chickens so many hormones the wings don't have to be the size of drumsticks like think like let's keep the wings smaller put more of them in the bag and they will cook through better like they're they're selling these gargantuan wings that don't cook right and they're a little bit

too soggy even in the air fryer yeah see that was the thing that all and if they're too soggy for you yeah because i think you're less sensitive than i was in my wing in days i would at the end i was always ordering them extra crispy i wanted those things carbonized because if they're not for me that would it would add to what was kind of a slightly upsetting experience yeah it was definitely better i did if i ever buy those again and i will um i will uh i will probably cook them

in the air fryer again you can't get as many in there so if for example if i had people over and we were doing like wings and pizza and whatever.

for a football game which I know you're against we got into an argument about that one time but I like wings and football um I don't know that I did what did I say well you just thought that that was a bad snack food for guests I remember I was having people over to watch a game you weren't one of them we were just talking about and you're like no no wings are not a good guest food for watching game they're way too messy and that's not what you would want at a game but I thought that that was maybe no I think I would I would revise that now I think they've so permeated the

culture that i think it's very normal for people to have a big thing of wings at a football watching event it's probably right up there with you might say nachos or something i mean it's so yeah i i

don't think that that's weird anymore although you would um i i would say that if you were going to do something like that do your guests a favor and try to find wings that are more of a dry rub but you know that are very flavorful but yeah but because it is a messy gambit for sure but uh all i was going to say was the air fryer does improve most of these things but you can't make big batches of things right so you got to decide whether it's a little it's a little like um drawer right yeah well ours is a top loader but yeah i mean it's pretty small on the other hand though i was impressed with how much faster it is i think i kept on thinking of it as like i don't know it's like a deep fryer only use air whatever i don't need that i have an oven i just don't need it like it just always seemed so unnecessary until i think after my first batch i'm like oh i get it this is a microwave that doesn't suck like it cooks these things really fast like you don't preheat anything you just put it in there and 10 minutes later you're like oh that would have been like 15 minutes like 10 or 15 minutes of an oven preheating then a longer cook time and then it would have come out not quite as crispy and this is like way faster so i gotta mention that you're not cooking it in any kind of oil so i mean that is a healthier well i wouldn't in an oven either though these would just be all of these things would just be on a on a you know oh so you wouldn't drop you wouldn't drop the mozzarella sticks into some deep fryer type situation anyway i would do For any of these freezer things, I would just put them in the oven, but it still takes a lot less time.

There are parts of the country, because I was just there, where I believe all of that stuff would be cooked in a three inches of Wesson or something. It was—I don't want to get into sounding like I'm—it's not even—how do I put this? it's it was it's not that i was i really wasn't judging anyone but i was it was interesting to witness at this particular thing i was at in tennessee this um marble tournament by the way thank you to all of our donors of the day for making tbtl possible hello and welcome to top story i was i was struck by two things one i was at this uh on saturday this roly hole national marbles championship um which is this very specific game to this part of tennessee and kentucky it's right on kind of the state line and uh it it was it was really fun it was really long it was like a 15 16 hour day of filming because they start early in the morning and they go till late at night but there was a couple of things i was struck by one there was no alcohol at this thing and nobody even seemed to be missing it and i was thinking if you are at an event anymore like you know there's the willamette river here in portland and there's like blues fest or there's like whatever you know the dragon boat races if there's anything going on down there the beer garden is a massive component of the thing and we've just and again if this sounds like i'm on some soapbox about drinking i'm really not at all it's just because i know i was talking about drinking on flights the other day because they had to help that woman off of my flight out to nashville but it's just i haven't been at a get-together that has a thousand or more people where there's no alcohol and no one seems to care like we're just like hanging out listening to bluegrass music and watching people play marbles what people were doing though was just housing some of the most unhealthy food i've ever seen in my life just and then and you you couldn't have found a diet soda in a three-county range it was just like a very different it was like nobody there seemed bummed about the lack of alcohol but but also nobody that i observed was let me put it this way the the three or four jogs that i went on when i was in tennessee were the most harrowing three jogs i've been on in the last two or three years because there is absolutely no dedicated area for it to happen one of them i went on this lake trail that was supposed to go around this lake kelly lake in standing stone state park and it's listed i thought it's like a jogging trail No, it was like one foot wide on the side of a hill slash cliff To where I almost tumbled down There were so many spider webs as I was running That eventually I stopped pulling them off of my face Because it was pointless And then later that night, the guy who showed me the Let's Go Brandon t-shirt I told him, oh yeah, I tried to do a jog at this trail He goes, yeah, we're not much for jogging around here Yeah And as you can

