Muse

Hey, dummies. I know that a listener is a 10, a partner of a listener is an 11, and the chance of a listener is a 5. But we need to come up with a new term for reluctant TVTL listeners. For example, Ryan Knapp, I know you are listening, and you will not admit it. Power out, guys. TVTL.

So maybe this isn't exactly the most polished radio broadcast you've ever heard. They sound un-freaking-incredible together.

Listening to public radio without donating is like eating a dinner at an exquisite gourmet restaurant and then not paying the bill, just walking right on out of there.

It's exactly like that.

Instead of stealing food, though, you're stealing our words and our thoughts. And please don't play this on the radio.

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

Gotta have that root beer.

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

It's a tough but rewarding job, one that takes years to move into.

Coming to you once again from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. It is the, I would say, almost the perfect time of year because it's still warm out, still staying light relatively late. The rain has not returned, but it does have just that little bit of fall crispness, edge in the air. I don't know. I mean, spring is also very beautiful, except spring usually has a lot of rain associated with it. I think this time of year, fall, might be the absolute sweet spot, the Goldilocks zone here in the P&W. We have arrived at the perfect episode of the show. It's episode 3,775 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. 3,774 would be not enough. 3,776 would be too many. we're in exactly where we want to be at 3775 watch i'll find out that it's actually the wrong number for the show the day that i decided to really highlight that big news in the case of adnan sayed the person convicted of murder in maryland who of course was the subject of the podcast serial previously on serial um he's been released from jail and this is after the prosecutors asked for this to happen we will talk about that also um a guy in florida i'm trying to say florida man that's been a little overdone but a guy in florida decided he had a couple of hours off and he thought it's a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity i've got a couple of hours maybe i'll go into a swamp and see what happens oh my god that's so crazy why that is not an actual recording from the swamp but i could understand why you would think so because That person also is definitely somewhere where you've got some kind of crickets going on.

Oh, my God. That's so crazy. Why?

I think that's probably Antoine Dotson. Our friend Antoine Dotson. I don't mean our friend, but the viral hit Antoine Dotson. Anyway, also on Sunday night, so going back a couple of shows now, I saw something on an airplane. I heard something on an airplane that made me think about cancel culture.

They didn't cancel you. You canceled them.

And I don't usually play the same audio drop two shows in a row, but I just find this, this is from Larry King not understanding that Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld decided to end, or at least, you know, the people on the show Seinfeld decided to end the show. It was not canceled by NBC, and that made Jerry Seinfeld very mad anyway. We'll talk about the latest on cancel culture, at least what I saw, plus emails and v-mails. And this guy, longest running co-bro of the show, may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Now, it's not a secret that there are some folks who take a certain shine to him. I mean, is he a bit of a ladies' man? Doesn't he look like the kind of boy who has to fight him off? Yes, he does. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

I am the kind of boy who has to fight them off. Thank you for recognizing that. Them being mosquitoes as you're standing in your yard. I thought it was referencing people throwing dog poop in my garbage can. I have to fight them off because I have such a attractive. I feel like you've won that battle. Yeah, it's been pretty good here. Not as much foot traffic on the street. You know, the schedule of the trash collectors picking up my garbage.

Garbage in a timely way has been much better since we moved. So I can get those babies off the curb almost immediately. I can hear the trucks pulling up. Basically, we bought this house knowing that the garbage situation, the trash pickup situation would be ideal for me. I have a little periscope here that we built into the house. We actually made the previous owners build it for us as part of the thing.

You didn't have a lot of leverage in the deal. I know it was all cash offer. Yeah. exactly about 800 over asking yeah you did the one request you waive all of the inspections the

one request that was to have the previous owner install a periscope yes a trash you know so it's a trash periscope i mean it's not made of trash it's a it's made of the normal stuff that periscopes are made of glass i would guess and brass mirrors um but um no but it's aimed directly at hey did Did you ever, speaking of canceled, I really miss going to. So they didn't cancel you. You canceled them. Heard that somewhere before.

You know how absolutely compressed and horrible the actual audio quality of that is. That's an added element to it. Was this from Beyond the Grave when Larry King recorded?

Most of the things he did were from Beyond the Grave, I believe. All due respect. But, you know, I used to love going to the Five Point, the diner and bar that's down there, kind of a Belltown adjacent. And, of course, it's owned by somebody who we now realize is a very, very despicable person in the way that he has. Despicable he. Despicable him. Yes, for sure. But anyway, I mean, despicable is not even the right word there. But anyway, I'll move on. But I haven't been there since those all those allegations came to light. And we realized that, like, we do not want to support this man. And so I really miss that place, though. It's a really cool bar. And one thing I'm just thinking about now is the whole periscope angle. Do you remember the periscope in the men's room? Yeah, when you were using the urinal and you're staring straight ahead, it was like kind of a big kind of crudely built periscope built into the wall so that technically when you're there standing there using the urinal, the space needle, which is not part of this building, it is outside, would be to your back. But as you're urinating, you're looking into this kind of black hole and then you realize, oh, there's a mirror way back there that attaches to a mirror on the roof and you can stare at the Space Needle while you pee.

I only I think I've only actually looked into that. It was kind of legendary. I think I only looked looked into it a time or two. I have to say I wasn't that wasn't a place that was part of my regular routine and still you until you and I became friends. And even then it wasn't regular. I bet you we've been there together like twice, maybe.

Yeah, I just remember the first time I ever saw anybody do pull tabs. I didn't know they existed until you got a basket of them. And I was like, oh, can I pull one or two?

I feel like that place was also, again, I'm just thinking of the one or two times that we went there. It seemed like a real rolling thunder spot for me. Like a day where we had somehow knocked the show out earlier. We were on, you know, somehow like you and me at about like one or two in the afternoon, probably blowing Camaro Kev's phone up to see if he wants to come over. And me just looking for looking for trouble with like ordering hard liquor in the daytime and you're eating a chicken fried steak. And this is a night that for me inevitably will end up at Goldie's Casino in Shoreline. That's yeah, that's what my sense memory of those days.

Everything's right about that, except if I'm eating at that time of day, I'm eating a French dip. The chicken fried steak would be more of a breakfast meal for me. But no, everything that you say about that is right. Because Camaro Kev used to work right around there, so he could get off work, come meet us there. That really was a place where I went a lot, though, like I think maybe with you a few times, but generally speaking. You know, we lived on Capitol Hill, and this was maybe, I don't know, a mile down the hill from us. We just rolled down the hill. The worst part is I'd rather walk up the hill to the bar and walk down the hill at night again because it's a steep hill. I mean, for people who aren't around here, Denny Hill is a steep-ass hill.

and you know the problem with that hill was uh or problem i guess the challenge of that hill was made evident by the initial bike share programs that they had in seattle this was before like sort of e-assist bikes so it was just like i think a sort of regular bike that you would that you could um you know check out and the city started this program and they had to end it because what was happening was everyone was renting the bikes on top of capitol hill and then leaving them at the bottom of denny yeah because nobody wanted to ride them back up the hill because they weren't e-assist yet and so they were like yeah this city is topographically does not like portland is just flat right everywhere is pretty much the same elevation but yeah that is a that's a monstrous hill i do love uh in fact becca and i later are going to go to a little barbecue that's like a live wire uh kind of kick off the season uh thing because we're by the way we'll be back Thursday night.

night at the alberta rose theater it's going to be a great show please come see us sonam of sesian will be there conan o'brien's assistant from the conan o'brien needs a friend podcast uh and it's going to be a really great show anyway we are going to this barbecue and it's um it's at uh my friend and the executive producer of our show's house which is about a mile from my place and we're going to walk there and i love that's the perfect distance for me i wish i could walk to everywhere I'm going to eat a little too much food and maybe have a couple too many drinks because the walking back is just so, it's the difference between feeling pretty lousy the next morning and being basically fine. What did you say

the distance is one mile? That's kind of hard. One mile

and it's flat because it's Portland. Yeah, yeah. A mile is about the sweet spot. Now I will be bringing bubbles on a backpack, which I can give you an update on tomorrow's show how that goes. The request came out from the staff of the show, could you bring the cat? And I have a new backpack for her that i can it's like a backpack i can wear that she hangs out in so i've never walked a mile though with her i've just walked down the hall of my building into my car so we'll see how that goes point being a mile is a really good distance because you get to kind of burn it off a little bit and i know you're a pretty in the summertime you're a pretty big like walk home

