Muse

Can you be honest with me?

What is it about me that is, like,

that makes you not want to sit here?

Honestly? Yeah. Like, everything. Starting with your face first. Just, like, the expression on it is really bad. You sort of look like you're smelling something that doesn't smell good, or, like, you're, like, squinting even though you're wearing glasses. Like, your eyes don't work. You're effeminate, but not in, like, a good way. It's almost insulting to women, the way you're effeminate, because, like, you're not androgynous. You're just, like, soft and doughy. You don't look like you have bones under your body at all. You're just sort of like an old baby, you know? You just seem very uncomfortable. You know, like, a little bit. You're apologizing for your existence. Just...

That's a complete answer. T.B.T.L.

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd say, but if you thought a sausage couldn't really hurt anyone, frankly, think again.

I was just trying to find E.T.

E.T. Classic Spielberg. Weaver of dreams. I love when his finger lights up. That's how you can tell he's an alien. And his face. And his face. So, what are you working on these days? Eh, mostly I just sit around the house and complain about things.

Yeah? How's that working out for you?

I mean, I can't complain, so, you know. Is this a joke? Because if it is a joke, I just want to say that I get it. I get the joke and I'm in on it also. And it's hilarious.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Hey, where's the freaking gabagoo? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I don't know who that is, and I don't care to find out.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia, where we're seeing some blue skies, folks. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. Some clouds, but a lot of blue sky, and we are entering into a run of four or five just absolutely spectacular early spring days. I've been waiting for this moment for months, and it's finally here. It is noticeable inside me how different I feel knowing that we have good weather on the way and that we're going to have, you know, sunny days and nice lawn mowing weekends and everything's going to be okay, folks, because spring is here. It's springing and we've arrived at episode 4,161 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. I had a pretty memorable day, for me anyway, yesterday, down in Los Angeles. I guess Culver City, to be specific. I guess the Sony studio lot where they tape episodes of Jeopardy, to be extra specific. Never let me slip, because if I slip, then I'm slipping. It was a borderline religious experience. Walking around the stage there where they filmed Jeopardy and watching. A number of games being filmed. They tape like five or six games in an afternoon, and I was watching those and got to try out the buzzer and write my name in the little thing. It was pretty great.

Is this real life?

The other way that I like to spend my time when I'm not watching Jeopardy is cruising TikTok. I'm going to be a sit-down comedian on Tiki-Taki. But that might be difficult for me soon in these United States because the U.S. House of Representatives just passed basically a law, if you will, a measure saying that TikTok either needs to sell to a non-Chinese company or face a ban in the United States. And I can't decide if a lack of access to TikTok would be a great thing for me or a not-so-great thing, so we will talk about that. Oh, and we'll talk to this guy, longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I have a pitch for you, a good old-fashioned TBTL segment pitch. And I could have run this by you off air, but in case you don't like it, I want you to have to reject it.

You want me to have as few options as possible.

Exactly, and if you do reject it, then I want you to reject it in front of a large jury of our peers, our listeners, okay? So I know that you and I subscribe to some of the same kind of morning newsletter emails. You know, they have kind of like a bunch of a roundup of stories, and lots of times there's good content to talk about. I'm hoping you have not clicked on the one yet that comes from Time Magazine.

I don't get, oh, is that in, that's Time Magazine, but placed in an email from, like, Pocket.

Yeah, I think this is a Pocket, and I know that you get Pocket as well. So I'm asking you, as a friend and colleague, if we go with this idea, maybe in tomorrow's show or later on in the week, that you don't click on this. Because I think it works better if you do not read this in advance. But Time Magazine has a post, it's an eight-minute read, in case you're curious, how to respond to an insult according to therapists. And so what I need from you, this is the most dangerous game, Luko.

Andrew. Yeah? As the intro tape was playing, I was doing a thing that I tend to do, which is mindlessly scrolling on my phone.

You clicked on it.

No, I didn't. Oh, good. But I saw the headline as I was deleting. Let me go into my trash folder. Delete it. Burn it. Throw the phone away. Let's see. Trash. Okay, yeah. 9.47 a.m. From Pocket. how to respond to an insult comma according to thera dot dot dot yes and i as i was swiping left in my email program on my phone and hitting delete i thought actually that would be a good tbtl topic am i going to remember to go back into my trash and rescue this and bring it up on the show because i i can just speak for myself here i don't take criticism very well um and in fact was just complaining on the show the other day about somebody on the tbtl facebook page saying something that slightly hurt my feelings. Anyway, I saw this headline. I thought that'd be a good topic, but I didn't actually do the work to save this email. So thank you.

And yes, we should talk about it. Well, it's more than we should talk about it. You haven't even heard my pitch yet. So that's the headline. Listen, don't say less. Yeah, well, here's the pitch.

As the kids on the soon-to-be-banned TikTok say, you've got me, man.

And this is where it makes the segment both potentially amazing, but also very dangerous for us.

Oh no, I have a hunch.

I've read the comebacks. So basically there is a list of sort of like comeback phrases suggested by therapists, according to your email preview. I'm not a therapist, I'm a thera, comma, pissed. So anyway, what you need to do, and this is your homework assignment, is to come in tomorrow with about, I'm going to say, I think there's maybe seven or eight of these. You have to come in with like seven or eight insults that you're going to hurl my way. But you have to thread a needle here because I'm a sensitive boy. I'm a thin-skinned boy.

They have to be specific enough that they're kind of funny, but not so specific that they're hurtful.

Exactly. So can you, I mean, if you like this idea, And my pitch to you is, don't read this article. I've got it in front of me. I've got the lists of comebacks and explanations of how they should work.

Well, it's a light week for me. So I should definitely, let's try to come up with a segment where I have to do homework.

Just, is it really that hard to come up with insults for me, Luke? I mean, trust me, I can put you in touch with some people I went to school with.

Can they be, let me, no, I don't, are you kidding me? Is it that hard? You just, you've just framed why it's so hard to come up with insults for you. If I say to you, like, you know, your mom wears combat boots. Hey, hey, hey, you know what? I can come up with seven very, very general, like, kind of like, you know, odd dry up sort of 1960s eras, 1960s era, like, insults. But are those as interesting as if I try to come up with insults that are more Andrew specific, but then that but that are not so Andrew specific or so Andrew accurate that they are, in fact, slightly hurtful.

You could come in with, is that your face or did your neck throw up? Uh-huh. That could be that. Yeah. Then I would say this.

No, don't do any of your face or is your neck blowing a bubble? Oh, I've never heard that one. That was, we had that one when you were born, you know, the doctor slapped your face. Save it, Luke. Bottle it. Bottle it for the segment. So they can be like, they can be this level of insult.

I think that's fine. I just come up with something on the fly. I just like the idea of you, you know, insulting me however you choose to do that. And I will go into this with the thickest skin I can muster. I'll tell you what. I'll put the homework on myself. I will thicken my skin tonight. I'll see if they have any skin thickener.

There's a guy doing that on TikTok that I'm always tempted to pull drops from him, but I don't know what his kind of full mental state is. So I want to make sure his thing is he is a guy who and he doesn't have like millions of views, but his thing is he likes to fancy himself as the guy who can punch rocks. And and like so he'll just put these videos up where he's and it's not even that's one of the reasons. responses that therapists recommend by the way you insult me and i say punch rock punch rocks he's like in his little preamble or his little boilerplate will go like hey hey i'm hey i'm ronnie um i'm the guy that punches rocks currently in day 64 of putting horse medicine on my hands to try to make them tougher oh wow yeah and that's the part that got me is this an ivermectin thing are there i don't do horses just have the best medicines horses have the best medicines there's something about the inside of a horse medicine that's good for the outside of a rock puncher's hand he's he literally goes like i'm so and so the guy who punches rocks this is day 63 of me putting horse medicine on my hands to try to make them tougher and it's just like there's so much to unpack from that statement and i've so then of course i end up scrolling back into his video history to see is he really like his thing is he I can punch a rock until it basically turns into gravel or dust whoa but I don't know if that's really what's happening I mean he doesn't punch it and he's not making the I don't think his his claim is you know hand me a boulder I'm gonna punch it and it's gonna turn into dust what he does is he'll just repetitively punch yeah yeah stuff yeah until it kind of breaks down over time and then eventually gets smaller and smaller and smaller truthfully it's not even even his version of it it's not super convincing it's definitely something i wouldn't want to do and something that my these precious podcasters hands would not be able to do so he does have some sort of physical ability that i don't have but it's not quite i think as i don't think it's quite as unique as maybe he's thinking it is but it's the horse medicine part yeah or is it dog medicine i gotta find i gotta go back and find this guy Anyway, yeah, that's one of the many reasons I hope that the United States Senate will please shoot down this bill vetoing TikTok. Because how else will I get my videos of guys punching rocks who are putting horse medicine on their hands so that their hands become tougher?

We're going to talk about that later in the show, right? Like, I won't get into that now. We're going to talk about it right now.

It depends. Do you want me to go? Do you want me to wax rhapsodic about my experience at Jeopardy now or later?

