Muse

Every single piece I curate is bespoke. Ooh, bespoke. I love that word. What does it mean again? Bespoke? Bespoke. Uh, it's when an object bespeaks. Right. It betalks. It, no, wait. It beteaches us something about ourselves. Wow. Yeah. Thank you. I think I have my pull quote. TBTL.

Giddy up. We're jumping on the audio wagon today, everybody.

I say, I say, what up, dog? Let the fun begin. That's a tune-up, bro. I just feel like I'm excited and I feel relaxed and I'm ready to party with the best of them.

We're just a bunch of savages, right? We're not like your fancy California friends, your George Clooney and your California raisins.

We're the number one show in hospitals and on sinking riverboat casinos. All right, let's toss the ball around. Okay.

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

This song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the world.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. We are living in the midst of a podcast boom. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon. It's nice to be here at my home base broadcasting to you all on this Monday.

Bring it back home, baby. Bring it back home.

I'll be here for, I don't know, six hours, seven hours. Then I'll be heading down to Ramona, California for the next few days for some television recording. But in the meantime, I'm going to really just soak up all the comforts of home. Drinking coffee out of my Twin Peaks coffee mug from Tweety's Cafe. That's some mighty fine pie. Got my bell here. Got my various printed elements, which is always challenging in the hotel environment. So I'm just, I'm feeling like this is going to be a really good show. It's episode 3949 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

Oh, and we've got news, my friends. We've got updates. We've got all kinds of clarifications. We've got lots of news. On a couple of stories that we have been following on the program, including an attempt by Disney to do something ambitious that has apparently not gone particularly well for them. It was literally a major disaster. It's funny because I know we've got some, you know, Disney fans in the audience, and that's great. And I know that the trips to Disneyland and everything provides a lot of joy for people. And yet, I think because I'm a curmudgeon and because I didn't grow up going to Disneyland, it's never connected for me in the way that it does for some people. So I probably take a little bit of schadenfreude, you know, sort of in some of these Disney things not working out. But then you've also got the stuff in Florida, which has me now deeply rooting for Disneyland. So maybe whereas I was maybe going to slightly dance on the grave of this Disney project, now maybe I should be mourning it. because I'm firmly Team Disney when it comes down to what's going on them and the very sort of, what's the word? What word can I say when children are listening? The not-so-great governor of Florida. Anyway, we'll talk about that. But also, we had talked about this case of a photograph of prints that had been published in a magazine, I believe, and then Andy Warhol, the famous artist, had repurposed it.

for me to like to be able to to condone that like my artism is bigger than that question is was it a

new piece of art that andy warhol made with the photograph and there's now been a supreme court ruling on the matter we'll talk about that too and we'll talk to this guy longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships of course he's got a delightful I don't know if we can call Bingo a kitten anymore, a delightful young cat who, over the weekend, generally likes to sneak into his studio and unplug various things.

A cat is an angel that poops in a box.

We're hoping that he is able to contact us now through the magic of internet technology. He's Andrew Walsh. Good morning, my friend. Roger, Roger.

Wait, is that what people say? Okay, I'm hearing you.

Is that what people say? Roger, Roger? I don't think people say that. Roger Wilco. Roger Wilco. Roger will comply. That's why the band that I was, the Wilco cover band that I was in, we were called Roger. Ah, ah, because it's the first part. It's the unsaid part. It's the part.

It's adjacent to Wilco, but it's not Wilco. You know how that's always a cover band. Like my cousin Kellyanne, when she got married, lo those many years ago in Philadelphia, she's a huge Rolling Stones fan. And after the wedding and the reception was in their backyard, I think, or there was some party in their backyard and they hired a Rolling Stones cover band, which was called Shattered. Mm hmm.

You know, or it could be popular. Papa Wuzza, like that's your, by calling a Roger, a Wilco cover band Roger, it'd be like Papa Wuzza would be a good, I don't, I think.

Or would you spell Wuzza, W-U-Z-Z-A, it's one word. Papa Wuzza. Oh, I had W-U-Z-Z-A, Papa Wuzza, that's the, oh God, that is such a terrible name for a band, I feel like I need to take a shower. Also, I feel like people might think it's Smurfs related, I don't know why the Smurfs have been coming up so much on the program lately. It's like the Wuzzas were like an off-brand Smurfs. You could get a Wuzz a plushie for like half a price. They were the Canadian Smurfs.

Hey, I want to tell you a story. I think I can tell this story in an interesting way, Luke, that is relevant to our interests. But because of the nature of it, I'm worried that I have to be a little bit withholding, which I don't know if that makes for good radio or not. But a while – so you know how people sometimes gently correct us? they'll write in to the show because you and I maybe got it. I mean on the rare occasion we get a fact incorrect but every now and then also we'll maybe use a word or a phrase that we don't realize is derogatory or offensive in a way we don't realize. And so people will write in and be like, hey listen and they know that we're sensitive little boys and so they'll write in like I don't think we say little boy anymore. Love the show. You guys are great. 99% of the time You get it right. But I just wanted to call you in on one thing. I did that to somebody today and I was really not sure if I should or not. So let me walk you through this. I'll tell you all the details except for the word that was actually used. But, you know, I'm a big fan and maybe friend of, but really your friend, Danny O'Neill, formerly of, you know, we worked together when we worked on the AM radio. And he's known around these parts for writing for the Seattle Times and then being a sports host, a sports show host on 710 ESPN. He isn't on the radio anymore, but he is doing his own little production thing where he writes a weekly or biweekly email about Seattle sports that goes out kind of a Patreon type of deal. The occasional podcast. As you know, I'm a big fan, Luke. I subscribe to this stuff and I really like his newsletter. It tends to be really care for his work. I know I know you don't because he was your editor and he kept his he was a really good editor, too.

Yeah, I probably mentioned on the show, like what tiny bit of journalistic scruples I have were probably from just like him editing some piece I wrote about swimming at the U-Dub.

And he's like in his newsletter is really good. Like it's a you know, it is a sport. It's about sports, but he does a really good job of kind of tying personal stories into it in his own personal experience. So I just I find him to be a really good writer, a really thoughtful man, generally speaking, just a good human being. I like his work. So anyway, he I was reading his newsletter this morning and he was referring to a player. And I'm I'm forgetting I think it's a was it a Celtics player or a there was some player who was like famously during this NBA playoff run was talking a lot of shit on the court. but then after losing was not giving himself press availabilities or was not giving the press availabilities. And so a lot of people were dunking on this player. I'm sorry that I can't remember his name.

I wish. I'm so bad with the NBA. I just know that right now the Miami Heat are just making mincemeat out of the Boston Celtics. But as far as the plot lines along specific players, I don't know much about it.

