Muse

Hey Oscar. Yeah? When you get a loan, you don't have to use it for exactly what you say you're gonna, right? Yes you do. No, but I mean, once the bank gives you the money, it is your money, you can use it for whatever you want, right? No Kevin, that would be fraud. Let's say that you tell the bank that you're gonna open up an ice cream store. But instead, you buy an ice cream cart. Technically, you're still selling ice cream. I know you have gambling debts. Gambling debts? What? Promise me you will not take out a small business loan and use that money to pay off your bookie. What's a bookie? I don't even know what you're talking about. You are weird. You are a really weird dude.

TBTL. Look, I get it. I'm not always fun to be around. I can be loud and abrasive. My breath, the doctors say I have incurable stink tongue. I really dug the way you use fantasy, current events, and cooking and a kind of tapestry of storytelling.

Lady Gaga said she's addicted to it and is not harmless.

Did you ever think that maybe there's more to life than being really, really, really, really, really, really ridiculously good-looking? So I'm nervous, but I'm excited at the same time. So I'm just going to start talking about what I like and hope I get some replies.

All right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. We're getting medium play on three independent radio stations in Central Europe. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Eww, brother, eww. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia. Very nice to be back home. I was in L.A. and Palm Springs for most of last week. I will say the weather here, not great compared to Southern California. But it's nice to be back here in the Madrona Hill studio where I've got all my little bells and whistles. And I feel like I'm ready to turn in a really quality, quality episode of the show here as we kick off the week. It's episode 4,169 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Speaking of top-notch broadcasting, of course, Andrew made a major media appearance on Friday on the local public radio station there in Seattle, KUOW. I've been very curious how it went. He was a bit apprehensive going in.

Well, what did everybody think?

Mom, can we go to bed without dinner? Yes, we can.

So we will hear about that. Also, it's baseball time.

The crack of the mat, the roar of the crowd. That's right. Baseball's back.

But we are not going to have a conversation about baseball, my friends. It's the second show in a row, I believe, I've used this exact device. We are going to have a conversation about maybe the funniest bit of interior decorating I've ever seen a minor league baseball team employ in their sports bar concept.

How funny is that? That's pretty funny.

Something very, very clever has been done by the Portland Pickles baseball team, And we're going to get into that and we're going to get into all of it with this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I'm looking at him through our special video connection, and he looks real different on this Monday morning. Here's my sweet stash. Let's freaking party. He's Andrew Walsh. He's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning. I don't really love the way I look in this particular view.

So I've got to figure out how to move the camera around in the studio so that it's high enough that it doesn't get my huge double chin that is now exposed, but low enough that it doesn't just focus on my male pattern baldness. Do they make a camera for that? It's a narrow band.

It really is. A narrow band of attractiveness, but I feel like we have the technology. You've got a 4K Logitech camera that I think is up to the task. I just want to jump right into this because I did text you over the weekend. Full disclosure to the listeners. I did text you over the weekend to ask how it went, and in fact, I believe I may have even texted you at some point on Friday. What I know is that you had this big appearance on the Weekend Review on KUOW, and you really wanted it to go well. And you also mentioned to me that you had a shaving incident.

Yeah, I actually texted you on Friday. I couldn't help.

You had your own stuff going on, too, on Friday. You were on a big, fancy shoot, I believe. But I had to text you about the twist because I was making such a big deal on this show about how nervous I was about doing this radio appearance, you know, part of a roundtable of people on this Week in Review radio show on KOW, something that I always wanted to do. But then once I was invited, I felt very, very nervous about it and had some true anxiety about it. And I honestly do think it's not unrelated that my beard had been getting a little bit shaggy. And so, I mean, that is unrelated. That has to do with just human growth.

The nervousness did not promote follicular growth.

Yes. And I was stood in the mirror and I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to trim my beard down. That'll make me feel good. I don't really love the beard trimmers I use. And so I did this thing where I was going to really do it right. I combed my beard out. So I looked absolutely bananas. I looked like I should have been institutionalized. I combed my beard kind of backwards, if that makes sense, so it's sticking out everywhere. And I'm like, Dad, I'm going to give myself a really nice, careful trim. But I was so focused on combing my beard out and then maybe thinking ahead about my appearance on the show that I—

You're also blasting the song Needle in the Hay by Elliot Smith in the back. Oh, that got dark fast. At what point did you become Luke Wilson from the Royal Tenenbaums in this scene?

That got really dark. But I had the razor on the completely wrong level, the wrong setting. And so I'm trimming my beard, and I'm thinking, oh, this sort of feels funny, but it's because I've combed it all. I'm kind of going more in depth than I usually do in my beard maintenance or whatever.

This is how many hours before the show, before you're going to appear at KUW?

This is actually late to the night before the show. So I was sort of like, okay, this will be the last thing I do before I go to bed. And I ended up, and then all of a sudden I'm like, wait, this is not right. And all of a sudden I realized, oh, dude, you have your trimmer on the completely wrong setting. I kind of stroke my beard down and I just have these bulge, bald spots on either side of my face.

I know you like, quietly to yourself.

I had one perfect heart on my right cheek. It was actually really impressive for an accident. But I looked like somebody who was struggling with a lot of things. I looked terrible. I trim it down as far as I can. So then I just sort of trim everything down pretty far. And I go upstairs and Genevieve's watching TV on the couch. I'm like, Genevieve, I might have made. And then I walk into the room and she just has this, oh, sweetie, look on her face. Like, what what has happened? I'm like, I can't I can't pull this off. Right. I can't keep the beard short with these bald spots. She's like, no, that that doesn't look natural. And they're on both sides of your face. And so I was just like, I'll just sleep on it. She's like, you could just leave the mustache. I'm like, maybe, I'm not sure.

You know, you're talking to a person who pioneered the Tiny Wig 2000 technology, Andrew.

That's true.

You completely ignored the obvious solve, which is go to your local CVS, go into the department where they sell various hair colorings, find a swatch of pretend hair that's roughly the color of your beard, steal it, bring it home, cut it, hot glue it onto a barrette, and you just seamlessly fold that right into your beard pattern, something I have literally done in my life, but not for my beard.

That is funny because it's sort of what I ended up – I ended up turning this little beard situation into a bit of a radio win. If I had one good moment on Friday, it was because I was able to talk about my beard as an analogy for the city council. I'm not even joking about that part. Okay, what? I'm listening. But so just to go back to the moment. Non-existent? Is that what you said?

What's that? You know, I feel like we've really, well, I'm saying if you don't have a beard anymore, were you saying, like my beard, the city council is non-existent on this issue?

Let me, I'll explain what happened here and then I can tell you about the analogy that I made. But anyway, so I come upstairs and Genevieve just has this look on her face, just like, you know, she really wants to support me. And she's like, maybe you can make it work, but I can see in her eyes that she cares about me and is like, don't. And I realize this is getting a little bit far afield, but, you know, I'm a little bit, I guess, I guess embarrassed is the right word about how much I talked about my anxiety about going on the radio for one hour. You know, like we were talking about it last week, like it shouldn't have been that big of a deal, but it really was. I felt a lot of anxiety around it and it had been growing in the weeks since I knew I was going to be on the show. um and uh i i i think that a big part of it i sort of realized wasn't just me being on the radio but also me going into a workplace for the first time in a long time i know that sounds weird luke i mean obviously you're always flying around you're on camera all the time i don't in all i don't want

to pay myself i told you i gotta do this exact show this friday and the only thing i'm worried about is how am i going to be perceived when i ask for a visitor pass right like it's the it's the human interaction component of all of that that's actually what i'm a little bit anxious

about yeah i totally understand that feeling i i went to grab a cup of coffee um beforehand because i i wanted to you know me i wanted to make sure i wasn't rushing in there at the last minute or potentially being

late um so i took the train into the area where the station is and then i got a cup of coffee at a coffee shop nearby while i had like 15 minutes to kill and i didn't want to be there super early and i realized like how nervous i was i like wanted to drink my coffee and it spilled a little bit i'm like oh my god um and i realized oh this feeling i have i it's not a feeling i remember from going on the radio this is a feeling i have before a job interview i hadn't had a job interview in a really long time but i do really think it's like i mean yes the pandemic changed the way a lot of people felt about going into work but you and I have been doing this show I haven't walked into like a radio station as a and I know I wasn't an employee in this situation but like I haven't walked into like a professional setting in a long time where I had to actually give at least the cursory thought about what I look like and now here I am the night before with bald patches in my beard a beard that I had I think non-stop for 15 years now like I've always thought like I like shaving and I've been tempted to shave it but I truly don't like what I don't like what I look like underneath the thing so um i i kind of well i want to say this if i can i think you look very

nice without your beard but i also think you wear the beard well and it's certainly the way that i think of you in my mind so i i i don't think that it's like uh like you can't pull off not having a beard but i also think it's a nice look on you and it's kind of your signature move it took seven months to grow and needs half an hour's grooming every morning and that's sort of what i was

thinking i was like boy my my beard or as i thought about over the weekend or whatever is like any like little TBTL illustration of us, any kind of headshot or whatever we need. By the way, I need at least three months before we do any headshots heads up. So I think I'm going to probably keep this for a while. But anyway, what happened was I came down the next, I'm like, let me just sleep on this. I don't want to, I don't want to do any more shaving tonight, but I will say this as much.

