Muse

Can I have the room for a minute? Everybody out! My empire is... SONGLING!

All right, everyone back in? TBTL!

Good afternoon and welcome to Judgment City. You've just had quite a little journey, so for now, relax and enjoy the ride.

Dude, you got the best barrels ever, dude. Just like, you pull in, and you just get spit right out of them. And you just drop in and just smack the lip. Whoopah! Drop down. Snap. Ah! And then after that, you just drop in, just ride the barrel and get pitted, so pitted like that. Eh, tomato, tomato.

It's tomato, tomato. You say tomato, tomato, I say tomato, tomato.

How can they say this about me? I don't believe it. I show them. I record everything.

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

It is political correctness. Run amok.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. You're entering a world of pain. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where we're actually getting a little bit of sunshine here on this Tuesday. Hey, cheer up. It's Taco Tuesday. Big improvement on the just absolutely torrential rain we received yesterday, putting me in a great frame of mind to bring you episode 3890 in a collector series let the fun begin now um as you know i spend a lot of time scrolling tiktok so as to not spend any time alone with my thoughts and it's working people i haven't had a thought in many years but i have seen some some videos and heard some audio that i'd like to play for you today it's an audiophiles nightmare in no particular order or for no particular reason other than two pieces of tape have been really captivating my imagination of just some more or less random people i saw on tiktok so we're going to play those including pitbull's biggest fan who's weighing in but they

might say pitbull is it cool and i'll challenge you by saying what's not cool about a guy saying

it's mr worldwide also the internet's most i guess cyber bullied cowboy is not taking

anyone's crap anymore i stood down nine grizzly bear charges in my life five black bear charges and i once stepped up and stuffed an eight-foot tom cougar square in a mug with my walking stick

to save one of my dogs so we'll play that audio we'll also recount the story of me going on local television here in portland this morning that's right i'm still vibrating from the adrenaline and high of having been on every day Northwest.

I've never been on live television before.

So we'll get into that. Oh, and an update on my neighbor who is just a true a true legend on every level. Oh, speaking of true legends, let's talk to this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships.

Oh my god! He unmuted!

He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke.

I promised you yesterday that I would not distract from the mission today. I believe

the promise was you would have no experiences and have no thoughts between the end of yesterday's show and the beginning of

today's show. Because we don't want to get off on one of my dumb tangents here at the top of the show. I don't think they're dumb. Your word. Very useful. Your word exactly. One of your dumb tangents I believe is what you said yesterday. And I'll set you up for what we wanted to leave space for. You told me and the listeners that you ran into your neighbor and that this is the best story that will ever be told on TBTL and it's going to change the way we look at the world around us forever. Is that how a good friend sets up a story like this? Did you have

a chance to look at the show sheet today?

I did. And then I had this joke in my head and then I saw, oh, he wants to bump that over to later in the show. And I was like, well, I'm going to say my joke anyway and I'll let you clean it up, honestly.

Did you see how I had a very carefully constructed transition between my neighbor, who I decided non-organically to start calling Mr. Portlandwide, so it would feed into the TikTok tape about Mr. Worldwide. Right. Because I'll be honest with you, the TikTok tape is a little kind of out of left field.

I am really intrigued by it, actually. Both of those pieces of tape that you played.

And I hope there's more. I don't know where that's going, but I'm very intrigued by that, by both of those pieces of tape that you played at the top of the show.

Okay, so I want to talk about Mr. Portlandwide and Mr. Worldwide and the Internet's Angriest Cowboy all coming up in the Top Story segment. But if I can just quickly mention that literally minutes before you and I logged in, Andrew, I was over at the studios of Coin Television here in Portland promoting live wire radio on everyday northwest which is a it's that kind of television program that is now in almost every major city in america at least every major city with tv stations i think that's new day northwest in seattle is that still a going concern that you know of

i assume i mean i just yeah i mean you cut the cord long ago even before the cable was cut i didn't really watch you know kind of daytime local television so i'm not super it's a fascinating

business model like and i think it's it's accelerating i mean every the folks uh were super nice i went over there i uh you know jumped on the air for four minutes and promoted the an upcoming live wire taping so that was a great opportunity for our show but it is i think the segment that i was on was the only non-paid programming during the hour and in fact when i showed up at the at the station the very nice front desk person who met me said oh are you here to see an account executive or one of the producers of the show and i was like oh right because this is primarily advertorial and as i was watching the very the different segments that were preceding my little quick moment in the sun it was it's incredible they have a um they had uh they have a like actually this is a really good idea if you're gonna do like paid content they're doing like a instead of march madness it's like march plantness or something and it's like a tournament of plants and they're basically like different plants are taking each other on and then i don't know if they're getting voted or just picked to go through the bracket but i was like i'm into that of course when i got on the air i told the host that i have a huge amount of money that sunk on gladiolas and if they don't win i'm in a lot of trouble financially she was i would say mildly confused by the reference but anyway they had this other uh cooking segment i forget i forget what they were cooking but it was really well shot it was actually very beautiful it was in like a nice kitchen somewhere and they were i forget the exact ingredients because i was kind of getting ready for my segment but then later i realized it was brought to you by the like strawberry counselor whatever like the main thing they were using to cook was an ingredient that this you know

association of growers grows now just to jump in here and i think clarify unless i've got it wrong and and maybe this is maybe this doesn't need clarification and maybe i'm being condescending but you know when you think about these kind of local shows traditionally at least us watching them growing up if there's a cooking segment you picture it being kind of on the set but this sounds It's like this was some pre-produced package from somewhere else that they were just playing while you were getting ready and maybe chatting with the host or something.

Yeah, it was definitely pre-produced because it was shot. I don't know what kind of studio kitchen it was in, but it wasn't on the set that I was on. And it was really well done. I mean, it looked really nice. And what it looked like to me was this organization of growers has probably hired a professional crew and company and booked out some studio kitchen and was probably bringing through a number of different media programs for the pre-produced segment, if that makes sense. It's like, come on down, and your interviewer can interview so-and-so from the National Whatever Association, and he'll cook you up some interesting things, and you'll have a great piece of content that also we will pay you to play on your TV show. And then, what was the other one? So then I was on, and then as I was leaving, I was noticing on one of the TVs in the lobby that then it was a segment about laundry hacks, and it was clearly one of those things where the person who was talking about the laundry hacks was on a set somewhere that just had a certain brand of detergent on all the shelves behind them. And so they were going to tell the host of the show about how to do some laundry hacks, which my guess would be would involve their particular detergent product. It was an amazing world of advertorial content that I wandered into. Because when I was growing up, we had local shows like Northwest Afternoon in Seattle. Our listeners from Seattle will remember it fondly probably.

like Connie Thompson and Elisa Jaffe, I think. And there was a guy host as well. I forget. We got to go and be in the studio audience of Northwest Afternoon when we were putting on the middle school operetta, Amal and the Night Visitors. They were always trying to get people to come be in the studio audience. Because they had to do like five days a week, they had to get 100 people to show up. So if you showed up, if you brought like 30 people from your opera production, then they would let you, The payoff was you could promote, like, as they were coming back from a commercial, one of the kids from the opera. And by the way, they didn't pick me, Amal, from Amal and the Night Visitors. They picked Sarah Newton, who honestly was probably more telegenic than me at that time, to say, come see Jesus Creek's production of Amal and the Night Visitors at Ingram High School on this day or whatever. So north of this afternoon—

And in the background, you could hear you saying, this is my box. Was that Amal?

This is my box.

Was that Amal who said, this is my, who's got the box? That wasn't, that was one of the wise men

That was played by my friend Seth Brolight In the production You know the mummy, do you know that by the way The mummy played this like Kind of mean guard for the wise men No, he's tall, I can see him being a good guard And I sang a song to him that was Don't you dare, don't you dare, don't you dare Ugly man hurt my mother Don't you dare ugly man hurt my mother I'll smash all your bones, I'll bash in your head But anyway

That's not unlike the first time I met him at a dinner party at your house it ended up coming to i remember you saying that as well more yelling it than singing it uh i'll bash your bones at some point the grooves and the brain

the pathways are so set yep that when i would see him i would just that's how i would respond yeah but point being northwest afternoon was like a lot of these kinds of shows it was uh it didn't have any sponsorship built into the programming it was like an interview i remember i i literally remember the one time that we went there um my school and we sat in the audience and i was so geeked about being on a set of a tv show the guest was jackie stallone sylvester stallone's mom and she told all these because she had a um she was a psychic at the time or she you know marketed herself as a psychic anyway you know i don't know i wouldn't say that northwest afternoon was always the most groundbreaking television but what it wasn't was just an hour of ads that are parading and masking as and again i'm not even mad at it it's like look you got to do what you got to do but i'm just surprised that they've figured out a way to and they do i will say this it says sponsored content i want to give total credit like when something was sponsored i could see the chiron on the screen it was saying sponsored content so it wasn't like um they were being very upfront about what it was but i thought what an interesting business model that you figured out how to make these commercials hopefully entertaining enough that the people who are selling the detergent will pay you to come on and tell you some laundry hacks and then people at home will watch it and like everybody kind of wins i guess now

you were invited on the show at like by the producers well i was gonna say i mean you're also there to to basically sell something to promote something at least did your audience But, I mean, I'm assuming that you didn't pay.

