Muse

I know this is weird, but could I ask you some advice? Yeah. If somebody, like, this is your turf, right? And if somebody stole your turf, how would you get it back?

I mean, I don't really know. To be honest with you, I don't really have, like, a turf. You know, I just kind of walk around with the look on my face that says I have weed. Weed face. Yeah. I mean, if someone's up in your shit.

Yeah, you know, I don't know what to do. I mean, what would you do if you went to the bathroom and came back and there was another guy here? I'd just handle my business. Okay, but like how specifically would you handle your business? I'd get mine. Set it off. Be a man. Man up. You know, represent, man. Like represent an attitude? You got to flip the switch, man. You got to light it up. Sorry, a lot of these sound like lyrics from the album Willennium. T-B-T-L.

A lot of the times what we like to tell people is that you have to let life bounce off of you. Yep. Right? And so we are going to do just that literally, in a literal sense.

Dear TVTX, you're so amazing. And I know you're going to do better. Love so.

All right. What's going on? That just tweaked a little something real bad. I like to rotate until the pain spreads and it's more of a numb, numb everywhere kind of thing. You know, it's nice to see how sort of loopy and weird your arms are. I've got real noodle arms these days.

Oh my god, oh my god, change the channel. I can't even look, I can't handle the pressure! Can I just say I feel like I'm on MTV right now?

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

Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo?

My name is Luke Burbank, I am your host. I can't believe you're still on the air. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where it's kind of a bit cloudy. It rained a lot yesterday, but it's supposed to stay dry. We're giving it a solid medium here on this Tuesday. We're getting medium play on three independent radio stations in Central Europe. We have made it together, my friends, to episode 3970. Let the fun begin. In a collector's series. Now, you know I'm not one who really cares much for stories about the royal family over there in England. The Sterlington Collection is making available a limited edition replica of this timeless heirloom. Unless they're doing exactly what I predicted they would do. And in those cases, I love to talk about them, including the exact thing I thought was going to happen happening with the podcast. We are living in the midst of a podcast boom. The podcast network that Harry and Meghan were supposed to launch with Spotify, which they got $20 million for, which produced a total of 12 episodes of any kind of podcasting. And those 12 episodes probably involved other people doing the interviews and not Meghan, Duchess of Lies.

Well, we know you're good at lying.

Whatever her name is officially. So we will talk about that and gloat a little bit. And then I will do the opposite of gloating. I will apologize for being very petty the other day about this drag benefit that I'm going to be in. I don't know. I was just in a mood of being sort of being, again, just kind of being sort of bitchy about the whole thing. I wish I hadn't done that. Try to set the record straight coming up. Oh, and we're going to talk to this guy, longest running Cobra of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. If I'm having trouble generating good content, I think he is somebody I can lean on today. Oh, my God. I can see the germ clouds. Okay. That was not the drop I was intending to play, but he's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

It's fun when you can surprise and entertain yourself.

It's rare that as the person who picks the audio drops, I also can sometimes not know what's in the audio drops. I think this is the one I was trying to play. I think I might have just stumbled on good content.

Oh, yeah. That was from yesterday's show. Yes.

You asked our friend, our good friend, Lynn, grab those for me, but actually grabbed me three audio drops. Oh, I see. And I put them in, and then I was playing the wrong one. There's also this one. Dear Penthouse Forum. Yeah, I wondered if that was going to make the cut as well. I did not ask for that one.

The only one I asked for was this. I think I might have just stumbled on good content. But I also got... Oh, my God. I can see the germ cloud. And, of course... Dear Penthouse Forum. So, anyway. The Penthouse Forum was related to the content one. I remember that they were right next to each other because I said, this has never happened to me before. I stumbled on good content. Got it. And that sounds like.

Like the beginning of a penthouse. That was always the joke in the 90s. Yes. And the other germ cloud. I don't remember that. Was that about a. Oh, I never gave you an update on my toilet situation. No, but I got I can see the germ cloud. Speaking of germ clouds. What is the dealio? Can I tell you a little story? I had something else I want to tell you about today. Maybe I can work that in later. But I got a doohickey, Luke. I got a doohickey that I'm really excited about.

I bought a doohickey on Amazon last night and it was delivered this morning. that I want to talk to you about. Wait, hold on.

Let's forget Turlet Talk for a second. No, no, no. I'll tell you about that. I want to know. Let's trade doohickey stories. I want to tell you about my doohickey. What if we both got the same doohickey? At this point, that wouldn't even surprise me. What is your doohickey? A DVD player. Oh, yes. I saw that. I had to buy a cheap-ass DVD. I'll bet you you didn't buy a cheap-ass DVD player. I bought a cheap-ass DVD player recently.

The most expensive DVD player you can buy is like $100 now. And it's between, like, $10 and $100 for a DVD player.

Aha! Unless you go to the giant Goodwill on Dearborn and you walk away with one for, like, $9.99 and there might even be a DVD stuck in the middle of it. Basically, when I got rid of my old Xbox recently and replaced it with a new one, the new one doesn't have the ability to play DVDs or Bluetooth or anything. and it's rare that we do that but I do have you know like a season or two of 30 Rock or Strangers with Candy and various things like that that will want to pop in every now and then that things that might not be forever streamable so I bought the cheapest DVD player I could find at the cheapest store I could find and boy is the image quality crappy you just think that like whatever it's all digital boy real noodle arms real noodle arms that's not the doohickey i wanted to tell you about but why did you uh why did you buy one what are you

trying to view um what are you facing uh well i'm uh i have been wanting to go back and watch a documentary that i remember seeing when i was young when i was like maybe under the age of 15 it's called streetwise and it was made in seattle and it's a very well-regarded documentary about kids who were experiencing homelessness although of course we didn't have the that terminology back then but i remember seeing this movie when i was a kid and just being fascinated by it and always wanting to revisit it but it doesn't stream anywhere um you can only buy the blu-ray from the criterion collection cool yeah so i bought i was like i was about to buy it and then i realized i don't have any device to play this none of my computers that i have even have like a disc slot on them anymore so i was like am i going to actually buy a dvd player so then i can buy a dvd from the criterion collection so i can watch it so i can remember this one specific scene from streetwise which was where one of these kids did this scam where they would call a pizza place this tells you i mean this is the 80s right they'd call a pizza place and they would order some kind of crazy pizza and i don't know if they would give a fake address or somehow they would they basically order this knowing that it was never going to actually get out of the pizza place or something so that when the pizza people but they would put weird stuff on it so no one else would want to eat it and then when the pizza delivery driver maybe went out to try to find the address and there was nobody there or whatever the pizza would get thrown in a dumpster and they would climb in the dumpster and retrieve this pizza that they had ordered knowing that it would end up in the dumpster and i was totally fascinated by this scene as a kid and again i just always heard great i mean the fact that the criterion collection picked it up tells me it's probably a pretty good doc so i uh but the craziest thing is you can buy a dvd on amazon.com a dvd player and they'll deliver this was about nine o'clock last night they were like do you want it by three in the morning and i was like no i'll be good if you wait until you know seven a.m no i don't need

no need to wake up mr amazon in the middle of the night right like like it was like i was like how is

this the thing that you have in a facility three miles from my apartment but um so so i and i got up this morning and i opened to go on my little jog i opened the door to my apartment and sitting in my this is actually probably not the greatest plan but sitting in the hallway in front of my door was a dvd player in the box dvd slash blu-ray from sony and you actually have a nice blu-ray

player you know i should probably at some point just get one of those because that sounds really nice like we have a few films here of course maybe they're available on streaming anyway but like badlands badlands was like the first dvd i bought i believe genevieve got me my first dvd player for christmas when we were first dating her first gift to me was a robe and i opened it up and i was kind of like Yeah, this is the kind of gift you get somebody when you want to change them, not when you're meeting them for where they are and who they are. And it was kind of funny. It was our first Christmas together. But, boy, I guess I've always been an asshole. I mean, I don't think it was a point of contention, but I think I was just honest. Like, she knew I wasn't a robe person but got me a robe and the idea of making me a robe person. I basically said, like, this ain't going to work. Like, I'm not a robe person. But, boy, I'd really love a DVD player. I don't know. Whatever. She ends up getting me a DVD player. and then she leaves town to go spend the holidays with her family down in Atlanta and so I go out and I buy my first two DVDs and I wanted to buy something that would give me like kind of nothing spectacular but just something that would be beautiful on a DVD player now keep in mind I got this thing plugged into a TV with a tube you know this is pre-big screen TV I just like but I went out and I couldn't believe I was able to play digital films and I went out and I got Badlands and I got The Graduate and I probably watched them both a couple of times because they're both just like so beautiful just to watch, you know?

