Muse

Hey, it's Steve here, and I got a big surprise. Here we go, folks. It's paper towels. Put your hand on it. Wipe it around. They're perforated. They come right apart. Crumpled into a ball, throw up in the air, it comes right back down. Oh my gosh, you spilled some water? No, not anymore. Paper towels. It's a kite. Put a string on it, fly it, it's a kite. Paper towels. It's easy. You can tie it in a knot. It's still there. Table's clean, kind of. Hey, hey, you can call for your friends. Hey, friends, come over. I got paper towels. If you got two, fold this in half, put it in your pocket, save it for later. This one, boom. This is for the car, the house, your backpack, paper towels. You've been saying, I got a good grade on my test with our best friends. Paper towel.

TBTL.

Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a god dang hot dog.

I'm going to suggest that we have a little constructive talking time. Not long at all. I mean, maybe 10 minutes or, okay, or maybe 15 is also good. All right, Bozo, thank you. I'm calling a lot of people Bozo now. It's like my new thing. All right.

Beat, beat, ribby, ribby.

Bada-boom. How'd it go?

Well, he's going to acknowledge me on Instagram, so I guess you could say it was one of the best conversations of my entire life.

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

We're talking about S-E-X, in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N. Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host, Mimi. Coming to you from the River House studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia River, where it's actually raining currently. Now, when we were doing the sound check and I mentioned that it's raining here in the middle of the summer and I played this audio, my friend Andrew Walsh was shocked. I would say he was disappointed. He was hurt. He was wondering why I wasn't playing my favorite audio, which is Denzel Washington from the movie Training Day saying, didn't know you like to get wet, though, because I don't have that audio on this computer. It's on the other computer of mine that's currently dead in the water. So anyway, and if you were at home wondering why I missed that great opportunity to play some Denzel, that's the reason. Even though the weather is a little foggy and rainy this morning, it's still been a beautiful bucolic scene here. I watched a mama deer and a yearling, a little baby deer, graze in the yard for like, I don't know, a good hour this morning.

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

Well, absolutely adorable stuff. I guess that's what happens when you live out here in Mother Nature, like I do, apparently. Apparently, this is episode 4005 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

And we have got an update on the TBTL coins that we... Can you verify? Can you give me some 411? For folks who donated during the most recent TBTL-a-thon, we've created these really cool kind of challenge coins some people call them that say I saved TBTL and you can only get one if you helped save TBTL this time around and we will tell you what the latest is on all of that also we'll tell you what the latest is when it comes to the baseball announcing going on in Baltimore, Maryland where one of the Orioles broadcast announcers has been suspended indefinitely for complimenting the team?

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

It's a great year in Baltimore for baseball fans. The Orioles have the best record in the American League. They're playing really well, and it's a surprise to many. But the owner of the Baltimore Orioles is apparently a very, for being a billionaire and having a lot of privilege. He appears to be a very, very thin-skinned individual.

How dare you people even say that?

So we'll tell you what's going on with the free Kevin Brown movement. Oh, and we'll talk to this guy, longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He is a real Cuyahoga clam.

Please don't be mean to Cleveland.

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

We should probably talk about something here. Uh-oh. It's happened to me, and I'm just sort of realizing it now, looking at my Gmail. I am now the type of person who apparently, unironically, uses the term onboarding in email. Oh, yeah, I saw that. Yeah. I saw that. We should talk about this. I didn't even quite realize it until I'm looking at the email in my...

folder right now i i sent an email to you and our pal slash boss speaking of which are off who i

believe is hanging out today exactly we've got tbtl employee numero uno and now i think we decided we may establish him also as our midwest correspondent it's john sklaroff hey buddy good morning guys how's it going good it's going well but actually i this is i'm glad you're bringing this up andrew and i'm glad john that you're here for this because well first of all we're going to get an update on the tbtl coins uh in a bit but i we have a company it's a small company it's the three of us and andrew was you sent this email out about just like scheduling stuff because we create a lot of content every week and there's video components and everything and i believe you

did unironically use the term onboarding in our three-person company yeah so basically we have to we have to get John up to speed on this video software that I use for these week in review videos that we're making for people who donated during the last TV Telethon at a very generous level. We're doing those every week and it's still a new process. And I'm, you know, I remember writing this and having a slight hitch in my brain, maybe as I was typing the word onboarding and then thinking, well, I just can't think of a better, I can't think of a better word right now. training seems a little bit too intense or maybe even I don't know like oh we got to get John trained on something I don't know so I used so I wrote how to train your Sklar off I wrote possible show upcoming weekend reviews slash onboarding John and it's not until like you were reading your intro and I'm listening to I'm sitting here listening to your intro which you are not reading I should make no if I was reading it'd be good and and I just see onboarding John And I'm like, that's me. I wrote that. I'm the type of person who says, let's circle back and onboard John.

You're really not generally. But my question is, do you are you realizing that maybe you crave a certain a certain kind of not corporate culture, but a certain level of professionalism that to some degree has gone out the window now that we don't work for a big, giant media company?

I don't think it's that. I think it's just I mean, and again, a lot of people use the word onboarding quite a bit in their jobs. Like, I think a lot of people don't understand why this would be so upsetting to me, but I just don't see myself as the type of person who uses that kind of corporate language. And I'm seeing it here. And like I said, I think I was just trying to get this out quickly. It was the best word in the moment. And now I am just kind of like dealing with the fact that I am that person because there's no denying it now.

Now, John, how did that feel for you? Yeah, how did it feel? How do you feel about the corporate culture of Too Beautiful to Biz?

I could really feel the synergy coming through the email. And it was really. We're trying to expand this vertical. It was, right, there was a lot of outside the box thinking by Andrew, which I really appreciated, you know, so I'm glad to see him step into that role as like a Mr. Manager here I definitely, I feel like

It's definitely, please, Mr. Manager was my father I feel like the break, not the breakdown, the alliances on this reality show that is now our company that we own slash work for is definitely Andrew and John being professional and maintaining calendars and Google Docs and things, and then me mostly just standing in the middle of an unfinished living room sobbing quietly. That's the division of labor on the show. You two are already, I could just tell, John, you're working away. Most days, I'll wake up to find some emails from you about relevant TBTL business things and stuff like that, which is amazing because that's the whole thing. we hired you for and Andrew you're really kind of dialed into the the broadcast schedule because we've got like like I said not just the newsletter we're putting up we're putting out this week in review video and there's all these little just kind of you know sort of moments that we need to hit so that the schedule can run effectively etc and then I just kind of look around and go like where honestly where should I put this soy sauce it was from a Chinese restaurant one time I ordered extra soy sauce and i have packets and i'm looking in this crummy kitchen of mine and i'm do i make a whole drawer for soy sauce what am i doing here with my life that's really how it's going for the

three of us well let's need a sauce straw sorry oh yeah sauce what is that a sauce straw what's that you know like a drawer where you put your sauces like your drawer did you wait did you just move to boston are you now our boss no no excuse that's a new york that's not boston thing a draw

coffee draw yeah yeah wow a sauce draw i like that i i literally thought you were saying a sauce straw and i was like okay i'm trying to picture it like it's really wide and it just has a lot of packets of soy sauce john are you a i'm sorry i'm just peppering you with questions but it's just exciting to talk to somebody new are you are you one of those like do you keep things like i I have now.

Napkins from so many different – first of all, I order far too much delivery food, although that ends now because I don't think they deliver way out here. But, like, you know, sometimes they give you a bunch of napkins, and I don't use all of them. And I'm like, I'm not going to throw away a perfectly good napkin, but then I'll just have a variety of different napkins, variety of different – anything that comes in that delivery bag that doesn't get used, it seems like there might be a reason for it. I hang on to it.

You know, the thing that we keep the most of in that vein would be chopsticks. I think we have like a bunch of the Chopstick Oh my god

I'm just realizing something Of the many things That didn't migrate down From Bellingham, Washington My old stomps When I went through a divorce and when I moved At some point I just broke down and bought a box Of really good chopsticks You know how the really good ones are round Oh really good disposable ones Really good disposable chopsticks, right? But they're like the round ones as opposed to the ones that are more kind of squared. Like the squared ones, they're fine, but you break them, and oftentimes the two pieces kind of come off together. You have this kind of weird, like one of the chopsticks is massive and the other one is kind of diminished. But then there's these round ones that are not even, I don't think, connected maybe at the top, and they're like high quality. They might be bamboo or something. And I went on Amazon and bought a box of them, And that's still at my old house in Bellingham. And I am only right now, three years later, realizing that I should have brought those chopsticks with me.

Well, let me ask you this, and I'm not being judgy here, and I certainly don't want to come off as highfalutin. That's one of the big dangers of the show is that I'm going to come off as too highfalutin, of course. Yes. But why don't you just get yourself some real chopsticks that you keep in your drawer, or I'm sorry, in your drawer, and then you clean? Like, that's what we have. My chop drawer? We have, like, probably, I don't know, six pairs of, like, chopsticks, like, in the same way you have forks and knives.

I don't know why. I don't have a good explanation for that other than I kind of don't love washing chopsticks, although they're not. They're arguably the easiest thing to wash. Yeah. Like, it's not. I can't explain it to you. It's probably just because I want to try to have the largest carbon footprint that I can. And I feel like I can achieve that through having a huge, I can have a box of disposable chopsticks shipped to my home where I then use them one time and throw them out. Isn't that what Greta Thunberg has been encouraging us all to do? I mean, I don't know. I should just get some real chopsticks and wash them. But for some reason, the route that I went was buy a box of really high-end disposable chopsticks.

I wonder if part of it is because of the fun of ordering takeout food. I mean, I know that that's not something that is rare for us, but there's still something fun about ordering takeout food. And so when you order takeout and you get the chopsticks, and I know the round ones that you're talking about, and sometimes they even have little, like, rings carved into the very top of them because they're not connected, like you say. I think I know exactly the disposable ones you're talking about, and I'm with you. And I'll be honest, too, because if you had said this, I would have accepted this as an answer. While I usually use our reusable, you know, regular chopsticks, they are slick to the touch. They are, like, varnished sort of. Yes, exactly. And there is something about the kind of raw wood feel of takeout chopsticks that is also kind of nice. So I'm not above it.