I'm a pretty big local Portland celebrity. So, I mean, a chance to get old LB down to the studios of Coin TV.

Well, I was wondering, did your producers say, hey, this would be good promotion for something coming up? Or they just reached out to you because they wanted to play a segment?

I'm guessing that somebody at Livewire reached out, because I'm doing the same thing on, like, a different TV station in a couple of weeks, I think. I think probably somebody at Livewire was looking to do some local media and was reaching out to a variety of organizations. and uh the folks on this tv show said yeah sure come on down and it was actually a fun segment and the person interviewed me was great i mean it's not even like any of this was was like uh you know i don't know bad television it just was a fascinating i just hadn't seen the because even even new day northwest in seattle i remember when it was kind of a big story about how what they had decided to do was do like two-thirds of the show would be interviews and stuff and like you know kind of what we think of as a traditional local news interview show and then the last third would be turned over to um you know an advertiser who would buy a segment and then there'd be like a cooking demonstration or something so that's kind of where the last i checked in on this business model that was the last i saw of it but boy it's really ramped up it is really ramped up you're

talking about how the cooking show seemed like it was underwritten by you know some growers association strawberries or what have you and well i was gonna apologize for what i'm gonna say next i'm just gonna say it um to refer back to a topic that came up on yesterday's show which was family ties um it was your fault for telling me not to have any new experiences um i you know having watch like

Probably like 10 to 15 episodes of Family Ties over the weekend. It really made me wonder if there was some sort of deal with the Orange Growers of America Association. I mean, I on that show. Yeah, because I remembered that they drink a lot of orange juice. But who boy, like any time of day or night, we just woke up, drink orange juice, just got back from jogging, drink orange juice. Like they are drinking orange juice in those little Vives and I kind of got a little obsessed and we started looking. i i wanted to see if i could get genevieve to buy the actual orange like the juice glass set that is used by the keetons if you search for uh family ties juice glass are you are you

now cosplaying the keetons in your household is that what's going on i mean you know um why am i

forgetting why are you renaming one of your cats mallory what um what is the name so meredith baxter bernie is the actor but what is her name on the show um this is driving me bananas mom baxter bernie that is it i do remember being like being a kid i crushed a lot i uh-huh wasn't a player but i had a lot of crushes um on real life on real life girls i would go to school with but then also almost like anybody on tv like almost any show i could tell you who had a crush on you know what i mean like i went through a yes a mary phase on little house on the prairie i also want

to throw a mary was the one i mean are you kidding me dude she was a man kato dime like it wasn't even up for debate miss me with those nelly olsen curls i'm i was i stand mary very hard as a kid as well yeah nelly olsen was um kind of a jerk too right yeah that was her character was also not not particularly uh appealing but yeah i think i think mary was by far and away the the if you were our age watching little house uh who you're gonna crush on yeah so anyway you know i just like

i had a lot of crushes but on family ties i don't remember having i remember having a crush on the

mom crush on justine wait is justine bateman on that show yes yes she is and like and that was

kind of the surprising thing to look back at that and you realize like she was like she was a real beauty and you know that's like the person that you should you know like somebody in my situation you'd think like oh yeah Andrew little little boy Andrew watching Family Ties has a bit of a crush on Mallory but no I totally had a crush on the mom in Family Ties I did anyway I'm sorry now I am gonna apologize now we're just um I want to I want to marry Baxter Bernie um and now I really did just hijack the conversation again but anyway they drink a ton of orange juice and I did start thinking to myself like is there any chance that there there was an actual underwriting was there

some sort of a behind the scenes right like a product placement yeah what were the rules my guess and it's it's interesting because yesterday we were talking about this in the context of how it seemed like 80s sitcoms were really playing by the book when it came to what the prevailing national particularly national conservative mood was i.e. like you said the nancy reagan stuff and it seemed like there was a system by which the sitcoms were really trying to reflect a particular quote-unquote wholesome generally kind of republican narrative in a way and maybe that's not all of them maybe it's just the ones i'm thinking of but i think i do think

family ties bucks that family ties was really like the the storyline right because alex being

a young republican was considered that wasn't that that was weird to the parents right yes and

also like and i think i started rambling about this yesterday and probably didn't put a bow on it but like a couple of the episodes i saw like one involving like the stock market i mean the it's a pretty anti-capitalist episode like the thing is like the parents point of view usually wins out on that show and the parents point of view is a is a more liberal point of view even the one that i thought started out kind of about divorce and it sort of seemed like it might be like leaning towards dad's rights and dads can't get a fair shake in this era of divorce but really like that the plot turns around and it really really explores the mom's point of view a lot more and how this guy was being very myopic and then very toxic so anyway um gohan though well

so uh maybe that then maybe that i guess i don't exactly know what my theory is here or my my question is i guess what i'm wondering is were there stricter rules in place in the 80s or were there rules at all about putting a product in a tv show but not telling people it was an advertisement for the product that very much happens now uh you know on in movies and uh it's called product placement but like and i think that we talked about this on the show before famously there's a story that it only ended up being Reese's pieces in E.T. because M&M's turned it down or something although i don't think that was for money i think true yeah but what what was what were they why would M&M's turn it down i think it was was there some kind of were they worried about the content. I mean, we had this conversation in like three months. months yeah i don't think there was a worry i just think that they just didn't i think they just passed on it i think that's all the information i have was that m&m's was just

like nah i guess my i guess what i'm what i'm trying to say or what i'm thinking here is as the media landscape has become more fractured andrew and as it's harder and harder to compete for eyeballs and as it's harder and harder to figure out the revenue the funding model of television i mean it used to be there's three channels if you put a show on any one of them It's going to get enough people that you can then get tied to, you know, pay a bunch of money to to, you know, be advertised on that show. And that's just not the world we live in. And as we've gotten as things have gotten more and more complicated, the idea of integrating ads into things has become more and more prevalent and integrating in products and not saying that we're, you know, we're drinking this orange juice right now because we're getting paid to do it. I'm wondering what the rules were in the 80s, like when the Keatons were doing it.

Did you notice the product placement that was so – I just felt like it was so obvious in the – and it actually became interesting as the plot line of the story goes on.

In The Last of Us for the Mushroom Association of America?

I was going to say In The Last of Us. It was too much. How did you know I was going to go with that? Because I guess you're referring to the weird virus that makes it look like they're growing fungi. Yeah, it would be a bad idea. I mean, it's a fungus.

I just don't think there's a fungus association, so I just hope people would go with me on mushroom association.

