Muse

Forgive me, Father, for I did sins. The basics. Fornication twice. Theft once. Impure thoughts. Some. One of them I thought was pretty, uh, pretty deeply impure. And that's it for this week. Thank you.

I see, I see. Aren't you leaving something out?

Oh, gluttony. I wolfed down a lot of food unnecessarily. I wasn't even hungry. TBTL!

For the next little while, it's going to be you and me together alone. I want you to lock the door and turn the phone off and really concentrate on what we're going to do.

The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming.

If I were you, I wouldn't focus on what he's saying, but more the fact that he's saying something. You know, these two are good. Very tough to do a morning show, this chit-chatty kind of thing. But these two have an intellect behind whatever it is they're doing. Life's a party, life's a party.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, a show that just might be too beautiful to live. It is so good. Every second of it is incredible. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Are you sure? That's what they said on Ask Jeeves. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it was a very soggy day yesterday, but we are seeing some lightning in the clouds, some blue skies. It's going to be a decent day out here in southern Washington state as we arrive at episode 4045 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

If you listened to yesterday's program, you know I was all excited to follow Andrew's lead and do some afternoon cooking to whip up a delicious football meal. Seared salmon with preserved lemon and quinoa. And I was on the fence about what I was going to put in the chili because I'm a sort of reluctant meat eater these days. I do it sometimes. I feel kind of bad about it anyway. I'll tell you how that all went. Yes, I'm literally promoting that as one of our stories we're going to discuss today. Speaking of football and Monday Night Football, has anybody noticed the new Monday Night Football theme?

You've got to be a real football nerd to sit through the whole thing.

It's really quite something, and involves Chris Stapleton, the country singer, and Snoop Dogg, the rapper, delivering what I think might be one of the worst raps I've ever heard.

I'm the president of rap music, and I need to work with you right away.

I transcribed it. I printed it out. I'm holding it right here because I just wanted to, I may frame this. It's art, honestly, how bad the rap that Snoop does in the Monday Night Football theme is. So we'll talk about that. Oh, and we'll talk to this guy, longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Your voice is like a combination of Fergie and Jesus. He's Andrew Walsh, and he is joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. Look at us. high fidelity, full fidelity, talking down the line. We had a little scare before the show. We weren't sure if we were going to be able to do the show. I was already making other plans. You were trying to figure out the technology. I was like, you know what? Maybe this is just the universe's way of saying we don't do a show today. I booked myself a hot air balloon ride. I thought you meant you were considering

just folding the company.

Which doesn't seem like the

kind of resilience that we need to have as a small business.

You know, I'm having trouble logging on. I've given it 15 minutes. I say we call it good. We call it good. Let's divide up the massive debt. Let's divide that up and go our own ways.

Well, I've got like four coins that I can, I mean, unfortunately, at Proximum Con Wee Wee is incorrect, but I think that makes them more valuable.

Yeah, I think so.

I got those things happening. How are you on this Tuesday morning?

I am pretty good. As promised, the house smells like I've been making stock for 24 hours, which mostly I have been. I didn't actually make stock for 24 hours, but let that baby simmer all day yesterday.

So you were able to activate your day of doing very little. Yeah. Starting with, and you got the whole, you made the stock and got ready for football and were cozy and all of that.

We did it, Joe. I mean, we did it. We had the most underachieving day possible. I wrapped up my TBTL stuff kind of early and just got to puttering, and putter I did. And then, you know, around midnight, no, no, it was earlier than midnight, around maybe 10.30 last night. It was time to start straining that stock out, which I did very carefully. Now it's cooling off in the fridge now and ready for another straining once it solidifies a little bit, Luke.

what my life is making making stock taking as long as possible to make soup water now what did

you actually eat for the for the game what did you do for your sports food what did we do oh i had um

and i wish i could remember the brand name because it's not too bad i think that freezer like grocery store freezer section buffalo wings are tough to do right i know that you don't really go in for them really at all but um often if they're from the freezer section they're kind of too i'm very picky about buffalo wings and often from the freezer section they're kind of too big and thus they come off a little bit slimy unless you really really almost overcook them um i don't like them when they are kind of pre-marinated in the hot sauce because that will add to a potential slime factor but i have found a brand and i do not have the brand in front of me it's a black bag luke it's it's got a it's got a horse on it it's like kneesy crouch cream like an intern could figure this out But there is a brand of buffalo wings now where they give you the sauce in separate packets. So you just heat it up in the air fryer for me, please, until you just have these nice brown, just slightly, slightly, I don't know if it's breaded or whatever, just slightly browned wings that you can then add buffalo sauce as you desire. And that is what we ate during the game.

Just hit up a B-Dubs, maybe? Do a quick drive-by? Get a Buffalo... I guess there's two Ws. Buffalo Wild Wings? I'm more of a Weck Man.

No, sure, I've done that. I mean, I don't usually... If I'm going to get wings from a place, I'm probably not going to do BW3. I'm actually a huge fan of the Korean-style wings that they have in these parts. So I might go to Baka Baka or maybe the Wing Dome has good ones.

I feel like, yeah, Wing Dome is – Camaro, Kevin, I used to have almost a weekly appointment at Wing Dome. That was –

Yeah, those are pretty good.

I, of course, was very excited to make my whole, I don't know, some kind of a chili type situation yesterday. But I was really on the fence about am I going to – am I going to contribute to a chicken losing its life by making this kind of white bean and chicken chili? Or am I going to get ground beef? What am I going to do? i ended up going with um beyond hamburger i was thinking about that and i later in the day i was

like i wonder if there's a meat alternative that would be good in chili since it's mixed up in a

lot of other stuff exactly and i just gotta tell you this it's so convincing i've kind of gone i've gone around and around with the with the fake meat stuff i was really into it for a while then i started thinking about it and a lot of it is you know as far as what the actual ingredients are is like pretty unhealthy really i mean it's not animal product but god knows what else is going on and there's a whole kind of like low sort of lower rent non-meat stuff now that's like all made by you know giant agribusiness and you know i i sort of like i for a while i was like i want everything i want to get all the stuff that tastes exactly like meat and keep eating it and then for a while i was like actually i don't want to do that because i'm just gonna go you know like i'll get actually just like a like a black bean patty over a like a fake hamburger patty or something but this beyond uh meat hamburger stuff that's that's like it's it's not in a patty form it's like just like regular hamburger meat that you would buy or ground beef that you would buy in a little plastic square i feel like we as a society have really leaned into this we want our our meat in a square now have you noticed that like what how do you buy your ground your ground

hamburger your ground beef i don't really buy ground beef i um do you grind your own i do i I use a coffee grinder, which really has an impact on the next day's cup of Joe. I'm trying to think here. I'm trying to answer honestly. I have not made like a hamburger. Oh, you know what? Well, when I'm making chili, okay, I don't buy the square stuff because when I'm making chili, I'm buying like ground turkey and ground chicken sausage, which usually comes in the more old-fashioned styrofoam tray than covered up in plastic. But I know what you're talking about.

So this, yeah, this beyond, I tell you what, I was browning it yesterday. it is so convincingly like ground beef like whatever their whatever beet juice they've put in to make it I mean sort of like the interior of it I mean you I don't think by sight you would be able to tell me the difference between this stuff and some regular ground beef no I believe it yeah it's shock the verisimilitude of it is just absolutely shocking but um so that's what I decided to go with it did mean that I had to well first of all you had a very chill day yesterday but i had a very busy day i was painting i was hanging rafters with my dad i was running in and out of town and i was buying a crock pot and then i'm just like standing in the walmart in the crock pot department and i'm looking and i'm trying to decide between a crock pot and an instant pot because an instant pot can be a crock pot but a crock pot cannot be an instant pot

andrew i'm confused about all this technology i think the Thank you. thing that we have that i always refer to as an air fryer is also those things is it a pressure cooker it's also a pressure cooker and an air fryer and an air fryer it's called does it make julienne fries i don't know if it does that i know that i make uh what i call freezer feast in there uh borrowing that term from a friend i think just like whenever i have like frozen food i'll throw it in there genevieve makes she uses the pressure cooker aspect of it to make hard-boiled eggs i I mean, that's about all I know about it.

