Muse

I have something I need to tell you.

I'm all ears.

Right, I'm not going to beat around the bush. I'm just going to get straight to the point. No f***ing around, because that's just annoying. And definitely no procrastinating. That's a good word, isn't it? Procrastinating. Pro-procrastinating. I wonder what the etymology of that word is. Obviously pro, very good. But crest, crest, I have no idea. Hey, why don't we look it up? Have you got a dictionary?

Not on me. Are you doing okay? I have a beta sequence I've been working on. Would you like to see it?

You have to be it so we don't see it. You have to live it or we won't forgive it. You have to inhabit it or leave it in the cabinet.

I know everything there is to know about computers, okay? All the Twitters, I know them.

That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.

What's on the website probably isn't going to be what's actually going to be. Okay. A lot of the times we will play like a Home Depot parking lot. There you go. Or a Best Buy parking lot.

All right, so follow the website. TBTL.

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

Another day, another victory for the OG, taking down the sweats, the impostors among us.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I'm back, baby!

Thank you very much to Andrew and Genevieve for covering me for yesterday, had some stuff come up, but I am here today at the Madrona Hill studio, looking out upon the mighty Columbia and, um...

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

It surely is, my friends. I guess we're in something called a beaver moon? honestly one of the there's a lot of entendre around that but it is what it is and the beaver moon i didn't realize how silly this was gonna sound until i started talking actually was what woke me up this morning like a moon rise over the columbia river was shining right into my bedroom window and right into my eyes and was how i woke up i mean can you think of a better but it was still like 6 30 in the morning so it was like everything everything was coming up burbank today um i was awoken in a very natural way by the beaver moon helping me get up and get after it and get ready for episode 4085 in a collector's series let the fun begin um something everyone has been on tenterhooks about which of course i wasn't here yesterday to explain is what happened at the Burbank Family Thanksgiving. Can you verify? Can you give me some 411? When we left off, my parents' hot water heater had exploded and it was unclear what was going to happen. I'll give you the update. Also, I want to take a moment to remember the life and times of Steve Poole.

You're like the coolest person I've ever met.

Seattle broadcasting legend. If you know, you know. Steve Poole has passed away. And he actually, in a kind of small way, small for him but big for me, had a kind of impact on how I thought about the world of maybe trying to work in this whole media game. Speaking of, I don't know if you'd call this the media game, but the internet and fishing and things like that.

That's a tuna, bro.

I came extremely close to getting fished today, like closer than I've ever come, which is bad because I'm also kind of sort of the spokesperson for not getting fished or being careful around fishing for a major software concern social engineering what is it exactly and how does it work we'll talk about that oh and we'll talk to this guy the longest running cobro of the show

maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships i'm flying in hot for that hottie he's

andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning luke as i mentioned to you during our sound check i was interested in hearing how your thanksgiving turned out until you mentioned the fact that you were almost a victim of fishing this morning, and now

I am so much more interested in that story. Well, we can get to both of those things, and we can get to them with sort of expedition or expeditiously.

But first, of course, we have to... I did not hear that in the sound check.

Yesterday, I had to addend the song. Happy birthday Delayed by one day I will tell you this Andrew And this is This shows what a not Kind of conscientious friend I am I forgot that yesterday was your birthday And somebody texted me A mutual friend of ours texted me yesterday saying It's Andrew's birthday And then I hadn't seen the text in time And I thought they were talking about today

I was like, oh, thanks, and they were like, no, it's today, i.e., no, you missed your chance to say happy birthday to Andrew in real time. So here I am one day later saying happy birthday, my friend. Oh, thanks.

Yeah, no problem. You know, I don't live for that stuff, so definitely no problem.

But did you wild out last night on your – I don't mean wild out. Like, did you get cray, but we were texting yesterday, and you said, oh, I'm going to probably be out sort of, you know, for most of the night. Was that because you were doing, like, a special birthday dinner or something?

Well, that was not a dinner. Genevieve made me a nice dinner on Sunday night. Like, we cooked some stuff up, and I opened some gifts, and we, what did we watch? Oh, Moonstruck, one of my favorite movies. So that was Sunday. Yesterday, I basically low-keyed it. I did have some running around to do, and I wasn't sure. I was thinking about maybe turning that into some rolling thunder situation. But honestly, I ended up just coming back here and just playing darts. Like, that's what the heart desired. Absolutely. The heart desires darts.

And by the way, very big with all of my 47-year-olds.

Maybe it was the magic of a birthday evening, or maybe just like the repetition is finally working. But I actually won a couple of games against the Dark Bot yesterday without having...

Do you think it was going easy on you because it was your birthday?

Now that you say that. Now that you say that, probably.

But I was very proud of myself. I studied your birthday, Dad. I don't know. And I'm giving you the W. He doesn't call me Dad.

he calls me sweetie I yeah there's a game that I play that's a very common game and like a lot of people it seems like I don't know if it's just because I've been talking about darts a lot so people have been sending me a lot of dart related content or if there is just a kind of a lot of dart stuff that's been floating around the Instagrams lately but I feel like I keep on seeing I don't think it's all the same one either but some phenomenal darting videos going around like somebody closing out a game of like this game

501 by just hitting like that sounds like a michael chabon novel the phenomenal darting of

andrew walsh maybe that'll be a show title but all of that is to say i know i i always try not to get too far into this and then i just eye glaze over talking about it but essentially this game you have to like kind of you start with a number and you count down and you know the more 20s or triple 20s you get get you closer to your target of getting down to zero but when you need to get down to zero you have to get a double um so in other words let's say i am down to 20 points i can't just hit the 20 i have to hit a double 10 and the way you hit a double 10 is this skinny little band that is on the very outside ring of the numbers on the dartboard that's why you have those rings and so obviously most of the real estate for the 10 is just in the big wedge but if you want to get the double 10 to close out the game you've got to get it in that tiny little window on the outside edge and so anyway that's what's been kind of the toughest thing to learn is to get just in that tiny little bit of real estate to close out a game.

Yeah, to me that's like harder than the bullseye

because the bullseye is small

but it's in the center of the dartboard. It's something that we instinctively, as a human race, we intuit that that's where we're trying to throw the dart, like right in the middle of everything. But to do it like off to the side of everything but still in a very small area, it goes against our very nature and that's why I think it's more challenging.

Maybe, and it depends on what you practice a lot. Like, I used to play a different game that was more bullseye-focused, so therefore it's maybe a little bit easier to get a bullseye than, like, a triple 14, or, like, sometimes as you're counting down, now I'm getting into it too much, but as you're counting down, the dartbot will tell you, like, okay, well, your best shot here with X number of points to get, knowing that you need a double to get out, is you should hit a triple 14, a regular 13, and then a double 20 or something. I'm just making that up right it'll tell you exactly what to get so it opens up the board more and it makes you practice more on the board because how often is anybody going to hit a triple 13 you know what I mean so it's good practice for different parts of the board as opposed to cricket where you're just hitting the same exact numbers and bullseyes over and over so I've been enjoying it all of that is to say I'm sorry I did it again I always say I'm not going to talk about it and then I talk about scoring darts which is the most boring thing in the world but I did feel Like yesterday, I was closing out games and beating the dart bot several times over, and I was, you know, I was feeling pretty good about myself. But you're right. Maybe it was just going easy on me because it was. But please. I have to be honest with you.

Yeah. The mutual friend who texted me was dart bot.

