Muse

Hi, and welcome back to Guys Outfits, the fashion podcast about guys who wear outfits almost every single day. Hey, how's it going, guys? Hey, guys. Today we got two best friends, and your guys' names are actually both Brad. I'm Brad Henderson. And I'm Brad Ham, with two Ms. Yeah, you guys are both named Brad, and you guys have such similar styles, too. Yeah. So, what are you Brad's wearing on top? I'm wearing a beige top, which is actually my favorite color. Okay, we love that. Yeah, and I went with an olive green top. Beige is actually my favorite color, but Brad is wearing beige today, so I decided to go with my second favorite color, which is olive green. Olive green, or the beige of greens, as they say. Oh, I'm actually obsessed with that. And what do we have going on on the bottom, Brad? I've got beige shorts, actually, to go with my olive top. Gosh, I really love that beige-olive combo. Yeah, me too. And you, Brad? I actually took a little page out of your book today and went with a little pop of color. Oh, wow. Yes, Brad, we are really letting our freak flags fly today, aren't we? Yeah, so I went with royal blue gym shorts to go with my beige top. And why don't you tell us about your look today? Oh, well, as I mentioned before, I'm really letting my freak flag fly today, and I'm wearing a neon yellow-green top. I'm obsessed with it. Thank you. And on bottom, I'm wearing beige shorts. Yeah, I'm obsessed with that neon yellow-green beige combo you got going on. Yeah, I went with a beige short similar to you, Brad, but it looks like your beige short has some fun pockets, and mine is more classic style. Yeah, Brad, what are you keeping in all those fun pockets? I just got a really long CVS receipt. I'm obsessed with it.

I'm going to suggest that we have a little constructive talking time. It's not long at all. I mean, maybe 10 minutes or okay, or maybe 15 is also good.

In 1971, Bill Greats invented Microsoft. Wouldn't it be cool if I could remember my dingus password for my email? What comes before anything? What if we always said it's the most important thing?

Breakfast.

Family.

Family, right? Thought you meant of the things you eat. Why don't I tell you all about it over a hot, steaming mug of beer and a cup of cold corn? Be careful, though. It's spicy.

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. I've been waiting for this moment for months, and it's finally here. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Spock, sabotage the system. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where...

Let us throw caution to the wind.

It is stormy and windy. It is so windy that as I was walking from the house out here to the studio, And I had a mug of coffee with me. The wind was blowing the coffee out of the mug and onto my body. Not into my body, which is where I wanted the coffee to go, but onto my body. So, I don't know. Unlikely anyone would see a photograph of me in this state. But if you do, just know it was the wind. That's why that happened. We're at episode 4050 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. I think I had my numbering off yesterday. So to the completists out there, I'm sorry for ruining your Monday with giving the wrong episode. Number today is 4,050 in a collector series. And I'm not just working with this brand new computer here.

Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets?

I've got a new setup. But the problem is there are lots of alert sounds. I don't really know how to turn off yet. So you're going to be hearing probably emails coming through and texts and God knows what. This is going to be a little bit of an adventure today with this computer, but on the good side, there's a bunch of preloaded audio sound effects in one of the programs that I use. But now I have the new fancy version because I'm on a new fancy computer and got all kinds of, I can do like, we could do a radio theater here. I can do, let's see, footsteps, and then the person gets to the door, and then they unlock the door, and then, anyway, so we're going to have some fun with audio today on the program. Oh, and the computer is not the only new thing that I'm dealing with. I also got the world's most complicated treadmill that I spent, this is not an exaggeration, roughly five hours setting up yesterday. I'm trying to build my beef castle. And that was when I learned, my friends, that NordicTrack is really not in the treadmill business. That's not the story they want to tell. There's something else they're trying to do. And I blame the New York Times. This is all going to make sense, I promise, when we get into the story. Also, time permitting, we'll talk about what's going on in San Francisco, where restaurants have had to institute a $50 fine.

for vomiting in the restaurant. You're a gross person. After your bottomless brunch mimosas. So we'll try to get to that too. And we'll definitely get to this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He is here to wish everyone a blessed...

Talktober!

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

Good morning, Luke. That was the sound of me unmuting my microphone there just for a little pause. I like to put some tension at the top of the show. Will he talk or won't he? It keeps people listening. Definitely.

It had me nervous. Yeah, certainly. Particularly on my new setup here. I have a lot going on here in the studio perched high above the mighty Columbia. There it is. Now, did you do that just to mess with me? I did. Your mic was muted because you were furiously combing through the internet to find audio to torture me with.

No, no, I didn't. I did something better. Okay, quick background for the listeners. As you just mentioned, you have a new computer, and you have not been able to turn off all the alerts on it yet. There was a moment during the introduction where I thought, oh, I should find a bunch of sounds that are like computer alert sounds and play them. Then I thought of a better idea. Why don't I just keep emailing you during the show?

Is this the email subject line, bing?

Bing, bing. That's the one.

Oh, that's terrible. That is terrible. You're like a rat who is in an experiment where if you push a button, you get cocaine. And they find that the rat just keeps pushing the button.

And this is good because I didn't have shit for the top of the show. This is your cocaine.

Just emailing me periodically throughout the show just to, God damn it.

It's giving me a really good sense of how long it takes emails to get from me to you, though. Because there's about a 20-second lag time, I'm going to say. So it's a little bit longer than I thought. Oh, yeah.

This is going to be a fun Tuesday, everybody.

Well, that's what I got. What are you bringing today?

Well, the last 24 hours, I've been setting up all kinds of things around here. It's like I needed to get a new computer. And in our world, as far as all the audio that we play and stuff like that, our computers are pretty central to what we're doing and also of course it's how you and i are communicating my hope is that this new spiffy computer will help us stay connected faster it already fixed one little audio problem that was starting to crop up with my old yeah you and i were noticing clicks and pops so that's kind of an improvement but then of course it's always just like more complicated than you think it's going to be to set it up and i don't actually have all of my uh audio drops because and i try i'll try to get too too complicated with this but basically i went to the apple store in portland and i got a new computer and i gave them my old i have a really old uh power mac that was my kind of main desktop computer even though it's a laptop and it was kind of dying over the years like none of the ports were working it was just and so that was the thing that i was trying to replace but i wanted to try to get all the tbtl audio off of it um so i could have some some old some old uh you know some og source material from even like the radio days because i've been kind of working with this like limited catalog of our audio that was on this a different computer that i use so i buy the i buy the laptop and i give them the old one and they are going to migrate it over the all the stuff on the one computer to the other one and then i get a call from the apple store that says it's a message it's from a guy and he goes hey um we found out that the new computer is actually not big enough to transfer the stuff that's on the old computer so you probably need to buy a bigger computer you can call me back and we can talk about it so i call the number back and i immediately get routed to like apple sales like a person who has maybe never even heard of the city of portland oregon let alone they're not at the store and it was like two days of when i had a moment trying to call and get back to the dude who had left me a message saying call me back to talk about the computer it was quite frustrating I finally learned the hack, though, Andrew.

Wait, hold on. Can I ask you a quick question? Do you believe that he wanted you to get in touch directly with him again? That was his intent, and it was more difficult than you expected? Or he left you this voicemail, but basically the thing is, we tell you you need to buy a better, bigger, more expensive computer, and here's the number for our sales line. Good day, sir.

I'm trying to see if I can actually find the original voicemail. Here, I'm just going to play it for you, Andrew. I'm going to play it into the microphone. I don't know if this is going to work, but I'm going to give it a try. Here we go. Oops, hold on, speakerphone. Why, this is a terrible idea. Where is it playing even?

Okay, forget it. I was going to help you out there, but I was sneezing my head off. So what can you do? There's a lot of stuff. You took a break from sending me emails?

enough to have a sneezing fit he just look i'm just gonna read this thing hi luke i'm calling from the apple pioneer place store in regards to your computer data transfer it sounds like uh this was a call back that they gave me basically what's happening was there was this phone tag going on where i would get a call from a human being in portland who's sitting next to my computer who's going we can't do this transfer they would leave me a message saying call me back at this number but then it's the it's the hell that we have over documented on this show now Now, this is part of modern life. They never want to let you. That was not Andrew. That was not me. I want to let everyone know that was not Andrew. But I wish it were. That was the Parking Kitty app in Portland. The Parking Kitty? That's the app that they use in the city of Portland for like auto paying your, you know how like basically parking meters that take coins. Those are sort of a thing of the past. It's all digital now.