Did you notice it, though? I was going to say The Last of Us. In episode three, the quasi-bottle episode that we talked about, it shows the love affair of these two guys through time, as time passed in the early days of this apocalypse or pandemic apocalypse or whatever. and wine plays a big role in that plot line and for most of the episode when you see them sit down like when these two characters meet for the first time and one of them makes a really nice meal you they have this Beaujolais Villages wine it's like kind of a mass-produced wine I've bought it before it's like you know it's probably on par with any of the kind of large wine chains that you can or you know like concerns that you can buy you see it in a grocery store or whatever and this is a decent one by uh and looking it up here it's like technically i think it's louis jadeau beaujolais villages it's a common bottle i'm sure you've seen it a million times but i noticed that like in several dinner scenes they always were drinking this exact wine and the label was always pointed directly at the camera even to the point where there might have been a continuity thing at one point because how can how is the wine following me around the room like they always had the label pointed then wine play i don't want to spoil it but wine does play a role a somewhat darker role uh and i noticed that they did not show the brand of wine at that point that's so interesting okay

i'm such a i i'm just so bad with you have face blindness i have wine blindness uh-huh I just say, give me more. I'm concerned how much I like wine. But so I will tell you what my takeaway – I bet you're totally right. My takeaway from that episode was, God, I hope that someday there's a sort of apocalyptic event that just leaves me with a lifetime supply of really good wine and high-end meat that's been, like, shrink-wrapped and frozen so it has, like, an eternal shelf life. so I can just be Nick Offerman making that first meal and taking that bite of a steak and drinking his good wine. I don't know enough about wine brands to know that that was a real thing. What a weird show for product placement, and what a show that doesn't really lend itself to the idea of product placement. I guess everyone also has been trying to buy this jacket that Pedro Pascal is wearing. Oh, yeah. And it's like Huckberry, and it was not— According to Huckberry, it was not product placement. they were as surprised as anyone when he's wearing it um but uh uh it's funny because like that show just because it's apocalyptic and because everyone's just kind of trying to survive it's not like one of those things where someone's like um you know walks into a bar and says i'll have a johnny you know a johnny walker red or something it just doesn't it doesn't lend itself

to product placement yeah right exactly well i guess joke books i guess pun books are also play

role so i bet you know i need to watch i need to watch the end of that real fast because i um i think i've been three episodes behind and i'm starting to see it memeified on tiktok and i'm starting to see a lot of headlines about the final episode of the season yeah was that was that last

sunday or i think it was last sunday was i don't believe it was last sunday i gotta say yeah i really um i said this on the show and i and this is you know I You know, sometimes people are bummed when we don't all like the same things. But I thought the show started strong. I thought that episode three was just some of the best TV I've ever seen before, which is a pretty high bar. Saw some really strong stuff after that. But then I just got to one episode that just really slowed everything down for me. And I wasn't as into the writing. And again, I know that I'm a little bit snobby about that. And I don't want to be. I want to enjoy things more. But it just kind of like some a show that had a lot of very precise, I believe, showmaking from writing and editing and everything started to like kind of started to split at the seams a little bit with some corniness and just like kind of some lines that are written. I'm just like, I don't think people talk that way like that. There's something that kicks off in my brain sometimes where it's like suddenly I can like see the writer's room. I've never even been in a writer's room. But, like, you just sort of, you can feel, you can see the script more than you can sort of feel the people just living the moment.

And you can feel the machinations a bit. When he gets, and, you know, this is now, I'm giving information that's more than a month old, so I feel okay about this. But, spoiler alert, if you really don't want to know about what happens mid-season of The Last of Us, maybe mute this or something. But, like, when the two of them get to the town in Wyoming that's where his brother is, that's where it started to feel really written to me. Like, they need to create—like, he's so excited to see his brother, but then they need to—now it's sort of like, oh, shit, the pressure's off. They got through, you know, they got through all this dangerous territory, and now they're within the walls of this very functional place. so what do we do now and it's like old old wounds are opening between the brothers and you know it just kind of like it felt like i caught in other kind of movies i called a fake up which is like a pretend breakup between romantic partners so that the narrative that we can continue on with the narrative arc of the movie because if there's not a breakup then we're just i guess we all live happily ever after so they have to have them break up over something that no one would really break

up over um that's exactly when they got into the city that's exactly that's exactly when i started to feel the writing that was one scene and they actually and i i don't think what you said is a huge spoiler i'm actually going to clean up a little bit of about what you said about that episode three because i actually think even if you're not into the last of us i think that if you the less you know going into that episode even if you just watch one episode of tv that is going to kind of like really give you the feel i still recommend it don't clean it up what if we

just do it two ways so they're having this wine at a super bowl party at the end of that episode we just head fake the listeners so they don't know which version of the end of the show is

real and then they're right back in the dark if you want to hear the non-spoiler version of this go to this american life.com um no what i was gonna say was but you identified the exact moment there and again so still spoiler warning although this isn't like as huge of a plot point but yeah So you're in this village that in this apocalyptic world, and this is, again, kind of a trope of this style of storytelling where there's been this community of people who have been very high functioning as a community, right? And they have like a kind of a – they have a good town that functions and everything. And they – because it's like such a trope – and again, I'll bet you it's exactly like this in the video game for what it's worth. I'm sure there's a lot of people right now who's like, well, that's how it was in the video game. And that's great. Like, that's fine. Like, be true to the video game. But I'm just critiquing the product that I'm watching, which is like immediately that these two men who have to really talk about their feelings go into a bar to do it. And it's just like a bar, like kind of like a kind of like if I remember correctly, a bar, a very comfortable style, almost saloon style bar that you might see in the early 1900s or 2023 sort of. It was just like it kind of didn't matter, but it gave you all of the little things you needed, which was a glass to hold on to. And drinking whiskey a little bit. If I recall, there was even something about the way they were drinking the whiskey that didn't he he poured he topped him off long before he was anywhere near finishing the whiskey sort of. And the conversation, that was exactly the moment, Luke, where I'm just like, oh, my God, like this, this whole like we're two brothers working some things out and having a tough conversation felt so written to me. And again, it's a compliment to the writing before that, that it was so seamless and the acting, I think, between the two main leads in the show, they they are so smooth in most circumstances that you can forget you're watching a TV show. So that then when you get back to more like kind of, oh, yeah, this is a little scripty, it stands out a little bit more. But there was that one. And then I think the episode you haven't seen yet, which is another kind of bottle flashback episode, I felt like the writing is really clunky and some of the actors weren't able to overcome it as good as they may be.

You know what is so sad? what my thought was at the open of that or when they get into the kind of like.

The two brothers reunite, and they're in the bar, and they're pouring the booze. I thought, oh, they still have booze. Okay, I could do that. How was that my take? I was like, oh, wow. Is that like the last bottle of whiskey in the world? Are they making it? Do they have – is there a distillery somewhere? What's going on? Because that seems like that would be worth its weight in gold right now. Can I just – we should get to a break. But I mentioned this. The reason that I've been falling behind on The Last of Us is because I have been reengaging with this show that I used to be pretty obsessed with, and I am now once again quite obsessed with it. It's called Alone. I mentioned it yesterday. it is i think one of the best television productions certainly of unscripted television that i've ever seen it is so emotionally powerful like again i can't if if my description yesterday made it sound like a reality show it's really not there's no host none of the people competing ever see each other so there's no drama like no one's like oh i can't believe he just did that like it has it it's it's only a reality show in that the last person who's able to just like literally exist in the middle of nowhere with no food water or shelter they do win a cash prize other than that i i couldn't even call it a reality show i would have to call it a documentary project but the journey that these folks go on as they're in the like complete wilds of alaska or Labrador or wherever they are and like and again they've got these cameras that they're filming themselves and after you know 30 or 40 days this camera becomes their only friend and the there was a guy I was watching I don't know whatever season 8 or 9 a guy named Biko who I was rooting for so hard and he was just having this running conversation with his father into the camera like he was out there for like 70 days and it's just him processing his feelings he really loved his dad and him trying to make his dad proud and like he's it was so emotionally raw and like really weirdly real um and i mean people just get to a point when they're talking to these cameras where it's like all of the trappings of modern life and all of the things that we do to put a certain vibe into the world are just gone they are gone you've been shitting in a hole for 80 days You've just lost all artifice at that point, I think. But also, it can be unexpectedly funny sometimes. I'm now on to a different season, and there's a guy named Biko Andrew, and he – sorry, not Biko. This guy's named Igor. Not everyone has an unusual name on the show. These are just two people that I've identified with. This guy Igor is – they're in Labrador and way out where there's like some polar bears maybe coming down.

That's the big thing that you're worried about. and he's been wandering around trying to find like a campsite and he spent the first four days not even figuring out where to build a shelter and i'm like this guy is in a lot of trouble and he finally finds this area that he wants to be at and he's collecting up this seaweed that's growing and he's like trying to figure out how to eat it and he goes this is great seaweed he goes get the seaweed you got this pot you got yourself a stew like carl it's like carl's carl weathers reference And I was like, I feel like I've got to be one of, like, 50 people who's ever watched this show. It just went by. Obviously, there's no laugh track. There's no audience. It was really quick. But I literally wanted to find this Igor guy wherever he lives. And I think he lives in Utah, maybe, at the time of filming, they said he lived in Utah. And I wanted to be like, I see what you did there. That was a you-got-yourself-a-stew reference. And my friend, I see you and I observe you and I appreciate you.