Oh, I had. I had a. I don't think it was either Katie or dart bot. I had a. Don't think that was an accident. Yeah. OK. All right. I apologize for that. I might cut all that out. But let's talk about Thanksgiving briefly, because I know that you survived, and that's the important thing. I want to know about this fishing thing, but let's start with Thanksgiving.

Well, there's not a whole huge update on Thanksgiving other than to say, cue the Mariah Carey song Hero, which I would have.

put together for this if I was more into planning the show uh the true hero of the Burbank family was Walter B my dad who managed to and my sister Hannah by the way don't let's not sleep on Hannah Hannah N's contribution um my dad pulled the uh defective hot water heater out Hannah helped him move it because I was down here podcasting I was doing a very important job of podcasting meaning thank you for that by the way i'm hearing i'm hearing mariah's beautiful beautiful voice so uh yeah my sister hannah beelined it over there helped my dad get this the wreckage of this hot water heater out of the basement got the fans going got the basement all dried up by like 2 30 uh the day before thanksgiving i know we're going back a ways here my dad had gotten a replacement hot water heater from the Home Depot and was installing it, and by maybe 8 or 9 o'clock at night, they had hot water again. Wow. And we all showed up on Thanksgiving. Macy's Day parades were watched. Although, I got to say something.

Wait, hold on. Before you do that, before you get into the Macy's Day, Was the original plan to spend that first night, like the Thanksgiving Eve at your parents' house and then all wake up there together in the house together, and then the only change you had to make was you now instead arrived on Thanksgiving Day, or was that always the plan?

That was a modification of the plan. The original plan was some of us were going to probably stop by my sister Hannah's house and do a kind of pre-Thanksgiving thing, and then some of us would journey up to my folks' house and stay over. And so it ended up getting modified a little bit I just left super early on Thanksgiving morning And was up there by parade time Here's what I want to say about the Macy's parade And I would not stop going on about this To the assembled daughters and nieces and nephews That had come together for this viewing A parade, Andrew is people walking around outside in the freezing cold in New York City or wherever you might be having the parade, possibly with floats, possibly with big balloons. But I'll tell you what a parade is not. A flippin' pre-taped video of a performance from the Broadway musical Aladdin. Oh, yeah. Followed by a pre-taped performance from whatever the Neil Diamond Broadway musical is, which is how they were kicking off the macy's day parade they kicked it off with multiple things that were not people parading that was the beginning of it huh and i don't know if this if they were stalling i i mean there were some high winds so maybe i mean there were protesters gluing themselves to the street somebody glued themselves to the hay arthur balloon which was very dangerous because then they were like 60 feet in the air over 34th just like stuck to the balloon like i don't know what they were doing but like i would i what is the drop you play this violates every tenant of broadcasting respectable broadcasting this violated every tenant of what a of of what a um a parade is which for me the macy's day parade is like an off-brand k-pop band badly lip-syncing their like number 60 hot 100 song while standing on a float from concur travel software you know what i mean like weird not quite famous enough performer because if you're you know if you're taylor swift or whatever you don't need to be on one of these floats but if you're someone who the label is really trying to get out there you will get on the Build-A-Bear float and you will sing your Christmas song that is currently not making a huge dent in the radio airwaves.

I believe, and now you've watched way more of these than I have, but a few years ago, and boy this was the coziest thing I could have possibly done. I stumbled into this idea in the middle of Thanksgiving afternoon, but I put on the Thanksgiving Day Parade from 1986 I want to say, and I loved it it had all the commercials in and everything And I was not a family that grew up really obsessed with the parade, but I loved this bit of nostalgia, which I'm trying to say differently than nostalgia now. I don't know which one sounds right anymore. But I would notice that some, oh, the commercials for He-Man toys and then all the tie-in with He-Man. I think the movie came out. Whatever year I was watching was the year that the scene with Maddox. The version with Dolph Lundgren as He-Man? Yes, so there was all this tie-in to the parade.

There's a lot of whipping in that movie that I didn't like.

But also, but I would say that like there were little performances that were not necessarily on moving floats, but they were janky as hell and they were outside like.

the street like you know what i mean like can you picture that as well like that's a parade yeah it's still outside even if you're not on a float you're still outside the audio is bad and the

moves are probably bad exactly and it's always a strange tie-in it's always like uh you know it's like the hartford company but then they've got again the pop culture aspect of it because usually their thought is or at least a lot of times they're like we're trying to get some visibility for our company so we'll get like a third tier jason derillo type not jason derillo jason to almost and we'll put him on the um the budget battery float because that means it gets to park in front of the cameras for the networks and we get to see this person lip sync their song for 30 seconds and we get more airtime i mean it's a whole setup and what i also love about those floats is that there's always like pam from accounting who's one of the people just kind of standing on the side of the float like it's obvious that in these court these big corporations that sponsor these floats there's often my guess is that it's some kind of a like incentive or a reward like hey if you're the top you know performer or if you are nominated by your department you can go to new york and be on our budget battery float and those people um god bless them are never really fully committed to the bit they're sometimes dressed like something or other but they're just not comfortable in this space it's not what they do and something about that disconnect is great viewing for me not at their expense but just the humanity of it all let me play you i don't think this is going to pay off but i saw something on tiktok that kind of describes this weird world It's by a TikToker, a performer, I think named Jamie Lynn Watson. And here's what she's doing. She's standing like I think in her living room. She has a pillow tied to her head and she's holding like a little kind of pom-pom twig thing in one hand. I think she's kind of pretending to be someone who's standing on one of these floats. Okay, can I just play you this audio? I do not know if this will pay off. I texted this to myself like four days ago. But my memory is that it sort of typifies exactly what I love about the people riding the floats that are not natural performers.

And isn't this inspirational? Here is a veteran who lost his entire family in a fire. As a huge Macy's thank you and sorry, we dressed him up as a fat croissant who works in a teddy bear factory powered by the spirit of hope and also powered by Duracell. Up next, Pentatonix and Barry Manilow sing a new song they invented called Let Me Know If It's Christmas, and we get to talk with Megan Thee Stallion about her new role in the DreamWorks animated film Gobble Girls, about a bunch of fuzzy turkey girlies who dream dreams of hip-hop. Now, back to you, Paula Abdul. We don't know why you're here.

I feel like that sort of nails it on every level.

You gotta send me that. We got to use that as intro tape. That is wonderful.

Jamie Lynn Watson is, I believe, the creator of that content. Yeah, they actually paid off better than I expected. Oh, my God. How about this? How about, and I know it's early in the game for us, but just to try to keep things on schedule, let's maybe thank some donors, and then I will tell you about how I came very close to accidentally losing some of the money in my bank account that I have received as payment for this job thanks to our donors. How about that? Oh, my God.

Thank you, baby.

I am seeing a potential issue down the road for me doing the show here from the Madrona Hill studio, Andrew. I've talked a lot about the sort of HVAC or lack thereof currently on the project, i.e. I don't have any, like, you know, built-in heating devices or cooling devices in the summertime. What I do have in here is a pretty nice space heater. It's made by the DeLonghi company. And it's a kind of a, it's weird how everything has become apolitized, if that makes sense. Like, the DeLonghi Heater Company, I've known about them for years because we used to have, you know that classic, like, kind of space heater, but it's rectangular shape, but it looks like a radiator a bit. I think so, yeah. And you plug it in, it's safer than other, you know, it doesn't have any open coils or whatever. I remember we had one of those growing up made by the DeLonghi Company. Now they make another one, but it looks like it was made by Apple. it's like this big white thin rectangle with kind of, like, cool edges so that it looks, you know, like it was designed by Johnny Ivy or whatever. And it's pretty effective, but I have it at full blast. I have it trying. It's not getting there, but it's trying to make this room 90 degrees, which it's not working. And as we've been going through the show, I've been moving it closer to me to where very soon I will be straddling it like a hobby horse just to stay warm. And the real thought that just went through my head was, maybe I need to buy another one of these and put it on the other side of me so that I'll just be getting, like, a double dose of DeLonghi heating while I'm doing the show because here we are. It's, what, November 28th, and it cold in here. And I'm wearing a sweater, too.