Yeah, and actually Danny was writing about that Heat Celtics game or the series, but then sort of just made a quick reference to this person who I don't think plays for either one of those teams who, you know, wouldn't back up his shit talk on the court, you know, and then like by hiding and not not talking to the press when things didn't go his way. And he referred to that person as a name that I know from misusing it myself is a slur. Like it's a it's a word that just I grew up just thinking it meant kind of a weakling, you know, kind of a dweeb or something along those lines. But I and I've told the story on the show before. I won't go into detail now. I learned that it was a gay slur when I called my friend that and later found out that he was closeted at the time. Whoa. And who's closet? Yes. And this is something that you kept him in the closet for a good 10 years. I remember I remember telling that story and then using his name and then freaking out like because I, you know, obviously he's he's maybe not obviously, but he's not in the closet anymore. He's a proud gay man. But like at the time, I. we grew up in a conservative you know place we grew up in ohio during a time when i was not super comfortable in in queer spaces or stuff like that and here i had this good friend who i didn't know was gay for for a long time until we were adults um and so that added to the embarrassment when i realized i one time publicly called him this word pretty loudly in in a professional place and i you know said dude i had no idea first of all that that even meant that you know anyway danny used that word today in his newsletter again it was just a quick reference to somebody that he was just sort of dunking on if you will that's a basketball term so kind of a play on words there um but i wasn't sure like should i let danny know this you know what i mean like i don't it's very clear like that he doesn't know that he's using this word danny would not use that if he did know and i even looked it up i'm like am i right about this is this the first hit if i google this word and it you know all the first results say that like you know offensive slur like whatever so i'm like so i did the same exact thing i'm like danny love the newsletter hope this isn't annoying like by the way this word i think it means something that you don't realize it means and i learned exactly i even said like i learned this the hard way when i called my friend this in college and whatever and so he was like oh yeah oh i god i didn't know that he's like i literally didn't know that i'm like dude oh good i like neither did i yeah i mean obviously he wasn't

gonna be like i know what it means well i don't i mean i'm just listen i'm the person that was on the show trying to die on the hill of using gay as a term for things that were negative so people

have weird reactions to stuff like that oh i see oh right right right sorry yeah you meant like yeah good thing that he didn't like not reply to me or try to push back or try to say well there's

an alternate definition or like just try to dig in on it which again i have been guilty of on this show because my pride is hurt over whatever it is it's like i'll be like i'll be on the 11th results page of google trying to find something to support the thing that i was saying it's

clearly not correct me too been there like this initial reaction we have to defend ourselves in some way and i often think of paul f tompkins i know i mentioned this on the show a lot to him saying that one time a fan kind of approached him about something he was doing in his comedy and like his initial reaction he's like we always get like defensive and i my initial reaction was like no you're wrong and he's like all i had to do is think about it for a couple of days and i realized like yeah i'm gonna cut that out of my bit like there's no need to do that that's dumb so anyway it was one of those moments i guess i don't have a great power out here but danny the funny thing i guess is danny and i were going back and forth on you know privately on twitter and uh and he's the funny thing is he was he wanted to use another term that he thought might be a little too edgy so he went with this one this was his safety school this was his safety word exactly oh wow anyway i really did struggle though i was kind of like do i like first of all is he hearing from other people about this i kind of doubt it like probably most of the people who listen or read his newsletter probably might not be attuned to that either i don't know like is it calling attention to something that needs to be called attention to i don't want to be living in his head or whatever but i was like well it'll just he doesn't have to offer an apology a public apology or anything unless he hears from a lot of people but maybe it just doesn't happen again But it was weird how much I struggled

Just go back and cut it out of the post

Replace it with something If you can, it's an email though I mean that's kind of the problem

He's not using Big String That was the name There was an email company When I worked at KVI Radio There was We were sponsored for a while By some email program That was called like Big String And their whole selling point Was you could pull the email back And what's funny to me Is that was over 20 years ago And I feel like we still don't really Have that technology figured out I know there's little elements of the iPhone now where you can edit a text or something that you've already sent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I just feel like that's, I mean, we can put people on the moon, but we can't yoink an email back. That is a really good point. I mean, in this case, it's like Danny's probably sending it to thousands of people. And it's also his, it's how he makes his living, not unlike Party Hardison's tables. It's how he makes his living. So I don't know if he wants to yoink back an email from like a thousand inboxes either. But it's like it seems like we should have the technology to to do to edit some of that kind of stuff.

Yeah, like I am surprised that that is not a function of Google or like Gmail now where you can see if somebody has received the email or not, which I mean, that's one of those things, too, because you can yoink something back. I am definitely sticking with that word, by the way.

That's a Homer Simpsonism, which it's come back into my life because one of the people that's just started showing up on TikTok like crazy for me is this kid. I say kid because he sounds like he's in his 20s, who roams around the Everglades in bare feet, just walking in alligator infested water. He's a naturalist. He's really into these animals and preserving them. And he's making this all on his phone. He picks up all kinds of snakes and he always calls it a yoinking. I'm going to yoink that snake. And he kind of picks it up and shows. it off and then like lets it go he's got like different levels he's got a gentle yoink he's got a whole range of how he yoinks these snakes i'm a gentle yoink farmer yeah exactly sorry i

interrupted uh yeah oh i but i don't know well now now i'm all over the place i realize i'm all over the place today generally speaking so i guess buckle up but it's all over the place monday it's an all over the listeners have come to expect exactly it's what pete carroll calls mondays after football games it's an all over the place monday um i uh so in other words if you had the ability on let's say gmail to pull an email back i guess would be helpful to know if the person has seen that or not already before i get back but then that gets into do we want all of our emails do we want the recipient to know whether or not we've seen the emails like i think there are services like if you're dming someone on instagram oh sure maybe yeah and i guess maybe you your texts on

iphones i don't know if that's the same way if you are silly enough to have it set so that there is a read receipt no see i don't want that i don't like that no i don't like it either i would never have read receipts on because i i need to i need to reserve the right to pretend like i'm just now seeing your course i don't mean yours specifically but yeah a text from a person when i text someone and i get the read receipt which tells me that they've looked at it i'm like oh man you you know what i put that up there with it's right up there with your venmo being public yes these are two of the most personal things a person can know about you when are you reading their texts and also who have you been giving money to for what a slice of pizza that's interesting like i i just find it amazing that as many people have their venmo public as do because it's i i find that to be very personal someone's someone's in relationships too you know someone's reimbursing their spouse for gas and i'm just going okay i'm watching take me into your world how did this get decided as the

way this is financially operating in this in this family do you know that literally as the intro of the show was playing i had to venmo my friend to some money for something and i don't we apparently did not have a history of venmoing together and this just happened moments ago and i called up her venmo based on username right and i'm like but is this the right person and because of some public posts for like going back the past several years i was able to identify it definitely as being her because like one of the things was uh like hot yoga in west seattle and i'm like okay i didn't know you did yoga but i know you live in west seattle and another one was like um some riot girl band tickets that i know that it was like it wasn't sleet or kenny but it was something

like that i'm like oh yeah this is definitely katherine the clues were leading you confirming yeah i did a version of that the other day um without getting too much into my decision making uh and poor decision making let's just say you know i play in some of these poker games and there is believe it or not a certain amount of venmoing that goes on because it could be late at night maybe there's no atm anyway it's just a whole financial ecosystem and there was somebody who owed me some money and i i they'd venmo they'd owed me before and venmo'd me and i was trying to figure out is this the person and then i went and looked at their friends and their friends were mostly poker dgens that i know so i was like yeah yeah we're in the right exactly it's no west seattle hot yoga but it's it was it did indicate to me that i had the right person so in a certain

way it was kind of helpful that i'm kind of glad that she left this stuff public mine yes i make mine private but 99 of mine will just be an image of a baseball because like whenever i'm using venmo i'm paying somebody back or they're paying me for baseball tickets that's basically what i

use venmo for right i you know the the the what would you call it the sort of emoji culture of venmo is kind of entertaining i mean i again i find it to be a deeply entertaining read i love that all these people are just blasting their personal information out there or their personal money relationships but i i would be mortified although i've just now been talking about probably one of the more sketchy like the thing i would be worried about people seeing i'm now just describing to thousands of people none of whom are following me on venmo so this is my system

is not consistent here but i um i just to be clear because i don't want to be withholding on this story as well the reason i had to pay my friend via venmo is because she helped me with some some gardening help um i was having trouble watering my garden so i just use the emoji of an eggplant and some squirting water so it's all on the up and up you're growing peaches yeah peaches eggplant and she helped me water them so i just so i use those three emoji

and i kept that on public um my uh i had an interesting experience on thursday night doing wait wait that i don't think i talked about on friday because um the show hadn't aired yet and I didn't want to spoil it for anyone or I try to be pretty sensitive on Friday about stealing their thunder.

