Muse

You've been listening to a Glistening Goose podcast, co-produced by Jingle Jangle Media, Inflatable Jukebox Productions, The New York Times, and Splunk's. Your one-stop shop for pistachio nuts and swimming trunks. The podcast was produced by me and Ahara Minara. Executive produced by Maria Gornzinski, Jack Goulash, and Peter McTeter-Totter. Additional reporting by Laura Panerni. Our editor is Skye Ben Shugan. Our deputy editor is Kylie Sassafras. Bowels Editor is Noah Elefante. Constance Editor, Bison Hodgepodge. Executive Editor, Bill Fist. Executive Associate, Associate Executive is Mary Moo. Sound Production, Sam Blind. Audio Production by Hester Lestrange. Production, Production by Bofi Fennell Harrington. Magic Tricks Performed by Zamo the Great. Original music for this episode is provided by Young Kong. Next week on The Secret Rabbi. How much lettuce is too much lettuce? TBTL

I've seen it coming for years I've worried about it I hoped with all my heart I wouldn't experience it I wouldn't see it but it's now here

Chips and dips, chips and dips I love chips and dips

That's a no from me, dog

You know, being in prison I have finally decided to start my first novel I started it two weeks ago It is Christine by Stephen King.

Mom, it's not real. It's a jib-jab.

You know, I just came here to hit dingers and have a good time. That's about it. All right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

They've never touched anything in their lives. Let them touch those things for once.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

Wipe the potty, wipe your body.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where it's been windy and rainy and a lot of stormy weather here in the Pacific Northwest. Although right now we're actually getting some sort of sunbreak, some little bit of blue sky peeking through. So, you know, this whole conversation bothers me for people that were curious about the weather at my house. That's that's the update on that. Here's the update on episode 4,040 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. I have had a song in my brain for the last three or four days, and I can't seem to get rid of it, and so I figured...

Hey, want to hear the most annoying sound in the world?

What I would do is infect the brains of all of the TBTL listeners and Andrews.

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

Tell you about the sitting song coming up. Also, big piece in the Seattle Times today, trying to look into who was behind this massive private fireworks show that went off recently out there in Puget Sound. And whether or not it was exactly legal. Is it legal to be this insane? So we'll talk about that. And we'll talk to this guy, longest running Cobra of the show, Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships He's been getting into various alternative thinking strategies lately I found him recently chain smoking and just tearing a beer can into a small figure Time is a flat circle He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now Good morning, my friend

Good morning, Luke Do you know what I'm doing right now? Aside from talking to you and playing this music underneath us? What? Making mud

I thought you were going to say making money Looks like that makes one of us.

I don't know. We've got to check in with John about that. I have a device upstairs that's been churning away for about, let's say, I started at 7.30 last night. So about 14 hours now, 15 hours now, that has been taking my kitchen compost and turning it. Well, my kitchen scraps, I guess, and turning it into compost. Have you heard of these Lomi devices? L-O-M-I? We talked about them on the show. Oh, yeah, we talked about them on the show. Exactly.

I think I want to say, like, Listener Bette might have one. Somebody has one.

Yep, up in upstate New York.

Good memory. And this is one of those rare occurrences. Well, I have a theory already, which we'll get to in a moment. But I looked at it, and I was like, because I don't have a garbage disposal here. And, in fact, you know the number one gross job, I was doing it this morning, is dealing with the teeny tiny particles of food waste that are constantly getting stuck in my sink drainage. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, because you have one of those little, like, baskets.

Yeah, I mean, it's like that whole kitchen is a complete nightmare. But it's just, there's nothing kind of more unsettling than having to go down and, like, hand dig out little pieces of orzo that got beneath the strainer somehow. Whatever. Point is, I...

I should get something for composting. It would make my life easier. And yet I looked at the price on that loamy thing, and I went like, hmm, that's a little rich for my blood. But now you and Veeves have one at your house. Wow.

Yeah, well, what's your theory on that?

Veeves found one on Facebook Marketplace.

No, close. We have a friend who has one and is letting us try it out because they don't like it so much. And I don't know why, though. They rehomed their loamy? Yeah, I think. So I'm like, don't tell me why you don't like it. Let me just try it. And so there's three different settings. First of all, I will say this. Not that, I mean, this is maybe a rude thing to say, and I don't mean it to be rude. I don't see you having the patience for this whole process.

Oh, you're being rude to me.

I thought you were being rude to the low man.

I didn't know who you were being.

No, I'm being rude to you. I mean, it's weird to say you don't have the patience because it takes a process that would usually take, like, a season, right, for food to break down.

If anything, this seems very much up my alley.

And instead it happens quicker. But there's a lot, you know, like there's a whole process. As you first, we always have a tin on our counter where we collect the scraps. Then you've got to be kind of careful about what you're putting in there. Like you can't put, I've been eating a lot of plums lately. Turns out our neighbors have a plum tree, but you can't put like pits in there.

I have some bad news about those plums you were looking forward to today, Andrew. Oh, you didn't. The ones in the icebox? They were just so good. Do I have that right? Were they in the icebox? Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah, icebox. You got it.

Like Juan Carlos Williams, I think. But anyway, so I just sort of feel like separating things out and then eventually putting them in this thing. And then so what I did was I had some food scraps anyway. I also took care of some stuff in the fridge that should have been tossed out a while ago anyway to like kind of get a full load into this machine, which is about the size of like a bread maker, maybe. I don't know if that's a common thing. And then I did. It said you can put yard waste in there, too. So just to see how it handles everything, I just took a few handfuls of leaves. I have about 100 bags of dried leaves in my garage right now waiting for me to take them out to the curb. So I threw some of that in there, too, because I feel like you want a diversity of stuff in there. And this is my first time out, so some kind of dry, crackly leaves, a bunch of food from my kitchen. Put it all in there. You put a little tablet in there that can help accelerate things as well, a little bit of water. You got yourself a stew going. You lock it in, and then you can put it on one of three different phases, basically. One is the quick one, which can go like three hours, and boom, you're done. The next one is, I think, maybe five to eight hours or something. And in that one, it takes a little bit longer, but you can put like those compostable straws and packaging and anything that is sort of industrial compostable. You can put it in that one. Or you can put it on the super long cycle where they say it provides like the best, richest dirt for growing because it uses kind of lower heat and takes more time. And you can only use food scraps and yard waste for that one. So I'm like, well, first time out, I want to see how the best dirt looks. So last night around 730, loaded it all up and hit go on that thing. It's been churning away all night. It's not silent. I don't know why I expected it to be silent, but it's not super loud. it's like um a dishwasher it's about about a dishwasher only you can sort of hear the movement inside is a little bit different the rhythm is different but i'm going to say about the decibels

of a dishwasher yes and so then when this is done making your mud although i don't is it is it it's

dirt really probably right i wanted to say making mud because i thought that's alliterative no i

like it yeah i'm i totally support it but i'm trying to wrap my mind around this whole thing are you will you then take this uh container outside and then where do you have a compost pile somewhere where are you going to dump this what this all turns into probably the neighbor's

yard it's gonna sure chuck it over there yeah um i brought in you know what this is actually a quasi interesting thing here too i'm not somebody who saves things because we might need it later i think we all as humans have an instinct to do that but i'm the type of person who because i maybe because i hate clutter i'm just like get rid of it we'll never use it again but I had like I don't know five of these old gladware containers that are like you know kind of decent size but we got some better tupperware at a yard sale last year so I'm like I'll put that stuff out in the garage I was like I could have just recycled this gladware stuff but for some reason I put it in a bag and I hung it in the garage and I said you're not good for food anymore but someday you might be good for something and then yesterday I was like oh my gosh when this mud is being done made I can grab one of those things from the garage and fill it up so we're going to start by filling up small little tubs i don't think it's going to be a huge payload but if i continue to do this throughout the winter we will probably have quite a bit of of compost to add to

soil in the summertime or spring i have i have tupperware thoughts andrew so when i moved here you know i've moved a few times of late and i've been divorced a few times of late and so the my sort of things like tupperware are kind of a gray area for me because it's like i didn't ask for any of that in the division of assets but i i did grab a few things i think when i left bellingham i don't know i've had this like very sort of island of of broken toys kind of tupperware situation going on um and so i decided are we talking real tupperware i'm