You're going to be like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. Exactly. I'm going to ride this thing all the way down. Oh, yes.

Hey, we should thank some donors. We should. Folks like Robert Sautel of Marshfield, Massachusetts. I don't know the temperature in Marshfield, but I'm guessing it's not balmy today.

I wonder if they grow cranberries in Marshfield. A lot of cranberry growing out there. It's so beautiful. I know I've said this before, but to pass a cranberry marsh is amazing. It's breathtaking.

Well, thanks, Robert. Appreciate you. Thanks also to Harmony Star in Mill Creek, Utah. I don't want to get into name and names, Andrew, or ranking names, but Harmony Star is a hell of a name. It's a good name, yeah, definitely. How many mysteries did you solve this week, Harmony? Oh, yes. I'm seeing some kind of person that's a journalist, but who also is solving mysteries.

Yeah, or potentially somebody who is reporting on traffic in a major metropolitan area.

Sure, sure. like, let's see, Dallas Rains. That's a weather person. I'm trying to remember some of the, I was trying to remember some of the names when I worked at Metro Traffic. But those were not so much plays on words. There was like Bev Devlin was one. I forget the others. But anyway, Harmony is there in Mill Creek, Utah, and we are so appreciative. Thank you. Thank you, Harmony. That brings us to Christy Elburn, who's in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Nice, beautiful. Somebody's been writing in and claiming to be from Medium Rapids, Michigan. I think that's a joke.

That could be fishing, Andrew. Yeah, it could be. And I know all about it. I was fished to within an inch of my life this morning. Sounds like it. We'll talk about that coming up. Thanks, Christy. Marcus Haynes is in Manassas, Virginia. That is fun. Look at this. Manassas. Look at this distribution. We got Massachusetts. We got Utah. We got Michigan. We got Virginia. We got Marcus. Thanks, Marcus. Thank you, Marcus. And then Richard Lohmeyer checking in from Monroeville, PA.

Okay, cool. That's not too far from Virginia.

And then John Pelletier. What do you think? Pelletier. I was just wondering about that.

It could be Pelletier. I think I knew somebody who spelled their name like that, and they went by Pelletier. But it does seem like a proper French pronunciation could be Pelletier.

I have a feeling that maybe John's kin We're like, we're tired of explaining this We'll just go with Pelletier We're in Phoenix, Arizona And you know what? If you can't beat them, join them I'm John Pelletier And I support TBTL And I don't care who knows it So thank you everyone hello and welcome to top story so what happened this morning andrew and it is the strangest thing because again i spend probably more time than a lot of people at least being recorded talking about cyber security and phishing and being careful and things like that and i think of myself as a pretty savvy person but I got way down the road with a fishing moment today and it's funny because it brought up all of the feelings that I am constantly telling people who have been fished when I do these little videos that they shouldn't feel or that you shouldn't feel embarrassed or that you were a dupe or whatever you should you know mention it to your supervisors if this was on a work device you know what I mean and I found myself very much the moment of being like god how could i be so stupid so i got an email this morning from

well it purported to be from lifelock and during remind me remind me lifelock is is what again i

know lifelock i just can't remember what they sell it's one of those services that's supposed to keep your identity from being stolen which by the way is so it is a cyber tool it's a real irony in this situation right yeah but um it was like uh let's see i might actually even have it i deleted this off my computer but i was it was the other one let me see if it's still on this one um i uh uh during the pandemic i was one of those people that had um some like fraudulent unemployment charges filed against me or not filed against me, but filed like in, you know, someone basically tried to steal my identity and file for unemployment. And I found out about this because I think somebody at APM like sent me something that said like, we just want to tell you, you're not eligible for unemployment. You still work here. And I was like, uh, yeah, I know that. And then that sent me on this kind of frantic moment of like locking down all of my accounts and, you know, freezing my identity and stuff because that was a very bad feeling. And then I received some paperwork from the state of Washington saying, like, some of it was like, we've turned down your request for unemployment. And then some of it was like, but we also gave you $7,500. And I was like, oh, man. Usually I'm the one doing the identity thieving, Andrew. You were hoping that,

you're like, if you're going to waste that money, at least put it in my account. Exactly. But wasn't this also part of, like, a broader ring that was actually well publicized?

not maybe publicized but reported on yes and washington state was um was hit especially hard because what washington state decided to do was really start throwing the money at people kind of early and often thinking we can't have a pandemic going on and also everyone is just financially crushed by it so what we're going to do is err on the side of taking care of folks and we'll sort it out later and i don't know if that was the right call or the wrong call But basically, like, it led to a massive amount of fraud. I feel like it was even called, like, Operation Sparrow or something. Like, I think the scammers had a name for it, which is never good. When they've got their own name for it, like, hey, everyone, welcome to Operation Sparrow. Now let's get after it with the frauding. So I can't even remember if at that time I actually signed up for this LifeLock thing. But basically, I got an email this morning that said, and boy, this is maybe this is the takeaway from this, Andrew. We shouldn't be looking at email in bed on our phone before we've really taken on our day. Maybe we're not. Maybe I just wasn't in. I wasn't in the mindset of trust but verify. I was in the mindset of like, hey, a beaver moon just woke me up and I'm in my cozy bed and I've got the space heater. Again, every room in my house that I want to be in has to have some kind of janky aftermarket heating going on So I'm like, okay, it's warm in here I'm just going to look at my phone for a minute And that was how I experienced this email And literally maybe that played a role in it If you get an email from Beaver Moon, I do recommend opening it though Sure So it's from LifeLock And it says something to the effect of uh hi there just to let you know your lifelock um extra super protection has been renewed for another year for 377 dollars and i was like those bastards i was like well first if i'll tell you this if it would have said it's been renewed for 50 a year i'd have been like you know what go at it lifelock i could probably use your help like it was they picked the exact right number And I'm sure they know this Like an amount of money that's going to cause most Americans To be like uh excuse me Like that's you know Uh $377 That's a lot of Three leg parlays I can be putting down On various Seahawk futures Like that's an amount of money That is going to send me In an almost like triggered state To call the phone number Which is right there Like there's two again I don't have the email in front of me Because I deleted it but like basically it was like just letting you know that you're and of course they've got the logo correct everything kind of looks normal except what I realized later was it didn't say that it was emailed to me by LifeLock it said it was like from Luke Burbank to Luke Burbank I mean and that seems like a dead giveaway

but I think but what

happened was my and maybe this had to do with being on my phone my eyes went to the body of the email before they went to the the subject line which I checked or the email stuff which I checked later when I was like oh fuck oh oh crap I want to apologize to the children in our audience they just heard me say the first two letters of the f-word oh fuck oh crap is it that's right it's an ancient curse that's right and I put that on whoever was trying to scam me this morning so it's like you know we're chart your your card is being charged for this amount and then it's like um and then it's like and here's our phone number and then it's like below that it's like

