Muse

So what is this new project you guys have for Sally?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, so this new project we have, it's called The New Medusas, and we think it could really use the Sally Reed touch. So it's a show about three women who run a salon in Soho, who are just trying to get by, and they have snakes for hair, and they turn dudes into stone. Okay. So, right now, the show, it's a little, I don't know, mm? And I think that you, Sally Reed, could bring to it more of a mm. I don't know what you mean. So, right now, the show, it's more, yeah. And you could bring it to more of a, yeah.

I think I know what you're saying. I have a client right now that's bringing to a Fox show that before was just, hey. So we're looking for less and more. That actually wasn't in the email.

TBTL.

Dear TBTL, you're so amazing. And I know you're gonna do better. Luckily for me, I've processed all my feelings. And I've gone through the five stages of grief. denial anger internet commenting cat adoption african dance cat returning to the adoption place watching all the episodes of murphy brown and not giving a flying fart whoa watch out says

that bird ew it's got a snake oh it's chasing a jackal oh my gosh that's the voice of the youth

of america have a good show dummy it's what you do is so important well all right hello good morning

and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Oh, hey, y'all said my name.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia, where we have been just absolutely bombarded with wind and rain over the last 24 hours. Like to get wet, though, huh? Training day? In fact, as I was getting ready to do the show this morning, I looked over to my left, and what do I see? But one of the trees actually blew over. It's not like a big one. It's the good news. But some kind of—I don't know what these things are. I'm going to go out there later and scan this tree, this poor felled tree. with one of my favorite apps on my phone, which is called iSeek. And it allows you, you can point it at just about any kind of plant life and turn your camera on and it'll tell you what kind of tree it is. I don't know what kind of tree blew over, but I liked them. And I'm sad that it's blown over. But I'm happy that we've arrived at episode 4041 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. We have plenty to talk about here on this Wednesday, including the story out of the Pacific Northwest, specifically the kind of Puget Sound area where there was a big fireworks display recently.

Cannibal! Cannibal coming.

That was not like a 4th of July thing, obviously, looking at the calendar. It was some private fireworks display happening on the exact date to the day, I believe, that there was a similar fireworks, private fireworks display last year. So something is clearly up. Seattle Times trying to get to the bottom of it. Also, for many years in the greater Berkeley area, there was something called the Hot Tub House, where a guy built a hot tub, and he had told folks, if you'd like to come use the hot tub, you're free to do so.

I just want to talk. It has nothing to do with mating.

What seems on its face like something that might be a little on the I don't know side And really, it turns out, was a very popular idea. Thousands and thousands of people over the years actually came and used this hot tub. Now that house is for sale. We'll talk about that. Plus some emails and V-mails. And we will chat with this guy, longest-running co-bro of the show. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I think of him as being... Straight gas homie! He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

It's funny that you used that drop to introduce me today. And this is so gross. And this is as personal as it gets right at the top of the show. But you literally made me laugh with that because of an inside thing that happened. I'm about to make an outside thing. But earlier today, this morning, Vives and I, I don't know, woke up around 6 or something. Genevieve fed the cats. I laid in bed like a lazy.

bones um but there's like this period often in the morning where Genevieve and I are sort of half awake and half asleep or whatever and uh I was half asleep and I woke myself up with a little toot and and I turned around and I was like oh my god I'm so sorry babe she's like oh it's okay and I'm just like I woke I woke myself F-A-R-T I know we've talked about this on the show and most of the listeners think that we're bananas that after 21 years together 22 whatever it's been with me and Veve that like that would still be an issue for me but I don't know man talk to Freud but it is an issue with me and I was so embarrassed that I woke myself up with a with a toot that Genevieve was right there to experience

I'll say what I always say when this topic comes up on the program which is I find that to be quite charming Not that I'm telling the other listeners how to live their lives with possible partners, etc. But I think that, as for me and my house, Andrew, I'm with you. Like, it's nice.

In this house, we believe. Yeah, exactly. Bozo did the dub.

And if we can just not completely, you know, fart all over each other all the time, maybe that's not the worst thing either. Fart it right into my butthole.

Now, I should say this, and this kind of throws Genevieve under the bus. I was surprised that she tried to light it on fire. That was the part that I was like, wow, okay, so we're really going for this.

If you can get your partner to engage in some sort of Jim Rose sideshow type of circus shenanigans, then maybe that puts it back on the table.

What is a Jim Rose sideshow shenanigan?

I'm surprised you don't know about this. I feel like this was a really big thing in my 20s. Not for me, but you'd hear about it a lot. It was a lot of folks who had really extreme amounts of body piercing. I remember there was a guy who was involved in it who, like, I would see on the Ave, actually, a lot, who had almost his entire body was tattooed to look like puzzle pieces. Oh, I can picture that, yes. I think he was called, like, the Puzzle Guy or something. He might have also had that thing that you can do where you, over time, kind of have your tongue split into sort of two sections like a snake. so the my memory of i was always hearing i was seeing posters for it and hearing about it was never for me you know i mean you're not wouldn't be shocked to hear that but for a certain kind of person who might be more into like body modification and burlesque and burning mans uh the jim rose circus sideshow seemed to loom fairly large i wonder if that was mostly a northwest thing because i i guess i would have thought not that you would have been like super into it but i would have thought you'd been you would have been adjacent at least to some people who would have been like, hey, the Jim Rose circus sideshows come into Cleveland and we're going to go down there and light our farts on fire.

I see what you mean, what you're saying or what you mean, because I think I said what you're meaning, because, yeah, I would hang out with gothy people or punky people or what have you. But no, I don't. Well, first of all, I'm not really into that scene, although I have seen Mr. Puzzle Guy before. Unless I'm thinking of the Riddler, which I'm not. I can absolutely picture that guy. He was able to, you know, somehow achieve an amount of fame that brought him into my consciousness. But that would not be a scene for me. Any kind of. Yeah. However you describe that kind of show.

Well, I'm also learning that this was pretty localized to Seattle. It was a modern day version of a circus sideshow founded in Seattle in 1991 by Jim Rose and his wife, B.B. Ashard Rose. The sideshow then called the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow came to prominence to an American audience as a second stage show at the 1992 Lollapalooza Festival. so that would totally check out so this was a bigger deal in the northwest probably than anywhere else or at least a thing more people in the northwest knew about I assumed it was just traveling around the country at all times wowing audiences but I think it was pretty localized people that were part of the circus sideshow the amazing Mr. Lifto who would lift heavy weights from his body piercings it would be funny if Mr. Lifto

dropped things

he was just like an extremely straight-laced person with zero piercings like he was just dressed like one of those mormons coming to your house to try to proselytize but super clumsy just just drops everything all the time yeah um let's see uh baby the circus queen which i believe was the co-founder of the thing would perform various stunts including having a watermelon placed on her back and split with a sword um matt the tube crowley i'm a little worried about even reading further into what somebody called the tube was doing.