I mean, I'm actually surprised at how often a movie that I want to watch is not streaming or I'm going to have to buy it. And I think it's because I don't watch a lot of like Transformers, you know, like whatever the big movies that are happening in the culture, those are usually not that interesting to me. It's like, I just remember like, oh i want to watch you know this movie that i really liked uh you know niagara niagara or something something that made some impression on me like in the 90s when i was in college and like you know and then you go to try to find it and it's just like there's no nobody's streaming that movie nobody's like there's no market for that except me so i thought why don't i just go ahead and do this the other thing that this little doohickey aka blu-ray slash dvd player which was 70 it also is wi-fi enabled and it's a streaming device so it's like a stick it's like a roku or something like i can play i think youtube and netflix on it so like that's kind of a decent amount of bang for my buck for 70 yeah it really is yeah you're making me um you're

making me think maybe i want to invest in a better maybe spend more than 9.99 for a dvd player by the

We'll see how often I end up using it, but I also have really dialed in my projector game up at the other house. Remember, I was asking you about maybe slightly outside the legal lines of how to get Mariners baseball, and you said you didn't know, but you referred me to somebody who did know. Yeah, right. And I was great.

I said, you don't want to go around the system because Major League Baseball has been traditionally really good to its fans.

Particularly those fans in Oakland.

Absolutely, yeah. So did you – somebody sent me something. I didn't realize that the Mariners actually even put, like, some things up on their Jumbotron supporting the A's fans' efforts and, like, actually taking a swipe at ownership.

Which is great to see considering the bad blood between the teams when I think the official Mariners Twitter feed was beefing with the official A's Twitter feed regarding, I think, Smash Mouth. Years ago. Years ago, yeah. But it's good to see that, you know, bygones are bygones. And we can, as relatively small market teams, we can band together to hate the league that is trying to take a team away from a city that loves them. Exactly. Okay, you're doohickey.

Okay, yeah. Oh, by the way, I did want to give a shout out, though, this conversation we're having. I think this is a great idea, and it's been around for a while now. but i i know chase burns and i want to say jazz k-mink although i may be pronouncing their last name incorrectly host i believe a podcast or some sort of a um some sort of a series and these are two writers who write for the stranger here in seattle but they're partnered up with scarecrow video one of the you know last like places you can actually rent dvds and i believe vhs and they have a series called on unstreamable it was a podcast but i think it's also a column or something I think it's so cool because it really shines a light on the fact that like so many great films are just not available via streaming and we're all kind of sheeping it up. We're just kind of like, oh, yeah, the stuff that is available to us is the stuff that is available on streaming platforms. And it's like a microcosm of the actual content that's out there. And so therefore, we're really like just letting the companies tell us like kind of what we should be watching. I'm seeing here Northern Exposure is one of the things that they cover. That's apparently Super Mario Brothers.

The 1993 version starring John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins.

That actually really shocks me. You'd think they would have pulled that one out and put it on the streaming services because of the newer movie. But yeah, I found, by the way, on a really old VHS tape that I've been combing through. Most of this one tape I told you about was I found this tape at a garage sale, of course, and I was digitizing it because I love seeing what's on these old, strange, unlabeled VHS tapes that I find around town. And I found a whole like an hour and a half of coma.

morning news from february 28th 1995 but then after that it was like one of those things where the tape like the the main recording would end and you'd see what was on the tape before that and there was some more like fx programming and then at the very very very end of like a five-hour tape or whatever it was it was the greeniest most awful audio quality but it was an episode of northern exposure and i thought of you and in the commercials there was an love that show there was an okay soda commercial do you remember okay i mean it was like i always say it wrong is it amber or ember when you find like old bugs that can maybe uh bring dino dna

back amber that's i think amber is like a dying little like a little flicker of fire yeah or a amber is like i only know that amber reference from jurassic park yeah exactly life finds a way

Yeah, if you want to bring back dinos, you're going to need to find some amber.

You need to get yourself some amber. Anyway, amber is the color of my energy here on this Tuesday, by the way. Nice.

Shout out to that. But, okay, my doohickey, doohickey talk, continues now. Now, I have the talking doohickey stick. I bought a little device. So I have a cheapo. Everything I have is cheapo, right? So I have a pretty cheapo record player that I've had for a while. And it's not like cheapo, but it looks retro-y or is retro-y. I bought it years and years ago because I needed to digitize something. So it's kind of an early model of a record player that you can plug in via USB, right? And I just needed it for some production stuff. But it doesn't have super great quality. You know, if you're a real audio head, you can buy a record player where the stylus costs more than my house, right? It's not like that. So it's already, like, on the occasion that I'm listening to records, I'm already kind of defeating the purpose of listening to old vinyl because I'm not capturing the warmth or whatever people are chasing.

You're not warming up that amp, that Macintosh amp.

I have no tube amp over here. But I enjoy it, and I like the intentionality of listening to records and also just finding something dumb at a garage sale or a used record store. Like, I have this Smothers Brothers record that I found the other day called Mom Always Liked You Best. It's very yelly, but it's pretty good. I might play some music off of it this Friday. I haven't made up my mind yet for music for your weekend. But oh, and then I was then I bought our friend Celine's Prom Queen record from like 2017. But I happened to see her and she had some. So I grabbed one Doom Whop and I was like, I want to listen to this, but I can't explain it. Like the record player is out in my dart alley kind of area, but I have a long cord. And so it's piped into my audio board here. And so in order to listen to a record through a speaker, I kind of got to like blast a speaker in my studio, blah, blah, blah. Point is, I was like, I like listening to records, but I want to listen with my headphones on. But I can't be corded into my record player because I'm walking back and forth playing darts. So do they make a device that I can just plug into the audio jack of any old device and turn it into a Bluetooth device? And for the low, low cost of like $20 or $25, Luke, I have this little doohickey that acts both as a transmitter and a receiver of Bluetooth, meaning that you can either take an old device like maybe your DVD player and turn it into a Bluetooth device by having the audio come out of the earphone jack into this device. and then you just hook your headphones up to it, your Bluetooth headphones. Or if you have some headphones that are not Bluetooth headphones, you can plug it into the other jack and it's like a receiver and it turns non-Bluetooth headphones into basically cordless headphones. Is that not a great doohickey?

That's amazing. I had a doohickey like that in a couple of cars ago because I wanted to play something on Bluetooth, but my car didn't have, maybe it was the Toyota, the 4Runner, it didn't have the ability to be a bluetooth but it had like an aux in so i could take the

bluetooth doohickey aux in it yeah okay yeah yeah isn't it that was when i used to live in england oh ox isn't it i see and so you put on receiver so then your phone would talk directly to your

car phone would talk to the doohickey which was going into this was years ago and it wasn't very i feel like it was kind of not that reliable have you tried yours and did it give you all of the experience that you were looking for yeah now keep in mind the main reason i bought

mine was the opposite of that like this has two different but like this would basically it would be like taking my record player and having it broadcast to youtube so i don't need my phone i just need my if you had earbuds or whatever you could just air buds but um yeah no it seems to work great i've only used it in that way like so far of like listening to my smothers brothers records uh with my with my bluetooth headphones now the thing that i've been you know i've been

buying records lately kind of a lot even though i don't have a record player well i did order this record player from japan that i can tell you about but it's taking like a month to

get here is this the kind with the stylist that costs more than my house that i was no it's not