and to dispute the charge here's the website and here's a phone number and i should have i mean alarms should have been going off in my head immediately because like i'll tell you one thing when these companies auto charge you the last thing they want you to do is undo the auto charge they're not like like if a real company is like hey we've just auto renewed your thing they're not like and here right here is the phone number to make this not happen that would be bad business on their part because most people would try to make it not happen the other thing that i should have known right away because i hit the number andrew was a dude picked up right away no like hi you've reached lifelock press one for you know like a guy answered right away the guy did not sound like he was in america that didn't shock me because i thought you know most of these companies have now outsourced most of this kind of work so the fact that it was somebody who didn't sound like they were speaking english as a first language or whatever again that didn't throw off enough alarm bells i was like it was like the guy answers the phone i can hear people talking in the background i'm like hi i got um a renewal notice from lifelock and i would like to cancel this and get a refund and i forget exactly what he said to me but he was said something that was a little garbled and i clarified i said i want to cancel this and i want a refund and he said okay well we just need you to be at your computer i I need to show you the link to undo this. And thankfully, that just like immediately, like I was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, this, oh, that's what this is. Oh, this is a total scam. Holy S. Holy shh, my God. This is my new move. That's another ancient curse, yes. Yes. I was like, I mean, I sat bolt upright in bed and like I hung up the phone and then I deleted the email, and then I blocked the number. It was just like, away from me, Satan.

I threw my phone into a bag of rice for some reason.

Precisely. I mean, I can't believe that I fell for that. And then, of course, I guess before I deleted the email, I did go up to see, well, what did they send this from? Or were they able to spoof the LifeLock thing? And no, it was like a kooky email at like a gmail.com, which then they had made it so when it showed up in my from thing, It said Luke Burbank to Luke Burbank, which, again, had I noted that, it would have been like, that doesn't look normal. But you just – again, I think part of this is looking at it on my phone. Part of it is being kind of groggy. It just – it slipped right past all of my bullshit detectors. And, I mean, thank God, again, I know that, like, in no universe should you ever be, like, logging into something on your computer while someone far away is telling you what to do.

Never click on the links that they give you. Like, no matter what it is, go to the website and sign into your account. If you think there's any possibility, never, never click on a link that is in the email.

But I feel embarrassed of myself and foolish of myself that I got to the point where, I mean, I talked to this guy for probably 90 seconds. But like the fact that it got that far, the fact that they got me to hit a number and start talking to the dude is is shocking to me.

Have you now think about our parents, like for real, you know? But I don't mean – I'm not trying to be condescending towards older people. There are older people who are way more tech savvy than me. I know that. But it is a reality that older people did not grow up with this same technology.

They're not digital natives, as my daughter constantly reminds me she is.

I've been thinking more and more about how – and again, I don't feel overwhelmed by technology yet, but I do now understand how you can get to an age and that I will someday be at an age where the world feels too overwhelming to me. I've been thinking a lot about this, maybe from just observing people a bit older than me at the checkout kiosks at the grocery store, which I don't know. You know, again, maybe I'm the weirdo here, but I always I I prefer the self-checkout. But I know a lot of people, including you, are kind of grumpy about it. And I think a lot of old people are especially grumpy about it because they've done it a certain way their entire life. They don't want this extra responsibility on them. And it can be complicated. And the stupid scale is too sensitive and all this stuff. And the people have to come over and help them 30 times. I've been just sort of observing various scenarios like this around me and just thinking like, no, you know, there might have been a time as it is a very young person where I might have been like, oh, my God, I can't believe you don't know how to use a checkout. I don't know when I was that person, but let's just assume I was now. I think I'm I can see like, OK, I know how to do this technology, but I know that there are other things out there. Like, I don't know. I don't know how people do the tick tocks, how people make the tick tocks, you know, and I, I, I'm confident I could learn if it was a priority for me, but like, I can just sort of feel that kind of stuff slip away a little bit. And I could see myself as a 70 or 80 year old, if I'm lucky to make it that long and just be like, I can't figure out how to do this shit.

you know what else my eyesight is going so bad that some things are so hard on me too i'm just kind of like oh i can sort of see how just everything can become a little bit more a little bit more confusing and make me more susceptible to all kinds of stuff and i mean not to pile on

the terror here but like you throw in some deep fakes you throw in some like you know voice spoofing which is which is a thing that's now actively happening where people will get a call from somebody that sounds like their loved one saying they're in trouble or they need money can you imagine um being 75 or 80 years old and getting a call from your like grandkid and it's their voice or certainly very close to their voice i mean there is that's just i mean that would throw me like if this like that just if i somehow got i'm not i don't want to give them any ideas i know if they're listening but um it's like i could see myself getting a a call you know that was upsetting from somebody i loved or like addy or something and being like you go into sort of like a mode of just wanting to fix whatever it is that's gone wrong that you know i mean that i could just see myself i let me put it this way before this morning i would see those like people helper local tv things about like you know someone's parents got scammed out of all this money because they thought that there was someone being held for ransom etc and i would sort of be like wow that's that is really unfortunate for them but i can't see anything like that really happening to me and after having called a place that was going to try to break into my accounts or whatever yeah you called them that i called them that's extra that's extra bad and like and so i can i don't know i just i i'm feeling a little i'm feeling a little fragile i'm feeling a little vulnerable and a little less sure of my of my web savvy and a little embarrassed probably

i'm not trying to put that on you but i mean yeah um imagine getting a call in the middle of the

night and you just hear this from whyy in philadelphia i'm sticking out my g at for the

which also and i need fifty thousand dollars and you're like is that my daughter terry gross by the way if the theory holds and this is going back several shows now but i was very excited last week when um uh i was talking about now i'm blanking on who sent in um kayla i believe listener kayla sent in a text explaining giot being like yes you know giot damn and by the way she said i was hoping you would say that on the radio and i can't stop laughing hearing you but wait why would it be giot then is it giot or is it giot because you wouldn't say giot damn

you'd say giot damn with a heart well yeah i think what do they say in the song because maybe

Does anybody have the song available? Is that a thing? Sticking out your g-at for the Rizzler. Oh, okay, so it is a hard G. Okay, it's the Terry Gross got it wrong here. Okay, that's fine. Well, let's hear the Terry Gross version.

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm sticking out my g-at for the Rizzler.