I don't know. us tell the environment like and again again i don't mean i this is probably sounding kind of judgy uh by me or snooty in some way everybody gets to live their life however they choose but i will say this is the place i never saw i didn't i did not at any time ever see one other person trying to jog and i went to this kind of like this paved little very short path around this kind of fetid lake or pond that was where i ended up going two of the times and again this appeared to be the only place where you could actually kind of run and not be on a highway and in danger and or whatever stray dogs you name it i went there two different times never saw another soul there like it's just doesn't it did not appear this does not appear to be a part of the

country where people are like i got to get my steps in do me a favor don't jog around lakes anymore I read something scary in the New York Times today That we'll talk about later on in the show Don't go jogging waterfalls

Yes Please stick to the why There was one thing by the way There was one place and it was a CrossFit studio That was by this fetid lake And I was like alright well good for those folks That doesn't you know seem I tried CrossFit and it was much too difficult for me I was like okay so you got some folks out here And again I'm not making a judgment about if somebody exercises or not I just was like I feel like joggers are kind of my tribe when I go to Vegas for all of the debauchery and all the bad decisions I make I generally try to get up in the morning and get out there and run so as to sweat out some of the poison and you'll just see at eight in the morning the other joggers in Vegas and it's this little community and I have to admit I enjoy that community I enjoy seeing people that are part of this that are interested in this activity that I'm interested in but as I'm driving yesterday out of town i had to take a different route because it was faster i guess i was on a major highway heading out of um basically hillham tennessee where i had been on my way to nashville and on the side of the road huge billboard overton crossfit because overton is the county they're in and that was the place i'd looked at i was like hey crossfit people these are kind of my folks huge sign just said let's go brandon no yeah i love to see it i mean they paid for a sign that said let's go brandon overton crossfit did which is actually not shocking because crossfit has a very i'm not this is not a judgment on people that do crossfit at all but it is a very militaristic like it a lot of a lot of folks you know that have been involved in the military are part of it the guy who was the founder of it turned out to be very problematic he doesn't have the company anymore if i understand right uh or at least some of the crossfit boxes as they're called have kind of disconnected from the national CrossFit movement over the problems with the guy who kind of started the whole thing. I remember hearing a bit of that, yeah. And again, I have to stress this. I know people talk about CrossFit changing their life, and we have listeners that love CrossFit. It's the best part of their day. So I'm not saying that anyone's doing it wrong, but there is a certain kind of militaristic, the Punisher history to CrossFit as a thing, and so I guess I shouldn't be shocked that they decided to spend their own money to get a let's go brandon billboard but it's like i had been so touched by what i saw as a sort of a lack of that or at least not as much of that as i was expecting and then just as i'm driving out of town it was like the people that i thought were like those are kind of the people that would get me it's like nope would not no thank you why are the people