it's like a hundred dollars um the whole thing but basically what happened was and we have so much real stuff talk about i don't know why i'm descending this is doohickey talk man don't deny doohickey talk so i that's a possible show title um as as i've mentioned on the show many times if there is a a platform that has me figured out in terms of trying to sell me shit it's instagram and i have found myself scrolling instagram and there's a record uh company or like a record label i guess they're called cold busted which i don't love that name but the way they have gotten me is i'll be scrolling and it'll just like i'll go past an ad and they'll have a record that's just playing a really cool song or a very chill kind of vibe and i'm like it does a thing i think because i'm scrolling i'm just like in somehow what they figured out is like what sort of what was it called like line 23 like they're supposedly in the olden days of tv there was like some part of the spectrum of the tv that like like went past your conscious brain and went right into your subconscious maybe that was just a rumor but like what they figured out with me on instagram is that like there are certain things that will just like cut right past all of my like logical filters and i'll be like huh i'll almost like hypnotizes me or something and i'm scrolling and like i pass this record is just playing and it's showing a record at first of all the record is a beautiful color it's like pink and that gets me because like that's not the color that records are usually it shows you the pink vinyl as it's pink vinyl the pink vinyl is spinning on this very designy portable Japanese record player right and the actual music that's playing is also like um very kind of vibey in a way that I like like it doesn't seem to have lyrics it's kind of almost like something DJ Shadow would do or something if that makes sense and because of wherever I was emotionally on that moment that I was scrolling I was just like oh I really want to get this so I bought it I know the record was 20 bucks or something but because I bought something from this company now i'm getting over i'm sort of getting over served by their other ads and they've gotten me with like a different record i'm taking a picture of this and sending it to you

i'm looking at the i'm on their website now i'm curious how you look at the one called the deli

vibes three that was the first one i bought again i don't like any of this naming i feel like all this stuff is bad but then i was scrolling again and uh and they popped up and they were playing a song i really like something called boris blend from something called berlin future lounge and that's this seems to be like an older record i don't know when this was made but this is a double album produced by this company cold busted and i bought that as well so now i have these two albums that i really want to play but i don't sorry i'm putting those away i don't have a record player so then what do i do i end up buying the cool japanese record player how did you track that down that's not there that's i don't it doesn't look like they don't sell that i had to buy it from i had to buy it on ebay from japan um i think i i forget how i did it i might be i maybe there was some writing on the record player or something somehow i googled about and then i saw that it was being sold on ebay for like 100 bucks or something and then i went and watched this british guy do like a 30 minute review about this record player and about the stylist and about a bunch of other stuff that i don't even understand like dick as you know those record folks they go deep but what he basically said was it's a pretty good record player for what it is i just thought it was so freaking cool looking so when that shows up then andrew i can play these these records and

uh finally feel like then finally finally be and then be done and then be done and i'll never need

anything else again for the rest of my life this is interesting until i need to get a bluetooth do do so i can listen to my records while i wander around my house i um i am somebody else was i had

not heard of this a cold busted website but somebody was just telling me about a very similar one where they sort of like they re-release i mean it's it's exactly this is exactly what my friend was telling me about but there was a different website where they're like kind of like re-releasing old like kind of either like jazz records from an era that has gone by or jazz records from different countries or cultures or what have you it seems to be a whole thing now And again, like I understand the visual appeal of this, too, without even like listening to the music, seeing like this old style of kind of jazz record cover is just I mean, it just it is, as they say, a vibe.

And it feels to me, I mean, I will say this, like over the years, in fact, whatever happened to my record player, I don't know. I mean, I just got the rest of my stuff out of the house in Bellingham and I got a bunch of my like a bunch of my old vinyl was there and I brought it down. So I've got it at the other house and there's some real gems in there. And what I'm reminded of is that for all the things that.

that I acquire and then don't really ever really take advantage of or use enough because maybe I acquire something because I think it's going to create a certain moment for me and then maybe it doesn't or whatever. I actually do – all right, Kat, stop saying facts. I actually do listen. When I've had like – I had one of those Crosley, like you know those suitcase record players? I had one of those which when I was getting this stuff out of the house, I said to Kira, I go, I guess I'm just going to leave you that record player that was, like, I think a gift to me. She goes, are you insane? She goes, you gave that to me. I was like, well, someone gave it to someone, okay? But I had that thing.

So that's where your record player is.

But, I mean, you know, that's not, like, those are not a high-quality record player at all. No, no, but they're fun. But they're fun, and they're like a little suitcase you open it or whatever. And even that thing, I used to listen to a lot of records on that. and so i am looking forward to getting set up in my new place and and having a system you know where there's a record player like i was when i was at addy's on sunday she was playing this jim sullivan record um because of course she went to the sub pop she went to the sub pop warehouse record sale i was like how was that she goes what did she call them she was like a lot of headphone dads elbowing people or something like it was like a certain kind of like record collecting dad in his 40s who's down there just like elbowing people out to get oh she called them mud honey dads yeah there's a lot of mud honey dads down there which if you get it you get it but um all that to say yeah she put a record on it was a really nice vibe i do enjoy that vibe and i do actually seem to take advantage of it when i have a working record player because there's something really fun about putting a record on and then doing whatever else you're doing as long as it's not one of those ones that you got to flip over in like 15 minutes because that's annoying

yeah the one yeah you like a shorter record yeah like but not even like a 45 but just one that for some reason doesn't have a ton of material on yeah like an ep they'll kind of like something

like that where i'm like oh my god so i've been three songs yeah all right i'll walk across the

room and change this it kind of depends i don't know i also have like i spent a lot of time in in high school and college it's like making mixed tapes i was actually mentioning that to you before the show today and just like there was something about like okay well like this weird sonic youth record from japan only has a few songs but i gotta dig that out because i want that to be the fourth song on on side one or whatever like the idea of like kind of shuffling through there there's something i i know that i just sound like an old man but there is something about physical media that is fun that that forces you to interact with it that is just incredibly

appealing to me well it's happening andrew i'm now getting emails from the criterion collection They're running the exclusive premiere on the Criterion channel of Godland In the late 19th century, Danish priest Lucas, played by Elliot Crosset Hove Makes the perilous trek to Iceland's southeastern coast With the intention of establishing a church Have you ever heard of a more Criterion collection movie? It's like a parody of a movie that somebody who's much more erudite than me would watch

Yeah, you talking about going to see Paper Moon That's about as erudite as I get No, it's really got me like Vives and I, like I mentioned, I think last weekend went to just see it was a kind of it was kind of my perfect Saturday afternoon. I think, first of all, well, I can't remember what the weather was like. I was almost going to say it was like kind of rainy. So I didn't feel bad going into the theater. Sometimes that's a thing. Like in the summertime, you're like, I don't know. Should I really I should be like mowing the lawn or pulling weeds, things that, you know, tasks that I enjoy that that let sun come down on my balding head. instead of sitting in a theater but it was one of those Saturdays where we woke up, I had to drop Genevieve off somewhere but then I was like well if I'm dropping you off then I might as well go to the hardware store and take care of this which then led to this and it was just one of those days where all of a sudden I'm like four hours into my errands and Genevieve's like texting me I'm done with my event and I'm at the train station why don't you just meet me here and we'll watch the new Spider-Man movie it starts in like 20 minutes I'm like I'm there, it just worked out perfectly and it was one of those situations where it started with me just running a quick errand in the morning and then it sort of never stopped and it ended with me uh watching the spider-man movie i just love it's not rolling thunder as you've uh as you coined which usually has to do with late night activities where maybe you maybe you have your first little drinky poo around five and the next thing you know it's five in the morning i believe that would be more the more the the definition of rolling maybe this is what

you're describing is rolling thunder as in you're having fun and you don't have to be drunk the

whole time that's also a way to be in the world rolling sunshine anyway yeah that was a very nice but but i really want to go to a theater and watch like just like a small it's kind of a small batch theater i want to go see whether it's an old movie that they're replaying or a movie that and i loved the new spider-man if you liked the first spider-verse movie you'll

like the second Spider-Verse movie. It's like, it's more of the good stuff and they do some interesting things with it, but it's also fun to see some non-Marvel stuff from time to time as well.