Let me sober up as much as see what this looks like.

As much as I was like nervous about going on the radio, as soon as I made this mistake and I went upstairs, I looked at Genevieve and I'm like, okay, I'm just going to take a shower. and then go to bed in the shower. I was not fretting the way you might think. I was actually sort of laughing to myself. I'm like, this is this is legitimately funny. Like, I don't know what I'm going to do about it yet. Either I'm going to shave my whole face or maybe I'll leave the mustache. I'll see what that looks like in the morning. But I'm just like, no matter what, like this is legitimately kind of funny. This is just a funny story. And like, I know it sounds weird, but I think our conversations don't take this the wrong way. And I mean that. But like our conversations about how you sometimes feel about your face or how you look when I look at you and I'm like I don't see what you're seeing I don't see why you're anxious about the way you look look and I'm kind of like and I often tell you like I've just gotten to a point where I kind of just realized my lot in life and I am who I am and in a certain way maybe thinking back on that conversation I'm just like listen if I go in there and I say something really stupid on the radio that I can't take back like that's going to feel really awful because that's you know because I should be good at this or better at this or whatever but if I go in and I just look like I got a fat face it's like that's my face you know what I mean like as long as I was a little bit nervous about having been you know having not shaved in so long that if I was going to shave away part of a beard I might have a bunch of nicks on my face or you know I didn't want to come in looking like like I crawled my way off of the sidewalk but I gotta say my initial reaction to this mistake when I realized oh my god I gotta walk in there looking somehow drastically different tomorrow i really was just laughing at i'm just like of course this is it and it sort of took my

mind off of maybe the bigger picture a little bit i know exactly that that moment of because we're trying to hold so tightly to the way we want this experience to go whatever the experience is or whatever the event is or whatever the thing is and i i i'm so with you on this where it's like i want to control every single thing and i think i feel like if i just stress about it enough and i prepare enough and i control it enough it'll go exactly how i want it to go and then sometimes there's a point where the sort of dam breaks so irretrievably that you just kind of laugh like okay well that plan is out the window yeah the idea of me controlling every element of this is no longer really realistic and there is something very liberating about that and that's

when i put on a bunch of white kind of clown makeup and dyed my hair green and just went through the streets of seattle laughing around midnight could you introduce me as walsh exactly what i said to bill we showed up so i so anyway the next morning i wake up i'm like yeah the same deal this is not tenable right i still had the bald spots in my face she's like yeah so i like well i'll shave everything but the mustache might as well just like keep on working in that direction if that doesn't work then i'll shave the whole thing off but i ended up leaving the mustache and here's another way i think it sort of helped me was when i got to kow i was still pretty nervous But then I kind of I'd worked with one of the other guests for a while and the other guest was very charming and Bill's very welcoming, the host of the show. And so I did start to feel a little bit less nervous. And I do think that, like, having been invited on their podcast version of the show for, you know, I don't know, several times over the past year really helped. Like, I think I was more nervous the first time I did that, weirdly enough, which is. not live and not in the studio so anyway so by the time i was in there the the one other thing about this mustache is they said bring a computer with you because we do stream this live on youtube for a very small part of our audience that still wants to watch us do this on youtube a holdover from the pandemic era so first of all like i'm like oh shoot like my computer's so small it's going to be laying on the desk shooting up at my face so i think you would have been proud of me everybody bring your own computer and then like turn off the audio on it but just so we can send the video feed out to like i don't know a hundred people who watch it live on youtube times are

tough over there can you w i know right i would splash out for a couple of logitech

i almost thought like should i just bring my own camera that's like no that's ridiculous but what i did do which i think you would appreciate was like the second they said that in the email the day before hey bring your computer because we're going to put this on youtube i thought to myself My first mission when I get in that building is find some books so that I can put my computer up. And when I was in the green room, we're all leaving the green room. I'm like, I think I'll take this book on African art. I believe I'll take this book about the work of Nora Ephron. I don't know what. I just grabbed a couple of books and brought them into the studio with me and stacked them up. I was proud of that move.

I'm bringing in two key lights and a glam team when I go in on Friday. Oh, yeah. It's going to be ridiculous.

You'll grab the same books. um i uh anyway so i so i'm sitting there luke we we have you know we're in the studio maybe five ten minutes before we go live and i look so different i look so different to myself that the whole thing just seems so funny to me it almost felt like i kept on catching a glimpse of myself out of the corner of my eye and it felt like i was cosplaying it literally felt like i was in there like i i think that part of my nervousness went down because i didn't feel like myself if that makes sense i was like playing a different character or something i can't quite explain it but in a certain way i think this weird mistake you were just dissociating i was really at the highest level i was looking at like so do you know who asher perlman is by any chance a new yorker cartoonist you've probably seen his work i think it's i think he goes by he um but anyway look it up if you care or whoever look it up he always you know it's new yorker style cartoons you know uh you know just ink cartoons um black and white but he always draws a little character that I look like just middle-aged mustache guy appears in almost every single one. He may even have a name like Doug.

I do recognize, by the way, these cartoons very much so.

You're looking at them now, yeah. I'm looking at them, yeah. You'll see a lot of me in them. And I just kept on thinking like, I'm that guy from the cartoon. Like I just, I look like that. So I'm going to, here's the other thing I realized. I miss shaving. Like I think I've even mentioned that on the show before that like I don't like, I like having a beard the way it looks on me, but I miss the process of shaving. So I went out and I bought some new razor blades. I think I'm going to just going to keep this for a while and see if I can keep on pretending to be somebody else who I like.

Well, I'm I'm glad to hear that this kind of accident ended up sort of working for you. But I also would like to hear how you made a connection between your beard or lack thereof and the Seattle City Council.

So I I wanted to be careful not to come. You want to come in with things to say. Right. But, you know, you and I were just talking on the show recently. Also, like the lesson I learned in my in my college speech class is like, don't assume you're sitting on some sort of comedy gold and wait for to wait for somebody to laugh or to force a joke in or something.

But right. I run into this, by the way, sometimes when I'm on the program, wait, wait, don't tell me with panelists that will remain nameless. But there are a couple of folks that will I can see that they've they've sort of made a list of some stuff that they if it comes up, they want to get to it. And then I can observe a certain maybe you might say shoehorning in of it or a now the whole conversation has moved on. and the classic would be like you know a couple of minutes ago we were talking about Hiroshima and it just had me thinking it's like okay the moment is past I want to roll out my best

Hiroshima material well yeah I mean I think honestly I think that's more fundamentally the issue with the joke yes I would guess so um so I'm kind of embarrassed trying to recreate this but I was one of the issues that I knew we were going to talk about was this idea of um people getting back into the office because it's good for the economy right and i knew that one of the people i was on with who's the head of the chamber of commerce here um she and the city council believe very strongly that like we need to incentivize companies to compel their workers to come back into the office because we're losing too much tax revenue by not having a busy bustling downtown i love a busy bustling downtown but i don't think going backwards in time and trying to ignore the fact that like technology has evolved how we work should be the way that we build cities back up by doing an old way of doing things now whatever I don't want to get in the whole thing I'm not against an employer saying hey for our type of work we do better when people come in the office I think that's

to the business owner managers or whatever but for the city's plan for our city leaders to be saying the way we get out of this is by having businesses forced their people to come into work downtown just seems so i don't know achronistic to me i think i'm saying that word anachronistic to me or just like looking backwards like you're looking for leadership here so anyway you're thinking of the akron groomsmen again i am i'm constantly thinking of the akron groomsmen who We're ahead because there have been two games played so far, and I'm the only person in my matchup who had players on those teams. For now. Yeah, right. It's all going to come crumbling apart in a couple of days. But anyway, so I had been thinking, I felt very strongly about this, and I'd been trying to think of a good analogy, and I had had a couple that I was sort of clicking around in my head. But then this thing happened, so I went in there, and again, I had sort of thought of this as I was heading out the door in the morning. And I said, as we were talking about it, I'm like, do I have time for a quick analogy? And Bill's just kind of like, all right, go ahead, like whatever. And so I'm like, all right. So like I, and then I told the whole story briefer than I have here about how I accidentally shaved this bald spot in my face. Nice. And I'm like, I had three choices. I'm like, I could like, you know, choose to shave my entire face, which I didn't want to do. I could come in with bold, bald spots in my beard and assume you guys wouldn't give me a hard time about it. But I didn't really want to do that. I'm like, I could try this mustache thing. I'm like, so I tried the mustache. I'm going with that right now. It's not the perfect solution. But for right now, I'm just a mustache guy. I'm like, but if I had called the city council, they probably would have said, scoop up all the hair and glue it back onto your face. So that was my big analogy. And I wanted to make sure I didn't jam it in there. And I wanted to make sure that it wasn't like, and then I paused for laughter. You know what I mean? It ended up, I think it ended up going over as well. It should. And even the woman who like kind of, you know, on paper disagrees with me, the head of the chamber, I said, maybe Seattle just has to be a mustache city for a while. She's like, I will not be running that by the members. We will not be calling ourselves Seattle, the mustache city. So it was a good, you know, I like.