Worried about reading this cold? Let's give it a try

here. The moniker came from seven feet of tubing that he would swallow. The other end of the tube was attached to a crude hand pump. Rose himself, that is Jim Rose, would fill it up.

up the pump with a variety of fluids and proceed to pump it into Crowley's stomach and then back out again. Huh. Whoa. Okay. That's you know, it's a living. Zamora the Torture King had a segment that featured the walking barefoot up and down a ladder of razor sharp sabers piercing himself with needles and meat skewers eating pieces of a broken light bulb etc. The Enigma originally known as Slug was billed as a man who would eat anything including slugs worms and grasshoppers and swallow a variety of swords also doubled as the show's organ player um oh his body was completely tattooed with blue jigsaw puzzle pieces that's your guy andrew what's his name again he's my guy uh his government name is paul lawrence uh-huh he he performed under the name the enigma with the jim rose circus side show but he was originally known as slug then uh the lizard man uh oh you know what i was conflating two people i think the lizard man was eric sprague a completely tattooed performer with a surgically split tongue uh you had of course cappy who was a yo-yo artist i feel like david capro aka cappy was maybe do you think that was a palate cleanser do you think people were like i expected to be yo-yo yeah that's all it is cappy was a yo-yo artist yeah you know what i'll take it you know

you've got your hands full of yo-yos right now you got to what four yo-yos per hand right

Cappy was a yo-yo artist who would do yo-yo tricks while also being pierced by a hot skewer for his anus.

I feel like there needs to be something.

I'm totally making that up, but I feel like he needs... I feel like Cappy was the only person not having their body somehow, you know, sort of, I don't know, run through with something while they were doing whatever else they did on stage.

I'm going through a little something over here. When you mentioned Lollapalooza in 1992, I was thinking I don't think I was at that one I might have been at 93 94 so then I go to Wikipedia and I start looking up the lineups because I remember the two Lollapalooza I went to I was in high school and the main acts that I was interested in on the main stage and I believe they both closed out both nights were the Smashing Pumpkins year and the Sonic Youth year I was a big fan of both of those bands and so it was big for me so I'm looking this up and it turns out that was 1994 for the Smashing Pumpkins and 1995 for Sonic Youth and that that basically holds with kind of where I was in my life and my memory of all of this. I remember having amazing times at both of those shows. What's driving me bananas or what is like making me flip my wig is who was performing on the side stages that I didn't even care about in 1994. Your Boys, The Flaming Lips, side stage 1994. The Verve, The Boo Radleys, which seems like a band you'd be into. The Boo Radleys, do I know them because of you?

I bet you they have a song that I love, but I don't remember. Like, I think that it's Toad the Wet Sprocket when I hear it.

Yeah, right, exactly.

I'm a little surprised that the lips were on the side stage, only because, you know, the Jelly song, Vaseline, had already been out. So that was a pretty big hit back in the day.

That's right, yeah, and that might have been. That probably was 93-ish or something, so you'd think that that would be, like, they'd be right in their prime as far as popular attention is concerned. But, okay, so Guided by Voices, I get that. They're a smaller band. They're an Ohio band. Rollerskate Skinny was playing. That's that British sort of wall of sound swirly band that I play for you from time to time. They weren't even on Spotify until like a year or two ago. I've played them for you a couple of times. Stereolab, again, this is all side stage. The Far Side, Luscious Jackson. Okay, that's side stage. Shonen Knife. That's probably a side stage.

Oh, I was so into Shonen Knife. Those are some huge names in 1994 that were just on the side stage. Well, what about the side stage of Homerpalooza, Andrew? Because that did also feature the Jim Rose Circus, I'm learning. So when Homer...

Oh, shit.

That's why I know that. When he becomes Cannonball to the Stomach guy, he's touring with Lollapalooza, and he is part of the Jim Rose Circus. Luke, I had full circle, my dude, Luke goals, my Google's.

That's why I know the guy with the puzzle pieces because of the animation. Luke, I had that episode on a VHS that I watched all the time and I used drops from for mixtapes that I made. And Sonic Youth did a very noisy edition of the theme song to end the show. I would put that noisy little ditty at the end of mixtapes for people. that episode lived so large that's where um Lisa and Barr to smell some weed at the concert and they say what's that smell I don't know it smells like Otto's jacket which is a great line I mean like Like, I sort of feel like if you were to put that episode on now, I could probably mouth along with every single line. And that is probably why I know that somebody ordered an orchestra, possibly while high.

Well, that's I think that also only added probably to my miss sort of understanding of what the how widespread the Jim Rose circus sideshow was. Yes, because I'm hearing about it all the time when I'm traipsing up and down the Ave in Seattle as an impressionable 19 year old. Then I see them on The Simpsons and I'm like, well, this is just obviously a nationwide phenomenon.

Yeah, no, that I mean, that makes sense. And what they were trying to, you know, encapsulate in that episode, they go. I blanked on the name for a second. They're like, possibly while high Cypress Hill, I'm looking in your direction. It's like some guy in a tuxedo say that. And I mean, I I don't know if a week goes by that. I don't say possibly while high Cypress Hill I'm looking in your direction um yeah that episode loomed very large for me very large I was so I was so much a boy of the 90s you know like I just loved that era I loved the fact that I was living through that era I identified it as an era that I was living through you know in in Cleveland Ohio you were out here actually moshing it up with I

was jim the puzzle man creeper or whatever his name is yes um i this is the irony of me kind of accidentally well not accidentally i'm doing it intentionally but the irony of me going into old man yells at cloud is that that's also a simpsons reference but like i don't want to go old man yells at cloud or everything used to be better but i do think there was some kind of there was something to the fact that you had that vhs tape and for whatever reason you had that episode of simpsons and so you probably watched it a lot like you could do that now like i think about this because becca grew up with older brothers and they loved the simpsons and they had like i don't know five seasons that they had taped off of the television and when there was nothing to watch they would just watch the simpsons over and over again so there's this range of the you know i probably mostly like the conan o'brien years or something that like she can just like if i even even say if I had said like three syllables of a joke from one of those episodes she would just tell me the whole episode or could quote it directly back to me because of how kind of burned in her brain it was just because of sitting around as a kid and just watching it and re-watching it and and and you could do that now I mean I'm sure that on FXX right now they're playing the Simpsons or I could pay whoever it is is that 21st Century Fox who has the rights to the Simpsons um it's Fox but like yeah I I could do that I could recreate that I could just like re-watch the homer palooza episode or for me maybe the one where um you know homer eats the bad meat although that's a very apoo forward episode maybe that's not like maybe we don't celebrate that one anymore i used to think that was pound for pound probably the funniest episode ever of the simpsons but point is you could sit around and watch the same episode of the simpsons over and over again but you'd have you it would almost make you a weirdo at this point because you have your choice of every simpson episode that's ever existed um and and so like some of that there was just that like there was that like you were constrained by what was on that vhs tape to some degree yeah and there

was something fun about that snl too there are certain snl episodes and sketches that are burned into my brain because i had them on a tape and i assume that everybody knows about them but they don't because like one of them is um i don't even know if this one is online i've looked it up before but i know it was well there was an episode with paul mccartney who was both the musical perform the musical performer and the the guest right and um at least you know he was definitely the musical performer and he appeared in some sketches I don't know if he actually did the monologue but there was I was obsessed with the Beatles so if Paul McCartney was on something then I set the VCR to roll on it right and there was a a sketch with Alec Baldwin playing somebody whose name was the mimic and he was like a James Bond style kind of you know he's wearing a tuxedo I mean Alec Baldwin of course he's wearing a tuxedo what is he a farmer after five lemon and his whole thing is he can imitate anybody and so he's sitting next to a phone like to solve his mysteries or whatever and then like there's some older woman and she goes to answer the phone he's like don't I'll answer the phone I will be you then he picks up the phone he's like hello and he just does the worst imitations of everybody it's like totally over the top i don't think it's that good of a sketch but paul mccartney has a cameo in it i believe and i had it on tape so i watched it a million times and then i mentioned that to people are like i have no idea what you're talking about alec baldwin as

the mimic i've been seeing because i spend far too much time scrolling through tiktok i have been seeing um this it's been coming up more and more my algorithm which is where somebody remembers a sketch from SNL like that, like the mimic or.