I always feel like I'm putting, with the reusable chopsticks, I feel like I'm putting paint in my mouth because it's wood that is covered in some kind of varnish or lacquer. And there's something about, like, whereas a spoon or a fork is just going to be metal, putting lacquer into my mouth, which then is getting wet over time, there's something kind of tactile about that I don't love.

We do have some metal ones as well, But there's tactile there that you probably don't love as well, but it gets over the paint thing. How do you feel about the metal straws, though?

This is the essential question of our time.

I mean, we have a few. You know, I understand, like, here, was it a Seattle law, Luke, or a Washington state law where basically you cannot just use plastic straws anymore because the environmental impact of burning through so many of them and then sending them out to garbage barges in the sea?

I'm going to – it sounds like a Seattle rule, and it sounds like the kind of thing that I think – wow, I'm getting strafed by a helicopter out here. It's real – Nice. Yeah, a real flight of the Valkyrie. What's going on? That sounds like a Seattle thing, and it sounds like one of the kind of things that I think intellectually I'm totally on board with. Like there's no reason – wow, that's just like a huge military medic helicopter just flew right over the house.

Do you have the big cross on the bottom like MASH?

Yes, and it literally went, Suicide is Painless, went through my mind. The theme song to MASH, for those of you who don't know. Otherwise, that'd be a very weird thing for me to say. And dark. I agree very much with getting rid of plastic straws because of how bad they are for the environment, how bad they are for sea life. I will say, of course, that they have not yet invented a proper substitute. The paper straw is not a...

to the task i'll just deal with the paper straw because again i don't i i saw one video somewhere of like a sea turtle with a straw lodged in its you know eye socket and that was like for that to even happen once it's too many so i'll deal with the paper straws it's worth it but i just can't

believe we can you know no they they do though i think that you've used these they have plastic straws now that are biodegradable but you don't know like when you go to the movie theaters here they're not giving you paper straws because i'm with you like i hated the paper straw phase of this of this transition but like when we go to amc or whatever they're they're giving you straws that feel like plastic they might not quite they might be like if you're really rough with them they might split a little bit and you gotta be careful but like that's not a that's not a daily issue like i'll bet you you've used straws that you think are plastic straws that are

actually biodegradable well that's great i would recommend all places that are currently giving me paper straws agree which is a happening a lot in portland like recently like i'm talking in the last two weeks um i would hope that those folks would shift to whatever the like more biodegradable yeah straw situation is now here's my problem with the metal straw that's also a thing you get in portland a lot in the restaurant and what i want to see is i would like to see some proof of how they're washing these metal straws because i think that's there needs to be a whole special device for this but you can't just throw them in the dishwasher and hope that some of the water kind of like makes its way into the straw because i had an experience as a kid that has stayed with me to this day which was remember those plastic straws that were like a fun thing as a kid where it went loop de loop de loop oh yeah yeah yep i remember being a kid and having one of those and drinking out of it oh god and it having some kind of i forget what it was but it was there was something that was still in there some old i don't know what it was like i just i can just have a sense memory of it of being all excited probably i'd made some strawberry quick milk or something and i'm watching go through like it's loop-de-looping and then when it hit my mouth it didn't taste like the milk it tasted like some old dish water or something no and when i tell you that's one of the like top five formative moments of my life like it really it And then I remember thinking, even as a kid, how the heck are you supposed to get this straw clean? Just think about the sort of hydro dynamics of the whole situation. So when I'm in like a restaurant in Portland and they bring out the drink and it's got a metal straw, I'm like, I hope to God they've got a system for cleaning this. Because otherwise, I'm just drinking someone else's backwash, apparently.

You know, Luke, you guys always talk about on the show how you'll be talking about like pizza or tacos or something. I'm like, well, I know I'm having for lunch today. I know I will not be eating lunch today. after hearing about strawberry quick.

You can imagine how disgusting that is. Yeah, this is horrible.

Oh, you mean you're just going to have strawberry quick instead of lunch and you're going to do it for a big deal of straw? Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's exactly.

I feel like strawberry quick. Did you guys ever mess with strawberry milk when you were a kid?

I think pretty rarely for us. I know we had this one thing that some relative brought over from New England, which was like a coffee-flavored syrup that we would sometimes put in our milk, but like a sweet, you know, like a like if you got coffee flavored ice cream or something i remember that was a big treat to

put a little bit of that in our milk i you know i mean i feel like strawberry milk is the kind of thing that if you didn't grow up with it it seems totally bizarre but if you did like i think i liked it more than than chocolate milk because i love the taste of strawberry i mean it's just a big giant massive amount of sugar that you're putting in your milk i was you know the golfer john daly is i'm i'm saying this like you are both totally unaware of one of the more iconic characters in sports history over the last 30 years yeah he's the really short one who stands on his knees right and makes jokes yeah exactly yep yeah um loved him by the way on the carol

burnett show what is um am i putting you on the spot who is that's dorf on golf it's tim conway

right yes yeah um but um john daly is just an amazing it's just an amazing character to me i I mean, he is somebody who is very I mean, I don't think he's like he's not really competitively like, you know, great at golf anymore. Like he's in the top hundred players, but he's still playing professional golf all the time. And he's just famous for his appetites in all directions and just being just he he he plays golf and lives his life exactly like I would if I were able to basically be drunk all the time and still play golf at an incredibly high level. I mean, he's still in the top like two percentile of people on the planet Earth who can play golf and also in the top two percentile of people who drink over 100 Bud Lights a day. Like he's just this massive figure of consumption. But lately, because I see a lot of clips of the Graham Bensinger show on TikTok, I've somebody when I last time I mentioned Graham Bensinger. Somebody emailed in and said, oh, yeah, I went to school with him, and he always dreamed of being the next Bob Costas, and he really seemed to have done it.

We used to talk about that guy. It was the type of thing that seemed like it was always on between baseball games or between a baseball game and a rerun of the same game you just watched. You'd get to Graham, what's his name, Ben Singer. But now people, he's achieved viral status on TikTok. I can't think of anything less TikTok-y.

he's no he's absolutely he's he's manifested this i mean first of all i think he's a good i think he's yeah he's a good interviewer i mean there's no reason he shouldn't have this job but there was a long period of time where i would never even see the show i would just see promos for it while i was like watching the mariners like you said and i'd be like when is this show even on how have i never heard of this person how is he also getting like these really big name guests and um anyway he was i think interviewing uh john daly and john daly now apparently who for years would eat like mcdonald's for like four meals a day or something has mostly switched off of that stuff but he drinks like seven gallons of whole milk a week or something like he's just going through whole milk like crazy he was talking about and then i thought well that's a really interesting that's an interesting thing for you to be doing i mean he says he barely eats now he drinks whole milk all the time and it's not like a diet he's just into it and then and then i think it was graham bensinger said and then how much um like quick chocolate syrup are you going through he's like well almost the same amount it turns out he's drinking four to eight gallons of chocolate milk every week whole milk full of chocolate syrup which i really success looks like you got to put that in the lead like drinking drinking eight gallons of whole milk a week is kind of interesting drinking eight gallons of chocolate milk a week is a whole other category and chocolate

whole milk too like that's something like Genevieve drinks I think she kind of goes back and forth she always has milk in the in the house but like often skim milk sometimes we'll bump it up to one percent or two percent but like whole milk is a thing that's a milkshake yeah absolutely although I

grew up drinking that because my mom it my mom loves vitamin d whole milk and we were on um um we were on wick which uh is like basically food stamps my dad would i've told the story many times my dad what my dad was interesting he uh we qualified for every sort of free food subsidy that you could get but my dad was like no we can afford to buy our own food like he wasn't we weren't ever on food stamps i would never got free lunch at school but my mom when she'd take the babies into the public health place would just get wick on the side and i guess my dad just didn't feel like arguing about it so you know that was like you get uh it's women infant children and the idea is we would like the young the the growing babies of the world to have proper nutrition and so um we had a lot of milk around we were really had all the milk and cheese that we could consume as a family and my mom loves whole milk to this day is she still drinking it

the way genevieve and genevieve's family drinks a lot of milk too i think all of her siblings and And I think her parents very big into milk culture. I grew up drinking milk, like a lot of milk, I think, like a lot of kids. But I got to an age where it just stopped appealing to me as a beverage. Like, I'll still use it on milk. But even when we were in Polsbo for the TB Telethon, I, you know, it was the first time I was buying milk that I didn't have to, like, kind of consider other people's usage of it. So I went for almond milk because that's fine in cereal.

Yeah, I don't have any milk in this house right now. And I'm trying to think of why exactly I would buy some Now I use half and half of my coffee now And I eat so much cheese Like the refrigerator here Which is on the front porch as I've mentioned It's mostly cheese products Like it's not that I'm not consuming dairy But there's something about a big jug of milk That in my adulthood has become kind of less appealing To me for some reason

Yeah me too, me too Especially if there's alternatives I was going to say Nestle Quick The strawberry stuff to my memory Like you were saying it might sound weird if you didn't grow up with it, but it's almost like it's kind of the appeal of a milkshake only melted. Like, I mean, I'm not suggesting they put that in the marketing, but.