from the eagles kind of guy right yeah i mean we're a little far from the eagles well you used to be like two miles now but we used to be about a mile i mean it's funny now we're talking about a half mile we used to be like just over a mile i think like i'm you know like 1.3 miles or something from the eagles and the way there was not a very i mean it's funny it's the same route but like the way there it's just a very slow um kind of uh grade uphill incline a little bit and it's also just like a not very nice walk right you're walking along kind of a lousier part of roosevelt with just like kind of cars speeding by and it's not very it's not a very pleasant walk there but the walk home same route but you're tuned up a little bit it's downhill you're taking all kinds of pictures that you're going to remember the next day when you look at your camera roll um yeah no i we we loved walking there and that's very much genevieve's influence over me you know i mentioned to you before the show that i went to see um pavement this weekend i thought he kind of talked where did they play they played at the paramount and so i was down by the paramount with a couple of buds and that was fun and then at the end of the day at the end of the night uh i'm getting my my one bud is going to capitol hill for area to to meet up with some folks another friend is heading back home to west seattle so i make sure he gets to his bus okay um and then i'm like okay good and then i get and i look down at my phone and i say okay i got to catch the e-line home and we've talked about the e-line before it's one of the kind of sketchier bus lines but you know get you there but you know you meet interesting people there and anyway so i'm waiting i get on the bus just gets catch the e-line okay and then you know it's about a half hour bus ride and it didn't even occur to me luke it didn't even occur to me occur to me um until like halfway through the ride i was like i never even checked to see what a car would have cost me now in this economy would have been too much money anyway but like that is genevieve's influence on me the fact that like there might have been a there was a time i wouldn't have even considered a bus from downtown i don't even know they had buses in seattle if i'm being totally honest there would have been a time I don't even mean that long ago last summer I probably would have just dialed up a car I think maybe part of it is the cheapness that I'm feeling a little bit more everything just seems a lot more expensive these days and there's some hard evidence to back that up and I'm like I didn't even look I was just like yeah of course I'm going home now from downtown Seattle around 1130 at night of course I'm going to get on the E-Line and I'm glad I did I had nowhere to be in a hurry or whatever it was a nice night after a long night After a few beers, a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Somebody asked me if I was a bounty hunter again. They keep asking me that. You keep getting that question. I know. No, somebody said that you look like the type of boy who has to beat him off. And I said, you're talking about my garbage cans. Sit down.

Doesn't he look like the kind of boy who has to fight him off? Yes, he does. Anyway, I'm rambling, Luke. I'm rambling. It's my new favorite piece of tape. It's nice. How was the pavement show? I saw pavement at the Paramount. uh many years ago were you there was it with you i know vanessa was there no i saw pavement i've

seen pavement i gotta say my pavement record is pretty good i saw them it's one of the best shows ever saw in my life unfortunately i can't remember the actual venue because it was cleveland and it was so long ago but it was in college a a friend of mine who i was mildly in love with um oh i

think we've talked about this yeah you were she yeah i think we talked about this actually a month

or two ago she made me a tape where it was like silver jews on one side and pavement on the other and i like i at the time i actually i think i like the silver jews side more of course steven malcolm is being a uh on both in both of those bands uh but anyway uh and so it was one of those perfect timing things where they must have been touring i want to say for either bright in the corner.

Or Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain So, you know, mid-90s Mid to late 90s And it was one of those things where I just discovered them Because she wanted me to come with her So she gave me this tape And so I just, like, kind of the peak of discovering them And falling in love with them And then to see them in kind of a club sometime I want to say, yeah, this I think Crooked Rain was 94 So this must have been bright in the corners Around 98 or something So that was great And I saw Steve Malkmus once live at a festival It was amazing And then this show was good, too we were way up in the um this is one of those things i know our buddy jonathan was there uh with us too and i'm embarrassed yeah hauser i'm embarrassed to tell this story because um it just makes me seem like such a like kind of a skin flint and i've talked about money too much and but it is one of those things where it shouldn't affect your experience but it sort of did so this was a last minute idea my friend paulie's like hey do you want to go see this payfin show we got a few tickets jonathan i don't know why i'm calling him jonathan i never call him jonathan to his face hauser says he's interested too so the three of us go um but i was really on the fence because floor tickets first of all the show was technically sold out so paulie was looking at like those secondhand sites which or what do you call them not secondhand but you know aftermarket aftermarket sites which i'm not a huge fan of this whole this whole thing of people buying up the tickets and then selling them on on these um third-party sites but anyway the floor tickets are really really expensive for what I need out of this and I'm like I could take it or leave it then it's like okay mezzanine tickets are like 50 bucks I'm like okay that's about my limit I think for this 50 bucks that's fine I'd do that and so we get the tickets and you know everything's fine and then we go take our seats we know that the tickets are like way up in the top mezzanine pretty far in the back but it's the paramount like I'm not sweating it or whatever but then we sit down me and hauser sit down in the wrong seats temporarily we're in like the wrong section we're just like one section off or something but i asked these kids and they were kids they were like you know in their early 20s whatever i asked them to scooch over and they're like no i think we're in the right seats i'm like well it's no big deal as long as nobody cuts you know kicks us out of these seats that we're sitting in um it's fine we can find plenty of space around here i'm not trying to kick you out we i was mistaken i thought they were in our seats anyway point is they're like yeah no we just got these seats for like seven dollars or whatever yesterday or whatever and i was kind of like i don't know i don't know if paulie sort of got had or if it was a matter of waiting until the very last minute but this young woman looks at me and i you know i'm feeling pretty old now it's not even about the money it was more about in this moment i felt very old and doddery because she's like 50 you spend she's like you don't belong up here you must belong downstairs you belong these aren't 50 tickets i'm just kind of like okay whatever like i'm looking at my ticket i know i'm in basically the right spot right and i was kind of like it wasn't even about them it really was not about the money it was just feeling kind of old and inept at going to concerts like this this young kid just looking at me being like sir you belong down there if you

spent real money on these like they used a they snapchatted a qr code yeah exactly yeah grand

theft auto nine which came with a promotional ticket to this and and you and paulie were like had like two desktop computers out exactly hack into stub hub right exactly and that was more

the feeling yeah so it wasn't like you know like whatever we had we had a nice time like i had a really i had a really good time i've had paving songs in my head the past two days because of it it was um uh it was fun for hauser to meet my friend paul who's been friends with me since high school like it was just it was a good night it was good vibes i enjoyed the show but it's just that one moment and again i had to keep reminding myself like first of all i know this isn't really about the money like it is what it is and also just like don't let this one thing retroactively change how you feel about this experience but you know what's funny is i have the same problem even

though i am very um i'm pretty profligate with my spending unfortunately i'm just not i just um i don't think about how much stuff costs a lot of the time and i i should be much better at saving i'm gonna have to host this podcast till i'm 150 and more critically the donors are gonna have to keep donating till i'm 150 because i don't know if i'll ever be able to retire um also getting divorced every six years isn't great yeah isn't great for the wealth building but anyway alimony but um what does stick in my craw is something like that where i i overpaid for something or it feels like and i don't even know if you did or not that's the kind of thing where like you know if you told me those tickets were two hundred dollars but it was a really fun night with my friends and it was you know i don't think i would pay two hundred dollars for pavement tickets having seen them but you know whatever if i were i could see eating it on a very expensive Ticket price and just having a great time But if I paid $30 for a ticket And everyone else was like oh yeah we got these for five Oh they were handing them out in front for free yeah that would gnaw at me throughout the entire show like that would really really uh bum me out i think your joke about like me and paulie being behind desktop computers is really kind of nails because i don't know i mean i don't think that paul is not um what's what i'm looking for like somebody who's not familiar or comfortable he's not a luddite in fact um his his family is very technologically um he comes from a family of tech people he does i mean yeah i mean his his well i don't want to go into the details of his life but anyway um but that's the feeling it was really just the look on this young woman's face you know that was kind of like and again it was just kind of like she i don't know just like the difference between seven dollars and fifty dollars and her eyes got so wide and it just like felt very much like a sir you don't belong in this Like, you belong in the caviar, you know, the section where they're serving champagne or whatever, which, you know, it's $50. It's not that. But it's just like looking at this experience through her eyes just made me feel like just like very, very out of it and old.

Did you show up with your official pavement T-shirt that you bought downstairs for $63 that was only available during this tour? I know we've got listeners that are very into that. And I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, but that's something that is never, I mean, people just like to collect different things. And again, it can be very cool if somebody is like, every time I go see this band, I like to get the t-shirt from that, that tour. It's a good memory and a reminder. Like, I don't want to sound like I'm being dismissive of that, but that's just, I mean, for me, it's always like, uh, I'm, you know, if it's going to be $50 for this shirt or whatever, or if I don't love the design of the shirt, but it happens to, I, there's also just other than wilco which by the way it's ironic yeah i'll be seeing them later today that's because you're going to bend oregon exactly that just to hack off our oregon residents um you're going to see wilco i have so many questions but i want to say one thing really quickly about that kind of sense of missing out not not missing out but just being the wrong thing so i've been traveling again a bunch and something interesting has shifted it would seem within the or maybe it's just a particular route i was on but i've had i was on a real hot streak where i was getting upgraded a lot when i was flying so i was getting to be up in first class and then i just got used to it and now i'm not getting upgraded as much i have the same status it's just the luck of the draw on the particular flight are there have people actually purchase the seats in first class or are there people that are in the 100 i'm gold 75k but there's something now gold 100k and are they getting the seats first and the thing is it's fine but now that i'm like uh when i was flying home from nashville to seattle on my way to portland i was in the first row of coach i was in row six now i used to love row six i called it the first class of coach because you have a little more leg room uh you're you know it's just i so if i have to be in coach I'm always going to hope that I could get in row six seat F that'd be the farthest to the right in the sixth row that to me is the best seat in coach I had that flying home but what I could hear was the laughing and the careful care of the stewardess of the flight attendant I should say in in first class and I know what that's like because I've been up there Andrew and they're just like so happy you're there and they know your name because it's in some computer and they've just like everything you say is just a hilarious like well can't you can you believe we all got on this flight together we are such a chummy group and not that the people are rude to you and coach they're not rude but there is just a level of fawning and i could hear it all i could smell them bringing out the nuts that they warm up it was just like i'm i'm so close and like if i were to get up and try to use that bathroom they would yell at me which if i were just one row forward andrew then i would be allowed to use the front bathroom so anyway when i did the short flight from seattle to portland i was in fact upgraded to the first class cabin i had a rare thing happen