and they can't find it and so then there are these people that are now the way they're getting their clicks is they have some way of finding sketches so there'll be a little text that's like can you find whip master for me and then you just watching this sketch which i had no idea existed but it's so funny to me and it's very similar to that one you just described the mimic but it's starring bill murray and it's like a western and it's like you know set in a saloon but his whole thing is he's the whip master like he can he's got like a bull whip that he can just like use to basically defend himself and to like do all of these things like he's this incredible whip master but he's so bad with the whip yeah it's just like the mimic yes but what's what i think is really the funny part is the real meta joke that's going on is it becomes a joke about the actors that are in this western tv show none of whom want to have to like so his chris farley is the bartender and he comes in of course like he does all this whipping and it like grievously injures chris farley then phil hartman comes in as the sort of like um the the snively whiplash you know he's got like the mustache and everything he's the bad guy and he's like uh i own that silver mine over there and then the whip master's like that's my father's silver mining you know and and phil hartman goes that's not what the government thinks as long as i have this deed he's holding the rolled up deed in his hand but he's also wincing because he knows it's about to be the part of the scene where he has to hold the deed out and get it whipped so it becomes a joke about what if you were an actor on a western show where you knew you were gonna probably get whipped just like wincing holding it as far away yeah he's holding as far as ways he can it's like clearly he's like he's like really hating this part of the filming of the tv show whip master it just i don't know why that just uh made me laugh so so much but um yeah another uh another little uh what would you call it another little piece of history that i've been uncovering by way of the chinese government mining all of my

information so if you don't mind and i know that this is not going to pay off because it wasn't funny if i remember this sketch was the blocking or like the pacing of it i remember being like really awkward and and what have you oh I see you know what came right before it I found the entire episode of SNL they have not clipped out this sketch you know how SNL you can find almost any old sketch that people liked on their website now you know they've sort of remastered it or whatever this the mimic sketch is not anywhere to be found online except for our savior the internet archive where people are doing God's work of just like taking these things that they find and uploading it so this is the full episode season 18 episode 13 so this is from february of 1993 and paul mccartney i don't even know if there's a joke here paul mccartney just plays the butler in this sketch for some reason and um he's talking to the woman of the house and i think he's about to let alec baldwin in i have to be somewhat clumsy with my needle drop here because it's a whole big file but it looks like i'm nearby here so take a listen to this he says

I think the only joke there

is that it's a super famous person playing a butler

oh no

okay so now there's an intro that you guys can't see that is somewhere between like James Bond and the Pink Panther, but more James Bond-y as far as kind of stylized from the 60s.

The Mimic, Master of a Thousand Voices. Tonight's episode, Mimic Sea, Mimic Do.

As you know, my husband is in charge of the city's water supply. If it got out that he was missing, it might cause a panic.

I see. Can you help me? Well, yes, you see, I have an auditory gift far beyond that of the average man. I need only hear a voice but once and I can replicate it perfectly.

Astounding.

She goes to answer the phone, but he's like, no, I'll get it.

Hello? Hello? Yes, this is Eve, Devereaux. Yes? Okay, thank you.

what was that your dentist's office confirming your four o'clock teeth cleaning tomorrow i had

them completely fooled should we go on i guess we'll go for one more call hello yes well this

is mrs devereau you've kidnapped my husband oh five hundred thousand dollars cash to peer four

by midnight okay bye-bye they've kidnapped your husband do i really sound like that yes exactly

people are always shocked when they hear the sound of their own voice for the first time that's the joke i remember okay that's great that's a great joke by the way the irony that

one day alec baldwin will be married to a woman who also has lived her entire life in a made-up voice. How do you say cucumber?

You know, how you said it growing up.

Yeah, right. Just imagine you're in a wealthy suburb of Boston.

Thank you, baby.

Hey, let's thank some of our daily donors for supporting the program. I feel like I've somehow taken this segment from being a positive moment of appreciation to a sort of terrified moment of relief that we did kind of step out of the traditional media game. Just reading today about major developments at WNYC in New York, their parent company, just having all kinds of trouble with advertising.

Oh, I didn't see this.

Yeah, unfortunately, it looks like there's going to be folks losing some jobs out there. And, I mean, this is like one of the first things I read this morning, and I just read it with this really intense sense of appreciation and thankfulness for the TBTL donors because just all over this industry of making sort of on-demand content, there's a real kind of correction going on. And I mean, and I guess the WNYC stuff is really more like terrestrial radio, which is where it sounds like they're having challenges. By the way, WNYC studios are great. They produce some of my favorite shows, Radiolab, The New Yorker Radio Hour. It's not like they're not doing great work. It's just a weird world out there. And somehow, Andrew, you and I and John Sklaroff are able to do this for our job because of people like John Pincus in Chicago, Illinois. I don't want to put you on the spot, Andrew. But John Pincus is known for many things But in my mind for one of the more iconic Halloween costumes To sort of show up in a TBTL context

This was before my time But you've told me this before Before your time Was there ever a time before you?

I don't think so

That's all I remember Yeah, John dressed up like the guy from the Twilight Zone episode

Oh, the glasses

With the glasses, the guy that basically survived some sort of nuclear event, and now he can do all he's ever wanted to do, which is read books. But then he breaks his glasses. I was obsessed with that episode of The Twilight Zone as a kid. Me and Peter Williams actually made our own recreation of it. But the problem was we didn't really have the technology to, or we just didn't have the smarts to figure out how to make the glasses break when they fell off of my face.

Yeah, well, honestly, the reason you couldn't do that is because it wouldn't happen in real life. I remember that being somewhat frustrating in the show. Like, glasses don't fall. Well, maybe it was a different time, but modern glasses don't fall and just break like that from a fall. They get smashed.

My memory is he's going up the stairs to the, like, library, and he trips on the stairs or something. But the problem was we didn't have any stairs. We didn't have a library. This was all being shot basically in Peter's dining room. It was the setting of every movie we made. And so what I had to do after the glasses fell off of my face was I had to, like, bend them in my hand as I was picking them up to try to make them look broken.

Yeah, because you can't make cuts, I assume. This is all live to tape.

We probably could have. That's what I'm saying. We didn't have the imagine. I mean, this was the early days. That would have been, you know, we would have had to do some kind of clever problem solving that I think you were doing in Ohio, be jockeying between. This whole episode today is about high eight and VHS technology. Yes, it is. Of the late 80s, early 90s, Andrew. yeah but like i'm sure we could have figured something we did eventually get into making some edits but it was one of those things where there was like a three frame delay did you ever have this this situation where basically like you're trying to like pause something over here and and record like unpause something and hit record and then pause it like you're using this almost like i guess it was sort of an analog system was an analog or digital those that stuff that's analog that's man you're using this analog system but a very like low low-tech way of trying to make edits between a Hi8 camera and a VHS player, and you realize that when you hit unpause, it takes exactly like a third of a second to

kick in. So you need to hit unpause first on the source, and then hit unpause. pause on the recording. And you have to kind of like

you start to learn the weird timing of these devices, you know, so you can account for various little weird delays. We eventually got into trying to make edits, but not when we were making the Twilight Zone episode that John Pincus so effectively recreated that night in Chicago that I saw him.