i like i like so much about that i like that you got personal got real with the kuow listeners because i i'm guessing that that is not the usual speed for that show um so i think if i was just listening and i heard that i would like be like i can relate to a person having kind of like a some kind of um you know we that's not quite a fashion emergency but somebody having some sort of personal grooming emergency at the worst possible time i like the the scooping up the hair and gluing it works as a I think that was a really good that was a that was a nice little um

bone mo there so yeah so that was fine I did I would I won't tell you that there weren't other moments in the show like not big deals and we don't have to get him in we don't have to get into them here but like just a couple of times where I sort of felt like I dropped the ball a little bit or I there's one like on one issue I was like saying things that I don't even really totally agree with but I was a little bit nervous and out ahead of myself but it wasn't as bad as it could have been like I've seen myself I've heard myself truly nervous and truly like there were a couple of times I slid out of control a little bit that you know throughout the weekend would ping into my brain and literally I would win like oh shit why'd you say that but like I know but those moments I know were way worse to me than than than other people and and like there's just one moment where I literally felt like I let Bill down I was like oh damn I had more on that i just couldn't think of it in the moment and so whatever but the show was fine like bill probably thought oh this isn't going somewhere so he moved on to something else you know what i mean but like in my head i just wanted to be the good boy i wanted to prove that i could

be a professional i'm i was when you texted me i asked you over the weekend how this went and you said you know sort of what you just said there which was like not nearly as bad as it could have and you haven't you weren't as beset by kind of like intrusive thoughts as you might have otherwise been and i i just cannot tell you how much that made my weekend like because i appreciate that and it's not even that you did well or didn't do well because i knew that you would do fine because you're good at this stuff but i didn't know how your brain would interpret the event like it was almost like the performance is is irrelevant to like how my friend andrew is dealing with things this weekend yeah so the idea that like it kind of um that that you were able to to realize that it was it was fine uh made me really happy uh for you i was struggling with my own demons this weekend of serious entitlement that i had to i had to really take a moment and check myself we were um in palm springs doing a story i sent you some photo and video of this i was like this is maybe the greatest reporting assignment of my entire life uh because you went

into the jungle looking for colonel kurtz right i did and i found him grat that was thank you that It was a plum assignment.

And he was standing next to D.B. Cooper. So anyway, Andrew, I'm sitting on a couple of Pulitzers right now.

Oh, nice, nice, fantastic.

Yeah, I cracked a couple of big cases over the weekend. I love Palm Springs, and I also really love mid-century architecture.

And so I was in Palm Springs doing a story about this guy named Albert Frey, who designed a lot of the stuff in Palm Springs. He was originally from Switzerland, but he ended up really kind of like making his long term home in Palm Springs and just designed all this really cool stuff, including this thing called the Illuminaire House, which he actually designed when he was living in New York State. And it was kind of this like prefab idea. I kind of talked about this on Friday. I know more about it now because I spent the weekend talking to folks about it. But it was this idea of like a prefab aluminum house that would be really functional for people and that you could build a lot of for cheaply. And it would kind of create, you know, a good quality way for a lot of people in the U.S. to live. It would solve a certain kind of housing problem that was happening a lot like in the 1930s. The Illuminar house didn't really take off, but they've reassembled the original version in Palm Springs and put it next to the art museum. It's part of the Palm Springs Art Museum now. So we were doing a story about that. But it just so happens that this guy, Albert Frey, also built a house for himself above the art museum up on this, you know, kind of sort of rocky outcropping that looks over Palm Springs. And it is a glass box with a boulder coming into the space like the house is built around this massive boulder and it has a swimming pool and this like insane view of Palm Springs. and it's it's essentially like I talk about like sort of a coat hook moment sometimes this idea that I've had that like I'll just find the exact right coat rack and then I'll have a coat on there and then I'll come in from a productive day and I'll hang the coat up and I'll feel a certain way or I'll be going out to an adventure and I'll the other kind of snapshot moment that I have of my life is living in the hollywood hills although now i could sub in the hills of palm springs in some like mid-century glass box with a swimming pool and sitting there and like having a martini and dipping my feet in the swimming pool and gazing out upon the city and somehow feeling

okay for five minutes i know what would happen is the bojack horseman music playing underneath

you in this scenario or does that come later i'm talking in every phase of life right now Literally right now.

I was going to start sneaking it, but I think, first of all, I've made that same exact joke before, and I didn't want to get you off track too much by just having mystery music come in underneath you.

The thing I know about myself is that if I ever got to this moment of life, which I really feel like is sort of the apotheosis of my life, at least when I'm in an unrealistic place, what my brain tells me is if you just can do whatever needs to happen for that moment to exist, then you'll feel okay. Then you'll feel like enough, then all of the stuff that bedevils me, that bedevils a lot of us, will go away. Because everything's perfect in your life. Rationally, I know that that's not how life works, and that I would literally sit out there, and there would be probably an hour of being like, it's happening. This is really it. And then after an hour, I'd go, okay, well, what's next? And I would just be the exact same person I am. I now have a new fantasy, which is the Frey House 2, which is what this technically called is the second house he built there. That's now my new fantasy is living in this house, which is impossible because it's part of the permanent collection of the Palm Springs Art Museum. But Andrew, when I tell you it is so, so up my alley, so incredibly just like cool, in my opinion, from now, I will say this, the word on the street was he built this. This guy, Albert Frey, lived in this house into his 90s. he had a bell installed down by the parking area so people could ring it because what is one of his favorite things to do was wander around this house naked and he needed some way for people to

let him know to put some clothes on good good thing to do if you live in an all glass house

i mean what i would imagine is at this actually to this day but particularly in those days there was nobody for miles so i think he probably just felt like it's pretty safe um but like i i guess at some point he i don't know if he married or he took uh you know he had he had a companion um a woman who moved into the house with him and the story was he had to expand the house because it was like such a rudimentary glass box with a swimming pool that he loved she was like i refuse to live here unless you add like a legitimate bedroom it was like a studio apartment for years and years so it's kind of an interesting space because it's not even it's not that it's really fancy it's very like spartan like it doesn't have a lot of storage it has it's it's it's the kind of thing that if you're like an obsessive mid-century design fan kind of like i am it's it's you're very into it all that is to say we were going up there to get what we call b-roll so it means that we're not i don't have to do anything on camera i'm not standing like by the swimming pool being like check this. out because the story was not about this guy's house this was just extra footage but I was told we're gonna go up there and we're gonna and we you know had of course our camera crew and our sound guy and and uh and it was like we're gonna get to just kind of like have our run of the place and I had seen photos of this house and I was like like basically I could have flown out early because now we're at the phase of the story gathering where I've done all the interviews that I'm supposed to do I and and oftentimes if we're just down to getting some some b-roll shots if it's not really important that I'm there, I might take the opportunity to start my journey home. I stuck around for this, right? Like I was like, oh, we're getting a special tour of Frey House too. And we're going to set up our cameras and we're going to get all this footage. I was like, I am not missing this for anything. And we get up there and there's like three or four cars parked there. I'm like, that's weird. And there's just like people hanging out in the house. and i and i'm sort of like ask our producer like what do you think is going on and and she was like well um they're supposed to be we're supposed to have a half hour window between the tours of the people being up here but it doesn't appear to be the case and i realized that like sort of there's all so many groups involved in this thing they're the people that are helping us cbs get our tv story about the illuminaire house and they're from a pr firm in los angeles that specializes in art projects right so they're visiting and then they're interacting with the museum people but then there's this other wing of the museum that like charges i assume a lot of money to drive people up for tours of this spectacular piece of architecture and it's a saturday and the illuminaire house is being the ribbon is literally being cut so it's a big day to be checking out all things albert fray and of course there's going to be tours and of course they're going to be busy but we get up there the first the first tour that was there leaves