who and again i keep on i keep on trying to keep this in the political sphere because it is based on politics i mean that is believe it or not a political statement but like there is so much we were talking about this the other day with the you know talking about people's flags on trucks and racist symbols on trucks and bumper stickers and how it all kind of comes back to like owning the libs like i think of like when obama was president and you would see you would see like pro obama bumper stickers there was a pride for people who supported barack obama and let's even just say the democratic party although i think it's a little bit more nuanced than that amongst a lot of people who vote that way like there was pride in a president and so you would see hope signs and you see bumper stickers it wasn't like let's talk about how terrible the previous president was or something and i may maybe i'm being a little too rosy-eyed here because i mean obviously there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth including coming from me when um when trump was president so i don't want to make it sound like the left never goes negative that's ridiculous but like it just sort of just seems so weird to me that all of this cultish stuff that is linked to politics and how these folks vote is really just mean-spirited owning the libs not like pride but maybe that's not true i guess trump was their obama i guess they loved you know before let's go brandon before they had to say f you biden which is what that means i guess they were just proud to fly their trump flag so i guess maybe the more i talk the stupider i sound Here we go. The thing that I think I – I don't know if I figured this out or just somebody said this and it resonated with me, but what I realized at some point, the popularity of the previous president was with people because he didn't have – he did not have a coherent political ideology. he didn't stand for any kind of traditionally conservative stuff right but as long like because i thought well he doesn't really have a good tax policy or he's not strong on whatever you know like these things that we were always taught is what the republicans were about even though more and more we realized that was also a lie like the republicans have really just been about trying to i mean not all republicans not every person who's ever voted i've voted republican in my life but it's really the republican party has been about keeping the power dynamic as is keeping the status quo in place i.e. prioritizing white straightness and making sure that anybody who's not that does not get enough power to where they could somehow challenge that authority and make a more equitable world right that's really what they've been about and they'll just use they've just used whatever that was the most effective tool for that it's less about like you know fiscal responsibility or what have you and more just about making sure that the power structure that has been in place stays in place okay that being said um the thing that i think

i realized about trump's supporters early on was as long as he was fighting with the people they don't like that was enough for them as long as he was being openly uh hostile and misogynistic and a million other things towards Hillary and the New York Times and Nancy Pelosi. That's all they wanted. They wanted someone to be fighting with the people that they didn't like, but they didn't have a way to fight with, which is different than, oh, Obama, we're going to have a sign that says hope. And we're thinking this could be a thing where the world gets better. This could be a thing where more people have opportunities. No, this is a political ideology. The Trump, the MAGA stuff, this is a political ideology built around just fighting with the people that you don't like, But that you don't feel you feel powerless To fight but now someone is finally sticking It to AOC and Nancy Pelosi And you know Those those those coastal

Elites you know it's the dumb Bullies it's like and that's probably why I'm Personally and emotionally triggered by this Stuff so much is because it is just Echoes of the dumb bullies that I Would go to school with right like what would Happen is I'd be you know I would Stand out because I was nerdy or whatever but Then I wouldn't keep my mouth shut because these bullies were also just idiots you know and i could and then i would say something smart ass right and then i'd get and then i'd get then i'd get into it even more and that it was not a good combination to be and listen i i don't i wasn't some prize student i wasn't i wasn't going around like people didn't say hey uh you know make space for the smart man walking through the hallways that's definitely not my reputation but yeah the brick of what did we say here he comes carrying the brick of dublin um but uh but you know what i mean like i don't consider myself like the smartest guy in the room ever but these people were knuckle draggers right and they were just mean-spirited dummies and that's kind of what you see with this this particular collection of people on a national level it's just like they're just bullies

now but this was what was so this was what was so kind of i don't want to say disorienting for me because i i really had a lovely time in tennessee but it was a bit of a there was i guess some cognitive dissonance being employed by me because i don't know if i've hung out with a nicer bunch of people right like as i people that were associated with this marbles tournament the people that were owned the airbnb i was in everybody we talked to it was just a very very friendly group of people who i greatly enjoyed meeting and also i was like if i were to scratch beneath the surface on anything political with these folks we would be looking at the world wildly differently and it's it's an odd feeling to because i'm i live in a bubble in portland generally and and i'm mostly in big you know big urban cities where i'm generally going to find people that think the way i think and then to be in a place where it's just i mean my guess would be 99.99 of those folks voted for trump and would vote for him again there was a sign that i saw by this state park we were going to where somebody it had been trump pence and they had modified to be trump flynn like they were they were looking to have the disgraced former military commander michael flynn who turned out to actually be an agent for another country although he didn't report as such just like one of the biggest scoundrels in a long time that they had hand drawn his name in over mike pence i drove by the sign like Thank you. 20 times before I could figure out what the hell they were talking about. So it was weird for me to be hanging out with people who I found to be so warm and pleasant and just folksy and would just do anything for you, but also to feel like they, in their hearts, support a worldview and a candidate who is just