Wow. Okay. So I ended up going with the instant pot because I thought, well, this will be a slow cooker, but also maybe I'll get into pressure cooking. I don't really, I don't know what it is I want to pressure cook, but it just seemed like this thing does two jobs instead of doing one job. I might as well get it. But of course I get it home. By the time I get home now, it's like, and I've got all these ingredients and everything. Oh, another thing was I was trying to find, I wasn't sure if I could actually cook this fake ground beef and if it would perform like regular ground beef in the slow cooking environment because it's just like i don't know can you simmer that stuff for hours and hours and hours the way you would because you know with regular ground beef it's like breaking down fats and there's a lot of stuff happening and that's what makes it so tasty i didn't know if this like fake ground beef was going to perform the same way if i'm trying to disappear into there disappear or like turn into an iphone or who knows what what will go on so i'll tell you what if you drop your chili

down the open hole of an outdoor toilet though do not chase it okay absolutely i know it's expensive

yeah please but so i was like so i get now the seahawk game is starting at what was it 5 10

west coast well i don't know apparently i was wrong about that i thought it was 5 20 and i

missed kickoff so who knows i think it was 5 10 there you go and so i'm now like i i get all the stuff i get home the instant pot is still in its box and i get this thing out and it's already i'm realizing wicked complicated like i'm watching google i'm watching um youtube videos about how to set up my instant pot which is not what i want to be doing right now because time is ticking and i'm trying to i i need to i need to get at least three hours of simmering going yeah so we can at least eat maybe by the third quarter and um you know and plus i haven't made this particular recipe oh that was the other thing that happened i bought all of the stuff right i printed out some recipe i found a recipe that seemed pretty good printed it out went to the store bought all the fixins brought it all home somehow lost the recipe like i dropped it in the store or something meaning i didn't know because i'd printed it out i didn't now know i couldn't find the recipe again if that makes any sense because when you google best chili recipe there's like 87 million results

and you couldn't remember this wasn't like a new york times one or no it wasn't the new york

times i i look through the new york times it's too highfalutin like you know um every there are andrew it turns out over eight trillion websites that have some variation on the name dish delish sure or what you know like they all have their i think primarily you know sort of these blogs are founded by uh mostly women who uh cook food maybe for their family and uh have decided to expand into online influencing they're all of the blogs have almost the same name like and i couldn't so here's what i have i have a thing of cumin that i've purchased a thing of chili powder i have all these fixings and i don't know the amounts to put in because i can't for the life so now i'm looking i'm looking at the clock and now it's like 4 15 i haven't even set up the instapot because i the first result for how to set up your instapot is some no offense weird family that's going watch our kids set up this instant pot this instant pot is so easy a kid can do it and now here's my kid setting it up i'm like i don't need this right now tell me if this weird metal thing needs to go under the inner pot or on top of it or like i just i would i was having

a lot of trouble so you know what you did wrong there though you bought yourself a pressure cooker and now you're cooking under pressure it's a high pressure it's actually a high pressure cooker is what you accidentally bought you have to look read the fine fine print there i mean i'm telling

you andrew i've never been i've never been more stressed about a meal that was supposed to be chill for me to create the whole idea was you had gordon ramsay screaming behind you exactly this is shite like i'm not even kidding the kitchen is a disaster and i haven't even started yet because there's now i've got the instant pot out of the box but again just the just the sort of packing material of an instant pot is it turns out robust and i'm of course got to wash it now and i don't really know how to fit it all together which if you see one you'd be like really that was complicated luke but there's this piece of metal that it comes with that i finally learned later is a basket of some kind so you can i don't know you just like you can put it inside the pot so it holds something up away from the other stuff but i didn't know if it went under the pot because you can take that out like a crock pot.

anyway i was confused i'm trying to figure out i'm trying to find the original recipe so i actually know the amounts of the things i'm trying to put so i'm scrolling the internet finally like on page 11 i get to the recipe which was sponsored by the beef it's what's for dinner council which was which was what i was trying to find oh yeah here's the recipe so i get the recipe

i print that was the official recipe you're looking for is the one that literally it was like a blogger that you were swapping i know right talk about irony it was the blogger was like and

thanks to the beef council for sponsoring because i think that goes on a lot too now if you've got a fairly influential food blog going a recipe blog you know suppliers will reach out to you like the american beef council yeah and the irony is that that was the one ingredient i was not using from their original thing i'm also really obsessed with trying to um folgers crystal my dad with fake meat if you know what i mean like making stuff with the fake hamburger to see if he notices um just as a as sort of an experiment yeah um because that to me your dad also seems so chill

though you know what i mean like i don't see him i mean would he ever comment on the food in front of him that somebody else made other than to compliment it you know no he would not he

absolutely would not and he would eat i wasn't here on friday night because i was in eugene and there's all this food and there's frozen pizzas and there's all kinds of stuff and i go like hey dad what did you have for dinner last night goes uh a can of soup like he just like heated up a can probably didn't even take it out of the can he probably just like put the can on the burner and opened it like a 1920s railroad hobo he cooked over a fire i'm assuming right

over a big metal barrel the lid is still attached but just bent back yes yep that's how he that's

weird he wears those boots where the toe of the boot is totally blown out but he just wears that way anyway anyway he is a very you're right he is an incredibly non-picky person but I'm always curious if I can if I can trick him so finally I find the original recipe I get it I'm browning the fake meat I'm dicing I'm slicing I'm getting it all uh kind of I'm you know sauteing the onions into the the fake meat and now I'm starting to finally Andrew get the smell that I've been going

for can I ask you a question a cooking question because I don't use um I've only made chili like in a pot on a stove before are you sauteing and browning all this stuff directly in the um whatever we're calling this is it the instant pot are you doing that on the stove I'm browning it in another

pan and one of the problems is the pan is not really large enough for all of the fake meat so I'm having to stir very very carefully um now if this is like if you're using regular hamburger I guess the idea is you brown it because it does something to bring out the flavor later there was some debate online as to if browning it was really necessary or not but I was trying to be very faithful to the american beef council's directions on this so i was browning the meat and mixing the things in and now it's it's um probably 4 30 so we're kind of pushing it but it's it's happening andrew it's starting to happen i'm i've got all things considered on in the background i may have poured myself a little bit of white wine um i'm i'm sauteing it's starting to smell really good in there and that is right when my dad decides to start beating the living shit out of the wall on the other side of me. This is actual tape. I just started rolling on my phone because it was preposterous. This was three hours. And then the compressor would kick on, which was great. So, um, this was my perfect afternoon this was my perfect afternoon of of of cooking a cozy meal was that during the game it was it it bled into the game a bit but he was knocking off at around the time the game was starting it was just my whole sort of vision of like i was going to be listening to atc i was going to be sipping my wine the house was going to be full of great smells it It was a cozy day. It's raining outside. I had this whole dream of how this was going to be. And in my mind, none of it sounded like this. But I will tell you this. The chili turned out dynamite. Yeah, good. It was so good. And also, Andrew, I have a new lease on life because I've discovered something called pre-made, or at least the mix for Red Lobster's Cheddar Bay Biscuits.

