Muse

There's any duplicating going around here when you're not present?

Uh...

Hmm? Huh?

Yeah, maybe.

Do you duplicate alone?

I think that's kind of a personal question.

You're laughing, Miss Tiley. Are you taking my duplication investigation seriously? Or are you disrespecting my duplication investigation?

No, no, I'm not disrespecting. I'm just saying that there's no real way I can check, you know, because I leave at a certain time.

I'm not... Duplicating is taking place. and when duplicating takes place that means there's more than one there may be two or three Miss Tyler two, three or four I do y'all are joking are y'all kidding with me? I'm talking about duping duping duplication I just work here you in charge of duplication?

yes sir

show me how this duplicating machine works I want to learn all about the process

TBTN so maybe this isn't exactly the most polished radio broadcast you've ever heard i know we suck i know we're taking a risk it's a leap of faith you don't say much friend but when you do it's

to the point and i salute you for you just sit around all day thinking of nice things to say

to people well it's not necessarily during the day but i do like to be nice to people dude give

this is grass clippings give us the real deal or we're out of here here i'm gonna do for you guys

i'm gonna hook you up to the best stuff okay but you gotta jump into my van definitely for sharks

come on 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 is the beginning of a social engineering attack My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. I feel like a bird showing over these haters. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where you're looking at yet another beautiful summer day.

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

Hope you're doing all right. If you are out in one of the parts of the country that is experiencing extreme heat right now, hope you're staying cool. We've got a cool episode of the show for you. It's episode 3,974 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

26 shows away from our 4,000th episode, which will be at the Neptune Theater, Seattle, Washington, July 29th. Hope to see you there. We, of course, love playing audio on this show. And there's a particular clip of tape off of TikTok that we fell in love with actually a while ago. And it resurfaced last week on the show. and we were in Stitches, and then now people are telling us, actually, what we were laughing at is really the product of joke theft. You've got to be kidding me. That the person who put this funny tape together that we love so much was stealing someone else's work. Lying is like 95% of what I do. And should we care? We'll talk about that. Also, you know the show Jeopardy, right? You're familiar with that show?

Never let me slip, because if I slip, then I'm slipping.

One of those little contestant interviews they do has resurfaced lately for its very eerie relation to the disaster with that submersible that was lost near the Titanic. We'll play that tape for you. And I've got a theory, not a theory as to what happened, but I've got some thoughts on sort of the denouement of that whole submersible thing. I don't know if it's a hot take or not, but I'll share it with you all coming up. Oh, and we'll talk to this guy. He's the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships, their grace, their splendor, and all that intricate rigging. He is a soulful rocker from New Hampshire. He's Andrew Welsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke. I have a little story that I've been meaning to tell you. And why did this take? This is the beginning of a social engineering attack. Why did that jog your memory on the story?

Yeah, and we were doing a sound check, and you played that, and I made a yelping sound, and I was like, whoop, I meant to tell you something about that tape. Okay, so let's start there, actually. So can you remind the listeners, I'll put this on you, remind the listeners where that particular tape comes from.

I believe this comes from some of our cyber training that we would do at our soon-to-be former company, American Public Media. Boy, that's weird to say.

I know. In fact, I'm just getting Slack messages from our boss right now, Joanne, wanting to know how things are going. I'll have to get back to her after the show.

I'm going to file that time sheet.

You really do, actually. I think I filed mine, but you better get that in there. Yeah, and social engineering is one of the chapters in the cybersecurity training. Now, Luke, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to quiz you here a little bit. Do you remember what social engineering is?

Well, sure, of course. Social engineering is when somebody basically, when a hacker, one of the bad actors, is reaching out to somebody via social messaging or basically getting the human being to do the thing that lets them into the system versus some kind of a software hack or finding some kind of software vulnerability.

Oh, you're doing so well. Are you sure you want to leave APM? You wouldn't have had the answer to that question eight years ago.

Did you say that we at APM, the employees, were the first and last line of defense, Andrew?

Possibly. But, yeah, Social Engine, it's not like a blunt force attack or like trying to figure out a password or whatever. It's a human being is trying to get your information and actually trying to get you to give up your information somehow, right? And it's called social engineering. I can only say those words. This is the beginning of a social engineering attack. I was having dinner the other night with a friend of mine who was visiting a former Blaston Globe. Are you familiar with the Blaston Gobe? It's a newspaper in the New England area. No, former Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz, a good friend of mine from New Hampshire, kind of came up in the biz together there when I was working in public radio, and he was working for the Concord Monitor, I think. Anyway, he's a really good journalist, and he's working on a book now, And it is called The Longest Hardest Race. It's called The Longest Hardest Race. And it's about some sort of an auto race that was like, it pitted like Henry Ford or like, you know, the Ford Motor Company back in 1909 against two lesser known car companies. And they would race all the way across the country as like a way of kind of advertising their car, you know. Interesting. Yeah. So anyway, and it's really interesting because Ford cheated like crazy. really um yeah avowed anti-semite just great great guy anyway so it's you know but it's funny though because i kind of didn't realize okay this is an aside i'll admit but i kind of didn't realize that like there's a germ of truth to those wacky movies of the 60s and 70s where you have people who are like it's a mad mad mad mad world i think was one of them and there's another one we talk about all the time cannonball run cannonball run right and cannonball run too With Dom DeLuise, I believe And anyway, so it's funny to know That there were these cross-country Like, you know, just get by hook or by crook You gotta get across the country And the first one there wins all the notoriety or whatever Anyway There still are, I think there's one called the Gumball 5000

Oh, that might have come up on the show The Gumball 3000 I guess that's international But there are Still some, I mean, not super high profile But there are still some things like that where people are trying to set the record for driving across the country. And what that one comes down to, and this is less fun than a Dom DeLuise romp, but what it really comes down to is one guy is driving. There's two drivers, and then there's a navigator. And I think the navigator's main job is to try to figure out where the cops are. Because in order to set this record, you have to drive. Your average speed has to be 100 miles an hour. And so it's a very... I've seen clips of it online, these people trying to set the cross cross country driving speed record and it's just it's extremely tactical it's like joyless and tactical as opposed to like probably what this well actually i bet you this henry ford thing was joyless and tactical as well because they're trying to set this you know beat the other team or set this record or something again very little mirth the way that we were led to believe in things like it's a mad mad mad mad world well it's funny i almost wonder

if it'd be interesting to have him on the show i know we don't do a lot of book interviews but But the thing is, like, Eric was out here doing research for the book because it ended out here, I believe, in Seattle or certainly on the West Coast. And so he was out here checking various Seattle public records for various documentation from the time, stories from the time. Again, this all takes place in 1909. And when we had dinner with him, he was, you know, because he's just living and breathing this book and this story right now and has been for years. It was just like sitting down. He just like every question was another anecdote of something just like some crazy hijinks, shenanigans, cheating that happened along this along these roads. But anyway, the reason I bring all of this up is Eric has been, you know, reaching out just like by any means necessary to people who might be related to people who were involved in the story. Right. And so he's reaching out to grandchildren, you know, adult grandchildren or great grandchildren of people who might have been involved in the story somehow. And that's a tough thing to do, especially in this day and age, you know, finding somebody's phone number and having somebody actually pick up an unknown call, you know, and some guy that he reached, I believe, was a lawyer or, you know, a prominent, successful business person in his own right. he reached Eric reached out to this guy and the guy did talk to him but he just kept saying or I don't know if he kept saying but he said well how do I know this

isn't social engineering and i was just like wow this guy took the cyber security training and honestly is doing the right thing like if eric's saying hey i have some i have some questions about like people in your family long ago and like oh you're getting my mom's maiden name like what what information is this person who's pretending to be a quote-unquote reporter working on a quote unquote book and this guy was like is this social engineering wow that's the end of my story my

problem with by the way now i'm just reading all about this new york to seattle race um that happened that your friend is writing about um from i'm at the some kind of it was called the ocean to ocean race in 1909 did ford win legally and then it's going into all of the uh kind of protests that were lodged by the team that did not win they were called the shawmut team and they were alleging that the ford vehicle when it showed up in seattle had a new axle that wasn't stamped

from new york yes which violated one of the main rules which was no new axles yes because there were certain that that's really interesting and first of all luke just you know nobody read whatever luke's reading you want to wait for the longest hardest race to come out no i mean i'm

sure there'll be so much more texture and nuance and character development but that is huge because