not trying to be snobby but out of curiosity you're talking like classic tupperware brand tupperware or just food storage like the glad stuff that you get i'm using it in the way that

we misuse okay uh velcro and and uh you know xerox okay like i just mean food storage stuff some of it is probably real tupperware some of it is not there's a couple of like you know greek yogurt containers probably becca sent me some leftovers and something a soup container would have the master of reusing and repurposing things like that like you know if we get some Thai food and it comes in one of those clear containers like that will then serve another purpose she's also very concerned about BPA stuff though which is the leaching of the plastic and that actually comes into play in this story I'm reading the New York Times recently and I see in the wire cutter column these are the best Tupperwares that we've found and uh I looked and they had they recommended this I mean again food storage I don't know these are all Tupperware brand but the one they recommended the most it was like 24 and I thought I could change my life for $24 I have like a couple of weird just like things and does the lid fit and they're all that color of orange look like you had lasagna in there for too long yeah oh

you mean $24 for like a set yes like a nesting set oh god yeah yeah you just clear everything out recycle it and just bring in the new right but here's the problem

so it showed up and I unpacked it all and I washed it all which I've yeah I hate doing that but you gotta do it you gotta do it when it's new so I washed it all it's a It's $24 Andrew It's a massive amount Of food storage It's every shape and size The thing about the BPA was I told Becca I've recently come into some new food storage stuff And she said did you get the glass And I was like no because I feel like that's a breaking hazard She goes the glass is better because It doesn't leach any BPAs And also it's unbreakable And then I said what they call me Mr. Glass And I was like you just literally set me up For an actual line from a Kanye song So I feel like I bought the wrong ones But that's neither here nor there I'm going to use them for a while But there's so much of them, Andrew And I was trying to put them in a cabinet last night Because I needed to clear room They were all over It's a very small kitchen in this house And I was trying to put them into a cabinet And I was stacking them And what do you think happened? They all fell out onto me Like in the infomercial Like the most sort of like hackneyed joke About how infomercials make your life look so hard It's like this housewife, and for some reason, it's in black and white. This is the one part of the commercial that's in black and white. And she's trying to put all of these containers into this cupboard and a cabin, and they're all falling out on her. And I literally lived through that yesterday.

Then the scene stops and a red slash goes through it.

It is bad. I'm telling you what, it's worse than I thought it was going to be. So I had that moment of feeling like I was living in a 1990s infomercial. but um back to the uh to the the composting thing um i do want a picture of these things did you get

them to set did you get them to set up right now in your in your cupboard no they're not they're

not organized andrew so what is the issue well the issue is that i didn't want to take i didn't want to take 45 minutes i was making dinner so the whole problem was i needed to clear out all of this freshly washed food containment stuff so that i could then wash some dishes that were in the sink yeah there's a capacity issue in this kitchen or a surface area issue and so i basically like i wasn't like it was eight o'clock at night and i said i'm going to put on some jazz music eat half a gummy and get into the zone of organizing this this tupperware it was i need to move this somewhere else so i can move this other stuff so that i can make my dinner and so because of that i just kind of shoved it all into a lower cabinet where it's sitting currently i also couldn't bring myself to throw out the ragtag uh mismatched ones too because and this goes to why this is what i was just talking about yeah it's hard to throw out i mean it's functional yeah it doesn't all match but it's not like i mean it's it's not not functional

yeah that's that's why it ended up in my garage and again i'm usually loathe to do that so now i've brought in the deeper ones the ones that maybe hold geez i'm not good with things like this a couple of quarts maybe um but then i still have a couple these plastic things out in the garage that like they must be if you're sending kids to school with like a little snack or a little lunch they're like they're like kind of they're not super big but they're like more shallow and flat and sort of compartmentalized there's like two compartments in it with a flat lid i was like i have Thank you.

no idea why we have these things no i i mean somebody sent us cookies after a holiday party god knows why we have these yeah and i'm never going to use them they're completely not useful to me but i put them in a bag and i hung them up in the garage and i said you're not you're not you're no good for food serving anymore but maybe your service will come in screw

screw organization like you know just loose screws and things like that although of course That is really the job of a coffee can.

Yeah, exactly.

We have possibly nailed down for some reason. That's like real strong dad energy.

Oh, the good ones are where they nail in the lid to the ceiling or to the underside of the shelf in the workstation. Right. Then you can unscrew the glass jar. Yeah.

That's yeah. You got yourself a workbench. You got yourself a bunch of of mason jar lids that are all affixed to the underside of the shelf. that's how you can just go ahead and do your thing there that's i um i long for those days here that we're we're nowhere near that level of organization so anyway so with this loamy thing

i'll let you know tomorrow how it turns out uh you know i don't know if it's going to be too you know we might have texture issues again like i threw in some of the roughage in there to sort of balance it out because i i would assume that if it's all food scraps especially if it's sort of like wetter food scraps it could end up being a bit soupy compost is more complicated than i thought it was going to be but i mean here's the deal too it's got a um and this sort of ties in with something else that goes on around this time of year which is we have to start closing our windows because it's getting a little bit cooler outside and i was just talking with hannah about this on spotless yesterday it's like for me like having good airflow through a house is very important you know that i'm very paranoid about pet smells uh and uh i won't make the same joke the same Beach Boys joke that I made on the other podcast but just know that it's a pet sounds I had

a pet sounds joke in my head and I we let it go I know I had to acknowledge it I mean I felt like

we were all thinking um but anyway I you know I worry about you know smells of of just like life you know and then cooking like I was saying to Hannah like that that feeling of like you cooked a meal the night before and then you leave the next day and you come back home and you realize oh it still smells like it still sort of smells like i don't know steak in here or fries or whatever you know what i mean whatever it is like i really hate that i do not like the idea of a house having a having a sort of lived in smell i think it's very off-putting for visitors not that i allow visitors into my house but still someday i may have to invite um you know some sort of law enforcement into my house in a raid situation i wanted well i think the term is allow well that's True, yes. More than invite. Yes, allow. It has to do with the warrant.

If a judge, if they've been able to get a judge up in the middle of the night and get them to sign a warrant, then yeah.

Exactly. So anyway, and I did notice the Lomi does have a-

Is Washington a smell-your-ground state?

I think it is. The White Castle doctrine? Mixed results, yes. So anyway, this Lomi also does, it does give off a little bit of an earthy smell. I wouldn't say it's off-putting right now, but I do wonder if I went outside for a little bit, if I went on some errands today and then came back if the house would have an earthy smell to it, which, you know, that's not ideal. And again, it's that time of year where you can't leave all your windows open. I mean, that's... Could you put it under the sink

like it's in league with the garbage and recycling?

And then pull it out when it's time to use it? No, just use it. No, it wouldn't be very... You kind of have to access it. The lid kind of situation. Yeah, because it needs to really lock on there. Yeah, it's kind of big, and it's not bulky. It's not in a weird shape, but it is kind of big. It looks like something that they would make eggs in in the movie 2001. I'm just saying these words, and I don't know if they hold up to scrutiny. It's sort of like very clean lines. Well, you've seen them, right? I've seen a photo. Yeah, so it's kind of like clean lines. It's not like big and bulky looking in that way, but it is big, right? And the lid has to lock on. It's got various filters sort of built into it that you need to access. So, no, it wouldn't be the type of thing that you put under your sink, I don't think. So that's what I'm trying to figure out right now. Like, part of me is like, well, if I'm going to be doing the long cycles, the 20-hour cycle, can I just plug this thing into the garage, take my scraps out to the garage, plug it in and forget about it? For some reason, that makes me nervous, like if something shorted out or if it caused any kind of fire, which.

Oh, like the inflatable hot tub that I recently purchased, which has tripped my breaker three times.

We were supposed to talk about that.

Pulls 11 amps.