Oh, I hear people like those.

People love them. Some people, and very strongly, Andrew. Many people are saying it. I have always loved those greasy, cheesy Cheddar Bay Biscuits that you get at Red Lobster. I've...

Thank you.

I made my own, I think before, you know, there's websites that tell you how to make dupes of things like that. But I was walking through the Safeway, and my goodness, what did I see? But a box of the mix for Cheddar Bay Biscuits. I made those last night. My dad, it was like he had died and gone to heaven. First of all, I don't think my dad's ever had a Cheddar Bay Biscuit. I was tempted to tell him that it was my original recipe because he wouldn't know the difference. I'm just messing around in there trying some things out. Oh, you know, Dad, it's just a little pinch of this, a little dash of that. You know, I'm kind of, I'm sort of a whiz in the kitchen. No, but those I like those Cheddar Bay biscuits were so unbelievably good. Like, I don't even want to think about the caloric implications because it's just a giant ball of cheese and butter. But holy shit, dude. So unbelievably good. I'm going to be making those like every night for a while.

I have a question for you that is not super. And I apologize for this. This is not super interesting. I'm just legitimately curious because I had a crock pot for a while, but it was like one of those really old fashioned looking crock pots. I mean, I think my parents got it for me new, but it was the kind that was just like a big ceramic heavy thing that would slide into like a metal like, you know, heating element thing. And it really looked like, you know, just it looked like it was from the 70s or 80s, I think. Not in an ironic way, just like the way it is, you know. But the only thing I ever made in there were specific stock pot recipes, like really slow cooking a meat or something, which often this might have been totally my fault. It would make the house smell really good. But then the meat was always like it always left me wanting more. Right. I was like, oh, I just cooked meat for hours. And when you cook meat for hours, it's just I probably wasn't doing it right. Whatever recipes I was following, it's just like kind of end up with like really great smelling boiled meat. um but anyway so when i make chili though you you saute everything in a big pot anyway and then you just kind of keep slowly adding ingredients in there you got to brown the meat i i didn't even know you you could skip browning the meat but you brown the meat and you add the veggies and you brown the veggies and everything but then like as i'm adding everything you're just kind of adding it to this pot at what point are you taking the stuff that you sauteed and moving it over to the crock pot and and why do you need the crock pot at that point why not just have it in a big pot on the stove i don't know andrew with any of these questions well well good good thing that the question was super interesting no i know i because sorry i'm all over the place no no i mean

i i i don't i don't know the it probably could have just been in a dutch oven too like i don't know what the what the point of the crock pottery was but this is see this gets this actually does get to a larger issue though which is that i am i'm very scared i'm a very frightened man in the kitchen andrew like everything everything about the process of cooking food intimidates me because i feel like i'm gonna do it wrong it's gonna turn out weird there's i just don't know how to do a lot in the kitchen and so if something is like a crock pot recipe i'm just like buying a crock pot to put it in the crock pot where really what it is is heat is being applied at a certain rate to these things like there's and i do i have a big um like lay crusade dutch oven that i can Probably totally used for the same thing, probably exactly the same. And like Becca or you or somebody who's a little bit more comfortable in the kitchen would probably just be like, yeah, that'll also work. But I'm so rigid about this stuff because I'm just so bad at it. And I feel like if I try to improvise at all, I'm going to screw it up. So my whole thing is I literally print a recipe out. I either scotch tape it or thumbtack it to the cabinet above where I'm working and refer to it visually multiple times per minute.

That's good. I mean, I wish I did. I follow them. I'm like you. I follow the recipes pretty closely, but I always have them on my phone. Sometimes I take a screen cap. Sometimes I don't do that in the kitchen. Sometimes I take a screen cap and I save it in my pictures folder to make it easier Because, you know, lots of times these recipes begin with like a super long novel at the top and then a recipe that is like three lines at the very end. Anyway, but I like the I don't do it, but I like the idea of having something just printed out and stuck to the cupboard. That's good.

Yeah, I'm that's my whole that's my whole system. In fact, one of the things I should have brought down when I moved out of the Bay City of Bellingham was my recipe stack, which was just hundreds of things I'd printed out over the years and would refer to for making various things. But you would think some of those things, like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of even an example. There were things that I had made 10, 15 times. You'd think at some point I wouldn't need to look at the recipe, but that's what a fraidy cat I am. is that I just I'm so I want to get to the point where I understand more just how flavor combinations work and I mean that's the thing it's truly wild to watch Becca prepare a meal she is I've never seen her use a recipe and she'll make like some elaborate cake That's like, how did you even know what, how much to put in? She's like, you just, I don't know. You just do it. And it's like, it's like a language or something, or it's like somebody who can just play an instrument or read music in some way. It's like, it's a whole other language that I don't really speak, but it's pretty, pretty impressive to watch somebody who just understands how like, oh, you need a little bit of like, you need some lemon there. You need some acid to cut whatever that is. And just like instinctively understands all these combinations. I do not. I'm mostly a Cheddar Bay Biscuit man, like my father and his father before him.

Well, you are teaching the older generations about Cheddar Bay Biscuit. What color is your La Crusade pot?

It's kind of reddish. That's nice. Yeah, no, those are – that's something that I'm very looking – I'm looking forward to taking out a third mortgage on this house when the new kitchen is done and decking it out in La Crusade. Yeah, no. I'm a sucker for that stuff.

I don't know if you're buying yours new. We don't roll that rich in this family. But Genevieve is constantly on various auction sites, I believe, but they're like not not eBay. They're like some sort of like actual auctions where she then goes and picks this stuff up and she's found a couple of things that are just that's the dream. That's her drug of choice, like whatever the feeling is that she gets when she locks one of those things down.

How many of them do you have now?

We, I think, have two, but one of them also had some, like, kind of stains in the lining, and she followed some sort of, like, cleaning recipe online to get it, like, so it looks, like, new now. That's her second favorite drug is then bringing something home, or maybe it's all part of the same drug cocktail, but, like, to find a great find like that that other people have somehow, like, overlooked or undervalued, and then to bring it home and to restore it so it's, like, new.

Mine is like that, except I go to the most expensive store I can find and overpay for it. That's my drug.

And you say, well, this makes me a better cook. And they say, absolutely.

I was listening to The Daily yesterday, the New York Times program, and they were talking to one of the reporters about what's going on with Amazon. You know, obviously, the Federal Trade Commission has brought a lawsuit against them. and there's two of the two of the things that the that they're alleging basically are that they're they are forcing uh they're forcing out competition by basically um setting the price for everything if you are a seller through amazon if you sell let's say a leg crusade pot and amazon finds that you're selling it cheaper somewhere else they will take off the buy now button for your for your leg crusade business or whatever like so then you if i'm a consumer i could still buy something from you but i have to go through like four screens so it's basically the death penalty for a product so then what people end up doing is raising their prices elsewhere so that it's equal to their price on amazon so they don't get in trouble and then also amazon has this supply chain obviously all the delivery if you sell your stuff through amazon you pretty much have to use their amazon trucks and everything so the point is amazon is just controlling all the means of production now and everything and they there's no real competition because they're in control of everything but what this reporter was talking about was that um she and her husband had decided to stop their amazon prime as an experiment and they would said you know we're going to see over the course of a year if we really need something fast then we'll pay for the expedited shipping but let's see how this affects our consumerism and she said that since they got rid of their amazon prime they are buying so much less stuff and she was talking about the way that amazon has trained us with the how how rapid now there's the thing I want buy it now and it's coming to my house that day it is like a dopamine thing and it and I realized I was listening I was like oh my god I am so addicted to this right now probably every day I buy something on Amazon I mean and again like intellectually and we say this every time the topic comes up intellectually I I understand that Amazon is is in a lot of ways making the world a way worse place or if they're not making it worse now they're going to at some point because they'll just own everything. Everything we buy will be from them. But I'm totally addicted to that feeling of like going online, like thinking of something I want to have or need to have. And it also has to do with where I'm at in my life right now. I'm in this weird, empty shell of a house that doesn't have a lot of the things that I used to own or that I need. So there's always something that I'm looking at going, I need a coat rack for that or whatever and then go online and see what's there and then get this kind of excitement and then hit buy and then start watching it leave a facility and come to my house it's a it i'm very addicted