Well, we have time for both. So I guess we're here now. So I guess we can slide right into this. Yeah, I'm so slide right into TikTok. Slide right into TikTok as you brought it up, I guess. I'm not trying to we have we have time to talk about it all today, I think. But I'm just weirdly confused about this story. And I feel like I'm generally generally read into it. I'm not saying I took a deep dive on it. I've read. I don't know. What did you send me today? A Washington Post piece. I heard people talking about it on Morning Edition. Like, I generally know this TikTok congressional story, but I just feel like there are such nobody's explaining what they're truly worried about well in the press. Or maybe you've heard better than I have. Like, I don't understand other than collecting our data and its ties to a foreign government, a foreign government that the U.S. is not traditionally friendly with. I don't understand like what nobody's painted like the worst case scenario of what happens if we don't stop TikTok.

You know, that's a really good question. And I don't know the answer to that. And you're right. It's not. It's just being taken as a given that China having a bunch of personal data on Americans is something that they could then use against us in some way. But that what that would look like, I've never seen that described. It's just we don't want the communist Chinese government, the red Chinese.

Yeah, they're starting to bring in the word communist. You're hearing the word communist more than ever now, right? Yeah, it's back, baby.

Yeah, like, you're right. I don't, I think it's just taken as kind of a gospel truth that China wishes us ill, and if they have more of our information, our personal information and our behavioral patterns and all the things that they can analyze now because of how many of us are using TikTok, that somehow that just gives them a bunch of info that we don't want them to have. I guess, yeah, I haven't, like, no one said they're going to build robots that look like us, and they're going to, like, sneak them across the southern border, and then, like, a Luke-esque robot is going to be operating in the U.S., and it'll be able to operate effectively because it knows that I've been looking at the rock puncher. like what yeah what what are they actually going to do with the information um if if things go as badly as as the people worried about it uh are worried i don't know i don't know the answer what i think is so interesting too is this clearly breaks down along the lines of people who do and do not give a shit about tiktok i.e as users of it like sure yeah you know what i mean like the people who it would be like, honestly, for me, it'd be like.

If they outlawed Facebook, I would not give a whit because I don't go on Facebook. So it's just like it's like the people like there's a there's a pretty young, I think, congressman, relatively new congressman. I'm thinking his name is Max Frost out of Florida. Ironic. Who's one of the I think he's you know, he's he's against this tick tock ban. And I believe the quote in The New York Times was I'm not just a no, I'm a hell no on this. And it's probably not a coincidence that I think he might be under the age of 30 and probably in the generation of people who use TikTok a lot. It's also extra sort of confusing because the former president of this country, who we're obviously no fans of, is against the ban. Joe Biden is for this. Well, basically for forcing ByteDance, the parent company, to sell to a non-Chinese interest. so the the white house is in favor of this thing that congress is doing which brings together the likes of nancy pelosi and like chip roy of texas and so and then you've got like uh you know the former president on the side of of saying let's not ban it so i don't really i i do not want to be in league with him at all but i do think that this really to some degree comes down to are you a person who spends any time at all going on tiktok and does it feel like it adds any value to your life and if you if the answer is yes you're probably like hey let me continue to have access to this and if you're somebody like nancy pelosi who couldn't probably pick a tiktok out from a you know taco time you don't care about it and i'm not trying to be mean to old nancy pelosi but it's just like i think this really breaks down along generational lines in a lot of ways and

user lines and maybe that's one of the reasons i'm having trouble wrapping my head around this because i don't go on tiktok like my life would not be significantly different i mean i guess we'd miss out on some intro tape that you would send me I'm not I don't have a strong feeling on this one way or the other I'm generally confused and I'm kind of glad you brought up the Trump angle because I'll tell you what I had a line of of thought on this that then I heard a quote from Trump and I'm like oh god am I am I being Trumpy but like first of all Trump was one of the first politicians to raise the specter of a TikTok ban when he was in office you know however many years ago and he's you know so you can't really look to him for some steady eddie analysis on this right but really yeah right on let me get my chair i need to be sitting down so so now he's saying okay you know i'm against this this legislation purely for whatever he sees as the political advantage of that but of that standpoint but then at the same point saying we should we should eliminate totally facebook because he sees facebook as as you know an obstacle to his goals or whatever and so he's just got you know whatever that's dictator shit but um for me let's bring it back to small d dictatorship with me um i got at least could you tell could you tell i got lost there and what i was saying for a second but before i heard those quotes i'm listening to the story morning edition or whatever i'm thinking about it and i'm thinking well we see this mass collection of u.s user data as a bit of a threat and i understand that when you're talking about geopolitical situations that's different than just handing facebook over all this information because they're here and supposedly there are checks and balances on what happens here in the united states as as we are supposed to have oversight over businesses but here's what i'm getting at i'm like i know that tiktok is you know a much wider use by young people and has more um influence on culture these days than um than twitter or what is now called x but why in the world and this is what i'm getting to why in the world do i trust elon musk with everybody's information just because he's an american as opposed to right the chinese government and i think there's probably a good answer to that but that's what my brain sort of keeps on bumping up against oh our country and the and the billionaires who are in charge of all of our data in this country are so great that the true the true risk is communist China I mean they all seem

pretty freaking dangerous to me yeah and I don't know if we can you know necessarily trust the Chinese government at their word but they created something called Project Texas which is their plan to take over the state of Texas which I have mixed feelings about no it's it's it's there I believe it's it's sort of bite dances um attempt to appease u.s regulators and and and you know u.s lawmakers that are worried about this basically what they're saying is we've been keeping all of the u.s data in this other special place we have firewalled it off a lock box and we're put in a lock box and and and and so you don't have to worry about this because like a we don't have bad intentions. B, we're not the Chinese government, even though we operate out of China and everything in China. is presumably under the control or at least they can be easily brought under the control of the Chinese government but they're like we're not the Chinese government we have no bad intention with the data we're also like putting your data in a lock box we're calling operation Texas or something

so that's weird that's the operation Texas is the secured information I believe so I can double

check this but I think that's there um uh I think that that is is let's see TikTok has spent more than one billion dollars on an extensive plan known as project texas that aims to handle sensitive u.s user data separately from the rest of the company's operations that plan has been under review by a panel known as the committee on foreign investment in the united states or cephas named for bo cephas hank williams jr um no but that would be great oh yeah the slogan for project texas is don't trade on memes and we got a show title but um so the this this this organization or this agency in the united states that's supposed to be looking around because of course the other thing is whether if it's not tiktok it's um my dad and i were talking about this this morning uh because walt is out here uh helping me working on house stuff like just how many different things in our society like american society whether it's our cell phone towers or computers or cell phones or this that the other has a really strong kind of connection to china is either made in china or the you know it's run by something that we are at this point very very uh reliant on on on things that are made in china or that china would have the ability to maybe stop the supply of to us or turn them off remotely or whatever that's why there was a whole thing about cell phone towers and and laws around should we continue to buy the parts literally from china because then we're kind of over a barrel so there's a whole organization trying to look at everything and one of the things they're looking at is project texas and they're saying it doesn't actually solve the problem that we have of the chinese government of the red communist chinese government um uh having all of our data so it sounds like this isn't going to go

very far in the senate though right like they don't even well it's got bipartisan support i mean

like look the the the way the times wrote it up was it faces strong headwinds in the senate but then it also said those strong headwinds apparently are chuck schumer hasn't weighed in on it yet it wasn't chuck schumer saying absolutely no way it just and i mean the fact that the president says he wants to sign it and that it passed like overwhelmingly in the house and again brought together the strangest of bedfellows again i would say the organizing principle is people who don't give a shit about tiktok um and uh or you know just don't use it day to day and uh and so i i don't know i mean the i think the bigger challenge is in the courts probably because even if it's because again trump tried to do something like this and it got totally hung up in the courts very quickly on kind of like first amendment questions so i i i think it's unlikely at least according to like the three articles i read this morning um uh i think it's pretty unlikely that like i will be turning on my phone in four months and i won't be able to i won't be able to do my sweet sweet scrolling on tiktok but it does raise this larger question and and again you're pointing out something that's that's worth thinking about which is like what is the we're just taking it as a as a notion that it's somehow worse that the chinese folks would have our information than elon musk have our information and i i would i guess i would like none of them to have my information but also i i i can't be trusted with my thoughts for any amount of time and i need to do my i need to do my scrolling and i will say this too on this show and even on the other shows that i work on uh particularly live wire that what tiktok does what is it does connect me up with a, a portion or an age cohort of the culture that I would otherwise be very disconnected from. Uh-huh. Sure. And on the one hand, I feel kind of embarrassed about that because it's just like, it's time for me, you know, to, it's time for me to step to the side and to just completely stop knowing what Riz is. Like, there's no, I shouldn't know what Riz is. It's not important.

I think you should, I think it's good to know those things. I think it's important not to be the cringy older guy who then tries to embrace them and use them in his own life. And you're not doing that.

Sure, sure. I'll take that assessment.

With one exception of using deadass one time that I believe you got smacked around on Twitter about. Remember that whole thing?

I didn't know that I got smacked around on Twitter. You brought that to me.

That was a topic on TBTL, I mean, forever ago. You used the word deadass, and then some people jumped on that just saying, like, you should not be using that.

I'm trying to find you saying deadass, you're high.

That's why you got that drop from that conversation. I'm like, I only know that phrase from one Michael Christmas song where he says that and then.