full of hate. Yeah, of course, and I've got to be careful here, but first of all, you've got to keep in mind so you present in a certain way when you're there and you're and they treat you a certain way now i don't want to imply that if you had black or brown skin necessarily people would be cold shouldering you but if i have i have some

very direct evidence okay good our camera crew our camera guy daryl is black and our uh sound guy makanga also black and our producer young kim asian we had the real benetton scene going on and we were all laughing at how we all didn't fit in in different ways like they didn't fit in because of the color of their skin i didn't fit in because i'm just so obviously a yankee and just so not because like daryl and mcunga are actually from atlanta they live in the south so they were like yeah we're pretty cool here like we we sort of we get the vibe because we live in the south so maybe young was the like being from new york city and a swing dancer maybe young was the was the the least able to kind of enmesh and integrate into the into the scene but we all sort of brought

our own otherness to this and and i'm sure that i i don't know but it sounds like maybe you're implying that they were also treated well which i would hope and expect as far as i was able to observe everybody was treated pretty well thankfully but the tentacles of white supremacy they're just not as obvious as that either right and so i don't and again i don't i didn't meet any of the people you're talking about and so i can't just sit here and assume that they were all uh racist but i just mean that like in this situation yes it's not of course everybody's to be very kind to you a camera crew from new york city or whatever you know like doing something on their on their marbles tournament but like you know the again just the inherent white supremacy throughout this entire country but again amongst people who oh they're they're kind they're the kindest people you'll ever meet but they literally their favorite phrase is a code word that means fuck joe biden like that's not right kindness you know that's kindness in this very specific in this very specific way and it's easy to be i mean we should be kind to each other we should but like you can't let that you can't let that cover up some of the insidiousness that is

there's the structural issues that are so much bigger than where you just pleasant to somebody

when you chatted with them for 10 minutes exactly right but what happens when when when um you know people cross the border and then suddenly you know the people are supporting sending them to um didn't they weren't they sending now refugees to um kamala harris's home this weekend or

something i didn't see that i wouldn't be surprised yeah it's just you know what is kindness you know but this is the other thing and i brought this up last week about the like you know not seeing a ton of overt trumpness even though i know that the default this thing i was at had probably i don't know a thousand fifteen hundred people there i saw that i remember i saw one guy in a trump hat i saw a teenager in a let's go brandon t-shirt and i saw a guy in this t-shirt that was like some punisher bullshit and the back of it said land of the fragile home of the offended oh my god and i just wanted to have a black lives matter t-shirt and just sit right next to him and just see how long it took for him to get offended yeah because i promise you that guy is the most fragile person at that get together yeah like like i promise you that his fragility would be on full display if i were wearing a shirt that he thought didn't fit in there it would offend the living heck out of him but anyway out of think about this and again i'm i'm i'm saying i bet you that it was a if not 99.9 a 100 republican group that's a pretty low number of people showing out with that stuff and again and i think listener jamie our friend who lives in mississippi which is also a very conservative state kind of checked in on this too with us in an email but there is something about those folks and we also another listener who said that they moved from this i believe this part of tennessee sorry this should just be an email segment to um like somewhere in oregon and and they wanted to kind of move somewhere that they thought was more in line with their ideals like their kind of political leanings and and whatever and then immediately had like their neighbor was just flying eight million weird like trump flags in like salem oregon or whatever and they were saying that it was like we thought we were getting away from that it's just interesting interesting to see how it plays out because i promise if i went to the oregon state fair which is actually in salem i would see so much more outward Thank you.