to that process and i really need to break out of it i want you talk about that dopamine feeling i wonder if younger generations like let's even say like the the young kids like you know who are growing up uh in families right now who will be adults in you know 10 15 years or something i wonder if they will get the same kind of dopamine feeling it'll all be nor i don't think we're moving away from this trend i think it'll just become more and more normalized but i wonder if because we're on the tail end of a generation that still got excited when things came in the mail like i wonder if it'll be so normalized that it's just normal and it's not even like you you don't even get that little fun little burst of my god i was just i guess shopping though all like buying something all whether you're at the store and bringing it home or or at a at a thrift store or whatever i guess there's always been something about shopping that can fire those dopamine pills right the thrill of

discovery and all of that it's probably some sort of hunter-gatherer like you know like old brain like old caveman brain that we're that we're still using yeah i don't know i'm just like it's weird when you have one of those moments where someone is describing a sort of way of being in the world and you're like oh shit that is exactly me that is totally like i am completely addicted to and entrapped by this thing that is amazon.com and i think also part of it is because i am kind of out here in the middle of nowhere so it's the convenience factor is like is is is pretty

amazing well yeah i mean their plan is working right like because here's the deal like i was not until like the last couple of years did i make it kind of a regular thing to buy things on amazon genevieve got into it before i did i was still old school because number one i was just like kind of scared of buying things online i mean that's kind of too strong of a way of putting it but like very kind of like reluctant like oh i'm gonna hit the wrong button how would i return it and also like you know me i like process so i had no problem going to if i wanted new towels go to bed bath and beyond and you know push my hand into those bath towels and see which ones i like you know like why would i ever want to buy that online i'd always want to like kind of sample the towels they call those places bad bath and beyond i am still working on my um film bad beth and beyond it's a russ myers-esque film um sure but updated for today's um no absolutely it's transgressive sure yeah anyway um so i i'm fine like oh oh and also like i got into candle making years ago you know we've talked about that a lot on the show and i've gotten into candle buying lately oh yeah well that's the thing candle buying is kind of expensive right yeah so uh there's this great place the this holistic aromatherapy and and you know type of store very near us where we'd go and like fill up bags of wax and bring them but that place is closed already like it's like as these places disappear the only place that seems like where am i going to go to get my wax now where am i going to go to buy some more towels now bed bath and beyond is closed that zenith supply is closed like little by little these places are it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and then i have to go to Amazon and then the cycle just continues I shouldn't say have to because I can already hear the emails you know coming in clattering in saying you know well you can be more conscientious which I can but as as the options diminish it obviously becomes harder and harder to do yeah and my problem

too is I am terrible at planning I mean that was the other thing this reporter for the New York Times said was you can live without Amazon Prime it just takes more planning you just have to think about things like five days in advance instead of the afternoon of needing something or wanting something um you you missed the beginning of monday night football so that means you did not hear the new theme song have you caught the new monday night football no i had no idea no idea at all um it's uh really remarkable maybe we should how about we thank some donors and then i want to play this for you because it's it's a it's a real it's a real piece of art can't wait All right, let's thank some daily donors. These folks are keeping TBTL in business. We can't disband the company, Andrew. These people rely on us for audio entertainment, so much so that they're willing to donate hard-earned money. This is a listener-supported show. And we want to thank Jason Frankovitz Who's in Los Angeles, California

Beautiful Los Angeles

Yeah, I've heard of it Yes Connor Mulcahy is in beautiful Verona, New Jersey Now can you do this? Can you just move on? What do you think I'm doing right now? But what if Connor likes it? What if Connor loves it when I Also, oh man, Andrew I've been watching a show with my dad called Shetland

Oh yeah, you told us about that Or maybe your dad told me directly about this, yeah.

Yeah, it's, oh, I love it so much. But it's, you know, it's in the Shetland Islands. Yeah. So that's really teeing me up for a good Connor Mulcahy read, which I'm choosing not to do. I do want to go to the Shetland Islands, though.

Yeah, I mean, is this one of those shows, like, I haven't watched a lot of those things, but I remember loving Broadchurch for a lot of reasons. But mostly, like, you know, Broadchurch, season one was amazing. Seasons 2 and 3 I thought fell off greatly. But I didn't care. I just wanted to kind of, quote-unquote, be there.

I just wanted to live in that universe and in that atmosphere. It was so beautiful. It has really nice cinematography. And, you know, the Shetland Islands are quite a beautiful visual backdrop. So if you have, you know, if you have good camera people and good editors and a great backdrop, you know, I mean, yeah, I just like the visual sort of language of the show. There's this other show that I've been watching. there's did i tell you about vandervalk yet the cockney vandervalk rules yes hey we should do a quiz on that might get some listeners back um did i tell you i can't remember if it was on the show or off the show or if we've even brought this up but like there's this show that so there's basically like three shows that i've been kind of semi-watching with my dad and with my mom when she was over a while ago which they're all bbc or something like that one is um uh one is shetland that one i really like one is called um unforgotten and it's kind of hokey it's just basically their answer to like a you know a kind of a hokey american procedural but it's okay but it's it's it's it's a little and then there's van der valk which is without a doubt one of the worst television programs i've ever seen in my life okay first of all you know what let me let me finish let me let me finish thanking the donors and then i will tell you why i will bundle together the vandervall conversation and the monday night football theme it'll be called uh terrible thanks for asking these things are both terrible let's lock that down we want to thank kristen reicher who's in austin texas heck yeah thanks kristin hey it's our friend uh alisa nicholas who's in atlantic beach florida

i'm gonna give this an alicia as well i think it might be alicia and we're alicia i believe is the listener and again apologies if i'm saying that incorrectly especially as i correct you luke but i think alicia is the one of the people that i saw who was at that u2 experience in vegas i was

yeah somebody dm'd me i think that was let me see alicia yeah i think it was one of the people that were there for the uh pretty amazing for the the big debut so thank you so much also thanks to brooke latsky davis who's in san luis abispo california slo um and then jason lumpkin is in

little rock arkansas i've never been to arkansas you you've been there oh yeah you had a squirrel