Of course, you weaponize that against me. The way China will weaponize TikTok against the U.S. and U.S. citizens. So there it is. Full circle.

I do think that for me, yeah, I do think that TikTok is actually a very valuable sort of portal, if you will, into a bunch of actually a bunch of worlds that I just would not otherwise know about, have access to groups of people of sort of different interests. you know people that are into whatever they might be into different versions of life like it i guess that this could happen also on facebook if you were the kind of person who was able to i mean the whole issue with facebook as i understand it is it just starts delivering you massive amounts of only the kind of content and conversation that you've shown any interest in so it has a way of sort of ossifying our beliefs and thoughts because instead of giving you a variety of things it starts just giving you one kind of thing because that's the kind of thing you've you've like tick tock is weirdly not that way in my experience like it just goes through these life cycles like i'll just be getting for a particular day i'll just be getting you know a certain kind of corner of tick tock of people that are really into one kind of thing and it's not you know i can't think of a great example off the top of my head but it's quite varied by age by race by what um and you really see the different the different i guess you could say like subgroups and niches And you kind of pick up stuff from like, oh, you know, people in their 20s who are into skateboarding are using a certain kind of music in their videos or, you know, people of color who are this age are posting videos where they're maybe using this kind of writing on the screen and talking about it. Or, you know what I mean? Like it tends to get, it tend, there tends to be these patterns that emerge and it's views again into these different worlds that I would just never have in my normal life. And I do feel like that actually enriches my experience in a way that none of the other social media really does for me, because again, a lot of the other stuff tends to just deliver the stuff I'm already into. Like I cannot on Instagram, I cannot get away from expandable dining room table content now because one time I clicked on an ad because I was looking for a kind of a smallish dining room table for this little eating area in my house.

Like I just, I feel like Instagram, you're saying you're getting those Instagram ads. Yeah.

I mean, I'll give TikTok this. None of the ads are appealing to me. Like, like it's weird. And maybe it's because I don't ever post anything on Instagram. It only exists for me to view other people doing stuff, but I will say Instagram, the ads on Instagram have me completely figured out it to a degree. That's frustrating because it drives my behaviors. I buy things all the time off of Instagram. Um, probably because I have some sort of a hole in my soul that I think will, I will fill with this thing, but they have figured out the kind of ads to hit me with for the kind of products that I'm likely to click through on TikTok it's none of that TikTok is the worst Advertising algorithm I've ever seen It's never shown me anything I want to buy which is also kind of weird Right for a very successful company

Yeah but to separate out here The advertising You got to You must Keep them separated But to separate out Here the algorithm for the ads Versus the actual content I'm kind of surprised to hear you say to describe the user experience as far as taking in content in that way because i like i've heard from listeners directly like kind of just chatting on various public social media probably slack in this case like talking about how their experience with tiktok could not be more different than your experience with tiktok because it is literally like sort of fed to you in this way and so we have a lot of listeners who are like i remember there was a period when tick when you were new to tiktok and you were like feeling a little bit sheepish because they were feeding you a lot of like young people dancing in ways that were slightly hornier than you were like completely comfortable with given who you were but like you know they sort of came in that wave and other people were just like that's so funny i've never seen anything like that i'm just getting nothing but plant content you know because i like plants and now that's all i see is plant and knitting or whatever you know what i mean so in a certain way the the whole one of the selling points of tick tock is that it does find you where you are and maybe your experience with seeing sort of various subcultures in this way speaks well to the way you use tick tock but actually generally speaking doesn't it sort of seem that it is actually programmed more like you have less that was my experience when I first logged on to tick tock you can tell I'm young because I say I logged on to tick tock the first time I logged into tick tock I found it very frustrating that I couldn't find I couldn't seek out content that I wanted as well because it was more just like hey just don't worry about anything

Andrew, just take the ride. I'm tick tock. I'll take you on a ride here. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm just, what I'm doing as you're talking is I've actually opened up tick tock on my phone just to see what it's giving me. Um, and, uh, and just on today, because like this here on this Wednesday, because it really, for me, it does vary and it goes, it cycles through things. It'll be a lot of one, it'll be home improvement or home remodeling Because I've been, maybe part of what it is If you subscribe, if you start following someone That's kind of over-accounted for But like, one of the things I'm very fascinated with Is people cooking elaborate meals in jail

Oh, okay, yeah, Prezine, huh?

Prezine, but on levels that we could have never known about Back in the day when we talked Prezine Because what we were talking about, Lo, those many years ago When we were still a radio show was like you know things you could get out of the vending machine and then i don't know kind of more or less i think combining ingredients out of the vending machine but the cooking the actual cooking that a lot of guys are doing what happens is i get the sense that if you have a cell i don't know if you have to be by yourself in there or not but like if there's a surface like maybe there's a kind of a little metal desk that's like built into the wall it's like attached to the concrete wall if you decide you're not going to use it as a desk well that's a metal cooktop and what guys will do is they will basically like over time kind of scrape all the paint off to where it's just metal again they will make these like um kind of sterno things with toilet paper that they wrap elaborately and put a wick in and they make these basically these like little heating devices that if you light enough of them underneath the metal you've created a huge griddle top and like the the food that gets cooked is just fascinating to me it looks terrible i feel like i want to i want to i want to comment and go i would leave the hot cheetos out of that sandwich sir it looks it like looked pretty good up to a point and then you went too far but anyway i get a lot like this is somebody i'm seeing somebody who's frying chicken i don't know if You can actually see this. It's a guy who's frying chicken in what looks like a wastebasket using a stinger. So a stinger is basically like any kind of electrical cord that could have been for anything that has been cut and separated. So what it is basically is just electricity. And you drop it into water if you want to boil it. You drop it into oil if you want to cook it.

You plug it into the wall and then you take the raw end and you drop the two.

And it's just applying electricity, i.e. heat, to whatever you're trying to do. So I've got that going. Then next up, let's see This is an ad for Some kind of walking treadmill And then next up is I get a lot of this too It's just clips of Stephen Colbert And that's because I actually don't even follow this But I let them play because I'm a big fan Next up, this is pretty funny It's a clip of a guy That Camaro Kev and I are obsessed with Named Don West Don West used to hawk baseball cards On like QVC Actually I think it was the kind of Shopping channel you could get on Like late at night on a Saturday It would somehow come on like the regular TV station And he would always yell Jam mint tins Which was some particular kind of mint Like Really good condition like baseball card Or whatever let's see And then just like a very Real estate listing for a very expensive house In Los Angeles

Is that an ad or is that content?

No. Well, it's somebody who is a real estate agent in Southern California who is kind of doing a real estate ad, but it's not sponsored content. And then let's see here. A lot of this now happening, which is a woman in her car talking about either something bad that an ex did to her or a horrible date she went on. That's really, there's a very, very, very popular series of videos from a woman right now that was called like, who the hell did I marry or something? Have you seen this burbled up into even your awareness? Nope. A woman was married to a guy for some amount of time and did not realize that he had made up everything about his life. He had lied about his employment. He had lied about his family. He was having pretend, apparently, according to her, pretend phone conversations every day with friends and family where there was no one on the other side of the call. And he would just walk around the house in these one way conversations so as to establish this whole life that he really didn't have.

This did burble its way up. I didn't I didn't see it. But like I've heard people talking about it on podcasts because there were like a few of them.

kind of happened all at the same time there was another one involving i believe a a man who had a twin brother and was sort of scamming his wife as well i didn't hear about that way yeah there were kind of a couple at the same time yeah but i don't i don't know the details on that yeah so so and you're saying that sort of spawned even more like kind of people to make this content

of being like well check out my story it's yes it's there's it's a very big it's a very big part of the content now basically it's and it's typically women talking about just like um really terrible dates they've just been on they're usually like sitting in their car or sitting in their in their house with a glass of wine having just come back from a horrible date or talking about the the lengths uh that some ex of theirs went to uh to deceive them in some way or other um and anyway this is not paid off very well but i guess i was just trying to i was trying to get an assessment of what this morning looks like for me because it does feel i again i'll just i'll say this last thing and then i'll stop uh because i'm boring even myself here oh by the way i also get a lot of like rogan adjacent stuff not because i'm particularly fond of joe rogan but because every once in a while i'll let something play because i find it interesting whether it's like a huberman lab clip this guy andrew huberman now has a podcast that's really popular and he i think kind of blew up from being a guest on rogan he's a stanford like ophthalmologist or something but i'll get a lot of this kind of like a doctor of something sitting in a podcasting studio explaining you know that really like you know we should all be eating more red meat and drinking whiskey or something i don't know it's always like something that's kind of counterintuitive or slightly heterodox in the health and wellness space Anyway, all I'm trying to say is TikTok, for all of its faults and for the fact that I may be giving my most valuable virginal data, my special gift, I may be giving it over to the Chinese government. It has really, I think, enriched my life in a way that other social media has not over the years Because it has allowed me to see into the experience of a bunch of people that oftentimes look really different from me In fact, what I would say, the thing I'm least likely to watch on TikTok is a 45-year-old white guy those hold like a video where a guy who looks like me is just talking to you about like you know i don't know just kind of like hey here's what i'm like here's what i don't like when i'm on a date with some whatever it is it's even though i mentioned the rogan stuff that's really not primarily what i'm looking at funnily enough the thing i'm least interested on tiktok is stuff like me what i'm most interested is people that look nothing like me people that are like talking about some experience that i have no frame of reference for that's the stuff that's interesting and i we'll be honest with you, that's unique because I don't tend to pick up magazines that are written by and about people who look different than me. And I don't tend to there's a lot of the wider culture that I don't engage with because it's not part of my lived experience. And it kind of feels like it's sort of a different scene. TikTok is not like that for me, oddly enough. I want to know what people who are way different than me are doing. Another interesting thing about this,