this is supposed to be a testament to the durability of the car you couldn't you could replace things obviously the replaceable things like filters or oil or what have you but when it came to things like axles and motors you couldn't replace it because that's you know it's George Washington's axe as the old expression goes like is it really your car anymore if you're replacing the engine halfway through or is it the same car and so but that's where like Ford did all kinds of cheating like having having engines like kind of secret secreted by train in the literally a lot of the shit happened in the middle of the night and also just like paying off fair like they literally would have to use fairies to cross bodies of water where now there are bridges and like the four people getting there first and then paying off the people so that they wouldn't go back across to get the competition and stuff like that like real real dirty pool my friend i like

somebody in the comment section who's clearly a ford head because this is like a this is like a ford enthusiast website says well maybe the actual was changed without his knowing while the car was overhauled en route by one of the many ford dealers who were eager to see it win that's you're going a long way to you're thinking well maybe they didn't even try to change the actual maybe while they were sleeping someone else came in and changed the axle for them because they were such uh ford enthusiasts themselves they wanted to see them win right that's really you're really twisting yourself into a pretzel to defend the ford team yeah in this particular scenario yeah especially

if that if they're even saying it's some like ford some early version of a ford dealer or repair place it's like well they're still they're still acting in their own uh self-interest there i'm

just looking at these cars too these were like guess model t well the website is a model t enthusiast website i don't know if those vehicles were considered model a's or model t's i am not good with classic car conversations but it reminds me of i did that tv story a few weeks ago about the guy from kansas city who lived to be 109 charlie white the third and in his early days of life one of the things that he a formative event for him was when he was like about 18 or 19 he and two friends got in i think it might have been a model a and drove from kansas city out to Los Angeles which at that time was a tiny town when they drove through Arizona they were just driving in the desert there were no roads like you know there there were roads but there wasn't an interstate highway system that was like you just will cut through Arizona now on whatever freeway you're on and like their car would get stuck sometimes and then they would just have to lift the car up because that's how kind of simplistic and I guess you could say light this vehicle was three teenagers could pick the car up and carry it over to a less muddy spot and then drive it a little more or push it up a hill or do whatever. It was like a car that you could kind of ride in sometimes and sometimes carry if you needed to. It's crazy.

Mentos, the fresh maker.

But just the idea that somebody who was alive until not that long ago was going through at Arizona at a time that it was physically mostly desert and there were stretches where there was no direct road so you were just driving on the dirt. Like, it's crazy to me.

Yeah, it is. But I mean, that, yeah, like that's that was Eisenhower. Right. And so that's like 50s. And if the and again, I know that this is basic information and I'm just sort of freelancing here. But, you know, if that if those if the interstate system was established in the 1950s, imagine all of the time it would take to actually get it, you know, produced, you know. So it doesn't actually surprise me. It seems like, again, the older I get, the more I realize that time is basically the blink of an eye. But, yeah, it wasn't that long ago that we just didn't have the highways. Uh-huh. And, I mean, that's also, I think, tied into there's probably a lot of shadiness.

with the automobile industry and the interstate highway system i feel like i've heard at times about i mean because that was think about a boon for auto travel all of a sudden we're going to build a bunch of a bunch of avenues by which you can now go from point a to point b like that's a really good thing if what you sell is a car you know or what you make is a car yeah i mean

oh this is the part of the show where andrew heard one little headline he's really hoping that luke was following the story closer than him uh i'm just going to throw this out there to keep the conversation going but if it's a dead end it's a dead end but i heard a snippet of a news headline the other day saying that basically the um the electric vehicle industry has sort of after a while of a bunch of different manufacturers trying to create their own versions of the plugs that you charge these things with they're going to a standard and the standard is the one that Tesla established so it's sort of a win for Tesla but like as somebody who does not have an electric vehicle right now but probably will in his lifetime I sort of think like even if it's like technically a win for Tesla that's definitely a win for everybody we don't like just as a as somebody who uses a a smartphone that's had a million different chargers in the past 20 years since I've had smartphones like that will be a huge boon to just like getting people into EVs which I think we all agree is better for the world, right?

Exactly. I have a Hyundai, and it uses a USB port. Yeah, USB-C? They've switched over to USB-C, but I have to get the dongle for it. No, I'm with you. There's a way that standardization for that stuff is going to make everybody's life easier. And I guess as much as I'm not a fan of Elon Musk's, it just probably makes sense that it would go to the Tesla model because my guess is that's probably the most widely sold EV and also they have a ton of these charging stations all over, which is a whole other thing. I mean, that's one of the ways that this myth of Elon Musk being a self-built business genius, I mean, the amount of federal money that went into building all of these charging stations basically for Tesla or at least greatly subsidizing them is something that people don't talk about when the people that are like Elon Musk devotees, the amount of public money that's gone into the creation of Elon Musk's wealth is really something. but it does seem like it probably makes the most sense for that to be the standard thing i guess rivian the truck maker not to be confused with mentos the fresh maker um has has said that they are going to adopt that standard the tesla standard for that so that's a big do you know i think of you every time i see those trucks because uh there was a rivian facility down the street from where

we did the last tv telethon and i told you about it no just because they're beautiful beasts i think of you as a beautiful beast um but also because i didn't i didn't notice those trucks around me there were rivians on the road but i didn't see them chugging i never saw them driving i never saw them you know i'm a little car blind anyway and a little bit kind of just literally myopic and what i guess i pay attention to um and it's just i'm laughing there because i remember being a kid and saying i wanted to grow up to be a detective and my all the adults in my life saying like he is so observant and i'm just like the least observant adult i've ever met in my life so i don't know how i went from being a kid or maybe like adults are always surprised when a kid repeats something that he saw or said earlier oh he's so observant and i'm just kind of like i literally looked at you in a coffee shop one time and didn't recognize you and went out with

my work so anyway the other way to look at it is you're very focused i'm very i'm very focused on

the unimportant things in life so anyway you would maybe it was be maybe it came up because we were doing a thon near i don't know why but you had mentioned a rivian truck on the show at one point i was like i have no idea what you're talking about and you're like they have very distinctive kind of headlights and kind of the front end of them like keep an eye out and you'll see them and then i think within a couple of days i genevieve pointed one out to me i was like oh now i see him all over the place and i'm like oh yep there's a luke truck haha i love that i get

to be a vehicle in your mind um those trucks are so interesting to me because and listen we probably have listeners that have one now first of all i'm very jealous like if i were looking i mean if i were a person of of unlimited means i would 100 own one of those things but um but like what i wonder is how much they're used as trucks they're such a beautiful object i don't and and by the way this goes for sort of all trucks i said this i don't know a year ago on the show or something i was driving somewhere and I saw a small truck that was just burdened down with all kinds of like debris maybe construction debris or something and I thought to myself most of the time when I see a truck that's doing a real truck thing it's actually a smaller truck that someone bought maybe somebody who's a little bit on the economic margins who's doing handyman work or stuff where it's

you know you're digging a trench or you're whatever and like you got the truck that you could afford to fill up with the stuff to run to the dump then you see these beautiful f950 king dominion ranch edition like these trucks that are just like wildly large and have all this capacity and you never see anyone carrying any debris there's sometimes there's like a a malamute dog in the back just riding in the back that's like the most you'll see in the in the bed of of like a big old fancy truck that's got all this towing capacity and like whatever you want to call it um so that being said the rivian is such a beautiful vehicle but i've never seen a rivian with any kind of payload thing any thank you that's the word i'm looking for i have never seen a rivian with a payload in it and again if you're gonna drive a truck and not actually use it to haul stuff around i would rather it's an electric truck than a gigantic gas guzzling monster so I'm not judging anyone I'm just it's an interesting thing to buy because I wonder what exactly the thought process is of acquiring a Rivian I have a lot of judgment when I see those