because the radio show is going to play that on the weekend. But so, you know, the Bluff the Listener thing, which is where there's like a made-up story. There's a real news story, and then there's two made-up stories. And the producers decide which panelist will get the real story, and then the other two people have to make something up that's kind of similar. So they sent out the email, and they were like, we thought Luke would have fun with this one. And it was a story from the Wall Street Journal. And the headline was just – I couldn't read it, by the way, because it was behind a paywall that I don't pay for with the Wall Street Journal. All I could see was the headline when I clicked on it. And the headline was something to the effect of Microsoft training videos so popular, they now have fan clubs. And I was like, oh, man, they're messing with me. This is about me because I do Microsoft training videos. And they're pretty funny because my friend Kurt, who writes them, is very funny. And I was like, oh, this is going to be wild. I'm going to be reading a real news story about me, about how great my videos are. And then I went to a special site Where I'm able to hack into the Wall Street Journal And get the article And it was about a different training system Training videos they do That are starring a friend of mine named Devin Badu But then I found myself I got a lot of emails over the weekend from people going This is so weird That you who are like Kind of the main face Internally within Microsoft Of like a big chunk of their like training videos Are on a radio show reading the whole thing about a different chunk of training videos from within microsoft that's

not about you that is that is strange yeah i mean i guess it would have been surprising if if there was a wall street journal article that named you directly and you only found out doing wait wait prep i think that's the only part of that that would be kind of surprising but yeah that must

be weird my thought was that maybe they had found i mean you know my brain immediately wrote the story which was oh the Wall Street Journal dropped this piece today I didn't see it but you're right if I if I had been mentioned in there I would have found out about it long before even if it was you know an hour later the email that's the kind of thing that would go around really fast but it's great because my friend Devin who they well okay so he plays a character I believe that the name of this series is called Trust Code and it's basically about this guy that works at microsoft named nelson who is constantly doing things like kind of wrong and is an example of like how to not do stuff when it comes to various microsoft procedures and what is funny is that when i am am am at that company uh doing uh videos and things i don't know if people had ever put it together that was the company i was talking about i usually call it a software concern on the east side but um there people will literally come up to me and go oh is nelson gonna be here or they'll say oh i like your videos more than nelson's videos it's kind of a coke and pepsi thing although i think clearly he's coke because there's a story in the wall street journal about how people have t-shirts with his face on it and there are watch parties and stuff but it's just weird because i didn't even realize that was him i had been hearing people because devin and i have known each other for like a long going way back in fact remember our blogger jake barker who we had oh yeah yeah jake and devin are really good friends and they had a great live talk show that they used to do in seattle that i was once a guest on um just like they're just really funny guys who have just we're just like you know doing cool stuff in seattle and now i think they're both in la primarily but so i go way back with these people and people had been talking to me about this nelson person forever i had never seen any of the videos i don't have access to them because i'm not an employee there and i was always like i wonder who this guy is my rival and then it just turns out it's actually a friend of mine and then one day i'll just be reading it on this national radio

program speaking of national media guess what i'm just seeing right now on the washington post once again the washington post trying to keep up with tbtl headline she flushed a diamond ring down the toilet 13 years later it resurfaced if i recall and i think i recall this correctly you and i broke that story using just good old-fashioned boot leather journalism yes thank you is that even

the term boot leather journalism well i don't think it is i've heard it i've heard it shoelace journalism but i don't think that makes any more sense than boot leather i've heard i mean a gumshoe is a detective right yes i don't think gumshoe journalism is a thing i think shoe leather i

think shoe leather shoe leather good old-fashioned shoe leather reporting is what i'm getting online here not well i'm gonna just boots on the ground which is a different if we're gonna i'm thinking

Das Boot I don't speak German That's my impression of Corky Talking about his production His Das Boot like lunchbox or something That he's making at the end of Waiting for Guffman He has his like weird I believe it's a remains of the day Lunchbox Oh no no you're right Remains of the Day Lunchbox. I don't remember what the DOS boot is.

He's got something about DOS boot in there where he's talking about, you know, and you've just all these men in this submarine and, you know, talking to each other. Muck, muck, muck, muck. I don't speak German.

I totally forgot because I always think of my Dinner with Andre action figures, of course. His big heads?

Oh, you can always get a reservation. If we're going to just really – I mean, sorry. It's just if we're going to do crossovers of our media projects on The Washington Post, I open up The Washington Post this morning, virtually, obviously, and the number one story on The Washington Post right now, the most read story, is literally the TV story that I'm working on right now and going to San Diego tomorrow for, which will now air this weekend. And it will look like we were ripping off the Washington Post, even though I've already been to Plymouth, Massachusetts, working on it and Kansas City, Missouri, working on it. And and now San Diego. And I was like, oh, really, really? Now you had to like they're publishing this story on day when it's about this guy, Charlie White, the third who lived to be one hundred and nine years old. It's written by his across the street neighbor. But I was just like, oh, this is going to look like we're just ripping off the Washington Post, even though we've been working on this for a long time.

Oh interesting so the piece in the post Which I'm now looking at right now is literally Written by his across the street neighbor

The guy who wrote the book there's a book

Oh okay I see

Well I mean it's the story Of this guy but the person who's Writing it in the post who works for the post Has published a book Which I think comes out this week it's all timed around This but just because of like How their schedule works And how our TV schedule works And in fact the I've already written most of the TV piece Because we're on edit this week Meaning like we're going to go to San Diego And interview this guy's daughter Tomorrow And then we have to like Basically have the story like the editor in New York Needs to be working on the story pronto So I'd already written it and the open of this Washington Post piece is exactly the open I'd already written for the TV piece

And I'm like dang it Okay I might be taking this to Tedious Town Which is where

I'm the mayor of Tedious Town

Yeah, I don't live there, but I have a place there, and I stay there a lot. It was a summer place. I visit –

I summer in tedious town.

Yeah, I visit usually once a day between the hours of 10 a.m. and noon on TVTL. But, okay, so the reason you're doing this story is because of the book, right? Correct. So did you interview – you must have interviewed the author of the book who wrote this piece. Yes, he lives in Kansas. That's why I was in Kansas City last week. I see.

Although I don't think we did the show from there because we had doubled up on our recordings. That was when we had our brains on friends on that episode that aired with Sandin and Molly. That was airing on the Wednesday that I was actually filming with the author at his home in Kansas City across the street from where the hundred and nine year old live.

I see. Well, not to belabor it, but I sort of feel like that's a little bit of a different scenario. It's not like you were doing a story that was, you know, kind of enterprise or even just a trend piece or whatever. And then the Washington Post ends up doing the same thing. I think you kind of got totally pickleball or something like if you. If if the whole point of your piece is based on this book and you interviewed the author, then it doesn't look like you're chasing so much. It's just like kind of, you know, doing the CBS Sunday morning version of the book tour.