I mean, I think we I mean, I think that maybe you and I are especially prone to do this because we play drops on the show and stuff all the time. But, like, almost any whatever your kind of friend or family setup is, like, we just end up letting these little jokes from pop culture enter our lexicon, and we don't even realize we're saying them sometimes. You know, I didn't see this show that you're talking about. I didn't see this scene in Alone or any scene in Alone. But it's like you almost just wonder how much he's even thinking about the origins of what he's saying. He's probably just said it so many times in his life. Like, Veeves and I are always like, oh, yeah, throw that in there. You get yourself a stew.

like it's just part of the lexicon now it made me immediately though start rooting for him like i was like okay if this guy says you got yourself a stew just that kind of like reflexively i was like i would totally like this person in real life like we could be you know how

they're spending their time yeah watching right and

And because the show is the show is really it's interesting because it's mostly the other thing, too, is they're not like the point of the show is not to put people out there who are going to just like flail and do badly because, you know, it's a very expensive thing to put this all together and put people out there, which is another thing I like about it. there there's no like you know how like american idol which i don't think you were probably a power user of either but there became this point like american idol my sense is it started with a bunch of people auditioning who were really good and the drama was are they going to get into the show and then there were some people that were kind of not great and then that was funny because they were so different than the other people who had a real shot at it and then of just became all every other audition was some person who's clearly kind of delusional yeah i didn't know that and so it was all just like you know like william hung she bangs she bangs where it was kind of this taking folks who didn't have a very good chance of getting onto american idol and making them a kind of a celebrity but the question of who's the joke really on and and what i like about this show is that they don't ever do anything like that like they would never send somebody out there who has like zero experience but also most of them are just like these kind of like i'm an i'm a primitive skills guide that's what i do and then you just have igor out there trying to find where his camp is and going you got yourself a stew well this is my new favorite guy on this season who produces this or what's the platform or this isn't well it's on the i've been watching it on the hit some streaming thing involving the history channel although i don't think it started out there i feel like it was it has no there's no historical aspect to it i think it might have been originally like discovery uh camaro kev is a huge fan uh of the show uh as well and so anyway i don't know if you're into that i would again it is a very very compelling television show for me anyway and i don't really like reality tv um but it has it has now become the main thing and i like i yesterday i watched like five hours of it again it's like if i start watching one episode i really need to know what happens next so would

recommend speaking of show alone platforms if you don't mind let me just tag this with a little thing i just i just remember tv reference well sort of it's sort of related to this um we have a new tv here in the in the basement kind of rec roomy area right and um it's an actual like smart tv we bought like pretty much i think the cheapest one we could buy of the size that we wanted it's not super fancy but all tvs are like smart tvs now right with they're basically like big phones with a bunch of apps you can download and then you can you know watch your watch your streaming on the apps now um vives and i don't have regular cable anymore as as you know luke And, you know, but we do pay for like Netflix, HBO, Hulu, the various ones. So we download those apps and we log in and we pay for them. But then there's the apps that are basically free, like your Pluto's that you mentioned or your two B's that have various styles of like, you know, streaming, depending on who owns what intellectual property that is hosted on there. And that's all free. But then when I want to watch something like an actual baseball game, that's where I got to get a little bit creative and a little bit extra legal. Right. Or less than legal. And I'll find some like janky streaming site and I'll plug my computer into the TV. Well, yesterday I had happened to catch something on the radio. Somebody saying like, oh, well, the World Baseball Classic is the United States team playing the Canadian team. and it starts at seven and I looked down at my watch and it was like 645 or something I was like oh I actually don't have anything else going on right now I haven't really watched any baseball I've listened to some spring training games but it's very much in the background I was like oh maybe I'll just sit down and get a little taste of early baseball so I'm like well how can I watch this instead of like going to one of my illegal streams and seeing if it was there I didn't feel like doing that I was like you know what this is like the world baseball classic I mean this might just be on one of these free streaming services right so i look it up and i see that uh the various games were bouncing around various properties and various networks and various streamers uh but yesterday's game was available on fox sports or the fs1 app i'm like you know what i'll bet you i'm doing things not just illegally but old-fashionedly like just download this fox sports app put on the tv watch the game and so i'm like is this gonna work i download the app and there it is the world baseball classic i'm like yeah but when i click on this it's going to tell me like i need to enter my cable subscription provider or whatever but no i hit play the game is in progress i'm watching it i'm texting you guys we're talking we're talking baseball on the old fun loving criminals chain things are great the united states team is just absolutely dominating the Canadian team, which I told you

Don't think it's okay to just roll in here at 100 kilometers per hour like you're Joel Otto with the Calgary Flames.

And so I'm enjoying that. I'm like, well, a lot of these people are probably Blue Jays fans. And Blue Jays fans always make us very sad or usually make us sad as Mariners fans. So anyway, I'm totally having a great night. And then I don't know. Now, the game wasn't going to go a full nine innings anyway because it was pretty clear that the Americans were going to trigger the mercy rule.

Oh, there's a mercy rule in it. I didn't know that.

Yes. Well I don't know if it's a little complicated But I thought we might even trigger the mercy rule In the first inning but it turns out you'd have to get Like if you get up by 15 points Somewhere in the first five innings They just call the game I'm sorry runs I wasn't saying that to drag you

I was like maybe it's the World Baseball Classic It's like soccer there's like a point system

No I'm being an idiot although there is something About accumulating runs I think in the I don't know anything about the WBC Anyway, but no, I'm sorry. I just misspoke. But if you get like 15 runs ahead of your opponent in the first five innings or 10 runs ahead of your opponent after the seventh inning, they'll just call the game basically because it's like I guess because you're talking. I mean, they're vastly different baseball experiences in these different nations. So you probably need to have that because you could get some real some real rough games if you don't have a mercy rule. And I don't know this at all, Luke. I'm totally speculating here. But also, I know a lot of major league teams here in the States don't really love their hot, often young players putting themselves out there potentially for injury. What about the ugly players? And let them play. So maybe like kind of limiting playing time is good for everybody involved, too. Anyway, all of that is to say, and this story doesn't really have a great ending, but it does have an ending, which is suddenly it stopped. the game just freaking stopped on me and it said okay that's the end of your free trial i saw nothing that said free trial i did not put in any information i just downloaded the thing i hit go i'm just like my god why don't i try this more often and just trust why don't i just trust capitalism to work for me more often this is great and then it just it just died on me i'm like well i'm not going to figure out some illegal way to stream this because the game was pretty out of hand but it was kind of a it was kind of a bummer i was kind of vibing can you buy are you going to

pay for whatever the mlb thingy is so that you can just watch those games on your phone or on your smart television i mean because it's a big the mariners are a very big part of your life and i mean you're going to go through a potential of 162 events where you have to like you know go through some kind of uh you know uh kind of questionable internet connection deal well

first of all luke i mean i do end up getting the mlb tv package and i have for years now and i don't have to i i paid for it when i was in la and it's pretty expensive it's like it was back then 25 bucks a month which i mean i know we can afford that but like you know that over the course of like whatever six months of baseball or whatever that's not exactly cheap the reason i bring up the prices luke even though i do end up getting that kind of through my phone service anyway and i kind of get it for free but it's a 25 a month value it doesn't mean i can watch the mariners games are you kidding me like the mlb and the owners of these teams are so goddamn rotten to the core that you cannot watch in market games because they have this special because they created their own goddamn cable sports is its own thing which is their thing which is how they make money and like the whole model of making money off of baseball is making it impossible for the fans of specific teams to watch their own teams in the market it is the most infuriating thing so even though yes i will have the mlb app and i'm a big baseball fan and i'm technically paying for it through my phone service no luke i can't watch my team here in seattle i still have to stream them illegally which i did all last summer i mean it's fine i also listen i listen to a lot of the games but it's also pretty easy to to find the games and i gotta say like i have mixed emotions about going on a very popular podcast and just admitting that i that i do this it's you know like i say i don't know that i can i don't think i'm breaking the law as in i could go to jail for this but i'm definitely like you know not playing by the rules but with baseball it's like yeah but i'm technically playing i'm technically paying for the service that should let me watch my baseball team it's just the audacity of mlb to treat its fans the way they do while they wring their hands over like how can we shorten games that's the problem we can't attract an audience we must shorten the games it's like how about you stop screwing the fans how about like start there

yeah that would be frustrating i mean you could also subscribe to the cable that i subscribe to and watch it i mean it is right exactly like it's annoying that they black out the they shouldn't I feel like if you're going to if someone is going to pay on a monthly thing in a city to have access to baseball on television, it should include at a minimum.