I've been, oddly enough, there are two separate times I've flown into XNA Airport, which is the Bentonville, Arkansas Airport, one for the squirrel cook-off and one for a story about thrift store art. So one time might be a lot to fly into Bentonville, Arkansas. I've done it twice. Anyway, I know that's not Little Rock, but Jason, thank you for checking in. All right. Thank you to our donors. Thanks for making TBTL possible. We could not do this without you. hello and welcome to top story okay the thing about this van der volk show is it is it's set in um the netherlands that's what we decided right that's what we came down on i think we're still saying the yeah it's set in the netherlands um but everybody has a cockney accent including the main detective van der volk and like it's so i'm like why doesn't he have why isn't he speaking english if they're i mean you know it's a bbc show or whatever it's or some british you know public publicly created thing why not have him speak with a dutch accent speak english but with a dutch accent like he's his name's van der volk he's a detective in like amsterdam he's like all right governor we're gonna and it's like what why are they classic dutch i was watching this with my mom and dad and my mom my mom is just a hoot so she's just like always up for roasting on things my dad is very earnest and my dad likes van der valk i had been drinking some wine and i was starting to just really go in hard on van der valk because let me tell you something else first of all i just started ending every every time someone would finish a piece of dialogue i would say isn't it isn't it and i did this all the whole show until finally someone literally said it's going to be a hell of a challenge isn't it and then my mom and i cracked up so much but also the the crime gang that was doing the crimes was a parkour gang andrew and they were using parkour to get away from the cops feels very sharks v jets it's just like uh let's spin a wheel what are people what is the thing that people are doing parkour okay what if you had a what if there was a murder in the parkour community but then van der valk was trying to catch a bad guy but the guy was parkouring away oh my god and not only that but like

one of the characters again i only have spotty memories of this because i was mildly drunk but like one of the the character one of the guys who's involved in it was like somebody was like how do i put this basically like somebody casually picks up a copy a printed copy of like parkour monthly oh yeah and the guy's on the cover of it he's like he's like yeah you know it's this guy and he's like hands him the magazine of like parkour monthly because you know everyone that's doing parkour is getting that magazine mailed to them every month well it's a small community

you're gonna end up on the cover at some point exactly like like is there a more silly device

to try to visually represent to us who the guy is other is there a more ridiculous way for us

to get visual on him than he was on the cover of parkour monthly listen to this do you know that you're watching a remake of a television show that uh originally aired in 1972 i didn't know that but i bet you the 1972 version was better and it ran for 20 years so the original ran from 72 to 92 and then it looks like in in uh 2020 they uh remade it um i'm assuming that the original one did not have any parkour references but i can't say for sure um and apparently apparently it might have also been based very loosely on a set of books of the same

name freedom in amsterdam it's a new day and a new dawn as vandervalk welcomes two new sergeants to the team impulsive hot shot eddie sulliman and technical whiz citra lee i'm reading from the episode where they're doing the parkour it's so great i'm forgetting like three of the other things that are so silly about this but anyway all that is to say uh when i was talking to my dad later i was like yeah we'll watch some of your shows he goes um well we're not gonna watch van der vaal together anymore oh that's a bummer i ruined it for him well i didn't ruin it for him i ruined it for him watching it with me yeah that's probably you know what dad i think that's a good idea yeah that's fair but meanwhile meanwhile uh we ran out of episodes of baptiste but i was totally down with baptiste even though that one was a little corny too but but um it's just we just can't like i used to say to addy there were certain songs that these are not these are not songs like if it was like a you know a hip-hop song that was particularly crude or whatever i would say this is a song you can enjoy and a song i can enjoy it's not a song we can

enjoy sure yeah of course like me and my dad and vandervalk although it doesn't sound like you're

going to be enjoying vandervalk by yourself in this case uh it's just something that my dad he's also my dad's also really into survivor and the amazing race oh really he's like how do i dvr survivor in the amazing race i'm like wow walt that's a not i didn't i didn't see him as a big

survivor guy he must be psyched that you can actually um yes TiVo things there I kind of forgot that you actually you know forever I was picturing you guys just like plugging in somewhat illicit thumb drives into your um projector or whatever but now you have actual cable there you have everything anybody could possibly you have everything a Walt could possibly

want no he's very very happy here I don't think he's ever going back to my mom and dad's house actually um speaking of rap music andrew the new uh well i had mentioned that there were some rap songs i didn't listen to okay oh gotcha yeah it's called a transition and look into it okay um the new monday night football theme is i mean it's been out for a few weeks obviously but it's um it's quite something of course i think you know they had there was the hank williams are Are you ready for some football? And then there was a, what was the most recent one? Because I know Carrie Underwood is Sunday night. I've been waiting all week for Sunday night. Kind of set to the tune of I hate myself for loving you. But what was the most, what was the previous, like last season, what was the Monday Night Football song?

I'm looking it up. I don't know. It's not all my rowdy friends are here.

No, that's Hank Williams Jr.

That was Hank Williams. Let's see here. I'm not finding a definitive answer. and i don't know um you know i'm not i probably only watch monday night football you know if a team that i was interested in was playing and maybe not catch the beginning i'm not sure

so if somebody out there knows let's see um yeah i i feel like there was some sort of pop singer was it like faith hill maybe or something i don't know anyway they have a new song uh for this season and it's chris stapleton the country music singer doing a version of in the air tonight by phil collins and then there's also that's the one who yes oh and believe me you'll be hearing that yeah okay and then you've got snoop dog in it and then you've got the drummer from santana i believe her name is cindy blackman santana i i'm guessing she might be married to carlos santana Or maybe that's just how they met They both had the same last name And they decided to collab But it starts with Chris Stapleton sitting in a huge dark empty room in a chair almost like he's about to be a bad guy in a batman movie like it feels like the chris stapleton origin story like why is this country guy sitting in a huge room where there's only one piece of furniture and that's the chair he's sitting in and then this big tv that's playing monday night football and uh this is uh kind of what it sounds

classic nfl rivalry is renewed these two teams do not like each other and you got to love that

so this is now chris stapleton is like walking you know walking along singing that he can feel By the way, I did not realize that lyric was, oh, Lord. I always thought it was, I could feel it coming in the air tonight, hold on.

Oh, that's interesting. I feel like I knew it was, oh, Lord. I'm not sure, but both sort of make sense to me. I feel like I held them both in my head at the same time.

Doesn't this also seem kind of like an ominous song?

Well, my question for you is, there's something so fake about those announcers, and I didn't recognize the voices, or I don't remember who they were.

It's like Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, probably.

But do you think that that's an actual clip of them commenting on something? It sounds so fake. It sounds like a video game to me. You know, I played that Madden video game, and they have a lot of, like, kind of pre-record. I mean, it's pretty amazing for a video game how they have so many options that they, you know, like, the game will just play something appropriate after a play. And it is pretty amazing to think about the process of doing that and the computing involved and the tracking involved. But, like, it also sounds fake, you know, even though it's real people doing their job.

It was also sad if this is what they wrote. Yeah, these two teams really – what was it again? These two teams don't like each other, and that's good. Oh, my God. Let me see here. Why won't my computer play? Hold on. I put you in a bad situation. No, no, you didn't. I'm just trying to figure out what it was. Here we go.

Classic NFL rivalry is renewed. These two teams do not like each other, and you've got to love that.

Oh, yeah, that definitely sounds like it's from Madden. That's 100% a line they wrote for Troy Aikman. And again, it's just like, think about, you know, obviously Hank Williams Jr. is a moron. But, you know, that like all my rowdy friends are here on Monday night. It was a celebratory song. It was it was it was jubilant. It was like, we're excited about this. Even with the Carrie Underwood one, I've been waiting all week for Sunday night. It's like these are these are exciting songs. We're like excited footballs here. This is like this is very depressed. And like Chris Stapleton is, again, it feels like something is not right for him. I also have heard good things about Chris Stapleton. Like, this is not anti-Chris Stapleton as far as his other career goes. But I just don't understand why they picked this song. He also sounds exactly like Phil Collins.

He also sounds a lot like Phil Collins, yeah.

Like, it's not putting his, they're not having him put his own kind of spin on it. He just sounds like he's doing a Phil Collins song like Phil Collins. Yeah, like you're doing karaoke.