mercifully but the guy's car isn't big enough to take everyone from the tour group down so now there are three people left andrew just three normal folks who paid money and were excited i assume to sort of go on a tour of this thing but they were sitting right by the swimming pool there's like this built-in bench and i really wanted to get like a cool photo of the swimming pool like just not even for tv for myself and they were sitting there and the rate the woman also said something the woman seemed very un there was it was two guys and a woman and the woman seemed kind of mid on the whole thing and one of the things she said was yeah it kind of smells musty in there and i when i say that i wanted to throw this person into the swimming pool how dare you mess up my photograph I want to take how dare you think there's anything less than spectacular about this thing that I hold so dear and how dare you even take up any space in the world right now those were the thoughts that were coursing and I wanted to go over to our producer and be like literally like could you do me a favor and jettison these people off of planet earth right now like the anger that I felt was so disproportionate to what was going on the amount of anger i should have felt was a zero any amount of anger for me to feel or annoyance would be an overreaction but the amount that i was feeling was a massive overreaction and i had to guessing

that if these people also were giving off a different vibe you would have had a different feeling about it like if they were if the guys were wearing ascots or like i don't know what exactly but if they looked like kind of part of a designy crew or even a crew that you might have even more aspired to like kind of bro down with you might have thought differently as opposed to if these people look like kind of like they didn't deserve to be there in your mind.

I don't think that was it because there were people that looked like that and I was pissed at them too. It was anyone who was messing up my, the way that I imagined this was going to go was we were going to have exclusive access to this thing that represented something way bigger in my mind than just like a guy built a house and like to walk around in it naked um uh which if you say it like that does sound really different guy built a black a guy built a a glass box house and like to walk around nude you were dusting for butt prints yes i was and they asked me to stop um they said sir please put that black light away it's it's scaring the people who paid to be on the tour i had since i knew this was going to happen so i knew we were going to go up there i had made this into something in my mind that i was going to have a certain kind of experience and it was going to be revelatory in some way and when anything changed that when there was just people i was there was a security guard there like okay of course there's a security guard you're letting people into this there should be someone to make sure that nobody does anything they're not supposed to do there was just there were tour guides there were cars that were not from the 1960s Everything that was interrupting my preconceived.

idea of how this was going to feel for me felt like violence and it didn't help that the people lounging by the pool didn't even seem like they were enjoying it properly to me but it was less about if they looked like people who get to enjoy this house and more about just like well if you're not even enjoying it if you think the house is musty if you're scrolling on your phone right now could you please go do that down the hill so that i can take off my clothes and wander around this house nude in the style that albert fray would have appreciated i think that these people are

heroes in a certain way by simply being there but i will listen if i can give myself credit for one

thing it was that in the moment of this happening i actually identified what was happening for me because i literally wanted to walk over to our producer and and say to her like what like what the hell is going on here like why in the hell are there people here who are not part of our crew when we were promised this exclusive access etc etc and then i realized well that's because we live in an imperfect world and because everybody wasn't talking to everybody else and also this is literally going to be five seconds of the story it's going to be one drone shot of the thing like we and we got everything we needed and everybody up there was very happy to step out of the way if our camera guy scott needed to like get a certain shot like everything that was happening up there was totally fine and completely useful for what we needed what it wasn't working for was this weird fantasy that i had going into this about how it was going to be

for me like independent of my so the producer and i had that question for you so the producer and camera people and other crew who needed their shots were they put out at all about having to work around people or did they share any agita at all or were they just like i know this is fine

Our producer had a little bit of agita because, and I joked about pushing the woman into the swimming pool. The woman who was sitting on the built-in bench by the swimming pool, there's a very narrow, because of this house being built into a rock thing, there's not a ton of square footage. Everything's a little tight. And if you were walking along, there was a very narrow walkway between the swimming pool and where this built-in bench was, where the people were sitting. and when and our producer and i um we were standing aria and i were standing kind of over in one thing and she walked along to get to another part of the of the of the yard if you will or the patio of this place and the woman who was just trying to be funny who's sitting there who seemed who said it was musty pretended to push aria into the pool and it was like just one of those silly jokes that wasn't it wasn't even funny it was kind of like duh and then later i walk and she pretends to push me in the pool and aria goes that just got funnier every time she did it so we were both a little like hmm this would be easier for us uh and more pleasant for us if maybe we had a little more of our run of the place that being said our camera guy and our sound guy because the thing you really need to be a camera person is like equanimity in the world and you need to just be the kind of person who doesn't get annoyed with stuff because to be honest with you the camera person and to some degree the sound person on one of these shoots they're doing the hardest jobs of the whole thing they're carrying the heaviest equipment they're being asked to do something that's technically really challenging but there's a creative aspect they're they're the first ones there because they got to set up these lights for hours they're the last ones to leave because they're putting all the gear into the car to leave the truck like it is a a very hard very challenging job and if you're if you're wired the way i am if you're just some kind of entitled, annoying person, the way I am, you will not last as a network camera person. And so of course, Scott, our camera guy was completely unfazed by the whole thing because that's just, he has just developed that ability to just move through the world and get his job done and get along with everyone and just like do stuff that none of which I have like naturally occurring in my, in my personality. But I will say at the moment where I was like about to have some kind of a meltdown. I was, I was, I was, I don't want to say proud of myself, but I was relieved that something inside of me said, dude, what are you doing right now? Like, how dare you be this annoyed at something that is not that big of a deal. And also we're getting everything we need. And also it's very cool. I mean, those videos that I sent you, I was getting plenty of access to this place. Like nothing bad was happening to me other than it wasn't exactly what i had expected um and i uh and i didn't feel i didn't feel great about the feelings that i was having afterwards but i felt at least relieved that i interrupted the cycle a little bit i did

not i was not familiar with any of this before you were telling me about it but i was googling here i did not realize that fray house 2 is spelled t-o-o and that there's a third one called fray house now just like the look who's talking franchise do you know which came from Yes. I think the one with Kirstie Alley Okay, gotcha Whichever one of the houses Kirstie Alley lived in

How bummed would you be to do all this research And then you finally read it for the first time And it's Freyhouse, T-O-O How much of the magic Just sort of sloughs away

Palm Springs' hottest club Is Freyhouse 2 I have so much other Minutia I could bore you with About my time in Palm Springs including what is clearly a glitch in the matrix of whatever mapping programs like Lyft and DoorDash use. I did not have one interaction. I did not have, because I didn't rent a car when I was there. I was just taking Lyfts back and forth. I did not have one Lyft ride where the mapping program seemed to work for the person getting to me without like watching the little cartoon car go way in the wrong direction. And then the timing being like, they're going to be here in one minute. Wait, they're going to be here in 20 minutes. Wait, they're going to be here in 15 minutes. There's something, there's some sort of radio interference in that town that was causing every time I had to get in one of those cars to be an adventure. The people were all super nice. I had very good experiences with everybody who I was riding with. But there's something, I've never seen a town that where like the entire, whatever the map program is, is broken in Palm Springs.

So were the drivers actually going way out of their way because they were also victims of this technological snafu, or did it just appear that they were doing that on your app? Because I'm just wondering, did you ask them, like, is it hard to get around here with this technology glitching out?

I didn't ask the Lyft drivers because I didn't want to seem rude or put off. Like, when I got, I didn't want to get in the car and go, hey, why did you go, why did you take a route that seemed really, like, it didn't make sense? because I can see how on Lyft in the app it'll show you this colored line that indicates where the car is going to go to get to you in the most efficient way. And then I would just see the car going and then all of a sudden that line would jump up by a block and then jump up by a block as the car was going in a more...

The route is changing, not just the car.

The route was changing, but I don't know. When I say the route was changing, the route was accounting for the fact that the car was now taking a longer way to get to me. Does that make sense?

Yeah, Pat, like, it looks like I should take a right here. The car didn't take a right here, so now it's saying it's going to take the next right, the next right. Exactly.

That just kept happening, and it was fine. I mean, none of it was catastrophic to my schedule, but I didn't really want to say, like, hey, what was up with that? Because I didn't want them to think I was really that put out, but it was just weird. But then on Friday night after we'd been filming all day, I was trying to get back to the hotel, and the first thing that happened was I called for a lift. I was standing outside of some kind of restaurant there called Tropicale in Palm Springs near where we'd been filming.

Oh, did you get any pens? I've been literally, since I brought you back some pens from the Tropicale, they have those perfect little clicky pens that you like. That's where you got it from? I've been meaning to write to them to see if they will ship me some because that was my secret gift to you. But it's been like five or six years and I never did that. Dude, I was standing in front of that place. I wish you had gone in there and just smurfed a couple of pens.