the team in that city yeah they should have just they should have priced that in somehow i can't

just buy root sports either i'd have to buy a cable package you know what i mean and all this stuff like it is it's a yeah it's a real screw i like that rant i like that rant that's some good

how about that yeah well let's go to a break and then let's come back and thank some people who are voluntarily paying for content known as the dazzling donors right more tbtl in just a moment

on your mark on your mark get set get set now ready ready go everybody rattle

hey let's thank some of our dazzling donors these are the folks who are supporting tbtl with a monthly donation now andrew during the break you pointed out something there is a big there's a big difference between what you were frustrated by mlb's rules and the various media entities there. There are rules around restricting access to content and what goes on over here on TBTL, which is it's an all-voluntary system. If you want to listen to the show, anybody can do that at any time free of charge. We also have been fortunate enough that enough people over the years have realized that the only way this can happen five times a week for us is for it to be our job. And so they voluntarily donate money that would you voluntarily donate money for jared kalanick to have a good season what if we could donate directly to actual mariner

i wonder what motivates kalanick by the way i think he's got motivation but i don't know you

think my salary is how i'm able to do this but that's nothing to scratch the surface your donations to jared kalanick anyway we have a couple of dazzling donors to thank including chris and danielle greenewalt out there in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one of my favorite spots in the country. They say, I'd like to thank the guys for their daily companionship. I can't believe it has been 13 years. Okay, so this is coming from Chris. I didn't know. I was being a little vague, but this is Chris writing. I'd like to thank the guys for their daily companionships. I can't believe it's been 13 years since my partner Danielle and I started listening on the AM radio. And now our kids, Chloe and Dash, are along for the ride, soaking in that TBTL magic. Some call it magic. Chris, some call it tragic. I'm glad that it's magical for you. I can't think of a better education. If I'm going to plug something, it might as well be my business. I run an interior architecture firm called Bunker Workshop. Even though I'm in Philly, I have no problem taking on long-distance jobs. I enjoy working for good people, and as TBTL listeners, I feel like you've already been vetted. I'm sure luke would find it interesting that one of my first clients here in philadelphia was kurt vile wow i do find that interesting chris very interesting and chris says and yes he's every bit as cool and weird as you'd expect i know that we cannot request songs this feels like a theme

oh is this another song request yeah i think we put in there please don't request songs because

of uh as long as it's as long as it's uh kurt vile i'm fine with it i know we can't request songs but i'd like you to give a listen to kurt's song one trick ponies i think it's a fitting tribute to friendship even the sort that exists between a couple of cobros and their silent buddies from philly thanks guys could we do this um i know we're still a ways out from the music for your weekend but how about the listener's suggestion this week could it be chris in philly

with one trick ponies by kurt vile yes now will you remember that or will we forget it not before we even get to the top stories.

Chris, I'll tell you something. I'll dazzle you with a deet. When we talked to Kurt Weill for Livewire, it was, of course, in the pandemic era, so everything was Zoomy, and he was in his home in, is it Mount Airy, I believe, is where his place is, in the kind of greater Philadelphia area, and I was admiring his home because I could see it because he was on camera in his home, and I bet you anything, listener Chris may have been part of that. That's pretty crazy, right? That is interesting, yeah. Good job, Chris. Thank you. And shout out to Chloe and Dash and Danielle as well. Thanks for tolerating this to the degree that you do. Maestro?

On your mark. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go!

Everybody rattle, dattle.

We've got to thank Lorraine Hirakawa of Puyallup, Washington. Lorraine says, hello, friendos. While If I am still considered a new listener, oh, God, I started in 2018. Yeah, Lorraine, it's only been five years, you know. It's only been, I don't even want to do the math on how many episodes that would be, that Lorraine has been listening. It's plenty, Lorraine.

I had a panic attack looking at this.

The show number yesterday as I was posting the show online, how close we are to 4,000, and we need to do something special for 4,000.

We really do. I mean, we're coming up on 3,900 in 10 episodes. We're going to be at 3,000, 3,900 in 10 episodes, leaving us a mere 100 of episodes to do before episode 4,000. Exactly. i had to write some kind of uh short bio for like they're updating the wait wait don't tell me uh like website or something and i really hate doing that stuff and i'm very bad at it um but i was trying to i think i said something like and you know and and he hosts you have to write in the third person too and he hosts the uh daily podcast too beautiful to live which which recently celebrated its 350th episode. That's what I wrote like a week ago. And then I looked and I was like, nope, that's about 400 episodes off, which is...

Well, that's a couple of thousand off. I think you meant the 3,500th episode. What did I say?

350th episode, I think. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I meant 3,000. Yeah. What I wrote was, what I meant to say was 3,500, 3,500th episode. But even that is like That's shaving like a year and a half Or something off of this whole nightmare And by nightmare I mean The thing that Lorraine is generously Donating to While I'm considered a new listener I started in 2018, the last three years While I've been living in Kuwait The two of you have been My companions I'm coming to the end of my contract And will return home to Puyallup this summer I hope to have the opportunity To see a live show at some point thanks for all the support over the last three years and insert drop here Andrew do you know I don't think I have that drop do you have the ability can

you search for individual drops yes if I have them what are we looking for here

oh I see okay Maria Bamford doing an impression of her mother saying what you

do is so important do you have the I do see how hard it is no oh yeah no I've never claimed to be good at this I was also just wondering I mean maybe I just Maybe I just play all the Maria Bamford that I have, just clear out the Maria Bamford file, but I'll start with this, certainly. Sweetie, have a good show. What you do is so important. Thank you.

Perfect. Signed, Listener Lorraine, soon to return from Kuwait. Welcome back. Your dreams were your ticket out. And, yeah, we'll see you at some point. We're going to be doing some events coming up. So now that, you know, now that a lot of the elements of normal life have sort of ramped up again, I, you know, we're going to we're going to be out and about and we're going to be seeing folks. And I can't even what an you know, I've I have I've been away from home for stretches of time, but never like in a place that seems like it would be as wildly different from Puyallup than, say, Kuwait. You know what I mean? Like the idea of coming like, OK, well, I used to live in Seattle and then I went to L.A. and then I came back to Seattle. Okay, those are different places, but like Kuwait, back to the U.S.

Very different lifestyle.

Different lifestyle, different, like, presumably, I mean, I'm sure in Kuwait they have everything, you know. For enough money, you can probably have literally every possible thing that you would get in the U.S. That being said, I'm sure there just must be, I don't want to project onto Lorraine, but it just must be really an exciting prospect of coming back to so much familiarity.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it could also be, yeah, I've never done that either. I don't know if it's difficult to kind of switch between cultures like that.

Well, Lorraine, we'll see you hopefully this summer, and thank you for supporting us. We really do appreciate it. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. All right. Quick update on my neighbor. As a lot of people know him, Mr. Portland Wide. So I've talked about this guy before. I've just sort of passed him a few times in the elevator and walking to and from the parking situation. He parks a couple of slots down from me in the parking garage under the apartment building. And he drives, I would say it's probably like a, it's a gold Sebring that is, is that a Chrysler product?

It sounds like Chrysler Sebring is a thing, but you know me, I'm terrible with cars.

Oh, right. Let's see. Let's see. Chrysler Sebring. Yeah, it is. Okay, good. Confirm. So he drives like a, I would say, yeah, okay, I'm actually looking at it right here.

Boy, do they make them at anything other than silver? I just typed in Sebring and they're all silver. This one's gold.

His is gold. Oh, okay. It looks like he's maybe in a Sebring LXI or something, if this picture of the internet, on the internet is accurate. And this guy has kind of fascinated me because he seems to be living. in a kind of a different universe than everybody else in this building. Other than me, a lot of the people in this building are fairly young, I would say. They're kind of young professionals. You know, we're right in the heart of Portland and it's a fairly new building with a lot of kind of like, you know, concrete and stylish paintings of Jimi Hendrix.

Nothing says young people like a stylish painting of Jimi Hendrix.