Okay, well, yeah, we can end this. I'll let you know how it goes. But yeah, that is a big thing for me. Like, I don't want it sitting on the counter, not even in the basements or the first of all, there's less airflow in the basement. So any smell longer, maybe on a train, maybe in the rain, maybe on a plane, maybe in the rain. So that's the other thing, too. It's kind of like, where do we keep it? How does it work? Do I work it into my daily life or has it become a project? I don't know. I'll let you. No, but it is very exciting to know that we potentially could start collecting some, like, actual good, you know, compost for our soil. And just to extend this a little more, I want to hear about this because I am very committed to having some sort of a garden by next year. Because I was – Becca and I were out at my sister Liz and her husband Jay's place out in – actually along the Columbia Gorge, but not the part of the Columbia I'm on. They live over on kind of down more in the – what is technically called the gorge. but they have they live on this incredible piece of property with a river literally running through it and they just like they just finished building this amazing home mostly by hand it's just crazy but they also of course have this very productive vegetable garden and we just went out there and we're just like liz goes hey i'm going out to the garden to get some stuff do you want to just like come with me i was like yeah we do and then me and my mom and becca and liz we just like hung out in this garden for a pretty significant amount of time while i just wandered around picking things off of the vine and eating them oh great oh it was so i mean it was just it helps that again it's a very meditative place very like just it's it's just in such a great location the whole property but like eating me a cherry tomato and then they have this incredible heirloom tomatoes that i'm paying like four dollars a tomato for it safeway and then a padrino peppers a whole bush of peppers growing and i like pick one off and i'm eating i'm like this feels like i'm feeding my soul in some way and i was just thinking there's no reason i can't do some version of that out here probably not nearly as robust as theirs or not as successful but just the the idea that i could at least walk out next year and grab some cherry tomatoes at least and maybe some basil or something whatever i can grow um so i'm that's a big thing for me next year is to try to get some

sort of vegetable garden going so i want to hear how i don't think that loamy is not for you loamy is for folks like us who live in and you know with very little urban yeah um land or whatever like if you're doing that what you want is a good like uh like we had in new hampshire it was so great it was just like a perfectly square box uh made of some sort of very tough plastic material that sat up kind of against our barn we would throw our food waste in the top of it and then there's a door at the bottom of it did you have one of these when you were in mount baker the door at the bottom of it is like where all the really nice soil would come out and you would stir it every now and then with a pitchfork but mostly it's just like it's you know it's big enough to let nature do its work but it's discreet enough that you can put it behind an outbuilding or whatever do you have any outbuildings aside from the studio i don't know but no this no this was

the outbuilding and now it's the in building yeah but in style place to podcast but that's what you

want like you don't want these little cupful no i don't think that's i one thing is i'm going to

put a garbage disposal some but some people said you can't have one with a septic but you can if they're super macerating meaning they really chop the stuff up so a i'll have a garbage disposal in the new kitchen and then b yeah i'll just come up with a system where i'm taking stuff outside because here's the other thing and peace and love to people that are living this reality but i would just put it this way none of your countertop food scrap things are fully keeping the flies away i'm sorry i just have to break it to you people of america who are using uh you know whether it's the the little garbage can you can buy or a lake i saw a lake crusade pot being used for this recently it's always a fruit fly situation no it's not it literally is i mean i've used one for like almost 10 years well maybe not okay good point i've never seen a fruit fly in your kitchen you're the one outlier in my experience every time i see one of those it's a situation other than the one you have in your house i will fully i mean i will give you credit

because i am super sensitive to that stuff now we do get fruit flies from time to time i was just telling genevieve hey we survived fruit fly season we have not had any fruit flies at all in a year and then somebody told me oh fruit fly season is actually just beginning in the fall as all of the the you know like in a fruit falls from the trees outside or whatever apparently we're entering it now so we'll see but like fruit flies do happen inside a home sometime i don't like it i create traps for it but i really i promise you like most of the time we do not have like we do it is i wouldn't i wouldn't allow for it let me put it this way let me put not everyone

not everyone is as particular as you are and i've been in more houses where the you know eggshells and whatever coffee grounds have been thrown into that little thing that's sitting on the countertop it's it's the situation is maybe not being managed as carefully as you're managing your situation and uh you know that's everyone's right to live their life the way they want i'm just saying i don't think i want to go for that in my household because i also don't trust myself to ride herd on it enough i think i'm just going to get into a situation where if there's a significant amount of food scrappage i'm gonna just take it outside and put it in something like

you're describing and you could also this is what i do um because we of course do have an outside sort of bin too it's that like that that compost roller thing that looks sort of like a bingo cage only for compost um but sometimes you don't feel like going all you don't feel like putting shoes on and going outside um and so we also have one of the

So we have our countertop little composty thing. It's tin. It looks like a cute old little garbage can or whatever. And it's got several filters in the top of it. And you buy new filters to sort of swap it out and keep it. And as you would guess, as I'm arguing here, I'm very particular about it. Like, I do not like going to somebody's house. And, again, everybody do their own thing. But, like, I'm kind of put off if I'm helping somebody do the dishes or something, which I want to do if I've had dinner at your place. And then it's kind of like, oh, put it in the compost thing. It's just like a Gladware thing that has more compost on the outside of it than on the inside of it because it's like grubby hands are grabbing it and throwing it. And again, I'm the one more with a broken mind than most people. But either way, that really turns me off. So anyway, we also have one of those right outside of our door. We have two of those little tins. And so for the stuff that cannot go into our compost, like, I don't know, you know, chicken bones or what have you, or if it's, you get something from, what's it, Whole Foods, you know, and it comes in that compostable brown paper salad box or whatever. I throw all of that stuff right outside our door into one of those little tins that then you can take it, you know, when you're outside later to the bigger dump, wherever that is in your yard, you know. So I could see you doing something like that. I mean, you're going to have a little porch right outside of your kitchen, I assume. Yeah, yeah.

I'll figure something out. That is so, so far down the road, my friend, from where we are now on this project. But there are people working here today, so that's a positive. Any day somebody shows up to swing a hammer is, in fact, a good day. If I had to swing a hammer today, Andrew, it could not be with my left hand. To be honest with you, it couldn't be with my left hand anyway. I'm not that coordinated, but my arm feels like it's about to fall off because I got my COVID shot yesterday.

Oh, you did. And I woke up this morning.

I didn't get the flu shot because my new health insurer does not cover flu shots or COVID shots unless you get it at their location. I have Kaiser. I think I already mentioned that, so I don't know why I'm being coy. so basically like i went to the like safeway in the local town here and just was asking hey do you have i spent like a couple hours yesterday trying to find locate the covid shot like who has it um you know how do i make an appointment etc and i was really striking out a lot of places don't have it yet um and so i did not have high hopes for the safeway in longview washington but i went in there and person said oh yeah we've got it here just fill this paperwork out or whatever I was like well can I get a flu shot too and she said sure So then I do all that I'm in the waiting area In the pharmacy in the grocery store which is An interesting I believe that I Describe that as a liminal space It was odd But I was waiting and then she came out She said I can't find your insurance I went oh because I switched insurance recently and now It's Kaiser and she goes oh yeah she goes Kaiser does not pay For any of this stuff unless you get it at a Kaiser facility And so and the The COVID shot was $140.

You paid that out of pocket? I paid it out of pocket. Because it was too late. It was already in your arm. You couldn't give it back.

No, no, no, no. I hadn't gotten the shot yet, but this was my calculation. I mean, I really, I kind of struggled with this. First of all, I could not get a firm answer from Kaiser. I'm going to the doctor on Thursday for my little, like, get my wellness check. Get a physical, see how, you know, pop the hood on this rig, kick the tires. I was jogging with Becca on Sunday, and she said, i'm really looking forward to you going to the doctor and i thought that's interesting feedback um but uh but so i i could go on thursday and ask this doctor that i'm going to seek hey can i get the covet 19 shot but i don't know if they have it there and i couldn't get an answer from anyone and i don't know if it would be covered i don't know if my deductible covers i don't know the rules yet and i thought i have live wire on friday a lot of people are getting covered right now i need to just i will rest easier knowing that at the very least i'm vaccinated for this or i'm boosted for this i should say now as the guy was injecting into my arm i said how long does this take to really have effect he goes about 14 days i thought okay well that's good timing that's yeah right right like i mean i i really did i felt like if i go to the doctor on thursday and he's like oh yeah we got the we got the thing right we got pfizer right here if you want it um it's free i will be pretty mad at myself but i also it would have been i thought a bad outcome if i got there on thursday and he said oh no we don't have that yet or yeah we have it and it's not covered so it's 140 dollars because you haven't hit your copay or yeah you know what i mean like i just didn't know what the rules were going to be and i thought it would be a worse outcome if i didn't

have any of this vaccine in my system well that's like a point against kaiser right away like that

seems pretty it is weird but otherwise i mean i have so far found them to be very helpful and easy to work with and like they're sending me eight trillion reminders about my appointment on thursday so it's like i'm not i don't know what the deal is with that and again i probably Just spent $140 I didn't have to spend But I just I kind of I don't know I locked up and I also felt