Can I tell you something that has been on my mind lately, which is this, and this is going to be a little bit of a tangent. We will come back to the donors in a second, but it's Halloween related and I'm only telling you this. I am not even opening the door of this to Genevieve um because I whatever so here's the deal I have been planning a trip back home to Cleveland to visit my folks for a while and I knew it was going to be in late October or early November Genevieve then recently said hey if you're taking that trip maybe I'll throw a Halloween party this year she knows that I do not like Halloween I do not like Halloween parties even if I'm not dressed up having a bunch of people dressed up around me sort of icks me out a little bit in ways that don't make sense but you just got to trust me on that um and so I've been you know i still haven't booked my plane tickets to ohio my plan is to sort of like you know travel uh during a time where i'll end up missing this party um except i feel like i've got and this is where i can't tell genevieve this because if i if she knows there's even a crack of light on this for me she will want to barge down the door but i think i have a really good idea for a for a costume for me yeah which is I want to bark there for me this is perfect because it's a very casual costume and it's somebody that I already can sort of look like if I do if I shave my beard in a certain way and who I definitely have characteristics of do you have any idea who I'm talking about I mean this is a pretty wide you know pretty so this person is bearded but

their beard is a little bit more tightly trimmed than yours

or do they have a mustache? They're a mustachioed character. Okay, mustachioed character. With a little bit of male pattern baldness, but also wouldn't involve any makeup, wouldn't involve anything. Doug Marsh from Built to Spill? No. But he was...

The plan keeps coming up again. I will

say this person does have a bunch of jigsaw puzzle pieces tattooed all over his body. Oh,

Terry the Tube Thomas.

Yeah, so all I'd have to do is show you my tattoos

Yeah Okay, can I get another hint?

Yeah, no, okay, so I'm probably making this more difficult So a hint is it's not a physical person It is an animated character Oh, okay Who is, and the clothing I would wear would just be very comfortable Like there would be nothing that would make me feel uncomfortable about this Other than the fact that people would be seeing my fat chin for the first time in a decade or two Can I need, okay, so is it a cartoon character? Yes, and I have said before that I am basically two characters combined into one human being. One of them is Monk, and the other is this guy.

And is this a cartoon character that would, are they from the 90s, the 60s, what era? Right now. Right now. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So is this a Fox cartoon? I'm not 100% sure, but this might be part of animation domination. Is it something from Family Guy? It is not. Okay, well, I'm trying to think what else is on animation domination.

Is that the Fox? Do I even have that right? I think that is. Yeah, no, I think that's what they're still calling it.

I don't know. You know what? We'll find out next time I'm watching football on the Fox network. That's the only time when I hear those sorts of references. So it's not The Simpsons. It's not Family Guy. I'm trying to think. Is Futurama still happening? Is it somebody from Futurama? It is not Futurama. Okay. um is uh if you tell me the show will i just give it away immediately yeah actually that's a clue

it's the titular character of a show it's basically the titular character of a show okay um

i'm how i feel like there are there are not am i forgetting about a a fox show that's part of animation domination but also the fact that you've been saying you've been you've been saying you're this person which makes you think this person has been around for a while yes it's not a new show

but it is a current show it's been or they're probably you know 15 seasons in or something

maybe i'm exaggerating that let me not the simpsons it's not family guy they're 14 seasons in

14 seasons in uh fox broadcasting yeah so it is fox 14 seasons in we play tape of this show

quite often at least in my intros it's like i i'm i'm embarrassing myself now because there's just some there's some fox show that's in its 14th season that i am just completely blanking on when you tell me i'm gonna be i'm gonna be just sick about it tell me when like um just to spare

the listeners from more of this yeah because maybe at this point a lot of them have already got all you guys like impressions here's that guy bob from bob's burgers oh i forgot bob's burgers is on fox it just seems so much better than family guy bob's burgers just seems so kind of like clever and not racist that i forgot it was on fox but couldn't you um see me like because i've

kind of got i've now malpatter baldness a little bit in the back of my head so if i got a little bit of a shorter haircut like that's all i'd have to do there maybe dye my hair a little bit darker but then just shave everything but a mustache the problem oh you know what the problem is the glasses that's always the problem i can't see without my glasses and you're not you don't have

even a pair of contacts you could wear for this special event no i got weird shaped eyeballs because the thing is that from an ophthalmologist diagnosis or is that just your theory i have i i

always say this word wrong but i think it's a stigmatism which i think is doesn't that mean

that your eyeballs aren't like I think there is a certain like there's some kind of shaping of the

of I'm not going to guess at it but yeah I think either way like yeah I've I was told early on

that I was not a candidate for candidate for well because like um see here's the thing I I think that'd be a cool a cool costume on you and I do like how like you just get like a white t-shirt with some like oil some like grease stains on it and an apron like you've been cooking yeah and an apron and stuff I love that although the thing about the the thing I don't see in it for you is that you're not like as kind of outwardly depressed as Bob appears to be like your personalities aren't super similar that's where I was kind of getting thrown off because because I identified with him too much well no no no just because like uh the clumbo thing makes sense because you're constantly solving murders no it is true in fact but but the boss burgers he's just so hangdog and I mean of course I love the character and I love that show not enough to remember what network it's on but i do love that show so much but i think of him as just being so like yeah oh god okay i'm just gonna try to get in a certain way except this is this is where i

think and and you're right maybe i don't have a lot of characteristics of bob generally speaking but when i say that i'm a one time i think i put on the platform formerly known as twitter that i'm a a like my sign is monk with a bob belcher rising or something like that because uh monk Which you definitely get. I'm very, you know, like persnickety and I have to touch telephone poles three times as I pass them and what have you. But then Bob, Bob, when he's happy and he's making food in the kitchen, he's talking to the food all the time. Yes. And Genevieve is the one who pointed out. She's like, you're like, Bob, like you're just like you're you're having a full on conversation with that chicken before you're putting it into the oven. So maybe that's maybe that's where the comparison.

Your concern, though, is that if Veeves were to get even a tiny whiff of my temptation of your interest in maybe. doing it then she would probably be which can i just say and i feel like i'm in this camp as well now with my very lovely girlfriend like how lucky are we that there are people that actually in some

way want our company yeah no that's true many people that go through the like go through life

very lonely and and and to have the and i'm not saying this to like give you grief but i think about this in my own life like you know it's like a very very lucky very privileged thing to actually like to know that your partner of many years if she heard that you were actually coming around on a halloween costume would definitely want to try to get you involved in something she just wants me to help well i that's honestly i wondered when you said you're going to be you're going to be in in cleveland potentially i thought i wonder how this whole thing is going to go down because not of course not because genevieve is incapable she's very capable but the division of labor traditionally for you both with these get-togethers is you'll do a lot of the setup you'll do all of the cleanup and that'll keep you from having to maybe hopefully have too many awkward social interactions but if you're totally out of the picture I mean are you going to come home potentially are you going to be like the parents in an 80s movie coming home to find and will she be like Anthony Michael Hall and John Crying it running around the house trying to put things away and put beer cans under rugs or something yeah there's gonna be a cigarette butt stuck in a cake

for some reason there's gonna be a brassiere hanging from a ceiling lamp it's or maybe a fan uh it's gonna be a whole thing i actually did when i was picturing myself coming home i'm like this is so sick i was already thinking like well i know genevieve will do some straightening up after the party but it's still gonna be like i was like well i know i'll come home and i'll have to do the kitchen floor right away because that'll be sticky as hell like i was already like thinking about like what chores am i going to do when i come home after genevieve's party but i will i do want to i do want to stress again this was not a situation this is a true story this was not a situation where genevieve said well i'm going to throw a halloween party and i said well then i'm out of here right this has been i had been talking for quite some time about like this being the window that i want to make this trip it's usually the time of year that i make a trip back to ohio and then genevieve was kind of like well maybe i'll throw Bye-bye.

party she was on um the fence about it and then when i made up my mind to do that she's like well i'm throwing a party and she literally sent me a calendar invite that said halloween party come or don't which is i think it was exactly and i think i clicked don't i'm tempted this year to

maybe dress up i don't have any specific parties to go well i've i'm grateful to be invited to genevieve's halloween yeah andrew i thought maybe that one over here a couple weeks ago i thought

You said you already had a costume that you guys were going to come dressed as. Well, I don't know.