Exactly. And it was it's that's exactly what it isn't that I feel that our somebody stole our our great our great idea or something or like you said, our enterprise, our bootleather journalism. It's just one of those things where I'm like, because the same thing kind of happens with live wire. a lot of the time we record a lot of stuff and it's often timed around book tours and things like we did a an interview with a writer named jenny odell she put out a book called saving time which is this pretty high concept approach to sort of like how we think about time in our lives and use our time and things like that and like we did this recording and then the next week it's the cover of the new york times book review and then i asked one of our producers when's that gonna air and she was like oh in about four weeks and it just has to do with production schedules and things like that and i i tell myself that the average person doesn't really track things this way you know like like oh i guess well i heard that on fresh air and now three weeks later i'm here again on live wire boy they really got uh you know they really they really got outmaneuvered by old terry gross i most people don't think of it that way but i feel like i work on a lot of productions that except this one Andrew which is why it's my favorite because it's a Monday morning and I can be talking about how um embarrassed I was that I assumed I was in the training videos and it goes right out on the internet today that's right here hear that hot take today you don't have

to worry about us over polishing things we don't sit on stuff and make sure it's over polished that's for dang sure I will say that I I don't know man when I was a producer for talk shows on public radio like that I'm so split on that like I worked with hosts and you you know this because you and I would have a lot of private conversations where I'd roll my eyes about some host or another like kind of caring like oh well the the station across town did it first did it yesterday or or the network did it in morning edition it's like it just doesn't matter like it just yeah it's some people will hear it twice some will notice some will hear it twice and maybe even just kind of have it on in the background and so it also you doing an interview about this is different than somebody else doing an interview it's going to sound different you're going to draw on other things so like part of me always thinks that people in the industry make too big of a deal of that having said that i understand the feeling that you have as well you don't want to you you it's almost like the competition is more internal it's like other totally it's going to be other producers and other people who are contemplating interviewing this author or that author or that chef or whatever who might notice hey i got it there first but for as far as like creating something that the audience cares about i just think that's so low on most people's radar

i totally agree with you that's always been that was always my argument when when i was and we were working in more like you know talk radio or things like that or even just public radio daily public radio shows that were based on the news it's like i just don't think that i don't think the average person notices that stuff nearly as much i mean really um hey by the way would you would you care to have lunch in tedious town because um i know a great place it's called what i'm about to talk about okay great uh no but and i brought this up on the show before but like and i think this is somewhat broadly applicable it's in your world and mine it was public radio editorial meetings right which is like where a specific show the whole staff will get together and pitch stories for like the next day's show or whatever but this happens in every sort of business when you get a bunch of people together there are always the people who i think are like somewhere in the back of their mind worried that they're not contributing enough and the easiest thing to contribute is a reason to not do something or to bring up a you know to curse the darkness as opposed to lighting a a torch and like it just i would sit in so many of those meetings those editorial meetings where somebody would bring something up and so you know and then the person who had really not a lot to contribute would be like i heard that on um i heard that on morning edition i heard that on to the point uh two weeks ago like and they felt like they were contributing because they had said something but it was really just like that ends up killing so much stuff and again it ends up killing a lot of good ideas because of people's need to contribute even if

all they're doing is poo-pooing something yeah and hopefully like i mean ideally that person the room would be the only one who cares about it so the culture would just be like stop bringing that up because that doesn't that doesn't right affect or inform our editorial decisions but usually it is it is an ego thing i think with journalists or hosts or producers or what have you i thought you were going to say this is a little bit different but you know i haven't i have not been edited a lot in my lifetime because i don't write feature stories or news reports you know i mean my my production has always been like booking guests for talk shows and you know forming talk shows and forming segments but like it's very rare that like i have a piece of copy that i need to sit down with somebody and they're going to go line by line and edit me on the occasions that i have written something whether it's the tbtl newsletter which is just kind of laughable to put in the same sentence as this stuff but like something along the lines of that if i feel like oh i want a second set of eyes on this or for some reason on rare occasions i'm assigned an editor my frustration would be sort of that like once somebody has said i will be your editor on that they feel that they must edit something otherwise i mean of course yeah you this is your world i guess no no but like yeah like so right it's like just because i asked you to put a second set of eyes on this because i maybe i was a little bit you know feeling like it needs a second set of eyes or whatever it doesn't mean that you're not doing your job if you say actually no that that's fine you know like i just have worked with people in some rare occasions where it's like i don't think you really feel like that's important you just feel like if your job is quote editor then you

have to edit something right that if you just say looks good to me that's like a dereliction of duty or something so like you're gonna have to find one thing to kind of quibble with i have to say that like i i don't know if my emotional health is improving or declining but one thing that i have oddly come around on is getting edited on these tv stories there was a period of time where i was really like if maybe it was just because i was feeling more precious about them because i had not done as many like it was newer at it i was thinking well a lot of people see this this is a reflection of me you know like i think i just had a lot more i was overthinking it or whatever and if if there was something i thought was good that either didn't fit for time or was you know removed or whatever i just Thank you. Every it felt so personal to me where I was like constantly like about to like blow the, you know, the producers, you know, email up with some kind of like it's me or this line, you know, some dramatic shit. And now it's just I really do not it's not that I don't care. And I'll make an argument logically for like, hey, here's why I think this might be a better way to say this or whatever. But it's weird how maybe maybe that's also just that I'm giving up on life. That's why I'm saying I don't know if this is me getting healthier or less healthy. But it's like, I just don't care that much anyway. I don't take it that personally.

Well, that's probably healthy. It's probably in the middle somewhere, you know? I mean, I know you well enough to know that if something really struck you as, you know, I mean, inappropriate is the wrong word, but just like that. If you felt strongly about something, you'd stand up for it. I have no doubt about that. I would.

I just doesn't. I guess what I mean is I used to sometimes, I would get the edit. So I'll write a script, right? And then I'll kick it over to, like, for instance, the story that we're doing about the 109 year old guy i wrote the script on friday when i was flying home from chicago sent it to the producer the producer really liked it but had some changes like oh we didn't include this and i think that we could do we could lose this part and replace it with this thing which i think is maybe more of a priority and i was just like oh yeah that totally makes sense like it didn't it used to be that if there was any red strikethrough on the script it felt like deeply personal to me like i was being personally told i have no value or something like it really was kind of it was really agitating to me and now i just i don't have that initial reaction and again it's probably just from doing it longer and realizing that it doesn't matter that much and things like that and also that other people have good ideas that's the other thing that i think i've learned because you know like i'll lose some arguments or i'll i'll you know acquiesce on something and then that'll be the thing that the main editors will be like we loved that part so that the part that i was saying no no we shouldn't do that so uh anyway Alright How is it 37 minutes into the show Andrew And I've said nothing useful

I don't know I feel the same way I feel like I don't know I feel energized I'm not having like a case of the Mondays Where I feel like I just I feel like I'm sitting here talking to you But my brain is sort of ping ponging all over the place And I don't know if I've made one coherent point

Okay I am going to Andrew I'm going to make you feel really good when we come back from the break Because one of our top stories I think confirms a suspicion that you and I had months ago when we first discussed this particular topic. And it's cited in this San Francisco Chronicle article as a specific issue. And you and I, I think we nailed this months and months ago.

I could really use a win here.

It's going to be an Andrew W. Monday coming up on TBTL.

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

All right, let's thank some Dazzling Donors. These are the wonderful, generous folks who are keeping TBTL in business. I had a call this morning, Andrew, with some media folk that were inquiring about some media projects, because that's definitely what I need. I definitely need to try to take on more job stuff. But anyway, spoiler alert, I'm not taking on more job stuff. But one of the people on the call is somebody who's kind of been around the media scene for a while. And I was so, I have to say, so proud to be able to mention. They were like, are you still doing that podcast, TBTL? And I was like, yeah, we're doing our 4,000th episode pretty soon. I had that feeling of less shame about this thing existing for all these years. And it's thanks to people like Julie Lim In Phoenix, Arizona I'm sorry

Phoenix what?