just especially here in the city because I don't have a real chip on my shoulder about that too but like you'll see these huge huge trucks that are spotless nothing in in the bed of the truck at all it seems like they're they're only used to kind of re-emphasize the the manliness of the person driving or at least that's like what i always jump to and then when these trucks are maybe taking up two spots or they're backing into a spot and their hitch covers half the sidewalk or whatever and you could easily hit your shin on it or whatever like i have all i just jumped to so many conclusions about those trucks the one thing i was thinking about the other day as i was probably rolling my eyes at one i did remember that there was somebody in my extended family who bought basically had one of these beasts and it looked like that but the reason they bought it was because they had a boat and that they had recently bought and the only way to get the boat and they would like you know like take it i think i don't know out of the the lake in the winter i don't know what it was sure so it's kind of like one of those things where they did need it a few times a year to pull this boat around but aside from that you know they were just using it to go to the grocery store or whatever and so i'm like i guess there are some people who might have these things you don't have to be in like a ford truck commercial where they're putting the like railroad ties down on the truck bed and you see the struts bounce you know that you know that shot oh i sure rock you've got to get that seager going you've got to get the seager going you've got to have uh cranston uh growling into the microphone do you know i did an episode with genevieve uh it was called stars they just like trucks on after these messages where i uh i played for her all these famous voices of people doing like famous actors doing truck commercials and they're all super growly it might have been inspired by our conversation about uh job bluth why can't i think of the actor's name as will arnett will arnett you know he does the truck he does some trucks and he goes forward right or ford or chevy i think cranston i think he does ram i think he does ram and i think cranston does ford oh yeah i guess dodge ram and so it started with me just spoofing on like these actors who we know from malcolm in the middle you gotta be ready for a ford truck like these they're like doing this competition to go super low and so i played a game with genevieve if she could identify the famous people who were making the growling noises anyway um listen to after these messages that was a really good episode uh and that's where i land

on that um i as you were talking i was trying to find i should have i should have sent myself this from tiktok the other day i didn't think it would come up on the show but my just on the subject of i guess celebrities doing something which is loosely what's what we've been talking about there's this super cut going around tiktok of celebrities bragging about their wood in their homes based on and like from like you know architectural digest does this like it's MTV Cribs, but it's the Architectural Digest. Do you know about this? No, but I think I can imagine it. It's very popular because, of course, we're curious what are the living conditions of people that we've seen on television or whatever. But what it turns out is going on is that lots of people with a lot of money have been told a story about some kind of thing they have that has wood in it. Like, this was wood from the wherever. This was actually the first. Like, it's a, what's his name, Michael Imperioli going, and actually, this guitar, the neck of this guitar, the wood, was from the Chelsea Hotel, where I lived for one time. And what you realize is, lots of famous people read, lots of rich people have been told that the wood in something that they bought is from something else that makes it interesting, and it becomes a topic of conversation so much more than you'd expect on these little videos.

That would make a good supercut. I did not kind of know that, but I also like everything that you said is very imaginable. Let's put it that way.

Right. I'll find it and and play it for you at some point. Speaking of audio, when we come back from this quick break. uh we've got some audio from jeopardy a bit odd bit of i guess you would say coincidence that was related to the uh the submersible and uh also we're going to find out or at least we're going to look into the origins of our latest favorite piece of audio uh from the guy who was picked up from the rap battle by his grandmama coming up here on tbtl hello and welcome to top story okay um last week a piece of audio that we like came back around i don't remember did you use it as intro tape or why did we start talking about the rap battle tape

i can't remember i did use it as intro tape at some point recently but it also came up during a conversation on the show and this oh i know why i played a little quiz with you at the beginning of a show i'm i had i had a missing record in my spreadsheet a record of what i played when at the beginning of the show and i asked you to guess what 16 second or 17 second piece of tape began some show in april 2022 or something along those lines just the type of content that i proudly bring to the show every day um and the tape in question is this so this was an old tiktok video that you sent me a couple of years ago it's short it's sweet it's just a it's just a guy sitting i believe in the passenger's side of a car or something saying this into his phone hey grandma

can you come get me from the rap battle no i didn't win no he saw you drop me off it was pretty much over after that he did a pretty devastating rhyme about it

i was trying to not laugh because now i'm like i have mixed feelings but the devastating rap part is never not going to make me laugh well you sent me an update from some of the listeners who pointed out that this is apparently a tweet that has been going around for a long time and i guess presumably long before this guy made this video right so i think that the most likely scenario is that this guy had seen the tweet and was kind of doing a, if we're going to be generous, was sort of, you know, recontextualizing it and presenting it as, what would happen if this was animated? What if this really came to life, this tweet, and someone was doing it? For being ungenerous, he saw a funny tweet and then decided to just basically, like, steal the content and put it on the internet.

Can I just give the name? So somebody who goes by Gussie on Slack says, I think that might that tape might be a swipe of his famous of this famous old tweet. So it's like a tweet that people had to recognize as sort of already being famous, which was just somebody. And let's see if I can actually give this person this user credit as well. Somebody who goes by C-H-U-U-C-H. Don't worry about it. Chooch, I guess. Chooch. Like Snoop Dogg says, Chooch. That was a thing. Snoop Dogg was trying to make Chooch a thing. Really? the handle is actually at ch 000 ch so okay then maybe that's chooch i don't know man did it yip or did it yif um in 2013 so way back in 2013 this person chooch says hey grandma can you pick me up from the rap battle it's over no i lost he saw you drop me off and did a pretty devastating rhyme about it so the fact that whoever posted this on our social media site said this is a famous old tweet and i'm sorry i'm kind of getting ahead of myself for my argument a little bit i was a little surprised at the beginning of the show when you kind of categorically said that this was a stolen thing I immediately assumed like oh this is some very famous tweet that a lot of people have fun with in the sort of TikTok and hip-hop tradition of sampling and sampling and remixing no well it's

the only this guy doing it is the only time I've ever seen it which is why I thought that he had just hit upon an unbelievably funny premise for a little little video and the thing that I kept saying was it's so interesting that this person the guy that whose audio we've been using has like some other tweets but none of them are as funny as this one and there he doesn't seem like he's not like a content creator he looks like somebody who maybe just works in you know the construction business or something else and then just makes these little videos occasionally but doesn't have like millions of followers and doesn't have like 10 videos that have all this many follows or are 10 TikToks I guess that are like it was it was like a person who really wasn't that funny all of a sudden you know what it was like it was like when I was doing stand-up comedy at the Stars of Tomorrow Kiwanis Club talent show when I was in eighth grade and I part of the material was my own that I had written and part of the material I had stolen from Stephen Wright the comedian because i can't tell which was which well oddly enough most of the people there did not were not familiar with the work of stephen wright what during the performance one guy did yell hey, those are Stephen Wright jokes. That did happen. But what I can tell you is if you were just in the audience and you didn't know who Stephen Wright was, you were like, oh my God, this eighth grade kid has hit upon some extremely bizarre and universal concepts that I've never thought of. The difference in quality between the jokes that I wrote and the jokes that I stole from Stephen Wright was so, so vast. The difference was so noticeable that they must have just thought, Like, what happened? What did, like, lightning strike this kid? And suddenly he was able to write – because about three minutes of this is unlistenable. And then about five minutes of it is unbelievably good. Worldly, too. World-class. Yes, exactly. World-class and worldly. Like, speaks of much more life experience than we think this kid in this, you know, Chicago Cubs hat that he got from the pro image is, you know, capable of. That's sort of what was going on with this. It was like this guy has mostly, like, very forgettable little videos that, you know, people make all the time. And then this one thing that's like next level funny to me, which is much more kind of explainable now that we realize that the like the great likelihood is he saw the tweet and he just I do give him credit for delivery. I do think that delivery is pretty good, but I do think it's I mean, it feels to me to be theft because it's not I don't know how you should present this in a way that says this is based on a tweet. But it's definitely That's not how it appeared to me and that's why I sent you The tape and that's why I up until Like literally yesterday or something when I was Looking at these messages from you was under the impression That this one random dude had come up with this rap Battle joke when I thought was very funny like I was Misled by the whole thing which makes me think it's Not a hundred percent cool

Now here's the deal I Don't pay attention usually to whatever the Hashtags and Text at the bottom of a TikTok are you know and again i'm rarely on tiktok unless somebody like you sends me one in which uh case i should meanwhile i'm rarely off tiktok i know and i'm just remembering now that you sent me a tiktok yesterday i haven't watched yet sorry um i will watch it after i will watch my tiktok after the show today no um so i just i i went back so the guy who posted it his uh username is msd123467 um his his things i mean it's not like nobody's watching his tiktoks and i don't know how much of this is automatically generated but like the lowest ones i can find are 5 000 but those are few and far between he averages more like 25 000 to 60 000 views per thing well actually maybe i've seen i see them going up into the 60s and 80s but like it looks like maybe on average more between like 25 and 30 000 views so you know that's that's pretty good so somebody's watching this guy um but i'm looking at what i have been able to find as far as him and he is in a car It looks like he's in a passenger seat. He's talking on a cell phone or fake talking on a cell phone to his fake grandma. And the hashtags are hashtag throwback, hashtag repost, hashtag rap battle, hashtag GMA for some reason. And good morning, America. I guess so. Hey, buddy. Yeah. And what I don't see here is hashtag homage, hashtag hat tip to Gooch or Mooch or Chooch or whoever it was. it's also confusing because he's this makes it sound like he's reposting himself here was this not even the original video that he posted it's no i think why he did that hashtag is because he

wants people to repost it so if someone's searching in tiktok for a hashtag they're like oh what's something fun to repost and if they put that in as the search terms they would get to his

video okay well then if you take that along with the first two hashtags let's just really do this Luke, do you have a magnifying glass? You're not going to need it for this, but it would make me feel better if you're holding a magnifying glass and ready to really investigate this with me. The first two hashtags are hashtag throwback and hashtag repost. Is that a slight nod? And again, I'm not, I mean, maybe it's just theft. I'm just trying to explore this. I don't have a real, I don't have a real stance here. But when I heard it was a famous tweet, I was like, oh, this is somebody who assumes we all know this famous tweet. But oh, actually, do you want to know how much of the tweet had it had? The tweet had almost 60,000 retweets starting back in 2013 and about 117,000 likes. I guess the hashtag throwback is a little bit.