Well, I mean, I can't lie to you that, and this, again, will come as no surprise to you or the careful listeners of this show, but as I was buying something from their Criterion collection, as I was buying a DVD slash Blu-ray player, as I was gazing out at these couple of vinyl records that I have recently acquired, I was very much enjoying this fantasy of me being a little more analog in my life. And I do think some of that was from going and seeing that movie with Addie on Sunday, which is like such a simple thing that so many people do all the time. But like, I don't know, just being – yeah, being a little more analog in my life and being a little less TikTok-y, like putting on a record and maybe reading a book. You know, it seems, again, I'm always trying to become a different version, a different kind of person than I am. But I was kind of enjoying at least the fantasy of, like, a quieter life where it's like, hey, I put a record on and, hey, I go sit in a chair and, hey, I stare at the river. Hey, I read a book. Will I become that person? Unclear. History says no. But it's fun to think about it. Like, I've got to learn how to read first. Uh-huh. Reading is fundamental, Andrew.

It really is.

Okay, let's take a quick break. We haven't even gotten into something I didn't have on the show sheet, but that is – I don't want to say I have a connection to it because I sort of don't. But this submersible story that's missing, I have a tangential connection to it. And again, stress, tangential, that has me particularly fixated on this story. So maybe we'll talk about that.

And also, I have a connection to the Hunter Biden story as well. Oh, perfect. So, like, just a small, personal, just an anecdote. I thought it was weird that that wasn't on the show sheet today.

So, anyway, I guess we're covering everything the New York Post is obsessed with today.

I guess we'll get into all of that after the break. Love it. That was a great toss.

We was hoping for some razzle-dazzle. Razzle-dazzle. That's right, man. Razzle-dazzle.

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

Hey, look at this. We've got, dare I say it, Andrew, one more Dazzling Donor. I feel like saying we have one more Dazzling Donor, somewhere in America or even abroad, I'm manifesting some person getting on the line and emailing you going, hey, I never heard my Dazzling Donor message.

I think this should wrap it up. I think this is good. Yeah, old Danielle in Tucson, Arizona.

Based on our records and what we're able to sort of see in our system, Danielle Roberts of Tucson, Arizona, is our final dazzling donor. We want to thank Danielle for her donation of a dazzling amount of dough, keeping TBTL in business. Danielle says, hey, Andrew and Luke, I'm so happy to be able to donate at the dazzling level this year and going forward. Oh, thank you, Danielle. You said the magic words. That's what I want to hear. Going forward. I want to use my dazzling donor message to talk to some tens about something near and dear to my heart. Sobriety. From the big book of AA, quote, no words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity. Quick sand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I had been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master. End quote. If this speaks to you, I want you to know there is an escape. It's not unicorns and rainbows and bullshit. It is work, but it's work that is worth it. We have a sort of motto in AA. We strive to be happy, joyous, and free. It sounds so cheesy, especially when you're in the depths of despair, but it is real. I swear it is within your grasp. It doesn't have to be AA, but you don't have to be alone. Reach out. I promise you will be glad you did. Peace and love, Tens. Peace and love. xo xo xo luke and andrew comma shit like this is why what you do is so important well thank you daniel and thanks for putting that message out to folks that might need to hear that today um and glad to hear that you are on your journey and that it sounds like um you know you're you've found a way to be happy joyous and free that's really amazing um so thank you for supporting the show and thanks for putting that out there yeah um if that's uh again if that's hitting somebody where they live today. Danielle telling folks that it doesn't have to be like it is if you'd like it to change. So thanks, Danielle. Appreciate you. And thanks for supporting the show. Hello and welcome to Top Story. So this submersible that's missing

up sort of in the waters apparently near where the Titanic sank that is sort of all over the news. When I first heard about this yesterday, I had this kind of faint memory of my friend who is a producer for CBS Sunday Morning, Anthony, my favorite producer I work with. We do a lot of stories together.

Hope the other producers aren't listening.

Well, if they are, they could be my new favorite producer. and uh my favorite camera person to work for my friend Efrain I remembered like didn't they do something in the Atlantic about the Titanic Anthony was telling me yeah they were on this boat for like a week and it was like really intense and I googled around and they were on this submersible with a correspondent for our show and also a writer for the New York Times named david pogue they're like the the tech guy at the times and um uh they i watched the piece that they did and basically the plan was they went out there to get in the submersible and go down and look at the titanic and uh first there was weather condition issues and so they couldn't do that dive but then they were going to do a different dive super deep in the ocean in a different part of the ocean where the weather was better and look at some kind of undersea cliffs or something and they got like 30 feet down and the submersible broke and they were stuck down there and then finally they were able to like get back to the surface and and so they ended up and i was watching this story thinking of it as like a tv correspondent which is like you go in with one expectation which is like hey we're gonna go see the titanic and we're gonna have this footage and that's how our story is gonna go and then it just keeps not working because of weather and because of like the technical thing of this submersible and all i could think was i'm so relieved for my friends who i work with that that mission was scuttled when they were 30 feet below the surface because you never know and i mean this sounds like an incredibly um kind of grim situation going on for for the for the the folks you know who were in that submersible including the founder of the company who's from seattle yeah um and some other you know people who one of the big headlines is you know it costs a quarter of a million dollars to go do this or something so you tend to get a certain kind of adventurer uh who's maybe you know also sort of somebody who's done pretty well in business or whatever and you know that some of the names are coming out of the people who are supposedly on there we'll leave that alone i guess but it's just i was what i was a strange experience not to center myself at all in this but it was a strange experience for me to watch that TV piece and to feel sort of retroactively terrified for a couple of people who I'm really like legitimately very good friends with Anthony and Efrain and to know that they were in that thing and that one of their takeaways was and it's in the piece is that there was a significant amount of this that was this this submersible that was still let's just say experimental as

now really appears to be the case yeah and this is a really this is one of those stories that is It's really hard not to imagine what the folks who are part of this, I don't know, mission, for lack of a better word, are going through, have been through when they've realized certain things about the potential finality of the issue. I mean, God, obviously, I don't mean to memorialize them before all efforts have been exhausted, but it's really freaking scary, certainly.

And one of the things that's so frightening about it is because I think there's something like seven redundancies on bringing this submersible back to the surface of the ocean. There's a bunch of stuff that they can actually do that can get them back to the surface. But the problem is you can't open the submersible from inside the submersible. You have to be – it takes a team of people. It's basically bolted shut from the outside and then they unbolt it from the outside. so that's another thing too is it's like they could be and i'm not trying to be bleak here or anything like that but like it just there's so many challenges i mean it would be amazing if there if a miracle happened and i'm sure hoping that that's what happens for these folks the other thing i was thinking about too was like i haven't done anything exactly like that but like i was thinking if if we would have gone out you know if if i would have they would have asked me to do the story i would have not even had one second thought about like yeah oh shit we're gonna go see the titanic heck yeah let's go do it you know like i just wouldn't have even i would have never occurred i guess what i'm saying is i really don't go through life accurately assessing the real danger of a lot of situations i think because i think i just tend to think it'll be okay this is not me trying to be like i'm brave this is me trying to be like i guess maybe i should be a little more i should just think things through a little more because you know if i were If I had been out there, I would have been pissed.

pissed we didn't get to go down to the titanic i would have been like the story's ruined i've wasted a week of my life like that would be my only takeaway not like well thank god they scuttled the mission because it wasn't going to be safe like i'm the person that when the airplane when they're like we're trying to fix something so we're going to sit here for another 20 minutes while maintenance looks at it i'm just like tape it down and let's fucking go right i'm like i never occurred like i'm just so short-sighted i think in my life a lot of times that i never think you know sometimes it's a good thing to have safety protocols and to say like i was listening to an interview yesterday on all things considered with a um a woman who is a veteran and was in a helicopter crash and lost one of her legs and is now an amputee who does unbelievably challenging physical things including climbing everest and the reason they were talking to her though was because she had decided to stop i don't know how close it was like she was practically like i think she could see the top of everest and it stopped because it was unsafe for one reason or another and had decided to go back down and they were talking to her about that decision to get that close um and then to say like yeah but you know what i'm not going to die over this like this is not this is not something that makes sense for me right now that is a real like almost like superpower i think to be able to assess something and to say like yeah i don't want to that's not worth it you know to just accurately kind of do the um you know uh the actuarial math on something is i just was just thinking man i again i'm not trying to make this about me in any way shape or form but it just hit home to me knowing that the main piece of journalism around this thing was created by a bunch of people that i actually know yeah um so anyway hopefully there's a miracle happening i also found myself obsessively refreshing like cnn just hope hoping to see something like found all caps and an exclamation point so hoping that that is something that happens uh however unlikely it may feel yeah um all right here's something that i knew was going to happen which is that the uh what is it called archwell podcast network was going to flame out

Are we affiliated with them in the new setup we have with TBTL or no?