I don't want to blow a Becca spot. I don't know where she's landing on things. But, you know, I will say she's certainly not into the idea of dressing up for Halloween. She's not into the idea. She's into it. She is into it. Okay, yeah. But all I ever want to dress up like now is just somebody from I Think You Should Leave, which I feel like three years ago would have been kind of interesting. But my internet feeds are just full of people having parties where everyone dresses up like a character from I Think You Should Leave, and I like that idea so much, but it also feels deeply unoriginal to me for a guy of my age and kind of general comedic tendencies, like me being like, I'm going to be Carl Havoc.

Carl Havoc does seem like the most obvious one, and this is totally me doing this. I'm loving this conversation. I know we got to thank the donors, but if you were to play, if you were to dress up as a character, like forget about the fact that you feel like maybe it's a little bit played out um who would you choose at this point well you think would be a good fit for you that you think would be funny because carl havoc even if not everybody was doing it it would be a little

bit like kind of the obvious choice right sure because it's a person in costume and for the five people who haven't seen it the premise of the sketch is it's kind of a prank show where a guy is going to get all dressed up like he's this kind of odd looking white haired dude he's going to wander around a mall and bother people but when the guy tim robinson gets all the stuff on him he goes through sort of an existential crisis in the mall food court um but he's in a costume so that's why it lends itself to that maybe i mean i'll tell you what a a a sort of a bold move would be to not be a tim robinson yeah character because well for one thing i don't know if i i don't physically look a lot like him although probably of the people on that show he's the one I would look the most like yeah but like I could dress up like um Bart Harley Jarvis um like a

Harley Davidson baby that everyone hates yeah that would be funny an adult yeah I could do that I

could do um uh like let me think one of the a lot of the Tim Robinson he just looks like a normal guy too I'm kind of right it's not that interesting you know what would be a real power move if you could do it it'd be hard to pull off but if you had another friend who was willing to commit to the bit and you were a couple of like sort of larger dudes and you just went as the guy that tim robinson hired to try to make people think that the one guy was taking big steaming dumps

that's a very is that the very very very first sketch of the show maybe so maybe go is this

happened to you no no that's that's different those are the guys that come over to the house and then replace the toilet yeah joke toilet the other one was tim robinson is called into a work meeting with his supervisor because it's come to light that he found a guy who from the back kind of looks like one of his co-workers and he's been hiring the guy to come over and then go into the bathroom and take a big steaming dump so that everyone at work thinks it's the dude he works

with do you remember that sketch that must be season one where i think i remember i i've re-watched

it the least so it's so it's great just because tim robinson in the moment just keeps saying things He's like, you know, the weird thing is I just think I wanted to get caught, which is clearly not the case. Like, he did not want to get caught. Like, there's these little asides, little moments. Okay. You know who's probably had about enough of this? Kim Walter of St. Petersburg, Florida. Sorry, that's a little bit loud. Yeah. Kim, thank you for your patience letting me get that out of my system. And thank you for donating to the show.

Yeah, we heard from Sam. Sam, was it yesterday on the show in a voicemail? Kim's partner. Yeah, it was a big week for the Walter family of St. Petersburg, Florida. Huge. Thanks, guys. Thanks for being good friends.

Elizabeth McCullough is in Columbus, Ohio, Andrew. Nice. Nice. Where you are going to be hiding out. Not Columbus. Not Columbus. We're going to be hiding out. What if you went to Ohio and then you dressed up in Ohio, like did a thing with your parents? And just sent a bunch of selfies to Genevieve. Could you imagine the grinding of the gears?

What about me just, like, throwing my head back in laughter at a Halloween party with all of my exes in Ohio? I don't have a lot. I don't have any exes in Ohio. But still, I got to get some exes in Ohio and then do that.

Yeah, better work faster. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thanks also to Monica Regimbal of Burbank, Washington.

Oh, little bit thirsty, Monica. Moving to Burbank just to impress Luke.

And living there for many years.

years during the daily I think we looked up Burbank Washington like last year when we were thanking Monica oh thanks Monica appreciate you Joe Scott is in Kirkland Washington thank you Joe thank you Joe appreciate you and then Kenneth Mejia is in San Francisco California the Bay Area which we will be talking about during our top stories I think time permitting whenever I say time permitting means probably not going to happen but uh Kenneth thank you regardless thanks to all of our donors today for making tbtl possible hello and welcome to top story uh top story uh this a piece in the seattle times from the other day now trying to figure out what exactly went down with a huge uh private fireworks display that was shot off of a barge off of kind of off of the Bainbridge area and what was kind of well there was a few things about it that were that were of note one was that it sounds like for two years in a row on basically the same date or the same weekend or whatever this has been happening so this clearly appears to be like I thought it was funny how the times kind of acted like well this means they might be related I was like this

means they're a hundred percent related well also it happened on the same date going back so it's two years in a row, but then also two other times in the more distant past, right? Starting in 1998 or something. Do I have that right? I need to get this article back in front of me here. But it seemed

like, yeah, I think you're right. Point being, by the way, this was a piece in The Times by Mike Riker, Paige Cornwall, and Lulu Ramadan. The mystery behind a private fireworks show that shook Seattle. And yeah, that part where, I mean, I think that they're probably just being good journalists, which is they're not jumping to a conclusion. But I'm like, hmm, my My gut says this has got to be part of the same thing The fact that this has been happening on this date At various times Or at least this weekend at various times So just to read the beginning of the piece A private party became a public affair On September 16th When thousands of exploding fireworks shells In a display that rivaled 4th of July shows Awed and startled people Across the region And so the reporters for the Times then Basically go on this wild sort of Goose chase of trying to figure out who paid for these fireworks who's been doing this and it turns out it's all kind of coordinated and run through this series of shell companies that are all kind of designed I think just to obscure the identity of the presumably very rich people yeah like

behind ultra wealthy like they're just like we found this email address linked to this shell company which then had a phone number that was connected to this and I mean they went digging deep it's a very complicated um kind of uh list of connections that they've made that kind of went over my head but i mean it really seems like it's not just for this fireworks display but just generally speaking just super rich people not wanting us to know anything about them basically

yeah they trace it it seems like it's probably traced back to a guy named gordon letwin at least according to this reporting let me put it this way i don't i'd be really shocked if gordon letwin hears this but uh to keep us out of trouble um there's they seem to have found some association with somebody named gordon letwin who was a very early employee at microsoft in fact he's credited with creating the company's first email system so that seems like um a person who was very tech savvy early on and also who is now probably financially quite well compensated for being one of the first employees at microsoft maybe he invented clippy and that's why he doesn't want anybody to find him don't blame me there was a there was grainy footage of clippy on one of the yachts toasting like in the in a still shot at the beginning of cheers they fought they like basically like find this series of non-profits and like a mansion in redmond washington that was deeded for zero dollars to one of them and it's just this long and i also had trouble following the whole chain of events uh and chain of people but it just appears that there is a group of like you said ultra wealthy people who somebody has some party this weekend you know the weekend of september 16th which by the way makes me think it might be birthday related because it's not sort of thinking it's not really the like the like if it was peak summer i feel like you'd be doing this in like late august or maybe early september um the september 16thness of it makes me feel