there was no one next to me there was multiple empty seats oh that's wonderful but that to me feels like send somebody up there like every seat in first class is spacious enough you have enough personal space that you don't really benefit much from not having someone next to you i feel like they should just they should just have a have everyone write their seat number down put it in a bowl and pull some pulling names you should never fly a flight where for unless it's a weight balance issue weight distribution thing should never fly first class with seats open i feel like someone would benefit from getting to sit up there it's much comfier i misunderstood i

thought that you had a couple of seats next to you at that bulkhead row six or whatever because that's ideal i mean that's that's definitely the first class of code for like the 20 minute

if it's even that oh geez the 20 minute flight from seattle to portland i was upgraded and that's the flight where it like they literally go like we've not reached our cruising ding we We've now reached 10,000 feet. It is safe to turn on portable electronic devices. And then you hear another, ding, we've begun our initial descent into Portland. Please put away electronic portable devices. Like the amount of time that you're at the cruising altitude is under four minutes. So anyway, it was fine. I was late at night. I was very tired. So I was happy to be in a comfy seat where I could kind of just crash out a little bit. But this thing happened that had never happened, I'd never heard before to this degree, which was the flight that the person reading the safety announcements he had written jokes in to most of the announcements so like if the captain decides to turn this plane into a cruise your seat cushion will work as a but it was like every line had a joke written into it and i thought first of all i don't know legally if you're allowed to do that i bet you're not by the way that's the 46 year old in me you know 26 year old luke burbank if he was a flight attendant would 100% be using This public This mic time to try to get my Jokes in you know If the Kool-Aid man comes tearing Onto this plane By the way a lot of people have been making that joke I think a lot of people ripped me off on that

I was going to say I don't know about the legality of it Because they clearly make those videos Where like they're giving the instructions in song It's probably like a legal idea where there are Some things that you definitely have to say But then you can kind of have fun around the edges with it a little bit but i don't god i think about that person's co-workers listening to these same jokes over and over again like i know they're trying to make it like this more tedious part of the flight a little bit more entertaining but i would say like let's just get let's keep our heads down and get through it quickly like just hearing somebody's corny jokes is rough i was kind of

enjoying it because to me it first of all was the first time and probably last time i'll hear it unless i happen to catch a flight with this person again and i just thought hey this is a thing that's otherwise boring they're kind of juicing it up the jokes were not horrible by the way i probably gave the worst one it was just the one that stuck in my mind it wasn't like becca and i were on a um a riverboat tour you want i mean riverboats overstating it in the san antonio river right which is i think a man-made little ribbon of water that runs through sort of downtown san antonio and it's basically a big tourist attraction um we got a we got a ride on on one of these tour boats and the guy i think i might have told you about this at the time or shortly thereafter was brutal the guy narrating he was like he he was making jokes and they were so unfunny and then he would often follow up his bad joke with yeah i went there oh god it was to this day beck

and i would just go yeah i went yeah you can start saying it as a joke because it's so annoying but then you actually somebody hears you say that hey right yeah let me just go back really quickly Because before we get too far away I wanted to give a quick shout out to listener Nate Who I ran into at the Pavement show as well And I'd like to just publicly apologize for calling him Bruce You thought his name was Bruce? He introduced himself as Nate to me And then two minutes later I introduced him to my buds as Bruce Although this is one of those Okay, let me tell you about this really quickly Earlier on in the evening Me, Hauser, Pauly Having some drinks before the show Before we walk over there, right? And then during our conversation I mentioned something about some scenario where I ran into a listener in Los Angeles many years ago. And my friend Pauly, who I still think I think that I'm just doing this as a hobby and the Genevieve pays all the bills, which isn't totally untrue, was just like, wait, hold on. Somebody recognized you. Does this happen? Does this happen a lot? I'm like, well, that doesn't happen a lot. But I mean, people do listen to the show that I work on. sometimes you run into them um and then later on i am wait like jonathan and paulie are getting some drinks at the show now at the paramount where the opening band is playing we haven't taken our seats yet and i'm standing alone outside of like our section and that is when nate and his buddy came up he's like hey are you you andrew from tbtl or whatever he said and i was like yes but like could you please just do this like five minutes later like i just my friend paul still thinks that i'm just like he probably doesn't know you exist luke he probably thinks you're a teddy bear that i'm playing risk with and then doing a fake radio show with which he is every like honestly that's on me not him um but yeah i was like i was just really i was just like your timing is just off here could you please impress my friends and then oh here's the real point of that story though so then so then hauser comes up and he already knows hauser hauser is way more impressive and famous than me anyway so yeah it was a real cool moment for me and then i called him bruce so good job all around tvtl breaking news some breaking

news for you andrew uh nate's name is not bruce no um as we've been chatting we've been getting some texts from our friend televisions uh chris hayes

Oh, yeah, I thought my phone buzzed.

Who wanted to point out that Martha Raddatz does not work for Fox News, nor has ever worked for Fox News. On yesterday's episode, we were, you were talking about the Fox broadcasting chain that you're on regarding coverage of the death of the queen. And there was somebody named Martha was doing a standup. And I said, Raddatz, because I just remembered she had left NPR for a TV network job. But I was wrong. She did not. She does not work at Fox. She has never worked at Fox. um she works at abc so i just wanted to before i forgot correct that now if i can for a quick moment go back to the jokester on oh yeah yeah yeah i was generally positive about the whole thing because i just kind of thought yeah okay i like it i like you're going for it and it's kind of younger younger uh guy uh who is doing this i mean everybody seems young to me but he seemed like maybe mid late 20s okay i'm cool with it so then there are these two other flight attendants and uh they're they're two women and when he gets done one of them says oh that's pretty funny are you into comedy goes yeah i'm really into comedy he goes well probably my favorite comedian is louis ck and i'm overhearing all this because i'm in the first row of the plane and they're talking in that little area where the flight attendants hang out and there was zero recognition on the face of the other two flight attendants who were i would say women in their mid to late 20s as well there was zero recoil there was zero like wait the louis ck this guy didn't in any way think uh maybe i don't want to like mention my favorite comedian is louis ck to people i work with or really anyone at this point he just said it like there was absolutely nothing about that that could be even the tiniest bit fraught and it was received in exactly that way it was received in such a way that told me his gut was right the only person that seemed slightly scandalized by this was lb in row in seat 1f i was like dag i guess louis ck is not as canceled as people would

tell you who he is well yeah i mean i think he's the perfect example of this as well um because he you know he he had his his his incident which is really really gross and an abuse of power and we don't have to go in the details of it now people know or they can they can look it up but but we talked about it a lot on this show and anyway like and then he released an apology that seemed pretty heartfelt I think some people took some issue with a couple of things but I felt like if I might be remembering this wrong but I felt like his first written apology was kind of like okay I hear you and then I think he took some time off and you're kind of thinking okay this is Louie like he's you know aside from doing some pretty awful things like he's a really smart man like he's you know he was kind of almost genius level as far as like kind of his observational humor and how he leveraged that and like the way we as a society as a culture sort of like celebrated him and kind of rightfully so for the way his brain worked for his for his craft like yeah we loved him like i really thought that he would come back and like after that acknowledgement of of having some growing to do and learning to do whatever he could come back and talk about it as a you know as somewhere between a comedian and a monologuist and explore it and explore his role in it maybe and but instead he really kind of came back and like I've never I don't think I've ever taken the stand that said like this person should not be practicing their art anymore like he everybody does have the right to do that and if there's an audience there then that audience can can you know enjoy it I guess and I can then judge that person and their audience maybe if I feel like they're they're doing it in a way that is kind of on the backs of others um but like he really just kind of when he took the stage again really made jokes about cancel culture right and like kind of like put himself in like more of a almost like he was a victim of of society overreacting to things and you're just like what that's your takeaway from this and like that to me was just like that to me was like oh i i want

nothing to do with this shit heel sorry yeah that was the bummer because i agree with you i read his apology to be pretty well written and it struck me again that's my experience i'm a male and so you know i that's my perspective on it and if i were somebody else who who might be more the object of his um harassment i might have a totally different uh read on his apology but i thought the apology it struck me as pretty uh a pretty good way to do this but then i mean i think his show in madison square garden uh was um which i believe was sold out for multiple shows so there you go he he may only be able to sell out madison square garden now andrew so yeah right for louie but he i think he had a huge backdrop that was um you know an illuminated thing that said i'm sorry which i don't it didn't read to me as an actual mea culpa it read to me