Not yet, but I'm working on some deals. Okay, gotcha. I can't talk about yet on the show. We're with you.

Let me know when that comes through. Okay.

I was, listen, this whole story of the podcast empire that was supposed to be hatched by Harry and Meghan by way of Spotify, like, I think I was destined to be suspicious of it mostly out of jealousy. because here we are, we've been doing this show, well, for a long time and we're coming up on episode 4000 and, you know, no one's ever offered us a million dollars to do it or a half a million dollars or really more than about $50 and then you hear that two people, one person whose most famous thing is they were born into this made-up thing which is the royalty and then the other person's most famous thing really is that they married into this made-up thing called the royalty that they were then going in suits and also starred in suits to me more interesting than marrying into the royal yeah that's actually true yes and i don't like listen i don't like i actually find megan markle to be a very likable person and i definitely think that like the bullshit of the royal family and their racism and all of that stuff is real and so now at some point i do believe that megan markle has experienced a very crazy thing which is to be one of the most famous people on earth, to go from being the fourth lead on suits to being one of the most famous people in the world, that has to be a crazy thing. I'm not saying that's not a thing, but I'm saying it's like the Kardashians. Like the Kardashians, their life now, their lived experience is truly something that is noteworthy because of the level of fame that they have, but not to me because of something else particularly interesting about them. Again, I think the Kardashians are really savvy business people and i think they're really hard working and you know i'm not begrudging them but it's just when i heard that spotify was giving uh megan markle and uh prince harry 20 million dollars to start podcasting i just about plots because it's like do they know anything about podcasts are they interesting people like is like there's something about the idea that like if someone is famous then you should give them a podcast that just for obvious reasons rubs me It kind of grinds my gears just because we've been we've been in the trenches doing this bullshit for so long that the idea that you just like because you're famous, you'll understand what makes a good story or what's interesting or you're a good conversationalist. I just find that sort of personally offensive.

I mean, yeah, I mean, like you say, the Meghan Markle story is kind of fascinating. I mean, like you say, from this sort of the sort of social and culture.

leap obviously but also to uh you know being a victim of this terrible institution and the and the racism therein as well like but that makes her a great interviewee right right but why does that person have to be the interviewer and it's right this whole thing has and again not to turn everything into like our own you know from the perspective of us do doohickey talk yeah did they even talk about their bluetooth doohickeys like no i mean listen i'm not trying to say that what you and i do appeals to everyone and that we should get a 20 million dollar deal although i wouldn't turn it down but like it goes back to what i was saying the other day about like it just the whole industry like i was telling i think i was talking to my dad last night and we're talking about tbtl and this transition that we're making and i kind of mentioned that like you know i was listening to tbtl as a podcast when it was still a radio show and the vast majority of americans had no idea what a podcast was like we mentioned rss yesterday as a joke that that was a go-to joke for a long time because the whole thing was like oh i have to explain what a podcast is what do you do for a living well first i have to explain rss like that joke does i mean to the degree that it ever worked it doesn't work anymore because obviously everybody knows what a podcast show works means the show's already in trouble but it's like it's such a bubble like it's just and that is what has happened and we kind of and you know like it's been great that we've been able to connect with the network for apm it's been a great experience for eight years and it offered so much security a security that i'm going to miss a lot but but i know that even institutions like american public media in order to in order to survive in what i consider to be sort of a bloated economy you have to compete on the levels of the spotify's and it just doesn't none of it it's starting to feel like bitcoin to me a little bit like everybody like where is the 20 million dollars coming from is it coming from pre-rolls like in in they they being i think like executives kind of saw oh this is a this is a burging industry let's turn it into the new hollywood but like you don't have box office sales and you're not and you're not making a bunch of money in the in the in the asian markets or you know like in like china national international you're not like sending you're not sending iron man receipts in from china on opening weekend like where is the money coming from and it's like well the money will be there and it's kind of like I feel like you and I again I'm sorry I'm now I'm turning this into us but I can't I can't not but like it's almost refreshing to go through what you and I have been kind of discussing I think for the past couple of years which is like we have something here that is different like let's stop let's stop associating and trying to compete in the space where people are making are inking million dollar deals based on a certain amount of like I don't know automated ads or where wherever they think that money is going to come from like you know what we do we talk to a small but interested and loyal group of listeners loyal being maybe somewhat condescending but

can't think of a better word right now but people a small group of people who appreciate what we do for whatever reason and are willing to support it like and and therefore we will hopefully be in the black and be able to continue to do this uh for the people who want it but like not like kind of and be like i don't know like just try to compete with whatever the market is doing right now which seems like a big bubble that's starting to sort of i think maybe the air is starting to

hiss out of it a little bit well i think you're right i mean you look at spotify they paid we talked about this last week i think they paid like some shocking amount of money for gimlet to absorb gimlet media because gimlet had started some really great shows that i remain a huge fan of i love heavyweight i love startup there's a bunch of there's a bunch of great gimlet shows but but they basically like sold to spotify and spotify bought them to get more downloads but But then that didn't apparently work because now Spotify is laying off 200 employees, many of whom were working on those projects, people that probably came over from Gimlet or who were hired to support that sort of content. Then they're cutting Archwell Media. I think that their kid is named Archie, so everything has to be Arch. Oh, I was wondering what the connection was. That's why the show was called Archetypes, but it's spelled like Archetypes. Maybe that was the issue.

People didn't know. Is Archetype the way they spell their show different than the way you spell?

Is that actually how Archetype is spelled?

If I missed a plan, I might have missed a plan of words, but let me look.

Because do you think that they named, because it's called Archwell Media, which again, I assume is Archie related. But then the first and only show they did was called Archetypes, which maybe they're spelling Archetypes correctly. I think they are. I'm wondering, what did they go with first? Like, where did this thing start? Did they have to name the show Archetypes because it already involved the kind of the rhythm of what the name of the company was or something?

It is just archetype. It's spelled as the word is spelled, I think, based on a very quick Google here. But that can't be a coincidence. That their kid's name is Archie and everything fits into that. Yeah, I'm not sure.

Well, and then it's called Archwell Media. Like, it just seems like a crazy thing. crazy coincidence if they just picked that at random because I guess the premise of the show. Oh, and by the way, back to the other thing you said that I thought was really spot on was I try to use more British terms when we're describing the Royals. Pip, pip, cheerio. That was spot on. Is that Britishism? I thought maybe it was a play on Spotify. I'll try to get my, try to get my terminology sorted. Keen on getting this. I'll be chuffed. Something that really, that I really agreed with that. you said was that because these two people have had some again a very crazy life happened to them because of the weirdness around being in the royal family they are interesting people or at least their story is is interesting because they've been through something very few people on planet earth have been through but that does not mean that they are good at themselves creating content and like not only did they sign some big-ass deal with spotify they signed a big-ass deal with netflix every and then like his book i guess i guess his book it was like the best-selling book of all time or some shit like some crazy i heard a stat that was just absolutely shocking to me about how and but but that's just because he's dishing that's just because there is an appetite for hearing somebody who was in the inner circle and now is no longer in the inner circle talking

shit about the other people in the family and i have no issue with that sorry about the noise i'm sure you can hear the noise behind me here somebody's really going to town on the never happen oh my god can you imagine can you imagine if megan's just like apologizing for the leaf because there's a leaf blower going on oh that would be that would be absolutely that's a show