Well, I'm sorry. next time yeah i will and i well it was a bachelorette party central andrew i was i did i was like i'm peace and love to everyone who's celebrating the you know celebrating their time with their friends in advance of their wedding peace and love but wow that there was a lot of bachelorette parties there was one point where i'm waiting for the lift i'm going to use a a word here that's a little edgy but one of the people uh one of the members smurf i'm going to use the word smirk like this bachelorette party one of so many goes into tropicale and again i was just i just wanted the lift to have a reference point right so i was like oh this okay cool i'll stand in front of this i didn't even put it together that's where you got the pen and um so some of the bachelorette party is standing out on the street and then one of the members of the party i guess their table's ready because the place was jumping and all i i'm just like looking at my phone watching this car that's supposed to be coming to get me just go like further and further and further away from the predicted route and this keeps going from like it's one minute away to it's six minutes away to I'm like you're just driving to Palm Desert now I think right I eventually canceled that ride by the way because I was like I think this person decided they didn't want to drive Lyft right now and they just forgot to turn it off like there was a point at which they were now 20 minutes away from me they were driving the opposite way from me but I was but

they were still somehow logged in do you ever reach out to them on the rare occasions that i got that sometimes i'll like you know text the driver like hey are is there an issue with the ride it looks like the map has you getting further and further away did you try that at all or did

you just not feel like messing i just canceled the ride and when it told me that it wasn't going to charge me for canceling the ride i felt like we all knew what was happening okay yeah yeah the app knew because usually if you try to cancel a pickup and it's too close they'll be like it's five bucks This was like, you know what? we get it something's up with this person so i just now if i wouldn't have been able to cancel the ride for free i would have texted and been like um are you still planning to come get me but i didn't have to i just said that's all right i'm gonna this this person doesn't seem for one reason or another they don't seem that into doing this lift ride right now considering right now they're somewhere near indio california they're somewhere lost in the antelope valley i'm just mentioning repeaters for kcrw now andrew in case you're scoring at home nice um so in the midst of all this as i'm like looking at the phone one of the bachelorette party people just a woman she just like sticks her head out of tropical and goes get in here bitches and i just i hadn't felt that bad since an hour earlier when i was at the fray house and uh was not being able to do everything i wanted uh i was like oh my god that is that is not a way of relating to the world that i particularly appreciate and you think because she had just discovered the pens i think that's kind of yeah yeah their table wasn't ready

for hours but she was like get in here look at these pens she was like andrew asked me to smurf

a few of these pens they're amazing get in here bitches we're getting some pens for andrew they're clickers but um so so then i've now like canceled ride number one because that person's in the wind And now I sign up for You know Assigns me a new driver And it's a guy named Gary And Gary is an interesting character Because A, Gary's driving a truck Have you ever had a Lyft pick you up in a truck?

Rarely But I can remember the last time a truck picked me up It was I think after an airport trip And I took the train to like Whatever The closest train stop at the time Which was the university Stadium exit It's just so hard The reason I'm being specific is you know that area. It's so hard to navigate around there. There's no split roads, many lanes. You can't take easy lefts. It's just like a pain. And I remember I'm waiting for my Lyft, waiting for my Lyft, waiting for my Lyft. And then it shows up, and it's a pickup truck. It was like a big pickup truck. I must have sat in the front seat with them. But, yeah, it was sort of strange.

Some of those will have a cab in back. I assume that they have to have a cab to get approved for Lyft, right? Yeah. You know what? I can't imagine.

I did sit in the back. I think I sat in the back seat.

So I see it's Gary. He has pretty, he has what we could only describe as an Andrew Walsh-esque mustache, except it's gray. And he's got like suspenders on. He's kind of got some sort of wildish gray hair and not a lot of hair on top. So this is Gary. He's in a gray pickup truck. So I'm looking and finally, you know, five, ten minutes later, a gray pickup truck with Gary in it pulls up in front of Tropical. And I'm like, great, Gary's here I go around to the truck And I don't know if I've ever had this happen There's already people in it Oh, wow There's four more bachelorettes, Andrew Bachelorettes, really? They come pouring out of Gary's truck And I'm feeling weird Because I'm standing really close to them And I was like, I think I'm the next ride Although I've never had that Whatever the system is that these things use It rarely has it where someone dropping people off Is also the person picking you up

in my experience pretty efficient but i mean it's a very small town right i mean that that's what we're getting into here right like it's just i mean there's a lot of people driving lyft because

there's a lot of tourists there i mean the whole town is tourists and most of them don't have cars so so they get out and one bachelorette says to me as she walks by she goes i'd buckle your seat belt and i'm like well okay i don't know what i don't know i don't know what to do with that information what are you trying to tell me about gary but all right so i so the last person out of the truck shuts the door and i'm getting to the back door and the truck starts pulling away and i'm like banging on the truck and i'm banging the truck stops and i go i kind of look now remember i've already canceled one of these rides now gary's here and i'm looking and i'm like this is gary this is a hundred percent gary he has suspenders on he's wearing suspenders in his lift profile photo and he's wearing suspenders now this has got to be the same gary and license This place says Gary, and it has dice on the mirror. Thank you. I mean, so I, like, knock on the window. He stops kind of a little bit stunned, and I kind of open the room. I go, hey, I think I might be your next ride. And he goes, huh? And I go, is this you? And I'm holding my phone, and I'm holding a picture of Gary. And I show it to Gary, and I go, is this you? And I wanted to say, are these the same suspenders? Like, what are the chances this isn't you? And he goes, oh, okay. And then he looks on his phone, and he goes, Trace? And I go, no, I'm Luke. Not only did he not have me as his next customer, he had someone named Trace who was supposed to be his next customer. But I'm looking at him on my phone. This is what I'm saying, Andrew. The whole system was bizarro. Eventually, it refreshed, and he was like, oh, okay, Luke. And then he was like, go ahead and get in. He gave me a...

ride it was fine he had been a heavy equipment operator he did do this one thing though that um is totally fine but it's just it i'm surprised when people do this which is i i guess the i guess how i would describe it is maybe assuming that people know more than they do i think i have a problem of maybe assuming people know less than they do which can probably get into an annoying kind of pedantic mansplaining type of thing god bless becca for suffering through the my many long tangents about subjects i'm only minimally informed on but there's this other version or this other side of that coin which is so i was just making small talk with gary about heavy equipment and i was like i was like so heavy equipment like dozers and stuff and he goes oh yeah dozers uh you know what he starts naming heavy equipment i don't i don't know about and then i'm just trying to think of follow-up conversation i'm like how do you and i actually have wondered about this I was like how do you know if you have actually dug up enough dirt but not too much dirt don't you feel like it's weird that these bulldozers I'm not talking to you Andrew this is not a continuation of my Gary conversation like someone's building a house like a couple of houses over for me and they had all like the like bulldozers and earth movers out there and I just always think man that seems like a really challenging job and really precise like you're scraping the earth but you don't it's got to be a certain like you can't go down too far but you also you know what i mean you you got to like scrape out a certain amount of this but it needs to be level it needs to be a certain depth there's like a bunch of stuff that i would have a really hard time with and he goes oh well uh he goes no we have a system for it and blah blah blah and he goes like um he goes do you know the area and i go not particularly well and he goes well he goes you know up on uh i-107 up on that ridge up there on i-107 i did all of those houses and i just thought in my life have i ever said to someone the equivalent someone i've just met like well you know you know i-107 all that ridge up there like i have never assumed anyone had that kind of information ever in my life once like because i because i didn't because i don't know where i-107 is and what are the chances i would know where i-107 is or what the ridge is above i-107 What must it be like to go through life thinking that a random stranger in your lift who just told you he doesn't know the area would be familiar with a particular ridge on I-107? That would be amazing. That would actually be shocking if I knew that information.

He might have been on autopilot. I wonder if he just, you know, he doesn't have to, but it sounds like he makes small talk all day during his shift or whatever. And so, you know, some of those things might just kind of come out on autopilot sort of, you know.

Maybe, although we were having a conversation. Yeah, maybe so. Also, maybe you thought I was Trace. Maybe Trace knows about that stuff. Well, where's Trace?

That's what I was going to ask you. I do have any sense exactly what I was thinking. Is Trace still just standing in a corner somewhere, just waiting?

When that gal yelled, get in here, bitches, Trace just went into Tropicale.

Yeah, Trace is just like following people around.

I am part of the bachelorette party now. Yeah, exactly. I feel bad for Trace. Okay, we do need to thank some dazzling donors. And then I really do. I spent the whole weekend resenting people who were at Fray House 2. and watching people roasting J-Lo on the internet. And I want to talk about this a little bit with you, Andrew. It's not usually the kind of thing we get into on the show, but I think there's something interesting going on here. So, after we thank some dazzlers.