That's better than whatever Seattle's is called. It's like Park Bot or something. I'll look it up.

hey we should introduce park bot to dart bot no i don't know i want dart bot to be focused on me i love dart bots like just because we're both bots you think what we have to know each other not all bots know each other that's frankly a kind of offensive dad um but i'm kind of all over

all over the place today but basically what happened was becca was doing a work thing and she didn't have her wallet with her and she was in an event and she realized that her car was going to get a ticket so she texted me this morning and said could you do me a solid could you pay the meter on my car could you pay the parking kitty on my car so i won't get a ticket so i did that but just it just ran out that was just that was the that was the app emailing me to let me know that that car is no longer under the protection of parking kitty gotcha well you

will have to explain every email that comes in all day today obviously it's gonna be a long show also i want to talk and we don't have to i know that you're in the middle or you're just ramping up to something here but i want to talk about apps when you're done okay regarding appetizers oh god don't do that because i will then go out and buy a bunch of cheese sticks after the show um no the the the name of apps and how it affects us as consumers go ahead so i the i was having

no end of trouble just because you know i don't live in portland anymore so i couldn't just drive down to the store so i was i was calling the store but when you would get it was a 503 number i'm calling portland but when you get into their system they're like you know hi what can we help you with this is an automated thing hi what can we help you with and then when you tell it they either the auto assistant tries to answer it for you or it tries to send you to wherever apple's whatever network of people that answer the phone for apple generally like in nationwide is you can't get somebody physically in that glass building in portland to pick up a phone unless you say to the automation i want to talk to a manager that's that's what somebody told and it worked yeah i want to talk to a manager and it got me actually a human being in the store took me like two days

to get that information out of someone like we literally are just we have magic passwords now it's almost like a like a story like a children's storybook of some fantasy land where like only these words will let you enter you go through a wardrobe yeah you're gonna see a fawn no luke that was easier like you just went through the wardrobe that was easy this is more like well first you must give us you must answer these riddles riddles three yeah like right it's bananas

so uh so the problem is it ended up being like um that what is that um old riddle of you have a boat and then it's just like a chicken and a fox and a bag of corn yeah basically like i was gonna have to buy a larger computer which was fine but even buying the larger computer the computer with more memory and capacity meant when they moved all of the stuff from my old computer onto the new computer the new computer was immediately going to be like redlined at like almost max everything which i didn't want to do because the only thing i want is the audio clips of like frank shires saying something that sounds funny out of context like that's all i want it's not i don't care about really anything else that was on that big you don't want like you know

whatever five to seven years of old pdf documents and exactly live wire audio like a movie that i

doubt like you know i downloaded who knows lost in translation or something like yeah so but they but the thing about apple is uh this apple store they won't do like a la carte migration of the data they won't just like take one thing off and they got to do the whole thing i sort of get that

i mean i sort of get that because it could get really complicated right well i want this folder Yeah, I get that too.

So I was on the phone with a guy named Franco when I finally got through for a good amount of time and he said, here's probably what you should do. You should have us move everything from the old computer onto the new computer and then make a genius bar appointment and then sit there and then... Somebody will help you take off anything from the new computer that you don't want. And I was like, okay, that's, you know, kind of annoying slightly, but that's fine. That makes sense. Okay, well, let's do that. So he says, okay. So he puts it in, you know, the order in and everything. And then I get an email from Apple that says, hey, your data's been migrated. Come on in. So on Sunday, I think it was, I go in there. I go into the store, and I have a Genius Bar appointment, and I go find somebody and say, hey, I've got these computers. they're backstage can i get them because then i need to go to the genius bar and do this transfer they go sure and the guy just walks out with three computers and he goes are these yours and i go well two of them should be you should have just said yes i know right and i'm like uh okay well and he goes yeah so um long story short nothing had been migrated no one had done anything in the system he had no idea what was going on i mean he's a nice enough guy but it was like the computer that was supposed to have all the stuff on it now had was sealed in the box the other computer that turned out was going to be too small was open and they were it was i owned it even though i didn't want to have like it was there was so much confusion around what was going on with this thing which is weird because my experience generally with the apple store is they're pretty on it so i had to explain to this guy the whole thing and so then finally the the the plan was go take the new computer that has nothing on it take it out of the box sit down at the genius bar get your old computer we will send a genius over and then they will show you how to move the stuff over manually i'm like okay i guess that's what we're going to do here so i go sit down and then i get a person helping me who was i don't want to say that she was unhelpful andrew because it was i couldn't decide during the process if if this was really unhelpful or not or it was just somebody who has good boundaries at work because the first thing i said was basically like i made this appointment so someone smarter than me can help do this while i sit here because i don't know how to do this stuff transfer files around i don't have an external drive uh the computer the old computer sometimes doesn't turn on unless you do some crazy like hold the power button and then hit shift three times while you're you know doing standing on one foot so she's like well what's the problem i go well i'm trying to transfer stuff from this computer to this computer and she goes oh okay so well um she goes you're gonna um need an external drive and i was like oh okay and she goes yeah they're at the other end of the store and then she's just standing there so it wasn't like hey do you want me to walk you down there and show you which one you need or hey do you want me to go grab one or hey do you want me to radio someone it's i don't work at the other end

of the store i have nothing to do with the with the external drives i just stand here and i was like uh okay um and she goes uh so if you want to go get one i was like well maybe i'll get one but first i had to ask a few other questions i was like i'm having trouble turning the old computer on it doesn't just always turn right on easily it gets caught up in this thing i go and i noticed that you all have a system for hitting certain weird buttons and making it turn on so that's kind of why i need you to help me even turn it on and she goes what i can do is email you the link in our help section of the apple website for how to do those key commands i was like you're going to email me a link how about you do it with your hands here where you work and it just kept being things like that where it was like i would ask something and it was it was as if this person really was not interested in helping me do this it was i don't know maybe they're trying to teach a man to fish so i could eat for a lifetime but i was the notion of emailing me a link to the website which by the way i could gorgle myself felt kind of like hostile to me yeah i'm not sure

i you you mentioned this we're talking a little bit off air about this yesterday and i'm really having trouble figuring out the i don't know how to feel about this to be honest with you because your experience is so much different than mine like i need a new computer as well by the way um and so that'll be a whole nother week of shows me talking about that i can't wait to start emailing your ass but i uh but so okay you and i are in complete different ends of the spectrum when it comes to data management obviously right like i've got i'm not even that great at it honestly like yesterday when i was looking for some old archive files that i want to play for you near the end of the show oh i just found a i just found a tub of gummy worms that i forgot about in my hardware drawer down here that's nice save those for later um but anyway like i have various hard drives that actually are not labeled that well so i was very lucky that i kind of grabbed the right hard drive yesterday but as far as being kind of meticulous with my data while i'm not i know we have listeners who actually kind of work in like the it field or whatever when they hear about like the difference of me just bouncing files back and forth as opposed to doing actual backups there's a difference between that like i'm not saying that i'm the expert on these things but at least I have a system and I'm pretty meticulous about it. in a way that I don't expect most human beings to be. On the other hand, though, with the exception of, well, this computer is kind of a quasi-brick right now, and I need your help getting into it, just moving files over, like I have a folder of all of my audio for TBTL, all of my drops when I get my new computer. I will ping that to a hard drive, and then I will ping it back to the new one. And then if I had an issue with logging in, and she's like, well, it's just like control. it's like well you guys have like open apple e and shift while you hit the power button like that is a pretty simple solution just to power up in safe mode or whatever they're asking you to do so in a certain way like i don't i don't have a good read on it because i'm super meticulous in my own weird way about these things so i don't want to be judgy about it but also like there's also like well i don't want to throw anybody under the bus but then there are the people who rely heavily on the geek squad well i'll just say it because i love it and it's charming but like my dad is best friends with a geek squad i'm pretty sure the geek squad only has one customer left in the united states and it is my it is my dad and i think that it's a good relationship but it's just kind of like i don't know like if you're leaning too hard on the geek squad here for the apple geek squad or whatever i probably am and you're right i this is something

that i have a certain amount of sort of agita and anxiety around what i want to first of all i'm bad at it and what i really want to avoid is a situation where i'm sitting up here perched high above the mighty columbia trying to do some computerized thing that i don't really understand and then calling like a helpline and trying to get them to help me through it i i would rather be this is where i'm very much you know abe simpson an old man yelling at cloud i would rather be sitting next to a human being in a store who could then like anticipate what the problem is or identify what the problem is and say, oh, you need to drag this here. I didn't want to be doing this myself because I didn't want to hit a snag and then just be stuck. Now, it's not an overly complicated process, probably. I still haven't done it, by the way, for the record. Because what ended up happening was I ended up just being sent home with the new computer that I purchased and the old computer that I have that may or may not turn on and then a link to the help page for how to turn the computer on if it's being weird. And I need to go to, like, Best Buy or something and buy an external drive and do this transfer myself. Right now, the way that I have these drops, things like this.