representation of trumpiness than i saw at this thing in the middle of tennessee and that doesn't indicate political leanings it's just weird that not the people there just didn't feel like they needed to constantly tell everyone that's who they're voting for maybe because it's just a

given yeah yeah and that goes back to i mean that goes back to your original point on this way back mid last week when you showed up there that like maybe you don't need to you don't need to fly these trolly signs although a business uh changing their signage to say let's go brandon is is i mean

astounding to me yeah really really bad really bad form now speaking of being over there though you know i did fall in love with these donkeys that were staying right by uh you know or i was staying right near and their names are fred carly and sam and by the way they are apparently jerusalem donkeys that's the kind of donkeys they are and um so i i made that little video where i was feeding them and i was a little bit nervous about it and so that was the hey dummies video and then andrew you decided to try to come up with a name was it a name for the video yeah

basically and it's funny that this stood out to you i appreciate i'll take the compliment but i was telling you before the show that i was honestly felt like i was sort of punting on the newsletter this week i didn't i didn't want to spend too much time doing my job of course so um it was a true story that uh usually you know you or i will record a hey dummies video i come up with some punny title for it I really try not to overthink it sometimes we overthink the titles on this show but that's part of the bit but like I don't even know if people notice that these videos have a title honestly and so I just try to think of something off the top of my head but this time like I felt like the word donkey seems so ripe for wordplay yet I couldn't really come up with anything great and so then I'm like so then I'm walking by Genevieve who's working at her desk so then we find ourselves in this conversation we're throwing around these donkey puns then i'm running them by james our video editor and then suddenly i mean honestly this was the point of all this was like we are three grown adults you know pulling down salaries genevieve's not even for american public media this is like the taxpayers of washington are paying genevieve to come up with donkey puns for me and so suddenly i sat down to write the newsletter i'm like we we threw a lot of bad ideas out there let's just collect them up here and share them that's all

i think these were great i was i thought they were very funny so uh do you want to read them

or do you want me to why don't you share them because the thing is i have now listeners have been uh including our friend john sklaroff uh over at apm had some other ideas that i'll share

too to add to this list honky tonk badonk donkeys badonk donkeys badonk donkeys badonk donkeys is that how the song goes honky-tonk but donka donk yeah honky-tonk but donka donk yeah that that's a good one how about too cool for mules see i think that's the one that at the end of

the day we just told james just go with whatever one you think is best genevieve loved too cool for mules that was her favorite but i i thought for sure someone would be like um andrew donkeys

and mules are different things right yeah donkey o period t period which when i realized what you were doing is you wrote on the newsletter you were trying to make a don quixote joke yeah that was my favorite but i like that a lot sell there this one i also really enjoy donkey like one of your french girls oh yeah that was a last minute entry by me that's a good titanic reference which

i've never i also like this one take me home i'm donk yeah yeah i like that one too although i also

think you could have gone with the tank take me donk i'm home oh yeah right which is the t-shirt right or the whatever yeah take me donk i'm home uh donk tread on me apropos to the part of the country i was in after all the conversation

uh-huh ask me another oh god dude i am not even joking my favorite one i cannot put in the newsletter and i cannot say to you when i realized oh donkeys are called asses i was like oh that opened some doors but yeah probably not for this audience i remember being a kid and being you know

my parents were very very religious and very strict about the term the words we were allowed to use but you could say ass because it was in the bible it comes up a lot in the bible you know

We're just, like, finding ways to talk about donkeys. People are riding asses, like, crazy. Yeah, riding ass.

Yeah. This is a good one, too. Beg, burrow, or steal.

Yeah, that was got to give credit to James for reminding me that burrows is another name for donkeys. Good job, James. Living on burrowed time. James. Something burrowed, something blue. That was mine after James reminded me of that. I like that one. I wanted to throw in John's here. John wrote back. He's like, hey, man, anytime you're working on pun play.

Involve a fourth adult here. I'm over here. He's got living on a brayer.

Wow. I'll bray for you. Okay. Thoughts and brayers?