Okay, yeah. But that also feels on brand. I don't want to say anything about my good friend Terry Gross, who I've emailed with a total of three times in my life, so I consider us good friends. but i i would i don't really know if i want the real terry gross to know that it's got i would like her to go with the more formal giat for the risler you wouldn't say that to andy rooney would

you from w hyy in philadelphia i'm sticking out my giat for the risler there's something about his

breath at the end that's one thing that the robots get really right about him is like he does take breaths in strange places sort of i bet you that's one of those things that the ai is

is particularly good at like the rhythm yeah it's got to be looking for when it's trying to recreate a voice it's got to be looking for like i don't know if data points is really the right way to describe it but just like the things about human speech that we probably the average person doesn't understand is what is essential about human speech and it probably has to do as much with pauses as the actual tone of the voice and the way you the way one talks and it's probably the pauses are probably pretty easy to follow because they're that's just math right that's like an average of this amount of non-talking so it probably gets the pauses pretty well i want to

come back to this experience that you had though because i do find it relatable i think that type of scam is very common now i've been seeing a lot of them like in fact somebody with and again i'm not trying to dunk on anybody here but some of the folks whom i work with with my little volunteer neighborhood group they're not they're definitely not digital natives and they're they're not super um you know uh literate you know super internet literate i guess is it yeah it sounds such that sounds so stark to put it that way but yeah um and somebody was checking like our shared gmail account for that group and somebody said hey i haven't have either one of you gotten back to this person and I looked at the email that they had for forwarded and it was like

so obviously scam it was like um oh wow and it was very similar to what you're you're talking about did i say it was so obviously scam do i mean spam or a scam that's how the kids talk it's giving it's giving scam i saved time so um anyway like and it was exactly that thing like okay you're and it even referenced bitcoin but it said your order for you know this bitcoin shit went through for this number of hundreds of dollars or whatever it is you know you're all set if there are any issues with this click here or call this number you know and i see those a lot and usually the first thing i do is you look at the email address not like the what what the email address just sort of looks like in your inbox but when you hover on it like where it is always come

from which which i have to say like again i don't want to be um sort of i don't want to be like the sky is falling here the digital sky is falling but like when they figure out how to make the email say what they wanted to say like thank god that's still somehow something they can't really crack you know what i mean the email didn't say um lifelock at lifelock.com that would have then that would have been like well maybe info at lifelock.com or something like the fact that it had to be this weird gmail account with a bunch of gibberish in it like i don't know i mean again knock wood i don't know how they haven't how that's something that they haven't really been able to fully master but like that feels like maybe you know that's the like that's like the wall that's the last bit of the of the wall in the north it's just like holding them back and when that wall goes we're in trouble when the email spoofing gets better it's like golly what

are we gonna do do you remember and unfortunately my memory of this is a little bit foggy maybe that's better it'll keep a shorter story but when I was moving to Los Angeles I had to move to LA I think a solid two months if not three months before Genevieve was going to make her way down there after like you know packing up our she was going to stay behind pack up our stuff and live out the rest of our lease or whatever in our apartment here in Seattle I went down to LA and I ended up renting an Airbnb type of situation that we talked about recently on the show but the original plan I think was to rent a small apartment for me um and maybe even sublet it or something for several months and um we had one and I think Genevieve just because she likes doing this stuff Genevieve had identified something online like it looked like a good deal a good place for me to live and we'd gone pretty far down the road of um paperwork and everything and then Genevieve I think or at least the paperwork was given to us digitally and then And Genevieve mentioned, oh, it looks like Andrew will be coming down with maybe one cat. Is that a problem? And there was like no resistance to that at all. And like there's always some resistance. There's always some question or something.

Who knew that that was going to be the thing that actually kind of saved your bacon? Exactly.

Oh, no.

I know there's something amiss with Pat Robb.

I talked on the show yesterday about how I'm probably not allowed to use the turkey gobble sound anymore, and I guess I can't. I tried to use it one time too many. Maybe the universe is telling you something, Andrew. Yeah, it has to wait for next season. But anyway, and so Genevieve's like, I don't know, I just, she's like, we were ready, like practically mouse hovering over a button to send, like, the first, maybe not first and last month rent, but, like, rent plus security. I mean, a couple, if not a few thousand dollars, right? We were hovering over the button and Genevieve's like, I just, there was like nothing about the pet at all. No questions, just like, yeah, that's fine. And so I was like, well, what's the guy's email address? And so I just Googled not his name, but his email address in quotes. And immediately it came up on watch out for, you know, some sort of watch out for these scammers site. And not only would we have been out whatever thousand dollars, however many thousands of dollars, but i also would have gotten down to la the day before i was supposed to start my fancy public radio job without a place to stay and would have had to tell all of my colleagues i can't come to work because i don't have a place to stay because i sent all of my money to a scammer and now i'm in

the big city and like so i hope you all take me very seriously exactly tomorrow when i'm running our show exactly right oh that gets back to that kind of feeling of uh of of embarrassment around this kind of stuff which you know um maybe maybe we still need to spread the word even wider and further that you you should not be embarrassed but i mean it's it's it's starting to feel like it's almost more the rule than the exception that a lot of the online back and forth thing is possibly nefarious i'm saying this because at thanksgiving my sister liz was talking about something I think my my dad was like looking my dad just loves to look for

discount computers online like my dad will drive to the other side of the state to get a like 20 year old macbook laptop for 200 instead of 250 or whatever like and he was explaining to me and again i want to remind everyone walter b was the hero of thanksgiving along with my sister hannah but like um and and you know so whatever his system is hey go for it dad but he has um this a sign making machine that's called a plotter and what it does is it will cut vinyl letters for you you know of various sizes and then you take those off and you put them on the sign a lot of the signs that you see in the world now are actually vinyl letters because it's easier than hand painting a sign but he was telling me how there's a bigger better plotter that he keeps seeing for sale but it's two hundred dollars and i was like yeah but if you do one job that needs to be a bigger size which would be possible for him i was like well wouldn't that pay for it he's like yeah but he goes i have so many different systems in place that are all running off of like 15 year old software that i've managed to just keep he he would make your like descent into the drivers of your computer andrew seem like a child's play i'm sure like the the craziness of my dad's like adobe stuff and file management and getting he has this like 15 year old system that's probably the only like system of its kind that exists and is functioning in america and it's out in his little sign shop where it's all this old stuff that can't be updated because then it won't talk to the other stuff but anyway he was looking for a gently used computer online and he was just mentioning how um he you know for the umpteenth time it turned out to be like a scam like they wanted a deposit and Liz my sister was like oh yeah that happened to me I was looking for snow tires last year and like the people kept being like okay well we need a deposit to hold on to these and she was like no I'll just come get them they're like yeah we need a deposit and she was like she was like and then I just figured out it was a scam and I was like what is the ROI on that like yeah someone's trying to get like someone went to the trouble to build an ad for a 2015 macbook laptop for 250 to try to scam my dad out of 75 and someone else presumably some other bot or person was building an ad for snow tires that my sister liz was looking at in a totally different part of the state and they're trying to get a deposit like have they covered

every possible thing you'd want to yeah right yeah and yeah is it one operation that just covers a

lot of ground i mean that just seems like so uh like so much work to just like again it's probably automated in some way but it's not so automated that you know my my sister and my dad are both very smart people when it comes to this stuff like they both identified them for being scams but it wasn't so obviously a scam that it was like you know the the sort of english was totally mangled or like the ad kind of made no sense and you know you you see those kinds of ads and you you just know right away well that's not real it they had nailed it enough that these two intelligent people had gotten a few clicks into the process and in fact started communicating with people before they were like yeah this is this is obviously a scam yeah well not to turn

this into a PSA but I mean I think it is enough of one now but but certainly even if you think that you're savvy and that you got this just like there's never any reason to use the information that has been sent to you in an email even if you're like a customer or a patient or whatever of the organization that's emailing you you can always go to the site itself and then log in under your credentials and then get somebody on the phone using the publicly you know the publicly available information uh and figure out whether or not uh there is an issue with your account or whatever it may be but never there's no reason to ever use the information that's actually in the email because even if it's totally on the up and up like that information is elsewhere anyway and i