I think specifically, I find this interesting, not so much about the platform, but about specifically your relationship with the platform Luke is I feel like with others so in you know just tell me if I'm wrong about this but having known you um for pretty well for a long time I feel like uh the greater appeal for you on a platform let's say specifically Twitter was your engagement with it the stuff that you produced and then the the endorphin hits that you would get as you would see things either be successful or less successful through likes and engagement and all that and um since you say goodbye to twitter well whatever that was two years ago now probably um and you've switched more of your your attention over to um tick tock you don't seem to have any i mean i have one tick tock i think i made once because i just wanted to see how it worked it's basically just staring at water or something like that um but uh have you even done that much on tick tock i don't think you've created anything i made one tick tock

were you staring at water i wasn't staring at water i feel like you had already accomplished everything that there was to accomplish in that space it's true we need our own brands the one tick tock that i made if i go to my profile uh which by the way my profile photo is a picture of former minnesota vikings quarterback kirk cousins doing some kind of like neurofeedback program that he was it's just like a very funny picture he's wearing looks like a bandana of neurofeedback little electrodes because he was in the quarterback show when he was in that quarterback show but the one uh uh post that i have uh that i have put up because there was this again this trend

Where typically, you know, kind of women of a certain age, young women, maybe in their, you know, 20s or early 30s would have a picture of them next to or nearby their significant other, their boyfriend or husband. And it would be the kind of thing where they're just taking a picture in the kitchen. He doesn't even know he's in the photo. And it would be kind of a, as they say, a flex. It would be this person saying, like, I snagged this dude and you didn't. And and therefore I am, you know, I'm proud of myself over this. And this particular little photo was from a woman said, I pulled him by hanging out with him one time. And it's a picture of her. She appears to be pregnant. And then this kind of like her dude in the background, he's just like in the kitchen doing something. She's like, I pulled him by hanging out with him one time, comma, you could never be me respectfully. And then I was so struck by the photo of her guy in the background. and um just what appeared to me to be um his just his deep availability to really most people out there if that makes any sense and by the way i'm not this isn't about jamal adams the situation a little bit i did in the direction of this dude i kind of yikesed him a little bit and and what i will say is both of these people are conventionally fine looking this isn't like me shaming somebody because of their body uh type or or their you know what i perceive to be their kind of neurotypicalness like this you know she's a very conventionally attractive woman he's a conventionally fine looking guy he just looks like a real derp and like you know just your classic like he's got a couple zins a couple zins in you know kind of just like uh just looks like a normal derpy guy from somewhere in middle america nothing wrong with that but the idea that that this was The flex that this that this particular TikToker wanted to put out there I just thought it was really funny so my Post my one and only post Andrew is Just a screenshot of her With that her saying Her guy and then if you scroll over it's just a real Close-up picture on the dude That's it no I didn't write anything it's just

Kind of like you just use you used The you were able just sort of like kind of like Repost that actual Content but you were able to zoom in on the guy's Face like yes in post

exactly and i um this is my one and only post which was literally like you said it was just to kind of try to learn the technology it has 15 hearts so it's getting out there i think we can agree it's going viral nice and that's it that's the one only post i did i'll probably delete it at some point i haven't actually thought about it until this conversation but you're right my oddly enough my relationship with with tiktok is so radically different than my relationship with Twitter was because you're right what I loved about Twitter I mean I did like reading things and I learned a lot on there and would see links to articles that were interesting and and certainly illuminating but mostly what it was was me getting a little bit drunk on an airplane and trying to think of a funny tweet putting it out there and then getting pretty jazzed if some if a large number of people were interacting with the content or if on a great day Richard Marx said this is a great tweet as once happened i don't even remember what the tweet was but it was totally like performative on my part it was totally about me being like look at this thing look at this observation that i had or this funny thing and and and getting a lot of good like uh getting a lot of good feelings off of a lot of dopamine off of the responses and that's completely different with this tiktok situation where i never post anything it's not about people not about me going like hey guess what? I have this great thought. It's totally me just kind of being a bit of an anthropologist through these worlds of all the different kinds of things that people are doing out there and ways that they talk, the kind of language that they use, again, the kind of music that they put under the stuff, the way the video is cut off in a certain way, or the kind of backdrops that they use. All of it is really interesting to me, but as a consumer of it,

not as a performer of it i'm gonna this is such a terrible way to end this segment we should just ended it there that was a good wrap up but now i'm gonna do the tbtl thing and continue this conversation and try to describe something very difficult to describe that if you haven't seen this is going to be awful but um i follow again to to reiterate the joke that everybody makes uh i don't follow tiktok but i see the important stuff when it migrates over to instagram like a real old right reels exactly and i follow uh sarah spain who is or was with espn um and um she shared something yesterday from tiktok which is she said this is the beauty of tiktok right here to see how the community kind of comes together around something cringy and makes it into something beautiful and apparently you might even know this source material although there's so much stuff out there i wouldn't be surprised if you don't but apparently there was some sort of some sort of guy who's

seemed a little bit nerdy but very self-confident and apparently this video went viral for its cringiness because he says hey happy star wars day everybody and also this is the perfect time to introduce you to my new girlfriend and he's like kind of he's got her in the frame but he's sort of gripping her in this way that like really makes it seem like she is sort of just like an acquisition she almost looks like a ventriloquist dummy she looks a little bit uncomfortable and he's so excited to show off his girlfriend and like literally that's all i know of the original video it's just like happy star wars to everybody this is the perfect opportunity to show off my new girlfriend and it seems sort of objectify um or whatever and just generally cringe and so what happens is apparently one person takes his video and sort of expands it out a little bit so that they could add their own arm to it they put on the same shirt he has on or something and you see that he's kind of like got i don't know maybe a toy pistol to her or something like he's holding her hostage and then somebody else takes that and expands it out and you see that they they add their own wrists to it and she you see that she's bound at the wrists and it keeps going until eventually like you have somebody pretending like they're outside the door saying this isn't cool let her go let her go people are like flooding out of school buses with a bunch of toy guns like they're raiding the house to save her somebody then cuts in a politician saying my fellow americans We've heard the news of the hostage situation and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And again, as somebody who does not like spend any time on TikTok at all, this little argument for seeing how like you can sort of take something that was like cringy and turn in just the hive mind and the creativity again. Like I get really I know I've said this a lot. I don't know why I need to take it here, but I just get so angry when I think about these youngish people because I know everybody is making that's kind of the sentence, right?

What's that? You get so angry when you think about these youngish people.

I get so angry when I think about these youngish people. That's the Andy Rooney in me. No, I get really cranky when people are like, I don't know, man, comedy's dead. You can't say anything anymore, whatever. And again, even like Levitard's a little bit like that. And it drives me bananas because I'm like, no, no, I think if you look to TikTok, which clearly I don't do enough, you see that there is brilliance. There is so much funny, amazing brilliance. And there's so many more outlets for people to be funny legitimately. And there's tons of bad shit out there, too, that is cringy and you can pass over it. But the good stuff kind of gets elevated. It's just not in the platforms that the old guys used to appreciate.

And it's not necessarily Dave Chappelle standing on a stage talking to a microphone. Yeah. There are levels of comedy, particularly on TikTok, that are so visual that have to do with one kind of like, you know, like you just kind of described and like I've always really thought was cool about this particular platform is the iterative process. the way that a joke starts out one thing and then it just keeps i mean literally like you can throughout a day you can watch it evolve and the there's a particular song that's being used as the as the kind of the soundtrack to whatever this particular meme or joke is and then someone re-records the song but in a kind of a different style like maybe they do a folk version of it and but that's a change some of the lyrics for some reason and then that becomes the new like The layers of different jokes that get kind of layered on and the tags, you might say, to use an old comedy term, and the iterative process of it is so unbelievably creative and funny to me. And not something that you can easily just take and put on a stage somewhere and perform it as what we would call comedy or even make a TV show about it or even make a digital short about it. It's so hyper-specific to this medium. Yeah. Very specific to the medium. You could say Reels and TikTok are kind of the same thing. I think they're basically – which, by the way, this is why Trump is against banning TikTok because my first thought was, I was like, well, if they ban TikTok, what will I do? I was like, well, I'll probably just end up on Reels because that's TikTok essentially. And then people will just start being on there. But, of course, that's Facebook.

Yeah, then it's Zuckerberg and, like, again.