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.

Hey, let's thank some dazzling donors. These are the incredibly generous, supportive, wonderful people who are making TBTL possible with their donation of a dazzling amount of dough Starting with Rachel Howell, who's in Broomfield, Colorado Rachel! We met Rachel in Denver We sure did, Rachel says, hi friendos I'm grateful that I was able to dazzle with my donation this year I've listened to TBTL since 2010 Ah, a newcomer. Rachel, welcome. Welcome to the listening audience. I honestly don't know what my life would look like without having my five-day-a-week dosage of Luke and Andrew. If your TBTL symptoms last for more than five hours, ask your doctor if your dosage of Luke and Andrew is right for you, Rachel, is the thing I would tell you.

If your TBTL episode lasts for more than five hours, definitely. Today's might. I know, I realize that.

We're 54 minutes in, and we haven't even gotten to J-Lo yet. I know. One of our dazzling donors. Uh-huh. Yes. Oh, God. Well, she needs to go on a PR offensive, and I think it starts with dazzling TBTL with her donation. Rachel says, I'd like to promote the National MS Society fundraiser and events. If any 10s are looking for a new...

new charity i would advocate for that uh so the national ms society um yeah i know folks um i know folks with ms and i know particularly in this part of the country in the northwest there's a high occurrence of ms so it's greatly it's very likely that a lot of our listeners have been touched by this in one way or another and it's obviously a really really worthy cause to um to help support so uh rachel is suggesting the national ms society there is a website listed here it's national ms society.org chapters yeah slash cal slash fundraising hyphen events so

exactly and if you didn't get all of that and if you're somebody who's really interested and how could somebody not get all of that it's a complicated address but if you are looking for that email and you don't feel like rewinding your podcatcher um just email me and i'll connect you

with this link via absolutely i bet you if you google national ms society fundraisers and events She'll get there as well. Rachel says, finally, a big thank you to my amazing husband, Matt, who claims to be a 10 but is really a 10.5. Shots fired, Matthew. Rachel questioning your TBTL. Do you go with bona fides or bona fides?

I was going to say bona fides there.

Yeah, I think bona fides. That's one of those ones, though, depending on – I hear different people say it different ways. Whoever I heard it say last, if they seem like a smart person, and that becomes my new default until I hear someone else say it differently.

Yeah, I don't think I've probably ever said it the same way twice in a row. I probably always alternate.

Matt, who claims to be a 10 but might be a 10.5, thanks for being cool with my great love for TBTL and my yearly donation, smiley face. Thank you, Matt. You are a hero. I'll make you a goddamn five if you want, as long as you don't make any trouble for us in the donation department.

Thank you, Rachel.

Please keep up the good work. Dummies, you're loved. Signed, Rachel from Denver. Hey, thanks, Rachel. That's so sweet of you. And thanks, Matt, also, for being cool with this whole thing. Maestro?

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle.

Hey, look who it is, Andrew. Yeah, it's my buddy. Your friend and mine, Anna Anafi of Seattle, Washington. She did one-time Week in Review guest, I believe. Yes. Full-time Leaf Clearer from her neighborhood.

Greenwood, yes, exactly.

Sometimes Leaf Policy Resenter in her neighborhood.

The deal was cleaning up all the leaves from the gutters are good, but then kind of being punished for dispensing of them in a proper way, right?

Yeah, like let's make it easier for the people who are doing a great kindness to the neighborhood, trying to keep the sewers from blocking up by making it easy for them to get rid of those leaves. Anyway, Anna's moved past all of that and now is focused full time on TBTL support. And it says, while I only became a regular listener in 2020. Whoa, that is. Yeah, I didn't quite realize that. Yeah. I mean, bone Ammy hasn't scratched yet. did i make i think i made that reference on the show recently what is going on with me and bon

amy i don't know were you were you greeted with this amount of silence what are you talking about i i really was not sure oh you know that you know it's that wood floor it's not wood it's it's well

i don't think of it as because it has a little bit of grit in it it's like a powdery cleaning thing that we used to have like weirdly a lot of when i was a kid maybe it's for floors i don't know What I know is that you would put a little bit of the powder on something and some water, and then you would use it to get out, I don't know, stuff that was hard to get clean. But the thing was the can had a chicken coming out of an egg or something, and it said hasn't scratched yet.

I'm looking at this now. It's very, very charming. It's powder cleanser. We used a different brand of powder cleanser in our house. I was thinking of Bona for whatever it's worth. There's a hardwood floor cleaner called Bona, B-O-N-A, that somebody introduced me to a while back. But Bonami, is that how you say this powder cleanser?

I don't know. There's so much stuff I'm having trouble pronouncing today.

I kind of love this can, though. Isn't it great, though?

Okay, so we used to have the one that's in the yellow, like, tube. So I'm seeing a bunch of pictures of this now. Are you looking at the one that's basically like a yellow kind of cardboard with a foil type of thing tube? Have you seen that one?

Yeah, like when you say a tube, you almost mean like a Pringles can. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm looking at. In fact, this is going to be the show pick.

That is so, so reminiscent of my childhood as a kid. There was just so much of this around for some reason when I was a kid. And that hasn't scratched yet thing just really. It's lodged in my brain, as you can tell, and maybe Anna Anoffi's as well. I don't know, but I do know that Anna's been listening since 2020 because she just told us. Anna says, I sure have gotten a lot out of those years. It's amazing how quickly one can learn the inside jokes. Well, that's because we got about five of them and we make it every day. That's right. I don't want to take away. I don't want to steal your valor on this, but some of it is because you're a quick study, but some of it's because we got to get some new material.

Yeah, absolutely.

It also Let's see here The jokes I've now begun to speak the language of TBTL And also you can annoy your friends and family With constant drops And shushing them while the pod is playing Oh no Anna that's a good way to really damage Some friendships I can only imagine Anna trying to shush someone And then the person going oh okay I'm about to hear something And then it's just more of this

And it's this. Oh, no. I'm worried.

Here's what we know about shushing. Or, hey, oh, this is the good part, right? This is what we know about this just generally in life. Whenever we do that, even with quality products, it never works out. Like, so many times I've said to somebody, oh, no, this line in the song. This is the line. Oh, hold on. I want you to hear this. I want you to hear this. and universally and invariably the person just kind of like is like oh okay it's never the way to get someone to enjoy something more to be like oh check this out oh this is so funny when he says this and yet i do it all the time and it never works and that's with things that are actually well made can you imagine shushing someone to hear this there's a song i don't even know if i

want to say well I will say it's a Michael Christmas song that was one of my like there not only just a song that I love but one of my favorite moments in hip-hop was embedded in this one song and I'm sure I probably shushed you and made you listen to this one moment I think you appreciated it but I was in the I've ruined the song for myself now because it's a cringe moment for me every time because I remember being in the car with Genevieve and saying here it comes here it comes here it comes she's like yes you've played that for me a million times I've heard it and like she had i don't remember playing it for her a million times i probably maybe had done it once before or whatever but she wasn't like and this is very rare like we'll you know kind of tease each other or whatever about like me and like kind of repeating the same joke or we're getting too excited about something but like in this moment and i'm sure she has no recollection of it i'm sure she has no idea that she ruined my life but just in this one unguarded moment she was like clearly like actually irritated because i she was probably also talking and i wanted her to hear something or something and she was just like yes i know i've heard it and it was just like it was pure unadulterated annoyance at me and rightfully so but now whenever i hear that part of the song instead of bringing me joy i feel shame thank you anna thank you anna for donating to this

this is a special show andrew this is the best part of anna's daily dazzling donor message i don't have anything personal to plug uh but i find it fitting to mention the ravenna pop-up kitchen if it hadn't been for andrew mentioning that they needed more volunteers it would have never occurred to me to go looking for this specific volunteer gig. I've come to look forward to Sunday meal service and some of the entertaining regulars. So any Seattle Tens who want to and are able should join us. You can prepare food, serve food, or both. It's a great team of caring and dependable folks. Thanks, Luke and Andrew, for your dedication, and thanks to all of the guests, hosts, and callers, and especially the kids who tell jokes. Yeah, good call, Anna. We need more kid jokes. 206-414-8285. 206-414-TBTL Hit us up with those kid jokes Always good content I value this community of weirdos That's Anna saying that I'm not allowed to call it a community of weirdos No, we asked you to stop saying that I believe cease and desist Was the specific words your attorneys used The fact that we have different attorneys is weird Didn't start off that way

Didn't start off that way But it definitely became a need Weird thing is my attorney's name is Danny And so is yours That's what adds to the confusion I did want to say Anna responded to, I think, a tweet that I sent out back when I tweeted. So that tells you how long ago it was. I think it was a couple of solid couple of years ago.