As I said that out loud, I realized that that makes it sound a lot more okay boomer, but I'm just telling you the demo in this building is mostly people probably in their late 20s who have professional jobs and are living in this building that's pretty well appointed or whatever. And drive a certain kind of car. There's a lot of electric vehicles in this building. Anyway, then you've got my guy who drives this Sebring, who locks it up with the club every single night who has a thing of kitty litter down under his sebring because it leaks oil i didn't even know that was a remedy for that but it's amazing and i realized the other day he has put a cb radio antenna on the sebring and it was funny because he had i noticed that he had tied because you know like a cb radio antenna is pretty tall yeah he had tied it down to his regular antenna because the ceilings that inside the parking garage and where we actually park are too low for this antenna and so he had to tie it down to his regular antenna and i thought what a process he must have just put that on for some reason but he must just leave that thing tied up all the time nope he doesn't andrew how do i know because i pulled in to the garage the other day coincidentally behind him and he immediately had to pull over get out of his car and tie down his cb antenna to his regular antenna so that he could then proceed into the lower bowels of the parking garage and park his car and i was like i'm waiting for this guy i want to ask him about that antenna what exactly is the deal and so the other thing i'd noticed about him is he had like two spare tires in his parking space like one kind of lying flat and one that was kind of sitting in the other tire leaned up against the wall and I just figured oh these are just his like I don't know spare tires like I would believe anything from this dude like he is just he's just kind of on his own wavelength with this stuff and then I had already parked and I was waiting for him because I literally wanted to ask him about the antenna situation and then he pulls it he backs his car in and he smashes into the tires doing zero damage to his sebring because the tires are there as a bumper system okay so that he can back his car all the way in but not hurt his bumper right much like the kitty litter this is a person who is thinking outside the box andrew in terms of caring for their car also caring for the infrastructure

of the parking area like so then i'm just waiting have you ever seen the tennis ball move by the way i remember my uncle had the tennis ball move he moved into a new place and it was a tight garage and so like he dangled a tennis ball from a string from the from the ceiling of the garage and like when the when maybe the front grill of the car or maybe if you're backing the trunk or something when it hits that ball it means that's time to stop you ever seen that i have but i never

understood what that was i thought that had to do with the automatic gate or the automatic garage door or something because i'd already i've seen that many times i never understood what that was about the the ways that i've seen is it's hanging about the middle of the garage it might be like bumps when it bumps the roof of your car it tells it tells you stop or something if you've seen it

in the middle of a garage maybe there's like a lot of head maybe there's a lot of storage and headway it might be that the people in the garage just say this is as much as you can pull in and then there's still plenty of room for us to get access to the refrigerator or the garage door into the kitchen or whatever but it's my if you see that that's telling you where to stop I think

oh wow yeah I have I had seen that growing up and I never knew what that was about but so now I'm doing this thing where I think I was coming home from maybe a trip so I was very slowly getting my like luggage out of the back of my car so I could time my exit with this guy's exit now sometimes he stays in his car smoking ciggies and talking on his phone for a long time so i was like is this going to be one of those days um it it wasn't i he eventually got out of his vehicle and i like rushed up to meet him and i said hey what what is that is that like a ham radio or something goes oh no it's a cb and i go what do you do with it he goes i talk to people on my entire drive home he goes it used to be on my truck Thank you. But I don't know if, like, he doesn't have his truck anymore. It was interesting because it seemed very clear to him that I knew about the history of his truck.

Right.

Which I really didn't.

Yeah.

But he was like, oh, yeah, it used to be on my truck. I'm kind of bummed I don't have it on there anymore. But now I've got it on here. And I was like, do you tie it down every time you come in here? He was like, yeah. It's no big deal. And I go, what do you do? He goes, oh, I ride the Skip. The what? The Skip is the name for, I think, technically, the Skip. well the skip is just how far does your signal go when you're talking on a CB I think I thought the skip had to do with the ionosphere or something like how the radio waves or whatever kind of I don't know is that short wave or long wave whatever kind of radio a CB is how it bounces off basically like a certain part of the atmosphere which will dictate how far your signal goes but he was like oh I just get on the skip and he goes I'm triple two I was like what he goes yeah just go triple two portland triple two portland and then he goes people just jump on it they go i hear you in hawaii he goes i talked to people in alabama he was like i got these friends in hawaii now he goes i'm just learning about i just i just get out there on the skip and see what's going on this dude and i love this about him and i think he might work in road construction or something because he had one of those orange kind of like uh you know reflective vests on i think he on his drive home just fires up the cb radio says some triple two in portland and then whoever hears him just says hey i'm so-and-so in hawaii or i'm so-and-so in alabama what's going on yeah and then they just chatted up for his whole commute home and i just thought what a life-affirming thing like how cool to be connecting with people and to be that open by the way to the world like this guy i have much to learn from this neighbor of mine i mean that's

the lifestyle right i mean i it sounds very appealing to me as well um but um i mean that's that's the when we talk about ham radio we'll usually hear from ham radio operators who say yeah it's great because i mean the cool thing here is you can be on the move like it's the 1980s and your name is like smoky or maybe the bandit um but uh i just uh yeah i mean that is that is the lifestyle it's just like it's almost like the the i mean message boards is an antiquated thing but this was like kind of the pre-message board just like hey i'm here who up yeah i just i i

think the reason that i was so impressed with that is because i have completely lost that sense of openness with the world like i don't really i mean i love doing this show with you i love getting a chance to interact with the folks that listen to the program same for the other job stuff that i do but like whereas there was a time where i would want to go on like when the internet was very young and there were like news groups dedicated to a tv show that i was into and i'd be like oh people are just on here talking about you know in living color what and i was like what is happening you know i wanted to be a part of those conversations I just the idea for me of of of making essentially small talk with strangers as I'm driving home, that sounds so draining to me personally that I really wish that I still had that kind of sense of, like I said, openness to the world.

I think the closest thing that has hit our culture that is sort of like this, that I barely, barely, barely dipped my toes into, but I know some listeners kind of congregated around the app. What is it called, Luke? Gosh, darn it. Clubhouse. Clubhouse, exactly. People were kind of making friendships there. It's just like this audio-based app, which I sort of feel like it was also a way for people to get in trouble. i mean like any kind of technology like this is like why were you in this group where people were spreading anti-semitic rumors or what have you you know was that happening with clubhouse you know there's an actor that i like um and i'm blanking on his name right now but yeah like i kind of i followed him on a couple of different platforms and then that happened again i don't think that he was proselytizing or saying anything but he's a well-known person who's in this clubhouse you know during listening to some talk or whatever and the stuff that is being said in this talk is problematic and then he's and now he's like well listen i didn't know whatever and it's just kind of like it does sort of it sort of changed the way that i looked at him when i would see him pop up in my feeds or whatever i'm sorry that i'm blanking on his name but um anyway uh all of that is to say like that i think that that might tap into that energy a little bit of strangers just

sort of like um checking in yeah i don't need andrew to talk to strangers because what i can do is watch them on tiktok and develop strong parasocial relationships with them such as the uh there's a comedian named libby higgins uh very funny person on tiktok and other streams and And she just. does these I mean they're they're very weird videos but like in the best way like this is one she did where for some reason she's just deciding to defend Pitbull or deciding to basically extol the virtues of Pitbull so this is the original video this is her talking about Pitbull but again she's in on the joke not that Pitbull's a joke I think we've kind of come I've sort of come full circle on like always wanting to make fun of Pitbull almost in the way that I did with Nickelback but then like you know thinking I don't know who's Pitbull really hurting maybe he's a nice guy but this is libby higgins talking about pitbull regret to say

that there are people in this world who not only don't listen to pitbull but they might say pitbull isn't cool and i'll challenge you by saying what's not cool about a guy saying it's mr worldwide he's mr worldwide he's not Mr. Miami or Mr. Florida or even Mr. United States. He's Mr. World Wide, the whole world. Maybe his name is Mr. World Wide because he takes the whole world. Just like Jesus did in that one song, he's got the whole world in his hands. He's got the whole world in his hands. And he says, you're feeling down. Guess what, MF-er? Not anymore.

so that's libby higgins talking about pitbull but what's amazing about tiktok is the duetting function where people then will just take a video and jump in and this is where it gets interesting to me because this is where a real very serious pitbull fan who i'm guessing didn't completely read the room that libby higgins is kind of doing this a little bit tongue-in-cheek this woman is i guess what she's taking away from this is that there are people who are questioning the greatness of pitbull and that is where she jumps in to add her two cents he's mr worldwide he's not mr so it starts with of course the original video and now the other person's

jump in in a minute here miami or mr florida or okay the queen has to chime in one he's mr worldwide Two, he's my love He's my lifestyle and he's not a phase And three, I met him I kissed him, I hugged him And I held up the meet and greet line For friggin' 15 minutes Because me and Pitt had a lot of shit to talk about