I could see the argument that that is an indication like, hey, it's a throwback to a thing we all know. I could see if I could see the person thinking that maybe that was a nod to the fact that this is not their original work I I also just think this is a I mean again if this guy's getting you know in the 60s of thousands of views that's certainly not insignificant for a lot of the videos I was going to say maybe he's also a person who just doesn't really understand how attribution works or how content

works and just kind of thinks like hey you know um this was a funny thing that i saw i'm going to repeat it i'm trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt on this but it definitely it didn't feel to me like yeah he should have been like hashtag retweet i don't know i don't know what the hashtag should have been but i felt like it should have been more clear that this was not his original work because like i said this is not something that's going around that i've ever seen that was going around tiktok where you had hundreds of people because usually what happens with that is that's a piece of audio so it'll be like a piece of audio from like you know Vanderpump Rules your favorite show and then people will be like you know lip syncing or lip dubbing over the audio but in different sort of situations and environments and that's kind of where in the comedy sort of lies this isn't one of those things as far as I know this was him just kind of doing a thing that again I thought was really funny but that was not very clear to the average person that this was not his original joke and you would think if

this was something that was super popular in that way then it would develop its own hashtag as well although I'm going boy you want to know what's fun type grandma rap battle into TikTok you just get a bunch of people rap battling their grandma but I do see another guy hey grandma okay so that's him again that's somebody lip syncing over his thing so again sort of drafting off of that okay so interesting it could be it's in this gray area between homage and theft and maybe we're leaning a little bit more towards theft

theft but yes but I'm not I kind of want to I mean I don't know it feels like it's it's you're right it's it's in between homage and theft but it's also like somehow it's not doesn't make me furious but also I feel like there's a better way to do this my big question though is do we keep playing the audio because the gift that we were given as podcasters who tend to also straddle that line between homage and theft we couldn't have played the tweet

this is mean this is me closing tabs my apologies what were you listening to no i don't know what just happened i was trying to close out tick tock but i think i oh you know what i did i clicked on the following tab i wasn't even paying attention to what i was doing but you know how the internet tricks you now they put little red dots next to something so it seems like oh i need to check this out there's an alert but there's never an alert it's like hey you should add more things to your shopping basket or did you know about our new features and so i fell for it i wasn't i was listening to you i wasn't paying attention i clicked the thing that says following with a little red dot which means that i guess the few people i'm following have new content and it started auto playing probably pd usa might have been i have i follow about 20 people i think um hey did you get that photo i sent of you of who's your who i know you have a lot of favorite um a lot of favorite tiktokers but the guy that you were obsessed with maybe two summers ago and maybe still are but really pointedly obsessed with him a while back he's a really skinny guy he's got a funny handle he's got a very thinny a thin little mustache and he kind of talks like this we were obsessed with him you would always send me his stuff kip dynamite no wow i really

thought i was gonna get there i think i saw me you send me a picture of this person i was at a bar

um i don't know like on capitol hill like uh a few weeks ago and it looked like it was i couldn't tell if he was a flyer because he's touring as a comedian but it looked more like he's just like pop art now like somebody had plastered his face up on something i can you resend that because yeah let me try this oh well wait you know this guy when you're gonna go oh when when i get to it i'm

doing from the bathroom i think that that's the guy from hall and oats oh is it i didn't know why you sent me this i literally thought this was i thought this was an accidental text you sent this Text to me at a sort of a later hour, maybe a Saturday night Yeah, and I remember looking at it the next morning and thinking oh, I bet you Andrew meant to send this someone else because I don't think we have a backstory Related to Hall and Oates that I can think of is that I think that's I think that's Oates from Hall and Oates

But so I'm trying to think of are you oh really? Oh, okay

Because it looks like you know John Coltrane you've got obviously Obviously, John Goodman from Lebowski. Like, it looks, it's an ad for some boozy brunch, but it looks like it's got photos of otherwise kind of famous people. So you are looking at that now. I scrolled back in our text messages. Right above that is a foot shot that I sent you of me sitting in the waiting pool.

Oh, yeah, stop sending the pictures of your feet. Some people pay extra for that, Andrew. So that, but now seeing, so that's so funny. I'm not a Hall of Notes guy. So seeing that that is Daryl Hall. You know, that's Daryl Hall and Hall is John Oates, John Oates. OK, so that's John Oates. Does that picture of John Oates remind you of the tick tocker who I'm thinking of? Because that's so OK, I'll figure this out. He's got a really funny name and he talks in a really high voice like this, I think. And I was obsessed with him. You were really obsessed. What's the nature of his comedy? Like, would you just super weird? But if that doesn't tell you much. Oh, here's here he is right here. Gucci

pineapple oh that does look like he looks I mean it's Gucci pineapple John Oates are they this are you sure that's not I'm looking at Gucci right now very certain these are not the same person but I totally understand why you would

think that I mean it is astounding he's making do a side-by-side do a side can

we can we screen could this be the show pick today yes I have to do this right is this dress is the stress Gucci pineapple or John Oates here and I'm

gonna do a really janky one right now because I'm just gonna take a photo of this with my phone so i can send it to you but i'll do it better for later i'm doing the old man thing i totally see why you do understand right like i'm looking at this he looks exactly it just occurred i just remembered that we're doing a podcast i'm not even joking i just

remembered that we're doing a podcast that's when you're in the flow state that's when this is all sorry everybody no listen that's like you know actors will talk about losing themselves in the character and you forget that's that is the apotheosis of podcasting when you forget that you're podcasting that's when it's all working now um can i play you while i'm waiting for that photo to come in this is not going to pay off because it's highly visual but can i play you some of this celebrity wood brags yeah oh yeah please i wanted to hear it actually so this is from architectural i think this is mostly i think this may be exclusively from architectural digest magazine i don't think i can narrate who each person is without it getting too choppy it starts with the actor Dakota Johnson from like Fifty Shades of Grey and other things like that and then it just cycles through a bunch of people just talking about what the origin of the wood

is in their beautiful homes. This was made out of the wood from Winston Churchill's yacht. I'm not lying. This is a teak bathtub. It's amazing. It's made by Scottish barrel makers. So the neck

of this guitar was made from wood that was recovered during the renovation of the Chelsea hotel to somewhere i lived at one time so we purchased these three barns out of wisconsin

that were built by this incredible amish community a little over 120 years ago i bought this in new

york this bathroom door and it was in jackie onassis's building these doors are actually from the paw which is really cool the moment that i knew that this was the place that we would raise our kids is this 300 year old oak tree

it's a sewing box and it was owned by the one and only ann margaret we do also have like a lot of

teak that was um rupaul okay i believe with this but it was a wood sewing box that's why it falls that's why it falls under the cat from an old bar called chumley sorry they're going back michael imperiale has apparently another guitar that's built out of wood of course he's got a million

guitarist of course he does it's a sewing box and it was owned by the one and only ann margaret

we do also have like a lot of teak the body was from an old bar called chumley's this cabinet it

was in one of the oldest castles in sweden it was also all teak and then just wood heaps and heaps and heaps of wood i love wood i love the wood that goes around the most expensive wood you'll have ever seen my favorite part of this room is really the wood that's patrick the stick and here's the porcelain replication of the stick

who knew that is wonderful is that a really i want to i don't know if this is the original uh i think it's from somebody named carolyn mckenzie uh watch i'm gonna be like i watch carolyn mckenzie just like do you want to hear uh celebrity wood brags part two epic tables yes i think i again i i'm finding this through someone named carolyn mckenzie who plays uh who performs on tiktok under crazy salad comedy i don't know if this is uh their original work or not but whatever okay so now we are on part two celebrity wood brags epic tables looks like it's starting with chelsea handler talking about her dining room table my dining room table and

The wood from this is from the piers in Venice, Italy.