I can see you coming in here tonight.

this feels like the collective heartbreak of a city just like again this feels like i keep going back to this reference this feels like a song that should be happening when batman is standing on a roof looking out at gotham or something or or or like there is that documentary about when

the browns left cleveland in 1995 right you can see them packing up the trucks or whatever to

this song sure right like this is not getting me hyped for monday night now you can feel it right now you're getting the drums

i don't know what that sound was luke but i literally because of the way you set this up i pictured um who's the uh who's the gen x batman uh robertson robert pattinson robert pattinson that's what i said like i literally my brain automatically pictured him zooming by on a bat bike with like really really fat wheels because something went vroom and i totally pictured that

cut to andrew snoop dog with low riders and dancers because if you know if you have snoop dog you have to have the lowriders and and now so now we've shifted into the snoop dog

rapping portion of the song us first them survival we must win it's tribal my team one head to head with adversaries nothing is given so we gotta take it it's fourth dimension so we gotta make it

Can I just read these for you? Rivals. Us versus them. Survival. We must win. It's tribal. I'm starting to sound like Harry Carey. It's tribal. My team like kin.

That would have been an interesting showcase.

Now that I would have supported. Will Ferrell as Harry Carey doing this rap. It's tribal. My team like kin. By any means necessary. when head-to-head with adversaries. Nothing is given, so we got to take it. It's fourth and inches, so we got to make it. Can you feel it? That is doggerel. Actually, it's pretty funny. Snoop doggerel, that is. I don't know what doggerel. I would be laughing at it. It's a very, very bad poem. It's like the lowest form of poetry. More like Snoop doggerel, Andrew. Oh, right. That is an absolutely, that is just a putrid rap song. I mean, I love Snoop. I like his music. I mean, you know, the older stuff. But, like, this is very bad rapping. Now Chris Stapleton is jamming on his guitars. They're showing highlights.

People jam out on their guitars.

Dude, it's amazing.

It's very long.

And Andrew, I don't know if you're going to believe this. At the end, when Cindy Blackman-Santana hits the drums really hard.

Wait, wait, wait, don't tell me. Don't tell me, because I haven't watched this. Do little beads of water come bouncing up?

No, Andrew. All the glass behind her.

Oh, I was thinking. You know what? I was still underachieving. I was thinking too small.

It feels like this is, they just, they got a room full of people together, they're like well hicks like football okay and again i'm not calling chris stapleton a hick or the people that like kim hicks but they were like we have to appeal to this section of america but they're like but also other people people who might like snoop dogg people who might be people of color or whatever like people that are not necessarily in the what they categorize as this chris stapleton world so we what about the other folks and it's like but so we'll have snoop with lowriders but then what about people that love the music of santana well what if we had cindy blackman santana just wailing away on the drums like it just it it's amazing to me that um poochie the dog didn't skateboard through this at some point and then one person's like wait and hear

me out just hear me out what if we write end racism in the end zone same meeting same meeting

it's just yeah iracism yeah like it's i don't know i don't know why i care so much about this whatever it's i think it's because however corny these songs are they do become for me and it sounds less so for you, Andrew, but for me, they become kind of part of my, the sonic sort of tapestry of my week. Like as bad as the, I've been waiting all week for Sunday night is I, I told you the other day I was walking somewhere with Becca, walking by like an FX McCrory's in Portland. And I saw that on like, you know, you could the big glass front to this restaurant. You could just see that that was what was kicking on in the bar. And I felt a, like a visceral excitement course through my body. like it's almost like the cornier the better in a way because then you can just have fun with it the problem is this is so wistful it's so maudlin that i feel like i can't ever it's too epic too it's just like yes too much too much everything exactly so um do better monday night football

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female

oh man it's not from a female i wish i had the wherewithal the technology to have just come instead of the email sounder for just to be rivals us versus them survival we must win it's tribal my team like kin do you think is snoop dog a terrible rapper a terrible lyricist is it all production no first of all i think martha stewart

wrote those lyrics secondly um and which if you think about it that way it's not not too bad right

for no if it's martha stewart this is actually pretty good this is the first time out i'm

impressed sure uh trying new things i applaud that um i think that he does i mean well again this was not written by him this was written by the same people who decided to try to hit

demographic in this song. These teams don't like

each other and that's good. Like yeah

I mean this was I'm sure not written by him or I mean even if an initial idea was scratched down by him I mean just so heavily vetted by people I mean just yeah I mean Genevieve has a job where you see a lot of people like kind of vetting you know something because she writes something and then various people have various interests. I mean just imagine with the NFL and the sponsors and the this and the that and well we can't say that well we don't want to get in trouble and we do well we want to make everybody happy we want to be inclusive and like all of these things but like nobody really caring about that shit right just like and just like trying to and then you end up with this it's like it's like the equivalent of like you know some sort of gaudy wrap on a like a like when you get your van wrapped

or whatever you know what I mean like you're like wrapping your wrapping your truck with

monster energy drink right exactly it's like well we need this logo here and also we're sponsored by this and then the next thing you know it just looks like somebody barfed branding all over your truck and you're like you're driving to a job site somewhere um can i before we get

into the emails of the emails can i just throw one more thing out there that i would love it if you and genevieve can discuss on your uh commercials podcast after these messages um did you happen to see that travis kelsey commercial that was in pretty heavy rotation last night for experian one of the credit reporting agencies which is this the one where he's talking to the kid he's in a lot

of commercials now is this the one where he's talking to the kid in the tunnel and the the kid knows everything about him and he knows everything about the kids exactly yeah yes uh that i can't

think of the other examples but that commercial is the like maybe third or fourth commercial i've seen of late where it is very obvious they shot it on a green screen do you think that those two

people because the first thing i thought when i saw that yesterday was these two people are not in the same room this kid and kelsey but then they chest bump and i was like would they go through the process of faking a chest bump if they're not actually in the same room but there was something that seemed very fake about that commercial you're right the it's the background it's because they

didn't want to go shoot it in a tunnel at a stadium somebody said oh we can just shoot this all on a green screen and this will just put the bat we'll put the tunnel up behind them it's not convincing it's uncanny because there's we're still for all of the technology we can put an elon musk in space oh by the way leave him there how about that we can we could do a lot but we still have not fully gotten the like chroma key green screen background looking like i don't know if it's a light and shadows thing if it's a depth perception there's just something about it that's off and there are more and more commercials that are going this way i think probably because you know some the production company says to the client we can do this for like fifty thousand dollars less because we don't have to go like rent the stadium um pay for security block it out set up you know spend days setting up the lighting like it is way harder to shoot something out in the real world but there's more and more commercials where they think we don't notice it's a green screen and i'm noticing it's a green screen yeah that's that makes so much more sense

because i was like well they couldn't get these two people in the same place at the same time it's like well you'd only really have trouble getting one person in the right place which would be the super super famous football player i'm sure the other kid you can get him in the same you know like on the same set as travis kelsey wherever he happens to be but you're right the thing that seemed fake about that was the background of both of them so in the same room okay but something did

strike me about that that's yes and see and you you were like your your your keen eye was like

something about this doesn't doesn't really add up yeah and i i formed it into an actual like kind of front of mind thought but i think a lot of people just like even if you're not actively thinking about it because like i think about commercials and you think about production and commercials but like even if you're not actively thinking about it i still think it's going to be like just vaguely uncanny for an average viewer just like something is off about right and like

it wasn't worth however much money they saved to do that um so and also it's good that finally some people are talking about travis kelsey i did you it's been such a low-key couple of weeks in

his life is he involved with anybody as far as you know i'm not not that i'm aware of i mean i

will say this everything that i've kind of heard about travis kelsey in fact from our listeners in kansas city is that he's seemingly a pretty good dude yeah yeah yeah like has good takes because i

remember at one point like you you was because he had shaved his head and he had sort of like a kind of a white power bill thing going on like just visually this is several seasons ago and i remember you on the show saying like i don't think that like just based on based on his vibe i don't think that he and i would agree on much and a bunch of people wrote in to be like no no he's really he's he's fighting a lot of good fights apparently like i haven't read up on it but