i would listen to yeah exactly i mean basically like look i don't again i want to be careful because this show archetypes is probably not particularly designed for me but there might be some people maybe our listeners who loved it or it was designed for them it was the sense i got was it was megan markle interviewing um women who had done sort of extraordinary things of you know very well-known famous uh women like um of course when i printed this andrew it printed it on a piece of paper that already had writing on one side so i'm trying to read the double print jamila jamil uh serena williams uh mindy kaling and others those were the kind of like celebrity guests who Meghan Markle would interview. Again, I'm guessing sort of talking about being a woman in the world and trying to be taken seriously in a lot of rooms that maybe historically that hasn't been the case, particularly being a woman of color. So what's now emerged though is that any interview that wasn't with a Mindy Kaling level celebrity was not actually being recorded by megan markle if you were one of the experts if you were one of the eggheads one of the smart people who's done some interesting research but doesn't have a name like paris hilton then you were interviewed by get this andrew possibly a gimlet employee yeah right who then cut up the audio and then megan pretend asked the questions at least this is the current allegation and then they cut it all together so that it seemed like megan markle had also interviewed by the way the people who were the the so-called experts they sound pretty interesting to me and I heard some tape I was listening to a like a video clip of this whole story and they were playing some of the uh some of the experts and I I thought what they were saying was quite interesting talking about the origin of the term bitch and kind of where that comes from and how it's used and things like that like but the idea that Meghan Markle who's getting paid 20 million dollars they produce 12 total episodes of this show is so pressed for time that she cannot also interview the experts used for her 12 episodes of this podcast is just I want to say it's shocking but it's really not shocking to me what it shows me is that this was a very low priority for team Megan like I don't even blame Megan Markle maybe this was Megan Markle's great joy maybe she loved this more than any of the other things any of the other fires she's got an iron in but i can tell you that she's got at least three schedulers and somebody who's sort of like planning out her week and her her month and her life and somebody in that group did not see this podcast as a big

priority for her yeah you know it's not freeing up a fucking hour a week to do it maybe only because it's been the model for so much longer you're talking about harry's book and like you know how successful that was and it's because he uh is a big name and has a lot of access and is dishing dirt like that's i just feel like yeah that's a model that's you know time tested and and and successful like writing a book because you have lived a life where you have gained information that other people want even if it's sort of a rumor-esque and delicious in that way like probably ghost written but that's also typical again but that's fine and again but But the thing is, it's not –

it's still your experiences or at least totally that's the thing like hey i know these things and i want to put it in a book like that makes sense and like i guess to a degree and again it wasn't you know it's not a show that is targeted towards me so maybe i'm being too dismissive as well um but you know like does megan markle like does she bring do the conversations between her and her guests bring out the best of both of them you know what i mean like i and i i kind of doubt that you know it's not to say that you don't have something interesting to say or a story to tell but it's just kind of like well everybody has a podcast we should have a podcast so i did the math here so that's by the way 20 million i guess divided by 12 is 1.666666 million so uh

per episode yeah exactly though i want to i need to clarify though that there is some speculation that they did not create enough content to get the full 20 million so that's yeah so it's it's possible that you know there was a clause in the contract but to me it's like i agree with everything you're saying and i don't you know again everything i've seen and heard of megan markle i think she seems like a quite likable and smart person and i'm not saying that if megan markle megan markle probably as much as anyone else if she had said you know what i really want to be about i want to be about quality journalism and storytelling and creating like really genuine moments in the podcast space i don't think she's incapable of that she's as capable as any other person is of doing that they make it their goal but the difference is when like somebody like uh our friend uh madeline barron who did the wonderful show in the dark when madeline barron set out to do that show it wasn't like well i've got 45 minutes on a tuesday and why don't you go ahead and do all the interviews with jacob Wetterling's family and then I'll just cut in my my questions over the producers questions like if you really want to do this like you you have to kind of take it seriously and you have to kind of like try and this just feels to me like everyone's getting into podcasting hey these are famous people here's 20 million dollars okay what's the least amount of effort that I can really put into this in a given week and still and again I don't even really blame Meghan Markle for that because I don't know what her maybe she was constantly arguing with her handler saying I need more time to focus on the podcast well we can't because we have you scheduled to be on the today show for your new line of hand sanitizer or something like you know like I don't even know if this is totally her fault but it just I find it as a person who does this five days a week I find it mildly offensive that Spotify thought well these people are famous they'll be good at

podcast yeah and by the way like I most of my complaints is sort of like what this represents as far as the industry is concerned and what we consider to be a podcast and what we consider to be a valuable podcast. Right. But I would say that, you know, if there is a tinge of sexism around what we're saying, let me make it racist as well. No, I was going to say, like, I feel the same way about Obama's podcast with the boss. Like I like I also am not interested in those guys as podcasters. Like I'd be maybe interested in them being a guest on a podcast. I'm just not

interested in them as podcasters like why right well and yeah i mean now i think we're just going around the same thing uh speaking of uh content that i have been enjoying lately which is not what we've been doing but i'm pivoting here as a professional podcaster andrew who produces more than 12 episodes um in two years uh i can pivot on a dime as the producer i told you to say that by the way i started watching this show last night on netflix called flint town it's very interesting it is a docu series where these folks just embed themselves in with the police department in Flint, Michigan and now any documentary where you're filming it sort of from the police's standpoint is very fraught obviously but I don't it's not really pro cop what it reminds me of is The Wire because they start filming in flint when flint has uh for i forget the size of the city but at this time they had 98 they'd gone from having 300 police officers to 98 police officers and they had the fewest number of police officers of any city of their size in america this is also as the water crisis was unfolding and it really gets into the local politics like the you meet the police chief and then a month later there's a new mayor and suddenly he's the old police chief and now There's a new police chief and they follow these these these cops who, again, you know, they don't present them as like superheroes necessarily present them as real people. But they also start out at the police academy with these people that are training to sort of come, hopefully, for the police chief. of flint become part of the flint police department because again they cannot get people physically to like do the police academy and wear the uniform and drive around in cars what's happened to the city at least at this point i don't know what the this is in 2016 when they filmed this so i don't know where things stand today but basically you have a police department that is not proactively policing they're not like driving around like we the way you think about policing is like hey if i'm breaking into a house there's a chance it's not a great chance but there's a chance a police officer is driving by and they say hey you can't do that or somebody calls the police and then the police drive right over and say hey you can't do that and i assume that's what the cops do that's what they do yeah no no like clearly all right be hey buddy be a pal get down off that shed did you

go to the academy as well hey don't do that hey i did but i went to the police academy from the

movie it was me bobcat goldthwaite and um uh michael winslow no but like the whole like the The whole idea is that they are just – they describe themselves as like they feel like FedEx drivers. They're just on a route. So like a call will come in. Something bad happens. There's no one to go check it out. And by the way, these police officers are not – again, they're not doing the thing. At least they are wise enough to not do it on camera where they're like, we can't manhandle people, so whatever. We're not in any rush.

We're not going to do our job.

That's totally not their vibe, if that makes sense. their vibe is like yeah we ever any call you're on one cop's like i just when i'm on a call i try to do the best job i can on that call and i try to block out that there's 15 other calls that are just waiting you know because then it's like when that call is handled then you like look at the list it's like where do i go next and anytime you're getting to the next call the incident has already occurred the incident is over so you're not like proactively policing or whatever point is it's a pretty interesting show hold on though i am a little confused so is the and maybe

it's because this is a show that isn't necessarily taking a specific point of view but actually just presenting the nuance of this is this is the is the the premise that this is an underfunded police unit or this is a different way of policing that um maybe has more de-escalation and de-emphasizes how a lot of cities run into issues, or de-emphasizes the policies that end up causing issues with the police departments.