am the king of convenience i'm never the person saying this but this is probably worth taking the long way on generally speaking like even if it seems faster yes it's just fully turning into a psa so welcome to social engineering what is it exactly man how does it work i'm mostly talking to myself here andrew because i feel like this was this was me dancing right up to the edge on this thing you know and like i'm i'm mostly saying this for my own edification but i think my new policy is yes never respond to anything that's coming to me in an email or text form no matter how legit it looks taking a moment also that's the thing it's never something that you have to act on in the next five minutes and that's me you know like basically what happened was this morning i had an emotional reaction to thinking i was being charged 377 dollars for something i didn't want and because i got that emotional reaction of like hey what it like propelled me into this behavior of hitting this phone number and calling them. And I mean, thank God I hit the phone. number thank god that's still my go-to instead of clicking on the link you know to I am surprised

about that I'm surprised that you would go to the phone first I'm glad you did any internet thing

yeah by that I don't mean I don't trust it to not be a scam I mean I don't trust it to work like I am still and maybe this will maybe this will help me in in my life as the scams get increasingly sophisticated but I'm still always going to despite all my frustration and my complaints on this show. I'm always going to be a person who thinks I'll probably get a better outcome if I can talk to a human than if I submit something through some intake form. That just feels to me like it just goes into some gaping maw and there's nobody who ever will look at it. Whereas if I talk to someone, I might get some sort of, you know, remedy on the situation. I don't know if that's true, but that's my instinct and thank God. But I just mean, I'm really going to have to be disciplined about not just realizing anything i get from any service that i may or may not have used there's no reason for me to respond to it within the next five minutes and there's no reason for me to respond to it through the format it came in and it's like okay take a moment like you said go to the website for whatever this bank is that i probably use and then log in and then figure out what's going on by by following the the appropriate steps and i know that's not like the fun answer but i think it's got to be i just like i've got to commit myself to this like i've committed myself to jogging i just have to be like this is what i do now to live a long and happy life speaking of long and i sure hope happy lives i want to before we get to the emails and vmails just um kind of give a shout out rest in peace to seattle broadcasting legend steve pool who passed away um recently according to his family he was 70 years old um if you grew up in the pacific north like i texted a surprisingly long list of people um from seattle when i found out that steve pool had passed away over the weekend and like um it was like within like the groups that i was texting the people i was texting it was a kind of a real emotional moment because steeple was a was a longtime tv personality at como tv in seattle most of that time was spent as a beloved local weatherman but he was just like a great person in the community i was texting with our friend p fletch about him and phyllis was saying that he was really inspirational to her as a black man who was on tv when you didn't see a lot of that in seattle and that that was really something that inspired phyllis um i will say that when i was i don't know i want to say 11 or 12 years old i remember going down to the um swimming area at green lake near my house and seeing steve pool was set up to do one of those you know weather shots from in the field and he was getting ready to do his thing and this is for whatever reason this is what jumps out about it to me was he had all of these hand-drawn little like storyboards that he presumably he had drawn

and i remember asking him first of all he was totally nice and affable to some random kid who's talking to him he's about to go on the air so you know probably he should have been like can we talk about this later and um but he wasn't he was like just super super nice and welcoming and then i was like what are these drawings and he was explaining to me that this was so he knew what was going to be on the screen at the tv station and what these drawings were were like drawings of different weather patterns and like it was it was basically his visual notes about what was going to be happening when they weren't showing him at green lake if that makes sense like what was going to be coming up on the main screen i'm sure nowadays there's plenty of technology for this but back in those days i think the technology was steve pool free handing what the different screens were going to be and he had them kind of laid out so he'd be able to refer to and know what was going on and this whole thing just felt like the highest level of television magic to me and i don't know why like that that memory of him and his little drawings and the camera and him being nice to me and then me watching him kind of light up and go on tv it really went into some kind of part of my brain that was like that's a thing that people do and And like, he's just here at Green Lake, a place I go to. Maybe that could be me someday. So he was a pretty inspirational dude to me, even though I'm sure that he probably doesn't didn't remember that interaction. But it was a big deal to me.

I didn't grow up around here. I know of Steve Poole and I see like little kind of weather news teases from him from time to time on my old VHS tapes that I collect at garage sales. And so and I know I knew he was beloved and I saw the outpouring from all kinds.

people in my social media circles um this weekend i have a question for you now which is like kind of i probably inappropriate if i'm going to be honest with you but um like he did he do want my social security number because of my life block account um so here's my experience and again this is like opening up an opportunity to say something um slightly less kind or or more critical but i'm just confused by a criticism i thought i overheard at a bar this weekend what i you know again saw all these outpourings on social media from people like you know older and younger than me about how great steve pool is and everything and i just have always known him for being like somebody exactly how you just described but i overheard somebody like it you know not a conversation i was a part of say something about steve pool dying and then being sad and then somebody like yeah i liked him except all the weird stuff or something i was like did i hear that right like he wasn't like an over-the-top guy right he was steady eddie wasn't that his whole brand or am i am i making that up did he do sort of like kind of goofy things

i don't know about that i think this person was off their nut and maybe racist i yeah i don't i i'm i don't know enough about every aspect of steve pool's life there might be some part of the story that i missed um uh so i don't i don't want to sort of get out on the record one way or the

other but as a broadcaster he did not have a reputation for doing over the top type of

broadcasting i don't know if there was i don't know you know i was just more interested in

seeing like oh yeah he would do this bit with um he would dress up dogs and tutus to help him with the weather or something like that which unfortunately is something that isn't outside the realm of possibility for a lot of local news stations so um i just didn't think that

was his brand though i don't know of anything on air that was over the top he was really the consummate and i would say like kind of filled the reason i think that it's been kind of emotional for so many people um who grew up in the you know western washington area is because he is he was sort of one of the last holdovers from a time when most of us were watching the same stuff on television like where everyone's parents were watching the news at 11 o'clock and there There was this kind of shared awareness of who, like I couldn't, and I say this with peace and love, I couldn't tell you who any of the local weather people are in Portland or Seattle anymore. But there was a period of time where almost everybody in Seattle knew who Steve Poole was. They knew who Gene Anderson was. They knew who, you know, Susan Hutchinson was. Like there was a period of time where there just wasn't as many, there weren't as many channels. And we all kind of, we all sort of were hanging around watching sort of the same stuff. and we know we knew who those people were and i don't want to get into like a things were more innocent back then but i feel like steve pool is kind of one of the last of that generation of folks who were kind of a big deal to everyone in the in the greater seattle area i just don't think that's ever going to happen again uh in like as far as the local meteorologist goes it just feels like it's much more of a kind of transact transactional thing now where if you even tune into the local tv weather first of all it's like why would you like all of that information is just so easily gotten and uh and and if you do i don't i mean maybe there's a a group of people that are still deeply connected to local television news but it seems like that group is getting smaller

and smaller here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man It's not from a female.

All right. Emails, V-mails. Yeah, let's try.

Things of that nature. Yeah. Here, I have a voicemail I'm going to play for you. We'll get through at least one of these today. This is a bit of a longer one, but this is a little bit of an admission slash apology from me as well. I was checking the voicemail line yesterday and listening to some messages people have left recently. But even after I listened to all the recent voicemails, I saw that the Google Mail or the Google, you know, voice system said you still have like 22 unread voicemails. I'm like, where are they? That doesn't seem right. I've been staying on top of this. So I scrolled, scrolled, scrolled back and I found that there was a period leading up to our TBTL-a-thon when everything was bananas for us, right? Like we were leaving APM, we were starting a new company, we were relaunching, we were planning the fundraiser.

I was battling various fraudulent unemployment claims on my account.