This porch is the home of this giant cypress table. It was a sinker log, so it was buried in the West Bank of New Orleans.

This table is called the Soma table. It's made in a very small village in France.

Handmade and crafted by none other than Nick Offerman.

This is a Japanese door that's the countertop of the table. I found this old sewing table. We had these artists from Los Angeles, and they made us a replica of the table. The thing that's epic about this table.

This table is actually really special. One solid piece of wood. Two pieces of wood. A charred big maple leaf. I love it. The chairs are amazing. This is like a tree. This is sharp.

We live right here. That was, I believe, Adam Levine from, what's that, Maroon 5? Maroon 5, I was saying we live right here.

and putting his hand on a gigantic dining table. There apparently is a level of money that you get where one of the first things you go out and buy is a massive, massive dining table.

I believe that's a joke in the new Fletch movie as well. Oh, interesting. Speaking of intro tape, I play this tape from the movie Fletch starring Jon Hamm. When I say the movie Fletch, obviously I'm being an idiot here. it's most famously a pair of movies with Chevy Chase from the 1980s I think of it first as the book by Gregory McDonald and then it was rebooted or kind of remade with John Hamm a very very strange movie like tonally it's like I liked it but it really was struggling to figure out what it was as a movie this new Fletch one but anyway at one point John Hamm's character Fletch goes undercover as he often does and i think he's going in as a journalist going into some sort of like kind of influencer type person's house um and she's giving him a tour and she's talking about the wood of the table all being like one piece of wood or something like that and she is

the one who goes on to say this every single piece i curate is bespoke bespoke i love that word what does it mean again bespoke bespoke uh it's when an object bespeaks it be talks it no wait it be teaches us something about ourselves you know i uh do you know who is uh who's the other

person in that scene you would recognize her let me see if i can figure that out she had a pretty small role um but uh i watched that movie maybe a couple of weeks or a few weeks after i came out and i immediately grabbed that tape used it as intro tape the next monday and i got a uh a note from genevieve's sister who listens to the show saying i've been waiting she's like i watched that movie when it dropped i've been waiting for that to be intro tape i wonder how frequently that

happens for folks that listen to the show they see something they're like at what point will that make its way into the sort of tbtl lexicon yeah it kind of delighted me it's kind of like

okay we do have you know there's a piece of tape has to be funny yes but also has to have like sort of a sense of rhythm and a good place to end and like there is sort of a pattern that goes along with a lot of that stuff when it's pulled from a movie or a tv show by the way i have gotten this

photo from you and you're right i mean the similarity is eerie and in the even down to their eyebrows and the expression like their eyes he raises his eyes you're right that's that's but

I'm what that's him that's oats, but I wonder if is gucci pineapple doing that's what I'm starting to wonder about

is Because it's I didn't realize the similarity until you sent me these two pictures But it's I mean, maybe that's just a certain kind of her suitness where you get that those kind of very strong eyebrows and that kind of Very thunderous mustache if you choose to grow it and curly hair, but then he raises his eyes I mean, he literally looks like he's doing like he's doing an impression of that photo

know like it's so similar i couldn't believe that there was just some random and again this is kind of a montage of posters like you say like kind of like uh like it wasn't in the bathroom but it's kind of near the restrooms of a bar i was in at capitol hill and so you can't see what else is written on this particular poster because it's kind of plastered over but it's just like his little face sort of poking out from the from the back and i just i was like why is i didn't know his name was gucci pineapple at the time but i'm like why is that tiktok guy why is his face plaster

the corner of this bar and why won't Luke return my texts well I'm really glad this came up again um I did remember we're podcasting but I don't care but just on a personal level this is helpful to me because I was like huh that's because we don't you and I don't have any like shared hall and oats humor per se and so like I was like that is the oddest thing for Andrew to take a picture of and send to me again I just thought maybe that was meant for somebody else I I was just like i had no idea why you had sent me that picture was probably why i didn't comment on it because i was like i don't exactly know what to say about that um and also i've certainly sent a many a many a text at certain hours where something is striking me as incredibly meaningful or funny and then i wake up the next morning like maybe less yeah that's why i have so many feet photos exactly in my text chain i'm telling you people on only fans would pay a lot to be behind that paywall and you get to just live there anyway um uh but i'm really glad i got an explanation of what you were thinking because he does look exactly like gucci pineapple so i can see exact i can see why you would why you would send me that um all right uh there's this tape that's been uh going around and by tape i mean some of the worst uh recording probably ever of of television programming because what what we and this is funny the the premise of not the premise of tape the The description of this audio tape is,

A guy is on Jeopardy, he's one of the contestants Unrelated to anything He is a dead ringer For Steve Martin He looks so much like Steve Martin If he told me he was Steve Martin I would think he was Steve Martin And it's so much so that it's mentioned In one of these articles I don't know, like the New York Post Or somebody's like, oh and by the way He looks exactly like Steve Martin But that's not the point of this tape This guy is telling a story to our pal Ken Jennings About how he uh was supposed to go on that submersible bound down to the titanic not the i don't think this mission that that ended poorly but a different one but he had to skip it because it was the weekend of his son's wedding and so at the time i don't know how many months ago this actually was the anecdote but at the time the premise of the of the whole conversation is man what a bummer of scheduling that you missed a chance to go to the titanic for your son's wedding this is the audio and why i say it's the worst audio is because it's just someone pointing their phone at a television and everywhere i looked on the internet this is the audio everyone's linking to this is apparently the only place that this exists so just are we not at the naval postgraduate

school and a pretty good nautical story here you went to your own son's wedding but at great cost is that right that's right kj i have a friend who uh are we going with kj i like that that's right

kj maybe this really is steve barton that's a pretty funny a pretty funny little um you know

overjoined her to ken operates a company that will take you out to the wreck of the titanic wow you go out in a boat and then you go down in a submersible craft and tour the wreckage it sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but through a miracle of bad timing my son john and daughter-in-law caitlin were getting married that weekend i was very happy to go there as a beautiful wedding and uh not a shred of regret in my life there's a joke here somewhere about

a wedding and undersea wreckage but it sounds like it was a wonderful event sb if i may oh

that's why he calls him sb because he called him kj see that by the way that's a classic i feel like that's a classic ken moment he walks right up to the edge of making a anti-marriage joke but then he backs right away just gets up gets right up to the edge and then just steps back now the thing about this everybody that's going around everyone's like oh my god this guy survived well the thing is i'm sure whatever mission he was supposed to go on ended uneventfully so it's not like he was supposed to be on this one that that was lost at sea or under the sea that would be a much more um kind of you know i guess what scary moment or something and in fact there were i've been reading more articles about some other people who uh were going to go on this and and one very rich person because you had to be pretty rich to get on this thing uh his son was doing the research his fairly young son i mean maybe like teenage and was going to go on with him and said this doesn't seem safe to me and they pulled out so that's like a more kind of crazy story of like almost being on something that ended very obviously disastrously now here's the thing i have been thinking a lot about how what they now think happened with the implosion of this thing because of course they found some debris and and and so as opposed to this scenario that a lot of us were imagining i don't really know how much you really were thinking about this or caring about this story last week when it was going on was it it was everywhere in the news but were you like interested in it were you reading up on it was just kind of one of those noise things that just

was happening all over for you no i was actually a little bit more dialed because i some some big stories sometimes if i don't catch the beginning of them they do sort of become noise to me and then i have to ask you or genevieve like hey can you catch me up on this um like the the johnny depp trial was a and the amber herd thing was a big one of those um but uh this one i was paying a little bit more attention to and also you won't be surprised to hear that a lot of my content came from the Dan Lebitard show. They interviewed a couple of interesting people about it. I don't have their names in front of me, of course, but like one was a former military submarine guy. And another guy is a guy who was part of this small adventuring community. And he had actually, he'd actually already put down $10,000 to go in this thing at some point.

Oh, and was he the guy that pulled out and then wanted his money back?

I don't know if he wanted his money back, but he definitely pulled out And he gave up his like $10,000 deposit or whatever it was because he just it was a very level headed interview where they sort of set up his kind of adventuring ways and the types of stuff he does and how the people in this community kind of all know each other because you're you're both you have the financial means to do weird stuff like have dinner on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro or whatever the type of stuff they do up in Blue Origin. Right. And also like, yeah, in the space stuff or whatever. But he also said that, like, I put in my money. But then the more I heard about this, I just had a million red flags, many of which we've all heard in the news before, like some of the red flags of this company and like what they what they had constructed and how they had constructed it. But he had he had a lot of dazzling details. He's like even a small one or a smaller one.