as a cheeky joke about like i'm so sorry i did this and if i were one of his victims i would be that would be really disappointing because it would feel like a person and then you know i i i understand that his instinct is to use humor to deal with everything in his life because that's kind of how he's wired but i have seen him like on tiktok i'll see him pop up in places now he'll do interviews on some comedy podcasts and stuff and it does seem like he's sort of like it's like he had to go to comedy jail for a year and he had to like you know he kind of got in trouble but now he's you know now he's back and it seems like it strikes me i don't know what i want his sort of general posture to be but it doesn't it feels like he's just kind of like yeah you know they tried to cancel me and it didn't work or something yeah and i think is his

early his early um like kind of before he was doing the big shows you know he started just dip his proverbial toes in the water again and like he was doing i think some people maybe had cell phone tape of it it was or maybe he even maybe he even officially released some you know low low quality bits i i don't think that's the case i thought it was more of kind of a leak situation where like he's like kind of doing clubs again and and the takeaway is just kind of like you know again it's it's from a stance of his own victimization during this time of cancel culture and it's like well right you know you're not i mean you're making money off of your art and

you're selling out medicine square garden yeah i don't expect him by the way i would not have expected him to suddenly be like you know self-flagellating on stage or like you know to like stop doing comedy and turn it into a listening tour or something or where it's just like he's suddenly goes from being this kind of gregarious person to being like hang dog all the time and like like that nobody expected that from him but there's a way for him to keep being funny because he is a very very smart comic there's a way for him to be really funny and also reflect that he did some shitty things and that he should have been he should have probably suffered some consequences for them and that just doesn't seem to be the the particular route that he chose and

you don't even have to make a bit out of it like maybe even i mean that is what we expected again as a compliment to him we expected that because he does seem to be a thoughtful guy who likes to explore his weaknesses that is a huge part of his show when i say show i mean a stand-up and his tv show which was like you know an extension of all that like he is a man who puts it all out there And, you know, and does vulnerability like does vulnerability really well. Right. And so we kind of expected that. But even to the degree that, like you say, it also you didn't he didn't have to like if he could have taken his first kind of step out and just say, like, you know, maybe, well, this is awkward. And it's like, you know, or just show gratitude for people showing up. You know what I mean? Like not even just be like an earnest, just like in a not long, just like an earnest, like, I really appreciate people being here to, you know, to see to see the next act. or or whatever like there's just a way to do it without again just being a dude who feels like he

was victimized yeah that seems to be i haven't i didn't watch the madison square garden show and i've only seen clips of him so i guess i'm not really i can't i can't say that i have thoroughly explored what his vibe is but just that i'm sorry thing didn't feel yeah like a person who was like sort of had learned from the stuff they did that was that was terrible and if you think about anybody in your life going through what the people and what louis ck now admits he did to the people that you know uh that that he victimized it's like it's really incredibly awful it's not like a light thing it's not like a you know it was al franken miming touching someone's you know private area or whatever when they were asleep in a photo which i'm not saying that's cool either right but there's like it wasn't something it wasn't a joke that landed wrong from louis ck it was something much worse than that and that's why it's kind of a bummer okay let's do this let's take a quick break and then we come back uh we'll talk about the latest uh with adnan syed and also why you probably should really know what you're doing before you decide to wander into florida Swamp for Fun. Coming up here on TBTL. Thank you, baby. Alright, let's thank some donors of the day. These are the folks who are keeping the show going by donating money every month. And we really, really do appreciate it. As I established earlier in the program, we'll need this to go on for another $100 and 40 years at a minimum. We want it to be like the Queen's Funeral. We want it to be endless, very expensive, and ultimately, you know, memorializing us. I did think when the Queen's Funeral was going on, when the latest version of it or whatever you want to call it, God, I was thinking, I would really, I would love it if the entire

world stopped and spent like literally two weeks just talking about where my lifeless

Thank you.

body was. I don't have that same urge, but I do have the urge to brag a little bit about the fact that I was, my little dumb riff yesterday about the brick of Ludwig, first of all, was more, it had more things right than I even thought. I couldn't click on that link for some reason. But it's actually called The Stone of Destiny. I made it. I made it least cliche. There's this stone that is, you know, from, I don't know, like the 1200s or something like that, that lives in Edinburgh, but, like, it comes and it's, I'm not making this up anymore. This is a real thing. And it's like, it's traveling to Westminster so it can sit underneath the king's throne when he, what is the word I'm looking for, when he becomes king during his coronation ceremony. Like, literally, this stone is – it was also stolen, by the way, by some Scottish youth in the 1950s and taken back to Scotland until England grabbed it back again. So, anyway.

Well, one of the things I learned during the endless coverage was there is a jewel in the crown that they take out because of her passing away.

Like, it never – they take it out during the ceremonies or it just never goes back in and they just – I don't think it ever goes back in. Oh, interesting.

I don't know. Because she probably wears a different, does she wear a different crown than Charles will? By the way, Charles, I'm going off of like two videos I saw. God, he seems like an asshole. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't just mean like, you know, he was, and this is something that, you know, is well known. A lot of Britons really dislike the way that he treated Lady Diana, who's a very sympathetic figure there. um you know by having an extramarital affair and things like that but i've just been seeing these clips of him just like because everything's filmed now when he like sits down to sign something there's just one clip of him just complaining he writes the wrong date on a document like and he's like oh i hate this and he doesn't like so hard for him he thinks the pen is getting on him and he hates the pen and he's mad that he wrote the wrong date it's like bish learn what date it is yeah get it together right and then like there's another one where there's no audio but he's just sitting down to sign something turns out mostly what is assigned things he's sitting down to sign something and there's like some stuff on this table in front of him it's all you know official stuff it's not like somebody left a kfc bag on the table it's like you know it's like the official royal whatever stationary things but he doesn't want he wants to sign it he just wants it out of there and if there's like of course 30 people assigned to him at all times to make sure he never has one moment of discomfort but this mere this one second thing where there's like the thing in front of him isn't what he wants he just starts gesturing at it and then people just swarm in to get out of the way and it's just like god what an unpleasant person are you sure

that it wasn't the official royal game day bucket go boom oh that's a callback you know who loved

that joke jeremy merrill of des moines iowa now we don't use the s because it's iowa because they have proper pronunciation oh this is iowa oh okay because i was wondering because i can never

remember in washington one of those s's is pronounced washington goes with the des moines okay uh uh iowa goes with des moines okay but for washington i'm never sure if it's des moines or Des Moines? It's just Des Moines. Yeah. Des Moines.

Okay. Erica Mittendorfer is in Seattle's, does Seattle's, Washington. Thanks, Erica. And then Carolyn O'Donnell is in Colchester, Vermont. That sounds idyllic in the fall. It sounds beautiful. I mean, can you imagine the fall colors in a place called Colchester, Vermont?

I can very well, but also, bundle up, Carolyn. Winter is coming.

And then look at this. Kevin O'Brien. Well. Renton, Washington. My actual. Who makes more money? Do I make more money off of Kevin? Does he make more money off of me on a yearly basis?

Wow, that's an interesting question. I wouldn't know that in anybody's relationship with their insurance agent, but I would assume that somehow you mess up the algorithm, too, just with your lifestyle. I got a lot of things I'm sure at any one time, Andrew.

and they're spread out over various jurisdictions and who knows what's going on. Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate you, man. Amalia Talti is in Yonkers, New York. I got lost there one time. Crazy. I got a good play out of it, though. Good. Is that a Neil Simon play, Lost in Yonkers?