like it's gordon litwin's birthday i was reading the comments on this article something i don't usually do but i just wanted to know how people felt about this um and somebody actually brought up some good points maybe i'll share later but a lot of it was just like why is this seattle times

know using their investigative powers to look into something so trivial or whatever where i actually think that there's some maybe some some bigger things going on here but um one person was like i am disgusted that the seattle times didn't even mention that this is the date of mexican independence and i was like i don't think gordon shumway or whatever this guy's name is yes elf sorry alien life form no um sure maybe but my guess is that is not a celebration of mexican

independence based on what i know about the history of how wealth tends to accrete yeah in this country i would be really surprised if this was a mexican independence day uh celebration um it it also like they get into this like the the story on the boats that were out there these like incredibly expensive yachts that are all kind of like rented out of these places on like i think it's on like union and they all come together these super duper fancy yachts some of them that rent for like a thousand dollars an hour one of them was previously owned by gary payton of the sonics aka the glove which is just a weird little dazzling deet but they talk about like just basically these unbelievably fancy rented yachts that all kind of like come together for this thing there's this fireworks barge and then they all kind of go back to their you know their whatever you'd call it i guess their slips or wherever they're moored um now here's the thing though they obviously used a legit fireworks company to do this fireworks permits and got and got permits maybe not as many as they should have had but they i mean they did i want to say i'm not listen the ultra wealthy don't need me defending them they've had it good enough but like it isn't like um somebody just i don't know just lit like eight million fireworks from boom city off on a boat somewhere without like like there was a professional company that was hired and they as part of i think their services they went through the permitting process and they were granted a permit i think it was like maybe kitsap county said you needed one more because we're the county uh that's nearest to where this is happening like it sounds like they they had most of their eyes dotted and t's crossed but like not one of them but also that whoever it was who was saying hey you should have had a permit with us has decided not to pursue it so you know i mean this was something and also and again i don't i don't want to sound like i'm trying to side with these super wealthy people unless they want to invite me on the boat next year i'm available but like also apparently this was like the kitsap county sheriff's department or something was warning people days in advance that this was going to happen which is also kind of surprising like this was not just totally out of the blue this was something that the some kind of local like entities were saying hey just a heads up there's going to be this fireworks thing in a few days

Yeah. So here I just found the part in the article that we were discussing about permitting, and I'm just going to read it directly to clear everything up here. It says the Times obtained permit applications that were submitted to the U.S. Coast Guard, because, again, this was on a barge, and the Seattle Fire Department by a company called Western Display. They're a fireworks company. Another dazzling date here, by the way, is the company itself didn't say this, but somebody who knows the industry says a fireworks display like this, which is a professional display akin to what you would see a city put on on the 4th of July or New Year's Eve or what have you, costs about $2,000 per minute. Do I have that right? I remember reading an astounding stat in this, and I think it was two grand per minute of fireworks. Just something to think about while you're watching your next fireworks show. but it says the company so they did get the Coast Guard and the Seattle Fire Department those licenses all set up but they did not get the application permit from Kitsap County as you said which technically has jurisdiction but the the fire marshal there said yeah but they did their due diligence so I just want to make it very clear there's nobody out there saying you know this company or guerrilla yeah that they didn't do what they were supposed to do i think and i'm sort of stealing this from the from the comment section i think somebody surprisingly put it pretty well that like even though kitsap county maybe gave a warning on just their facebook page a couple of days in advance they felt like listen some people with money paid for something they did their due diligence let's maybe not be mad at the rich people we can be mad at the rich people for other reasons or whatever but wouldn't have been maybe like the seattle fire department's responsibility or these other or the coast guard to say like listen there is a full-on fourth of july style fireworks display that is going to impact the entire region like does the responsibility fall more with the people who handed out the We'll be right back. permits to publicize this i think so i also think you should just tax the living tweedle out of this yeah i hope they did like i'm you know what i mean like whatever it is like we're talking about dynamic pricing like there should be a 200 000 tax on this yeah because it literally affects

everybody in the region whether you some for the good but many for the worse and not to mention

that if you can afford this and these yachts uh you can afford a ridiculous markup on this like at that point another hundred thousand dollars another two hundred thousand dollars is probably just you know um kind of you know change you're finding in your seat cushions i mean yeah i'm with you i guess probably here's the hard part about this whole story for me and this is kind of what came up probably when we were talking about real fireworks around the fourth of july which is i don't want to run afoul of our listeners who are very sensitive fireworks and by the way the times talks to a guy in the story who's a vietnam vet who lives on bainbridge i think and who says yeah this stuff really messes with my head and i know that like there's nothing worse than looking at your pet and seeing them feel scared and not being able to explain to them why why this scary thing is happening so i do not want to i don't want to i don't want to anger those people but i also have to admit i do kind of love fireworks in fact when becca and i were driving um back from my sister's the other day like last weekend we were coming along some body of water somewhere and we just saw like big fireworks going off it wasn't like this but they were pretty substantial and i literally thought that went through my mind was hey free fireworks like and it was on a river too i think it might have been on the columbia it was somewhere where it wasn't like in a neighborhood which is another thing i don't know how sound travels and again i don't want to get into a position where it's like the pet owners in our listening audience are like mad at me about this but i do think doing it out on the water has got to be a little bit of an improvement than just doing it in a neighborhood i don't know i just i just enjoy looking at big explodey fireworks and so it kind of feels to me like if i had had enough heads up and if i've been able to slip my pets a couple of gummies and if i've been able to get myself sort of personally prepared for it the idea of just a dope ass firework show going off out in puget sound that i can watch from my house or some vantage point i would not personally be mad at the visual side of that experience

yeah no i love fireworks man i mean that's the thing i i try to be sensitive i used to be pretty insensitive to the people who didn't like them i would just be like i don't know i just grew up I grew up in the country you blow off fireworks on the 4th of July like it's fun like you know like and I never I never had any pets who had issues with it and I think it was a bit of a journey for me to be more empathetic on that point and I remember I don't know if it was one of our listeners or whoever it was talking on this topic at one point just saying that like you maybe it was literally you Luke just saying like you don't you don't know what it's like until you see your beloved dog cowering in the tub for four hours and I got I've actually also never had pets that

were particularly freaked i think like maybe olive didn't love it so much rudy was just too just too dense to figure out anything was going on ever so are they treats are they yeah exactly like is this the is this the treat sound effect you're right so so i actually have to say like i have not i haven't had that experience but i can imagine it and like you know if like bubbles was to be super extra freaked even more than normal i wouldn't like that feeling i would really want to you know so i i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to minimize yeah and i just want to