Let us throw Gaussian to the wind.

Because I emailed myself, like, 20 audio files this morning. That's my current data management system. Yeah, that sucks. From one computer, like, literally dragging, like, MP3s into an email and then emailing them and then opening them on the other computer and then putting them in my system. It is this. This was just a stopgap measure. I'm going to go down to town today and I'm going to get the drive and I'm going to do the process. And I don't think it's that complicated. I think this really speaks to my my sort of technophobia and the fact that this is something that I've said this a lot on the show. But I really admire how kind of sort of systematic your brain is when it comes to fixing these kinds of things for yourself and for the show. And whether it's an audio problem or a software problem or you're downloading drivers or something like you have a really good way of working through this stuff. It just puts me in a complete panic and fog.

It's just it's like me trying to it's like for the what would have been the 3000th episode when I was trying to tie a bow tie for the first time in my life. and Genevieve watched a YouTube video of it and got it down in no time and I was standing in front of a mirror and I could not tie it and I could not tie it and I remember standing in front of the mirror. I was, how old was I then? 38 or something? 40? And I had a feeling that I hadn't had since I was a child. My face just got all red. I was, I wanted to throw a tantrum and I don't think it was even like a bunch of nerves around the show or other things although I might have been living in LA at the time and maybe there was some anxiety just about my life at that moment But like, I just remember standing in front of the mirror being like, I cannot, why a boat? I can't tie the boat. And then Genevieve just ended up tying it for me. Like she came backstage and tied it for me, you know, a week later when we actually walked out on stage. And so anyway, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to relate to you in these feelings of like, we have our weak spots of just like, that was not me. I know, I know. I want to take, I should get back on that train though. So I do understand that. Hey, Luke, but in all honesty, now that, I mean, I kind of, I raised the specter.

It was Kaiser Permanente telling me the updated COVID-19 vaccine is now available. By the way, I didn't have to pay $140 for it at Safeway. I could have gotten it for free at Kaiser. No, I did. Oh, you did. But I didn't have to.

Could you try to get reimbursed?

I'm going to right after I get done data migrating.

Anyway, I was going to say, like, get yourself a hard drive. It's probably not that big of a deal. Macs are a little bit more complicated.

So if you're just like, I kind of know your system or lack thereof. So if you're just sort of like dragging in files and if they're living in a million different places on your computer, that could be a little bit of a hunting and pecking situation that I would not be jealous of. But I do think if you just have a folder with all of your audio in it, just like bounce that and then bounce it back. But I was going to say, if you do have an issue, like I started by saying this as a little bit derogatory, but not really, like just call the Geek Squad. Like, they will come to your house and help you with these things. I think that is what they do. Like, they just will, I think, literally, like, no job too big, no job too small. I was just looking it up. Like, I know it's weird to go to Best Buy, and it seems very kind of basic, probably. But, like, if you want somebody at your side helping you through something, they might be able to help. I thought you were going to say I could call you. Well, you could. If it was a PC, I absolutely would. We could go get some drinks. at the data migration party no i absolutely i would but um i uh i just don't know max and i have a feeling that this is peppered all over your hard drive i'm guessing yeah i i think it's

going to be actually super easy when i get the right equipment it'll be fine the one other thing that happened at that store which it it felt to me like a microaggression just because i had just gotten done with one employee who was like you know i don't know maybe she had one maybe there's like one of those invisible fences that they have for dogs like if she crossed over into another part of the store she got shocked or something so that was why there was no way she was walking towards where the external hard drives were i i so now i have these two computers and we're walking back to becca's house which is like a mile and a half away and i was like you know what it'd be more convenient to have a bag for these because i'm carrying them so because we'd walked to the store in the first place so i go back in so i've left the store and i turn around i go back in and it's you know that whole thing again you don't go to the apple store very much if at all if ever so so the it's have you actually have you darkened the door of an apple store i have that one that

is now like some janky building that turns into a spirit halloween i think on the 45th in the u district or i don't know what but that's not an apple store not anymore but it used to be a legit

one did it not it was one of those authorized it was not never not like the one no not like the

one in you village oh yeah the you village one is super fancy that's like the real deal all glass

wall glass and everyone's in the blue shirts that's an apple store there are other ones that are like authorized to fix your products and stuff but the the apple store itself itself is such a weird sort of social experience because you go in there's always like eight people in blue shirts holding tablets that are just kind of milling about and there's no desk there's no like you go up and I mean like you don't walk into the store and you go like stand in line and then say you know it's just kind of this weird organism that's kind of amoeba like where there's people in blue shirts and they're all wandering around and they all kind of have a tablet or a phone on them and they're all kind of doing something but you can kind of grab them at any time but they might actually be helping someone else it's a very undefined situation which I'm sure it's like Swedish or something right I'm sure there's like some kind of Scandinavian approach to customer service which i have to say it's generally fine in my experience but i go back into the store and like one of the three guys whose job it is to just hang near the front of the store goes hey what can i help you with and i go i just bought this computer and i wondered if i can actually get a bag for it and let me just mention these computers are not cheap like um you know i feel like i've at this point invested heavily in this apple store um and he goes oh yeah okay well um bags are five cents and i'm thinking sure let me just reach into my coin purse and get a nickel out now i know some of that is like i don't know if that's a state law or a city law like they have

to charge um but wait wait what city are you're you're in portland for this yeah i think it's

probably a city lot he goes well they're five cents and he goes and if you go over there to the orders thing you can talk to one of them and you can ask about getting your bag and again And I know I just sound like such a curmudgeon, but it was like it just felt like everybody I was talking to in the store was telling me that I'm not actually the person to help you with that. But there's someone over there who will help you with that as opposed to just like, oh, yeah, let me grab your bag. Like, oh, yeah, let me let me just you know what? Let's walk over to the hard drives together and I can kind of like show you which one probably makes the most sense for what you're doing. I just and again, this is where I'm this is where I'm completely torpedoing our chances of growing the younger part of our demo. it felt generational to me ever so slightly and i think overall it is a very good thing that more people working in more jobs i think feel more empowered like that's what we see with the labor movement that's what's going on and i think that's a good thing but it is a recalibration for me for my for my brain of what my experience for most of my adult life is when i go into a place where they're trying to sell me something which is usually like let me help you with that or let me figure out how to fix.

solve this problem for you let me go quote unquote above and beyond now maybe going above and beyond was people being taken advantage of you know so i think overall it's good that people particularly younger people seem to have more boundaries but it's still taking me a minute to kind of get used to that being how things tend to go now at least at the apple store yeah and at least you know we

had to adjust our expectations during covid and some of those norms have stuck like the the covid era norms have stuck around as well but also this idea of yeah like what what is labor what is a job am i being what am i being compensated for here and like our society has changed so much and i'm not i'm not trying to to pile on because i'm with you like growing up customer service was the number one thing and then as an adult like i just like you know like the the idea of the idea of bad customer service in some ways obviously in some situations still rankles the hell out of me But I think back in the day, like I simply would not understand it if somebody would would help, you know, like serve me in any way, whether I'm buying a fishing pole, which is something I used to do a lot, obviously, or I'm, you know, ordering food at a restaurant, whether it's at a counter or with a server, like the idea that they wouldn't like smile and be friendly or whatever was just anathema to me. Like that would be like I would never go to that place anymore. Now, some of my favorite places, I realize like a smile is not what you're here for. You know what I mean? You're here for somebody to throw some soup down in front of you and it's good soup. So it's good. And but that's kind of different than what we're talking about now. If there is sort of an adjustment in the way usually probably younger people in the workforce look at their jobs, because like there's just not society is just so effed like this is good. I'm taking this conversation way too big, but like that was not me. But this idea, like, and I'm sure that working at the Apple store in Portland is not the worst job in the world that one could have. Like, I worked at a fiberglass factory. I'd probably rather work at an Apple store. Yeah. But on the other hand, like, there's just like, I think back in the day when we expected a certain amount of pride of work and pride of and good customer service, maybe it was because there was a track towards working towards something and working your way up ladders that don't exist anymore. And you're just working for companies that are just trying to cut corners at every, I mean, we're talking about Apple, right? I wonder if Mike Daisy has ever looked into the labor practices of a company like that. You know, that's what I mean. It's just like, it's hard when you're in that situation and you're working with somebody who does not seem like they're excited to be helping you. It really sucks. But on the other hand, our systems are so goddamn broken right now. It's also tough for me to not sort of see it from their perspective a little bit as well. Like, I don't know, man, I'm here. I'm going to do my job. I'm going to do the job they're paying me to do, but they're not paying me to go above and beyond.