No no I think you did the right I think you did the right thing

by the way because you're right you don't know about availability and also there's a lag time in it anyway so you don't you want i i actually i'm not criticizing you i'm just disappointed in that like that yeah it's a strange policy if any insurer should try to make it as easy as possible for people to get preventative care for simple preventative care like that it's not just for the person involved this for everybody this is like well not to mention the whole point yet being like a stickler being like well you're not at one of our facilities it's just like such big health

care bullshit imagine that i were to get covid and it were to be really bad and i'm now hospitalized do you think that's gonna cost guys or more exactly right then just letting the safe way have a few vials of the good stuff yeah but um uh the i felt a little fatigued yesterday and a little kind of a little fluey afterwards but um and then but i feel fine today and but but boy my arm i woke up and i was like what the hell did i get shot like oh oh oh yeah yeah covid shot it It was like my arm was – now it's actually pretty much fine.

But no other symptoms, right? I don't remember the booster giving me symptoms. I remember like the – they weren't boosters. What were the – we got our – everybody got their first – Bivalent? Yeah. Everybody got their first two shots. It was like you had to go once and then wait three weeks for the second one. That was the original. But then we all went back for a third one. Did we not? Was that technically a booster?

Well, not all of us, Andrew, as I'm learning. It's very interesting, actually. No, seriously. Like the data around the booster – so you're right. The first two, that was the vaccine, the bivalent vaccine.

Oh, I think it was my second shot of the vaccine that laid me out, kind of.

That one, that made me, I felt poorly after that one. Then there was the booster, which I just thought everybody was getting the booster. It turns out far fewer than half of America got the booster. And my guess is far fewer than half of that group of people will get the latest booster. Like, which I don't, I mean, $140 is pretty steep. So if people are being asked to pay that out of pocket, that's significant. but for um you know for for people who can afford it or for people who it's covered by their health care i just don't understand not getting it but i might my sense is that as we go along with this fewer and fewer people are are availing themselves of it so who knows do you know that the last when

i actually got my booster so that's what it's been am i right that aside from this newest round is my memory correct then and i think you just confirmed this that there was there was the the vaccine part one vaccine part two and only one booster before this new one so have i gotten three shots total myself or were there two boosters already and this is the i feel like i only remember one booster but i could be but i could be totally misremembered so three shots total probably um for me and it really i dropped i dragged my feet on the booster not out of anything other than just like laziness of not like not taking the time to just like look up where i can get one or what have you and i remember i was in the car driving to rudy's listening to the am news station that used to be called como and like just like hearing some story at the end of a newscast about like who's getting the boosters and who's not and uh it was probably um rick van seiss who was like just a reminder that you know the cdc still recommends it and he just said a couple of things that i was just like yeah what the hell am i doing i got to my i got to my barbershop parked outside and before i got out of my car i just made an appointment at the cvs to go right after my bar it was like it was like just so out of a book about me or out of a tv show or something me just driving around listening to the radio and the radio told me to do something and i did it like i don't know if i have any other examples like that in my life with

the possible exception of buying onion rings or something ha and meanwhile i was in this mode that i get into when i had there's a perceived scarcity of something i'm gonna if and when the society completely crumbles well i'm just gonna call it good i'm just gonna walk into the columbia river with some rocks in my pocket but i would be a really bad person to have in an actual kind of like a sort of post-apocalyptic type of deal because already i'm wired that if i think there's a scarce amount of something i sort of want to hoard it i want to make sure at least i'm getting mine and like there was something yesterday about calling around and talking to some different health care providers and some clinics and stuff that all said yeah we haven't gotten it yet that when i walked into that safeway and they said we do have it it was like okay this is here like i don't know if it's going to have any appreciable impact on me this week in terms of my likelihood of getting sick um i again my guess is that there's probably a universe in which i could have gotten it at certainly for much cheaper and and in an easier way just by getting it from my doctor or getting it from some kaiser facility somewhere of which there are many around here and down in portland but i had it in my mind i was like this is something that not everyone can get their hands on but i'm i'm right standing right next to it why would i not you know so i don't even know if i made the logical decision i made a decision based on my sort of weird default setting which is like if you're telling me there's not much of whatever it is i don't even like black licorice if you told me that black licorice there was a national shortage and i walked into

a store that had a bunch of black licorice i would just buy it because there's not a lot of it not

because i even like it they should do a golden ticket situation and they should have done a golden ticket situation with the vaccine right when they're trying to actually they sort of did actually what the what am i saying they almost literally did i mean it didn't have the fanfare of a golden ticket but they did have like didn't they have some sort of lotteries going on that like if when you got your vaccine here in washington state you'd be put into or you had the option of being put into some drawing or something but it's sort of a reverse golden

ticket in a way like it wasn't the golden ticket didn't entitle you to the vaccine but the oh yeah

no no entry for money was to try to incentivize no the vaccine is the chocolate bar and the golden ticket is inside the chocolate bar and that's how you move chocolate bars so i was thinking this is

how you move vaccines right although do you really have to move a chocolate bar i feel like that i feel like the vaccine is the the broccoli and then they were promising you that maybe if you

your broccoli you'd get a chocolate bar or something yeah well i'm not i'm not i think the analogy broke down somewhere but anyway yeah they were they were giving that shit away

hey let's thank some of our daily donors who are making tbtl possible I feel very lucky to have this job, Andrew Particularly on a day like today I'm getting to sit here and talk to you About compost And as I'm doing this Some of the folks that are working on the house Are going back and forth To, you know, get lumber And take it down to the basement Where they're doing this structural project And then going and kind of Just working very hard And I think occasionally Catching a glimpse of a guy up here in a converted garage talking into a microphone.

Are you up high, though, so at least you're looking down at them?

I mean, I am literally looking down on them. I mean, it just couldn't be more imperial what's going on here, and that's kind of on me and my life choices. But these are the days when I'm like, boy, this is a really lucky gig that we have, and we have this gig because of people like Scott Hartley of Oxford, Ohio. Hey. Is that the home of Miami University of Ohio? I think so.

When people say, where'd you go to school? You can say, I went to Oxford. I don't know if that really works. You could say, I went to Oxford. I go around telling people I went to Oxford, but it just means one time I went to Oxford, Ohio.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I used to wear Oxfords. Yeah, so there you go, too. So that's kind of how I got in the door. Scott Hartley Jarvis, thank you very much for supporting us. Also, congratulations if you got that reference. Kathleen R. Lockhart is in Buffalo Grove, Illinois in Sweden.

Yeah, why is the country listed as Sweden? I think Kathleen's having a go. Or this is a very strange typo in our system. Or there's a Buffalo Grove, Illinois in Sweden.

Or Kathleen winters in Buffalo Grove, Illinois in summers in Sweden. Oh, that would be the life. One of those Buffalo Grove, Sweden kind of cross-continental type of deal.

They're sister cities. Is Sweden a city? Sure.

Sure.

Sure.