yeah he actually does this podcast with his brother that is very good too which i think is maybe even where all this taylor swift stuff started did you actually hear what he did i mean I have to say like as far as these things go I thought it was sort of clever so I you know I guess the story is that he was intrigued by Taylor Swift um and then he actually you know the thing they do at the Taylor Swift concerts now is they make these um friendship bracelets and you make a bunch of them and i guess they have some people made them for us at the 4000th episode which was really sweet but you you make them and you put the name of a taylor swift song or a lyric from taylor swift on these little bracelets because they have letters right and then you go to the taylor swift show and you trade them with people so you give them a you know shake it off friendship bracelet and they give you a um blank space those are the two taylor Swift songs that I can think of and honestly my seat to see if you could land there don't ask me for a third because I have like no help here but like so I guess what Travis Kelsey did was he made one of those friendship bracelets but he put his actual phone number on it and he tried to get it to Taylor Swift oh and I guess it didn't get to her so then he talked about it on his podcast with his brother and then somehow that information got to Taylor Swift and then they began chatting and now appear to be in some sort of dating situation but um the i see clips of the podcast because his brother jason is a i think like the center for the eagles or something and um they're actually pretty entertaining dudes it's just kind of chatting

it up cutting it up as it were i don't like getting into i certainly don't like saying anything that just sounds like kind of the the cliche windbag shit of the moment and there's a lot of that going around with this like you know taylor kelsey kind of relationship and i did you watch sunday night football to me that that monday night football isn't so much in the rhythm of of my life so much as like actually sunday night football now like i always come home and i usually cook something and kind of get have a good cozy sunday night and now that sunday night baseball is basically done for me i've been uh you know i'll i'll focus more on the nfl um but

did you watch that because it took place in new york i did not see that game um but i'm guessing was that the chiefs playing so was that another you yeah the entire game was just filming taylor

swift in a luxury box it was chiefs jets yeah and so you know so she's in new york anyway right i'm assuming that i don't know where i don't know where her area is um but i assume that she lives in a giant um giant golden nest rainier oregon yeah i'm not sure but uh but uh anyway yeah so it was just a lot of focus on that and you know and so everybody's got their opinions and then like you know just terrible people at barstool have all kinds of toxic takes on it it's like i don't you know whatever like these folks are in a relationship that's fine whatever it all it's all what's a toxic what's a toxic take on them oh oh my goodness i think all kinds of i don't even want to repeat it but i and i've only heard a sort of third hand kind of reference to it but like all kinds of unmanliness and like her you know just like anything that just would make a uh a super macho guy feel somewhat threatened by this relation anyway oh yeah i i was not i was not

privy to any of the anti travis kelsey and taylor swift enjoying each other's company again i've

only heard glancing reference i've only heard glancing references to that and i don't need to kind of get into it and it's not like the stuff I'm listening to is that but one question that might be rude but it's really hard not to ask yourself is like listen these are human beings and usually when human beings are in a relationship even if they're super famous I just generally kind of root for them you know you mentioned I think Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell the other day I'm just like oh that's I just love I love the fact that they they it must be hard to be that famous and stay in a relationship I think it's hard to stay in a relationship anyway even without all the fame and everything so anyway i just tend to root for these things but in this case like they these aren't just folks these are brands you know and it is 2023 and not just kelsey being a brand but also the nfl being a brand and like what this means and and the nfl being a brand that has so um maybe desperately is the wrong word but worked very hard and in some cases cynically to uh get more women to watch the sport and bring more women into football and now you have i mean And it just it's hard not to feel like it's hard not to at least wonder how much these are gears turning in an economic and cultural way as opposed to. Again, I want to bring that up without like diminishing the idea that these are human beings who actually have real feelings, which is also true. But like, God damn it, this does feel scripted like this is part of Keegan-Michael Key's writing session.

what i think is i think that these are two people that are enjoying dating each other uh presumably i don't think it was orchestrated by the nfl but i think the nfl is doing back flips yes about it this is one of those things where it's just like omg they got so so lucky with this one for the for as long as it continues and i mean there was an interesting thing this summer which was every time Taylor Swift would be performing at a stadium that was also used for NFL teams the NFL would be just like thirstily like tweeting at her and trying to come up with you

you know, angles to connect the NFL and Taylor Swift. So certainly this is something that the NFL has, you know, been praying for. I don't know what sort of, I don't know what kinds of lambs were sacrificed. What sort of, you know, what sort of, I don't know, what went on in order to try to manifest this. But I do believe that these are two people that are interested in each other and having fun dating. That's, I feel, probably like a real thing. But I think the NFL is over the moon about it.

Yeah, exactly. and not going to let it obviously not let an opportunity pass them by no they're definitely

they're definitely not going to i mean it is it is interesting too to see somebody at this level of fame i guess that taylor swift is and the way that it's sort of like it's almost like um she's a planet and it just bends gravity like reality bends around her or something just by virtue of her being in the press or in the in the luxury box that's all anyone's talking about the announcers are like working in Taylor Swift references to their calls like every it's it's it's like you know there's 60,000 people in this thing and they're all pretty much paying attention to one person who's not even on the field like it's an it's an interesting thing to see someone who's that famous that it actually pulls focus from the football game on the field which is a thing people

are obsessed with yeah I I had a weird perspective on this that I'll share with you I told this to Genevieve the other day it was probably on Sunday night during the game I Genevieve came into the kitchen I got my laptop there I'm cooking and uh and they you know keep on flashing to Taylor and I kind of give her a quick background on like you know okay so they're in New York and they keep showing Taylor Swift up in the luxury box or whatever um and the whole thing does feel kind of silly in a certain way but like it doesn't ruin the experience for me because the whole thing is silly like what we're watching is silly the fact that I get upset over the outcome of these games is essentially silly and i said to veves and you know this is probably because of my obsession with vhs tapes and like kind of finding them and archiving them um is like if i came across in the year i don't know 40 43 or something and i didn't kind of know this was going on i'm like oh here's an old cassette tape or here's a here's a you know thumb drive or whatever it is where somebody recorded an old nfl game and like it was this cultural moment whereas like they kept flashing to the box because Taylor Swift was up there it's like oh it's like such a moment it's such a such a marker of the times we live in that is innocent enough and fun and like just sort of like someday I mean I don't know if we'll look back on it but it's just sort of like if I stumbled upon this in the future I'd be like oh this was kind of interesting like everybody's really focused on this relationship between a tight end and this megastar you know like there's something like thinking about it that way like almost picturing this moment in the past I found somewhat charming i don't think i explained it very well i just saw an article last week or

something that there some scientists are saying that we're probably about halfway through life on this planet that you know um that was their best guess was that it's got another couple hundred million years and then it's like over because of like not like specifically climate change but just like everything that's happening to the planet and what you know and this is that part is the natural probably life cycle of a planet less you know than um than you know my mcdlt packaging or something but there's just something about like a 200 million years from now when the earth is just kind of you'd be turning into this hot rock that there's no life on in the last kind of life forms or eking it out and just to think back at a time when a significant portion of the country was obsessed with is taylor swift dating travis yeah right right like it's just such a it's such a weird blip in the existence of this weird thing that is humankind on this planet that just happened in my opinion by just a bunch of weird random shit you know who do you think

not to get heavy but who do you think the last human will be do we have time for this here at the end of the show is there a heaven you know i i don't know if i actually tweeted this out but i remember having the thought at one point and this is long before elon musk took over twitter and renamed it and everything but i remember thinking at some point i wonder what the last tweet will be and now i wonder have we seen the last are we still calling them tweets if somebody posts

something to that i do feel like this x thing didn't really take though yeah you know what i mean like like everyone if they have to call it that they will call it the platform that used to be called twitter yeah everyone what it's really done this changing it to x thing what it's really done is just wasted collectively i don't know a month off of all of our life because every time you write about it every time you talk about it in a journalistic sense you have to clarify so and so on x the platform formerly known as twitter it's like all it did is just cause us to all have to say that a lot and like because no one's calling it x just kind of like just hey did you um god did you see what bradley cooper x'd the other day andrew is it yeah is

Is that even what the term would be?