You know why I went straight with that? Because I just Arizona'd it the other day And I felt like I gotta keep The listeners on their toes If I do it every time Then I feel like it's not gonna be Like right now when I do that When I say Arizona It's delightful People have to pull their cars over like it's a situation but if I do it every time I just feel like it's not going to be you don't want people to pull their cars I want no so Julie is in Phoenix and is dazzling us with her donation of dough and says all right so many things I love about the show I think my favorite thing is when the guys make each other laugh or talk over a tough situation it's always so genuine and reminds me that there's nothing better than a good friend ah Julie what a nice way to describe this thank you I also love it when they get things wrong well okay i'm listening uh feature not a bug is that what i'm

hearing yeah i think i think julie's referring to stuff you you do i'm assuming sure actually it is she says i love it when luke gets things okay And when Andrew gets things wrong, it makes me want to stop my donation. That's what I'm reading. I'm assuming if Andrew ever gets anything wrong, I will find it delightful as well. It makes me laugh and want to throw my phone at the same time. And that's really a unique experience. Here's to many more years of listening, learning, and laughing with y'all and the Stens. So it sounds like Julie is hanging out over there on the Stens Facebook page, too. Well, Julie, thank you very much for supporting the program. We really do appreciate you, and thanks for all that you've been doing. Maestro?

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

Everybody battle stand. Look who it is. It's our good friend Brent Henry Martin down there in Los Angeles, California. I just was pre-reading Brent's first line, and it made me laugh because I I did This is definitely Well let me just read the line Ahoy hoy friendos TBTL is the only podcast Where my Instagram being hacked Became a minor plot point With follow ups True story What was the resolution Of that whole thing I was laughing because I think that was a particular point Of interest for you Andrew It was Because then there was Wasn't it like Ramon as well So there was like People in your orbit Were getting hacked By the same weird crypto thing

or something yes so i follow brent on uh instagram brent's a just a fantastic photographer i think he will get into that in this message and i will let him promote his own handle because he had two for a while and i keep on promoting the wrong one but the reason he had two instagram handles for a little period of time was because he got hacked and like his whole account became like reaching out to me and all of his other followers asking to invest in bitcoin or it was clearly not him But the thing is, then your friend Ramon, who I also follow on Instagram as a way of trying to get closer to you, is he got hacked, too. But I'm telling you, it wasn't just the same type of scheme. It was the exact same one. It was like pointing towards the same, like, you know, BS links or whatever, the same exact language. And I'm just like, I still don't know. And I guess this is Brent's business and Ramon's business. I still don't know exactly what leads to your account getting hacked. I saw like Ian Furness, a local radio host here. I saw him on. Do you know him? I don't even listen to that.

I don't know him. I just he's just a, you know, he's a sort of ubiquitous KJR and Seahawk TV broadcast guy.

Yeah. Yes. I can't. I couldn't pick him out of a lineup. But our friend Jessamine works for him now. So anyway, I saw her tweet like his Twitter account got hacked this weekend. And it's just like all this. like again i think it's bitcoin or something it's just like i just don't understand i don't know geez well maybe i should take more security trainings like i don't know what do you have to do something in order to find yourself compromised or can you just wake up one morning and find that the hackers have you that's the part that i don't understand either i'm certainly not

overly careful with like what i mean i probably should be with like if i'm on a public wi-fi network or things like that i also when it comes to instagram and this is this is the part we're not talking about i also just never i just don't click on that much stuff and i also if anyone tries to friend me and they have like less than 50 followers i just delete like or if they have no posts or they have less than like 10 posts i'm like pretty judicious i think anyway with who i accept as a follower or who i follow like because i'm that's the again i don't know if that's the mechanics of it but i you know you start to get a lot of these like some sort of you know like very attractive woman uh who wants to follow you on instagram uh she looks like she might be a cartoon and she is can i ask you a question it's like no you can't because you're a bot right now

so i don't know if that's how they or you know how you stop that you just say you just did and they're like i can't deal with these dad jokes right now like i just it's like it's like uh

It's like shooting a vampire with a silver bullet. It actually kills the bot.

It kills the bot and the vibe. I don't know.

Can you? Because you just did. If you mansplained to the bot, it defeats it. Anyway, continuing with Brent's message. Thank you to all the tens that checked in. I am a commercial photographer specializing in capturing design spaces and those that design them. But I also need to cover this dazzling expense every month. So I also photograph other things Headquartered in Hollywood, California But I travel for my clients all the time I've recently had the opportunity to find representation For the art side of my work Nice, Brian, congrats Thank you both for setting the record straight At the time you did as well as you could With the information you had available But for various reasons related to All the usual things associated with social media I will be using my first And preferred Instagram account

at bhenrymartin that's the letter b henry martin going forward so this is an official statement from the funeral directors of america no this is an official statement from our friend brent martin about what his instagram handle is so if you want to follow him uh for fun or for business or just to talk about crypto it's at b henry martin he's back to b henry martin brent specifically

says in the that he wants to learn more about the the crypto market so please email him any

links you can find no do not i mean the beauty part is good people he'll have to keep dazzling donating so that next year we can read another correction about what's going on with his

instagram well i don't know how much i don't know how much to take that literally but brent sort of the way he says it here is in order to pay for this dazzling donation every month i'm taking on side work i don't know if that's somewhat kidding on the square but if you think about it that way i mean people are donating a like you say a dazzling amount of dough to do this and what is money but more work for people too and that kind of puts in perspective for me so thank you brent and julie and everybody he says you can contact me be aware of anything interesting

going on in my world and you can see the portrait work i did for listener slash friend gregory and his wife that's all happening over on instagram at b henry martin that's where brent's at these days brent thanks man we really do appreciate you thanks to julie as well we could not do this thing without y'all hello and welcome to top story uh we talked about this galactic star cruiser disney hotel that they had opened to much fanfare it was it was described as being five thousand dollar a stay because you basically had to book a minimum of two nights there and that would come out to roughly five thousand dollars and it was billed as this real immersive experience um where you could cosplay and you could participate in all these um you know there's like a bunch of actors a bunch of disney actors that were hired to play different people from like the star wars universe and um you and i i think talked about the fact that the participatory aspect of it would be a little off-putting just for for us like for somebody who performs I guess essentially for a living if we can call this a performance it would be better if I treated this more as more of a performance and less of a just talking to my friend Andrew but as somebody who allegedly performs for their job I don't I don't personally have a lot of interest in performing on like a in a hotel environment that I'm paying five thousand dollars to be there I would like to recede way into the background ideally the background would be right next to the bar for me that would be like how i'd like to enjoy the galactic star cruiser and um it turns out they're shutting it down it's um it's going out of business i think they're just finishing out the year they've had to call a bunch of folks who had reservations and offer them uh a different like an earlier reservation um because they are let's see i'm trying to find the exact uh i guess Where in this article that I printed out Say the exact cancellation date Anyway it's pretty soon They're going to be shutting this down Now one of the things I didn't realize There was only a hundred rooms in this thing So like no wonder they had to charge people An arm and a leg Because like a hundred rooms That compares to 30,000 total rooms Across the Disney World Resort 100 rooms in this one 30,000 rooms throughout the resort So like of course this was going to be a premium experience you know people complained that the rooms didn't have any windows they had video screens that showed space but for all intents and purposes you're still in a bunker like i don't know if i could if my mind could fully trick me into thinking i was looking at a window i'm very not into being in a windowless environment personally but this is the part that you and i as i've already mentioned had identified as something that would be probably not great for us and it turns out this might have been the whole issue