Oh, no, you're right, though. It tastes exactly like a strawberry milkshake, except it's just not frozen, but it's that exact same flavor profile. This is an extremely weird right turn for me to take here, but I had an interesting experience the other day in the town that's near me, which was, and it's on the subject, I guess, of food subsidies, I had been buying stuff at Home Depot and just doing my normal round of things. And for some bizarre reason, I had a powerful lust for Papa Murphy's pizza. Oh, man. It's been a while. Okay. Yeah. Because I don't even know if I could get pizza delivered here, but if I could, I think it would have to make a long journey. So getting a Papa Murphy's pizza. murphy's pizza is kind of the perfect you know the perfect solution because uh you know i can cook it here and then it's hot and fresh out of the oven although the oven is so old at this house that i don't know what any of the temperatures are it's all been a worn off by time so i just turn the thing and then just look and wait for the element to be a really bright color of red and then i think well see how this goes um but i go into the papa murphy's this is actually part of a larger conversation that i want to have really with both of you which is my whereabouts OK, so I go down to well, let me just actually start here. I realized yesterday I went and I found this really great little jogging path around this man-made lake in kind of the big town near me. And I was jogging around. I thought, oh, I'll tell Andrew about this. I'm very excited. I found a good place to run. And it's in this really cute neighborhood in these really old historic homes. Like just made me very happy. And then I realized, oh, I can't tell him where it is because I'm not talking about where I live. And I thought, is this sustainable? Like, is this sustainable for me to be living in? First of all, it's not that much of a mystery. I'm sure the listeners who care that much could triangulate it. Second of all, what is exactly the point of me not, like, me just being vague about where I live? And most of the stories that I tell are about some run-in somewhere. And is it always just going to be, like, in southern Washington I had a run-in? I found a cool place to jog somewhere in southern Washington. Like, I just feel like, as Ron and Don taught us, you get to the universal through the specific. And if I'm not, if I can't just say that I basically live in a place called Kalama, Washington, if I can't just say that, it's going to really, it's going to make a lot of the stories I tell a lot less interesting. So, so there you go. Where I live is kind of, it's not really the town of Kalama. It's kind of in no man's land between the towns of, like, Longview, Washington, Kalama, Washington, Kelso, Washington. It's about 35 or 40 minutes north of Portland on I-5. And anyway, that's kind of where I am. And I found this lake called Lake Sacagawea, which I guess is a man-made lake. There's a lot of Lewis and Clark around here. They're very proud of that, right?

Sacagawea famously led the Lewis and Clark expedition because she was Native American and had more familiarity with this geography around here. so there's a lot of stuff named for her a lot of stuff named for lewis and clark but um i found this great lake that i jogged around and it was so awesome there's like a japanese zen garden on an island you walk across this bridge and then you just go and sit amongst all this like amazing topiary stuff and like meditative benches i was like wow way to go longview washington but anyway as i was leaving the home depot the other day i decided i wanted to get some um papa murphy's and i get to the papa murphy's and it's like a mob scene there are so many people and i go in and i go like uh can i uh they go did you do the online order i go no they go did you call ahead and i was like no it's papa murphy's what are you talking about like this is the subway of pizza you have a bunch of vats with stuff in it and i want you to put it on some pizza and then i'll take the pizza away and they're like well it's you know gonna be a half hour or something. And I was like, what? And I realized that Papa Murphy's is one of these places where you can use SNAP benefits and EBT. Because oftentimes you can't use those benefits for food that is pre-cooked. You can't, as I understand it, go to McDonald's if you have SNAP or EBT. You can't just go to a place where they're going to hand you the food already cooked. You can buy groceries with it. And like Papa Murphy's is considered groceries because they have not applied heat to the product yet and i noticed a number of people that were using you know their card that was generated by the state of washington using ebt or snap benefits there and i thought oh this is interesting well first of all there's you know the town of longview washington i mean it contains multitudes as most towns do but there's certainly a portion of the population in longview that's fairly economically marginalized and i just realized like wow going to a papa murphy's in a kind of place where there is some economic marginalization goes on can be a whole different experience than me going to the one in Portland by my house where maybe you had less of that going on and they had a big sign right in the window like Snap and EBT welcomed here which I just thought well I need to call ahead for my Papa Murphy's orders now did not know the Papa Murphy's on Ocean View Drive was really cracking on like a Sunday night or whatever can I pick a nit

can I nitpick a tiny bit please maybe this will open up a debate Maybe it'll be a three-way debate where you, me, and John are all enemies by the end of this, and we no longer have a business. I don't know what I'm opening. I don't know what I'm unleashing here. Hopefully not. Yeah, how do you feel about this, John? It's been a good run, right? I like having a paycheck, so hopefully not.

Have you talked to – did you leave some of the doors open at 8 p.m.?

I burned all those bridges. I burned all the bridges. Okay. Um, actually, John, I don't know if we can talk about this. Hold on. I'm legitimately, now I am legitimately invested in this. John, actually, hold on. The nitpick was sort of a, it was just going to be a joke. I was going to say, would you say that maybe Mod Pizza is closer to the Subway model? Because you're not, like, finishing cooking your Subway sandwich, like, once you get home. No, that's a good point. Okay, but that was silliness. But, John, absolutely be honest with me. we can just skip over this and i can even edit out this part of the show if it makes you uncomfortable but yeah you know you are a highly moral person and you have really strong you you are and you have really strong convictions and without getting into some of the um some of the issues that you had with apm because that's not honestly not what i'm trying to do here i did hear through folks who by the way were like really like people who still work there today um were saying how awesome it was that on your way out the door you kind of respectfully but strongly stated some issues you had with apm in public forums like on the slack forum like how much can you talk about that uh without getting into maybe i don't want to drag apm here but your feelings of kind of having an opportunity to leave a company that you like but definitely had some that some some maybe moral issues with and you're just like you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna let this shit

fly a little bit well so yeah i i don't have any problem saying anything i uh i will say it was on my way out there were some conversations but i had also been one to speak up prior to that too you know even before all of this and before i knew that there was gonna be an opportunity for me to work with you guys i'm just the kind of person where uh i i don't like bad things happen good people i don't know if that maybe that's not the best way to say it but i just i don't like seeing uh injustice that's not that makes me sound so much better than i am but um so i've i've piped up there's so i you know talking about slack specifically andrew at 8 p.m there was um it's a very slack heavy organization something the organization encourages i think like there's a lot of uh fun channels not like you know not dissimilar to the stens slack where it's like oh you like this one thing there's a channel for that so there's like a basketball channel or there's like a hbo tv channel or whatever i guess max channel i don't know if they have to rebrand

the slack channel but like you and kiki lolo started the marvel universe channel kiki started

it i was just very active in it yeah yeah yeah and so like um it's a way to like build culture and like get to know your colleagues and people you wouldn't necessarily work with in a big non-profit and so it's a very slack heavy organization and um there's one channel called our values which was like a lot of times it'd be reporters you know from npr news or something chiming like hey i saw this really cool thing that wbz in chicago did or whatever on this particular coverage or something like a lot of like highlighting goods like these are the values we should be living up to but it also became a space where um when employees felt uh uncomfortable or dismayed by things happening in the organization they would they would pipe in and say those things And so I was one of those people that would do that. And I know I'm already going on and on, but I'll say, like, a little context to this is before what you're referring to, Andrew, happened a couple years ago, I, along with some coworkers who were – one was – or two, actually, were data analysts for APM Reports and then some other folks. we analyzed uh an employee-led pay equity survey and and and presentation to see like are people being paid fared in this in this in this large non-profit so this is something that specifically something is very near dear to my heart and um in a large non-profit or every non-profit they uh there's legal obligations from the irs to post um financials for the organization And among that is included the top earners' pay in the company. And so that's what the issue you're referring to. Where were Andrew and I on that list? I was going to say it was Luke who was on that list. You guys were both ahead of Kyrisdahl, weren't you? Yeah. So, yeah. So, like, that had the most recent one. And these are always, like, a year behind because of, like, filing and taxes and IRS and stuff. But, yeah. So the most recent one had come out. And this was in the wake of some layoffs. not APM and NPR, but Southern California Public Radio, which is part of American Public Media Group, the larger, and I feel comfortable saying this because this is all public stuff, right? And so there were some layoffs over there. And then it was like, oh, well, guess how much that's the CEO of Southern California Public Radio is making. And here's the salaries of other top executives at APM NPR. And I think, again, I feel comfortable saying this because it's not dissimilar to a lot of the conversations happening in workforces across the country we're in uh i think we've joked about before it's late stage capitalism where

we're at right now and we're all doing our best to get by but you see something sometimes you're like well what's the justification for that or why are you earning that and you know maybe there's a layoff here or there kind of thing yeah so it wasn't like um it was yeah like you said andrea is like just going into the space and asking questions like hey this is a public document this person's pay increased exponentially in the already that one of the highest earners of the company what's going on there you know like what's the what's the structure like well yeah i mean

you're putting it you know in very polite terms but like the people that i was talking to who i will remain who will remain nameless for this conversation but again they said it and some of these folks by the way are management level folks um but they said it with amount of with an amount of respect but definitely they were just kind of like yeah john's really kind of guns a blazing i mean they didn't use guns a blazing they they were not in a looney tunes cartoon the way i am But, like, I sort of got the impression they're just like, yeah, get a load of this guy. They're like, have you been reading what John's been posting? And I said, no, I don't know how to use Slack. But, yeah, there seemed to be some – you were leaving an impression around the organization, maybe I should tell you.

Yeah, I'm just – I'm very much pro-transparency and especially in a nonprofit, right? Like, you're getting public dollars, donations, grant money, state money, right? Like, all these things, these are public dollars. And I think they're, you know, as an organization that's supposed to be mission and value based and all these things. And this, again, this is not taking shots at APM. This is, I think, just the nonprofit sector as a whole often comes into these issues. I just, it's a thing I take very seriously, especially as someone who is asking people for money, right? Like, I was the one working with you guys to reach out to the tens and say, like, hey, we need your dollars. If we're going to ask people to give their dollars to this organization, I want to make sure that it is being used in a respectful manner to the people. Now that we're a for-profit company, though, we're freewheeling. I don't care. No, absolutely.

I'm buying three to four Papa Murphy's pizzas a day.

Luke, can we at least get you an oven thermometer? They cost like $6 on Amazon. Can I just tell you this?

For somebody who's 47 years old and has had a lot of experience in life, I'm just remarkably naive about things and just remarkably incapable in so many areas. Like cooking, I'm very bad at cooking. I will commonly text Becca, if you were going to saute vegetables, how would you go about doing it? Like I literally will ask her for advice on the most simple of cooking things. But there is something really weird going on with me in this oven, which is I feel like we're connected. like okay psychically emotionally and the fact that i don't actually know what the temperature is i'm just eyeballing it's been working so far because i've cooked multiple pizzas in this oven since i've been out here like and i have a barbecue i barbecued up some corn yesterday i i feel like oddly empowered by the fact that i don't know what the temperature is on the oven like i and and it makes me feel like i'm like um some kind of survivalist you know so i so i don't want an oven thermometer because i like not knowing i like having to rely on my wits when

it comes to uh to cooking things do we have room on the um like i guess on the too beautiful to biz platform for the psychic chef like a tv show that we picked the psychic chef

um i um i would be happy to uh sort of look to grow that vertical and then you can onboard me exactly

now onboarding is starting to sound weirdly dirty and i want to make a lot of jokes about onboarding all over the house but let's just leave it there

hello and welcome to top story all right our top story today an update on the tbtl coin situation uh john you sent andrew and i a video that made me delighted uh the other day of uh of one of the coins of a like a what a proof of concept what what do you have to tell the folks

about the coins yeah i think it's beyond concept it's like a real tangible i don't know right you have them there's oh wow yeah those that was me banging one against the table here um yeah so i have two heavy boxes apparently uh metal coins when they're stuffed in a box can be pretty heavy Heavier than lunchboxes?