Oh, thoughts and brayers. That would have been really good. Oh, but the best one, and this is irritating, Luke, because I should, first of all, I should definitely find the actual email of the person who suggested this, but it's so obvious. It was there the whole time. It was the Hey Dummies video It should have just been called Hey Donkeys Like boom, simple, clean

Funny, I give it a

I'm sorry I can't give you I'm sorry I can't shout out the person But as soon as I saw that I was like Oh yeah, Hey Donkeys Of course if I had landed there too soon We wouldn't have had a newsletter

Well right, and also I think that's pretty funny But it's I'll give it credit for being efficient And not being overwritten but like though honestly the one that made me laugh the most was of course donkey gram donkey grandma be tripping yes i'm a sucker for any 30 rock reference um so uh though that list really made me so happy i also made i don't know if you saw andrew but once i learned how to feed the donkeys and i realized that they were really the only thing about them that was a problem was they are covered in flies so if you're feeding them you are then covered in flies for the period of time that you're hanging out with them but like i i realized as i was checking out on um sunday that i had bought and bought a bunch of fixings for you know i made some salad while i was there and had some veggies but i didn't get through all of it and i was like what do i do with this i'm gonna throw it out and i was like wait a minute this is like christmas morning you give like a corn cob full because i mean they're eating they're grazing on just like whatever's out there and then for fun you know they'll get some of this like feed or whatever you know that they can eat out of your hand but i'm like like that's a real treat for a donkey to get to eat a thing of corn so um uh it's a big lump with juice so i uh i realized oh i should just give them all the veggies that i didn't finish and so then i made a little video of that and i took them out there and i fed him and it is just i have to say is pure joy to watch a donkey just completely house a cob of corn and like how happy they are is it just the cob with the corn already off you've

already ate you've already eaten the corner it was no corn's on there oh nice okay gotcha so yeah did you have any concerns about whether or not because i mean it seems obvious but did you have any concerns about whether or not they could eat this i know this sounds really stupid but like did you check with anybody just to make sure that there weren't any dietary restrictions like oh yeah they eat most vegetables but don't give them a cucumber they'll have the gas i probably should

have i didn't but i also sent the video to patrick who owns the donkeys and he thought it was hilarious so i guess of course this would have been after the fact right but he uh my sense is that donkeys they're not exactly goats right goats can famously just eat like anything they're not maybe quite goats but they're they're close to it in terms of like they'll just their systems can handle anything anything that grows out of the ground pretty much that's not like if it's anything a human could eat they could eat it right like and a lot of things that we wouldn't want to eat that's where they literally exist on it because he was patrick was telling me that like yeah they just they just roam around in this kind of big you know few acres of kind of grass and golden rod and whatever and they just go around chomping down on whatever it is that they chomp down on and he gives them water and they could basically just like live on that um so i was pretty confident that they could eat corn but you're right I probably should have checked but I got excited about making this video and then I just got and then I just went for it should we just do another donkey video for the hey dummies next week maybe could we get John and some other folks to come up with another round

yeah

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

alright we did not get to our top stories but we can do them tomorrow so we'll do that in the meantime I kind of cannibalized I was doing the worst of all worlds earlier in the show where I was like from memory paraphrasing emails from people who I wasn't even attributing them to

I'm glad you got those perspectives in because the stuff that we've been talking about that's not a comfort zone for me I'm making some pretty broad generalizations I realize generally speaking so hearing from people who have lived in various places and have interacted with people in different ways like i think that's good i'm glad you got that stuff in there because i've been focusing more on voicemails in fact i know that we're in a little bit of a time crunch but i have a long voicemail i want to play i've listened to the beginning of it and it's a very intriguing lead in and i'm dying to hear where this goes but i honestly don't know where

it goes in fact it looks like the person ran out of time and had to call back usually i edit that

stuff out but what before you start playing it can i just because i have now i think i may have hacked into the mainframe no i think i'm in my tbtl email and i wanted to just uh mention that it was listener amber who was talking about moving from uh tennessee out to beaverton and then seeing the trump flag on their neighbor's roof in beaverton oregon so anyway thanks to a listener amber and also listener becky who emailed in on the topic uh and other folks in case i'm uh forgetting them but anyway i just wanted to get that out of the way before we launch into this

email nice and this is on a totally different topic this is about finding money what's what's your dream andrew well my dream is to someday find a bag of money um like any responsible adult And this story comes from Erica. I have no idea where this is going, but I'm dying to find out.