In this San Francisco Chronicle article that Katie Dowd wrote, she writes, although dressing up was not required, it did invite fans to interact with the crew's actors for two full days, putting it out of the comfort zone of more introverted guests, guests who didn't want to commit to the interactive elements or who preferred to be cozy in their hotel rooms by 8 p.m. could miss crucial parts of the storyline so in in sort of leaning into the participatory this is an escape room meets a cosplay meets a whatever it meant that for the people that like to enjoy their vacation time by just maybe lounging in the in their room and chillaxing and whatevering they would be getting less of the experience because they're not there for when, you know, Jabba says something that's critical to the plot. And yeah, this article does a really good job, I think, of kind of pinpointing why this wasn't a success. And I don't have the article in front of me right now, but like there's a line in there that specifically says, like, you're really putting the success of this on the backs of a pretty niche audience, which is those who are wealthy enough to go and who are into Star Wars enough to go. And then it also mentions the sort of interaction part of it. And so you add on another layer there of like the people who need to make this work are people who are outgoing enough to want this sort of interactive experience. Now, here's the one thing.

It's a Venn diagram with three overlap points.

Exactly. And like I could see and I'm going to talk about kind of like nerd culture here as a bit of an outsider. And so I hope it doesn't come off as, you know, insensitive in any way, because I love nerds. I'm actually somewhat envious of the people who get really into like subcultures like that. Sometimes I'll be flipping through social media and I'll see references to whether it's a, you know, is it manga or whatever? Like, clearly, I'm not clearly clearly I'm not into that world. But, you know, I mean, people have a whole language and communication. I always feel like a bit of an outsider. I feel a sense of some sort of jealousy. So I mean this with love, but you could also see a world where the people who fit into that kind of, let's say, nerd descriptor are also maybe people who are a little bit more private or a little bit more insecure in some ways like myself or a bit more even reclusive is the wrong word. Introverted is the word I'm looking for. And again, a lot of that stuff I can associate with as well. The only thing that I think maybe challenges that a tiny bit is, and I find this to be very beautiful, when I was at the Emerald City Comic Con years ago, Luke, I think I was using the same press pass that you and I got when we did a TBTL from there, and we talked to Will Wheaton, and I think Sean was on the little TBTL stage with us. And, boy, that's going back a long time because I think I was brand new on TBTL. But I also used part of my time that weekend to go around and do a sort of like a Vox Pop, right? Just like wandering around with my microphone interviewing people in various – I don't know if I only talk to people in cosplay, but I talk to just a bunch of people who are enjoying the con and put together a little montage of people talking about why they enjoy it. That's some of my favorite stuff to do, the little montages. anyway I just remember hearing from a couple of people uh who said into the microphone like this is the only time that I can sort of be this version of me when I'm not dressed up and I'm not at a con I'm a very shy person and I don't I don't you know interact with a lot of people or whatever that's just my proclivities but when I'm here and I don this like whatever they happen to be wearing I feel kind of like a different person and I'm more outgoing and I'm more extroverted And these are my people. And that I mean, I freaking loved that. It etched itself on my brain. And so I wonder if that sort of challenges this notion a little bit about people who are in the sub genre are also tend to be shy. But that's just me. That's not something you said or this article said. It's just something that like I was sort of musing on today.

My guess is like there's a range, obviously, you know, of how outgoing people might feel. And definitely that thing you said, and I've heard that from your piece and in other places, that there are a lot of folks that when they don their sort of cosplay stuff, it really helps. It's almost it's like a sort of an armor. I mean, sometimes it's literally an armor if they're being like Thor. but you know kind of like it's a it's something that that that allows them to actually feel slightly liberated in the world and they can express themselves in a way that might feel a little less comfortable without the yeah without the outfit um uh yeah i guess i just i wonder if anyone is getting fired over this i'm not advocating for that i'm just saying like this was an ambitious try that now that we're looking at it's like like we're talking about the venn diagram is like you have to be you have to have you have to have five thousand dollars you have to be really into star wars and you have to be outgoing in the way that you're going to get your most fun out of this and that really seems to narrow it down to well as would be uh clear here a pretty small group of people it just it's strange to me because you know disney is such a huge well-funded company presumably so much hello hi luke that was my microphone falling as i look

for a hard drive to see if i can find my montage from comic-con in 2012 just go on with the show

anyway i thought i was gonna get through it when i just hit it hard with my arm i didn't realize it was then gonna fall out of its holder and hit the ground yeah just like uh disney does

presumably so much research on stuff like this like before you pull the trigger on a whatever or however many millions of dollars this project was, my guess.

would be a company like disney is going to like focus group it you know down to the penny and figure out like what's the who's the audience for this and who are the customers for this and and you know how are we this is serving some group people that aren't getting served in a certain way you just think they run so much research on this stuff it's weird when there's just a giant flop just like a complete swing and a miss which just kind of appears to have been yeah and this

doesn't um this isn't a reaction to what you were just saying but the other thing that i think this article tapped into for me was and you you brought this up the other times we talked about it but the real claustrophobic nature of this adventure like yes no windows and all of that but honestly like i've never been to disneyland i think i went to disney world when i was like two or something like that um but it just sort of seems like if you're with you know assuming that maybe you you're a family with kids or whatever like a big part of it is like well bouncing from this thing and to that thing and maybe having too much cotton candy and then getting your ya-ya's out on the spin-o wheel and then, you know, taking a break here and, like, being in the out-of-doors and having a lot of energy and running around in a sunny location. And when you compare that to this, where it's kind of like, no, in order to get our five grand worth, we have to show up on the main deck so that Corporate Commander... I don't know. I can't riff on Star Wars names. My apologies. is going to blast us off into space unless we stand up to whatever like you know what i mean like it just sort of seems so prescribed that it probably misses the mark of what people are

looking for in a vacation like that yeah so if you would like to go to this i think now is a time i mean honestly like maybe this the other thing is there could be there are some people i'm sure there are at least some number of people who had like the most fun weekend of their life at this place so if you're someone who thinks this looks interesting i believe prices are dropping um so Get in while the getting's good

Yeah I know you're trying to wrap up I was going to say That was my one last question on this thing Is like I was like Well can't they Couldn't they slash prices But I guess it just Because it seems like a lot of the cost Would have been the startup cost Of creating the sets Right Like and that money's already gone So like couldn't you just slash price That's a sunk cost I feel like Yeah But maybe it's just like There's still just so much overhead In keeping it fully staffed Or whatever That if you start cutting back on that Maybe you lose the experience But I was kind of surprised that before they closed it, we didn't just see, like, drastically reduced prices.

They were, I think, dropping the prices a bit. But I think the other thing you said is true, which is the operating cost of just the actors and everything that goes into it. And also, again, 100 rooms. That's very boutique. Yeah. Like, I think that, again, having no business training and having never been to this, I'd like to speak with authority by saying it seems like there was not a lot of – It seems like if you open something that's got 10,000 rooms in it, there's maybe more margin to play with. It's more costly, but it's also like there are more revenue streams. There are more ways you can kind of like discount some rooms, but maybe make other rooms nicer. Like when you have 100 rooms, it's a very boutique experience, and it's going to kind of like live or die by like does it work? Does the concept work? So my guess would be they just didn't have enough real wiggle room without just operating in the red. So I wonder what they're also going to do with the building.