I don't know. I mean, I've heard of it a million times, but I only know that it's a thing. I know nothing about the plot. I think it's a Neil Simon play. I'm probably wrong. I think it was Martha Raddatz who wrote Lost in Yonkers. Owen Theret is in Sarnia, Ontario. A. I'm sorry. A. Oh, okay. I was wondering what you were doing there. Okay, gotcha. I was just, I don't know why it sounded like the Fonz. I'm just stoked we have somebody in Sarnia, Ontario. Yeah, that is cool. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you everyone for supporting TBTL. Wouldn't be here without you. Thank you, baby. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Adnan Syed has been released from prison in Maryland. A kind of amazing turn of events. If you remember, Andrew, for maybe the three people listening who are unfamiliar, the case of Adnan Syed and his girlfriend who was killed, trigger warning, by the way. I don't know. We're not going to try to be overly gruesome, but I mean, the facts of the case kind of are what they are. his girlfriend hayman lee was found dead and uh he was convicted of the crime but maintained his innocence and um his sister i think ravia chowdhury was a real advocate for him may have even gone to law school i think to actually i don't know if she's his sister but his an ally of his who's featured heavily in the series serial which was kind of a whole phenomenon i mean that's almost like not i mean this is a person's life and it's also the loss of someone's life um so those are the important things about this not the wasn't it don't you remember that wild time andrew when we were all listening to cereal but kind of i mean that was culturally at least for the people that we tend to kind of like you know rub elbows with that was a phenomenon like every i didn't know anyone who wasn't listening to cereal who didn't have theories it was it was sort of the you know

true crime for the public radio set i mean it also started the true crime podcast trend i really think it did yeah i mean i'm not saying that there weren't any other podcasts out there that that didn't do something maybe somewhat similar and kind of flew under the radar and right now those podcast hosts are like wow we were doing this first i mean but like nothing to that to i mean it's still the number one production yeah exactly and and and fame and it's really like it introduced serial introduced the world to podcasts now i know that you were doing podcasts on before and i know that comedy bang man you know i mean i know there are a million podcasts but like as far as a mainstream way of people like oh well i guess i gotta learn how to subscribe

to podcasts now because everybody's talking about serial and it was extremely well produced and well done of course by uh you know sarah koenig and julie snyder and the team um but um you know after all of that, it certainly, it seemed like there would be some momentum to try to, you know, see about reopening the case. And it was reopened, and there were many appeals, and Adnan Syed lost all of those appeals. And he had basically got down to his last, last, last, last appeal and lost it. And the reason, I don't know if you've been reading up on it, Andrew, but the reason this happened was because the prosecutor came back and said, we cannot keep this guy in jail over this right now because they say that there were other very viable suspects who had the means and the motivation and the opportunity who were not pursued um there was a bunch of other investigative issues i think probably some of the stuff that was raised in the serial podcast you know that was was pointed out this was because the prosecutor basically said we cannot have this person be in prison in good conscience when this is there is so much doubt around this case now so he is out of

jail and do i have this part right i did kind of more of a cursory reading of this so that's on me but so it was the prosecutor who said there are some other persons of interest here so you know like like you said we we need to not keep this person in jail but it's still up to the prosecutor as to whether or not to start a new trial like they could still say i don't know i still think There's evidence here, but we would need to retry him. Isn't that part of the decision making process now? And it would still be up to the people who are now saying, don't keep him in jail, prison. Is your question, are they going to retry the case and retry him? My understanding is there is still an option for them to to retry him. It wouldn't be double jeopardy because they're saying we can't hold him. We're letting him out, but we can still retry him. And I guess my question is, am I correct in thinking that the person or the office that said we can't keep him in jail is the same office that will decide whether or not to try him again? I would guess that that is the case. I haven't seen that specifically, but that's kind of how this stuff works, I think. But I would be very shocked if they actually go back and try him again after all of this and after, you know, he did 20 years. And what would be interesting would be if they were to actually, you know, pursue the question of the other people who they now think are viable suspects. I don't know if those people are alive. I don't know if, you know, viable suspect. I don't know what that means. I also feel really sad for Heyman Lee's family. This is re-traumatizing to them. Yeah, that's totally true. I saw her brother interviewed in the Washington Post, and he said, look, we want the right person in jail, but this is also just a kick in the gut for us. You lose a family member, and then it becomes this other person's story, and I would imagine feeling like our loved one who's not alive has become a footnote in somebody else's story, and I could see that that would really hurt.

Luke, I think that we're wrong about something here. It says in the New York Times And I'm sorry to bog us down But just in case I can nip this in the bud Before we get a bunch of emails It says here that it was Judge Melissa Finn Of Baltimore City Court Who vacated the conviction Quote, in the interest of the Justice of Fairness Finding that prosecutors had failed To turn over evidence that could have helped Mr. Syed at trial But the prosecutors brought this to the judge I see, okay

Like last week or something So she had to rule I mean, the prosecutors don't get to, like, let someone out of jail. But what happened was because if this were if this had been his attorneys, he was out. My understanding is he was out of legal options. He had tried it all or his attorneys had. But this was because the actual like the D.A.'s, the district attorney came and said, we have doubts now about this. And that's what kind of got the ball rolling.

I see. Yeah. OK, that makes that makes sense. OK, gotcha. I just wanted to kind of nail that down. And it does say prosecutors now have 30 days to decide whether or not to retry him.

i would be i would seem pretty shocking for them to for them to both you know bring these concerns up with the judge which they probably knew had a good chance of releasing him and then turn around and try him again um i would be i mean who knows but it's also like i said i mean that we probably said this at the time we were so so so so far i mean the amount of information that i had about this case was just what they put in serial like what they put in the podcast serial which does not give me any special insight i was always very back and forth on what i thought had happened i mean i i had a theory for a while which was that maybe he and this guy jay had been involved because this guy jay remember i don't know how much you remember this from back when it was we were listening to it had basically kind of was the witness against adnan and had described all this stuff and adnan had denied it and the question i always had was why would this jay guy lie and i had a theory that maybe um they had committed this and adnan had already kind of like chosen the position of i didn't do it and so then had to stick with that which meant that him and he and jay's story didn't line up but i could never figure out why this jay guy would admit to this or or talk about it in the way that he did if it didn't happen but uh clearly the da's office thinks that there's some real doubt around this So Adnan Syed, he's out of jail. And Jay did not face trial? I can't remember much about it. I don't think Jay did any time on it, if I remember right now. The other thing is, God, how long ago did the story, did the series come out?

It's been a long time. I think this was around. Well, I know that you and I did our cereal spoof, a show about breakfast cereal. I was in L.A. when I made that because there's a bunch of my KCRW friends who were on that little fake montage I made. So that would have been. That would have been 2014, but I think it probably peaked before—yeah, it was probably 2013, 2014 that that was out.

The other thing is I saw a tweet from somebody who works, I think, with—somebody who works at Gimlet with Sarah Koenig. It said Sarah was in the courtroom, and they're releasing—I think it's going to be out today, Tuesday, that they're releasing an update on Serial.

so yeah well I guess I don't know if you saw the New York Times story but that was one thing that struck me in fact I'm calling it up here now because I just quoted from it but um you know there's a bunch of photos of you know like there's some kind of odd non-well-wishers it looks like kind of gathered outside the courthouse and then there's a big picture of Sarah Koenig and it's so funny because I mean she looks I don't know if it's funny it's sort of funny to me it's an odd picture because it's like she looks like any one of our colleagues over the years our years in public radio right like she's she's on the phone she looks like she's busy talking to an editor or whatever she just like she looks like I don't know if you're there yet but she looks you know I don't want to say frazzled I don't want to I don't want to depict her as in a negative light as far as her appearance but she just looks I'm seeing the picture she just looks and she's holding a shotgun microphone she's got like headphones around her neck she's got a big tote bag that you and I would recognize any of our colleagues having with probably her digital recorder in there and probably another windscreen.

or something and she's just talking on the phone to her editor and she just looks like really

busy that is the most any of our friends would public radio reporter in action yes right photo or at least in the process of reporting a piece that i have ever seen and if you've ever worked in public radio you will recognize it that is so funny andrew it is so i mean you and i and everybody else who's worked in this has just been that person a million times where you're trying to call your editor you're but you're like trying to make sure you're not missing the important thing and like um it's also just interesting that the phenomenon of serial means that a picture of a public radio i'm gonna i know gimlet's not public radio but let's just go with a public radio reporter this photo is part of the story in other words yeah the story is about adnan syed being released but it's also the story of sarah koenig being there recording exactly i think the whole

thing is i when i saw that photo i it kind of um it's an interesting photo it kind of uh it it It kind of stopped me in my tracks for a second. I was like, oh, wow, yeah, that's an interesting, it's kind of her story too, but she's trying to report the story, and it's not, you know, I mean, it's like, the reason that podcast was successful is because it was on the back of really good reporting, you know, like we live in an age where people are doing all kinds of true crime stuff without the amount of like responsibility and recording that she brings to it, right? But then, but I also don't know, I mean, Sarah Koenig worked hard, this was a career defining project of hers there must be pride there but also as a um journalist i wonder if

she has any misgivings about also being part of the story now i know sarah a bit and i 100% think she has misgivings about being part of the story like she is that's why she's a good journalist and why i'm gonna be hosting live wire on thursday night on a stage in front of people and i'm shilling tickets like you wouldn't believe like because she is a journalist who wants to tell stories and shine light on things and because of being the host of this thing it thrusts her i don't want to speak for her but i'm just going to say i bet you anything my guess would be knowing her a bit that that's not the part of the job that's appealing to her yeah yeah i'm sure of it

and again based on this photo she just looks like she's just like i know it's it's just a working second in time but yeah i mean she's just working her ass off um eric murda had to work his

ass off andrew to stay alive this is a true that's a true statement man this story this shocking was a piece in the times by april rubin over the weekend actually that is just really something so eric murda i'm just reading from april rubin's piece eric murda didn't usually have much free time between his irrigation service calls but on july 17th he had far more a far more generous schedule was looking to fill a couple of hours he decided to explore the manatee fish camp near one of his job sites he ended up in a swamp area near sarasota florida where he lives his downtime on that summer sunday turned into what he described as a nightmare survival story four days and three nights lost naked and suffering alone in the swamp after an alligator bit his right arm off now that just imagine it's a sunday you're working he's presumably in his uniform or whatever his work clothes it's got a couple hours to kill and figures i'll just go explore this park the thing i was texting with becca about this is i you know lived for a brief time in florida if it's summertime and i my job is to like install irrigation ditches and i have a couple of hours off you know where you're not going to find me outside yeah like i'm not trying to blame him here but i just it's shot the one of the most shocking elements of this story is that he decided to relax by going out in a swamp on a sunday when it was presumably 95 degrees and 95 percent humidity you would find me on the floor of the am pm lying next to tumgus staring up at

wherever the ac vent was blowing down sitting in tumgus's lap that's gotta be just pouring pouring

slurpy or whatever they call the am pm version of it into my mouth to keep me cold that would be what i would do on a sunday not let me go investigate this swamp but anyway he decides to go for this little walk that's the other thing it's wild to me the trouble that people can get in in you know fairly populated areas like i always think of you know if if i were to be a hundred miles into the woods somewhere you got to be careful out there because if something bad were to happen you're just so far from help but if you're in a city if i'm in mount tabor which is a park here in portland or you know something like that it just seems like it would be so hard it seems like to me that there's not any real danger and yet there apparently is so this is the quote from him i challenged the swamp the swamp challenged me back by the way he's recently trademarked that not unlike gino Ha ha ha ha!