Right. So it's kind of it's like, but but but anyway, yeah, I all of that is to say, I don't really know how I feel about this, because something about saying it doesn't matter at all that we're all or at least those of us on TikTok are parting with, I'm sure, all kinds of personal. Like, for instance, they know that I look essentially like Kirk Cousins doing a neurofeedback. Right. That's the Chinese. Xi Jinping has that on me now. if you are looking for something to augment your tbtl listening with i cannot recommend the sporkful highly enough you know about this show right produced by friend of the show and friend of me dan pashman they like to say that it is a show for eaters not for foodies you don't have to know a lot about food you just have to enjoy the experience of putting food in your mouth and chomping down on it and swallowing it um i'm very jealous of this other

thing that dan did a while ago he invented a new kind of pasta it's called cascatelli i've bought it in the store and then made stuff with it it's amazing it's delicious it's toothsome it's all the things that dan was trying to set out to do when he invented his own pasta uh they talk about all kinds of interesting stuff on the sporkful like uh why is the shallot super special is there such a thing as a halal pork what kind of fast food should you eat on vacation and stuff like that We love Dan. You're going to love the Sporkful. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

We was hoping for some razzle-dazzle. Razzle-dazzle. That's right, man. Razzle-dazzle.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready.

Ready.

Go. Everybody razzle-dazzle.

Everybody razzle-dazzle.

Before you start talking here, Luke, I need some positive feedback here.

You really took advantage of the program that we're using where we can see each other.

I held up a single finger right into the camera.

Big old finger up to the camera so that I knew that you could not have used that tool to stop me as of like three weeks ago.

I wasn't even sure if you saw it. Sorry to step on you, but I wanted to know if you noticed the back-timed ring out on that Sporkful promo that we just heard. if it gave you old-school public radio production vibes.

It was really good. The problem was my brain was distracted because of something that I said, because I tend to listen for my own performance.

Oh, okay.

Something I said at the end of that promo, which if I launch into this, it will, first of all, further embarrass myself and the program by trying to talk about tech and platforms and things. And also, this will be a six-hour episode because we haven't even gotten to the Dazzling Donors yet. But I will just say this, remind me to circle back on the topic of wherever you get your podcasts and how that is, I believe the writer Anil Dash said, wherever you get your podcasts is a very powerful statement about the media. Remind me to talk to you about that. Okay, that sounds good. In the meantime, though, remind me to thank our first dazzling donor today. Of course, these are the incredible, generous people who are supporting TBTL, keeping us going with a donation of dough that is truly dazzling. We're talking about Leslie Tunstall in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of my very favorite places and one of my very favorite people. We've known Leslie for years. Leslie says, Too Beautiful to Live is a life preserver. It's a rescue ring, a lifeboat, a life jacket, an oxygen mask. It's a rescue dinghy, a guiding buoy, a lighthouse beacon, a torch in the stormy darkness. I'm not sure how this accolade somehow morphed into a maritime theme, Leslie writes. Maybe it's because of that damn blue logo with Luke and Andrew sitting in a rowboat with oversized heads and puny hands and wrists and pointy knees. That's exactly why. By the way, in the words of Coolio.

They kept saying, like, in the art department at 8 p.m., they said, are the knees pointy enough? We said, no, make them pointier.

And make the heads bigger, please. Yes. Um, Leslie, uh, this is exactly why you're talking maritime terms when you're talking TBTL, because of course, if you look at that little boat we're in, it's the USS Friendship. The idea of this show being, we're all about trying to cure global loneliness, or at very least make friends with you, all the listeners and help you become friends with each other. So this is all part of a very intentional branding project and it's worked well on Leslie. Leslie says, I love both hosts as much as any regular neurotic parasocial fan or groupie could. I love Luke for the story of running buck naked frantically throughout his half-constructed bungalow, searching madly for the missing bubbles who had managed to hide inside one of the bathroom walls. I love Andrew.

Were you naked? Or is that how Leslie likes to picture it?

I mean, I don't know what goes on for Leslie. I may have been. I certainly have. Again, I can't I don't want to sidetrack us This is an extensive message from Leslie No sidetracking That's my fault Has TVTL considered getting an editor, Andrew? I need one of those How to deal with insults tips right away Stat I can't wait for tomorrow's show I need five cc's Stat Let's see I love Andrew for having the soul of a saint To spend an entire evening Driving aimlessly around Seattle Ferrying an unhoused Cognitively compromised woman searching for her shelter until the lost lamb finally casually commented that maybe she might have the address in her cell phone now i just said to you let's not get distracted but i do need to point out that my story was about nudity and irresponsible cat ownership and your

story was about being christ-like oh that wasn't he i just make those things up to sort of feather They're my own rep. Reputational nest.

I also love Andrew for not purchasing a new set of machetes with which to pursue the diabolical restaurateur who ruined one memorable Thanksgiving dinner. That's my job. Call me the Danny Trejo of that story because I plan on someday really taking that guy down. I'm the one that's been tracking him across Internet impressions more than you have, Andrew. Remember I found him in some other story and was like, this is our guy.

He's in Nashville now, right? Causing trouble in Nashville or something like that?

He's being seemingly kind of, I don't know, not the most pleasant person out there, which to me was just rich considering how kind of rude he was to you and Vives and many other people who were merely looking forward to a Thanksgiving meal they had paid for. Exactly. Leslie says, had I been in Andrew's shoes for either incident, Luke would have received a phone call to come downtown immediately and post bail for me for attempted manslaughter. Trying to think what that bail would look like. Well, you don't have any priors, right?

Also, if this is premeditated, it might be worse than manslaughter.

Yeah, it just depends on how the DA is feeling that day. But I don't know, $150,000, shored. Yeah, we could probably get that. We need $15,000 to get you out. Okay, we've got it. I love Luke because he bursts out crying in public at the spectacle of an Indian immigrant father and his little daughter earnestly struggling to express himself in English. at a deli counter in a supermarket uh that is that is true i believe i i i can't guess at the background of the person but my guess would be just based on the local kind of um sort of breakdown of folks i'm thinking the person might have been from central america but the but the overall point holds which was a father and his daughter father doing a money order and having a difficult time communicating um and and the look on the face of the of the father i was very um it was relatable to me in a way because i i know what that feels like not to the degree that this guy might have been feeling it because i've been very privileged in my life but yes i do that particular topic you get me talking about the darien gap and i am i'm gonna get get pretty emo um i uh i i love uh andrew for the way he makes his very funniest comments in a sort of throwaway toss-off tone well that's where you're wrong leslie because i listen back to the show sometimes and what you have to realize is andrew records the program at his place so he does a thing where he lowers the volume of my voice ever so slightly i punch it in and and and increases the volume of his voice which is a subtle kind of aural cue of who is in control of the program and and then we'll go back in later and he'll record little bone mows and little asides yep exactly i have a whole i have

actually a whole folder full of them i've pre-recorded thousands yeah and i just punch him in it's like the um the supplicant chicken what was the burger king subservient chicken subservient chicken that's how supplicant chicken seems like subservient succulent chicken sounds

really good a succulent chinese meal i love when either one of them cracks each other up so much they have to step away from the microphone in order to soften the volume of their delighted laughter i love that luke is such a perfect exact embodiment of a seven on the engram scale that Engram authors no longer need to even write anything for their chapter chapter of Engram seven. Try just post a large photo of Luke on the page and move on to chapter eight. I I haven't Engram Engram. That's not now. I want to be clear. I don't think I think I might have been mispronouncing that because Engram is a Scientology thing. But Engram is a different kind of what's like a Briggs Meyer type of thing. Right. It's a sort of a personality type. And I guess I'm very, very strongly a 7 on that, according to Leslie.

I didn't realize that engram and ennegram, I don't know if I'm even pronouncing it right. Is it ennegram?

I'm guessing that it's got to be said slightly differently. It would just be too confusing otherwise. But the engrams, if I understand, is a Scientology term, and that's something you're trying to get over, trying to get rid of. When they have you do one of those stress tests. Yes.

Did you see the Super Bowl commercial for it? I don't know if it aired in all the markets. I think maybe somebody sent it to me and Genevieve and you literally see it's about like the discovery centers that they have around and you go in. You're like, what is this? And they actually show people holding like whatever you call the soup can thing.

Like a couple of like sort of electrodes that you are supposed to be. I don't think that's what Leslie is talking about.