Think about that. What weighs more, a ton of coins or a ton of lunchboxes?

A ton of feathers, actually. And did you, I mean, we have like, the number is north of a thousand of these things, right?

Yeah, there's like 1,300, I think, or just over.

I did not even think about the weight implication. Yeah, me too, because these things are solid, man.

I felt bad for the delivery driver, but he was cool about it. Yeah. So I have these sitting in my home. They actually came a lot sooner. I was, uh, talking to the vendor, uh, this woman, Carrie that I've worked with when I was at APM, she's really awesome. And, um, she helped us procure these. They were supposed to be here within, you know, it was gonna be about six week turnaround from when I placed the order in mid July and they're here already. And so, um, which is awesome. And so now there, did we, am I spoiling? Did we say what comes with these? Can we talk about that? Or is that, was that something I can't remember if we talked about in the THON.

I think that we mentioned it. Yeah, the certificate of authentication.

Right, so there's a layer of certificate of authentication that will be packaged with each coin. So that's the next step. So I am now working with a local printer here in St. Paul who's going to be jamming those out.

Today it can be yours for just $19.90.

A little more, but yeah. And so he's a great guy, Dave, I've worked with. He's really swell. And so we're just working on getting those printed. And as soon as I pick those up, hopefully, I'm hoping by the end of the week, maybe early next week, it'll take a couple days longer to get the job going on that. But as soon as I have those in hand, I'm going to start stuffing the envelopes with the coins and the layers of authenticity.

You're doing that by hand yourself.

Well, I can't do it by feet.

Yeah, no, that's –

That's pretty good spoof.

Yeah, yeah. But this is – I just want the image. I want people to picture you in your home in the Twin Cities.

I want people to picture John really questioning if it was a good idea to join Too Beautiful, Too Biz in the early days when he's stuffing his 1100th coin into something in Bailey.

Yeah. No, I definitely – it's one of those things. It would be like one of those good – I think, Andrew, you talk about this a lot, like good mindless work. Like you just kind of – you're just kind of in a rhythm and you're just doing this off like some movie or something on the background. I hope people aren't allergic to dogs because I can't guarantee some of my dogs' fur won't make their way.

Can you train the dogs to do some part of this?

If I could, I'd be on Lyreman. Does he sell the show? I don't know. Oh, man, I wish. But, yeah, so I'll be doing that once I have the layers and labeled envelopes in hand. And, yeah, then I'll be going in the mail. So I'm hoping, kind of looking at the date, so today's August 9th. ninth i'm hoping that they get into the mail by the middle to end of next week now based on awesome again that depends on the print and you know and and the printers are really like i said a really great printer and a company to work with but um you know we're just the way the nature of these things so i'm hoping by the end of next week they get put in the mail and people can start seeing them by the week of the you know 14th like probably later in the week uh and then and then

from there that's an incredibly fast turnaround i have a question this is the obvious question that i think everybody is wondering but will you be sealing these with your own tongue slash saliva and if so does that mean if you ever commit a crime we will have your dna uh well you know

i was playing on but now that you made that point i should probably get some kind of uh sealer yeah something so you guys don't have that and then we'll just accuse your dogs of

the crime i guess because that's what the dogs that is actually what they can help out with

they would be more happy to lick them all shut um you know what i'm just realizing as we're

talking about this i totally had a dream about these coins i think last night or the night before and thank you i was looking for that uh and i totally i didn't realize while it was happening that it was a dream if that makes any sense because that's kind of how dreams work and then i forgot about it until we started talking about it again and then i was relieved that it was a dream so this was the dream john somehow you and i were in the same room and you were like handing me one of these coins which i was so excited about but for some reason it was about like each coin was like the size of like a saucer like far too big for someone to like slip in their pocket or even maybe carry like they were like a discus it was like a discus yeah and i remember trying to be cool about it and thinking well we did send a lot of emails and i kind of checked out at some point maybe we agreed it was going to be the size of a discus and i just like i knew there was no going back and i was like yeah these are pretty cool this will be great thinking this is not what i was hoping for and i only now realize that that isn't real life that

isn't what happened they're exactly what we're hoping for according to i had a dream that that's

what happened that it is not what happened what happened is these they look so good in that video you sent us john like they're perfect in every way i'm like so psyched about it and i'm so psyched for people to get these because you know we talked about this a lot um when we were doing the thon that like the whole idea is this is only you only can get one of these coins if you were able to help us out during this the kind of first independent

independent tbtl-a-thon or the first one in a long time because literally we needed people to save tbtl and hopefully it's something that people will have around for a long time and they'll kind of be proud of it they'll be like yeah i did do this i helped save this podcast that i like um so anyway really good job on that john and and good job to the folks that you worked with to design it and also a listener eric who helped with the graphic design like they couldn't have been more perfect other than if they were the size of a saucer that'd be the only improvement I can send these back and get the saucer-sized ones if you want. They re-melt them down?

Yeah. Except all 1,300 coins will only produce 40 saucer coins.

Right. So we're going to give them out to the first 40 people and everyone else's SOL.

I'm going to share the video that you sent us. Now, this is a little bit of a sticky wicket here because you sent – and I like your style of doing this. I don't know if I've worked with somebody who's done this a lot, but you will often send a quick video to Luke and I to show us something. Like when the sample coins came a couple of months ago, you're like, here's a little video of me unboxing them. And it's just for us. It's not for publication.

And there was the thing a few months ago when it was like 11 o'clock at night.

Yeah, your foot videos. I was wondering about that. To package coins.

On the subject of which, everybody tune into this week's Hey Dummies. I was able to wedge in some pretty sweet foot content.

A little tootsie content.

Yeah, Andrew, I want you to check the open rate on that email. Now that I've put that out there, I want to see if that moves the needle.

Well, I am also going to include this video that John sent us. Now, John, I think you're a little bit apprehensive about this because this was not for public consumption. It was just like a quick video that you sent that it was like, you know, you weren't producing it for public consumption, like I say. So there's a period where you're trying to open a coin and the camera just sort of points at your chest. Your, I will say, T-shirted chest. It's not a bare chest situation.

My softball shirt.

Exactly. And you're a little bit like, well, I'll reshoot it. And I said, no, I don't want you to reshoot this. I just want the listeners to see exactly what came into my inbox today. So we're going to try to put that in the newsletter this week.

Yeah. I don't want to call it Sticky Wicked. I think it's more just there was I put my phone in my mouth and that's why it's pointed down at my shirt. i heard you go and i didn't know why okay what happened was i realized i need two hands to the coins bonus for people that are getting the coins they come in these little vinyl pouches so they preserve better right and if you want to kind of put prop up on a shelf or something and so like i was trying to open it one-handed with my phone in my hand and it wasn't working and then the again this is the slightly embarrassing part is it took me a lot longer to open the vinyl packet than i expected and so that's the part where i was like well my phone is not my shirt because i'm a doofus who can't open up this vinyl packet, but I, no, I don't actually have any hard feelings.

Okay, good. We will put that, so open up the email this week if you want to see Luke's tootsies and John's chest and these awesome coins, which honestly, I just want to reiterate, they could not look more perfect for, when I think about what we were talking about months ago when it was just an idea in a meeting and then to see them come to fruition this way, again, big thanks to Eric who helped design them. They're exactly what we were picturing. I cannot wait to get one of these in my grubby hands.

Oh, I ain't ordering for you guys. Oh, yeah. No, I'm just kidding.

I would. I mean, actually, it's really it's a it's a fair question because I haven't donated to the show. So did I save TVTL?

But Susie Burbank did. So you might. You know what?

Send. Yeah. Suze will love. I told you that, like, my mom, God bless. She was so geeked up about the lunchboxes, about like anything, any of that swag that we had that was at their house. My mom did not see it as like Oh there's all this junk in our yard She saw it as like Wait you're just giving away these lunch boxes And she's like I'm getting one for every one of your nieces and nephews And I thought because that's exactly what the kids of today want Is a lunch box with a cartoon of their uncle on it Like non-insulated lunch box They can take to school But anyway my mom was very geeked up about all that So she'll be very psyched To get her hands on a TBTL coin Have you all been keeping up at all on this situation with Kevin Brown, the announcer for the Baltimore Orioles? Yeah. Yeah. Has this been they've been talking about this on Levitard, Andrew?

I don't know if they talked about it on Levitard. I'm not caught up on that show. But I mean, as a quick entree into this conversation, like it's just been really big news, even outside of sports circles. And Genevieve and I were talking about it last night. And without getting too far ahead of myself here, I will say it's a real bummer that, like, very casual, I would even say, like, non-baseball fans are hearing this story coming out of that Baltimore organization as opposed to the story of what a wonderful season they're having. And, like, I know we're in the same, like, you know, we're both in the American League, so it's kind of a zero-sum game. But, like, aside from that, like, this is an awesome Orioles team.

And it's just so many good news stories about what's happening out there. And it bums me out that people who don't know that only know this shitty story. But don't you feel like Baltimore's had it too good for too long? Yeah, right. Exactly. Just in terms of the perception of the city. Now, this is probably more complicated for you, John, as a Yankees fan, because the Orioles are in your division, correct?

Yeah, but I am a kind of person like I if my team's not going to win, I'm happy when it's like an underdog winning, you know. So it's like if it was like the Red Sox, I'd be like, no, no way. But because it's the Orioles who have had modest to no success really for the last, I don't know, 20, 30 years. It's like you like to see it. It's like, oh, good for them. It's fun.