Now, I just said, hey, if we're you mean Twitter, the platform previously known as X.

Wait, are they going back? Yeah. Right. No.

How about every time we talk about Twitter, we go what X now? Like if you just have to also like because no one ever wants to say X. Right. We all have to say the thing that used to be called Twitter. But like now if we say Twitter, we have to say the thing that's now called X.

And I think they still they still call it tweeting. Right. But it's the platform like you would still send out a tweet on X. Is that true? It doesn't matter. Don't answer that. It's an X. It's a truth. The whole thing is exhausting. But I don't want to say that a couple of years ago I did put out sort of a hey if you want to volunteer with this group. And Anna was one of the people who replied and she's been out there like I think almost every single Sunday.

Sunday since and that is not what is called for by the way if anybody does want to volunteer just you know if you want to make sandwiches twice a year that's fine or even come join us outside you know every four or five months one Sunday like whatever it's fine you don't have to have that level of commitment but I think it's worth noting Anna's level of commitment thinking Anna's like me I think she enjoy I was just hanging out with Anna yesterday it feels like we're just kind of hanging out and honestly like having Anna there has really been a huge part of the enjoyment for me i'm not just saying that because she's um she's sprinkling uh all of this candy on us in dazzling donor form which i also very much appreciate but yeah anna's become a really really good friend and just honestly indispensable to a pop-up kitchen so just personally thank you

anna thanks anna for all you do we really appreciate you uh thanks and also to rachel and matthew for uh making tbtl possible today hello and welcome to top story something started rumbling last week andrew that was my stomach i apologize i've been thinking about it for days that was so rude can you move the mic further away from your belly it was unfortunate j-lo uh put out a an album and and and uh a kind of a concert not a concert film but a sort of a movie with it um and i don't i don't think she actually released it last week but i started really seeing a lot in the discourse about it last week and the story around this this album and and particularly this kind of like extended music video kind of music fantasy thing that she put together to accompany it was and this was from jlo's jlo's telling because i heard her on morning edition talking about it in other places was that none of the labels nobody with money really wanted to bankroll this thing they all thought that it was kind of a bad idea financially and so j-lo had to pay for this herself and i'd seen a number i'd heard a number i don't know if this is accurate or not but it was in the neighborhood of 20 million dollars that some like j-lo personally financed this project to the tune of like 20 million And when I heard her on Morning Edition talking about that a while ago, I thought, well, good for her. She's betting on herself. And she seemed actually quite likable when she was being interviewed. She sounded relatable, but polished, but, you know, friendly. And I actually was texting back. I said, hey, J-Lo seems actually, I've never met J-Lo. I was like, J-Lo seems pretty likable in this. And she was kind of being pretty honest about the fact that nobody thought this was a good idea. And she had to pay for it herself. I like stories like that, because nobody thought TBTL was a good idea. And the thing is, they were right, Andrew.

Yeah, I was waiting to see if we were successful yet.

I'm talking about J-Lo now. Oh. They were wrong about us. Are you kidding me? Please. We'll be the last podcast in existence, baby. I know. They were loud wrong about TBTL, but they were loud right about this project from J-Lo, because it is really, really bad and really unselfaware. And the thing is, $20 million is a lot of money, but it's not enough money to make like a, I'm not exactly sure how long this kind of movie thing is, but based on the clips that I've seen from it, there were some real, well, you know, when I gave that speech to the Oregon Banking Association and the feedback that my agent got was that there was a real credibility gap. there's some real believability gaps in this j-lo thing one she's like in some kind of fiery melting down like nuclear furnace kind of factory and she has to like walk across some kind of a like an i-beam to escape from this like thing that's melting down right and she's in like some kind of heat suit and she has like a it's like imagine like a like a welder's helmet right that has like a little rectangle for your eyes over it or your face and like she's supposed to be going over this like you know kind of thing you have to balance on I don't know what that what role this plays in the plot of JLo's new like music video movie but somehow she has to like dance her way out of a incinerator and the way that they've superimposed her face onto the little square of this like of this like heatproof outfit she's wearing it looks like something that you and I could have done in premiere with at least with with 20 minutes of training you mean like they

make it look like you can see through that square into her eyes because of course those squares but her whole face though not just it's not just the it's not just the little cut out of a welding helmet that would be around the eyes it's like cut out the whole face yeah because i think what

they what they thought was this is a good this is a good way we want to show that J. Lo is in here, but also we don't really have to have her in there. It can be somebody else, but we can superimpose her face. If they just do her eyes, it's not as convincing. So I think they thought this was a good solution. Somebody thought this was a good solution. Like, cool. It doesn't have to really be J. Lo, um, walking on an eye beam as like, uh, something is incinerating around her, but we can put her face in and you won't know the difference, but we do know the difference. It's not very convincing. She does a kind of a, like a singing in the rain style dance at the end of the movie where she's got an umbrella and there's some kind of a theme with a butterfly. I think the butterfly is like her soul or her spirit and a hummingbird, I think. Maybe it's a hummingbird. Some like little fantastical thing is kind of flitting in and out of these various scenes and it's very singing in the rain. It's on like a street. It looks like it's like a street in Manhattan somewhere and she's kind of walking kind of in a jaunty way with this umbrella, which people have noted is exactly like some of the scenes of Corky Sinclair practicing his dancing in Waiting for Guffman. But like what has happened is because this this kind of movie video thing is is it's not great. People have they started off kind of roasting it a little bit. and and which there's also a lot where jennifer lopez's pr team presumably at her direction has also done a lot of stuff within this movie and i think in other circumstances to try to sort of like portray her as a real relatable person and also as a like a you know somebody who who has very humble beginnings so one of the things that keeps coming up is there's somebody doing like an interview with her i don't know if this is part of the movie or not or this is part of

the publicity package for the movie can i interject just for one second because there are you i don't know if you said this or not there are two movies that go along with this project right there's other two okay so you have you have her new record and then you have this sort of music it's described as a musical film that comes out along with this is me now this is me now is the name of the record and this is me now a love story is like sort of the video component of it and then she also um you know funded and produced her own documentary about her relationship with ben affleck called the greatest love story never told which is on amazon prime and i'm pretty sure that she has funded all of these things and so i wasn't sure what your thoughts were on all of this and i haven't been seeing as much you know social media barrage about it because i'm not on those websites

you're hanging out in the wrong part of tiktok my friend but i've been hearing you know i've

been sort of hearing just casual conversation about this and so i wasn't sure if like if you were going to be talking about yeah so another kind of issue people have is her in this documentary that she's made herself just like Michael Jordan and all these in Tom Brady everybody wants to make their own documentaries about themselves for legacy shit which I kind of do have an issue with that um and like sort of talking about her relationship and shining a light on a relationship that failed the first time because there was too much light shining on it and so it's just sort of like it's all kind of complicated in there too i yeah i i would say that the the ben affleck stuff

i'm kind of less read in on like um the the other than people are saying it seems fairly clear that even ben affleck agrees that this was not a great idea like that to to talk about their their their relationship in this way in this documentary that she's also ultimately signing off on um but as far as the like their first round and their breakup i don't really know a lot about what people are saying about that but what i do and thank you for the clarification because you're right i was kind of blending the like the music video component with this like documentary that she's that she's also kind of had commissioned and she's kind of getting roasted on both fronts the documentary what what people are are kind of a little put off by and by a little i mean a lot put off by is like there's one scene where someone's asking her go to bodega order and it's like it seems like it's a very staged thing that's supposed to kind of be like a way to just like really establish that she used to go to the bodega and that she's very new york and that she's very kind of like just understands the day-to-day life of a new york person and the order that she lists so there's a few things one it's like obviously whoever asked her this question was probably told hey ask her her bodega go-to order like it's one of those things that's supposed to be real cash but it's probably there was probably a team of people including j-lo who yeah thought thought this through as a question but it's you know it's shot with like a cell phone kind of a thing it's real like verite and what she says is like um she goes oh uh my my my go-to bodega order i can't find the tape so i'm just paraphrasing here she's like uh a ham and cheese on a roll um an orange drink if you know you know and a bag of chips that's my go-to bodega order When I tell you, Andrew, how much the Internet, particularly folks in New York, particularly folks in the Bronx, are breaking down how. silly that order is like they're like what do you mean orange drink if you know you know what are you exactly talking about bag of chips nobody sends someone to the bodega and says get me a bag of chips you go like get me wrap snacks get me doritos get me uts like no one would say bag of chips right like like uh the people are a little more generous about the ham and cheese on a roll although they're all like it's a bacon egg and cheese with salt and pepper that's just like the default order for most people i mean we can't we can't say for a fact that she didn't ever order ham and cheese on a roll that is possible but there's just a vagueness to the order orange drink if you know you know and a bag of chips i will accept a bag of chips of whatever kind like there's just something about it doesn't really like it doesn't have the ring of truth to a lot of the people on the internet who are then like listing what their exact orders would be there is the scene though in the i think this is from the documentary where she's i think been working out i've only seen the the i haven't seen what precedes this or what comes after it but there's a scene