Period So there you go That's what's going on with that tape I told you it's really kind of out of left field

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out How I feel about that second person Because I both Well, either way it's it's at best it's going to be condescension at worst it's going to be like this person is a hand like first of all if you're if you love pitbull that much um good on you and there are people who like you say i mean call it parasocial call it what you will you know it sounds like she held up the line yeah exactly exactly like if you it's social if this person makes the world go around for you okay i got some weird things that make the world go around for me um but uh it doesn't sound super healthy but then also just like jesus christ how do you think all you think you're the only person in this line that uh likes that's what i was wondering about like yeah i was

i was i was like um i how do you how do i put this observing the same things that you just mentioned which is like i don't think we need to punch down or yuck any yums but i uh you know this is obviously somebody who loves pitbull also is not lacking for confidence i've seen other videos of her in which she refers to herself as the queen okay hold on one second you this person

who did the duet who did the reaction yes you've just sort of seen this person around or did you

start clicking on this person after this pitbull thing i had seen her popping up really once or in well that's how the algorithm works i think i had seen her on like a friday i think her her deal is i'm not sure where she is i'm guessing florida she is giving strong uh reminders of the the woman who was sort of known as tan mom like she's a kind of a woman of around that age and she's either very tans a lot or is applying a lot of kind of makeup that makes her appear tan and she just kind of goes around narrating her life and I think I saw a video where she was like it's Friday and you know what that means and she just had like a whole bottle of like you know some kind of barefoot wine and she was about to just go like have her Friday afternoon with her barefoot wine and I was kind of thinking like that's not my lifestyle because it would be a it would be whiskey but um I was like you know you go you have fun with that um so I don't want to say anything that sounds like I'm being negative about this woman but I will say if I was in that line to meet Pitbull and this woman. was was thinking that she was the only person who was connecting with mr worldwide i'd be like we're all in this meet and greet line yeah because we have a special connection with mr worldwide yeah exactly so please honor our lived experience as well and i don't want to sound like the old

the old man in the room although i always am but like if i have anything critical to say it is this desire to just go on the internet and just narrate the small boring details of your life like are you shitting me you have nothing better to do than to talk about some old 80s sitcom that you watch how or how we might be streaming various sporting events or a run-in with a neighbor or like i mean i just don't even under like not everything has to be public like keep Some things are private.

Now, this guy, I don't know the back story on this guy at all. Here's what I know. This popped up in my For You feed. It's a guy, sort of a cowboy guy. He's standing in the snow. He's in a cowboy hat. He kind of has got a little bit of a Sam Elliott vibe going, if I remember right. He's got kind of a thick leather cuff on one of his wrists. You know, a nice-looking guy, probably in his 60s. you know lots of salt and pepper and i don't know what has been going on for this guy like what people have been saying about his outdoorsmanship or his cowboysmanship but he is about fed up with it andrew and he decided this is all delivered by the way in one take into the camera um i don't know if he had notes if he had a like a prompter behind him or if he had memorized it or what but he decided to send out a message to the haters i'm just calling him mad cowboy this one's for all

the haters out there all of those who think it's cool to sit back in the safety of their mother's basement make clips of my videos and talk shit about me out there on the internet you little have no idea the life i've lived 41 years working professionally with horses 30 of those spent as a remote wilderness guide i did shit on a daily basis that would make you just piss yourself i stood down nine grizzly bear charges in my life five black bear charges and i once stepped up and stuffed an eight-foot tom cougar squaring a mug with my walking stick to save one of my dogs

now part of why i find that hard to believe is because i've been watching a lot of the show alone and if ever there's like generally speaking bears are running away from them because bears are bears generally do not hunt humans and one time one person saw like a mountain lion from very far away if this if this has really happened to this guy that is a lot of interactions with wildlife wildlife that generally is avoiding humankind because they're nervous yeah i mean

he's talking about how tough he's using this as examples of his toughness but it also kind of

makes you question his decision making thank you i don't know if this is the guy i would be hiring uh to to lead me on the thing if i'm gonna have to punch any kind of tomcat i don't know if i'm

signing up for that i watched 17 horses lose their lives out there i lost three good friends and i've held the lifeless body of my best friend in my arms geez this again is a lot of trauma for

a job like at i don't know at horse 13 at friend four and a half who i've lost i probably walk away you may say you know what too much to bear you know they are they're hiring at mod pizza

like maybe just fill out an application just try it on for a little bit you won't ever have to hold uh one of the other mod pizza employees in your arm as they take their final breaths

It will be less than, I promise it will be less than nine of your mod pizza colleagues that you will have to watch expire due to the rigors of that job.

I've heard my own bone snap. I've stitched my fucking body twice myself. And I felt the searing fucking heat of a hot brand. You have no idea what tough it is. sitting back in your mom's basement going to work in your cubicle stopping by 7-eleven on the way home and then talking trash about fellas like me wait have you been following me what did they say

i don't know i need to go back and figure out find this guy's account and kind of see see if i can if i can go back and kind of unpack this go into the black box of what was said Also, 7-Eleven is a really specific place for me to have stopped as his where his mind goes. By the way, I believe that this guy really is a horse guide and I believe that he really does live a very rugged outdoor life. Like, I don't think that this is, you know, I don't think he's lying about any. Well, I think he's. exaggerating some of the stuff but i don't think he's lying about what his lifestyle is but it makes me wonder is he ever out there on a cold night you know shivering away thinking god i would love to get a cheeseburger bite at 7-eleven like 7-eleven is such a specific place for him to think all of us soft people are going after work he must love 7-eleven or think that's Just like if only there was a 7-Eleven out on the, you know, the Alberta range. I'm also getting strong Canadian vibes from this guy based on his pronunciation of things.

His voice sounds very familiar. You know what? I think I was getting whiffs of Brimley, Wilford Brimley. Uh-huh.

Yeah. He's like a more fit Wilford Brimley.

You know what? I feel sorry for you fuckers. I really do. because what I see is a whole world full of hate-filled little soft and gushy blue Smurfs.

Now, how do you feel about that? Did you see that coming?

No, I didn't see the blue Smurfs thing coming.

But the thing is, again, it's like I feel like this is saying more about him than it might be saying about us, the viewer. I thought he was going to say something maybe homophobic or sort of anti-woman or something. i feel though if you're going to criticize people for being somehow too comfortable or not living the rugged life i you could do worse than calling them smurfs no absolutely i mean no i had honestly

though like he's putting on this like this bravado that he's so like he's so tough but clearly like you know who's he trying to convince more than himself like he is a man in a lot of pain what did somebody do did somebody give him a thumbs down on a video now the last uh about 10 seconds

of this are also interesting to me because you know he's just he's just and i bleeped out a lot of you know the b word and the f word and things and he's clearly like he's upset that he thinks people have been making fun of him and stuff which you know it's not a good feeling for anybody but then he kind of goes into this interesting meditation at the end about like i don't know Well, just listen for yourself and make a part of it.

Yap, yap, yap, but completely fucking harmless. For those of you who follow my videos, I appreciate you listening to my rant. Now I feel better.

I almost feel like he sort of regrets how mad he got. It's that kind of thing where it's like, okay, I got that out of my system. I'm sorry. That was a little much. But he did put the video up. Yeah. Yeah. So he didn't regret the rant so much that he did not put the video up on the TikTok. He did that.

I love all of you. Stay the course. Resist.

What do you think he wants people to resist?

I don't think a lot of these folks know what the hell they're talking about.

I mean, resist. I think of resist as being a very progressive idea. Don't you think? Oh, that's true. That's how I hear resist. although this guy doesn't fit into that doesn't seem to fit into that world is he trying to bring resist what is he saying resist against the smurfs resist against the easy access to 7-eleven i'm just i'm legitimately curious what he would like people to resist is it the modernity of our country that's or of our world that's turning us into smurfs what does i wonder what he wants us to

resist i i mean if there's any rhyme or reason to this at all which i i think it's like going on a reality tv show and just saying i'm not here to play games i just think that there are just things that like are just set and like the the person going off on tiktok or vine i'm more of a vine guy myself sure um it's just like i don't know man all these people are a little as you know the people who are like kind of again going after the haters and and like are kind of giving these angry rants that refer to things as if we all know and i'm sure there are some people who do know the the whole origins of what he's talking about in the story and the narrative arc and stuff i'm sure there are some i don't know how many followers he has but also what are the chances

that the real story is going to be incredibly dark and i'm going to regret having played the

i mean maybe but it's probably but i mean also he's this cowboy guy who's like tough and he's hurt his own bones break and all this stuff but he's still a guy who like really feels the need to be on tiktok and let people know how hurt he is on tiktok like he's you know how much of this is a character i mean you got to be dubious of all this shit right like both like from the minds that it come from are maybe not always the most stable minds and also the motivations are just generally it's just attention one way or the other now i am getting a little bit shitty i guess and um but like it is it's just it's a it's attention one way or the other but it also fits into let me I'm sorry, honestly.

for the fucking stupidity that you've all got to put up with out there.