Well, that's the thing that, like, can't you just still keep it as a hotel? Like, can you get rid of a lot of the overhead by getting rid of all the games and the interaction? Like, you can still have, you know, a few characters around the way you would have a few characters around the park. But, like, couldn't this still be kind of a fun place to stay for 100 people who then want to come and go and go to the park and don't have to, like, worry about being glued to some interactive story? Like, that would actually appeal to me. I know it's a windowless type of deal that wouldn't appeal to you, but, like, I would definitely spend a night in a room that had a fake window that looked out into a fake Cosmos.

See, I just don't know. Also, this is probably bad reporting on my part or bad research. I don't know where it actually is within the sprawling world that is Disneyland. Right, right. So it's like I don't know if it's, like, right near, you know, a lot of other attractions or if because it was immersive, it was out. it's out somewhere far away and not very you know accessible to all the other stuff but i don't know the answer to that i do know the answer to this case now you sent me this article andrew about the uh like estate of andy warhol and this photographer who had taken um some photos of prince uh the photographer is named lynn goldsmith and um and the uh photographs of prince were for

i think they were for a magazine they were i want to say vanity fair i don't have this in front of right now but a vanity fair-esque magazine i believe and then um later on andy warhol

took the pictures and kind of changed the color

and did that sort of Andy Warhol thing where he takes an image and he tweaks it. And so this photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, years later was basically, I think, suing the Andy Warhol Foundation for using her work without paying her. And the United States Supreme Court actually ruled on this. The majority decision released by Sotomayor, boy, isn't it nice to have one of the not crazy justices actually issue an opinion maybe i just don't read about that it just seems like every time there's like a bad take from the supreme court it's like um justice kavanaugh writing for the majority it's like you forget that you've got sotomayor and elena kegan and who else is on there but

doesn't it doesn't this one make strange bedfellows because i thought it was sotomayor and like roberts were on the same side and then kegan and another and then the conservative were

on another side i didn't even look at the breakdown i just like seeing sotomayor's name Sure. Yeah. Anywhere related to the Supreme Court for me. But but I know you read this piece, Andrew. But what what they point out, the one that I'm looking at is from the New York Times, Blake Gopnik writing that the court actually. So they sided with the photographer, but it wasn't really a decision related to the content or the work or the whatever you want to call it that Andy Warhol did. It was about the fact that the Andy Warhol Foundation had not paid the photographer the proper licensing at the time. It was like a licensing question more so than a, did you put enough purple on this Prince photograph to make a new piece of art?

Well, OK, I'm going to get into the weeds a little bit more here. And I read this like four or five days ago. And as we know, my brain is, quote unquote, bad. So I hope I don't mess up these details, but I think they're important. So it was Vanity Fair. I've confirmed that they hired a photographer and paid her a flat fee. I want to say four grand. And this is back, I guess, in the 80s. Right. And said, take, you know, take a photo, take this headshot of Prince. And she did. And I think part of the plan all along for that issue of the magazine was to take this photo that the magazine paid for and then give it to Warhol to Warhol it up. Right. And then Warhol made a bunch of different versions. He made, I think, like seven or eight versions, and then the magazine picked the one they wanted, which I believe was kind of a white and purple, you know, again, it's that classic Warholization of a painting kind of flattened out and added some stark color to it. But then the museum or who I don't know if it was the Warhol Museum in Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh or another whoever had that ends up having the entire collection, even the rejected ones, the ones the magazine did not use. And now they have them, you know, they own them, but I think they were loaning them out to some other people who were making money on it. And the photographer is like, no, I was paid four thousand dollars for the one that the magazine used. But now people are essentially profiting off of all these other versions as well, which was not part of the original deal. Does that sound right to you? I think that's what I read last week.

I think so. I mean, the line that jumped out at me from the New York Times piece was let's see here if I can jump back to I do have the article in front of me, but that's not helping me necessarily. a single let's see here however a close reading of the court's 39 page decision written by Justice Sotomayor Warhol's loss might not lead to the end of appropriation arts six decade run I guess that's what we're calling what Warhol does appropriation art the decision seemed to have been narrower than that it turned out that what the majority actually had problems with what the decision was mostly about was the Warhol Foundation's failure to pay Goldsmith a licensing fee in 2016 it looked like the court had sidestepped the larger issue of whether warhol should have used her image at all um a single sentence in the decision might bring still deeper relief the court expresses no opinion as to the creation display or sale of any of the original prince series works the justice has said referring to the series of silk screen paintings and prints that warhol had made from goldsmith's photos according to thursday's decision all those original warhols on canvas and paper had just as much right to go on existing and circulating being shown and seen and bought and sold as they had before so you know i

can i can um correct one thing i said four grand no they paid the the photographer four hundred dollars but they paid her to take this photo quote as an art artist reference so there was never you know it's almost like if i if somebody hired me to take a photo of you luke so that they could then take my photo and do a sketch of you you know um and so that's what her job was she said i was paid four hundred dollars not 4k very big difference there four hundred dollars to take this photo of prince and then hand it off to the magazine who hands it off to warhol and that's probably where most of the money went but because warhol again created a bunch and only the magazine only uses one and now

Thank you.

people are somehow kind of using these other versions i think it's a it's i don't know man i we were talking about music appropriation the other day and like the lawsuits involving you know a new musician selling a bunch of records but then the estate of you know some older musician or music act saying hey that sounds a lot like our song right what was the latest version of that

ed sheeran being sued by the estate of one of the guys that wrote let's get it on and i and i always

tend to with music say well uh you know like there's so many chords there's so many notes this is going to happen like let's let's let creativity reign and then i was reading this and i sort of had a different reaction and maybe that's because i have no idea how to make music but i do like taking photos and i sort of think like if i if i had a photo that i really like let's just say i took a photo of you on a bridge luke and it blew up because because um when are we doing our engagement photos no it's just i want us on a bridge holding hands no i took a photo of you you're on a bridge it's a really great photo and i love it but then somebody takes it and they do their own kind of down market andy warholification of it or something they take it off my instagram this is a very different different scenario right but then they kind of like add a bunch of color to it and whatever splash it up or whatever and then that just becomes super popular and super profitable for the person who does that and I don't have any control over my photo that would that would be a real problem for me now that's not exactly what happened here somebody was hired to take a photo for an agreed amount of money that was going to be used as an artist print so that they could do something else with it so I realize it's not the same exact thing but I was thinking like I don't know is this really the death of creativity as the people on the court who were against this decision were saying actually no yeah yeah i i don't think that i don't think that it's the death of creativity i do think we need some lines about like what is the original piece of art and what is is appropriating it well right because it's like

if you take the mona lisa and you just like you put a biggie crown on her and cock it to the side then like spray paint something in the background then you release it is that new art like to me that the analogy that you that you just put out there where somebody takes a photo that you took and then they just like super saturated and do some other stuff that to me feels a lot like if you would just sample a large section of a song not you play four chords that have been that like to me the the comparison of having a chord progression in one song that sounds like a different song is like a artist suing because someone's painting with the same color it's like yeah we only got so many colors uh whereas if somebody takes an original work and again the the specifics of this case are a little different because of like you said the licensing the magazine all of that stuff but just brought more broadly speaking it's like if somebody were to take a photo of yours and do all that stuff uh to it but it's based on this original thing that feels to me more like you've just pulled a long sample of music from a pre-existing song and then you're just doing your own new song kind of over it and around it but the spine of the thing the important part of it is someone else's work that to me seems like an infringement yeah that's where