Can you imagine that sentence? ever happening without without them going god that sounds weird yeah no i mean it's just again

like whatever his motives are i mean i don't they might not be they're good they might not be fully sound but like yeah it's just like it's like anti-marketing it's like well we i've destroyed the reputation of the company i've destroyed any kind of like um credibility with the company but like the one thing that is still valuable is the name like the one thing that still stands for something is the name and and you will say i tweet genevieve was flipping through some social media network the other day yesterday while we were watching monday night football i think probably on instagram and she came across like some you know like repost of somebody who wrote something and she turned her phone to me and said hey did you see this tweet or whatever it is and i was like that is like you're looking i'm assuming at instagram but somebody captured something that was posted somewhere they're just words but they're reposted here like literally can we all just call it did you see this tweet or sigh whatever it is because what the hell are any of us even looking at with the exception of tiktok which i think you know for better or for worse has carved out very specifically what it is doing you know everything else is just a weird stew of

of platform sort of and and again like no i i don't the the wealth of elon musk is so mind Bending that it's one of these things where I guess you know He could just he could lose all that money that he Put into Twitter and have to pay it back And still be fabulously wealthy like I don't think It's I don't think it's A significant amount of money to him I mean But like so this Doesn't really matter but like yeah the name Twitter twitter.com was worth something You could have you know turned it Into a bed bath and beyond or something I don't know You know the brand like At long last you could have at least sold twitter.com for a hundred million dollars and then someone's going to set up a like you know it's going to be a portal to 1-877 cars for kids or something i don't know you people know what twitter.com people are aware like there's an awareness of this thing which is that's worth something so then you change it i mean part of that is i guess because he basically wants to create this mega platform that's like commerce and he he sort of wants to make something called x.com that's like just everything it's it's what twitter was it's what paypal is or venmo it's it's probably tiktok it's everything all is probably a wedding registry for taylor swift and travis kelsey you can buy

them a new set of steak knives right it's it's the it's the home it's the television home of any fired fox personalities as there are more you know like i'm sure like a media company along those lines um well what do you want to do should we listen to a voicemail was that our voicemail I was like, okay, let's do this. I'm going to play this directly from the voicemail line. I was listening to this the other day. Now, we were talking about the electric trucks known as Rivians, the brand of truck, which I don't even remember exactly what our thesis is on that or what your thesis is. It's just like there's maybe a cognitive disruption between this idea of like kind of truck culture, but then you see these trucks that are the size of a truck, but like without the consuming of fossil fuels, it seems like there's a bit of a disconnect there.

yeah and i was just saying that they're a very beautiful object definitely which makes it seem that it's even less likely that they would be used for like you know hauling stuff to the dump or whatever you know the original utility of a pickup truck um it just seems like it would kind of not really apply to a rivian because a rivian is i wouldn't want to throw a bunch of old broken up concrete in the back of my rivian so it's it's kind of raises the question slightly like why is

it a truck exactly yeah that is yeah that is a good point I think they're really cool looking as well anyway we got this voicemail about Rivian culture this is like one example that we're going to paint every Rivian owner with a with a wide brush hi Luke and Andrew this is Jamie from

Madison Wisconsin I'm calling regarding the Rivian talk from Monday's show I actually first learned what a Rivian was due to a poor parking situation so this story might influence your idea of the type of person who would own this vehicle. I run the farmer's market here, and our winter market is held in an old sugar beet factory, which is super cool, but since the space was repurposed, there isn't a ton of parking. So as the market was ending one weekend, one of the farmers comes up and asks if I can get a truck moved from the loading dock. I was like, totally, I know all the farmer's vehicles, so I'll figure out whose it is. However, I walk out, and there's just a line of 20 farmers with their full carts stuck on the loading dock because this gleaming white Rivian has parked directly in front of the loading dock exit ramp with literally no way around it. So I just kind of pause and look at the farmer next to me and she says, yeah, we

knew it wasn't a farm truck so eventually we found the owner and they moved the truck but it took like a good 20 minutes and when they finally moved the car they didn't look at any of us in the eye and just kind of sheepishly got in the truck and left and that's what i think about every time

i see a rivian non-farmers yeah that's a very there the irony there that somebody's driving a truck and then that they're making it harder for people who also presumably drive trucks but trucks full of rutabagas yeah right exactly like you're pretend and again you know peace and love if you are driving a rivian though i look forward to you supporting tvtl because it's clearly going okay

and i i support you giving me a ride places because i'd love to see the inside i know me

too man i want to i want to ride in one of those uh that's the closest i'll get to owning a rivian will be getting to ride in one but like yeah there's a certain irony to a sort of a cosplay truck blocking the truck trucks yeah yeah also that sounds fun uh jamie the farmer's market in

madison wisconsin that sounds cool i hesitate to bring this up because i really don't want you to think i'm bringing it up to um bust your chops at all but um did we ever get any closure on that

truck that you just sort of left in portland uh yes we did i saw it for sale on like craigslist they literally they like did they filed like adverse possession on it or something sure did

you didn't get any paperwork you just literally were i found the paperwork when i was moving i

didn't think i even had the paperwork and i found it when i was moving but literally like like they had sent you something saying hey no no they never sent me anything they just like decided that they were going to sell it and the ad said we don't have the title but we're getting it oh interesting and i was just like you know what that was a uh that was a silly decision by me I could have probably I would have owed them the, I did call them a couple times and they like weren't there so I attempted at some point before I moved to try to remedy the situation and then it was remedied for me by them just putting it up for sale and I just figured we're going to call this one even. I might buy it can you send me that link? Yeah I'll try to find it and send it to you. Okay thank you Yeah I do need to get, actually you know my neighbor, one of my neighbors who I haven't spoken to a lot has this like the exact kind of like toyota tacoma truck i want to get which is just like a maybe early 2000s nothing fancy but just like a workhorse and i've been driving by this truck for a month now and it's never moved and i was thinking maybe i'll go up to him and say hey if you're ever interested in selling that truck let me know and then today i drove by and he was putting all of his garbage in it and making a dump run i was like damn foiled again from another ill-advised truck purchase Yeah, maybe not foiled again. Helped again. Also, is that a weird, I'm not going to do it now because he obviously uses it, but would that have been a weird way for us to get to know each other? Hi, I'm your new neighbor. We haven't ever actually spoken, but would you like to sell me that vehicle that's in your yard?

I think people do that. And if anything, it always, I think, just makes you feel better about the stuff you own when somebody says, hey, can I give you money for it?

Nobody has offered me any money for this boat that I'm looking at, Andrew, that's on a trailer in my driveway.

Oh, yeah.

So that's pretty much just going to be for me to deal with, I think.

Oh, and also nobody's made an offer on the pair of mini boots that Genevieve put outside our driveway to see if anybody wanted it before the rains came. I need to go throw those away now, I think, speaking of.

Okay, well, you do that. My dad is also here. He's whispering to me he needs to go to Home Depot. So we've got some important business to discuss. So let's go ahead and wrap this up. And say thank you to everyone for listening. Appreciate y'all. We're going to be right back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. Please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.