Enneagram type seven. I looked it up here. It says usually kind of a homely, gassy. it's weird that they got into that isn't it are they using a photo of me because you've described

me i mean perfectly with that so thank you busy variety seeking spontaneous versatile acquisitive

let's see I love that after 20 years together Andrew still strives to not fart on Genevieve's in bed speaking of gassy yeah that really turned on me there didn't it I love that too for you all I'm a supporter of preserving a little bit of the mystery in a relationship but I would also say in true TBTL fashion do whatever works for you in your life and in your relationship I don't want to judge people that are just fart transplanting all over each other maybe that's your love language and I'm good with that being your love language i'm glad for you and andrew are you and genevieve andrew and i'm glad for me and becca that that's not that's not where our that's not that's not how our love language works that's

right and i don't think you and i fart around each other either try not to and you and i have you know we've been we've we've been trapped in a couple of fart lockers i mean you hit a bottle of piss in a cupboard for me to discover one point that was that's that was fairly jackass

anyway leslie thank you for that incredibly yeah nice thoughtful and thorough a letter that you wrote after you'd already donated a significant amount of money to keep the show going. So thank you for all of that. We really appreciate it. And we really appreciate you. We love you too. Maestro. We've also got to thank Katie O'Connell in Chicago, Illinois. Now Katie writes in Luke's Irish accent as if I need to write that. Oh, as far as the

pronunciation of Katie's last name. Now, the thing is, though,

here's the deal. I, even though, you know, my mom's side of the family, the Kellys, hail from County Cork, I believe. Strong Irish kind of lineage for me. I don't think of myself when I, usually, when I go off on a pronunciation from that part of the world, it's me trying to do my Scottish accent, which i have absolutely no family connection to or ability to do um i do a lot of uh you know when we thank our listener conor mulcahy right i get real i like i just think i watched a lot of the simpsons a lot of a school uh schoolkeeper willie groundskeeper willie and um uh so uh but let me try because i used to have a um i used to have a a pastor i should say a bible teacher named um trevor harris when i went to jesus creek and and he was irish and he would say um um toy toy toy there was a and there was no he would he would teach and he would say there was a man called billy uh billy brown and um this was like kind of the vibe i loved this guy by the way trevor harris like he was the most fun teacher he's just like imagine a really charismatic fun irish dude that To just, like, turn loose on a bunch of students for, like, an hour, two days a week to just talk about the Bible. But without, like, we didn't have to read the Bible. We didn't have to really, like, it wasn't the boring side of all of this. It was just, like, a really fun kind of, like, as Irish folks can tend to be, right? Mm-hmm. So let me try to get there with my Trevor, my pastor, Trevor Harris. Hi, Katie O'Connell of Chicago, Illinois. How was that? That's pretty good. Yeah, no. Did it go too far into someone has stolen my lucky charms?

I was just waiting for Bill Clinton to pop out of that impression somewhere. And so I think that you were able to avoid that perfectly.

KT O'Connell says, long live too beautiful to biz. Never stop sharing the absurd and mundane details of your and your cats' lives. Where would we be without you? Mwah! Mwah!

Is that the first kiss we've received?

Oh, is that what that is? I believe That's a kiss Katie we're taken I mean So fresh Katie we're busy not farting on other people Sorry Katie Sorry thank you for the donation But This is me showing

Yeah I'm trying to So Luke is doing sort of a

I'm doing the if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it To demonstrate that I'm taken But I actually am not married I don't have a wedding ring on So it kind of doesn't really It's not First of all That was

I thought you were just having an episode To be honest with you

I mean the number of different ways In which that was unhelpful Are pretty shocking One I just stopped talking And this is Still For now anyway An audio product And then I started flashing My A ring to be like I'm taken But of course I'm not married I don't wear a wedding ring So that was Like I was saying to Katie Like come on over Check it out I'm single Oh that's actually kind of a funny story About being on the The Young Sheldon Set on Monday Young Sheldon I was interviewing Jim Parsons And Mayim Bialik And

And because they were there, you know, obviously Jim Parsons was like the star of the Big Bang Theory. And then Mayim Bialik played his love interest. And I think they get married in the plot of the show. So they were in Los Angeles together to film some scenes for this other thing called Young Sheldon, because that's like the prequel. And I don't think I'm giving anything away, but they they they're part of the final episode of this Young Sheldon show. I think it's kind of like sort of, you know, new heart when like he rolls over and realizes like he's in a snow globe or whatever. so the funny thing was we were just about to start rolling, and Mayim Bialik got up and said, oh, let me, she was still in costume from the show, right? And she goes, very funnily, by the way, very drolly, she goes, oh, I'm not married. I'm not a married person. She was like, and she was wearing a wedding ring because her character is a married person. She goes, I need to take this off because I need to let people know this is on the market, which was actually very funny. She was very funny and likable.

I've always liked her from afar. Yeah, exactly. In fact, I feel like in her like sort of I'm not a big, big bang viewer, but from what I've seen of it, her like sort of nerdy character and style very much appeals to me. Sure. That's probably would have been crushing pretty hard.

Yeah, that's definitely your kind of I mean, that's that's in your in in your area, your zone of interest when it comes to my zone of romantica. I did, I will also say this, I will say that Chuck Lorre, the creator of that show, the creator of the Big Bang Theory, well, he was co-creator of Young Sheldon, but he's a guy who, you know, he's done a lot of these like huge, hugely successful, hugely, what's the word I'm looking for, valuable, like sitcoms, right? Like the guy is The guy is Very very very well positioned let's say From having created like Multiple long running and now Syndicated shows like he's Probably the most powerful Yeah and is it all The TV is all of it TV that I would like you know particularly sit down to Watch not necessarily it may not be for Me but you can't argue with the success of All of it like and also just The like he is really Really really the kind of guy who, who sets the tone for what sitcoms in America look like right now. And I'm talking to, um, like, I think I was talking to the actors. Maybe it was when I was talking to Mayim Bialik and Jim Parsons. And one of them said, well, of course, Chuck Lorre. And I, and I knew Chuck Lorre was like sitting kind of behind me in a director's chair, just kind of hanging out on the set. We're like at the place where they filmed the TV show. And I go, Chuck Lorre, It's not ringing any bells Which I was I think I was trying to be edgy because There were a lot of different people At this place, there were a lot of media Entities, there was the CBS PR department Was also shooting videos, the CBS Social media, there was a lot of competition And I think subconsciously I wanted to establish Us as Being different or me as being Not like, talk about bagel bites If you know what that means Yes, exactly, I wanted to be like I'm the from the other two yeah I wanted to be like I'm not just here to fawn on you I'm here to be I'm I'm here I'm a cool journalist from CBS Sunday morning those are words that have never been said I'm a cool journalist from CBS Sunday morning I'm I'm not just here as part of a PR machinery to promote you I'm here to get to the heart of what is it to be two of the actors featured in Young Sheldon that was probably going through the back of my brain which is why I decide to like basically go like when they say Chuck Lorre and I go never heard of him so then but because because I I try to be the the bad boy of of of uh of you know CBS Sunday morning but I'm also a little bit nervous about I don't know getting in trouble or because I was about to interview Chuck Lorre Chuck Lorre after this and it was these two guys Steve Holland Steve Malero who's I consider a friend uh who was a big TBTL listener for a long time and then this

guy chuck lorre and chuck lorre is sitting back there and i turn around him after the interview and i say by the way i was i go i was joking when i said i didn't know who you are i go i'm familiar with chuck lorre and he just waits a beat and he goes yeah i'm familiar with jokes it was i mean he didn't say he he didn't say it in a way that was like trying to like um he put you in your place he wasn't trying to put me in my place but it was a very good joke yeah this is a person whose entire professional life has been creating shows that are full of

jokes and but what i think a huge part of that though is what did his face look like when he said it did he say it like kind of stone-faced and very dry or was he kind of he was smirking

at you smiling how did it feel uh it it felt funny to me it felt like good it felt like in good humor He wasn't...

And then when I interviewed him, he was really nice He wasn't trying to As I perceived it, he wasn't trying to big dog me But it was a perfectly Delivered response Because of course he gets jokes I mean, this is It's like saying I don't know, it's like talking to a Major League Baseball pitcher and going like Well, I was trying to throw you a curveball And they were like, yeah, I'm familiar with curveballs I spent a lot of time in my day Thinking about curveballs But it was perfectly delivered, and I thought it was pretty funny. And I was like, all right, well, this makes sense then. You're the funny man. And Katie O'Connell is the supporter person, as is Leslie Tunstall. So thank you to our dazzling donors today.

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. we've got to get to some emails and emails but I just wanted to say very quickly that it was very very cool to get to be on the set of Jeopardy yesterday like I was kind of not ready for how much I was going to be geeking out just to see the board and to walk around on that stage and to watch the rehearsals and to just be kind of in that room that But what you hear about a lot of things like that, whether it's like Saturday Night Live or other TV programs that there's a set. And then often when people go to the set, they're like, oh, I can't believe how small this is. It was the opposite for me. I thought it was very grand. I thought it was actually more grand than I was expecting.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah.

Because remember I told you, and you asked me not to show it to you, so I don't think I did or used as a show photo. But like there is a photo circulating around of like the back of the big wheel on the Price is Right and how it's just like, you know, like some some, you know, press board or plywood or something with some like spray painting marks on the back of it. And you see just how like it seems so grand on the front of it, but it's like almost literally two dimensional in that way. This did not have that effect.

Not at all. I mean, it was it was it was I mean, it felt almost like, you know, sacred to me or something. to be in this room where so much television has been created over the years that I've taken such joy from. I will tell you a couple of things. One, I have now realized that I think I would do very badly on Jeopardy if I managed to get on. There was something about, I watched like maybe four games from the audience because they tape a lot of games at one time. More than five, huh?

I thought it might just be like one week.