i mean i don't listen this guy went through a lot and i don't want to sound like i'm being unsympathetic or trying to have fun at his expense i really don't mean to be but that's an interesting statement for me i challenged the swamp because it sounds like this started as he just was like i'm gonna go walk around and just kind of explore a little bit and then apparently he he was so he became dehydrated and and confused because of the heat and that's when things really kind of went off the rails but it didn't strike me that he was

challenging the swamp when he started well i mean i could see him just i mean that's a good quote to end the story with i'm sure like somebody sat down with him this reporter probably sat down with him with for the times and they talked for a while and he's probably somewhat self-effacing and at some point i guess i i'm not somebody who goes for showboating in an interview but i could also just see this person just kind of like shaking his head and be like yeah i guess i challenged the swamp and the swamp challenged me back but you point out another part of the story that i find kind of the most i don't know if confusing is the right word but like man this story is well told in the times but like it just seems like it just goes from zero to naked and lost like

that i had to move my hands next to like he presumably drove his work van into a parking area right right and then so it's like a place where people go and it's a multi-preserve he's kind of walking around yeah you're right it's i think it's because he doesn't even really understand what happened true that's probably it yeah by okay so by mr murder's account he started out by exploring the swamp but the heat grew intense and he was parched he wasn't thinking straight and he was lost as for many floridians the risk of gators it was not as for many floridians the risk of gators was not unfamiliar to him but he decided his best shot at finding the way back to his car was by plunging into lake manatee oh my god like so he's just walking around and just becomes confused and disoriented and i will say drunk well again i don't want to i don't i feel like there's more to this story i feel like there's something that we're not there's something about the story that doesn't totally add up to me like there is an element that we are missing the more we talk the more i'm with you and like again this poor guy i'm really glad he survived and i don't want to besmirch him but there's just an element of the story that does there is something missing about i don't know again anything i say would just be sort of slanderous i guess so i'm not going to give the theories but i got a couple and just the idea that you just like park your car or your work van and you just start walking around and then the next thing you know you're like totally disoriented and now i will say people do really extreme things when they become overheated there was that other story and again another trigger warning of those two really good friends who were driving across the country from i think the east coast and they stopped in death valley to go on a hike and they got lost and they didn't have enough water and unfortunately one of the people killed the other person and said later that it was because the other person had asked him to because he was in such suffering. And the crazy part is they were less than a mile off the trail. Oh my God. And they eventually found the other guy and the victims, if he is a victim, the victim's family actually stood up for the guy who did the killing because they knew these guys were such good friends. There was nothing, it would be like you and I, Andrew, i'm not saying we're best friends i would just like to be in the top five but like it'd be like if you and i went on a hiking trip and then one of us ended up dead at the end it would not unless there's something you haven't told me it would not be because of like simmering resentment actually the more i say this out loud yeah the chances are i'm not coming back yeah wait it's not so then

what is it what is this feeling this burning feeling in my chest every time we dial up the

isdn exactly i doesn't even know what cody is i just turned into a cartoon i turned into a cartoon

of lake itasca um yeah i i know i know i know what you you mean about that i will i just just gonna say that like getting lost or even the feeling of loss man you can you can panic very quickly though i i remember just being i mean i wasn't even on the trails i can't explain i was like up Genevieve was on a real hike around the Grand Canyon and I had already had my little spook out of heights with her on a very like kind of family friendly uh little trail around the canyon the day before so Genevieve goes on a real hike down to the canyon floor and back uh in one day and I'm like okay I'll be just like up here literally drinking hot chocolate but at one point like I wanted to kind of take a walk around the the other side of the canyon but I'm just talking about little like almost probably paved at times little roads or whatever and um I was kind of getting further and further afield of where I needed to be so I'm like you know what I'm looking down at my map on my phone I can just cross through this wood

area now I don't know if I'm technically allowed to or not now that I say that there were no signs that said stay on the paths or whatever so I'm like I can I see what this looks like I can just cut across this little triangle of land and it was not it was January but there was not a lot of snow on the ground or anything but as I'm walking through these woods and I'm trying to follow my little blue dot on the phone I'm like whoa this I almost immediately started to get that sense of being a kid who's in over his head a little bit like I start to see snow there's more snow around here because people haven't been treading all over the place and my feet are getting a little bit wet and I'm like, this is further than I thought it was going to be and suddenly I'm like, is this blue dot even working? It's just like, Luke, I can't even explain to you. I was like, to cross this area would have been probably seven minutes of my life or something but it's amazing how about halfway through it I'm already kind of like, well, I've never worn a bear's skin before but I guess I'm going to find out what that's like. Right, you turn into the revenant. Yeah, it's just like, your brain really, I mean, you can get it's sort of like when you're swimming in the ocean You can get kind of panicky a little early on, I guess.

Well, I mean, and again, I don't question the I don't in any way question the story that this guy was at some point lost, panicked and out of options there because there's nobody that would voluntarily go through what he went through for any other reason other than it was really what was happening. why he was at that park what was going on before that who knows what his condition was but he ends up he's looking across this man-made lake manatee fish camp lake or whatever it's called and decides that the only way to get to the other side is to swim and as april rubin writes in the piece within minutes of entering the water mr murder said he realized his clothes were dragging him down so he shed them so now he's naked swimming again raising the question what did he think was going to happen when he got to the other side I mean I guess at this point he is in such survival mode that he doesn't care that he's going to be nude in public he just wants to get there

I know that's that's really when you know that like you don't know if you're getting out of this or not I mean of course I have a lot of shame about being nude in public but yeah like once you're like you'd actually say you would surrender to the alligator I would if it was between you can eat me but I just want to

put on a tuxedo first please If it was between the death roll of the gator or crawling out of the other side of the lake completely nude and walking past families to get to your car, you would just take the death roll. Right, of course, yeah. He said he tried to swim away. So again, imagine you're now just nude swimming in this lake trying to get to the other side. That was when he saw the alligator parallel to him in the water less than two feet away. My goodness. He said he tried to swim away. This is what—I love the New York Times. It's probably my favorite newspaper in America But they are understated sometimes He tried to swim away but the animal was faster No shit Sherlock You mean this dude wasn't able to out swim An animal that's been living In the water for 80,000 years That's one of the oldest Creatures on planet earth And is completely optimized for this job He couldn't out swim the gator So he said the animal latched onto his right forearm and the two fought. The animal pushed him under three times, then anyway, he loses his arm.

Yeah, I was going to say, it does get really graphic. I don't have to read each and every word, it's pretty gross,

but he loses his arm. And then he, but then, I mean, this is also gruesome, but kind of in a oddly satisfying way. No, I'm just quoting our friend Chris there. It's like punching your alligator, but in an oddly satisfying way. Um, the alligator appears to be satisfied with this, uh, situation and swims off.

With this trophy, yeah.