And I remember I remember as a kid, the Orioles go starting the season, I believe. Oh, in 18. They literally didn't win a game for the first. I think it was eight. Somebody can Google that. But, like, I remember it being on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine, and that's why I think I know it to be 0-18. Again, it was just a picture, I think, of, like, a very depressed Cal Ribkin Jr. And then, like, just 0-18 or whatever the number was. Like, they were so bad in those years. And, you know, I mean, again, I'm rooting for anybody and anything coming out of Baltimore. So you're right, Andrew. The fact that they've won 70 games this season and nobody really expected that. They've been in a rebuilding process, but they've kind of gotten—they're sort of pulling an anti-Mariners in a way, although the Mariners have been playing better of late. But you're right also, Andrew, this is not, as we like to say, a story about baseball. This is a story about very, very thin-skinned bosses, I think. So I'm going to play you this tape. This is the—he's one of these guys that kind of goes back and forth, I think, between TV and radio for the Baltimore Orioles. His name is Kevin Brown. One of the thoughts I have is he looks like he's 12. I don't know when they started letting 12-year-olds do major sports play-by-play, but this guy is very youthful appearing. And I have had that experience more and more. Aaron Goldsmith, the Mariners guy, looks very young to me. Yeah, he does. And I think it's because I'm getting older. I think what's happening is I'm getting older, and they're letting people in their early and mid-30s host sports things. And I feel like they're letting very young people do it, but it's just because I'm becoming a very old person. But anyway, this is the TV pregame little broadcast that's going on. And I think the story was that Baltimore was playing against Tampa. Now, Tampa Bay also, or the Tampa Rays, they have a really good record this year as well. And historically, the Orioles have been doing pretty poorly when they're playing at Tropicana Field. So this is this guy, Kevin Brown, kind of setting up this series of what's going on.

this has been maybe the toughest ballpark to play in but the orioles have a chance to do something special today they've already clinched at least a split in the series winning two of the first three and they could pick up a series win behind tyler wells today i did not add that music by the way

oh you did that is part that is part of the package oh and as the music starts a graphic shows up behind kevin brown which i think this is the thing that pissed off the owner it said tropical depression oh i didn't know that they're playing in the they're playing a tropicana field but they changed it to tropic hyphen cal like tropical depression right pointing out that the orioles had done poorly playing there over the years but that's juxtaposed with the fact that they're doing really well this season and that they're already they're already about to best their record for many seasons combined with this. This is ultimately a story of how well Baltimore is playing.

It's been a minute. The Orioles split a two-gamer with the Rays in June. They had lost their last 15 series here at Tropicana Field. You have to go back to when our now colleague Brad Brock picked up the win in the series finale June 25, 2017, the last time the Orioles won a series here at St. Pete. already got three and two of the chop this year after winning three of 18 the previous three years combined it is a stark difference Ben and it is not a bad race team it's not like all of a sudden the race became slouches in the American League East they've led this division every day but now two and the Orioles once again are back alone in first place so that is that is the thing

apparently that got this guy Kevin Brown indefinitely suspended and what's interesting is that i don't you know andrew you and i are are overly in the minutiae of like who the mariners announcers are at any one time like who's on radio who's on tv uh and in fact the mariners announcers have had some real bum luck this season as well mike blowers has had some health problems uh rick riz crashed an atv by the way if i gave you a hundred guesses at what would cause rick rico riz mariners announcer for many years if i give you a hundred guesses that

What was going to cause him to miss games this season, Andrew?

Where would ATV accident be in your 100 guesses? Right. And it sounds like a really bad one, too. It sounds like he's wearing a helmet. He feels like he's very lucky to have walked away alive, even though he's had spinal surgery and stuff. This is, again, one of our local announcers and kind of the face of the broadcast booth right now, I would say.

He was the number two guy to Dave Niehaus for all these years. And then Dave Niehaus passed away, and he kind of took the mantle.

Yeah. But then also, I mean, you point this out from time to time. It's didn't didn't he and Dave Sims also both injured themselves at a pickup basketball game on the road in Minnesota.

Did you hear about that, John? Did that make waves in Minnesota where you're based?

I went what was that this year or is that?

It was like two seasons ago. The Mariners were playing the twins, I believe. And who knew that the Mariners, like, play-by-play folks, you know, like, Rick Riz is not a young man, nor is he a tall man. And I don't know what Dave Sims' deal is exactly, but I did not picture them playing pickup basketball, like, you know, during their day off. There was a pickup basketball game where both men became horrendously injured. I feel like Rick Riz tore a biceps or something, and Dave Sims had to have total knee reconstruction or something.

I mean, they're kind of cooler guys than I give them credit for.

Wait, they're ATVs. They're like Napoleon Dynamite's grandma crashing that ATV in the dunes. Yeah, no, you're right. That's an argument for them living a rich life outside of the broadcast booth, Andrew.

But anyway. What's that? I do think there's a rich history, though, of baseball people being injured, not really to the game in goofy ways. I think, like, every year you hear some, like, I mean, this case, obviously, like, you're talking about an announcer. But one of my favorite non-baseball injuries was Clint Barmas, who was a shortstop for the Rockies at the time. And I know this very well because he was on my fantasy team and doing really good that season. He had been gifted a hunk of venison from his teammate Todd Helton. and when he was carrying it when he was carrying it into his house he tripped on the steps or something and like I don't remember exactly what the injury was but he was out for like eight weeks or something like that and you're like dude venison injury yeah it's like just carrying it like he tripped or something I don't remember exactly it's like the video of Sam

Darnold when it's like Sam Darnold and then it's like mono it says mononucleosis right like John what's his name Barmas Clint Barmas Clint Barmas venison right like the graphic that would flash anyway so uh it's kind of interesting because this guy Kevin Brown was apparently just like not on the air for a while until somebody and like the bowels of the internet I think it was like a reddit person or something was like trying to figure out why this guy wasn't there and again there's only a handful of people like Like, there's a thousand people in Seattle that would notice if, like, Gary Hill Jr. wasn't calling a certain number of the games, Andrew.

But is he the Gary Hill Jr.? Is Kevin Brown the Gary Hill Jr.? Or is he the Aaron Goldsmith? Is he almost the Rick Rids?

He's relatively new. I think he's only had the gig full-time of doing this for, like, a year or two. I saw at one point that they listed him as the main play-by-play guy since 2022.

But he is the main play-by-play guy. So maybe not like a household name, but you're going to notice him. I feel like Gary Hill Jr., like he's kind of like, he's not usually like the main, you're not tuning in for him. He's kind of like, he's part of the composite of the gang.

What if the Mariners hired the singer Gary Clark Jr. to also do some broadcasting and then we could have Gary Hill Jr. and Gary Clark Jr. kind of co-anchoring? I'd listen to that.

I don't know who that is, but I mean, maybe I am getting too much in the weeds here. I'm just sort of trying to figure out, like, how big of a deal this was for the casual Orioles fan who's tuning into a TV broadcast.

My sense from reading a few articles about it is that it wasn't something that the casual fan would immediately notice. Because also what happens, and then I'm just going further into the weeds, and I don't know what happens. Oh, by the way, your guy, is it Michael Kay? John, is he the main? Michael Kay has gone off about this, by the way, of course, in defense of Kevin Brown, I believe. But I don't know how it is for your Yankees, but, like, with the Mariners, the thing is it's a rotating cast of people. Sometimes they're on TV. Sometimes they're on the radio. If you're watching the TV version, like, I don't really understand what the rotation is. I just know that I either turn on a TV or a radio, and I'm going to hear some combination of a number of these dudes that I'm kind of aware of. But if I were to turn on the TV one day and it wasn't Aaron Goldsmith and Dave Sims, I don't know if I would even register something was off. Because they rotate around to different things all the time And I just don't pay enough attention to who's up in the rotation

Yeah, it kind of depends And it depends on who the replacement is And we can leave it there. But, you know, if you suddenly hear Shannon doing play by play or color commentary or something that would be a voice, you're like, oh, wow, they must be short somebody. But anyway, so in this case with Kevin Brown. So, first of all, this is a key thing here. It sounds like management was upset or the owner was upset because he was saying, boy, we our team used to get owned by this other team when we were in Florida. and now we're doing better this year but keep in mind there was a graphic behind him these were stats that were given to him he's not freelancing this this is not him on a podcast just like riffing off the top of his head and saying things that the team is rightfully upset about or something this is something that was prepared by the broadcast team of the Orioles he is not

caught in a hot mic situation where he's disparaging the LGBTQ plus community or misstating the name of the Negro League Hall of Fame. He's not doing any of those things. He's just saying, holy smokes, we're playing really well this season. We're playing so well that we're actually going to rack up a number of wins that we didn't get over the course of many other seasons. And that was enough for, is his name Peter Angelus, Peter Angelou, the owner of the Orioles, apparently to take offense to yeah i'm not sure the name go ahead john no is it john angels i

think oh john john dad right his dad billionaire who gifted him the team i think i don't think so

only because i was just looking at wikipedia and uh it looks like if wikipedia is to be believed that this guy who owns the team his dad his parents immigrated from greece and his dad was like apparently owned a bar or something and then he became a lawyer and then he made a bunch of money suing the drug companies over fen-fen the diet drug oh wow and i get the sense in the past right i feel like he had um and and just you know he built a successful like law practice i think that was based on that kind of stuff and then and basically back when baseball teams didn't cost like four billion dollars back when a back when a humble trial lawyer with many offices could afford to be lead an ownership group to buy a baseball team that's what he did that's that's what i i

saw on wikipedia for what that's yeah no i think that's right i think peter angelos i think that's like very much a generational thing for sports team owners these days where they had a parent who actually worked hard and then they just inherit like a classic jim ursay situation

with the Indianapolis Colts. Oh, my God. I saw a picture of Jim Irsay the other day. I don't even know what I would Google for it, but it was a get-together of some, like, Colts greats. So for the folks who don't know, we played some Jim Irsay audio a while ago. Jim Irsay is the owner of the Indianapolis Colts. His dad bought the team. His dad had, I think, a big, like, HVAC business or something in the Midwest. He made a bunch of money doing some kind of, like, sort of construction-y thing. and then again bought the team back when like a very successful but still somewhat normal person could afford to buy a professional sports team and then jim ursay ended up inheriting it jim ursay fancies himself like a singer and he's doing these shows where he hires a bunch of professional musicians to perform with him and then he sings like the johnny cash version of rusty cage while he's like sitting at a table in the middle of the stage this picture of jim ursay it's like a get-together of colt's greats one of the things i recognize is jeff saturday is in the picture who's i think the current head coach of the colts everyone on the stage i think it's like edger and james jim ursay uh uh jeff saturday anyway just basically people that are legendary within the i think peyton manning is actually in the photo everyone is looking normal everyone's just like staring ahead they're taking a picture they take a lot of pictures and then jim ursay is doing the most bizarre face he's got two thumbs up and he's grinning from ear to ear in a way that looks like he is in like in i don't know experiencing some sort of mental health distress i'm like everything this guy does is fascinating to me like like just even posing for a picture jim ursay is doing something that i find surprising or odd i'm looking for that now but i will tell you this i

did find the sports illustrated from back in the day with i i don't know what cal ripkin jr looks like there's definitely a sad looking uh maybe it wasn't him it might be him i'm not sure but It does say, oh, and 18, the agony of the Orioles. So, like, you nailed that.