I think a typical is five. Typical day is five. They were doing six when I was there because they were on this extended break because of the writer's strike and because they had banked a bunch of material to try to still have new stuff to play during the strike. So they're just coming back to, and this isn't going to, what I watched yesterday isn't going to air until April, but there was something, there was somehow a different level of concentration that I had sitting in the audience just watching Where I think of myself as a pretty Like a pretty good home Jeopardy player By that I mean If you throw me into a room With kind of just like typical people Like from my family Or Becca and her family Although Becca is like a very Really pretty dialed in on trivia and information But like if you put me in a room With most sort of regular people And Jeopardy is on I feel like I will probably know The answer maybe more than the average person Which has led me to I think the foolhardy belief that if i were to take the test for jeopardy and then get through all the different you know vetting process and whatever that maybe i could just get lucky and do okay on that show watching four shows in a row just sitting there in the audience and realizing how many of the questions i had zero flipping idea what the answer was it i guess it's the difference of maybe like watching a football game on tv and kind of thinking like i don't know i could probably run a route i mean what you do you you take 10 steps with like your knees real high and then you fake this way and you go that way right and then you maybe go to the game and you you're down there on the field watching people you're like no no no no i could not i would die from this this was sort of the equivalent of of that for me just watching how smart the contestants really are and but just the mechanics of the game were fascinating to me um and i was i was talking when we were interviewing ken jennings but also just talking to him a little bit kind of when we weren't recording and he was like so what do you think of this whole thing and i was like you know i don't want to say that i'm not always thrilled about every story that i get to do for cbs sunday morning because i am i'm honored to have the job but there are certainly times when i am

maybe more amped up and this was one of those days they couldn't get me i was just sitting in the empty studio audience watching so at the beginning of the day they rehearse the show with the contestants so they have jimmy who used to be part of the clue crew who's now the stage manager um for the show he runs everyone through practice rounds of jeopardy so that when you're standing up there doing it and you're it's your first time on the show you're not like completely and totally overwhelmed which is very smart by the way um because it is obviously super

intimidating um to use another uh kind of analogy that is often used in sports i think specifically football like you just need the game to slow down a little bit because if you're up there and you have that adrenaline running through you you just must feel so separated from your own body oh my gosh i which i'm gonna feel uh by the way next friday when i'm on kow i don't know if we've talked about that on the show but we've talked about it off air i'm supposed to be on a show I came back from vacation this has been on the books for a while and then I came back from vacation and I temporarily forgot about it and now just this morning I'm like oh my god I'm like a week away from being on that show and I'm already like pitting out in my shirt

I don't want to make it worse for you but I'm fascinated by this and I want to talk about it on the show this week just to kind of like maybe try to help you kind of your stress go down and also just to try to understand what's exactly going on with us i was i don't want to overstate it i was a little bit out of my body just watching jeopardy just being in the room and and kind of just watching it all go down again it's something that i have watched most nights certainly if i am home most nights of my life for the last 25 years you know since i had a home to go to that was my own and a cable television subscription most nights i will watch jeopardy i enjoy the show and i i can't think of much else that i've consumed that much of over the years to then be in the room where it's happening and just look around and be like okay well that's what that is and this and then of course having the kind of cool opportunity because we were there doing the tv thing to actually go up and stand on the stage later when everybody was you know when the audience was gone and kind of check out the signaling buzzer and and like write my name and they just get to do all of that stuff

it was really really fun like it was one of those days did you get a sense of those buzzers having

the delay that everybody talks about well yeah because there is a um you know there's a person over on the kind of judges table who is basically holding down a button that when ken jennings is done delivering the question he then releases the button oh that's why they don't work until

until that person says they work the buzzers don't work until that person says they work

that's true and so when that person when he takes his finger off of this button um that's that's basically like kind of muting the whole situation so it's kind of two things it's like him listening to ken jennings finishing saying the question or or the the the answer honestly they should get rid of that whole thing the like questions and answers and whatnot um it's simple it's very confusing also put a big wheel in there that's all maybe a Maybe an attractive gal turning the letters. Right. But so there's kind of like these, there's this human component, which is like Ken Jennings gets done reading the question or reading the answer, whatever the hell it is. And then this guy over at the table, he hears the end of the Ken Jennings part. And then he says, OK, now it's time to go. And you're, as the contestant, trying to kind of figure out this rhythm of all of this. Because if you buzz in too early, you get locked out for like half a second, which is.

Oh, so you can't just go click, click, click, click, click, waiting for him to undo it.

No, you're getting locked. You're not locked out for the entirety of it, but you just, you know, a half a second in that game against all of those other smart people is enough time. Most of the questions, at least two of the contestants probably know the answer. So if you get locked, and it's really like most of them, midway through the reading of it, they already know what they're, now they go into like buzzer, optimal buzzer mode, basically. You know what I mean? so anyway i just was i was just i was just delighted to be there the whole time and was yeah just really enjoyed everybody was super nice to us as well and um uh yeah it was just it was great if you if you are in uh i'm not getting paid to say this but i'm telling you if you're a jeopardy fan oh the other thing that somebody who was sitting i was sitting in the audience and the very kindly couple sitting next to me said oh we're in from tucson and we love jeopardy and so we just went on the website and we got these tickets it was pretty easy so i guess i would say i would recommend it if you're ever visiting los angeles and you like that show see about getting tickets i you know they gotta like you gotta put a fair number of people through the through the live audience every week you know they're kind of got to put butts in seats so it was really fun and did you just

Did you, like, pretend like you were on the stage of, like, the soundstage of, like, a sitcom and just, like, laugh inappropriately after each answer?

I did sort of like a Bob De Niro from Cape Fear.

I haven't seen it. So did you hide underneath a car? That's the only thing I know. There you go. That's from that movie. That's the only thing I know about that, yeah.

I believe famously he like the family that he's menacing goes to see a movie and there's somebody smoking a cigar, I want to say, and laughing maniacally in the back of the theater. OK, yeah. The theater is largely empty. And he's just like and they don't know who it is. And of course, it's it's Robert De Niro. Um, no, but you know what did happen was I didn't get the speech That the, the, the Live, the real audience was all Waiting outside the studio, you know, in a line And I'm sure they got like a whole Kind of spiel from the From the production folks, and I'm sure A big part of it was, turn off your cell phones You know, like Turn them off, off, like don't even put them on silent You just turn them off so they don't work Because of course they're very concerned about Photography and, and, and things like that And anyway, I didn't get any of that speech Because I was buzzing around We're filming Ken backstage, signing headshots and things So I go and I sit down And the show is going Questions are being asked And I My phone starts ringing on my watch So when my When I have my real cell phone with me And I'm wearing my Apple watch If my phone starts ringing My watch starts hapticking And this is very But it's only hapticking It's not making an actual ringing It isn't Thankfully But I couldn't tell you Andrew What setting I have it on You know what I mean Every time I update my system Or I don't know bump something It's always It's always a new adventure With this stuff Is my alarm Because the alarm that's on my phone My alarm all set for various things Sometimes it'll just start going off on my watch As well as my phone And it'll be making an alarm sound There's just a million settings that I just don't Give enough thought to And all I could think as I looked down on my phone And saw that for some reason My old management company Of my old apartment in Portland was calling me I think I might be getting mail there still or something I just looked down and I just see Grey star on my watch And I'm like Is this My watch getting the message almost before my phone does and is my my hand starts vibrating my wrist starts vibrating and i'm like is this the the is this the half second before my phone in my pocket starts ringing because that would be a very possible scenario because again these settings are always changing i don't have good high phone hygiene with this stuff and the fear that coursed through me in that nine tenths of a second as i considered is my cell phone about to start ringing in my pocket In the middle of someone trying to answer a potent potable I was Freaking out

But it didn't ring In the words of Lucille Bluth that was a freebie Like you just got away with it

I did but then I didn't want to take So then I was like I should take my phone out and turn it off Like so there's no way this can But I was like if they see me dig in for my phone Are they going to come over And be like You can't have your phone out Like is having my phone out of my pocket A worse transgression than possibly having the ringer on my phone not off enough i didn't know but there was also the element that i'm there with cbs sunday morning i thought the irony of if a game gets screwed up because the reporter from the other tv network uh didn't turn their phone off like would just that would be the poorest of poor form if it's some retiree from tucson it's like mistakes happen if it's me it's

like get your shit together burbs i did think it was interesting i had to look up i didn't remember which network jeopardy is on and that's nbc and of course you're doing a story oh really

oh i just looked it up and it told me nbc but that must have been wrong i think it's a non-denominational in that i don't think it's yeah i say abc because when i was growing up it was on the abc station in seattle but i think it i think it goes wherever it wants to go that makes more sense yeah and i

don't know why it popped up nbc here but it looks like yeah i i think you're right i think it's like it can um it can air wherever it wants to depending on the local affiliates but um what I was going to say was I there's interesting symmetry here on these two different stories because you have Mayim Bialik who you're talking to of course until recently was also one of the hosts on Jeopardy and but you're in all in the same day you're interviewing her about a totally non-Jeopardy story whereas two years ago you probably would have been interviewing her about Jeopardy or whatever but literally two different networks that's why I was looking that up earlier and I

I was trying to be careful to not bring that up.

I didn't know what exactly the deal was on everything.

Yeah, that seemed like a strange thing, right? Wasn't her original thing, like, didn't she post something publicly? Like, I just found out today that I'm no longer with Jeopardy or something. Wasn't that, it wasn't.

Considering that I'm working on a TV story this week about it, I should know more of the details. And I will, before this hits the air on Sunday. But, like, yeah, I got the sense, my sense of the thing is that as the dust eventually was starting to finally settle, with this whole Jeopardy hosting thing, which we covered, you know. By the way, I'm getting another call on my watch. You can see what it looks like.

As we speak, yeah.

But see, it's not, thankfully, it's not ringing. It's just, you know, it's just, it's not ringing. It's just vibrating.

Just overflowing.