be honest with people about my journey i do think that i'm empathetic to it now um but i'm also not gonna lie and just say hey i think that things like um fireworks and the blue angels aren't at all entertaining to me like there's a million reasons why the blue angels show like has cultural issues too right i mean from taxpayer money to environmental to the fact that it's scaring the the crap out of people and animals i still like it you know what i mean if i were to vote i would still probably if it was a ballot issue i'd still probably vote yes on issue number blue angels um but so anyway i don't want to pretend i'm one thing but i also do want to be empathetic to the people like the the fella in this story who had actually seen real battles in his life and it sounds like i don't know if they use the word ptsd but it sounds like this triggered something in him that is very unpleasant and he says listen like i don't love it on the fourth of july either but at least i know it's coming and to just be sitting in my home and suddenly have this barrage of explosions going on outside even though people like you and i would be like hey look at that free fireworks show sweet get on the roof i you want to be sympathetic to the people well it depends depends on the roof it was just oh well i mean i was picturing my roof of my old apartment building right where it's like oh sure flat or whatever but anyway um so i do i do understand that certainly and from the and this guy that they quoted too like he wasn't especially cantankerous right? He was really just sympathetic. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the, things where there isn't i can't find a like a there isn't a person you can point to that's either being totally ridiculous about their nimbyism or that's being just absolutely terrible with their wealth flaunting i mean again the fact that these mega million dollar yachts are coming together for some secretive thing it doesn't you know it doesn't seem like this is a bunch of people that i have a lot uh that i could relate to them on but again they got the permits they have the money it's some they're like they like do it i don't know it's weird i just i i can't find the obvious that like 100 the the the fault lies with one group of people in this it's not that everyone's just being such wusses about the fireworks and it's also it's also not like some people were being totally thoughtless in my mind you know what i mean like so it's kind it's one of those complicated stories where it's just it's just kind of one of those things we can't just say like how dare they but we also can't say get over it to the people that don't

like the fireworks i do think and that's kind of why i called out that one commenter who said listen like they did their due diligence to use that term again but if the if seattle fire department knows about this they have a big enough pr arm that they can put out a press release and this is exactly the type of thing that would be on king five news you know like a quick mention that hey mysterious firework party is going to happen again in the sound this weekend you know what i mean like i could see this being a kicker in all of the like kind of casual news sources one might have on around the house and i sort of feel like and you know the fact that it sort of feels like the the government entities are somewhat complicit here in keeping this low key until the shells were

going off well exactly and i'll just repeat myself just charge them like a one-time make just do this now change the whatever the law is just say that like the rules are if you want to have a private fireworks show then um the permit is going to cost you whatever the associated costs are for the local jurisdictions and municipalities just don't even make it a specific number make it like you have to pay for you have to pay for the fire boat that needs to be out there you have to pay for the public awareness campaign that goes on you have to pay for it just make it super duper expensive so either and then also you have to pay a hundred thousand dollars to put into a fund for people and pets that might need counseling afterwards just make it like crazy expensive and then either uh you get this great like boon to your coffers or they don't do it like then it's like it sort of fixes it seems like it solves itself one way or the other yeah and generally

speaking just reading this article though really if you have any like eat the rich tendencies though yeah it really like yeah it'll inflame those because it absolutely will it's just like this idea of we are so rich that we can just keep on creating like shell corporations after shell corporations so that you can't trace us and it's like if they're doing this for a fireworks display imagine what the tax implications of that are you know what i mean and the fact that like what was one of the um one of the people that they name who's connected to this in some way as an intermediary who would not go on the record of course um that said like their website says that they understand the needs of the ultra wealthy or the the discrete needs of the ultra wealthy or

something it was a guy who works for a wealth management company and that person's like bio on the website of the company was that they're good at catering to the needs of the ultra wealthy and the idea was maybe part of what this person was doing was catering to the needs of the ultra wealthy by helping sort of broker this whole series of of purchases and things running through all these various very opaque you know companies and shell companies and you're right i mean definitely when you read this it's a view into a world like um the guy gordon litwick or whatever like they talk about something where he actually i think it might have been when he donated what they call a mansion in redmond to some organization and they i think they said if i'm i'm doing this off the top of my head but something like it's one of the few places you can find him signing anything it's like whoa dude because like think about this too like honestly doing a private firework show if you give everyone a massive amount of heads up and if you say hey we're gonna do this fun thing that some people myself included do love if you want to come down to the beach and watch it not not my beach not my fancy private beach but like if i mean you could kind of be seen as sort of doing a benefit for the part of the community that likes fireworks like it's this isn't this isn't just like on its face always 100 of the time the worst thing you could be doing and the um the lengths that they've gone through to um obscure who they are like you said think about what the hell's going on with their taxes think about what the hell's going on with

you start to understand and i i don't subscribe to this but you start to understand how people do go down that rabbit hole of elites and like these you know globalists and shadowy cabals because like if it's this hard to figure out who paid for these fireworks uh you like that's just not even a thing that they should really be that worried about people knowing like hey the microsoft dude just had a big fireworks party out in the water off of bainbridge how that was annoying the The pets the pets didn't like it like that's going to be the extent of it. It's like it is it is a view into a world where these people know that like this one guy wants to basically go through the rest of his life. Never signing anything ever like that's just not a normal instinct.

Yeah, right. How many degrees? Never mind to say how many degrees of separation from Jeffrey Epstein is all of this. You know, it's just like that's where it takes your mind. What a terrible dark thing for me to say and also probably slanderous. slanderous so um this is a humor podcast we worried about slandering not epstein but yeah well that's true but i mean so obviously to to draw a parallel between a firework show and that that horror is is i don't mean to be glib about that but it just you just talk about how the ultra i mean even gates did have a connection right like the the ultra wealthy they travel in these circles and they don't they don't have to be accountable uh for big things or smaller things if you consider a firework show a smaller thing. Here is the sentence, by the way, that put my teeth, that literally, not literally, but kind of made my teeth ache. Brian Whitaker, Senior Director of Client Services for Laird Norton Wealth Management. The company bio describes him as someone who, quote, truly understands the needs of ultra high net worth families. It's like, oh, what? Oh, I'm so glad you truly understand my needs.

Truly was a high net worth. Oh, I just. Shank redemption. I know that that's a it's it's I you know certainly from the outside looking in it doesn't it doesn't seem like a great situation that's going on generally speaking in this world between the haves and the and the have nots 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 speaking of opaque financial transactions yesterday you said you got an email from someone I've been on this harangue lately about this terrible in my experience company that took over this i got a home equity loan basically to do this construction project and immediately upon getting the home equity loan the people i got it from sold it and yeah and the people they sold it to then uh use this company that's the loan servicer which is i don't this is not interesting and i don't have enough information to even make it factual probably but like i don't understand why these companies so like the company that apparently has the home equity loan now is called symmetry but then they don't they're not the ones who send me the bill they have a loan servicer they have some company that has to that sends me the bill and that company is called senlar it's like central loan something something and i don't understand why symmetry it's like you go to chipotle and you want to buy like a burrito bowl but then that they have like but then they they send you to someone else down the street to pay for your burrito bowl you just think that the company that you owe the money to would also have the people that tell you where to send the money i don't understand why that's something that gets like subcontracted out but it is and that company senlar is absolutely in my experience just terrible and i was uh been going through with them and then of course i had one of these moments where like very kaiser soul say where after i was having all these frustrations with them i then went online to see what their reviews were and they were universally terrible and they were um all people saying exactly what had happened to me which was like you can never get them to tell you what you owe them which just seems crazy criminal yeah it seems like the most basic function is how much do i owe you this month but like you can't you genuinely can't get a uh where i by the way where the things are at now i talked to a a person there who was pretty helpful the other day who was looking through the whole account and says well this makes no sense you paid this down to zero balance on this date and then two weeks later there was a the bill for fifty dollars and i don't know where that bill came from and that bill has been following me around for months so every time i would pay the monthly this fifty dollars wouldn't be getting paid because it doesn't make sense it shouldn't be there and uh and so anyway there's people just have so many stories about this loan service or just being completely impossible to work with but you said that as i was going on

and on and giving them the yelp review of a lifetime we had a listener who's like has a teddy bear from this place and fond memories i think that's i think that's mostly it i don't

think this really speaks to what you're going through now i mean the industry you You know, businesses change hands and are enveloped by other businesses. So I don't think Megan here is trying to sort of stage a defense of the company. But it did trigger some memories here.