Ja. Heydo. That's all my Swedish. I just exhausted it. Jag talar lite svenska. Lite lite svenska. Emily McKay. Hey, he's in Bellingham, Washington. Hey. United States. I was listening to the NPR news quiz puzzle recently. That's kind of our Sunday morning deal, me and Becca. And the person who wrote the puzzle game, the question, was in Bellingham, Washington. Oh, yeah. did you get excited i did i felt like it was a celebrity sighting i was like weird i was like i was extra excited that somebody from bellingham had gotten their puzzle through yeah to i feel like i could be i'm probably mixing up my weeks in fact i'm sure i am because we listen to we'll listen to a few of them on delay but one of the puzzles was um it's a i think a nine letter word for a body part that is above the neck and then you rearrange those letters and you can make a different nine-letter word for a body part below the neck not everyone has the body part or the body type body part type of the above the neck but everyone has the one below the neck did you get it not even close not when it's above that can i do you know the answer if i do know the

I'm going to tell you well let me work some of this out is it you say it's a body feature above the neck but is it internal is there any chance it's a part of the brain I find body part to be

slightly misleading and I think it's part of why I'm going to give you a little bit more context because I think body part was a bad way to structure the clue and this is no shade on the person who made up the quiz but I think Will Short should have John

in here as a puzzle master, as Aisha Roscoe says. It's more like a physical characteristic. So there's a physical characteristic that some people have that's above the neck, that if you rearrange it, it's nine letters. And if you rearrange it, then it actually makes, it describes a physical part of the body that's below the neck, as in the lower part of the body, anywhere below the neck is on the list now. And everyone has the below the neck thing, But not everybody has the physical characteristic Of the above the neck Nine letters

Okay I'm going to say it's mustache above the neck

That's where we started No Because you've got to rearrange You've got to ask yourself what can I make with mustache That's a body part You don't have a mustache

While you're puzzling I'm going to continue

Thank you folks I think it's Would we think it's probably Michelle Wendt In Puyallup, Washington

I'm puzzling out other things right now. Let me take a look here. I'm asking your brain to do a lot. I apologize.

Maybe Michelle. Michael or Mikkel. It's M-I-C-H-E-L, and we are T-H-A-N-K-F-U-L. Indeed. For you, for supporting the show down there in Puyallup. Rebecca Gerke is in Kingston, Washington. Hey, we were near Kingston Town when we were doing the Thon this year.

Oh, is that where Kingston is? Yeah. Oh, that's right. The ferry. You're right.

Yes, exactly. Thanks, Rebecca. And then Kate March is in Seattle, Washington, rounding out the list today. Thank you, Kate. We really do appreciate you. We wouldn't be able to do this without any of our wonderful, generous donors. So thank you very, very much. All right, Andrew. Any closer to getting the answer?

You got me with that Mikel thing. So, you know, you've got to give me extra time. Not everybody has a Mikel. Not everybody, but we do, and that's what's important. Thank you.

I'll tell you this, too. I thought it was a little racy.

Okay. The below the neck or the above the neck?

The below the neck was a little racy, and the above the neck was a little, I don't know, descriptive in a way that I was very surprised by the answer. It seemed almost right on the line of what we had let into the Sunday puzzle on Weekend Edition Sunday. It seemed almost more like it might live on a slightly bawdier type of program somewhere.

I keep on wanting to say hairline, because some people have a hairline, some don't, but that's only eight.

Yeah, I was looking at Widow's Peak, which is not really one word. Oh, interesting.

Male pattern baldness is too many words. Ears have, that's more than nine letters. I had gone down a whole road with earlobes. Earlobe, but most people have earlobes. I don't know, man. I want to keep working on this, but I'm worried that it doesn't make for the best podcasting at this point. Probably doesn't.

I'm going to just tell you, if you've been taping the puzzle and you don't want to hear the answer, hit mute now. I'm so mad.

Oh, wait. Wait, hold on. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. W-I-S-O. No, it's not a type of tooth. It is a type of tooth. It is, okay.

But here's the thing. I was going down some road of like, you know, sort of sex assigned at birth. Like, is there something that people assigned male at birth like physically have that people assigned female at birth don't physically have? Like, I was trying to get into like that sort of logic. It's not that. And it's, again, that's why I think physical, something physical it's it's more like a kind of a characteristic a kind of a way that you're

the a way that your teeth could kind of be arranged oh v e r b i t e is only eight

i mean what did you just spell beaver tip mickey mouse why do you keep bringing up beavers in

dirty ways i think i did overbite i was trying to spell oh okay it's another word for overbite what's another word for overbite underbite no that's no and maybe i'm misunderstanding what i've

how i've thought of this thing i don't know if this thing is technically an overbite but you're in the neighborhood it's not is it pal anyway just tell me i'm done it's buck teeth and then butt cheeks

or butt it's buck buck teeth and butt cheek yeah okay yeah ck okay all right all right yeah yeah Yeah, but again, buck teeth, I don't know.

I know, would you call that a physical? It's not a body part. If they said body part. I think they said, they should have said it's a sort of a characteristic or something. The problem was I was looking for just like a physical body part, like an eyelid or like something, a unibrow or whatever. I tried unibrow too. That didn't work. I thought that was going to be a breakthrough. Okay.

All right. Well, I guess I'll accept it. But again, I won't accept the body part. I'm trying to see how they phrased it, but I don't know if there's a transcript of these things.

You might be able to find it. Hello and welcome. to top story i can tell you that every week when i don't get the puzzle i always blame will shorts the puzzle master like it's never my fault that i can't think of it it's always the fault of uh of the people who designed the uh the question um listen i don't think this segment is going to work necessarily because there's just so much to try to explain and some part of it is even sort of visual but i have been vibing to a song andrew um for the last few days that started out on tiktok and it's it was it was it was just improvised by this guy who i think i might follow his name is brian jordan alvarez and this he's just one of these i believe he's an actor in in la i don't know what he's you know if he's working in stage or commercials or television or what but i used to see him in the early days of tiktok or at least my early days of tiktok during the pandemic i thought he was like from the south like from the south of america like as in you know mississippi or something because he would just do these characters that would be like the really gossipy waitress at like a southern diner and he was just so believable doing the accent that i just was like oh okay this is some guys from from like it just really gets the vibe of people down in the southeast then he just started doing this weird character that's like got an australian accent but he's really into i don't know if you've i know you don't look at tiktok nearly as much as i do I feel like an emerging trend on TikTok are some of these filters that just turn your face into almost like a, not quite a cartoon, but just like, not like anything that a human being looks like. Real blobby, I have some friends who do that on Instagram, yeah. like where it's like it'll be like but you're talking still and you know so it's filming you but then it's converting it through this filter to where he likes this one where basically like the tippy top of his head is tiny and then his eyes are really round and bugged out and then his mouth is like giant his mouth is like almost the whole thing and then his body is just kind of a pyramid i don't know what the hell the filter is i don't even know if i like it honestly because I find it attractive, Andrew, and it causes me to ask questions. Yeah, you like it so much that you don't like it, I see. Exactly. But so he started doing, like, that, just be walking around with that filter on, but then he's talking like he's Australian, but he's also really got the Australian accent down. And then, I guess, I don't know, some period of time, a few weeks ago, he decided to sort of break out some new voice. I found out that I guess he's technically, like, maybe Colombian-American. So I feel like there's a vague sort of South American accent going on with this, but he decided to just sing this song with this filter,

this weird kind of like his head is tiny, but his mouth is huge, odd filter. He's just sitting in his apartment, literally, and he decides to sing a song about sitting. And this is the song that has been going through my head. Well, this is a version of the song that's been going through my head constantly for the last like three or four days.

By the way, I love that all these TikToks just generally have some auto-transcription.

And it definitely thinks he's saying, sitting, like S-I-T-T-I-M. Sitting is the opposite of standing

I got one thing to say I think that sitting is something that people say it is bad But you know that sitting is actually good Because you deserve to relax It's kind of like a nap It's kind of like something else But it is actually just sitting Sitting is the opposite of standing And sitting is the opposite of running around but you deserve to sit.

All right, that's the song, Andrew. And what kind of accent do we think he's doing? I don't know what he's doing. He's kind of all over the map and maybe he would better describe what he's going for with that. It sounds a little to me like somebody who maybe is from Latin America and picked up English as their second language. And the fact that he's Colombian-American I thought might be a clue, but he also does he does this ozzy guy who's just really into weightlifting and gains and he just talks about in like an australian accent about all of his gains and why he's always getting gains like these characters are so weird and obscure and specific to this guy's brain and i'll be honest with you when he was doing the like southern like waitress who's gossiping or whatever it was just his normal face which is quite nice looking actually and i that was much more gettable for me like i was like i get these characters like i have i have a sense of what these are he has gone into a more deeply weird place and i remember seeing some of the stuff thinking boy this guy maybe he might have fumbled the bag here because he had a lot of people following him for these little sketches and these characters he would do and now he's just got this crazy filter on and he's talking about getting gains um as an aussie or whatever um but i guess he knew what was going on because this silly sitting song that he made up has just absolutely lit the internet on fire. Of course, you get the obligatory, the early, the first wave really of one of these songs becoming more than just some silly little ditty is when you get the obligatory acoustic guitar version. This is a singer, I believe that they perform under the name Purser.