That's wild.

I mean, okay. Does that make you feel better about your LeBron Sports Illustrated cover? Yes. That you talked about? Like, you lived with that for, I don't even remember what you got wrong. You got, like, the headline slightly wrong. I don't remember.

I think I had it wrong what he was wearing. I had him doing the Michael Jordan pose, which he wasn't. Oh, right, that was wrong, yeah. I think, other than the fact that it was LeBron James, I think every other detail I had totally wrong about that. So I'm glad that I nailed that Orioles cover, SI cover from back in the day. So anyway, I was a little, I have to say.

this i when i was doing some reading on this guy peter angelos who uh is the owner of the team i was kind of bummed to find out he's a lifelong democrat and like there i was just waiting to i was expecting to read that he like i don't know i just was expecting to hate every aspect of this person's existence and um just the fact that like he's not like a pro i was expecting him to be like One of the major donors to the Republican Party of Maryland and like, you know, his dad was like a robber baron of some. His dad, you know, was specialized in like busting up the unions of the coal mines of West Virginia circa 1905. Like like just whatever the worst like he's a descendant of the Sackler family. They made all their money on fentanyl or something like and then it's like his dad was a bar owner from from Greece. And then he like went to law school and then he like, you know, worked his way up and then he whatever like I and he's a lifelong Democrat. I was like, oh, this isn't totally fitting my narrative of not liking this guy. But I guess my question is, what do we think based on none of us living in Baltimore or knowing very much about this story other than what we've been reading the last week or so? I wonder what's going to happen. Like it's I feel like the team is now really painted itself into a corner like they got to bring this guy back. There was free Kevin Brown chants at the game last night, which, according to one website I was reading, the radio broadcast turned their audience mics down during the free Kevin Brown chants that were going on. People brought signs like it's a whole thing. The team has really messed this up now.

It's really I mean, there's I mean, they've just messed this up so badly. Again, it should be like the best story coming out of Baltimore baseball in a long time. And instead, everybody's focusing on this. And here are some other aspects of this situation as well. First of all, the team, unless something is broken this morning, I don't believe that the team has even admitted that this guy is suspended yet. Kevin Brown, I think that they're just saying we don't talk about personnel issues. And but it's it's various other like I think it was awesome announcing and maybe the Athletic had done their own reporting and talk to trusted sources to confirm. And there was also some people like insiders posting on public message boards saying I can confirm the story is true. so we're going with it the team hasn't even admitted it yet this is another little galling thing that i'm sure you came across luke apparently when kevin brown was first suspended he briefly did appear on the radio broadcast did you follow this i didn't catch that chain of events listen to this the reason he was on the radio broadcast even though he was already suspended from the tv broadcast was because they had to kick somebody else off the radio broadcast another one of their own broadcasters because we're not wearing Orioles gear a new rule that says all broadcasters have to wear a Orioles branded polo shirt and they have to buy it themselves no one of their broadcasters did not do that and so he got kicked off the air that day so they brought their suspended tv guy Kevin Brown in to do that I mean this is just like this organization and this owner sound like such like jerks about all of this and this is what we're talking about because other broadcasters are around the league are so offended by this so that's why you had yankees broadcasters bringing this up during their sunday games and like you had all of these broadcasters standing up for kevin brown around the country amplifying

this story out of Baltimore right you you messed with the wrong bunch of basically stat nerds who

have megaphones who have microphones exactly it's really galling I feel I mean I do I literally feel bad for Orioles fans that this is what everybody's talking about now but again I what I'm wondering

I totally agree with you on that um all the way around but what I'm also wondering is like how does this end because like they i feel like the the the hue and cry of like i feel like they really stepped in it the orioles from a pr standpoint really stepped in it with this so it seems like they got to bring him back but like when they bring him back it's like that first game back i mean obviously there's going to be a sort of a non-disclosure type of conversation like hey man we'll bring you back but you're not like you just gotta act like nothing happened you just gotta go right back pick right back up where you left off and like do not you know can't be like well anything new happen around here, folks?

Boy, what a great vacation.

If Letterman were still around, I'd love to see Letterman's top 10 ways that Kevin Brown will start his next broadcast.

Well, Luke, I think I saw something about this yesterday, so I did something further. So I Googled it, and it looks like they did say he's coming back this Friday against the Seattle Mariners. Wait, what?

Now, if the Mariners fans are smart, they will troll the Orioles.

regarding Kevin Brown. I don't know what they'll do, but maybe they'll start chanting tropical depression. I don't know what they'll do. That would be such a specific heckle when the O's are in town and we're saying stuff about their play-by-play person. So there you go. We've answered the question. Thank you, John, for your assiduous research.

That's going to be a tough series for us. I mean, it's going to be where the Mariners are right now. they just ruined the beginning of their season so badly that now we're really playing catch-up and suddenly catching fire, but now we're going to be playing one of the best teams in baseball. Not the best team in baseball, right? I don't know what's going on in the National League, but it's weird, though. Like, you know, so much of this show I spend talking about going to the ballpark and being really mad at the other fans that take over, specifically Boston, New York, and the Blue Jays, just so that everybody knows I'm not a complete psycho. Like, when Baltimore comes to town, even though they're so dominant, And even if they were to beat us, I'm not saying I'm cheering for Baltimore, but I would have no bad feelings about seeing some Baltimore fans rooting on their team. You know, it's just a different dynamic with those teams that take over the ballpark.

Right. And it's even going on right now. Like, you know, we're playing the Padres and it's like it's I don't think your point, Andrew, is that like no one from the opposing team, no fans who like live in Seattle can come watch the game. Right. And enjoy it. it's there just like a few teams also i don't know if you mentioned them but the yankees are one of these teams yeah um sorry never heard of them they're a team of new york john oh they're a team out of new jersey that's where their broadcast that's where their broadcast license

is hey luke should i go to that qfc uh where the the security guard who used to be a baltimore cop uh one time commented on my orioles hat that i accidentally wore to the grocery store should i go there and invite him to the game should he and i go to a a mariners baltimore game together

what an unlikely friendship i would watch that sitcom i think you should i think you should bring him a petition to free kevin brown and see if he has any idea what you're talking about yes

exactly you can andrew you can do it in the style of like those uh obviously staged tiktok videos where you like present him with tickets it's like hey man what are you doing do you want to go to game tonight it's i they're so cringy but then like a million people will watch them i'm like

i don't understand the internet there's a whole this would make andrew if you saw these you would go through the roof because it's and maybe i'm talking about something that's sort of adjacent to what you're talking about john but there are these guys that go around it's always dudes for some reason and their whole thing is like they start off by like they find somebody who it looks like they might be kind of in a bit of economic distress and they'll ask them if they can borrow like 50 cents for the bus or a dollar and then if the person who appears to be you know dealing with financial trouble if they are generous towards this person then that person turns around and is like actually i wanted to take you to the super bowl and i'm gonna buy you a new outfit and it's like and the person who's having this this kind of i guess you could call it charity extremely performative charity done for them then is of course they have to have this reaction like they have to start crying they have to thank jesus they have to be like my dreams came true and it's like it's so gross to me i mean i'm happy that the person is getting something but it's like if you really want to be kind to people just go give them the money and walk away like the filming of it right is so grotesque and the just smugness of the the guys being like you know i'm

gonna make somebody's day today it's just like you have somebody who's like experiencing homelessness Right. And then they are exploited for clicks when it's like, oh, I feel good video. It's like, no, it would be feel good if our like systems in this government like actually made so people had stable housing. Like maybe that would be a feel good situation.

No, John, save that for Slack, OK?

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

All right, email or V-mail before we skeedaddle?

Yeah, I got a voicemail that I'm going to play for you here in a second, but I'm also, like, actually going through my email right now because that's what I do when there's another person on the show.

I'm actually really going through something.

I'm really going through something, but John was giving me the cover that I could just kind of turn off half my brain and read some emails here that I'm behind on, and I see that somebody wrote in, Linder, our friend Linder wrote in to say that.

Do you realize, John, that Andrew just basically described your contribution as one half of what his brain could do if you do the math on that that's what he's saying is that he was able to one half of his brain didn't have to work because you were picking

up the slack yeah but can i tell you that's more than uh any amount of my brain that i use so i

feel like that's actually a compliment um but we got a note here from linda just saying that she enjoyed your instagram post And I'll see you next time.

That was like kind of a quick accidental sort of tour of your house as you were trying to show it in a state of disrepair. But then you got all these compliments on how beautiful it is and how beautiful the view is. And you were showing some distress on the show earlier this week saying you weren't trying to post a thirst trap or trying to fish for compliments. And yesterday afternoon at some point, I had not seen that in the wild, your video. But some people were talking about it on Slack and somebody shared the link to it. So I watched it and it was nice and it is a very beautiful view. But I wrote in the comments, show off, knowing particularly specifically that I was trying to like tweak you a little bit. But we'd already talked about it. It was a joke. But I have a I have a question for you. So you responded, you're drunk. And I'm curious, is that inner that is the second time in about six months that somebody has comment, has responded to something I sent them by saying you're drunk. And I'm worried that I am developing a reputation as an alcoholic. Like, I was not drunk when I did that.