As far as what's being talked about in the press is like, just like the, he said that all the tubes on the outside of this thing were on the outside of this thing. Like tubes that you need in order to survive inside. He's like, this thing is designed to go poking around wrecks. Like, why would you have the tubes on the outside? You know what I mean? Like they could hang up on something. He just had a million little dazzling details and perspective on this that I had not thought of before.

well I was also pretty pretty obsessed with this story I get I think I get really fixated on stories where like with the the soccer team in Thailand that was trapped in the caves I mean that had a miraculous outcome I even years ago was really obsessed with this submarine disaster that happened in Russia this submarine called the Kursk which which had an explosion like some of the like torpedoes went off and it disabled the sub and it sank to the bottom but there were still like 23 people alive on the sub and this idea when there's like a situation where someone's life is or people's lives are in danger but we might be able to get to them but there's a ticking clock i mean that's a pretty obviously like intriguing kind of thing so i was following it pretty closely and my you know like everyone i was putting myself in the place of like what would it be like to be in the submersible it's sitting on the floor of the ocean you you know you only have you know you know what the oxygen kind of levels are etc and you're just what hoping against hope what what's the conversation like in there are they not talking because they're trying to preserve oxygen like I was imagining them trapped in there and just what an absolutely unbelievably emotionally and mentally terrible thing that would be on the other hand what appears to have happened is that in less than a millisecond because that's how fast it is something was there was a breach and the thing imploded the thing smashed into basically nothingness in like before your body can register pain like the time that it takes for your for the pain receptors to tell your brain hey we're hurting is like something longer than half of a millisecond in other words the ending that these folks met and of course for their families it's tragic and i don't want to you know i don't want to act like that's not the case but as far as being this being how someone's life ends. Imagine this. Your dream your whole life has been to see the Titanic. You're gazing upon the Titanic and then nothingness. That's it. No pain, no awareness. The last thing that's going on in your brain is the thing you've been dreaming of for possibly your whole life. I feel like I'd sign up for that. Not like this year, but at some point. And I'm really not trying to be glib. I'm just trying to say this went from being a story about what I thought was the worst possible ending someone could meet to being in the top three best case scenarios of I mean I think most of us think we would like to pass away peacefully in our sleep you go to sleep one night and you just don't wake up that would be you know again hopefully at a ripe old age but like that's a very calm way to shuffle off of this mortal coil this one might even have that beat because when you go to sleep you're just going to sleep this is like this for me it'd be like the seahawks win the super bowl and then actually more the mariners win the world series walk off home run by julio rodriguez and then that's the last image in my brain and then

just like and then um on to the great beyond yeah and obviously just all the caveats i want to be very careful talking about this because of of course the tragedy and the people who are left behind but specifically the angle that you're taking here is from the perspective that we're all going to die like and so it's you know very human I think to think about like well what is the what what is the best case scenario for that situation and then you know that's something that I think about a lot too and it's funny I'm not nitpicking here but you even say like if that's something that you could sign up for you would but even like in a certain way it's like not even that almost spoils it like the the thing about it is like that you didn't even know it was coming suppose like you're doing something that is kind of inherently dangerous but also i think your point has more resonance because of the complete two opposite ends of the spectrum yes of something like this because one is one of the most horrifying you know there's a young person on board too right like um and so one is one of the most horrifying uh scenarios you can think of and i won't paint the whole picture here but there's five people and for a while we thought that they were all alive down there watching their resources dwindle and again and feeling responsibility for each other and a young person just everything that goes along with that let's not dwell it just makes me a puddle to think about that um no matter who it is just putting yourself in those shoes um and then to say okay but instead it was the complete opposite it was just like i was looking out a window at something amazing and then all of a sudden i ceased existing at least that's my belief system right yeah um i understand exactly what you're talking about there like it's even it's even like to not have any kind of four.

warning and to be in a blissful place i think that it's um i think that's a reasonable thing to think about when you're trying to put yourself when when we all look ahead to our eventual fate i mean i'm not trying to be too dark here but like of course we think about that don't we

yeah absolutely and i think the yeah this the not the not realizing it i mean i guess there's two ways to look at it one way is well i think i think we can agree that the i the idea that the sub was just trapped on the titanic or stuck at the bottom is quite possibly one of the absolute worst ways that anyone's life could come to an end but also like there is a universe in which sometimes people talk about when they have time to prepare because maybe they've been given a diagnosis or they're aware that their life is coming to an end some people i think take a great sort of satisfaction in kind of you know um sort of making the rounds and visiting with friends and and and sort of saying you know i love you to the people they want to say that to and i guess there could be if you were in a very like, and none of us, I guess, really know how we're going to be on this until we come up against it. But if you were in a very, I guess you could say balanced emotional place where you were able to just kind of like be relatively okay with the fact that your life is coming to an end and you could kind of like use the heads up as a way of like, again, just spending some really special time with some people that you love before, before you're, you're done being here, I guess that could be a good outcome. I just, that seems also rare because usually that if there's an illness then that illness is so pressing that you know you're not able to really do that but i just have to say like i'm i'm you know again i don't want to sound like i'm trying to make a joke out of this or make a bit out of it but like when i learned i would i felt a weird happiness is the wrong word but i felt like a massive amount of relief when i heard that they found debris and that they figured out this thing imploded and didn't just like get stuck on the bottom i was like oh thank god was basically what went through my mind yeah no that generally

as well yeah that idea and again i i mean it's hard for me to put myself in that situation because i'm claustrophobic anyway you know just add that to my list what is that speaking of tiktok so

you're saying we're not going to do next year's a tv telethon in a submersible anyway what was the

what was the far side cartoon where it's like somebody's like trying to like get over all of their fears at once of both like snakes confined spaces and heights and they just have somebody like dangling off of a crane and a tiny little module filled with snakes or something i'm not getting most of that wrong but anyway um yeah i mean like i it's hard for me to put myself in that scenario because i wouldn't go in that scenario like um but uh yeah i mean for me being in a cramped tight space and and and knowing that well whatever we don't have to repaint the picture

We all know what this I'm also trying to find far side getting over your fears. And it turns out you just get a lot of motivational shit, a lot of motivational

posts, I didn't quotes here far.

Nothing. Oh, is that? Oh, I see it. Wait, it's like literally the first thing. You're exactly right. Professor Gallagher and his controversial techniques of simultaneously confronting the fear of heights, snakes and the dark.

Oh, in the dark. And it's exactly what you described, Andrew.

It's somebody who's who's just in like a phone booth type of thing that's being suspended out of a window and um it's funny though but it doesn't so it is suspended out of a window

but it doesn't say anything about heights in the caption huh it just says snakes no it says uh yeah a fear of heights snakes and the dark oh height snakes and dark so the premise is yeah now the

thing is this is a funny joke this is a good spoof but it's not actually super far off from what they really do sometimes for phobias now they don't do them all at once but exposure therapy really out of an apartment window it's an effective uh it's like an effective uh you know um way of of getting helping people get over sort of irrational fears and phobias is to just like if somebody is is afraid of germs um you know you you might have them go put their hand on a dumpster for as long as they can and then you ask them what's your what's your level of what's your stress level right now one to ten and they'll say ten and then like three minutes later what's your stress level it'll be like seven because it's just like you can't and then if you're the last person holding

the dumpster with their hand on the dumpster they win the dumpster right they do it's hand on a hard

dumpster hand on a hard dumpster here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not from a female all right an email or v-mail before we skied at all

sure yeah sorry to cut you off there luke i just really wanted to get that joke in there and i was I was a little bit worried if I didn't, like, step on you a little bit. It wouldn't have gotten in there. I didn't feel stepped on at all.

I was also looking for a way out of the segment.

There you go.

And you provided it, so I appreciate that.