Sitting is the opposite of running around Sitting is a wonderful thing to do Because you're sitting Sitting is the opposite of standing on your head

By the way, I stand by this just from a messaging standpoint. I do believe in sitting. I was just noticing this when I was at Liz's house because there was a lot of people there and there were some chairs but also a lot of standing going on. And like Becca loves to stand, will always stand if given the option. And I, other than when we're doing this show together, if there's ever a chair, when we went into the Blizz's garden, there were like two little like stools. I went and found one of the stools immediately.

I'm trying to think where I am on the spectrum. I was curious about that. A little bit, I think I lean towards standing, at least in my own home. That's interesting. And to the dismay of Genevieve off. And I mean, one of the reasons I don't watch a lot of TV is I think I get like antsy. And so if Genevieve's not home, then I'll actually turn on a movie but I'll like stand I'll do I'll fold laundry I'll pause it I'll go walk somewhere else and like I will find myself standing in the living room watching TV and of course I play a lot of darts now instead of like you know I don't stand when I play my stupid video games but aside from that I feel like I'm even around the house like relaxing like I never want to sit down I want to keep puttering puttering puttering

there's also now a sort of piano jazz version of the song which is quite beautiful somebody named Monica Monique Martin taking on the song.

Sitting Sitting Sitting is the opposite of standing Sitting is the opposite of running around Sitting is a wonderful thing to do because you're sitting Sitting is the opposite of standing on your head. Sitting is

I love to hear people saying it's the opposite of standing on your head, because while they're putting a very serious musical approach to these things, you're reminded of how much this was just Brian Jordan Alvarez being dumb. Yeah, right, in the moment. Sitting is the opposite of standing on your head. It sure is. It sure is. We've also got—

Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. I don't know if I agree with that. It's not, though. Standing on your feet is the opposite of standing on your head.

Yeah, we'll see. Take it up with Brian Jordan Alvarez.

Sitting is the opposite of standing, but not the opposite of standing on your head.

But even to a degree, sitting isn't even really the opposite of standing. It was laying down the opposite of standing to you? I think standing on your head is the opposite of standing.

Oh, interesting. Okay. What do you think? Like your feet on the ground and your head in the sky. Okay, yeah, I did sort of.

Now your head's on the ground and your feet are in the sky. That's really the opposite of standing. Sitting is actually more sort of in a middle range of where you could be.

That's interesting. I mean, what is more the opposite of standing, standing on your head or laying down?

These are some of the great questions of our time I feel like laying down Well maybe that'll be in the second song This is one of my favorite versions of the song now Which is, I'm calling it Daft Punk Version This is like from a guy named Kenny Gray

I am such a sucker for whatever.

whatever this like auto-tune thing is that like the Daft Punk guys would use like I could absolutely have seen this on Random Access Memories or heard this

there was a person who did

what if the talking heads Let's go. did the sitting song, and that's...

Sitting, sitting is the opposite of standing. Sitting, sitting is the opposite of running around. Sitting is a wonderful thing to do.

I feel like Talking Heads have really, really been kind of ubiquitous lately because of the re-release of Stop Making Sense. They've been doing tons of interviews. I didn't know that David Byrne pissed everyone else in the band off at some point.

That rings a bell to me. I've heard that he's always very difficult. You know, I forgot a while back, months and months ago, I remember seeing the trailer, like some fun new trailer that he made for a re-release of Stop Making Sense. Did you see that where he goes to pick up a suit from the dry cleaners and you realize it's his old suit from the concert film? I was like, oh, they're doing something. And then I totally forgot about it. And I'll be honest with you. I have not caught any of this latest wave of press. So that thing is out in theaters? I didn't even know that.

I think it's in theaters and people are showing up in the suit.

Shit, I would love to go see that in the theater. That's one of my favorite movies.

I'm seeing clips of people in the theater now in the David Byrne suit dancing while watching Stop Making Sense. Oh, wow. Yeah, I heard a really great interview on Morning Edition last Friday with all of the members of the band. And what I found really refreshing about it was they were all together and they were talking about how they had had a falling out and how basically David Byrne had kind of hurt everyone in the band's feelings by acting like he was the whole band. And it was really all about him And that their contributions They felt he had really minimized their contributions But it was a really kind of cool conversation Because nobody was glossing over anything They were just being like, yeah, but also You know, things happen in life And that happened, and we're, you know We're working through it It just was like a very honest, refreshing conversation With a bunch of people Who had a lot of success together And had a falling out, and now they're, you know, back together At least for promoting this movie It didn't seem phony either, it didn't seem like, you know whoever's whoever's paying for the movie was like contractually you'll have to be in a room together it wasn't uh kim cattrall calling in from a cab to say goodbye to samantha's apartment is that the name of no carrie carrie's apartment carrie bradshaw yeah i'm such a carrie okay now uh we have breaking news related to the song which i won't play for you because i've already played you a lot of audio but i am hearing that remy wolf you know we really like remy wolf around here that she's covering the song now oh but this is the big this is the big quantum leap now the song is actually getting radio play at least in australia andrew on triple j down there our ozzy listeners know all about triple j because somebody named josh mack took the original kind of you know just like uh you know acapella and added in a bunch of other music and this is now a song on spotify that is being played on the radio at least in australia and maybe soon coming to a radio station near you if you live at a place that has cool edgy djs

Wonderful thing to do I got one thing to say I think that sitting is something that people say it is bad But you know that sitting is actually good

Because you deserve to relax It's kinda like a nap, it's kinda like something else But it is actually just sitting

But you deserve to sit By the way, this is the longest song we've ever played, the longest duration of a song that's also on Spotify.

Wouldn't it just be the height, the height of irony, Andrew, if Spotify took us down or delisted us? Are we on Spotify? We are on Spotify. they delisted us because we were playing the sitting song by brian jordan alvarez and josh

mac you've raised some anxiety in me by bringing really well only because i don't i shouldn't be airing this dirty laundry never mind there are some things that i maybe should have been doing on the back end as far as like the transfer of the feed from apm and here's my question even though my email address is now associated officially with the rss feed i'm not 100 sure that spot But if. has the best way of getting a hold of me if they're pulling episodes so the anxiety you just gave me is is there a chance that episodes of tbtl are being pulled but only somebody like some dead letter office at 8 p.m is getting these emails and i don't even know about it i'm going to open up spotify right now and i am going to what the heck i just found my driver's license in my shirt pocket a shirt that i turned on this morning this is very anti-andrew behavior yeah holy cow i've been walking around with a walk i don't even know the last time i wore this

shirt i mean certainly in the past couple of days but saturday night my guess saturday night eagles taking car services doesn't that seem like a night you might slip your id into your pocket for some

reason i was at the grocery store yesterday i find it hard to believe i didn't buy beer so maybe i was wearing this shirt yesterday i don't know but that is a bad i mean that i'm glad it's there but i'm really glad i didn't open up my wallet and and not see my my driver's license that is not a move that i go in for anyway i'm gonna open up tbtl oh by the way i wanted to listen to that modest mouse record uh good news for people who like bad news yesterday because i saw somebody at karaoke on friday who did the ocean breathe salty and i was really surprised at how good it was and what an interesting pick it was and so that song was going through my head and so i opened up spotify and i typed in good news for people and i hit search and the number one result was the modest mouse record and the number two result and maybe it's just because of my surfing habits but it was the tbtl episode from last week called good news for people who like andrews so i don't know if other people other modest mouse fans are looking for this about this landing on tbtl and being like well i like that song maybe i'd like this podcast with these two

fellas in the boat actually that might be a good search engine optimization for us yeah just should we just start naming every episode like yes you know can like basically naming them after a song that's very popular right now so people will catch i've noticed this thing on tech talk this is to the side of that but like i watch a lot of videos where like the person's sadly i watch a lot of videos of people playing slot machines for like a thousand dollars a poll i consider it to be kind of like suboxone or methadone for me because you kind of get the same charge out of it except it's not your money and also you watch them lose it's sort of weirdly satisfying it's also satisfying if they win but it's just like a it's a bizarre thing the casinos i guess probably rightfully so or correctly have figured out that like you know all publicity all attention is good so you can now sit in a casino and set up like a tripod and live stream on youtube as you play a slot machine yeah that seems odd i i it's strange but it's happening all the time and and i feel by the way like i'm watching a a particular guy who i find kind of likable but also one time he said let's go brandon