No, I knew you weren't because I looked at the time stamp and it would have been like five.

Yeah, it was like in the afternoon. Yeah, I was just, I was drunk, Andrew. No, I was really serious. Like, do people go, is that like kind of a common retort these days? You're drunk. Not that I know of.

I don't think that's something that's been memefied. Oh, no.

Luke, can I tell Andrew the real reason you brought me on today's show? Andrew, this is an interview. I've had to sit through.

I don't know. Have you guys ever been? I guess I can't talk about it because this stuff is anonymous, but I had to I had to be part of an intervention as a young as a very young person. It was a very formative period in my life. And I did quit drinking for a while. So it worked.

I am. I just was just trying to be. I totally understood that you were being funny and I was trying to be funny back. But I was also like I was giving it about a quarter of my brain. And I was just like, oh, yeah, I just wanted to like I was just trolling. i had one of john's um golden retrievers uh-huh uh i uh what are the names of your dogs again john

uh thor modi and benny in that order how is benny doing benny's doing great he's uh well yeah he's doing great he's uh sitting right behind me uh he so folks don't know uh we weren't playing having three dogs we got benny because he's a diabetic and my in-laws took him in and they also had two dogs and like we just all agree to be better if they didn't have three so now we have three and uh yeah so he's he's diabetic which is totally fine it's just it's it's like humans it's manageable with insulin and uh i think sometimes uh for factors that in this case we couldn't really nail down specifically he had an insulin or like a crash in his blood sugar and so i ended up taking him it was like eight or seven or eight at night and so i ended up taken to the vet er because he was behaving in ways i've never seen him behave and he had to stay overnight for all testing and he's like he's totally fine we just had to adjust his insulin going forward um yeah so thank you he's doing good though he's doing okay good i'm glad yeah i know

you had a bit of a health scare the other day you had to like yeah run to the um to the vet in the middle of the night that's so scary man i'm sorry about that but i'm glad benny's doing okay this is an interesting email that i'm just seeing here luke maybe we'll never get to that voicemail But we got a note from Rob in Portland who says, a few months ago on my bike commute to work, I was waiting for a traffic light to turn green, and I looked up to find one Luke Burbank standing on the infamous Bubbles balcony. I wanted to honor the deal that we have and yell across the intersection, hey, Lloyd, I'm a 10. However, I did not want to embarrass myself, Luke, or Bubbles in a public setting by hollering, so I didn't say anything. As I was headed to work this morning Now this was sent on Tuesday As I was headed to work this morning I noticed the Emmy statue Your daytime Emmy statue Was missing from the window A little thirsty to display it publicly But okay It was then that I realized I missed my chance To meet Luke Gone are the days when I might run into Luke At any of the local settings He lists a bunch of local settings But first of all here So you had a listener who identified The location of your balcony just by seeing you up there. But also, I'm now learning that that is also where you displayed the daytime Emmy that you bought.

No, no, no. There's two things going on here. I would never leave it on the balcony because then it would be subject to the elements, Andrew. And that's not how we treat daytime Emmys. No, I was using them as bookends on a desk that was in the room that I would do the show from. And that desk happened to be pushed against a window. so one of them, I guess, I never even really realized this, I guess one of them would have been visible from the street, but not because I really and truly was not trying to, because it was, I think I talked about this on the show, but it wasn't until fairly recently, like, I don't know, a couple months ago that I kind of really put it together of how actually visible I was in there, because I was up on the fifth floor, and I don't know, I just...

It's weird. I kind of felt like, I don't know, I'm in an apartment, but I'm up in the sky. Nobody's noticing me there. And then Beck and I were, like, walking from her car, like, towards my apartment building. And, like, I just saw Bubbles, like, just sitting in a window. I was like, damn, she's right there. Like, if I were driving by, I could just identify that cat as being Bubbles. And then I was like, and then I was imagining myself standing at my sit-stand desk all day long doing stuff. And it's like it was because that place had a lot of windows and stuff. So I think I was much more visible to the wider world than I fully realized. But the Emmy thing was not intended to be a flex. But, hey, if it impressed a few people driving down 21st, I'm not mad at that.

Sure. Why not? That's also the window where you would sort of grease yourself up in the morning, right, before TBTL. Yeah, morning grease. Yeah, morning grease. I'm going to play one voicemail for you here. This was the original plan. and I was going to play this because it actually led me to sort of an interesting little journey today. Take a listen to this little short note here.

Hey, dummies. It's Sarah from Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I once watched Andy Rooney compare the sounds of different car doors slamming, so he's got that going for him. Power out. Bye.

So I was talking over that a little bit. We were talking about Andy Rooney on the show yesterday. I think I accidentally made an Andy Rooney-esque sound, which then got us talking about Andy Rooney and me playing drops of him being just sort of like annoying and cantankerous, as was his whole deal on CBS for a long time. Oh, I'm now just realizing, Luke, this is your other employer. So maybe I should tread lightly with my I don't think they're going to hear that. You don't think so. But anyway, so, yeah, I'm not a big fan of Andy Rooney as a holdover from a different era when whatever. I just don't like Andy Rooney's rants. Right.

Can I say one thing in defense of Andy Rooney's mild defense, not of his not of his misogyny and I'm sure a million other things. But and I've talked about this before, but I occasionally I don't do this very much anymore. But for a while I was doing a kind of a fair number of commentaries on CBS, basically like a kind of off brand Andy Rooney thing. And what I learned very quickly was when you're doing one of those commentaries in order for it to feel like it has a quote unquote point of view. you very, I very quickly descended into Andy Rooney territory, like saying, I don't understand Twitch. It's like watching someone else's paint dry, I think is literally a line that I said. And then I remember watching someone being like, why am I being such a crank? And it's because it's not enough to just go, hey, Facebook bought this thing called Twitch. Isn't that interesting? It's like, you've got to have an opinion. And the opinion is mostly driven by like some kind of like, I don't this doesn't sit right with me so that's not to defend any of his terrible takes but I can kind of see how it happens because my very very sort of minor descent into that world I was I was channeling him hard after like 10 commentaries well it's a different tone but I can associate

with that on a much smaller level when I was briefly hosting a radio show in Seattle and I didn't have a co-host like it you find yourself becoming the stereotype of a late night talk show host who just like has to develop opinions and then shadow box with himself and then like tap the papers tap the papers maddow style on the desk because you're just kind of like you're realizing you're just sort of like you know again kind of um creating these uh what do you call it when you create something that you fight against not just shadow boxing uh straw man straw man arguments or whatever so i i understand that you have a job to do and you you slip into it i mean also andy rooney by maybe you know being somebody who really created that kind of space he's immediately a parody of himself because he's just like basically our caller here sarah says that she

one time here i'm gonna play this again in case i talked over i once watched andy rooney compare the sounds of different car doors slamming i once can heard him compare the sounds of different car

door slamming which actually that sounds interesting to me so i looked for that tape and i couldn't find it i found some really annoying tape of literally andy rooney saying

that there's too many like doodads and cars gadgets here in my office i don't really like gadgets i don't even like the word gadget i read though where automakers have plans to install even more electronic gadgets in their cars soon do we really need more of them i mean like that's just

like such a parody uh but i was gonna say what i think sarah is talking about i could not find the audio of it but i found a new york times like kind of i think a reader submitted review from 1964 of a full half hour special that an unknown at the time andrew h rooney wrote and produced called an essay on doors it must win a peabody award according to the person who wrote this. Apparently, back in 1964, they gave

Andy Rooney the time to spend a half hour talking about doors and contemplate on doors and the sounds of doors and what doors represent like that actually sounds good to me well that's what I'm

saying oh can I ask a question Luke like as somebody who is a professional TV person in this regard who slipped into the Andrew Andy Rooney's uh situation please use his full name Andrew H Andrew H. Andrew Herbert Rooney. Is there an example of somebody who does that kind of commentary that you think is really good? Who would be somebody that constantly has good opinions in that kind of way?

I don't think that's a real thing anymore. Robert Crowwich used to do – Robert Crowwich I think was at ABC TV. This isn't exactly an answer to your question, John, because it wasn't commentaries. It was reporting. I think the whole thing of television, it gets very formulaic very quickly. And I remember Robert Colwitch, of course, of Radiolab fame now and NPR fame. He was on TV for a while, and he was one of the few people I ever saw who actually figured out a way to tell stories on TV differently. And he was doing it on, like, Good Morning America or whatever, like stories about finance and things. He was just very clever. As far as the commentaries go, no, I don't think anyone's really – I mean, Gaffigan does a lot of them now on Sunday morning. Oh, I didn't. I think you mentioned that, but I forgot. Jim Gaffigan, the comedian. Jim Gaffigan. And I think they're fine. I mean, what they are is just like an extended. They're not even extended. They're like a truncated riff from his stand up special. You know what I mean? Like, it's like a thing that he's observed about, like, you know, going on vacation is like hard on the parents kind of a thing. You know, it's like it's supposed to be fun, but it's that you actually need a vacation when you get back from your vacation. that's making it sound like i that that's making it sound like i'm sort of negging i actually think jim kaffigan's really funny and um and so i think he does a good job with them although again what they are is basically a stand-up joke that he's just kind of expanded to be two minutes or something yeah so i guess i'd say he's doing kind of a at least his are funny and interesting observations but most of the time it's just the format is just i think fairly limiting and if you had to do one every week i mean really who's doing it better is probably somebody on tiktok right i don't know who that person is somebody sitting in their car somewhere probably eating carl's jr and talking into their camera like that's probably somebody who's who's doing it better than i'm doing it or anybody at the network level that's where the that's where the new andrew huberman roonies

are operating so so you either die uh eating tick uh eating carl's jr on tiktok or you live to see yourself become the andy rooney is that like the uh that was a really bad joke i was going i didn't even follow that that's okay it's a batman joke the nerds out there mike we'll get it what is the actual thing you you batman mobile you live long enough to see your you you die the hero you live long enough to see yourself become the villain is the is the line who says that it's um in the dark night uh when bruce wayne and harvey denner sitting around the table um i think it's might be maggie jill hall's character that says it oh yeah she's good in those um who plays like the in their love triangle she's the uh the love interest um did you see the latest dc one i think it was the