Power up, baby. All right, I have a voicemail I'm going to play for you here. First, a little bit of a setup. And I don't think I've ever told this story on the show before, so I don't think this is why Summer left us this voicemail. But a little story about my past. I went to college at Kent State University. By the way, it turns out I stayed in the same dormitory as another 10, although they were there about 10 years before.

for me um kunst hall show your respect to kunst hall everybody sure put some respect on their name exactly um anyway um when i was in college i took some you know broadcast classes right and one of the radio broadcast classes i took was really focused on commercial production which probably makes sense um you know is probably what most of us who were interested in radio would have gone on to do you know working you know in-house making little commercials or promos or whatever and I remember one assignment was you know make a commercial for Calphalon pans I'd never heard of Calphalon before but that was the specific assignment and then the other one that we did or another one that we did was like I think we had more latitude about what we wanted to promote and I think maybe it was supposed to be an on-campus thing I'm not sure I chose some sort of on-campus, I don't know, maybe I saw a flyer and decided I'll take this flyer for some organization on campus or something along those lines and I'll do a radio promo for them, right? That's all I remember as far as the details of what I was advertising or promoting, but I do remember that this was like kind of the late 90s and the internet was relatively new, but people were starting to put their web addresses on things, like for more information go here. But Luke, could Could this have even been before Google, or at least the prominence of Google? Oh, sure. Absolutely. This is the 90s. I don't know when Google started.

I feel like the early search engines were things like Sierra Nevada, or was that a browser?

I think that's a beer, but I think you're close to something there. Yeah, so Google was like 1990. Alta Vista? Alta Vista for sure. Yeah, there are various things like that.

But yeah, Google is a breakthrough because of how they because how the thing worked. But it was not the first search engine.

Yeah. And in fact, so Google here came out in 1998. So, you know, it wouldn't have been certainly dominant in 1998 about the exact year I'm talking about here. So anyway, I just have this memory of it. Maybe it's because I didn't get a lot of negative feedback on my work. I mean, not to be a I don't know. Like I just I was good at radio stuff. And so maybe the negative feedback I got really stuck out to me. I also really disliked my teacher in this one class because, like, I was already working at a radio station that was so far beyond the shit he was teaching us. And he was such a relic from, like, the old days. But either way, I remember reading the URL off of this flyer for my commercial and thinking, this is a little bit on the edge. This is pretty long, but this is the URL. This is long before Bitly or whatever. And it wasn't my thing, you know. I was just, you know, making a promotion for somebody else's thing. And he wrote back like that, that URL or whatever he said, that web link that you read is far too long. Nobody would ever remember that. And I remember thinking in my head, like, I did know that was a bit of a risk when I did it on the spot. But also I had decided it was fine. And so I was irritated that this old dinosaur told me it wasn't fine. I'm like, it's called the Internet, dude. Get surfing. Anyway, that sticks out in my head. In fact, I have, I can almost see them from here. I have these carts like I think we have do we have a show title yet

because it's called the internet dude let's get surfing as long as possible that or the Blaston Gobe

it's the internet dude did I say dude if not you did now I think I said get surfing anyway so I have those somewhere but I never want to hear it but also I don't want to throw those carts away but having said all of that that lives in my head as a little is a little oopsie that I made in an early radio project and then apropos of I don't know what I

got this voicemail from listener summer this morning hey looking Andrew I was listening to the Giants radio broadcast because I am in love with John Miller but there was a commercial what

do we know about John Miller oh we love John Miller yeah John Miller used to do Sunday night baseball he's again he's a he's an announcer for the giants and he has maybe one of the most calming voices in all of professional sports announcing it's just like it's just like i don't you know it's like honey or something and um i only know him because of when he when they used to have sunday night baseball and he would do those games but i'm a fan i'll bet you i've heard

the voice before i'm looking to see if i can get any um good calls here from john miller uh and

With John Miller, too, I'll buy you a little more time. It's not even the, like, you know, do you believe in miracles or something, you know, Al Michaels yelling about the hockey team. It's more just because the thing about baseball is so much of baseball is downtime, even now. I guess less so. But so it's just that kind of his way of just keeping, you know, the needle moving while the game's going on. I just always really loved his. the sound of his voice i think this is gonna unfortunately the first piece of tape i found was a world series call so i bet you it won't be quite as calming but i just want to see if i can

recognize this voice madison bubgarner trying to wrap up this world series do i got the right guy

here that's the guy okay i have heard this voice before madison bubgarner trying to wrap up this

world series for the giants he's ready he throws swing and a pop-up side the ball down the line in foul ground he's got plenty of room and he's got it and the giants have won they have won the

world series for the third time in five years that's that's a that's a good sound um okay so that's john miller and summer loves john miller and let me continue with this but there was a

commercial that just i don't even know what the job was i've lost track of it so much because i got hypnotized by the web link that they read out on the air for somebody to actually try and write down and it took me at least five minutes to write it down so i just thought that you guys might enjoy hearing it um if you are ready this is the link to if you wanted to apply to this job at this company that i don't even remember because the drop link wiped my memory out it is http colon slash slash ask.smartsheet.com slash b slash form slash 3VC3ED5D7D49CE4354AFA026F594ADBD25. And then on top of that, you have to remember that the job code is nice and simple, and it's 1-2. Anyway, if anybody wants to apply for that job, good luck.

and power out i need to hear that i tried following i was just trying to type it in in real time it's impossible um the second the aft i think is some sort of internal code and then the word after that is what is it um something sheets square sheets not square sheets that is i think the main takeaway there um do you happen to remember that i was googling it earlier i don't know if it'll come up here but i couldn't get a smart sheet i think it was like aft.smartsheet.com slash b slash form um i i tried to like i thought if i could find the website the link i could maybe kind of go backwards and re-engineer this or engineer backwards until i could find the commercial but if any tens could help with this that would be amazing i need to

hear this it looks like smart sheet yeah is basically like a spreadsheet software a piece of software project and work management platform so it makes me think that the person who's hiring for the job once is using some kind of a like a spreadsheet type of thing and needs people to log

into that yes that's what i'm confused either they're using smart sheet which is probably which is what you said or it's a job at smart sheet which i think is a i think you're right though i think this is probably some small local business that's using smart sheet to the way we're using like i want to hear the commercial though because what i'm what i'm trying to understand is does a human person read that i'll bet you somebody rattles that off really quickly i'll bet you at

the end of a commercial like totally summer can you give us more detail on this because i'm just trying to imagine a human being reading that that url with a with a straight face and someone writing it because what i could see is there's so much stuff that's sort of not ai generated but like there's a lot of like text to voice programs and there are things where it's like it almost feels to me like that was a glitch like they were trying to like you know rapidly put this information out and did some kind of a program some ai program where it didn't realize how ridiculous that url is and because it was like point to url and then it took it literally instead of you know what i mean it feels like a computer mess up to me yeah no human being would think that anyone was going to retain that kind of information um i have a feeling my guess and

we'll see who's who ends up being um right here and maybe neither of us or both of us but my guess is that somebody who doesn't really know what they're doing and they had like just like at the end of a loan commercial you and i have actually had to read these before you have to give out what is that number it's like three letters and then a number and yeah and you rattle it out now that doesn't really matter because that's for legal purposes mls number yes mls numbers like those are kind of fun to try to get your head around um but that's only for legal purposes you know what i mean the vast majority of people they don't if this is the thing you're trying to point people

towards because you want to hire them that just is so is so wild to me it seems like something where it was again some kind of a glitch where this got pushed through as a literal thing when it should have been

It should have been like then direct them to the website or something and it like just took all of the data from the URL and just like plugged it in.

You know who would not have put up with this? Ben Whaley. I just sent you, I couldn't think of his name before when I was telling the story, but I just found him. He's emeritus now, but I just sent you his webpage at Kent. I want you to look at, again, I forgot.

He looks exactly like Gucci Pineapple.

I wanted you to take a look at the photo of him. It's like a radio guy from another era who like really knows that he knows way more than you about everything, even though he hadn't really like kind of touched a radio board in a decade or two.