which i didn't like um is there any chance he was there with a friend named brandon is there a chance it was a coincidence he's like let's go brandon oh god i said it again he's really given to his

name is vegas matt and he's really given to kind of hokey he's he's sitting there betting all this money and every time the thing is spinning he's saying something to kind of like fill the time and also he's just i think he's just talking almost without even realizing he's making noise so he'll say like when he's down to his last five dollars or whatever it'll be like last chance at romance or like um you know uh what's it or he'll go like oh my lanta like he's just so i i feel like the let's go brandon thing may have been less politically motivated and more like he was excited but i also i just don't know the guy's politics he also lives in vegas who knows but i um i find myself watching a lot of these videos i do feel like i'm watching him kind of i don't want to say meltdown but what I'm watching it happen in sort of real time is the progression of something like gambling where he used to spin he'd be like okay you know we're down two thousand dollars and we're trying to win it back or something and now it's like okay we're down a hundred and forty thousand on this machine and I'm just like what the and it's like you've watched it go from where he used to be playing ten dollars a spin to where he's now playing seven hundred fifty dollars a spin or a thousand dollars a spin now meanwhile his wife will show up in some of the videos she doesn't seem stressed i don't know how deep this guy's pockets are but it's very weird to have this slightly parasocial relationship with this guy here's where i'm going with all this let me ask

you a quick question if you don't mind do you feel like the videos really all i want to talk about are the videos monetized though i mean obviously this is a question that i should have a better grasp on how people are making money as influencers on tiktok i assume these are tiktok videos like do you get a sense that okay like in a certain way he's maybe taking losses but it's like kind of part of the business because he's making money as a TikTok influencer in some way. I definitely think he's monetizing because he's always saying, Hey,

please like and follow and follow the YouTube. whatever i would be really surprised if the if it's monetizing to the degree that it's it's evening yeah he's breaking even right yeah i don't i i guess i don't really know the economics of tiktok i've seen a few videos that break down like somebody going like i had this video and it got three million views on tiktok and here's how much i made and it's it doesn't seem like it's 180 000 you know like so maybe he's maybe he's sort of um kind of getting a little bit of his money back through this i get the sense mostly he just kind of likes being sort of a celebrity and he's found this way to do it but it's also like you know like a lot of sort of bad habits and things it's progressive i think right i mean literally it's a progressive maybe he's playing a progressive slot machine which brings together all the losses but also if you look at it as a sort of a some sort of a disease it's a progressive disease and if you were betting ten dollars a spin yesterday ten dollars a spin today doesn't really get your juices flowing but seven hundred dollars a spin might it's like i just wonder where all this goes here's the point on search optimization andrew i always would see these videos and it'd be like you know whatever the most popular like most memed up tiktok song is that's going whether it's doja cat or whatever and i would always see that listed as the music for these videos and i always be like there's no music on this video and i think what they do in tiktok they do but they list it because they're just hoping people who are looking for that song and videos that use that song will it's just another search engine optimization or another search optimization so that like you're pretty much every video on TikTok whether it has a song or not will list that it has a song and usually if you can't hear the song at all it's listing some super popular song I think just as a way of

getting more eyeballs on it just by mistake you don't think that they originally uploaded it with the music and then the algorithm or the I shouldn't say the algorithm the TikTok strips the music of

it because i've seen no no the tiktok loves the music of it okay the tiktok doesn't mind you

using the music then why are they recommend they they they encourage it like the artists love it

because first of all you're never getting the whole song so it's not a you know you couldn't use it in lieu of of buying the album or subscribing to some streaming service and that's kind of like the whole secret sauce of tiktok really is these songs that blow up and then people make dances to them or memes of whatever. And like TikTok is the most sort of music-based of all of these social media apps. So I think what's happening is the people that are making a video are just throwing down whatever, and if they're not going to use the music, if it's not really like important to what they're doing, they'll at least list something hoping to get some more eyeballs. My point is that's what we should be doing on this show. Can you hum Doja Cat quietly in the background of every episode?

Doja Cat. I have been scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling backwards on Spotify. And I will have you know.

Scrolling down the.

Scrolling out of bed. With one finger on my mind. I'm down to episode 3845. And so far we have not. None of them seem to be missing. So that's good. That's hundreds of episodes that are solidly on here.

Not to mention that our listeners are so sort of communicative. that i feel like if we were if we were not showing up on spotify for a for an extended duration or even if it was one out of every eight shows was not getting put up somebody would let us know

yeah there's somebody who's been like trying to get at me through various emails and social means i don't think i've responded because i just don't have like the the wherewithal right now to do it but like when we transferred over like you know the 5 000 files there's been like i don't know there's like a i think about 10 or less that like kind of are just like not showing up in the feed But, I mean, we're talking Radio Days shows or shows from, like, 2012. Like, yeah, yeah, I'll track those down eventually. But, like, it's causing concern amongst folks that there's, like, one random episode from 2013 that is not in the feed. So, yeah, I think we would hear about it. And so far we look pretty good on here because of our new hygienic practices in using music on the podcast. I'm very proud of us.

And I'm appreciative of you, Andrew. Thank you. Yeah.

can you come organize my tupperware closet now you know we got we got dinged on your uh your hey dummies music wait what the um stan gets that stay do do do do do do oh my god they didn't take it down they were just like uh this is copyright but okay that's crazy you know what that's called

in my system bossa nova hold music i don't think i even realized that was stan yet i was just grabbing just any old thing and i didn't even occur to me did not even occur to me you came so close yeah i'm glad you backed up like that that that like that that would be a thing i thought i was i thought that was just some some silly thing that i snagged off of youtube eight million years ago that would there's no way that that was going to

like, set off any alarm bells. I don't think it caused

any issues. Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man! It's not from a female.

All right. Email. Sorry, we didn't get to fireworks. We'll talk about it tomorrow. It's actually quite fascinating story. Yeah, we should

carve out a little bit of time for that. And it reminds

me of something that happened to me this weekend, Andrew, that was adjacent to this fireworks story. Not the specific fireworks that went off, but something kind of similar that I

saw did you meet a mysterious anonymous millionaire billionaire i did and i think i they're pretty close to donating andrews and that's oh good work it luke work it um i don't know what that voice was i got a voicemail here from joanne who and she'll reference this but just as a little bit more context i was telling you somewhat recently that if you like if you strip our bed here uh and look at our mattress which is a relatively new mattress it looks like a mattress from a murder den because it's got a big nasty stain on it that it was clearly from some liquids. Those liquids were merely water from when we had that eight sleep cover, which was a device that you would put it over your mattress and it had little tiny tubes that would pump water and it would keep the bed hot or cool. One side could be hot, one side could be cool. It was so fun. DLT of sleeping. But then our cats with their claws destroyed it not once but twice and then water leaked all over the bed one night and it just left this stain where i believe the mattress is clean i've even used my little extraction cleaner on it but it just has this water stain on it it just looks i mean it's just so disgusting i was telling you that like if we ever move homes again like we have to burn this in the backyard or something which is i think probably frowned upon um but we could never let him know we could never let another human being see this thing right like it just does not speak well of us well this uh voicemail comes all the way luke from new zealand

hi this is joanne from cheviot chevois cheviot is how we say it it's actually cheviot but i

i think joanne was a donor of the day recently and maybe a blurs recipient and so i've been mangling the name of that town it should be cheviot hi this is joanne from cheviot chevois

cheviot is how we say it chevois new zealand um i was just listening to you talk about uh the stain from the water on your eight-foot mattress and it reminded me of a story of uh we live on a big sheep and beef farm in rural new zealand and my husband and so for a little context here for those

who are on the zoom call years ago when we're doing i believe a show and tell via zoom with listeners around the world um joanne uh i think showed us her chickens yes i remember that i think

i had that totally misplaced in my mind i thought that was australia so yeah i think that's new

zealand in rural new zealand and my husband and the shepherd were moving our mattress uh from the cottage in our farm to the homestead and apparently when they lifted it up on its side all this like white debris fell off of it and i had known that we had like a really old mattress protector and it had started to degrade and left like tiny shards of plastic all over it but apparently my husband told my the shepherd an 18 year old guy who works for us that it was our skin cells and now he's worked for us for two years and we've never clarified that we don't have some kind of degenerative skin disease and it still horrifies me to this day every time i think of it

anyway hope you enjoy that power out very mattresses very personal very intimate super

personal we don't want people to see them and the problem is they're both very personal you know there's things that that will occur on occur on the mattress that you know could be through all kinds of things happening and yet we're talking about we're not talking about buck teeth I'll tell you that much. No, we're talking about below the neck, my friends, below the neck. And just like people throw up and people have their period. It's a thing that you're lying in pretty much every night of your life at a point where all kinds of stuff can go on. And some of it may end up on the mattress. The problem is mattresses are one of the things that are the most impossible to move by yourself because of how much they weigh and how they don't have handles and all. It's like it's the thing that's the most personal and potentially embarrassing. And it's the thing you most need to call someone, possibly a stranger, to help you move.