Hey, Luke and Andrew, this is listener Megan in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I was shocked to hear Luke's story about SEMLAR loan servicing because back in the late 80s, My mom worked for Centennial Bank and Savings, I think it was called then, and they merged with Larson Mortgage Company to form the company that is haunting Luke called Semlar. I have a teddy bear wearing a Semlar t-shirt to this day. Now, when the bank and the mortgage company were merging, they were trying to come up with a new name. And I remember my mom saying at the time that one of the suggestions that somebody made anonymously was that perhaps it could be called larceny. And so it looks like media has come full circle. I am sorry to hear that my mom's former company, which she left in 1991 and so currently has no role in creating havoc in his life, has turned into something that is a problem for him. I guess that's all I have to say about that. Very weird to hear Senlar mentioned after all these many years.

Power out. So here's what I'm hearing there. What I'm hearing is Megan's mom is responsible for the fireworks show in the Puget Sound a few weeks ago.

She's pulling all the strings.

A lot of strings being pulled here.

Don't cut open that teddy bear, Megan. You're not going to want to see what's hidden inside there. A list of names. A money belt. But I bet you anything that back in those days, Senlar, at least in the early part of it, certainly Centennial, when the listener is listener Megan, you said listener Megan's mom was working there. I bet you I would have adored working with Centennial loan and mortgage or whatever they were called and talking to Megan's mother if that was, in fact, her position at that company. I think what's happened is just the not the vertical integration. that's the wrong term for it but just the like i again let me just yell at cloud for the second time this show it's very hard in this day and age depending on the the industry you're dealing with to just call somebody up who's sitting at a desk i feel like there was probably a time when i could have called megan's mom up who was sitting at a desk and said hey i'm having this problem with this and megan's mom would have been like well let me take a look at that let's figure out what's going on and then figured it out and then been like oh okay yeah this 50 dollars it shouldn't have been on there let me um just give me a minute i'm gonna go kind of clear this up with you know the folks over at the other thing now maybe i have a hopelessly nostalgic and incorrect idea of what this this company looked like circa 1990 whatever 1989 but like that's just so hard to find now and it's part of what i think is making all of us so crazy about so much customer service interaction now let me on the other hand since i did a put down of the modern world of sendlar let me get a put up of the sonos help people andrew who are from what i can assess definitely not probably based in this country but every time i have called them first of all sonos the speaker company we're doing we don't do ads for them but i would they um they first of all the helpline number is prominently displayed on their app which is just a rare rare thing in this day and age and when you call it they answer pretty fast not like right away but it's not like you're not on hold for three hours and both times since i've been out at this place that i've been trying to set up a sonos deal because part of the problem is i have these like ancient sonos speakers like i was wondering i got the first ever couple of sonos speakers they sold which means they are constantly the app is constantly trying to get me to like brick them and i don't want to i want to use them so it's a fairly complicated fix i think it involves networking and this that and the other and diagnostics and both times i've called sonos i've gotten someone on the other line who has walked me through it step by step and totally gotten me to a solution to where it's working and that's so rare in this day and age and also again um it's you know they're using a call center but they're just their folks seem to be really well trained and really know what they're doing and really pleasant I did almost I ended up kind of making a joke that I was worried

it might be right on the line to this woman that I was talking to this morning because it took a while and by the time that I was like resetting the third speaker she was talking me through okay now go to this screen go to this screen on the app and I was like ahead of her I was like I'm already doing it and she laughed and I said well I you know after three of these procedures I'm kind of figuring it out I go watch out I'm coming for your job please don't oh yeah that's

fun i love i love getting a

good customer service representative oh oh you're you were cringing at that i thought they were

only because what i was thinking of is the asymmetric relationship i'm trying to figure out how to set up a sonos speaker in the other building on my property where i now work versus somebody who i don't know anything about this person's life other than my sense was that they were somewhere on the indian subcontinent i don't know their life but i just felt a little bit like a joke about me it'd be like if i was um at a restaurant and a server was you know i helped a server like i took a plate out of their hand because they had too many plates and i was like i'm coming for your job like it might be a little i mean this person laughed but i was like yeah i almost felt like i wanted to say i'm really not please i know you're probably supporting yourself

and your family i think they took it in the spirit i'm okay having just heard the story that you told i'm quite sure they and the server would have taken it in the spirit okay good because

obviously and we were like hit i was like i don't think i've ever hit it off more with a person who is is is in another country and often following a pretty tight script i feel like those conversations for me are usually very straightforward and i don't i don't try to get cute with it because i just want to get whatever it is i'm dealing with fixed whereas if the person was in kansas i might be more inclined to kind of joke around with them and i don't know why and and and that could be my own hang-ups but this was definitely a totally pleasant completely effective conversation where i got the problem solved when you dialed us up this morning andrew i was sitting in here listening to my oscar peterson trio pandora station on my sonos um play five generation one almost bricked speaker and i was just in drinking my coffee i was just having a wonderful morning thanks to samantha wherever oh you know what else i did i got an email right after that from sonos rate your experience oh yeah across the board tens across the fun to get one of those when

when you're feeling good a really good customer service you know interaction i love that god i

hope that this i hope that they pin this up in the middle of the call center whatever it is give So Samantha gets her roses.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, well, what do you think? Should we go ahead and wrap it up? Let's do it.

I have some Homer Palooza to watch.

I have some Walter Palooza to get ready for. My dad's showing up tonight, which means I got to run to the store and get all the nutty buddies they have to sell.

Yeah, you need some nutty buddies and cigars. Hey, you know what? They're not dissimilar in shape and size and color.

Yeah, exactly. So got to go get a bunch of those. You'll be hearing, I'm sure, plenty of home renovation updates for the next week or so while my dad is down here. Also, Friday night, I'll be in Eugene at the Holt Center with LiveWire. Aparna Nancherla is going to be there The super funny comedian Also Anis Moshgani will be there The great, great poet Oh, Avery Truffleman From Objects of Interest Which is A really, really cool podcast Avery used to be at 99% Invisible Anyway, come see us down there on Friday Alright, in the meantime, thanks for listening Have a great Wednesday And take care of yourselves, dare I say it, Andrew? No, I don't say it

or you could say go Mariners and take the Seahawks with ya

okay there you go in the 80s when we were mad at the Cleveland baseball and football teams

I just want to say whatever has the least jinxitative properties oh good hey late show title alright see you tomorrow please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Hello, bands. Who is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra? Come on, people, somebody order the London Symphony Orchestra. Possibly while high. Cypress Hill, I'm looking in your direction. Hey, man, did we order an orchestra? What's up with this orchestra, man? Where'd the orchestra come from? I don't know, man. They didn't tell me about this, man. We gotta do something. Oh, yeah, yeah, we think we did. Do you know Insane in the Brain?

We mostly know classical, but we could give it a shot.

Now this I like. Power out.