That's the end of what he's saying. To me, though, it is actually kind of interesting from the perspective of all of the perceived haterism of the Internet. You and I were talking about this the other day, that the Internet is a very dark place, depending on what corner of it you're in and how far down a comment chain you are. But also, there is a lot of positivity and love on the Internet. see the stens page and the tbtl slack and places like that and that a lot of times on things like tiktok uh if someone's being shitty that the attention that they get is to stop being shitty not celebrating someone being mean to someone and if you know there seems there's a lot of love on the internet as well and yet there are so many people that i've noticed on like tiktok particularly that's the platform i spend the most time on who are clapping back at the haters there's so much clapping back at the haters and it's interesting to me because a lot of people based on what i'm seeing they don't seem to have that many haters they just don't seem to like i was telling you about that whole um world's smallest violin dido uh situation where it's like somebody is you know somebody told me i couldn't have two kids and still have my job running a plant nursery and it's like did somebody really tell you you couldn't have two kids and run your plant nursery like was that a statement that was made in the world where were you why did somebody tell you

why were they so why were they so unsupportive of that and i think what that person wants to say is

i've been able to successfully balance parenthood and running this business which i think is a cool thing that they're able to do that but to frame it as i proved the haters wrong is such a weird It's such a weird framing device that goes on all over TikTok a lot of the time. I just, anyway, to see this, again, Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott seeming tough guy who's stitched his own body up multiple times, clapping back at the haters, I just sort of was like, yeah, I do think this is really, this is a phenomenon that we're dealing with. I'm sure it's all addressed in our friend Chris Hayes' forthcoming book about the attention economy which um gets into the internet and might even say some of these things more eloquently

than i'm saying that i actually oh wait no part of the contract i want to say i was going to mention that i actually ghost wrote that book but and we're publishing it under christ are you

unfamiliar with how ghosts work yeah you know i'm a terrible you scooby-dooed it which means at the end of the book they reveal it was andrew welsh the podcaster that's different than ghost

writing ghost writing is we never figure out what yeah no i made a mistake there don't worry i'll

cut it all out here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female

no man it's not from a female the fact that it's dedicated to genevieve is a uh-huh that's a dead

giveaway well that's a but that's just a little easter egg for those of us who know yeah no that's

true huh chris hayes big genevieve has fan all right um my beloved genevieve um here is a

voicemail that we got from lisa in bellingham hi luke and andrew this is lisa in the pickleball district of bellingham washington and i'm listening to monday's show where you briefly talk about your um um we used to call it a stripper name i think you called it a porno movie producer name

or whatever can we just but um sorry go ahead luke i tried to pull down the i pulled you down So the listeners just heard you say, can we just and then you disappeared. That's what I said. Lisa. Oh, yeah, we can just. OK, you're back up.

You're back up. What's up? Can we just pull? Can we just pause for a quick moment? Now, I remember this dear listener, Lisa, telling a heartwarming story at some point about I believe it might have been a book that she shared with her mother. And just, you know, it meant so much to her and and how it was just a great reminiscence. I remember us having that conversation I think with Lisa It was really touching And now it's gotten to stripper names

Yeah no I mean it's going to get I'm telling you right now It's going to get What is the The book that she told us about When we met her Is one of the most famous American books

Striptease by Carl Hiaasen I should have Honestly that was a hint I should have known

Yeah now that I think about it It was To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm pretty sure. Oh, yeah. I could only think of Boo Radley. I was like, Boo, Boo, what is that book? Boo. See, I'm a ghost, Luke. I was saying Boo Ernst. I was saying Boo Ernst. Anyway, yeah, things are going to get a little bit steamy here.

I called it a porno movie producer name or whatever.

My co-workers and I were talking about this at work many years ago, and I realized that my stripper name would be my first cat, Midnight, and the street my parents lived on when I was born, which was Sunshine Avenue. My stripper name would be Midnight Sunshine, which ain't bad, right? Until a co-worker said that hers was Lucky Beaver.

Power out. Bye.

can we go back to talking about to kill a mockingbird just just i mean the pickleball district of washington is um all right is it the pickleball district of bellingham or is

bellingham bellingham okay well you know i we've talked a lot about pickleball of late because i did that little tv story about it and just because it's become such a topic everywhere And it's funny because it was notable that there was two pickleball courts on this one particular street in Bellingham, which I shall not name for the privacy of midnight sunshine. But it was notable because of how kind of unusual that was. There'd be like two different homes that had said had built these pickleball courts. And now you walk down any street in America, Andrew, it's pickleball courts left and right soon coming to your neighborhood in your yard.

I don't think that's entirely true. I was passing some park the other day and I can't remember which one it was, but it was something that I I feel like I pass somewhat frequently in my life. I don't pay much attention to it. But on this day, it was notable because it was either right after work or maybe it was a Saturday or something. But it wasn't even a very nice day weather wise. And there were like, I don't know, I want to say at least four. And I thought they were tennis courts or maybe they're just I don't I don't know how how different there. But there were these outdoor courts with for some sort of a paddle game, you know, with the nets and everything. And it was packed, Luke. I mean, absolutely. Well, were they playing pickleball? My guess. I was in the car and they were kind of far away. I just sort of caught my eye. And I was like, holy shit, that must be pickleball. I don't think everybody was out there playing tennis. That's for damn sure.

There was a really well-done local story here in Oregon by a reporter, Christian Foden-Venzel, who basically had gone to this one city in Oregon and this one neighborhood where there was these pickleball courts, and the folks living in the neighborhood were being driven crazy by the sound of the paddle hitting the ball because it's different than a tennis racket hitting a tennis ball. That's a more or less silent experience, but there's just the incessant sound. I don't find it unpleasant, but some people do. But there was a quote in the story that really stuck with me, and it was a guy who lived in the neighborhood and did not like the sound of the paddle hitting the ball from morning until night. And he said we had a neighbor who was who was sick with cancer and was passing away from cancer. And he said that the sound of the pickleball hitting the racket was worse than the cancer. And I thought. That seems unlikely to me. Like and this wasn't close to this person because we were not able to verify those details. What I know is there is a guy on an OPB story describing what someone, one of his neighbors who had had what sounded like a terminal cancer, saying that the pickleball racket hitting the ball, that sound was worse than the cancer. And I found that to be a very, very surprising scenario.

I find it to be surprising, and I also would really like to hear the person who's dealing with the cancer weigh in on that comparison.

Well, that's the thing, and I don't know if they're not with us anymore or, you know, what. But actually, you know what? There is some tape of them right here.

I watched 17 horses lose their lives out there. I lost three good friends, and I've held the lifeless body of my best friend in my arms.

And the pickleball sound was worse than all of it.

Wow.

That's a bold statement, certainly. Yeah.

Anyway. All right. Any other emails or V-mails before we skedaddle?

Let's leave it there today. Maybe tomorrow I'll play you Paul's voicemail. He's got an issue with a neighbor that he'd like our help with. Oh, is it pickleball-related? It's not pickleball, but it is noise-related, certainly. I was just laying off it now because I thought it might be a whole conversation. So maybe we'll do that tomorrow.

Yeah, no, let's save that whole conversation for tomorrow. All right. Thank you, everyone, for hanging out with us on this Tuesday. We'll be back here tomorrow with 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. Hi, it's Langley, and I have a joke for you. This is it. How do you put an elephant in a fridge? You put the elephant in, you open the fridge, you put the elephant in, and you close the fridge. How do you put a giraffe in the fridge? You open the fridge, take the elephant out, put the giraffe in, and close the fridge. The Lion King is having a birthday party. All the animals are there except which one? The giraffe. So he's in the fridge. Bye. Power out.