So this was around July of last summer and maybe June, July, and there was a clutch of voicemails that had not been listened to and they were quite entertaining. And one of them is from Listener Show. and i think this is just a wonderful voicemail at any time of year but just so you know like the energy around this voicemail is at the time we were trying

to figure out what we were going to do with all these surplus supplies of thank you gifts from american public media of course all of the lunch boxes which we loaded into a u-haul van and brought to the live show and forced upon listeners and and i believe we were also we did something with the tbtl tonight pants too i think we had a bunch of extras of those that we were maybe selling at

the show or something like that i tell you one quick thing about that so there's somebody that works at one of the schools that my mom works at as a security guard because let me tell you when it goes down yeah you want susie b in your corner yeah uh and there's somebody that works at one of the schools who's a 10 and i believe my mom brought this person a lunchbox from the like 8 000 lunchboxes that were at my parents house and my mom just casually this was during thanksgiving drop she goes yeah it was pretty dented up but um this this person didn't seem to mind and i was like we had enough lunchboxes that nobody needed a dented lunchbox yeah like there were there were pristine there were pristine lunchboxes available so to that uh wonderful person working in the school district over there with my mother you know who you are um thank you for uh supporting the show thank you for making me seem like a big deal to my mom and thank you for accepting a gift of a tbtl lunchbox that had a dent in it with with with gratitude and aplomb you you really didn't

have to do that although at this point there might not be undented ones right because we truly did like we we gave away all that we could possibly give away and then i think there were some pajama pants left over too and i i thought this is where you were going with this or the tonight pants i should say um didn't we get a a photo from i think a listener by way of john sklaroff who found like three pairs of them hanging in a in a goodwill or a thrift store somewhere around here like maybe yes maybe some of that surplus from the neptune theater ended up being donated which would be great although that's probably heartbreaking to some listeners who really wanted more tonight pants but we just didn't have the infrastructure to reship these things it's a more complicated

system than than you might think but well i mean as i said in response to that to you and john i'm just really glad they're not in a landfill i mean yeah absolutely yeah we don't need we don't need any more stuff going to the landfill and the i mean i don't know who's gonna buy those if they don't have a context for tbtl but there's something uh i either wanted them to end up in a kind of a goodwill or end up on um some kids living in a village somewhere who are wearing a um you know new england patriots world champions 2014 right you know famously those t-shirts that are printed up for both teams and then one doesn't win the super bowl i feel like the tonight pants would be a nice compliment to that level of t-shirt um because uh you know just i just like i just like the i like them being somehow in the ecosystem of clothing that's being worn without a lot of

context for it now i know you just threw that out as an example i'm not trying to sharpshoot but just to make sure just to make sure i'm like it wasn't that year i was totally guessing it would be well it wasn't that the year that because it would have been denver seahawks and denver lost So that would have been 2014.

Well, first of all, I didn't want to rub it in to our listeners in Denver. Although, boy, how the worms have turned.

I know.

Who knew?

I was re-informed this weekend.

Who knew that they'd be sitting pretty with old Rusty with Mr. Unlimited. But mostly what I was trying to remember was the year that the New England Patriots lost to the Giants on the David Tyree helmet catch. And maybe that was more like 2013. Okay. I was just like – I was throwing a dart, Andrew, and it wasn't landing in the triples.

Well, if you wanted to really inflict pain on ourselves, you could have said the 2015 Seahawks World Championships T-shirt.

Do you think you would remember that just instinctively that that was 2015?

Here's how I – and I think I'm right about that, by the way. Am I off by a year? Is it 2013 and 14 that we went or 14 and 15? The reason I think it was 14 and 15 is because of where I was in my life at that point, which was slaying it. No, that happened to be the two years I was down in L.A., and so I feel like 2014, the Seahawks won, and then 15, they lost. Was it consecutive years?

Yes, they played consecutive years. They won the first year. They lost the second year. By the way, the Super Bowl that I was thinking of was 2012, Andrew. Okay, so a couple years ago. Going on 12. It's just shocking to me that that was that long ago.

I also have a major problem talking about Super Bowl years because I'm not sure if the year is supposed to represent the season or the year that the Super Bowl was held in. It is one of the biggest conundrums of sports. For the biggest sports day as far as viewership is concerned and pop culture is concerned, how is it so confusing that the championship game is held in a different year than the season? It is so bizarre.

and that right and that also it has its own number that's roman numerals yes so that's a kind of

a third element to the confusion and the fact that i have absolutely no ability to i mean this is really i this was another big conversation at thanksgiving as you do when you gather with family was how many of us have been diagnosed with adhd and how much of us just have undiagnosed adhd and i don't i'm not trying to throw that around like jokingly but i definitely am i i'm There's a building sort of mountain of evidence that I probably have that. And I wonder if one of the things related to that kind of brain chemistry is almost an aggressive inability to retain dates and things. Like, I know that this show started in 2008. For some reason, that I know. Maybe just because it's just come up enough times. But like, there are so many other things that I could not even begin to tell you what even the year was that something happened. Talking about big moments in my own life, big moments in the Seahawks life. Like I would have never been able to tell you that 2015 was when the Seahawks actually won a Superbowl. Like it's, but it's, it's shocking to me when people know, I mean, I completely forgot yesterday was your birthday. It's shocking to me when people are able to map their world in terms of date, like specific dates that things happened or like, oh, well this person started working with us back in like, I don't know when I started working at places, let alone when someone else did. Like I'm just, and you could sort of chalk it up to maybe narcissism and a lack of kind of sort of taking in the rest of the world. I'm sure that's a little part of it, but I honestly just think it whiffs out of my brain for some reason that's almost like medical.

I'm really bad at it as well. And in fact, now I'm getting nervous about, maybe it was at 13 and 14 that they went or 14 and 15 is what I said originally, Because now I'm trying to remember, like, what was my last year at Cairo? That feels like that was probably 2012 or maybe 2013. It doesn't really matter. But I'm with you on that. Well, you did Schubert Dipko. I know. And this is not interesting. I mean, the thing is, I really want to play this voicemail from this show. But instead, I'm going to say something that is, like, super. The funny thing is that I'm going to say something that can be, like, super. if i don't say this carefully can seem very dismissive and insulting and i don't mean it that way but i feel like there are fewer people in my life right now who don't think that they have some sort of adhd tendencies or traits that i wonder if it's at a point now where because it is such the the the let's call them symptoms although i'm not that sure that that's the right word but some of the trademarks or symptoms of ADHD, they seem to be so vast and wide that everybody can identify them in some way. And I'm not saying that it's all bullshit, quite the opposite. I'm just wondering if it's one of those things that's almost more like a spectrum. Is there anybody who doesn't have symptoms and some people it's just more acute than others? Should we all just accept that we're probably somewhere that any human being who works with the imperfect minds that we were born with, with the imperfect chemicals? Like, is there anybody who's walking around out there just being like, I got it all figured out. My mental health is totally balanced. Like I don't have any bad days. Like that's ridiculous. Right. And so now I know I'm going pretty broad here, but I'm just wondering if like everybody has some sort of ADHD, if that's how we're sort of