And so I won't. Right. And I do think and again, I think this is a good thing. I think that a lot of people who are in the younger generations than me have identified, you know, I mean, when I was growing up or when I was in my 20s, there was no term of self-care. wasn't a thing that we talked about and kind of i think that there is i just think that there's a different way of looking at the world for people that are in their 20s right now of of kind of like yeah if i am gonna like if i go if i go run across the store every time some old like this guy luke burbank is here needing help with something that's really not that complicated and really i'm my job isn't to go get products i don't even have the scanner to sell it to him like that's not what i'm doing here like and i'm not if i start doing that then i'm just going to be doing that all day and that's going to feel bad to me so i'm not going to do that like that's a reasonable position to take it's just like i said i'm just i'm used to it being you know the the 1950s and just kind of like you know sir what can i get you that was how it was when i lived in the 1950s yeah no i forget that you're a vampire i've been seeing so many clips i haven't been watching what we do in the shadows and i really need to yeah they're like in season five now i'm trying to catch up i

think i'm trying i'm in the middle of season three somewhere i need to get on that because i now for

some reason on tiktok i'm seeing more and more clips of of mark uh is it prosich the the emotional the energy vampire yeah yeah and he's doing this you know and if you he's also famous in tbtl lore because he's the yo-yo man um of that we play audio from and i think is he one of chop and steel

I don't think so. I think Chop and Steal's bit was very similar. Some people get him confused. He was also in, not that it matters, I don't think you saw it, but Better Call Saul. He had a small but very memorable part.

But there's this clip of him talking about how he's harvesting energy from people through trolling online. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you've seen this episode yet.

You know what's weird? I love his... episodes the troll one actually not to be negative but i love the vampire and the energy vampires episode so much that that one i actually didn't like that much it was so it felt like one of the simpsons episodes where they're trying to be too much in the moment like the idea of trolling was like it was just and then so literal i didn't that show has such a deft hand that i feel like that episode was a victim of how good the rest of the series is Because that one didn't do a lot for me.

Yeah, I can see that. I think I need to at least, you know, give that show a watch because I've only seen it in clips. And the clip was he had all these laptops spread out on the bed. And he was basically like, it's not quite as good as doing it in person. But if I have enough laptops going, I kind of get, you know, I get sustained. But what was funny was the specificity of the things he was writing. like it was like a review on like TripAdvisor about going to China but not liking because he's like where's the Chinatown like it was these very it was like the things that they picked to have him doing online to make people mad were just like very funny and specific to me so there is

one episode that focuses on him I believe in the season prior to that where we really learn what an energy vampire is and how he you know he gets literally he he feeds off of the negative energy of others so he creates incredibly awkward social situations and is just like your energy vampire friend we all have one right and uh the one that i loved he we see him in action he goes in he gets a job at like some sort of a you know a a cubicle farm kind of job with so it's just like perfect like with with water cooler banter and whatever oh is that where he's just walking around saying

kind of like working hard or hardly working yes people just like literally dying or literally

getting collapsing yes and then as people are just like so put off by that he just feeds off of that negative energy and like to me that was like the really great subtle application of energy vampire and also in that episode vanessa bayer is also in the office and i won't give away the i won't give away why she is in that office but she plays a very big role and that episode start to finish is amazing vanessa bayer like i my favorite person maybe my favorite person i I've never seen anything with Vanessa Bayer and been like, no, you can miss me with that.

I know. She had this show that I don't know what happened to it. And I actually need to go back and watch the whole season. I think it might have only gotten one season, but I thought it was a genius premise and a great use of her where she basically is her dream has always been to work at QVC. Uh-huh. And she had survived her character. And I believe Vanessa Bayer in real life survived cancer as a child. Oh. and so her character um gets a tryout she manages to get onto like whatever the home shopping network is and it's like her dream job but she's really bad at it and so she's about to get fired and then she just for reasons that she kind of can't control she just blurts out like my cancer's back even though it's not and then i think that's all in the first episode so it's basically like a woman working at qvc or something like that lying about being sick to to get sympathy and everybody else in it is like amazing like it's just a perfect send-up of that home shopping network culture of a kind anyway the we inter i think i think did i interview her i think that they were promoting it and so like i don't know who it was hbo sent me like a screener of the first episode and i was like this is the one of the best shows i've ever seen and then of course i didn't watch the rest of the season and i um don't know if it's even on the air anymore but that episode they sent

me was so good and that was in the recent uh past right yeah it was during maybe during the pandemic

past couple of years okay but anyway yeah so okay let's um let's thank some donors and then i do andrew want to play you oh since i've been complaining about my new computer or the process i also want to i want to play you um some some of the pre-loaded audio drops like pre-loaded sound effects i have now it's going to be a whole new world for tbtl going forward i am looking forward

to yes keep keep going that keep saying words come on get there there it is

how did that surprise me there's the least subtle thing you've ever done and it's still

i didn't see it coming i only take credit for one of those bings i could have just let the universe and you're the other one trust the universe andrea

hey let's thank some of our donors who are keeping tbtl going these generous people are supporting the program this is a listener supported podcast i can't stress that enough

and uh i i was i was um i was recently hanging out and talking to some fellow podcasters and um and we were just chatting about the the the weird world of podcasting and and how to make money on it and how to not make money on it and how to you know have it be something that's financially sustainable and my one friend i don't know why i'm being vague but my one friend who teaches journalism at columbia university goes have has the harvard business school deployed a team to study tbtl yet he goes because it is a it is a totally unique business model that

somehow is working when so many other things are failing you know bings going on during the show exactly yet people still support it you know i'm going to say something here not to get too much into our financials as the drop goes but like you're talking about your new computer that that you bought that is specifically a tbtl computer that is going to live in your tbtl studio and make it so that we don't have all the technical issues that we often have when you're kind of going on the road and then coming back or whatever like that's dedicated equipment we are we're just talking in the break like while we were dialing up this music like about how i need i have one of these um one of these kind of digital converter things that we need to run the show i need a couple of them listeners might remember months ago that there was an ongoing thing where it was sending white hot static down the line to callers during the fawn I think yeah I still haven't replaced it I'm doing all these things to like kind of my version of propping it up with a stick basically to keep this equipment running eventually I'm going to need a new one of those things my computer that I'm talking to you on right now drops at least once per show I need another computer for that like the stuff that people are donating for is like legit business expenses that we literally need to do this show so i don't know if anybody ever kind of wonders like hey we're donating are we just donating so that these guys are happy with their jobs like no like we literally need these donations to keep this coming at you not to get and i want to give i want to no i you know what

i don't want to do that i was gonna say i want to give american public media some credit but i actually don't anymore i'm i'm past doing that even though we had a lot of great colleagues that we liked um i will say there were more expenses associated with tbtl that i really factored in And now that there are expenses, you know, it's good that we have wonderful people supporting the show, wonderful people like Nancy Heinrich. What if I was thanking Nancy on, like, a rainy day, Andrew? Oh, I love it. Nancy Heinrich of Olympia, Washington.

But it's one of those beautiful rainy days where it really clears the air out.

It's a summer rain. Exactly. When I'm thanking Nancy. and see we've got this because on my new computer i have the new version of this audio program that i use called farajo or farago and because i put it on the new computer i had to i had to basically buy this like kind of pack of things the the thing that i use to to capture recordings off of my computer and then also to play to play drops so it came with all these new sound effects which i'm very excited about so thank you nancy for helping pay for this nancy's nancy's in olympia washington let's just imagine that like i'm saying thanks to jane durden of alexandria virginia but for some reason i'm um inside a car while i'm doing it oh okay i thought you were just turning on the air conditioner no i'm i'm oh you're keys i hear the keys jingling you're driving but and i'm in the passenger seat okay gotcha but i'm thanking jane durden oh we got matthew mcconaughey in the back seat yes exactly and if the car goes below 50 miles an hour it blows up yeah it's the plot of that so jane thank you so much for helping pay for this what's called car interior ambiance appreciate you what what would be a great backdrop for thanking alicia schaefer of seattle washington

is there any chance that you're on a horse that's just like clip clopping its way down a cobble

That's extra. That's an extra packet. But I do have forest ambience, ambiance. It could be out in the forest saying thanks to Alicia Schaefer. There might be a horse there just quietly, just chewing its cud. Maybe, I don't know, a goat walks by.

Whoa! We can mix it. Oh, sure. Oh, shit. Wait, can it rain? Can it rain in the jungle?