Yeah, basically. And it's, I mean, it's horrific. I would, I would faint. I would just sink to the bottom of the lake from fainting at this point. I would be done. I'd be so done. Oh, yeah. But he managed to swim back to the shore, which is amazing because the gators left him alone now because it has this, like you said, trophy. The problem though is he's still completely lost and I'm, you know, now he's in shock. He's losing blood. i kept getting lost in the grass as he said i was scared to death to go back in that water but i had to i didn't know how the heck else i'm going to get out of there i there's nothing you there's just absolutely nothing you could have done to get me back into that water andrew like yeah ever i don't i mean i can't visualize this place and again everything he did was because he felt like he had to do that no one would do any of this stuff for kicks but i just can't picture i can't picture the landscape clearly enough to understand how it was that this still felt like the only viable option because to me it feels like a not viable option me too i i i'm still very confused

as to why to how he so quickly realized that he and maybe it's just the way the story is being told or something's being lost over whatever but like it just sort of sounds like how are how are you so lost so early

on that the the best recourse is to get in this water in florida anyway like it just seems like

Thank you. and is there a path and aren't people walking on the path i don't know like again because i haven't been to this particular place i just can't visualize it very well uh for a period of time mr murda said and by the way you notice that every single thing that they're saying happened they're attributing to him yes i think because they are the new york times and they want to make sure that if this ever you know turns out to be not exactly how he described it uh they they will have they will not have said anything that didn't happen they will have attributed it all accurately to him or whatever mr murder said he pulled himself up on top of a stump hoping someone would find him but eventually decided to press on he rested when his body would not allow him to move further there's a lot of times i couldn't keep going he said as the days got longer of course it got worse and worse that uh last day if i had a guess i bet that last day i didn't move but 100 yards flies swarmed his limb his rotc training taught him that he had to tourniquet the arm but didn't have anything to do it with he was cut up from walking through thorns now again remember he's nude this whole time right he doesn't have shoes like i like for instance if you gave me the state-of-the-art hip waders and every kind of like you know bug spray and protectant i would never go in this swamp ever like even the periphery of it he's got none of that and he's missing an arm um he was cut up from walking through thorns his back got attacked by red ants scavenged purple flowers became his meals he drank from the lake like this is just absolutely wild And also, I used to watch a lot of that show Naked and Afraid, which, you know, the premise was two people who didn't know each other would show up in a very inhospitable kind of environment, whether it was the desert or a swamp or something, and they would be naked. They would have a bag that would have like a fire starting thing in it or a pot, and then they'd have to just figure out how long they could live there. Very few people made it through the full like whatever 12 days. and the thing that always got him was bug bites it's really hard to start a fire and it's cold i guess he wasn't dealing with cold as much but like you know it's really hard to survive out there when you have a camera crew and a doctor who are just in a camp down the road that you can tap out at any moment like it is remarkable this guy lived yeah absolutely um i still want

to know i still want to know what happened during this deleted time though i think we're really on

to something here mr murder's family and friends started to realize something was wrong when he wasn't posting on facebook okay this is another question he has seven kids i believe um they mentioned later on in the story and i feel like if walt b went missing it wouldn't be his lack

of facebook posts that would be the indicator and walt b doesn't live with his kids like this guy has young i mean it sounds like he's got a lot of kids seven i think you said um so maybe i don't know how old they go but i know the youngest one is listed in here as being a child

still right so asked what happened to your arm and he said i fought an alligator right so i mean

i don't know his living situation i don't know custody i don't know if he's it doesn't say you know so i i don't want to make too many assumptions there but it just sort of seems like oh yeah yeah it's not like when i first read that i'm like oh he must just have adult children scattered around the country or something but no if he's got young kids like yeah we wouldn't he not be showing up

for things other than his facebook updates right well he must yeah he again this is such such speculation on on our part because we don't know anything but it's just it that's a strange line that the way that it was noted that he was gone was because he wasn't posting on facebook anymore yeah like it makes me think he must not live with anybody right now because most of the time when people go missing it's because they don't show up after work yeah yeah that or they don't they don't show up at a job that they're supposed to be doing etc like that's just that's that's a detail that was kind of odd to me anyway he finally managed to get himself to some sort of a gate or a fence i think that was kind of um rescue came on july 20th when he reached a fence of the lake manatee fish camp and found a man um a helicopter evacuated him to safety spent three weeks at sarasota memorial hospital um uh he uh and he seems to be doing fine now he says he's feeling fine um but that's again it's like this i the problem is you and i have never been here andrew so i guess i keep thinking of it like it's like a city park like you're at green lake or something and it's like it must not be that because my honestly my thought would be okay i'm at this lake this park whatever it has to have a gate around at a fence i'm just going to keep going till i hit the fence again it's all easier if i'm sitting here in the comfort of my air conditioned home i've got both of my arms zero red ant bites that i know of so it just must be a thing where once you're in a completely desperate state everything becomes impossible because of

how desperate your situation is yeah i mean my guess is see that i'm not so hung up on that when i first started reading it and they mentioned hey i'm going to check out this preserve or i guess this reserve not preserve um i did picture it maybe a little bit more accessible and more people being there but i will now totally take it on faith that no this is a kind of like a just because something is a um is an area of protection for animals doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to be well populated and he got you know he got it out over his skis pretty quickly um so i i can take it that this is a legit wild area that is nothing like green lake like i can totally take that this isn't again this is like florida you know i just think things are really built on the edges of swamps so much more you know than here in the heart of the city so so i'll take i'll definitely take that that it's this is definitely a more um rugged area than i originally gave credit for but still it's a little like how far i mean again like i'm just sort of thinking like and this is just like i don't know is it illegal for me to make these accusations? I'm just saying that, like, could somebody, sometimes people go out in the woods and they toke a little bit. Like, I don't think that that's not a moral judgment on my part. Like, I just sort of feel like something, something happened that it's just like the middle of the day and you're in between gigs. Like, how do you get so far?

Yeah, there's some part of the story that we're not getting. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, it's, he's alive, he seems like a nice enough guy, he's feeling well, he says he's healed, and he wants to become a motivational speaker. I guess he can't do his job anymore. I mean, that's the thing. I guess I was thinking, I mean, I don't know. Sounds like he was doing some pretty physical labor. Yeah, and he's missing an arm, man. So he'll have to find something else to do. But I mean, that's amazing. I guess my thought in all this is, however uncomfortable I am in a situation, like right there where I was having a tickle in my throat and had to pause, mute the mic, which I'm doing again, sneezes I'll leave in. Throat clearing, try to keep that to a min. But however uncomfortable I am in a situation, I could be naked, getting chewed to death by red ants with only one of my arms in a swamp in Florida. And it's not going to be that. And so I'll always have that to fall back on.

Just remember, you always have somebody inside of you who says who will rise to the occasion, even if a alligator is attacking you. I wouldn't.

I would just be like, I honestly, I think I'd be so filled with fear. I thought about this the other day back when I was in Tennessee because I went out on a jog I don't really like jogging on on highways on two-lane highways because I get really nervous about cars Just not noticing me or someone checking their cell phone at the wrong moment And like I said on the show the other day This part of the country that I was in is not designed for jogging. They don't have trails. They don't have there's nothing so I had to go out on the road and as I Turned from my airbnb and started to go down towards where I was going to try to run i look over and there is there are four of the biggest rottweilers i've ever seen in my life and they're behind a not particularly high like you know what hog wire is not really like not like a cyclone fence right like you know what a cyclone fence yeah those are usually plastic construction fences right uh well when i say cyclone fence i mean like a chain like the chain that's twisted into the stuff that's twisted into diamonds that like oh i was thinking there's a chain link fence is that a chain link fence okay so chain link fence oh i see i type in cyclone

fence and it comes up chain link fence so okay we had two maybe those are interchangeable that i

would have been like okay this was more like hog wire which is much thinner much lower like it was only a little bit above the height of their head like if they would have teamed up they could have gotten out of there and this was at the beginning of my run so then i go on my the whole my whole loop and the whole all i'm coming back is just like all i can think about is the like 100 feet that i have to be running and i'm across the street but still they see me the 100 feet i have to be running where these dogs are aware that i'm out there on the road running and are getting agitated or doing that low like like that low growl that's like you know it's not a chihuahua yapping away it's like a low growl of like cujo ness and um uh so that was terrifying but then of course i was thinking in my mind what would i do if one of these dogs just decides to just go for it and jump over the the the hog wire everyone else will figure out they can do it and then they'll all be on me and i was thinking what do i do in that moment and there were like you know these techniques that are supposed to work where you could make a fist and put your fist down the throat of the dog that might caught you make it impossible for them to do more damage there's all these other there's one that's really disgusting that i saw a clip of somebody doing at a dog park you put your finger in the words of carla bruni the one time first lady of france i believe put your finger in the bottom you that's supposed to be like get a dog off of another dog if they're fighting although boy then you have to live with that memory that that happened you were part you went proctologist on that yeah but i was thinking through all the scenarios and then i thought no i'll just let them kill me because i don't i can't fight off four rottweilers i just and i'll

also i would be so scared i would not i my muscles would lose all ability to do anything because the

terror that i would feel it would be so paralyzing well it's so funny i mean that's how i feel too about myself but like it's but you people who are in those circumstances always say well yeah i don't know always with the stories you hear they always say the opposite well those are the people that

lived to tell you the other people like me didn't live right because they were their body they did

not have whatever that was 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 all right email or email yeah let me play this

voicemail from rachel i started the show hot the other day with an un a very unfunny diatribe about how i don't like it when people refer to women as females and there's a specific example of a tweet that within the same tweet referred to men as men and women as females, and it got under my craw, and so I went on my...

I will mention, though, that the listeners really seem to be agreeing with you on that. I noted a number of emails saying, yeah, totally.

Here's one from Rachel where she's telling a little story about when she and her husband were still kind of either newlyweds or engaged.