defining it. I think that because I am a recognized expert on the topic of mental health and specifically attention hyperactivity disorder hyperactivity that would be a h d h by the way that's one of the number one signs you have it go ahead doc you can't um i my guess would be that uh that there's definitely a range like there are people that i know that are at like kind of a pretty far end of the spectrum um with with it being pretty pronounced just with really difficulty a lot of obvious difficulty kind of staying on task and staying with something and keeping track of things, et cetera. Then there are probably people that just have the kind of normal amount of what we might call scatterbrained-ness. And I guess what I would also throw in with absolutely no science behind this is that the world that we're living in has probably created this experience and feeling for a lot of people, whether or not we have anything kind of chemically going on in our brain in other words we are being there's just a lot being thrown at us informationally and emotionally and like in terms of the internet and social media and uh you know the power gloves and floppy disks and things like that that i would say this first of all there are certain kind of self-diagnoses that become very in vogue there was a period where everybody was hypoglycemic you know which i guess is maybe more medical than mental but like there are certainly things that happen where we all kind of start to think yeah that sounds like me whatever that thing is but I think that it also is has to be

to some degree related to what is going on in our all of our lives right now in terms of our digital life. It has to add to a certain feeling of being pulled in a million directions and attention spans kind of shortening. And, you know, like I was talking to Becca last night and I was lamenting the fact that, cause she is a very like she, if there's a person I know who doesn't have ADHD, it's her. You said, is anyone actually like able to just be in the world, and it would be her, it her. But I was like lamenting the fact that I kind of can't seem to get through a movie anymore. And she said, well, that's also me. And she is like the least on her phone person I know. She doesn't, you know, she just, she just is, I mean, her idea of like a hot, and I don't think she would mind me saying this, her idea of like a hot Tuesday night is like bombing through the New York Times crossword puzzle with some tea. Like, it's a very, like, she seems to live this version of life that I very much aspire to. And even she was like, yeah, I can't watch a movie anymore. So I just think that our, I think that the pace of digital life is certainly not helping this feeling we all have of being excessively scattered and feeling kind of like living in chaos.

Yeah. And again, I just want to reiterate again, because I know that, I mean, some people feel it very acutely. I've had serious conversations with people close to me who say like once I had this diagnosis, everything became clear to me like I could I could I could problem solve around my ADHD because I was able to give it a name and then I was able to recognize my behaviors. And then so I'm not saying that it's not important to have these conversations when I suggest that maybe everybody has a touch of it as it's currently defined right now. And identifying that could maybe be helpful as well. I hope I wasn't coming off of just being like, oh, it's just that everybody says they have it these days. But like if it's helpful to say that, like maybe everybody except Rebecca has has something like that. She can't watch a movie. She can't watch a damn movie. I don't know what's up with that. Perfect. What's up with that woman? Anyway, all of that is to say Way back in the summer of 2023 Listener's show had a bit of an adventure with her friends Involving some TBTL Do we have that kind of harp music? We're going back in time I do have a harp I'm going to have to dial it up here Let me see

Why don't they have that? Don't you think on the list of sample sound effects That they give me with my system Don't you think harp would be? I'm looking through here What do I have? This is not really a harp, but can we just play this for time travel? I could do better. That's called Charm. Ooh, that's even better.

Hi, this is Lister's show. I went out to the lake with some of my classmates yesterday, and I was sporting my classy TBTL munchbox and wearing my tonight pants, which I just, I mean, I guess I'm lazy. I also wear them as today pants. Anyways.

No judgment.

As soon as some of my classmates saw the lunchbox, they were just like, what is this? I hadn't seen an old metal lunchbox like this, and I don't know when. And what does it say? It says, too beautiful to live? too beautiful to live that typical response that sounds depressing who would have a lunchbox that says too beautiful to live and then i was like oh oh that's mine and i started trying to explain the podcast and i when i got up one of my classmates saw my pants and like flipped out and was like oh my god show there are pants there are pants on your pants those are meta pants your meta pants have pants on your pants i i need some of those and so i i started explaining that they were also related to the podcast and i started explaining uh like the saga of getting all of this swag and then trying to get it to the neftune theater and i started trying to explain what tbtl was and then their eyes all um kind of glazed over and they they changed the subject to other topics anyways i i thought it was funny and and i thought i would share and i i actually grabbed two pairs of tonight pants because i wasn't sure what size i might be and i i am going to give a pair of them to my friends who thought pants on pants was very meta and very cool so they're going to go out and multiply in the world yeah all right take care dummies

don't feed those after midnight we'll have a whole new batch don't get them wet i think what i would say first of all show thank you for the voicemail

I'm sorry that it took us so long to play it. And I would also say, Andrew, it's working, it's working. If we just keep generating questionable TBTL swag and putting it out into the universe, people will be forced to have conversations about the program. Will it convert anyone over to becoming a listener? Unknown. But will it at least create the possibility of someone becoming a listener? Also unknown. But I think we should still do it.

I think the important thing to notice is we are making more and more people's eyes glaze over. And that's important. That's the first step.

That's always been one of the main pillars of this program. One of the things we stand for is causing people to, to some degree, alienate their friends and loved ones, attempting to explain why they're carrying a lunchbox around with a drawing of us and Rudy on it.

It was Rudy on the today. Oh, on the lunchbox, on the lunch pail, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, Rudy. By the way, I don't know if I ever showed Rudy. By the way, update, Rudy is hale and hearty and recovering well from her. She had a little dental surgery for people that are still keeping track of the pod dog. But that was the best. That's the most flattering drawing of Rudy in history. That's Rudy on her frigging best day.

I would use this opportunity as well to mention that while we don't have Tonight Pants or Lunchboxes at the TBTL store, we do have the TBTL shop open. If you go to tbtl.net, you'll see it there prominently or go to, I believe, I don't want to give out the wrong address, but I'm pretty sure it's tbtl.net slash shop or slash store. And again, John Sklaroff designed most of the designs along with some of the listeners who submitted some designs on T-shirts and hoodies and stickers. And so check it out if you haven't already. I've been seeing, and again, thanks to John for sort of like reposting the stuff. A lot of listeners like taking photos of themselves in their T-shirts. I love it so much. It just, it feels so amazing to see all these smiling faces with TBTL gear on it. And again, the gear looks good. All credit to John and the listeners who helped with that because I didn't do shit and I'm just, I didn't rig shit, but it gives me a sense of less shame. So thank you.

Well, absolutely. I mean, I have to say like it really is. And this is, I think, ultimately what the whole project is about. It really brightens my day, Andrew, when I'm scrolling endlessly through Instagram and other places and I see a picture of some 10 who's excited because they got their their TBTL merch in the mail and they're, you know, wearing the outfit or have it laid out somewhere like that's just like it's it is a really, really fun thing to get to see. And it seems like it's going swimmingly over there. So if you haven't had a chance to check out the TBTL merch shop, please do. I'm curious, too, like, if we've gotten to the point where one Luke T-shirt has sold. I need to check on Luke Sklarov on that. He'll get him to send us some tallies. Would it be weird if I, you know, I'm very anti-wearing, like, Livewire shirts that have my name on them, except for maybe a little jog or something, like, because I would be mortified if someone caught me wearing a shirt with my name on it. Why is it that I feel like I would wear the Drawing of Me T-shirt? That seems like a way bigger attempt at a flex.

I know. Well, it's very stylized in a way that people might not recognize it as you right away. Also, people would be like, is that that guy? No, nobody would wear their own face on their shirt.

Exactly. Well, thanks, everyone, for listening. We are going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. So please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Hi, everybody. Things are kind of active outside the Kingdome, too. Looks like the first snowfall of the season for the Cascades. I'll tell you about that. And also the forecast for Cleveland coming up at 11.

Power out.