I believe it can. Oh, my God. And Andrew. I'm also, I want to thank folks for donating all of this money. I have a cash register out here in the Rainy Forest. I'm just tallying donations. Oh, wow. That sounds like the beginning of that Pink Floyd song. Watch out. There's a monster. Oh, just coming this way. Uh-oh. This became lost very quickly. That's okay. I'm going to get on my helicopter and fly out of here.

I'm safe.

How did you afford that helicopter? Rachel Smith of Seattle, Washington, Andrew. is how I'm affording it. Thank you, Rachel, for your support. Yeah, we had zero helicopters when we were at 8 p.m., but now we've got helicopter money. Nice. Oh, God. Thank you, everybody, for donating. And one day, if we still have the support of Sidney McElroy of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, we may even have jet money, Andrew. Forget helicopters. Let's get on our private jet. I want to just restate the scene for everyone. What is going on? I'm flying above the rainy forest floor in my jet helicopter. All thanks to Raul Alvarez of Seattle, Washington. Guess what's on here, Andrew? The Wilhelm Scream. It's called Wilhelm Scream.

Wow, there you go.

Yeah. So I just want to say thanks to all of our donors for making TBTL possible. This is a whole new exciting world.

Did you just invite an entire soccer stadium into the helicopter jet?

I did, but crap, dude. The police are here.

I don't have a license to fly this helicopter. Damn it.

You're over the limit of passengers, I believe, as well. That's right. And the limit for alcohol. All right, thanks, everybody, for supporting TVTL. We couldn't do this without you. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. How was that for a little audio journey?

Man, I just want to stay in that world.

I know. I honestly think I'm going to have to get whatever the expanded pack is of this stuff. Because, let's see, sample sound effects. Let's see. So we've got a bird of prey. Okay. Yeah, I thought I heard that.

Did you drop that once? I didn't. Not that I remember.

I'll be honest with you. I went into a bit of a fugue state there towards the end. Just had a lot going on.

the cat wait play that again that's a very very sick cat that they just had a person making a

meow sound for that what that that is what that is it's not a cat meowing it's that is a person doing that right like i'm not joking i'm gonna be honest with you the animal sound effects are not this it's not the strong suit this is a goat that's also a probably a person right

That reminds me, coincidentally, I just played this for you before the show, my old turkey gobble, which I used to be obsessed with, is a person making a turkey gobble as well, I believe. That sounds like a dog. Yeah, I think that's a dog or a synthesizer making that dog sound. Or let's see.

That's probably a real rooster, right?

I feel like that's real, yeah.

And an elephant. Does anyone even know what an elephant sounds like? Yeah. Oh, I guess they do that sound. Yeah, of course, a trumpety sound. Sorry, Andrew.

Don't rain on my parade. Well, how about we put some respect on elephants?

Oh, man. I've got a lot of... Yes. Oh, that's good. I'm going to need that. Do you think we're ever going to have a sword fight on the show? Because I've got the audio for it.

Shit, Luke, there's something you should know. I'm not left-handed. But I am also not left-handed, Andrew.

That was acting. I'm going to get on this train and get out of here.

Okay, okay, okay. Interesting. Let's talk about this for a second. Let's stop there for a second. I want to talk about this because I was just literally yesterday debating with Genevieve whether or not trains have whistles still because of the New York Times connections puzzle the other day. I think it was on Sunday. I found it to be especially aggravating. I still play this every day, but I find it aggravating. And one of them was like things with whistles, and it was a train. I was like, is that really how we think of it? That seems so antiquated to me. But Genevieve was like, no, a train whistle is still a very common thing. I'm like really like a younger generation. Like you say, a 12-year-old named things with whistles. A train is going to be in their top 10 list. I don't know, man.

Yeah. Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, Andrew. Everybody thinks it's true. Oh, is that a lyric? That's a Paul Simon lyric. Oh, gotcha. From the song, Train in the Distance. Are these cicadas? This is night. I just thought it might be interesting if your train observations were, if you were telling them around the campfire late at night.

I like that. Oh, no. Where'd you get the salsa?

But they're putting a street in, Andrew. They paved paradise.

Oh, no.

Put up a parking lot. And we need to stop the development that's happening here in this campfire. This is just called street ambience. I thought it was going to be a little more exciting. Yeah, I thought it was going to be more in there. It's kind of lame. I know. I'm sorry. That's on me. Anyway, I'm sorry that today's entire episode is me describing customer service interactions. I really... do have to here's the problem i recently moved into an empty shell of a home i mean i'm an empty shell of a person but that's different and i've been kind of setting up the new version of my life which has created a lot of a lot of opportunities for me to have customer service experiences okay so i promise to people listening maybe for the first time this show is not always just going to be me talking about buying something or trying to set something up but as it happens I've been doing a lot of setting up of things of late, and I got this treadmill delivered the other day, and it's made by a company, NordicTrack, because it's very rainy here a lot of the time, and I'm on a really big hill, and there are no sidewalks, and I don't want to be running up or down a rain-slicked hill with no sidewalks as large trucks are ambling down the windy roads. that sounds like a recipe for injury to me but to go where I like to go on my runs it's like it adds a half hour to the whole process minimum like I got to drive to town then run then get back in my car and drive home so this treadmill is supposed to be a nice wintertime solution for that but it was so disassembled when it showed up not just kind of like you got to like put on the arms of it or something like it was like there was like wire harnessing going on I mean granted i was clicking things together but it was like you know it's there's a lot of electronics in a new modern treadmill like i also wanted one that was pretty sturdy because i'm a i'm a big lad these days and i didn't want to get one that after like a couple weeks of me running on it like stuff was going to be shaking and falling off and coming apart so i got one of these ones that's you know a pretty burly piece of equipment but that means there's a lot of setup that goes on and it was about five hours yesterday that i was like screwing parts together and connecting electronics where are you putting this thing in the studio yeah it's it's um so in this room that i'm working out of right now i'm at the desk right now over kind of on the left side this is a converted garage that i'm in and then i've got a sleeper sofa that so if we have folks over and and they want to stay here this is they could sleep out here and then next to the sleeper sofa in the far right corner of this room is this treadmill um so i don't know if that's the permanent home but it's going to be the home for a while because there's nowhere in the house for it and um and like if i put it in the house and ran on it i think it would the house would fall apart

like well i was gonna say yeah i mean you want it in a place where there's probably not a floor below you because it's just going to be that's like that like my dad has some exercise equipment and it's nice because it's in a little basement room and there's something very solid also homemade No, he actually is. Is he weld a treadmill? I'm trying to think. No, he's got actually some nice stuff. He's got like a nice elliptical, but he's got a treadmill as well. And, you know, that treadmill, like you can, you know, especially a guy like me, it's rare that I'm on a treadmill. But when I do, it's very clear at the gym that I am on the treadmill because you hear, well, there's probably a sound effect of me on a treadmill in your box of sounds over there because it sounds very upsetting. But anyway, yeah, so I just sort of feel like if that was on like um on a floor where there's a basement underneath or whatever and you sort of get a hollowy feeling or things are falling off the shelves or whatever it's good to have that on solid ground then this

house that was built in the 1930s like it was yeah it would be a it would be a very bad idea to have it in the in the house so this is where it's going to be for now it's fine also one of those ones where it's like the it folds up you know what i mean like you can stand the the belt part the part you're running on you can stand that up so that it actually takes up less room when it's not in use so i get it all put together last night after again a significant time investment and there was this one point where i had grabbed the wrong bolts so i'm trying to put it was so complicated because i'm trying to attach one of the arms like the you know the thing that's going to go up and support this big tv screen that it now comes with i'm trying to put one of the arms in and i've clicked together electric like electrical connection so that the treadmill can be talking to the tv right so and i'm by myself here of course this is supposed to be a two-person job because i managed to i i had the wrong size bolt it was too long and i i was like attaching it in there and then i realized oh shit this is the wrong size bolt and now i can't get it out of here but i can't walk away because the the basically what was going to happen was this thing is metal and very heavy this arm this right arm thing if i walk away right now it's just gonna it's gonna tip over and just rip the bolt out with it and probably also snap the electrical connection like so i'm by myself i've been here i'm like i can't get this bolt out but i can't go across the room to get a better um like uh a better uh socket or ratchet set up because i'm like trapped holding this thing up because if i walk away from it it's gonna just like it's gonna literally break the entire thing before i've even set it up so i was Thank you. like i was i was like using one hand to reach around this this thing and like by hand painstakingly over the course of i'm not kidding andrew probably 20 minutes unscrew this thing so that i could take the whole thing off so that i could lay it down so that it wouldn't break itself so that i could go get the proper bolt and the proper kind of ratchet and socket to do it with and i was thinking to myself people dig their way out of prison with a spoon it's just about time commitment i was literally like hyping myself up going like you can do this it's gonna take a long time but it is doable and walking away from this right now is not an option not me bubbles sounds like she was no