Hi, guys. Listener Rachel here from Pittsburgh. I was just calling because of your conversation about female versus women and just the vernacular around that. And I wanted to tell a story of a time that I was talking to my husband. Was he my fiancé then? I can't remember. It was early, I guess. And he mentioned he was talking. So, yeah, I was talking to this. any like said person i think he was like person well a girl and like corrected himself to call her a girl and tried to keep going but i just like interrupted him i had that day been in a grad school class uh where we were talking about uh feminism and language um and uh one of like My classmates had talked about how we use the word girl in a way that we don't use the word boy and that it's a way that we are misogynistic and we tend to make women seem younger than they are and therefore less able or less strong, less independent, all these things. So I went off on him on how the words that he was using was part of the misogyny of our language. and my dear, wonderful husband just sat there and kind of took it. And at the end of my rant, he said, okay, but she was 10. And I had to eat my words because that is, in fact, a girl. So power out.

I saw somebody. Halfway through that voice, I'm like, oh, I'll bet you this was a girl. But it reminded me of somebody posted something on Twitter the other day. I was looking for it now during that voicemail I couldn't find it exactly so sorry no attribution and I'm sure I'll mangle it but somebody says I was at work today and I accomplished something and I'm making it sound like it was a made up thing it was sort of it was believable in the moment that I read it but basically said that somebody at her office referred to her as a girl boss and then she referred to him as a boy boss and he didn't like being called a boy boss very much now I understand girl boss kind of comes from a different I think some women call themselves girl bosses and so you know that's your prerogative to do that but i as a man would never refer to a woman who's doing so who's just like kind of owning it at work and be like you're a real girl boss how about like you're just owning

it like congratulations you know yeah i see lady boss some people use lady boss as well maybe because they feel i'm guessing but maybe because it feels like girl is is you know for a younger uh woman i guess a younger a younger female person i will say that like again i don't want i hope i don't sound defensive but we do live in a day and age where we talk about things we try to talk about things precisely and we try to in in the attempt and i think the worthy attempt to be inclusive sometimes i will admit that my brain locks up a little bit because if i start thinking about the event about the possibilities of everything so if i were to be describing um something about being pregnant you know uh persons who can become pregnant i was we were doing something we were recording something for live wire the other day and we were talking about women and elena said something like well people who are born anatomically women because there can be people that were not born anatomically female but who identify as female and so if you just say women you're leaving those people out so there's just it i i do feel like it is something where in my attempt to be precise and also to make sure I'm not leaving out...

somebody uh somebody's experience i sometimes i get a little i get a little confused i get a

little locked up well i'm um really smooth at talking about any difficult uh topics so just you know keep you know just i'll follow your lead you just follow my lead on those things no i mean i just personally don't feel like when we know somebody's gender you know as they identify like we don't have to shy away from from saying girl if if it's a if it's a child you know a female child or whatever or or or woman or or um or man like i don't think that we have to get rid of that language we just don't want to make assumptions about other people's gender until we know like i would never have any problem saying that you know my my this would be a very weird conversation but if i was like talking about my my friend luke who's a man i don't know i don't know what situation i'm having that but like no i know you and i know that you're a man who's a man he's he's

dead by the trail had something to do with the fact that he won't do any of his any of his

employee review stuff and they keep emailing me about it he asked me to dial at nine and i've been waiting around and it's 9 30 no i'm just joking um but uh on a day where we're recording on a special schedule for me but uh no i mean i i don't think we have to shy away from from that just yeah i think we need to not make assumptions and also not to segregate women out and be like oh that's a lady cop because it's a it's a woman who's a cop or a male nurse necessarily you know

right no describing a person doesn't challenge isn't super challenging for me because whatever the pronoun is what however that person identifies that's pretty usually pretty easy in my experience yeah it's when i'm talking about a group of people so i'm talking about it's a the topic is abortion and i'm talking about you know a woman's right to choose well then how do we who are we actually describing in that and how do we you know i can sometimes just get in my own head about trying to make sure that i am not leaving anyone out because there are lots of different ways that somebody can be a woman yeah you know and lots of different ways that somebody who's anatomically born a woman could be not a woman and so i mean the good news is this is something that once every two weeks might hang me up for three seconds so it's not like it's insurmountable for me to try to treat people with dignity and use the right way to describe folks i also wonder it's funny that

i'm taking it here i i promise i promise everybody that as i as i walk into these you know potentially insensitive waters um that that i am doing it with openness for gators and leave your clothes on i'm uh interested in in maybe feedback about this a little bit because like i do feel that sometimes i will get emails from people who are very concerned about you know using very precise language around certain things but i don't think that they are members of the community that they're looking to protect and i and i i truly wonder about this and i'm sure it's out there and i could do some more reading about this like i'm i i believe in trans rights very very very strongly like that is a that is a core belief of mine um and and just equal rights and human rights right um and when we talk about the when we talk about the um abortion situation and we often will just you know shorthand for years and years we say a woman's right to choose or or the the women who fought for this or or what have you um and if we say that we will you know sometimes get you know very nice emails or messages from listeners who say hey you know you maybe maybe ease off the word woman there and say people who can get pregnant which i understand like that is part of the population but i also wonder like for people who are trans if the conversation about abortion and erasing them from it is as much of a priority i feel like there are so many fights that trans people still are fighting and will be fighting for a long time and i want to be there for the fight and i wonder for people um who are of a population who don't identify as women but can get pregnant i wonder how much that does hurt them specifically as opposed to all of the all of the other indignities and and just awfulness that they face from our society every day and so that's one that i've kind of you know i don't know if i would struggle with it it's something that i think about a lot i'm sure i still say maybe a woman's right to choose or i might still say women there but i just also wonder truly how much of a priority it is for them as well or it's more of a priority of people who just want to be super super careful around language the analogy that i heard dan

savage used that i thought was kind of interesting is you know okay so if we can agree that the people who are pushing to limit a woman's right to health care they're trying to limit a woman's right to health care they're probably not doing the calculation of somebody who is identifies as a man but has the capability of becoming pregnant it doesn't mean that it wouldn't affect that person but that's not who that's not who the mitch mcconnell's of the world and the lindsey Graham's are going after. They're going after women. And this has historically been the case. In fact, they are probably they might not even be aware that there is also a category of person who might identify as a man, but who could have the capability of getting pregnant. And the analogy Dan Savage used was moves by Republicans to disenfranchise black voters in America. They make all of these incredibly complicated things and ID laws and all kinds of rules. And what their goal is, is to make it more difficult for black people in this country to vote. Now, so you would say this is this is something that is intended. This is intended to control and to hurt the interests of black Americans. Now, in some of those places, some of those zip codes, you might find a pocket of white people. And so you might say, well, no, the Republicans who are trying to rewrite the voting laws and override the Voting Rights Act, this is not aimed at black people. Because look at this pocket of white residents that happen to live in this area. That's part of where these rules are changing. Yeah, but we all know this is to keep black people from voting. Mm hmm. You know, and so that's that's just a factor. It doesn't I mean, and what he actually said was he just is interchangeable when he's talking about the abortion topic. he sometimes says persons who could become pregnant and sometimes he says women and he just said you know he does it's not like he is saying one should do one or the other but he kind of said i go back and forth but he was bearing in mind really who the target historically of this has been and the target of this historically in this country has been women that's who the patriarchy and who these republicans are trying to control in this i think we have to because we live in the real world and Because most of this show is me talking about, you know, something I saw on my jog or you're talking about garbage anxiety. So much of this show or me talking about bubbles. So much of this show is so low stakes. But we do live in the world and we are doing the show five days a week. And we are going to eventually get into territory when it's right in our face. And when you have people being kidnapped and taken to some other place as a political stunt, it's hard for us to not get into it. And as we get into that or to have Roe v. Wade overturned or to have a woman's right to control her body taken away, it's impossible for us to not talk about that. And we will still probably sometimes get it wrong or have a bad take or not have all the information. And then, like, we just I think it's OK for us to mess up as long as we're willing to try to fix it when we mess up.

Oh, wait, we're not going into news. I was waiting for you to play the email music, but we are done with the email segment. It ran out. I think it's time to say goodbye.

That's only the latest mistake. That's only the most recent mistake on today's episode. We're like an hour and 40 minutes in or whatever. Where does the time go? Do you have any more top stories? I could do this forever. I mean, I've always got more top stories in my back pocket, but I think we should probably wrap this up. I'm excited to check in with you tomorrow from Bend and hear how the Wilco concert was.

Yeah, so the next time we talk, I'll have seen the Wilco concert in Bend, Oregon. I've never been to Bend, Oregon. I'm going to spend a couple of days down there with some really close friends of ours who we haven't seen in years and years and years now. So, yeah, looking forward to it.

Yeah, it's a fun spot. I've only been there one time, and it was super freezing, and it was during the pandemic, like the height of it. So you couldn't go inside anywhere. And it was like negative five degrees. So that was a little bit of an experience. But I'm sure you're going to have a great time. So we'll be back here tomorrow. More imaginary radio for you. Until then, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

We'll be right back. of TVTL I have heard in a long time. Thank you.

Power out.