Hello, this is Erica in Arlington, Washington. And I was just calling because I heard Andrew say before that he wishes that he could find a bag of money on the street. So I wanted to call and talk about the time that I found a bag of money. It was not on the street. One of my jobs as a young person was cleaning and painting apartments and houses, but apartments was most of our work. And the rule was because I was the smallest person and I could climb up into all the small closets and coves of the apartments that whatever I found, I could keep.

So now, so I'm assuming when you're talking about cleaning and painting, we're probably talking about housing that is switching hands, right? Yes, that's my guess. Because otherwise you're just stealing.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I hope that's not how it works with people that come clean the house. Exactly. Okay.

So this is how I came to acquire a two-room tent that I still have and use. And I found various other like treasures that people would just leave behind. And so one day I was painting by myself in an apartment, and I found a bag of money in a regular closet. It wasn't hidden, like, anywhere that somebody could have left it behind. It was just, like, you know, reach my hand up, six feet up. It's just right there on the shelf. And I opened it up. It was probably, like, a couple thousand dollars. Damn. So I'm by myself. I could have just put it in my pocket and walked away, but I was kind of, like, freaking out because, you know, you see a lot of things happen at apartment complexes. So we were in Liberian, which is kind of the area around the SeaTac airport. And I had, like, that week had my tires slashed. Kind of a scary place to be by yourself just because of the crime rate around there. So I thought, why would somebody leave this bag of money behind? I started getting paranoid, especially in a place that was very obvious. And so I worried about how this money had been acquired. Was it counterfeit? I didn't know. I talked myself out of taking it, and I turned in the money to the manager at the apartment complex. And when I went in to the office, it was just the manager and I in the office, right? And so nobody else knew about this money except the manager and myself. and so i turned it in said which apartment i found it in walked away um i don't even know

if i told my boss but then a couple weeks later saw the manager in a brand new toyota corolla

and that's where the voicemail cuts off she's safe should we save part two for tomorrow or continue it now no here it is here it is to hear yeah let's let i want to hear the next can we just yeah she called back again this is all new territory for me i haven't heard this

again um i guess is that the listener's version of going over the river when you get cut off by the machine it's okay this is a good story so where i ended the story was i showed up a couple weeks later the manager was not there uh because they had taken the money for themselves and i am not sure what happened after that. The only thing that the corporate manager who was there temporarily until they found somebody else could tell me is that they were fired. Something illegal had happened, but they couldn't talk about it because of the legalities of it. There was legit

not legislators there was uh you know a case a court case against them so apparently maybe somebody found out about that money somehow that person got in trouble so i think i did the right thing part of me feels like i should have just taken off but anyway i love the show and i'll

talk to y'all later so that's interesting so we don't know exactly what happened there but she hands this money over to the property manager who works for a bigger corporation comes back that person is gone they had to fire that person there's somebody from corporate they are filling in I knew by the way

100% that person was going to take the money yeah you could tell that something was going to happen yeah like that just my guess would be that Erica it's Erica correct there's a short list of people who are going to hand two grand over to someone that they found and like Erica was on that list but i was like if this money starts moving around somebody involved is going

to be like snatching it i gotta say as much as it's my dream of finding a bag of money especially a couple of thousand dollars in this case i would hand it over to like it would just for for the reasons she mentioned and i think for ethical reasons in this case because i feel like that is trackable like again my dream is i find a bag of money someplace where it is completely like i always think of like in a parking lot because that's where my friend tony found a hundred dollars with his friend dylan right and this is the dream i'm chasing it's amazing the moments in life yeah that will animate define you years of behavior yeah exactly now i only hang out in parking lots looking for money no um but anyway like that's kind of like okay you find a bag of money out in the middle of nowhere somewhere it can't be it's not like oh this this ten dollar bill is probably probably belongs to the person who's standing right over it who's going through their handbag right now or something you know what i mean like this idea of just finding like a gift from the gods but like related to your job you are cleaning apartments where somebody lived it seems like both again morally but also probably for safety's sake it's best that erica did not take that money and i don't think i would either i think i would turn it into somebody i don't know if i'd take it to the manager though because i wouldn't trust them who do you trust enough to