help in this does bubbles love a project the way bingo loves a project bubbles is actually at becca's

right now because she was so sketched out being here it was decided that we got to wait for things to be a little more finished off but i will tell you if she were here she would have been absolutely the worst she would have been climbing all over me all over the machinery in fact the fact that i was actually able to assemble this thing was only because of the fact that bubbles is not here right now that's all i had going for me but all that is to say i finally get the whole thing put together uh and i it i turn it on and it boots up and then it immediately goes into the most inclined position it can possibly be in so instead of being flat it's like mountain climbing and i'm hitting the like decline like like you know decline and it won't do anything it's like it's like stuck in the up position in the you're walking up a mountain position and i'm trying to figure out how to fix it i'm online i'm in like subreddits and no one really knows anything

have other people identified the same problem though that's satisfying well i saw i saw a very

um i saw kind of a dis a dispiriting exchange where one guy goes there's like post the question hey i got this nordic track and it's in the up position and i don't know how to decline it and then like i don't know months must have gone by because then somebody came in and said i had the same question did you ever get this fixed and then guy number one responded oh hell no i returned it i wouldn't i wouldn't use a nordic track if someone if they paid me oh no i was like oh cool cool cool so the bigger problem though by the way i called this morning i called nordic track and i I got a very helpful gal on the phone, and she walked me through it, and I was able to fix it. It needed to be recalibrated. Basically, the thing was confused about how incline. It thought it was at zero. It thought that I was walking on flat ground when I was not. So I had to go through this reboot system, and it totally worked. It's rebooted. I'm looking at it. The incline and decline work. Everything is fine. Here's the bigger issue, Andrew. NordicTrack is actually owned by a company called iFit, iLearned, and they don't really want to make treadmills. they want to sell you workout software they want to sell you they want to be the peloton although by the way peloton i think has some financial troubles as it is but like they are not really interested in being a treadmill company or an elliptical company or a bike company they are interested in being a exercise software company of course because that's how you can keep on

selling shit that's right so and licenses and renew your license for the software and let me tell you brother oh yeah cup of coffee with the eye fit this is where we're really gonna get into old man territory because i'm with you on this one like you can't buy anything anymore you can only rent things not even rent things where you can buy licenses for things that you will then have like you cannot buy software you cannot buy an app you buy a year's worth of an app or you buy a year's worth of being able to use my treadmill or a year's worth of being able to um i don't know drive my car because it's right so many computers it's like it's getting out of hand and that is i'm just a very old man thing to say but i remember a day when you could buy shit i got on there i

turned it on and i thought you know this is a pretty high-tech piece of machinery of course the first thing it asked me is like what's the wi-fi here and i thought i was like oh cool this is gonna like i don't know i can probably watch netflix on here or something if i want to like this is pretty you know pretty high tech and then i realized oh it wants to get on the wi-fi because it just wants to keep trying to sell me different kinds of memberships of iFit with special runs I'm not really a person who, I don't really want to like go on a run with a guy who ran a 5K in San Francisco wearing a GoPro on his head and he's coaching me up the whole time, that's one I just watched by the way out of curiosity I just want to get on and I want to just see that quarter mile track and I want to see a little color change i want to see progress so i could see how many times i've gone around that quarter mile track to get to the number i'm trying to get to do you want people cheering you on do you want

virtual friends kind of like waving flags and maybe even like i don't know giving you holding out cups of water as you virtually run by i will answer that andrew with this I think that would be fun I I don't want – so I think what this whole – the sales pitch on this, which, again, I blame the New York Times wire cutter for this whole thing because this was the most highly – this was the highest recommended treadmill. I think that wasn't like $6,000 or something, right? So maybe it was like their second most. But of the ones that weren't ludicrously expensive, they said this was one of the best ones. There's nowhere in the review that I can remember Where they said oh yeah but You're going to have to constantly Battle with this thing To try to just do a normal workout When you turn it on it's showing you Something that looks almost like YouTube But it's a bunch of different like It's a bunch of different workouts you can do that have been Filmed where someone is like coaching you As you go do this thing or whatever And you have to go No I don't want to use iFit I want to go with manual mode And manual mode is about .0005 in size and it's in red. If they could make a font cry, they would.

You know what I mean?

Do you want to have an amazing workout with your new virtual friends and feel better than you've ever felt in your life? Or do you want to just be a sad little person on this kind of piece of shit treadmill in manual mode? It's just like, so you have to hit that and it's so small and then you have to hit it like two more times to just get to the little quarter-mile track picture. And I think I'm going to have to do that every single time I get on the treadmill. There's no just telling it, like, please, save the iFit for someone else. I just want to get on this thing. And I'm going to have to, every time I get on, I'm going to have to battle these very fit, tan people that want to, like, take me on, you know, a jog in, you know, around Lake Michigan in Chicago or whatever, in Aspen or something. and I was talking to the lady on the phone today who again was very helpful totally fixed the problem, it was awesome but I was like, I had to unplug the treadmill and leave it off for three minutes I guess it must have some sort of battery in there so just not like unplug and plug you gotta like let it drain all the way down so that it actually resets so me and this gal had three minutes to just sit and wait which was a long time and I said to her, I go, I get the feeling that um nordic track is really looking to be a software company or a workout you know a workout video company and she kind of laughed and i and that's when i realized oh this call is probably being monitored for training purposes and she goes well it's a really great system that people love they think it really helps their workout she gave me some but it was like i it felt like there was somebody like standing just out of the frame with a loaded weapon yeah like she knew that she was not gonna bro down with me on the fact that this that that they don't really want to sell treadmills because she knows that the you know somebody might hear that or whatever but um anyway so i guess the reason that i just want to tell anyone if you think about buying one of these things research if it's one of these things that is just constantly going to be trying to make you oh by the way i found a guy who put a video on youtube of how to like re like hack into your nordic track so that it's not doing i fit all the time it was so complicated it was the highest level of computer programming i've ever witnessed in my life anywhere i was almost tempted to pull the audio for you andrew because it's like you know the headline is like how to keep your nordic track in privilege mode so you don't see i fit every time and i thought okay well maybe this you press a couple buttons and then you don't have to deal with it i was 20 minutes into the video and i was i i felt like john nash in a beautiful mind i was just seeing like cartoon cosine equations just flying around the room in here was the most unbelievably complicated thing

ever so is this secret method uncovered keep privilege mode that's got that guy gears and

tech is that's our guy now i want to skip about like eight minutes in maybe or something because

the whole thing is about nine minutes i'm gonna get to the part go five minutes i like this thing now i don't know if you've noticed this on youtube where it shows you like the most watched parts of the video it's got the little graph on the bottom so you can fast forward right to the part i see i'm going to go right to the part where most people are dialing this save ourselves a lot

of insanity we're going to go into privileged mode if we're not actively in privileged mode so we're going to go one two three four five six seven eight nine ten he's tapping the screen two three four five six seven one two three four five six seven eight nine ten again it's going to ask Chris, for the number, I'm going to this video. He's emailing himself different numbers through encrypted video. Now we're on the website. So I'm going to punch in the code. 715131. Submit. And it spits out my new code, which is 350440. This is pretty straightforward so far. Submit. There we go. Now we are in privilege mode. So we're on to the main screen of our iFit device. now what we're going to do is open up my file manager now if you have not installed

this app you will want to follow some of my other videos that i've already done so you need to

download a file manager app before yeah it looks like windows what he's got we're going to open

the app es file manager that's just here right here now normally you're going to be at a root of some sort but don't even go to don't talk to me about roots storage on this device we're going to click up here at the top look for the little android icon and we're going to click that this gets you right to the root storage of this device how rude a lot of damage in here so do not and

we've got our show title anyway it seems to go on from there but that is yeah between downloading

between whatever he was doing with this like something that was generating like a dual a dual authentication like number but it was it was like doubling it or something i was just like glazed over so i don't know i'm also considering just signing up for fucking i fit that's the worst part that's how they get you that's how they get you it's like i don't know i think it's 15

bucks a month which whoa is kind of not insignificant bullying that you're being bullied

into buying that you don't even want i know but it's i mean i'll tell you this it's very effective behavior modification that they're doing because either you get to go to the fun party where everyone's getting totally jacked or you have to go to sad manual mode where all the losers are like they have set it up so that you have i mean just the click if i could just turn this thing on and then be at the at the exercise party that seems way more fun than like i think they i honestly think they've made manual mode worse intentionally so that you are more incentivized