I'm waiting for this photo to load. It's taking its sweet time. I can see it, but the link is taking its sweet time. But it reminds me of when I was at Nathan Hale High School, which I went to for my senior year because the place I had gone, Jesus Creek, had shut down. um and i uh i was intrigued by the fact that nathan hill has this radio station c89 and we you know the the classes that we took you had to take these intro to radio classes and they were taught by this guy a sweet guy but a guy who had like i think maybe been an engineer or like a tech not you know this is in the 70s i don't know if they called it tech then but like i think he was the guy maybe that worked on the transmitter or something for I believe a Christian music station that was his sort of radio preparation and so the stuff that we learned in these classes it was so funny because and I know I've told the story before but we would watch the movie Groundhog Day which I don't understand what the point of that was other than Bill Murray is a weatherman in it it was a broadcasting class so maybe it was like here's a movie about someone who's a broadcaster and we would watch the movie play misty for me starring clint eastwood as a radio dj in carmel california who has a stalker and um and the the point of us watching that was to learn that we needed to make up a pretend name so we don't get stalked that's the most efficient way to get that message across exactly you could take two minutes and you could say hey you might want to come up with a a radio name so that you know people don't know your real name that'll give you a little anonymity um and you can come up with a cool ass name or you could have us watch a clint eastwood

movie from the late 70s and that's what we did i remember taking a summer class um that was a class on comedy luke it was it was like a boring class but it was just on comedy i think and i do remember that and this is i've said this before on the show because this doesn't usually happen to me very braggy we had to do a stand-up routine at the end of the class and take a written uh evaluation in order to pass and i remember the teach after doing the uh my stand-up bit the next time i showed up for class the professor wanted to talk to me out in the hallway i think i showed up ready to take the test and he told me you don't have to take the test you nailed it like you're good whoa yeah right how often does that it sounds like i'm making that up but i'll never forget being like not only did my stand-up go okay but he said that i did my But that also goes to show you what bullshit this class was. I remember watching a couple of movies in there. One, I believe, was Bull Durham, and the other one was some sort of a dramatic reenactment of the late night wars. Uh-huh. Leno versus Letterman. Yeah, based on the book. Remember who somebody wrote the definitive book on that and then somebody turned it into a pretty bad movie? That's mostly what that class was. We would show up and watch those movies in like two parts or whatever. And I still am not exactly sure why.

Bill Carter wrote that book.

late night oh yeah i think he was a keynote speaker at some event i was at once now i'm just bragging all over the place i once shared the rare air with bill carter wow now also i'm

reading um professor whaley's cv and i'm i'm wondering where exactly he developed the authority to tell you if you're a broadcasting writer or not because he seems like he was a journalism person like a but mostly on the academic side yeah that's got a phd in speech communication with a mass communication minor uh he also has worked as a professional musician and recording studio session player and has worked in theater these are all great things andrew but none of them make me think he knows how to make a promo sizzle yeah and now you know now this is a man

who's out there in the world and i just totally blew up his spot again i don't think any of our yeah exactly you literally could if you just bleeped out his name no i you know i'm gonna let it you want him to know i want him to know because i don't think it'll get back to him i doubt anybody in our listening audience would um would violate this trust um but yeah i mean the fact that like he was like a a now that i've said it though they can't they can't cross that line um but you know that that that's the vibe i'm talking about and there are a lot of fellas like older guys in my life around this time be them professors or people i worked with at the radio station who i adored and really appreciate them kind of guiding me through my early days in the industry and also just early days of kind of becoming an adult um and so like i think i owe a lot of people a lot from this era of my life but also

There was this thing that a lot of them had or a few of them had, which was not totally unlike Tim Heidecker in the in the jazz sketch and the jazz. I think you should leave. I think you should leave charades, charades, charades, charades, where, you know, like the fact that this guy, this professor we're talking about now was like a session musician. Like, I'm sure that when he was in his 20s and 30s or whatever, he sat with somebody, you know, for their record. And one of those people also played with somebody who once ran into Jimi Hendrix somewhere, you know, but he would probably talk about it like he just like he just walked around. He had this air of just like being so wizened and so worldly, you know, and exactly what you're kind of mentioning in the CV here was like he was pretty far removed from any real world experience. so far as I couldn't tell yet just loved talking down to us like he was just like this font of

of wisdom you know I have the sort of well how do I put this without sounding like I'm trying to say I have it all figured out I think I have almost the opposite problem which is I find it I find it very off-putting in a conversation when someone's assuming I know who the people they're referring to are particularly if the person is supposed to be sort of famous or something and they're just being kind of like assuming that I know who that person is as a way of I don't know sort of puffing themselves up so I do the opposite which is I assume no one has ever heard of anyone and if I'm either it's a conversation about me meeting the person or even me just referencing the person I'll be like Tom Hanks the actor and people like really do you need to explain to me who Tom Hanks is you don't say Tom Hanks Chet Hayes's dad oh my god dude the Eric do you ever watch the Eric Andre show no and I don't know why I watched part of one once and I was like this is my shit it's really worth checking out I'm not like a you know completist on it I only see clips of it now and then but it I mean it's it's a high level of discomfort watching it because they just I mean more than any other show of its kind I think it's on Adult Swim still more than any show of its kind they just make it very awkward for the guest and for Eric Andre I mean they just do insane stuff and the guests are not prepared and uh as to like no one says like hey i mean maybe if the guests are smart they've watched some episodes and so they're kind of like a little mentally prepared but it's not like they don't clear with the guests like hey we're gonna do this then we're gonna do this and they had um i saw one i think in the new season where he has chet hayes on and it's pretty incredible because it feels to me like eric andre is because eric andre is not trying to be a journalist he's trying to be an entertainer he i feel like he speaks some some hard truth to chet hayes that really i feel like chet hayes probably needs to hear yeah like it's a it was a it was very i only watched like maybe four minutes of it on tiktok it was a very

compelling television i should check that out um yeah you know it's funny because i i always say to you and it's true i don't like cringy stuff so i mean i don't know what i saw i remember like watching part of it and being like oh i need to get into this like i need to sit down and get into this but if it's super cringy maybe it wouldn't be for me i don't know i need to see but yeah

and um it's pranks but they're it's it's sort of pranky but it's only on like the elite yeah so they're not out pranking an elephant or they're not out just like on the street doing something or whatever it's like some person typically somebody who's promoting something that's why they agreed to come on who is you know high up in the sort of social order is having to sort of figure out why is everything that's happening here deeply weird and so at least if there's somebody who's a subject of the prank it's somebody who can probably take it or at least

should be able to take it yeah and if ever and and and they usually do I mean that's a big thing too the reaction to the people is going to impact how I enjoy it you know what I mean like yeah

do they let them off the hook or not you know you know and I haven't watched enough of it to really tell you that I just saw the clip with Chet Hayes and it made me think of it but it was pretty It was like Eric Andre saying stuff to me and Chet Hayes is just in his mode of being however He is kind of talking in a patois that doesn't seem very natural to his lived experience and other things like that And and I forget what Eric Andre is saying to him, but he said nothing like like like what's going on with you? You don't seem like you're doing well or something He's just giving this very like the very kind of Honest response of like a talking to a person who is the least authentic a person could be I mean, that's, I think, the issue. And look, I don't know Chet Hayes' life. You know, he grew up in probably a certain kind of fishbowl that none of us can really relate to, and it could do all kinds of things to a person. And maybe he's a really sweetheart person in real life, but he is definitely not a person who comes off as living authentically based on anything about him. Everything from him seems like an act of deep insecurity of somebody just casting about who feels like they're always about to slip underwater and they're just trying to grab something that will make them.

they'll help them float and uh and eric andre has i forget what the lines were there's a couple of things he says to the guy that just cut through all of that right down the like are you okay kind of thing which is like weird you don't see that a lot on tv shows i just remember when he

finally released a statement about his uh parents tom and rita um being the first like kind of globally famous people to contract uh covid what did he say i don't remember what he actually said it was just funny because it kind of came out I just think it was like a couple of weeks later and he was kind of like okay I'm finally speaking out on this my folks are doing okay or whatever it's like we don't we weren't we weren't waiting for you to speak out on this honestly like that that wasn't something that thank you I guess that wasn't something that we knew we needed now your brother I would listen to what's his brother's name um uh Colin Colin Hanks now that guy Fargo he's kind of a treasure right he's yes chip off the old block there he does seem to have had uh

been able to navigate life in a less fraught way certainly well said well said live wire well hey speaking of hey i gotta go do that i should probably go do that radio show here at some point so all right i guess that's gonna wrap us up for today's program this was fun thanks everybody for listening uh this is our uh after this we have four more episodes as employees of american public media and then uh a week from today we'll be in my parents actual basement doing the tbtl a-thon lord willing and the creeks don't rise we will have the web assets that will allow you to log on and then keep supporting the show and and frankly be able to listen to the show

but uh it's okay we've got several days to figure this out all we have to do is figure out how to

get you the show and then how to get you to give us some money to keep doing the show uh that's all we have to do between now and Monday big week for me alright here we go alright thanks everybody we'll see you tomorrow in the meantime have a great Monday take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

it's beautiful what is it it's an altar or you might call it a hopa Isn't that sweet? I'm going to take it over to the Burns's. And tomorrow, Robert and Deborah will meet beneath it to become man and wife. And later, when they purchase a home, maybe it'll grace their garden. That's my sappy, romantic idea.

Must have taken forever to build.

Yeah, not too bad. About 70 hours. Which isn't bad considering I carved it all by hand from one piece of wood.

Power out.