My sense of how that kind of relationship ended was at some point, the people in charge of Jeopardy, after all of the, like, auditioning people and then hiring that one kind of sleazy guy and then firing him and then having co-hosts was, God, wouldn't life be easier if we just had one host and it was Ken Jennings? And I think that probably they kind of, you know, I think somewhere in their heart of hearts, they just wanted to have him be the host, probably because of his experience with the program. I think he's well-liked by the viewers. He seems like a known quantity. And none of this is a reflection on Mayim Bialik, who, by the way, again, when I met her in person, was very very smart and very very poised and very likable like all the things you would kind of want in one of these hosts and i think by the way did a really good job when i watched episode she hosted of jeopardy i honestly think that mike richards guy wasn't bad either i didn't think anyone was bad at hosting jeopardy that's the weird part other than future vice president aaron rogers how did we get 94 minutes into the show before we've even talked about that shit but anyway

It said RFK is eyeing two people. One is Aaron Rodgers. The other one, Joe Rogan. Jesse LaBody Ventura, I believe. Oh, right.

What I thought was just spectacular was that I think I was on the set of Jeopardy yesterday when I saw this coming on my phone, this like breaking news, that RFK Jr. said he's been in extensive talks with Aaron Rodgers. He's been in like, they've been in regular communication over this for some period of time. I don't know why that.

Probably in a steam bath under the desert somewhere.

Like, why that detail? Like, it's, first of all, the whole thing is unhinged. Like, it's just unhinged, and it's silly, and it's not going anywhere. But I thought it was unhinged in the world of just kind of like, I'm going to say something to get back in the news. I'm RFK Jr. But the idea that they've been having sort of substantive talks, like, what those talks must sound like. like the fact that they like have been in multiple phone conversations discussing the future of this country and their um planned to uh become president and vice president of this country just two blithering idiots just gassing each other up i don't so something about the fact that they've they're they're in conversation over this just cracked me up so hard i passed a truck

and i hate how much this lives in my head but i passed a little white pickup truck clearly like kind of a work vehicle yesterday um near the grocery store and it was just like it just i get so triggered i'm such a snowflake but it's just like on the back window of the cab there was like a a bump a sticker that was the shape of washington and it just said inside the state fuck insley with a big middle finger and then another another sticker next to it that says i will not comply and i was just like i i literally gave the truck the middle finger but kind of at a time when i knew he wouldn't see me so that's how i'm dealing that's how i'm dealing with things

well you know what happens when they can see you as i learned they might follow you all the way to

skamania lodge and try to fight you and then unfold themselves out of their car there's something funny about this tiny car i'm driving i'm glad you knew exactly in fact when we're talking about cape fear before i was gonna tell you oh i do sort of know because of the laughing because of not not spongebob um sideshow bob a really different episode if it was spongebob doing all that stuff honestly i think most of what i know about cape fear was from the cape fear parody episode of the simpsons which went into some great detail uh and that was probably in 1995 or six i i honestly that might be where i'm getting all of my cape fear knowledge I should watch it. And also, I mean, and that was a remake, right? Like that was originally a... Yeah, I think that was, yeah, that was a... Was it the 60s or 70s?

That was a reboot. Okay.

Hey, are you in the mood to hear a voicemail here? I've never been more in the mood to hear a voicemail. Okay. This is from listener Rachel responding to some conversation we have that I literally do not remember. about the heimlich maneuver this was on our voicemail line but i think it was from maybe a month or so ago so my apologies for playing it so late but you don't need to remember our conversation about the heimlich maneuver to appreciate yeah to appreciate i wonder if rachel

called the wrong podcast hey guys it's listener rachel from pittsburgh um i was just listening to you guys talking about doing the heimlich maneuver and different emotions you have about it and i have a story to tell the matter um the year was maybe 2010 i was driving i was right in the back seat i was in college and i was right in the back seat of my friend's car you know smushed in between two of my other good friends we're driving home from pittsburgh eating snacks and i start choking on one of the snacks and next to me uh is my one friend who's just like shocked i start like you know putting my hands on my throat because i literally cannot breathe my one friend next to me she's like shocked and doesn't do anything and next to me is my other friend andrew who is like my husband just described him as a man that's uh he's really got uh film noir pi vibes which i think is exactly right like he's got a raw sense of humor but he's He was pretty formal, and I really never see him let loose entirely, except for in this moment when he cheered, yes, as I was choking, and then hit me on the back a few times. He gave me some back blows from our weird, you know, angled seats and the backseat of someone's, you know, Ford Focus. And I did, like, spit out the particulate, and I looked at him, And I was like, yes. And he tried to explain that he was really excited because he had just learned in health class how to do this. And he realized he had an opportunity to use this in real life. But I was kind of dying, and I did not appreciate his response. Andrew is my TBTL baby, so he will be hearing this. And I expect, Andrew, if you have a different recollection of this, to call it and tell the guys what you remember.

Love it. Andrew, the private, the private investigator.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I'm trying to think, is there a moment in my life where I've been excited about something that is unfortunate because I can spring into action? I'm not the type of guy who really springs into action. I more fall back into action.

I totally understand this other Andrews feeling like I would, I don't want anyone to be in danger or to be afraid for their their life but i would love i would love to be in a busy restaurant when someone starts choking and be the only person who knows how to do the heimlich maneuver not unlike i believe bill murray's character in groundhog day i think that's one of that's one of the things that starts happening when he's really dialing in his life in that day is he's constantly saving a guy who is choking on like a piece of something and then he does it so casually by the end and i believe he says something like uh you might want to try chewing that first and then everyone laughs like he's just perfecting the moment um i would love to have that moment i would love to be able because the heimlich seems pretty straightforward pretty hard to mess up you know you make a fist and you place it over the stomach below kind of the um you know where the rib cages you don't need to be up in the ribs um or up in the you know um what do you call that the uh the chest the chest the xiphoid process i believe is part of that yeah i only know that because when we used to have basketball practice mr collard when you were he really wanted you to learn how to take a charge on defense which would be to kind of get yourself set and let the guy with the ball crash into you and he'd be like you want to have them hit you right in your xiphoid process point being you get that you sort of make a fist you reach around and you have the fist below all of that there you know and down in the stomach and then you kind of you sort of pull upwards and it seems like it's kind of whereas you know CPR the thing about CPR is things have gone dangerously wrong at that point presumably if you're doing you know rescue breathing or CPR on someone that's a level of seriousness I don't want to be around but somebody with like some a little bit of um you know a piece of steak that they didn't chew enough that i can kind of and then it comedically flies out across the room and then they have that relief and then i'm the hero that i can then everybody lifts you up sort of on their shoulders and music starts playing and then people stomp on two wine glasses and suddenly i'm jewish married

You're married to the person that you just saved. It's complicated, but also- A tale told a million times.

I understand Andrew being like, yes, I can use my skills here. Although he went with the hearty back slap. Yeah. Now, one thing, by the way, you're supposed to do, I'm not making this up, but also don't take my advice. Read up on this, please. This is not a medical advice show or a, you know, I don't know what, a CPR advice show or anything. But I believe if you're talking about a very small child, like, you know, maybe a toddler or a baby, if they're choking on something, something that they say you can do is literally pick them up by their ankles and kind of do an upside down, you know, because they're small enough you can do that. And that's really, like, going to reverse the trajectory or reverse the voyage of whatever is stuck in them.

So you're saying always, always, always shake a toddler? Is that what you're saying? That wasn't a regional thing, right? You guys had the billboards around here that said never, never, never shake a baby.

I think I have seen them. I have definitely seen them. But I want to be clear. We're anti-baby shaking on this show.

We're anti-baby shaking.

We're pro-baby saving as far as if they're choking on a piece of gristle. First of all, why are you giving your baby a steak?

Yeah, stop giving your baby a steak. That's weird.

That's weird parental behavior.

I'm also pro-slapping somebody a couple of times across the face if they're acting hysterical.

Yes, just to help them get it together. But only if they're a woman.

Yes, but only if they're, like, crying. A hysterical woman. Exactly, that's the best one to handle it.

Only if there are women having a thought about anything.

I've been watching too many black and white movies. All right. Anyway, well, thank you for that story, Rachel. And, Andrew, if you have another perspective on that, please share it.

Yeah, I want to hear Andrew's perspective. It was a stormy night on I-15 outside of Pittsburgh.

The dames started choking. I want to, you know what? I don't know if we do this enough or if it's obvious or not, but the phone number is 206-414-8285. That's 206-414-TBTL.

Please leave us a message. Andrew, remind me tomorrow on the show. This Andrew or the other Andrew? The other Andrew.

Okay.

No, I'm sorry. You, Andrew. Me, Andrew. Remind me tomorrow to tell you about something that I discovered about the show while you were gone, while I was in charge of more things on the show than normal. Okay. That explained a lot.

So I got to remember that, and you got to insult me tomorrow. Don't forget. Oh, yeah, yeah, right. I'm coming loaded. I got a lot of... Oh, wow. Oh, look, the first smile I've seen all day from Luke. Oh, I got thoughts. I got thoughts.

All right. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks for being part of TVTL. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So please, too, join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Enjoy the nicer weather if it's happening where you are. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

I don't really know how to end this conversation, so high five, sure.

Power out.