to want to sign up for their stupid system i'm sure i'm sure i'm absolutely sure that in fact i'm thinking now about my own little robot friend over here dartbot who probably has not gotten enough attention today um but even that i was just remembering like i woke up the other day and genevieve turned to me and she said did you pay 30 for that dart game and i was like well it was free i did the free version for like two whole days i realized i really want it and i want like it'll keep stats for you and everything like you know like for a long time whereas you know that stuff is all limited if you don't buy it so i bought premium and it wasn't until like later that I realized, oh, it set me up for a 30 year subscription, a $30 a year subscription. So if a year from now, if I'm still playing it, I need to pay $30 again. And it's like, how did we get to this place where it's like, you just, why would I have to keep paying for it? I guess it is storing data would maybe be the argument. Like back in the day, you buy a piece of software, you install it on your computer, and you have a physical piece of software. And I guess piracy is maybe one reason things have changed a bit but it's like how do they just get me to to to not even question the fact that i'm gonna have to pay them 30 a year to keep using a thing i bought once you

know i know i well just yeah it's a way of being able to sell you the same thing over and over again i realize as i'm saying this out loud there are people donating money to tbtl over and over

again so i would have tread mill lightly no it is true but also like it's also completely opt-in you know what i mean i couldn't i wasn't donating to dartbot i would i would donate to dartbot um it's in the other room i just want to make sure that it's not hearing oh it's part of this conversation but like um that is the difference of what we do if you can't afford it then you don't pay this time around but please do but you know what i mean like it is it is a totally opt-in thing and people believe what we do enough for some reason to to do it i think it's different I think what we're talking about now is just like this, you know, I know it's like just cliche to say it, but this the capitalist society that we're living in right now is pretty fucking gross.

Well, the thing that's stressful about it is and this is also kind of an illusion, but there's a feeling like if you buy something, then maybe you don't have to buy it again. And maybe if your financial circumstances change, I mean, this used to be a very conservative argument about about property taxes, which I don't think I fully buy. But I remember when I was working in the world of conservative talk radio, we get these folks calling in. You never own your house because even if you own it, you still got to pay taxes on it forever. And I mean, look, it's like this is part of you have a sewer line running your house. You have there's a lot of amenities from living in a city or whatever. And that's probably why there's taxes. But that being said, there's this feeling that like if you're like I'd better I need to make sure that whatever I'm doing, I've got at least $15 a month in perpetuity to pay for iFit for the rest of my life.

And the thing that's going about this is it's not a product that you necessarily want. It's a product that you're being sort of bullied into buying in order to justify this other large purchase that you just made.

I purchased a giant delivery system for workout software, which I didn't realize. Again, looking at you, Wirecutter, if you're going to recommend something like this, You should really put it right near the top by the.

way they just want to sell you this so that they can then hook you into their workout software program situation like just know that going in um which also i i'm gone so much of the time and i'm in so many different places i'm not going to be one of those people that's like living the i fit lifestyle like that's like i'm checking in at the at the hilton and i'm using their gym and i'm on their treadmill i'm like i'm i run outside sometimes i'll be in different cities like this is it doesn't really help with my lifestyle other than when i'm here on this one i also saw i don't want to be mean but like the guy i almost want to play this for you one of these days the guy who was taking everyone on this 5k run in san francisco was he's probably a sweet guy and all but the basically from when he's like all right we're gonna do this every it's a real race like it's an actual 5k that was happening in san francisco and i don't know how they got permission but he's got a headset on he's being filmed by someone and he's like but he has about like four minutes to kill before the race starts it's not it's it's it's labored it feels labored to be his patter waiting for like i'm sure once you're running he's got it down hey we're running together let's do this pace whatever but that the the downtime before they start running and he's just kind of like yeah just remember we're just gonna have an awesome day out there we're just gonna be kit we're gonna kill it everyone you know it's like his it was that was enough for me to say i don't want to sign up for ifit i don't think i want to live in the world with this dude

yeah that kind of motivation uh obviously does not motivate me hey i'm gonna um bring up something here that we have not please send it by email oh i will no i have a question for you it's not related to any of this it's kind of related to commerce in a way but i'd like your opinion on something so um one of the people who used to live in our house a renter who i believe rented the basement unit before we moved in suddenly after a year and a half of us living here has gotten a couple of packages delivered to us here in fact I was even outside when the Amazon driver delivered one of them and I said this is the wrong address you know like this person doesn't live here anymore you have the right address but the wrong person he's like there's nothing I can do about that can I just like he's like sorry I have to deliver this to the address that is on there and this is your address my guess is the person who used to live here maybe doesn't use amazon all that often and then recently started using amazon again but still had her old address typed in our new address and probably at some point figured it out it's amazon i'm sure she was made whole um two packages were delivered here both related to dogs and that makes sense because my understanding is she had a bunch of, she had at least a dog and also might have been a dog walker or something along those lines. Having said that, so I got these two packages. I held onto them for about a month and a half. I even, this gets a little bit too complicated. Somebody had left a sticky note on our door a couple of months ago saying, hey, listen, I'm just leaving this to let you know that a friend of mine accidentally had something delivered to your house they used to live here I'm picking it up for them but I'm leaving this note so you don't think I'm basically a porch pirate or whatever this is my phone number so when I got these other two packages I called that number and said hey is your friend or no I think I texted that number and said hey is your friend's name this and they're like no no my friend is somebody else I'm like well now I'm getting packages for this person so anyway I held on to them for a while and I have no way of really unless I want to like maybe contact Amazon but Amazon doesn't

give a shit about two oh yeah purchases or give up all hope by the way so amazon help is a that's a

that's a dead end so i did a quick google on the name didn't find any new updated info i um reached out to this number that somebody had left on my door at one point it's the wrong person so i'm like all right i'll set these things aside now it's been a couple of months so i opened them and i'm like okay well let's see what's in here this person is never going to get these packages anyway And one was a couple of very simple dog toys, like kind of, you know, tough ropes that are kind of tied up in a loop so that, like, the dog can pull one end of it and you can play with them. I gave one of those to Lola yesterday, Hannah's dog, who I got to meet for the first time. Oh, right. Very excited about that. But here's my question for you. This other one, and I wish I had it in here. I should have thought of bringing this up and I would have it in front of me. But it's a small little box, blue and orange, very sort of kind of modern-looking packaging. But it's called a and I think this is going to set some people off. It's called a dog bark collar. And I was like, oh, now, of course, I don't have a dog myself. These toys, like I gave one to Hannah's dog and I'm going to keep one here in case we have another dog that's visiting. We all have a dog toy on hand. But this dog bark collar, you know, it's brand new, just delivered. It's in its it's in its, you know, cellophane packaging and, you know, inside the box and everything. And usually I would take something like this and just like donate it.

a goodwill but like those things are kind of like maybe i don't want to donate this to goodwill maybe i just want to throw this away like i'm not somebody who just usually wants to put something more into a uh you know into a dumpster that's just going to go into a landfill or whatever especially if it's something that's brand new that somebody could use but like dog bark collars they have does it shock the dog i don't know i didn't open it but it sort of seems like that would how else would it work about it i can tell you the box is orange and blue and it's like right outside my office if you want i can go grab it and then we can i wonder if it's yeah

i mean regardless of what it is throw it out i think because dog bark you're right those words put together it really it's anti-dog bark exactly yeah unless it makes it unless it makes the dog

so happy that it's going to bark and squeal and delight like i don't think i want i don't think i want to put this into the world like yeah i mean i understand that like a dog that barks too much could be a problem for neighbors depending on where you live or what have you but you need to deal with that through training or or something but like i don't i cannot imagine any device that goes on a dog that's a collar that keeps them from barking that is good but honestly this could be now i'll hold on to it for a little bit see if any listeners say actually you know the technology has come a long way and all it does is whisper to the dog hey be a good boy and quiet down a little bit like me god that one sounds real um but yeah i was i just want to know if you but your advice

says yeah just toss oh definitely if it's anything that's going to try to give negative stimulus to the dog because there's also you know again i i was guilty of this years ago because i didn't understand the implications but there are those collars i think i had this for maybe flea my dog that was a boxer many years ago and i really regret it but it's like those kind of collars that are pokey on the neck so that if the dog is trying to go somewhere you don't want it to it's painful for them and i didn't understand at the time really what was going on which is weird because if i looked at it i would have said this can't feel good for the dog but like yeah either it's something that's pokey that is going to make it uncomfortable when they bark or it's something that's shocky and is going to shock them when they bark but either way i would say i would say we throw it out now i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to jackassify our show andrew but would it be interesting content i do if i bought one of those and then we each wore one during the show and then if we bark see if we could activate it does it respond is it just any kind of movement

of a vocal cord thing thing do you want how much does it hurt do you want me to bring it into the studio tomorrow and like unbox it and tell you what i'm seeing inside yes all right let's let's

do that here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female Oh, man. It's not from a female.