you get into and listen there's been some great you know there's been songs that we love based on that exact type of that exact type of artistic process right but you're paying you're paying whoever wrote the original hard knock life so that you know that i didn't rap over top of it

i didn't know this till i heard a piece on npr the other day but beyonce's i think her most recent album she did a lot of some of it was sampling and some of it was just writing music in the style of different i think largely a female artist that she really admired and she just according to the report i was listening to just credited as songwriters the people who had done the original songs and they she didn't ask them she didn't go like hey is it okay if i use your song but she just credited them i.e. cut them in on the profits of the songs which is like i mean finally some good press for beyonce like that's an incredibly cool move in my opinion like she she just was like hey you helped me make this song by the fact that you did the song and i think it's been a pretty big boon for a lot of the original performers you know who may or may not be putting out hit music these days to be now co-credited as a songwriter on a beyonce song i see you know i

was a little confused there so these are not covers these are her own written works but heavily inspired by previous works and previous artists precisely and instead of like waiting to have

someone sue her she's like no you co-wrote this song with me again it was based on what i heard the reporting was which again is just like a very i guess that's you can do that when you also recently bought a 200 million dollar house in malibu in cash no which her and jay-z did the other day that's a decent pickup did they have it in

a briefcase and wasn't handcuffed to their wrist like but um but no i mean that seems like a very cool move um uh to just like to kind of get in front of the question of who deserves some of the credit for this and again the people that it was going to from beyonce's end also seems like a

especially cool thing 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.

Emails or V-mails? Yeah. Let me play a voicemail that I got here. This is, well, this is nerdy. And I don't know if anybody's going to find this interesting aside from me. But I really did find this voicemail from Anna interesting. Because Anna is writing in about an observation I made about the word refrigerator slash fridge the other day. Slash frigiator. I can't play it because I'm playing our email music But just know that I'm thinking it We're all thinking it But I was trying to think of any other words That when we shorten them We have to add a letter to it Because refrigerator does not have a D in it But when we write out the word fridge We have to add the D And I was wondering if anybody can think of any other words That we add letters to when we shorten them Well Anna doesn't offer any other words here but does offer an explanation of why we need to do that for Fridge. And it involves, Luke, phonics.

Hey, Luke and Andrew. This is Anna. I'm a kindergarten teacher and a listener, and I was listening to your thing about Fridge having a D, and I just wanted to let you know that it's, like, added because it's governed by a very specific phonics rule, which is that if you have an I that you want to say it, and then a consonant, and then an E, we call it a magic E. If you don't put another consonant in there next to the G, it will make the I say I. So if you didn't have the D, it would say fryge. And you don't have to have the D in refrigerator because you have an er after it. That E-R ending nullifies the need for the extra consonant. So that is why we follow that rule. Power out.

Does that make sense to you, Luke? No, not at all. It makes sense to me when I was listening to it earlier today. I think it makes total sense. But, like, basically, if we just called it a fridger, if we shorten it to fridger, you wouldn't need that D. But because you knock the R off the end, then you need the D in there. Otherwise, it would be a friedge.

I want to point out that me not following that is not a reflection on Anna's description. I believe that 99.9% of our listeners followed it exactly. I have a very small and dysfunctional brain that just has – I have difficulties with directions and spatial locating and also wrapping my mind around concepts like that we're just described. I'm being totally serious here. But the fact that I didn't follow it, I don't think that that means a lot of the listeners didn't get some useful info out of that.

Well, when you bought Hooked on Phonics, you accidentally bought Hooked on Phoenix. So now you know a lot about Arizona and Arizona. I know a lot about the Phoenix Suns. And the sons, right, but you know very little about phonics. I just feel like Hooked on Phonics was like a pun. I don't know. I guess there were a lot of commercials. When God was handing out phonics, I thought he said tonics and said, put some gin in mine. Oh, when God was handing out phonics, you thought he said sonics and they moved him to KC.

When God was handing out brains, you thought he said trains.

And you missed yours.

And I missed mine.

When God was handing out noses, you thought he said roses and you're after a big red one. Yep, yep, definitely. I know some ones that are probably not family friendly. Let Danny O'Neill write about that in his newsletter, his filthy, hateful newsletter.

That's all I got for you today. Well, Anna, thanks for the clarification. That's good to know.

But I do want to put the call out, though.

Yeah, the question remains, though, are there other examples of this?

Of words that we need to add letters to in order to shorten them.

Yeah, good question. Good question. And I bet you our listeners are just the people to answer it. So please do get at us if you know the answer to that. Okay. That is going to do it for today's program. Tomorrow I'll be checking in, I think, Lord willing, and the Creeks Don't Rise from Ramona, California. Andrew, tomorrow I will read you the all-caps instructions from the Airbnb.

Oh, God.

Buckle up, folks. Can I skip tomorrow's show? it's just gonna make us all angry again do not use gps after you turn on laurel lane all caps do not go through any wait wait wait do not use gps i i get the feeling that these folks this is in a rural part of california i get the feeling that this air be

they've had issues with their people renting the airbnb who've driven onto other people's property along this kind of shared dirt road and in order to not get like you know sort of busted by like the city or the county or whatever they're really trying to stay on good terms with their neighbors i see so you if if you come to a closed gate you are in the wrong place i see okay okay that okay You got me. I'm trying to, but it's very funny because, you know, instruction number one is how to get on this particular road off of the freeway. And then instruction number two just starts with all caps. Stop using GPS here. I think the GPS must take people to their neighbor's house. Yeah. So they're trying to. I just hope you show up and it turns out that you're actually going to the Disney Star Wars adventure. What is that? That would be the greatest outcome of all time. If you get to a lightsaber, you're in the wrong place. These are not the droids you're looking for. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. Until then, please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

My character is Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. He's a classic rock dude. You know, green flip flops, blue sweatpants, tank top shirt. and a balding head, no matter how much cream is applied to the affected area.

I'm a Resident Evil Apocalypse stars officer. Guys who are standing in the alleyways in the streets trying to fight off as many zombies as they could before getting overtaken. I'm Barf. I'm half man, half dog. I'm a mog.

I'm a steampunk superman as a woman. Steampunk power girl.

Steampunk Flash.

Steampunk Green Lantern. Steampunk Wonder Woman. I'm a classic Catwoman. I'm oldie old school. I'm mostly purple and strokeable, except for the parts of me that are black, shiny, and painful looking. I got a lot of free pettings today.

Katniss Everdeen. My name's Tiffany, and I'm dressed up as Katniss from the new movie, The Hunger Games. I like the strong female roles, the go-getter, tick-butt kind of female roles. and Katniss can shoot a squirrel, like, in the eye from forever where she's, yeah, she's ticked by.

This is the first time I've dressed up for Comic-Con, and actually, kind of a funny story is I have social anxiety, so I'm really nervous and really, I get kind of spacey when I'm in crowds, so this is one of the ways I'm trying to get over that.

I love the fact that I can be a 30-year-old woman who wears a costume and people think it'd be, like, awesome instead of going, oh my god, you're such a nerd. Because, you know what, if this is what I'm into, so what?

Everyone crawls all the woodwork for this. It doesn't matter what kind of basement dweller you are. No one's a basement dweller here.

It's everybody's genuinely is having a good time. There's really no cattiness, no drama. Everybody's just admiring each other, taking photographs of total strangers.

Everywhere else, like, you get tortured in high school as a nerd or a geek or whatever.

Yeah, here, everybody's like, yeah, right on, man. Get a bunch of nerds together, and it's just beautiful. It's a shared experience. You're very into something that not a lot of the world is into. And if you could share that with a bunch of people, that's freaking awesome. Power out.