do the right thing you know i think what i would do is i would take the money but i would tell first of all it sounds like the rule was erica was allowed to keep what she found yeah including this tent so i what i would do is i would i would take the money like as in i would have the money i would possess the money but i would say to the manager hey i found uh some money in the apartment um i if if somebody comes asking for the money this is my phone number and if they call me if they can you know describe accurately what we're dealing with then i'll give it back to them like to me it's really one of these possession is nine tenths of the may not be nine tenths of the law but it's nine it's what happened with me in that gold coin that i found when i was a kid that kruger and and thankfully probably because the guy at little fat bat that was literally what the name of the batting cage was he was didn't realize this was worth anything was like why don't you just take it home give us your number and if anybody calls for it we'll we'll forward it to you and no one called about it so that's kind of would be my approach with any of this stuff would be like i'm gonna hold on to it i'm not gonna spend it i'm not gonna do anything with it but i'm gonna i want to be the one who is deciding if the person coming and looking for

this money is actually the person who lost it yeah in this particular case though i feel like this because this this apartment manager is not her boss right she doesn't answer to this fella right but I get the impression that he would try to big dog her I feel like he would say well then you have to you found money what is it handed over I feel like I'd be nervous to do that the one thing I might do and I don't think I would have the the moxie to do this but maybe you just take the money home this feels like the beginning of a movie you take the money home but you don't touch it for like a year right you put it in the back of your own closet and you know it's there And then you just sort of wait and see. And after a year, maybe it's your money. But there might still be some ethical issues there.

I'm just very curious about how this manager got busted because it was Erica and the manager were the only two people that knew about this money.

Maybe somebody called and asked about it. Like, hey, I left some money behind.

Yeah. And if you're the manager, if you're already willing to lie to Erica, wouldn't you think the manager would just say, I don't know what you're talking about? You know, like in Princess Bride, when they come up to the door of the castle and they say, we need the gate key. And the guy goes, I have no gate key. And then Mandy Patinkin says, Fezzig, tear his arms off. Wait, what's Andre the Giant's name in that? He's Fezzig, I think. Tear his arms off. And the guy goes, oh, you mean this gate key?

Yeah, right.

Like, you know, if I called the manager and I was like, I lost my paper bag with two grand in it. I mean, my guess is that the money was probably.

ill-gotten in the first place. Yeah, because it's a bag of

money. That's the thing about bags of money.

When you're moving, let's just say you have been working very hard at your job and you have been saving your money. And for some reason it's cash and you've got it in a bag and you've got it in the closet. As you're carrying your futons out and your other stuff, maybe you've got those stackable milk crates you're keeping records in or something. As you're cleaning the apartment out, I would think the $2,000 that you've been carefully squirreling away would be one of the first things you'd move. But even

And OK, but let's say that you're, you know, you're part of the criminal element. I still think that you would keep track of that money. Like, what is the situation at this probably not very fancy apartment complex in Burien that anybody's leaving money behind?

Somebody stole it. Somebody stashed it in that room. And then it wasn't their apartment. They were just there. They stashed it, meaning to come back for it. And then they either met some untimely end or moved out of state or were incarcerated maybe. Something happened where they couldn't come back and get the money. And so that's how it ended up there. And the person who was actually the renter of the apartment didn't even know it was there. That's my theory.

Because it's like kind of stashed away, as Erica said. Like she's reached her hand up and touches it. So anyway, that is a fascinating story, Erica. Thank you for calling in with that. Appreciate that.

All right. That's going to do it for today's show, but I've got some great news. We're going to be back here tomorrow with wall-to-wall coverage of the Queen's casket as they move it from where it is now to three feet to the left. So that should be some riveting content tomorrow. Please do tune

in for that. Do you want me to forward you any information I get about the schedule or about the

Westgate entrance? Yeah, could you? Any other sailors that collapse? Yes. Sailor down. All right, we'll be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. Until then, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

The End known as this never go in against the sicilian when death is on the line power out