flash that has like the early versions of batman did you watch that i'll watch it on max i heard

it was terrible it looked terrible there's the problems with the the lead ezra miller yeah i just right yeah i mean yeah i was we don't have to get all of it but yeah i i didn't have a desire

to see it that that struck me as a very i think we probably talked about it kind of in passing on the show as a very interesting scenario where they had already dumped a couple hundred million dollars into this film and the star of the film is somebody that was going through uh some really public sort of mental health stuff and was accused of various crimes and grooming and all kinds of things that are uh you know but they still had the movie they weren't going to just like they we're gonna just like not do the movie so it's like how do you play that if as the as the film studio that's that's you know made the film or whatever i guess they gave it a try it doesn't sound like it worked particularly i don't think that movie was was much of a hit yeah it's kind

of a bummer that they kind of um go ahead what's that oh just because that also had michael keaton in it right yeah that's what and it was such a i had very mixed feelings about it because i saw a couple of different versions of the trailer a couple of times because i was going to see movies I guess that were really dialed into what they were marketing towards and so I would see these you know it was Michael Keaton playing like that era of Batman like 1989 Batman which is what you know got me into Batman and I have such strong like nostalgic feelings about that movie I used to say it was my favorite movie I don't know if that really holds up anymore but it's definitely the movie I've seen the most in my lifetime and so that marketing totally worked like even though I knew like I saw the trailers I'm like this movie is going to be terrible this looks bad but also look at look at Michael Keaton playing Batman like am I going to fork over my $40 or whatever it is to see a movie these days to see a bad movie that is pandering towards me and I guess I ended up not see also luke i meant to ask you how did i thought asteroid city was still on the horizon i didn't realize we totally missed asteroid city did you end up seeing the new wes anderson no i like what

the day that i wanted to see it it wasn't out and so addy and i went and saw paper moon on father's day right and then uh the next thing uh you know um it was i guess not in theaters anymore i yeah

i blinked and i missed it but i also probably didn't we probably didn't miss that much honestly

you know again it's like i always say from batman you either die making rushmore or you live long enough that luke is inured to your filmmaking like right famously you say that wes it's like wes anderson is just like a victim of his own success with me which is that he makes a particular kind of film he has a particular kind of aesthetic i love it but i feel like i've seen it at this point because i've watched so many of his movies and you know if it were on the plane and it was playing i would certainly watch it if it just happened to be like a wednesday night and becca and i were looking for something to do or if you know it's on demand and i'm here you know looking for something to watch i'm totally not opposed to it but i just feel like i've seen that movie and i've seen that movie when it was called moonrise kingdom i've seen that movie when it was uh called the french dispatch i've seen that you know i've just when it's called the grand budapest hotel just like i've seen this movie from wes anderson at this point yeah it's like a genre

run to itself how many times do you have to see a world war ii movie it's like all right i've i've seen i've seen the one where they it's the pacific uh theater like you've seen you've seen

a million times already which is why i didn't run out to see dunkirk although now i feel like because you saw that in the theater right andrew i supposedly loved dunkirk i forgot that that was

a christopher nolan film that's one of my favorite nolan films yeah which makes me think i should

actually watch it i just because i just you know i'm the military stuff i'm i'm moderately interested but it's a real kind of blind spot for me like i just don't i didn't see i didn't watch band of brothers on hbo i did listen to the podcast called dead eyes which was great oh yeah about the guy who got fired by tom hanks from band of brothers for supposedly having dead eyes and then he tracks tom hanks down to ask what that exactly meant but um i didn't watch uh saving private ryan i didn't even watch shaving ryan's privates which was the triple x version they were

promoting it the lusty lady you haven't you haven't seen that yet then okay we'll compare notes on that later please though do if you can i know we're talking about s-e-x in front of the

c-h-i-l-d-r-e-n sex cauldron i thought they closed that place down do see oppenheimer in the theater

if you can yeah i know i'm going specifically if you can because i do think that that's the one thing about dunkirk is i'm really glad i saw it in the theater i don't even remember that much about it other than that it was like stunning and a sort of overwhelming experience to see it in the theater um i'm gonna re-watch it probably on tv and see how how it stands up but definitely oppenheimer with the sound design uh it's worth seeing on the big screen okay i will actually

they may be playing it i should find out they're playing it in a town near me i'm kind of like i said i'm sort of triangulated between three sort of small cities in southern washington so one of has got to have Oppenheimer, presumably. I know they're all playing Sound of Freedom, I'm sure. What is that? That's the, like, Jim Caviezel anti-human trafficking, and I put that in just the heaviest air quotes I can generate. It's this whole, it's just another one of these really, really shitty-sounding movies that's made by some kind of, like, religious film studio, which is now a way for people to sort of own the libs is to go see this shitty movie.

wait but Luke did you hear the the big story out of that you know the big news that came out of that so it's like this QAnon-ish like yeah like the libs are trafficking or whatever Pizzagate but one of the guys who was the major funder for it was recently arrested for get this child abuse like child endangerment or like basically not so much as trafficking I think but like adjacent crimes about harming children so I didn't hear about that but yeah of course the whole issue

is you know human trafficking is a thing that happens but it's rarely happening to the people who are the most worried about human trafficking in other words like your blonde haired blue eyed children were probably not being trafficked in that Starbucks or almost trafficked when somebody looked at them a way that made you feel weird it's happening to people but there are people that often don't speak English as their first language people that are here from maybe other places

or are brought here from other places

Yeah, it's obviously an absolutely horrible thing for the people that it's being perpetrated on, but the people who are the most worried about human, or at least most overtly worried about human trafficking, think it's happening to them. I will tell this story very briefly. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but somebody I know, somebody I work with, not on this show, but in a different context, told me a story about their... mother this was in texas their mother who's a white woman in her like 70s she and her girlfriends were taking a trip to a place called philipburg texas which i've actually been to it's an entire town predicated on selling signs that say it's wine o'clock somewhere like hand painted on three pieces of reclaimed barn wood it's just wall to wall that the whole town is just tchotchkes that like moms would like to purchase and hang somewhere uh in their in their kitchens just Choc-a-block with chocoholics. Chocoholics, I'm sure for a period of time, it was just all roosters. Remember when everyone's mom was roosterifying their kitchen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's that kind of place. And my friend who I know, who I work with, said his mom and her girlfriends were there for like a kind of a weekend just to, you know, go do some shopping and hang out and have fun. and she called him breathlessly explaining that she thought she was nearly human trafficked because there was a Mexican gentleman in one of the stores that was chatting them up and then later she saw him standing on a corner talking into his cell phone and she was pretty sure that she was talking into a cell phone? Probably to one of like the main traffickers to report back on how it went like the people who think that like so all that is to say it's I'm not trying to I hope when I when I go on my rant about how I hate that the elevation of human trafficking as an issue. It's not because I don't think it's awful when it happens to real people. But I hate when primarily white, primarily conservative people, another story that's been told to me is somebody who's a, the mom of a friend of Becca's. They were, for some reason, a group of people were talking about what would you do if you won the lottery? If you just didn't have to work and if you just had unlimited resources. And the mom said, I think I would fight human trafficking. What do you mean by that? like how would you what would you and like it's because it's just on fox news all the time as a thing yeah so anyway whatever this movie is sound of freedom cry of freedom it's like it's both q anon related and it's like some you know white straight woman you know whatever conventionally attractive woman is has been uh human trafficked to like columbia i also think they probably picked the nation of columbia because they thought we're not going to do a lot of box office there anyway like they're probably doing the math on like well what places do we not want to alienate because we want to try to like maybe sell some tickets and the thing is made like hundreds of millions of dollars and it just looks absolutely awful but as i'm driving around here i'll see a freeway overpass that literally has a handmade sign that says go see this movie

that's the kind of movie it is it's a way of expressing your identity aside luke from uh

the projection where the guy himself who funded you know was doing these kind of crimes part of the reason for their um the revenue it's like yes huge box offices i think they literally have a qr code on the screen after the movie because they have a whole marketing thing where it's like basically pay the way for other people to go so it's made a ton of money because people can like buy tickets for other people to go i think at the end of the movie literally jim caviezel

comes on as himself appealing to people to promote the movie and buy other people tickets.

So the story is there will be sold-out theaters everywhere, but there might be two people in them. So it's like a real Donnie Jr. buying his own memoir when he was the number one times bestseller or something a couple years ago or whatever. It's that kind of thing, you know? So it's like a real astroturf kind of nonsense.

It's also the Jim Caviezel descent into madness really bums me out because he's from Mount Vernon, Washington. And he and his brother were big basketball players there when Mount Vernon perennially had the best team in the state. I want to say their dad's like a chiropractor or something. My friend Kelly played basketball with those guys. And when he was initially being cast and things, I was like, it's really cool. This dude from Mount Vernon who played high school basketball in the state is getting these acting jobs. How cool. And then he just turned out to be a complete nutcase.

Now you got to go in on Chris Pine. Nope, not Chris Pine. Jeez Louise. Chris Pratt. Chris Pratt.

Don't, Andrew, you know what? Of your many flubs and foibles, don't beat yourself up over that one. They're very similar names. They're similar names. They're about the same age. Same era. They have a lot. Yeah, exactly. But I think Chris Pratt is the guy from the greater Lake Stevens area. Lake Stevens, yeah. Well, I think, once again, we're going to end the show on a Chris Pratt reference.

Well, I didn't want to end it on human trafficking. so this is the best I could do

but after this episode I am going to come back as myself and implore people to subscribe other folks to TBTL

I hear it's not a bad idea

John how do you feel as our Director of Revenue and Operations

like I said we're not a non-profit anymore so all bets are off do whatever we need to do

alright good stuff hey thanks for

spending the time with us today. John, thanks for being here. It was fun talking to you, man. Yeah, it was great chatting. We will be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Go Mariners. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

I love pickles. It's my heritage. I love a pickle.

Power out.