All right. Emails. Well, you know, this is interesting, Luke. Usually I have a bunch of voicemails just sitting on my computer ready to play for you. And I forgot that today I was like, oh, yeah, I don't have any voicemails to play for you. I don't know what to do here. I'm looking through my emails right now to see if there's anything in here that, based on the subject line, I should share with you. But we might not have an email segment today. Do you have anything else you'd like to...

This is so boring and forever taking.

I don't want you to feel assaulted by that audio. I just have only so many drops here. No, no, that's fine. The possible responses of that would either be this. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. Or this one. Not only does that sound kind of disgusting to me, it sounds unhealthy. So those are the three possibilities here that I have for you. And, in fact, I would log into my email, except that's yet another thing that I probably have to, like, slightly reset up on this new computer, if that makes any sense. So, I mean, I can play more sound effects. Let's see. What else do I have? Let's play a game called I'm going to play something, and you try to guess what it's called in my new audio sound effect system. Okay, here comes one. I have an email.

it's not called i have an email it's called gone i'm just looking at this here um this is from our friend susan who says i was listening to episode 4046 in which you and luke pondered the question of whether or not it can rain in the sahara no of whether or not foghorn leghorn is racist today i happened to come across this in a book called how the south won the civil war by heather cox richardson okay i'm going to read this i'm going to um read this directly popular we're still casting is that a fishing rod casting is it still going out no it's night ambience i think that's oh i thought that was somebody casting their fishing rod only it's never landing it's just going and going

A popular radio comedian. I don't even know what I'm reading here, by the way. I'm reading this cold, so let's hope that it doesn't trick me into saying something regrettable. It says, this is a quote from the book, How the South Won the Civil War. Popular radio comedian Fred Allen's show included a caricature, Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a southern blowhard who pontificated, harrumped, and took his reflexive hatred of the north to ridiculous extremes. a buffoon who represented the past the Clegghorn character was such a success that he starred in his own Hollywood film and later became the basis for the Looney Tunes character, Foghorn Leghorn so I see, so it was always a caricature of that it didn't come from it really sounds like a fishing rod I can't get that out of my head, it really sounds like someone's still casting it I needed to hear a plop of it landing in the water to kind of make it pay off

this is like we're doing the show in

um a the terminal of the airport now oh i like that you probably don't spend enough time in

those places no it reminds me honestly it's the only place i can sleep now yeah you know curled

up uh on the floor i see people curled up on airport floor sometimes i'm just like no that's you got to do what you got to do but like it just seems so dirty so dirty so in other words the

foghorn leghorn character on looney tunes is a it's it's a kind of a um a cousin of a radio character that fred allen did and the point was it was making fun of a kind of certain type of

southerner that's what i'm guessing and it sounds very much like for um mr showhead senator tanker bell kind of a similar thing or who's that or is it senator kennedy who had that viral video going around uh like earlier in the summer um who was reading some dirty passages from a book in during testimony of why we should ban books or whatever do you know what i'm talking about it we can't

we literally can't that's me being surprised sorry i'm still finding out about actually you

know what since i've already ruined the email segment if i find this what if i play this for you and then i did not beep it all out so hold but like oh oh oh i see what you say he's

reading something that he is his point is these books are being distributed to our children therefore we need to ban books and he's trying to read a very extreme example that's my understanding okay i thought you meant he was doing the move where it's like they're having the hearing about banning books and he's like reading what looks like a regular book but inside it's a hustler

oh i remember seeing that joke in the movie this is such a weird reference while i look for this video um and this is going to be by the way this is filthy luke and so i um i am going to have to beep it afterwards and i'm hoping that it'll just and i think probably a lot of people in our in our audience have probably already seen this because it went viral and in fact i was watching it last night because uh genevieve was playing for me the the um the first part of john oliver's ah yes uh this week tonight is that last week last week tonight um next week tomorrow after coming back from break for five months and just said this is what we missed and it makes you realize how much news happened how much bonkers bananas shit happened you know one of the things they were

doing on strike force five which i cannot recommend that podcast highly enough to folks um it's weird i feel like i i would have thought more people would have listened to it um but i was like i said i was talking to some fellow radio folks and i was like did you listen to strike first five and they were like yeah the audio quality was too was too bad it was like on zoom i couldn't listen to oh really did you did that strike you it wasn't the greatest but i got over it because i found the content to be totally compelling um because again it's it's first of all they're just all really funny and they're all kind of dunking on each other mostly dunking on fallon and but in a way that's very entertaining and then also they're talking about like just the rigors of doing like a daily tv show but john oliver is on there of course and one of the questions they had was like because this was during the strike they were like what is the story that you're the most sad that you can't you didn't get a chance to talk about like what happened while we were while we've been out you know and they all had their different things so it's kind of funny to hear that when he came back to doing his show that was kind of the initial that was sort of

sounds like the initial shtick yeah it was really some amazing tv views was like when we get home i gotta play this thing for you it's so good um so it looks like i found this here so i'm playing this for you luke god the washington post or i'm sorry the new york post is awful uh i have a small screen computer here and there's so much garbage all over the screen and pop-ups I can barely get this video to play but I think this is one minute of him reading for this and again I need to hold on I need to put a lot of marks in the recording that I'm recording right now to remember that this needs to be super super beeped let's take a listen one is called all boys aren't blue and I will quote from it

I assume this is the right one.

I put some on and and I began to I and kissed him while he he asked me to this was my and I was struggling to imagine. and slowly eventually i felt a mix of pleasure with the pain luke this isn't even the one that

i was trying to play that's not even the one that i i'm just trying to figure out what you're gonna

bleep it's just gonna be all bleep i'm trying to figure out what what part of that is and again And, I mean, the thing is, here's what gets complicated about that. The reason we would bleep it would be because it's kind of graphic content for a show that has kids listening to it in the car or whatever. But also, there's also the sort of unintended thing of acting like, oh, people talking about same-sex attraction and sexual interactions is somehow, like, dirty. You know what I mean? So it's kind of weird because he's trying to bring it.

Well, you know what? I just want to make it clear. That isn't what I intended to play. I guess that went on for longer than I thought, and that's what the New York Post offered. But the one that I heard yesterday and last week tonight was it was potentially even more graphic in the in the sexual acts depicted. But it was not clear to me in the one that I originally played that whether it was same sex or a same sex couple or otherwise. That was not the subtext of the one, at least the one that Oliver played and that I had seen elsewhere. But it was just very, very graphic depictions of sexual acts.

I'm on the the best of New Orleans website. It's just NOLA.com Here's a video of Senator And because I believe John Kennedy is from Louisiana Here's a video of Senator John Kennedy Reading from All Boys Aren't Blue That will haunt you forever It's just what NOLA.com Is saying They go down to Before they link to it The Twitter feed of this Where they go, warning, seriously though This is a lot It's from like There's a fairly major news outlet in New Orleans just saying that's that's how they're getting into this yeah i wish i could have found the one

that now i'm on another now i'm on a fox and you said i'm just gonna click out of all of this but um that that didn't quite pay off because i wanted to play for you the one that i heard on uh john oliver yesterday but either way it was going back to it like that sort of tradition of the southern that's my foghorn leghorn sound oh nice perfect see that didn't seem racist at all

because that's a rooster and he's a rooster yeah no i get jokes now here's the problem i've now played all the sound effects for you that i have here i i think i thought it was i think i thought i think i thought i had more stuff than i did now was that was that scream something that was purchased or was that the wilhelm screen it came with it right right but i want to find out if i can like i said if i can pay another couple of bucks and get like pages and pages of these things this would be so much fun for the show this is robot by the way I don't know what that is supposed to be. That's why I keep playing it when you talk about Dart.

Yeah, no, I kind of got that. I understood that it was a robot. I mean, it's interesting that that's the interpretation. I guess you don't want to give it words, right?

It feels to me like they got feedback accidentally from plugging a cable in the wrong thing, and they went, well, we could use it as... I guess that could be robot. Like, they were trying to find an explanation for a sound they didn't mean to make. You can see the sound engineer, like,

ripping off their headphones. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. We really appreciate it. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. Andrew's going to put on his anti-bark collar, and we're going to see how long it takes for him to get shocked. So do tune in for that. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all. if anyone touches my man kenny g i'm gonna be up in their face damn i waited forever for that beep

and then i finally just gave up on it while i got it while i was hearing the thing power out