Yeah, that's a good point.

It's a real bad intersection of those two facts.

Which is why, though, these disruptor mattresses might really be on to something. Are those still as popular as they used to be? I feel like it was really kind of part and parcel with the podcast. Yeah, Casper and all that stuff. I don't know if you know this, but we are living. and a podcast boom um but with the podcast boom you also had all of those purple mattress and yeah and um casper and all these mattresses that can come in a box but i don't know like does that make them easier to move once they're unboxed or is it always going to be difficult to move okay i don't know if you can get the toothpaste back in the tube with those guys i don't think

yeah no they're not going back in the box yeah ever ever you want to talk about the world's most impossible sleeping bag to get back into its thing yeah because i've you know had a few i've had a casper bed we have this i still sleep on this eight sleep and it's quite comfortable for me i don't have the the mcdlt thing on there obviously because i gave it to you and genevieve for the cats which is hilarious because now that i have a cat i'm 100 bubbles would do that no way

do you have regret that you didn't keep the top part of your mattress i never it was never something

that i was particularly drawn to okay yeah because we really despite whatever i said in the ads and you know what it's too late statute of limitations has expired you can't sue me well i well i guess

if we're just being really honest here like i loved the mechanism i loved the yeah the smart sleep stuff reading about my stats feeling like you may be able to change the temperature but i actually didn't really care for the mattress underneath it as much so we would put it on we have just like a standard old school mattress from like you know a mattress store not mattress firm i hate the name of that place and i will not uh darken their door uh although junk sleep was a good ad campaign i think yeah slunk jeep slunk jeep oh so good anyway uh so i am clearly struggling with that issue in my life do i like a mattress firm or not but point is so we would take the cover and you know with the with the tubes and everything and just put it over the top of a

regular mattress well i um love the mattress i slept on the mattress last night the other day my mom and dad were visiting and i took the air bed in the other room and let them sleep on that bed and my mom was raving about is that an avocado mattress i was like uh no it's eight sleep what does that mean i don't i think avocado is another brand that was that was i mean i i i don't really know the answer to this question but it's not going to stop me from trying to answer it which is i think probably along with all of the weirdness around the podcast industry and by weirdness i just mean how it went from being kind of not not something that existed to being everywhere to now kind of going through i think a certain um what's the what's the term like a correction yeah correction um i think that all these a lot of these companies that were revolutionizing how you get your fill in the blank including mattresses we're going to send one right to your house and you can and you can sleep on it for 90 days and then if you don't like you can send it back and just so many of these companies that were sending even just the hosts product so you can test it out and then it'd be like like uh you know that the the people that

were made the the alcohol pods that um oh yeah yeah um well it was it was a keurig brand but we weren't allowed no no it was not do not do not it was built by keurig but we were not allowed to say it's the keurig of cocktails which would have been the easiest most understandable selling point but they instead called themselves I can't remember what I didn't hate it like no I did

one ad for it but then like no you liked it and and they sent me one and I gave it to um Becca's brother and sister um because they love to have people over and have parties and stuff and I thought this is a really cool device and they loved it but now they can't get any more pods for it because the thing went out of business immediately drink works it was called drink works

Yes

Like maybe don't send Every Don't send out like A sample of this device To every single person Reading an ad for it Like you're I just feel like there was This heady time That all of these companies Were just spending A ton of money On podcast advertising And sending out a ton Of sort of proof of concept Sample stuff And I think Because they were all Getting a lot of like You know investor money I don't know how much Of that translated To like sustainable business models and how much how much of it was sort of a bit of a flash in the pan which kind of mirrors to some degree the way that elements of the podcast industry were a flash in the pan i also

think that part of that was um pandemic too i think that they came up with this idea because everybody was at you know you saw a boom in like pre-made cocktails generally speaking you already saw some of that stuff coming onto the market but the the market was flooded with sort of like more like trying to recreate the high-end cocktail experience that you would be having if you could go to a bar right now but instead you're at home having your zoom parties here's what i am flabbergasted about here um i put a little spin on it um stank i can still buy one of these off of amazon for 200 and oh here it is discontinued by manufacturer i was like you cannot be bought you cannot be selling this for 200 on amazon without making it very clear that you cannot buy any of the shit that goes in it anymore.

But you know what? I feel like this is a missed opportunity because when Becca's brother was like, oh, this thing's really cool, but I don't have any pods left, I thought, oh, well, I'll be the hero and I'll find some link to a pod because the whole idea behind that device, the machinery was it was just a way to get these machines. It's like Keurig. They're not really selling you – actually, I don't know if Keurig is a good example of this, but I don't think that they were really in the business of selling machines that make drinks. I think they should have been in the business of selling pods of pre-mixed alcohol. First, they had to get the machines into everyone's home. And then once you it's, you know, maybe a better example is like printer toner or something like that. You make the money on the toner like, you know, you sell me this printer that I have here, but then you get to make money off me over the course of the next 10 years. When I keep buying your toner, somebody should figure out how to make the pods for that thing because they don't have to do the building of the machinery and the mailing it out and all of that. they can just make the pods and say these fit somebody should 3d print these pods i don't know i assume that's just how everything happens now and be like you can just put these if you had a drinkworks machine put these in there like that seems like there's enough out there though that's

the problem the the market wasn't saturated enough with the the machines unless unless i'm misunderstanding your point i feel like no i think i think there's a handful of podcasters who have it now i will say this and so i went higher marketplace is just people that were sent to a machine to promote on their podcast it's me and josh molina um so i was remember i was on a call with him for one of those uh things once um so i i decided to look at the amazon reviews but then search by recent and so as of just two and a half weeks ago was september 8th whenever that was people are the subject is mad as hell one star this product has been discontinued and buying the pods is obsolete do not purchase so as of a few weeks ago people were still buying this august 8th somebody bought one and wrote don't buy you can't get anything people are so mad and then there's one if you keep scrolling about 10 down from april of this year five stars from cool dude says works great but don't buy no longer makes the pods so loves it but also don't buy it that's the

most interesting review maybe i've ever read that seems to be the general i mean in a way it's a compliment to the company you know like they're not the um what was it new rental cars of their industry where every review is just absolutely they're not the senlar loan servicing yeah what they do is like the actual product seems like people really loved it it just wasn't wasn't sustainable just like the show is not sustainable anymore because this guy that's giving me an estimate on some spray foam is apparently here oh he's here you gotta go okay he emailed me and said I'm actually, I just looked at your project. It looks like you're busy, but I'll hang out here until you're done.

Okay, we got to go. Somebody left us a voicemail the other day. They actually, their mom, I think, worked for Senlar before it was Senlar, but then they merged back in the 90s, and they only had good thoughts about Senlar, and they have a little Senlar teddy bear, and now they feel bad.

I want to hear about this.

All right, I'll see if I can find that, dig it up. Okay.

All right, thanks, everyone, for listening. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. In the meantime, have yourselves a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Oh, these sure are comfortable chairs. Oh, yes, sitting. The great leveler, from the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant. Who doesn't enjoy a good sit? Power out.