I don't know because I'm only two episodes in, but I can tell you so far, basically what it is is a very, very well shot, and I mean that, like the cinematography is amazing, the editing is amazing. All I can say is, imagine sort of the wire, but it's real people. And the access that they're getting with these cops is just really it's it's they're just riding along with them and they're you know watching them show up to things and climb over fences and do different things and again it's not like they're not being presented as like it's not it's not like oh these are the heroes of this story but it's like these are the flawed human beings i mean one of the cops is talking about how he was involved in an officer incident shooting and this guy by the way is sort of the least likable of the cops but they make him the least like they let him be the least likable and he basically says like this is what happened this person had a gun they fired it um i pulled my gun on them uh i came around a corner and pulled my gun on them and then thought that they still had their weapon they reached in their into their jacket and i shot them and it turned out that they had ditched the gun um 10 feet away or something and then he's sort of saying you know if that happened now i would probably be sued i would be you know and he's coming at that from the perspective of like basically like they're being too you know nitpicky with the cops which i don't agree with that opinion but it's his opinion but it's like it's presented kind of without comment like it's not like then the music swells and we're all supposed to think like he's right it's just kind of like and then there's another moment so they're doing security detail for a hillary and bernie debate boy weren't those heady days and they're just like sitting in this van because they're they're just kind of waiting until later when it's time for them to kind of go out and just do a little bit of crowd control and they're just talking about their sort of political beliefs and you got the one cop that's like i would vote for her and then other cops like are you crazy and they're like just having a real conversation and of course i don't agree one of the cops is like you know she she lies she's under fbi investigation why would you vote for her which i thought was hilarious considering the current state of affairs in the republican party but like it was just kind of a real conversation between people who i don't agree with but also like i can't it just doesn't feel like the producers of the show have their thumb on any scale if that makes sense like they just kind of dispassionately filming it and i'm now heavily invested like i want to see if this new police chief is actually able to like get some things working i want to know what happens to this one police officer who she uh was really hoping to become a detective and she was two days from it, and then

And then they switched police chiefs and then they froze all the transfers. So she has her whole like dream like ripped out from under her and she's super bummed about it. Like I'm kind of heavily invested in the narratives now of of the people in this show called Flinttown. And who plays the Steve Guttenberg character? I forgot. I forgot my other cadet from the Academy.

Here I go once again with the email every week. I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man. It's not from a female.

All right.

Email or female? Yeah. I'm a little on the fence here. You know, we have a few packages here that we have. Do we have any days scheduled where you and I are going to be in the same room? Maybe we can open some of these packages during the TBTL-a-thon in a couple of weeks. Let's do that. Yeah. So having said that, let me play some voicemails for you, or at least one. This is from listener Jamie. Oh, this brings us back to Toilet Talk, which on tomorrow's show, I'll tell you about my adventures over the weekend. repairing the toilet.

I texted you last night asking you about that

and you didn't respond to me. You're being very withholding but that's great. No, I did respond. I just responded Yeah, I responded immediately. I said Oh, I wonder if we're not getting... You know, that was on a text chain with several other people and I noticed that other people weren't responding to other things on that chain. I wonder if there was maybe an issue of things. Oh, no, I did see. I'm sorry.

There were so many people chiming in on this chain by so many people. There was like three of us that I missed that little part um uh where you said uh oh boring ass you had me at boring ass details andrew i think

i said long story short yes i did repair my toilet uh long story long i will add tons of boring ass details to the story because i do want to tell you about ass details because it was not um it was not uh it was not a straight line to victory and so i will tell you about that but But while we're talking about toilets, we got this voicemail from our dear pale listener, Jamie in Mississippi.

Hoi, hoi, this is listening.

Nope. Yeah, okay. Sorry, I just hit it too soon. Calm down.

Hoi, hoi, this is listener Jamie in Mississippi. This may be a long time for a short slide, but you can tell. Listen, if you talk about toilets or replacing toilets, it reminded me of a house that we owned in Tuscaloosa, and it was the strangest house. It had been built by the builder for himself in the 60s, so it had a lot of weird things that were very specific to the 60s. An industrial contractor had owned it, so it did another weird thing. At one point, the author, Barry Hanna, owned it, apparently got drunk, let the concrete pool blow it up. He drained it below the water table, had to call the neighbors over with drills to relieve the pressure and let it go back.

I kind of missed the could you tell what was going on there a famous author owned the house and did something to the pool but I couldn't quite tell what happened to the pool.

I think it sounds like what can happen with an in-ground swimming pool is if you take out too much of the water then it doesn't weigh enough like what happens is the pressure the upward pressure from the ground can crack a swimming pool or lift it because it's just a concrete box that you've buried in the ground. and if the ground like freezes and it expands there's all kinds of things that can happen which is why you generally want to have the water in there because it weighs a lot and it's keeping it in place so my guess is something happened with it not having enough water and then the whole drilling was somehow to relieve the upward pressure thank you okay i would have okay so in

encino man when they're because the only thing i know about encino man is i think i watched the first 10 minutes of it one time and i believe are they skateboarding or partying in an empty

in-ground pool is that all bullshit no i don't think it's no it is true bullshit no that's a documentary okay good yes um and and of course that's a famous thing in california that you know the early days of skating it was like find an empty pool i don't think it's like everywhere where there's a swimming pool without water and it immediately starts surfacing but i do think it's a thing that can happen depending on probably the water table and the soil and things like that

i see okay so anyway so so jamie owned this home in tuscaloosa it had a storied history with famous people um living there owning it uh previous to her partying there up to crazy stuff the weirdest

part of it was a toilet it was the primary bathroom was pink and gray towel really really nicely done but the toilet had shaped like a saddle that it had a indentation in it like you sit on a saddle and so it made you could sit your legs together on it it was the height i guess of

the 60s wait so are we sitting on this side saddle because i feel like i said when i picture a saddle i think i picture your legs spread apart which i was also one like that's that's also interesting

I think it must have been side-saddle

it must have been side-saddle but imagine if it was The other kind, though, maybe there's even something to hold on to, sort of like between your legs, I guess. That would be kind of fun.

A couple stirrups and a squatty potty. But at some point I said, I cannot sit on a freaking saddle to pee every day. So I took it out of a place, and I still have a lot of regret for doing that. But at the same time, I mean, I had the custom lid with the indentation in it. Never seen anything like it before. And so that was just a little too wide for me. Anyway, I'm sure there's a modern collector out there somewhere crying at the thought of this gem in a landfill, but I replaced it with a plain white toilet, and I wish I could say I never look back, but obviously I am. Power out.

Vintage bathrooms are not an obsession of mine, but it's the only thing that I do that even comes close to you, like kind of looking at all of your kind of design porn and everything, Luke, is – and I think this has to do also with – design um also you're really into porn porn which is another thing we'll talk about tomorrow

no um i my saddle i uh i i'm googling by the way mid-century saddle toilet yeah i wasn't able to

find anything yeah jamie if you have any old photos or anything or you can find an example online send it to me because this is very curious but yeah i uh i love old vintage bathrooms with the pink tiles or whatever and i have a i have a friend who um who listens to the show so i want to say this with all due respect but sent me um a a photo of her bathroom which she just remodeled recently and it looks wonderful and i know what it's like to have like kind of an old bathroom that is just kind of like uh it seems old and grimy and whatever to you but like to see all of the old pink tile removed and like i think when you live in the midwest like you just see that all over the place right like my my uh grandparents teal bathroom down in their basement like i can still it smelled like teal it smelled like irish spring soap in there like the little dried bar of irish spring spring soap that was only used once every couple of months once a fiscal quarter um i just love those old midwestern like probably i'm guessing 1960s era bathrooms and uh and yeah So I guess Jamie's regret is kind of changing one special feature of her old 1960s bathroom.

Have we talked about this? Have you been to SaveThePinkBathrooms.com? Do you know about this? No, no. It's just like kind of a whole website. It's very cute. It's got a real kind of, you know, GeoCities. It's got a real homestead kind of DIY website vibe. But it's basically dedicated to trying to get people to not remodel their vintage kind of pink bathrooms. Now, here's what I will say. If you happen to buy a house or even – I guess it doesn't only happen if you own the house because you're probably not going to remodel it if you're renting it. Although my dad did a surprising amount of remodeling in the rental that we lived in. I think the deal was he'd keep improving the house and they'd keep charging us $400 a month in rent. It was a little kind of an understanding like, hey, this guy is adding rooms in the basement. This guy is remodeling the kitchen. This guy is really upgrading this house And it costs us nothing But also we'll just keep charging him $400 a month rent But What's I think the thing is If you find one of these pink or Lime green or whatever These traditional bathrooms And it's still in really good shape Then it's like I would totally keep it But also bathrooms are that kind of thing Where it's like if you look a little closer And you realize all the grout has got like problems And the toilet's leaking and you know you want the bathroom to feel hygienic and nice very much and it's rare to find a bathroom that's hasn't been remodeled for 40 or 50 years that's in great shape if i found one that was in great shape i would have no problem leaving it totally alone or it would

take a lot of work to even like kind of get into the grout and do bleaching or even regrout i mean there are ways i think that you could make that spick and span but it would be so much work and

so much money to have it done i'm sure my sister sarah and her husband josh they have this really great house here in portland and it was part of this little um sort of subdivision i mean it's in portland portland but it was built long enough ago it's kind of a sort of atomic ranch style but it was apparently the model home for the neighborhood so you know people were going to buy houses in this neighborhood they were going to be built and so their house has every bell and whistle from 1952 or something including a pink bathroom in the basement where the sink is a giant shell oh yeah like i don't even know if it's like if it's real like if there's a such like imagine a clam shell that's so big that you could wash your hair in it or something but what but it's but it's also very like it's it's sort of um uneven in this way that makes it look very It looks like somebody went and found...

Like an oyster shell that was from like 20,000 leagues under the sea or something like monstrously large and then made it into a sink.

So they try to make it somewhat realistic. I was first picturing like a big pink porcelain thing. No, it's not like a perfect.

It's not like a stamped idea of a shell. It's something that seems like if you look at it, you're like, is that real? Did they find that somewhere? But and then the whole the rest of the bathroom, there's like shells that are like like mounted in the tile. Like and I just love it so much. also has great water pressure for taking a shower so can i tell you about something you mentioned

atomic which made me think of asteroids for some reason i just think of words that begin with a uh apples andrews um no i heard something weird on the radio today that i was shocked about also how long does it take to mow a tiny lawn how has this been going on all show oh i stopped hearing it a while ago okay it's still like i don't know it's bothering me i'm like trying to i've been like trying to like uh bring my microphone up and down but um any whoozles i was gonna say i had on 710 espn seattle sports or whatever the hell it's called now this morning and after a show ended right it i guess i was running in here to do the show so i guess it's at 10 o'clock they go to a commercial break the first commercial i heard was for asteroid city the new wes anderson film I don't think I've ever heard a commercial for a movie that's currently in theaters on the local sports station. And I thought it was especially strange that it would be the Wes Anderson film. Like, yeah, doesn't that seem like a strange that seems like a strange fit.

But I would say that it's a fairly narrow Venn diagram overlap of the people who are wondering when Julio is going to start actually producing and also want to know what's going on in the latest Tilda Swinton project.

Is Tilda Swinton in this one as well? I assume so.

I don't know, but I'm guessing. I mean, I feel like that's a pretty safe bet. Like, that just doesn't – like, K-U-O-W, sure. Seattle Sports or whatever? I mean, I guess you're in that demo.

Maybe there's dozens of you, dozens. Maybe. And I don't want to. This is definitely yuck and yums territory, which I've been hearing a lot more of lately. I thought that was something you brought from your youth. But I've been on other podcasts. I've been hearing a lot of people talk about yuck and yums. I heard somebody's kid brought it home from school, like elementary school, like we're not yucking people's yums. Oh, and that's where you first heard it, you mean?

Yeah.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, I heard like people talking about yucking yums on Lebitard recently and some other podcasts as well. I was going to say, though, and this is just me, this is my opinion, I'm not saying it's a proper or even well-informed opinion at all, but I was doing a little Wes Anderson math in my head when I was taking the bus somewhere with Genevieve the other day, and we were just sort of thinking out loud, I think we may have hit the tipping point of Wes Anderson producing more films that I don't like than I do at this point. like but but that's because like i i actually i was trying to put things into columns and like i think i put zisu in the net negative column and i think that's controversial i think most people feel like it's a little bit bloated but generally a net positive but i don't know if i

feel that way with the exception of rushmore i don't think there are any west anderson movies that i feel strongly one way or the other on and i see all of them i don't know if that makes sense Like, I feel like Rushmore for me is a transcendent film. It's probably in my top 10 films ever. Like, I love it so much. And then everything else is just versions of Wes Anderson-ism, whether it's The French Dispatch, whether it's Zissou, whether it's Moonrise Kingdom, this Asteroid City. I mean, the trailer for Asteroid City looks like a parody of a Wes Anderson film. Yeah, I haven't seen the film yet. Everyone is just doing the most Wes Anderson thing ever, delivering the most Wes Anderson dialogue like i feel like i'll watch it again in the way that i watched the french dispatch i'll find it entertaining i'll dig the sets um it won't like have it i would say one problem is that i think the movies sort of have less and less of an emotional core yeah no that's definitely yeah yeah and it's just kind of like pete that you just i mean i know you've talked about this with the tenenbaums kind of like feeling like a real emotional connection to what some of the

That to me, that's the one. I'm less Rushmore. I'm 10 in bombs. To me, that one is my, that's probably on my top 10, I would guess.

But I just, they all fall in this category of like something that I will definitely watch and that I will be happy that I saw, but that I will not like have a hugely strong reaction to one way or the other. Like I won't dislike them. I won't think they're the best movie I've ever seen. I don't know if that, if that, if that really helps at all. But that's just kind of weirdly how I now experience these films.

Well, I sort of like – so I – I feel that way about some and then like French dispatch kind of irritated me a little bit. It had some really good moments that I liked and it was a movie of moments. It was, you know, a series of shorts that were intertwined with kind of an interesting spine, but didn't really pay off. And in a certain way, I sort of felt like a little bit disrespected as a viewer because it really was like, oh, you know, I'm giving you all the visual stuff. I'm giving you all the twee stuff. I'm giving you all the dollhouse stuff. But, like, don't really worry about whether or not you're moving me with the narrative and characters and character development and stuff like that. There was a little bit of that, but I didn't feel like enough. Having said that, you know, I'm talking about Royal Tenenbaums literally being one of probably my top ten movies of all time because I can't not cry at the end of that, you know. And then there are two that I absolutely love but are kind of, I think, they don't fit the usual stereotype of him, which is, now I'm blanking on it, Fantastic Mr. Fox. I really like that one, which is a totally different thing. It's animation. And I really like Bottle Rocket, which is first one out. Yeah, I love Bottle Rocket. I love Bottle Rocket.

I haven't seen that for 25, 30 years.

And it's kind of before, you know, you just see the very early ideas of how he will block things or whatever. but you don't have, like, the dollhouse kind of aspect of that. But I love those films, and there's some other good ones. But Moonrise Kingdom, I remember watching that and just being like, oh, man, I don't feel anything. I feel nothing about that. The one where they're writing the— Man, don't pull that.

Yeah.

The one where they're in the hotel, I can't think of the name of it, but there's a Grand Budapest. Grand Budapest. I like that one. Okay, like, I'll rewatch that.

See, I find it hard to form any, or at least to observe, any meaningful difference between any of like four of the five films we've named like the grand budapest hotel is to me the same movie as the darjeeling limited yeah which is the same the same movie as the french dispatch i mean you know slightly different characters but the same overall vibe like i don't ever really know why anyone's doing anything a lot of intentional quirkiness a lot of tweeness a lot of just kind of a lot of the same stuff but again i also enjoy seeing all that stuff so it's just kind of like i don't know i sit through it i'll probably go have a couple martinis and watch asteroid city like you know this week or next week yeah and uh and i'll probably hope my whole goal is to not buy a truck on the way this time because that was where i was going when i bought that stupid broken down truck part of your analog your your shift analog

um you must hear that thing behind me now i i just like i'm hearing it a little bit that yard better be like we i'm gonna be able to eat off of that yard god damn it i'm telling you i mean i kind of appreciate it because they haven't been doing the best job of you should hire them yeah right love of upkeeping that yard i'm not that i'm not that i care they it's their yard it's not gross or junky or whatever but there are like some a lot of weeds kind of that are theirs that are kind of coming over the fence into our yard so i am happy that they apparently have hired somebody next door to really kind of take care of the lawn maintenance on this tuesday but i'm telling you this is a small yard and the area right outside my window is not that big i mean what are they do are they shampooing the lawn now like what could they possibly be doing

i want a report from you tomorrow i want to know about two things one your turlet and two how good that lawn looks i'm gonna look at what are they doing right now hold on i gotta go take my car to the shop so i gotta go i've gotta go shampoo my i've gotta go change the newspaper in my sock drawer I'll leave you to your investigation alright thanks everybody that is going to do it for today's show but we will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you please go to tbtl.net get your tickets for our 4000th episode which is happening July 29th Saturday all ages Neptune Theater it's probably like 80 tickets left so we will see you there alright have a great rest of your Tuesday and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all I like your nurse's uniform, guy. These are OR scrubs. Oh, are they? Power out.