where jennifer lopez is i think taking her hair out of some kind of um you know i don't know like ponytail holder or something she looks like she's been like exercising really vigorously maybe she's

doing choreography practicing choreography it's my understanding i can jump in here because i'd read about this this morning it's my understanding this was another kind of uh issue of contention with people in the bronx something about like well you know in the bronx we run up and down the block when i was a little girl we ran up and down the block so i got the impression that this hair situation was tied up in this exercise that she was doing running up and up and down the block

some people said was not really a thing i i think so i think what i think the sense i have from watching the video is she's she's just gotten done training or working out and she takes her hair out of whatever like thing and she starts teasing it out not unlike your beard before a big appearance on KUOW and she goes like and she starts shaking her head and her hair's all kind of sweaty and sort of unkempt in a way and she goes and she's like sitting on like a weight bench or something and she's like oh my hair's like this it just reminds me of being a little girl in the Bronx just running up and down the streets crazy girl just a crazy girl in the Bronx and it is like just it's having the opposite whatever they were hoping people's read on this would be how it would make people feel at least the corner of the internet that I tend to hang out in it is really having the opposite effect including people who went to the school that Jennifer Lopez went to a lot of people like I'm talking people who more recently than her went to the same school she went to a very, what appears to be a very beautiful Catholic high school in the Bronx that was like on the river. And I don't know what her status was. I mean, she may have been on scholarship. I don't know her life outside of the school, but the point that's been made by a lot of other young women who have also attended the school was this place was amazing. The teachers were great. The students were great. It's on a really nice street. It was a really good place to go to school and it did not have this feeling and the bronx as a place isn't necessarily this sort of wild atmosphere that jennifer lopez wants to project to the world as far as her like as far as like her legitimacy her background um but the thing is what this has unleashed and this is the part that i'm the most interested in and this is the only reason i'm even talking about this with you andrew is because i feel like this is a real moment of karma i don't believe in karma But like if I did, this would be a moment of to me karma really showing itself to be a thing because what is now happened on the Internet are tens, if not hundreds of people who worked at various levels of entertainment, usually in like production assistant or hair and makeup or other kind of that strata of the entertainment industry, sharing their stories of times that Jennifer Lopez gave them the worst interaction they've ever had. With somebody in there in this position and the reason that I tend to believe these folks is because a number of them will talk about a project that involved Jennifer Lopez and a number of other famous people and they will say things like and so and so so lovely just totally nice and so and so great really great to work with and so and so like these aren't people who are just like perpetually disgruntled. yeah they're just like people who are like i i worked with this person and they were awesome

um j-lo not that not that at all like people who took people who worked in on the promotion side of like power 106 in new york a young woman who was going to get to take a picture with j-lo because j-lo came to the radio station to promote something and just like her story of just complete in her experience anyway j-lo just not in any way

recognizing her as another human being who walks the earth, but just as a sort of prop to stand next to, to take a photo without any eye contact or conversation before the next prop moved through, like just story after story, people who are saying my parents worked in the high limit room at the Aria and, and, and JLo and Ben Affleck were in there again, this is just someone's story, but like saying, and Ben Affleck left a very healthy tip of a few hundred dollars. And then at some point, jennifer lopez came back in and took back about a hundred and seventy dollars of the tip stories that just have a lot of specificity and i can't verify them but i have to say they just don't sound unpossible to me and like the the thing that seems to if these stories are to be believed and again i don't really know why so many people be making them up and with so much consistency and what i haven't seen is one person on the internet saying i was you know you know i was a person who was who was who was had a terrible illness and i was in the hospital and i looked up one day and there was j-lo you know standing next to russell wilson yeah you know yet there's only one set of

footprints somehow they're still that was when russell wilson gave j-lo a piggyback ride like

that's right it was a fun sexy time there's nobody saying i had an interaction it's like trump there's no one saying i had an interaction with this person and it went better than i was hoping It's just only people going.

Kid Rock would like a moment of your time.

Weirdly, as it relates to both performers.

He was on J-Lo's back and Russell Wilson was giving them both a piggyback. Right. It kind of bums me out. Like I didn't know about this. I hate that. First of all, I'd always heard that I'd not heard one thing about J-Lo one way or the other about her interactions with people. Nor had I. But I'd always heard that Ben Affleck was actually quite likable and affable, which always kind of makes like it's weird that like I mean, quite affleckable affleckable.

Exactly. There's nothing in this. I want to say, I don't know. Affleck, there's there's nothing in this, by the way, that I haven't heard one person saying and also Ben Affleck was there being rude. like yeah yeah there's there seem to be no accounts of that either and that's what causes me to feel like there is some believability to a lot of these stories because again it doesn't seem like anyone's grinding any axes with anyone else or it just all kind of the the reason that I think the karma thing feels true to me here is because what it reads to me is not that Jennifer Lopez is an actively a bad person in the world or is getting up in the morning wanting to make people have a bad feeling about themselves but that she's also somebody who this is totally just my speculation she probably from a very young age wanted to be a superstar and worked really really hard to become a superstar and probably when she got to that level after all of the hard work and luck and all the stuff that goes into that, probably kind of thought, yeah, I earned this and I'm going to enjoy it in the way that I want to. And that means I'm not going to be worried about every person who opened the door for me getting out of the car at the hotel. I'm not going to worry about every production assistant who was there to hold the shade over me while I was, you know, standing off, like just out of the frame waiting for my shot. Like she doesn't seem to be based on these accounts a person who thinks about other people in the world who she sees as not relevant to her experience or not necessary for her to sort of like spend a lot of time worrying about how do they think about her and by the way that's not a crime and there are lots of people that go through the world that way but there's just something about i don't i don't like that as a way of being in the world i don't like that for people and the idea that like for so long it sounds like she was just going through the world kind of being just not as nice or thoughtful to people as she could have been. And now the people who mostly didn't have a lot of power in those situations have this power. It's called the internet. It feels like a leveling that, or I don't know what you want to call it. It feels, it feels to me like this has sort of been a long time coming and I, it makes me think that there is a loving God. A little bit of, it's comeuppance is the word that you

maybe want to use. And it's a fun word to say, honestly, I like that word. One, let me clean up one thing that I muddied up you're right she was in the gym when she takes down her hair and says quote when I was this reminds me of when I was 16 in the Bronx in the Bronx that was me that's not part of the quote no that's tape that's actually tape of JLo she can she can't say the Bronx saying that uh the messy waves remind of her hair remind her when I was 16 and in the Bronx running up and down the block but she was in the gym so sorry for messing that up as you were you were correct and I was muddying the waters there not that it really matters that much I suppose but But, yeah, you know, I wasn't sure where you were going with this story. I don't have really any opinions on J-Lo, generally speaking. She's in a movie that I love. that is actually in the same universe as Jackie Brown, even though it's made by a different production company. Oh, Out of Sight? Out of Sight, exactly. I love that movie, Coondog. That's my only point of reference for her.

I thought she was great in that film, by the way.

Yeah, do you realize that that's the same characters? It's just played by different actors who are in Jackie Brown, which is by far my favorite Tarantino film. But anyway.

Is that like an Elmore Leonard or something?

I think they're all Elmore Leonard, I want to say, because Rum Punch is the one that Jackie Brown is based on, and then there's that and then there's another one with Jennifer oh my gosh I was doing so well with celebrity talk there for a second with Jennifer from the television show Friends the head of Friends the head of Sirius Satellite Radio oh Jennifer Aniston Jennifer Aniston is also in a third movie that is part of the universe yeah oh really but anyway and I saw that in the theater and Genevieve and I were halfway through it before Genevieve turned to me and said these are the same characters from those other two movies like we didn't even know going in anyway having said all of that um so i don't have like an opinion on her her art or how she moves around the the world most of this is new to me except the one thing that isn't new is the only song i could possibly name by her because this was pop music during i mean i'm not good with pop music anyway but this was specifically during a time when i listened to no pop music kind of the the early 2000s when i was only listening to public radio constantly so huge blind spot for me but the only song i'd possibly be able to name is jenny from the block and i don't even know if that's the name of the song but we know that that's the theme of the song right yeah don't be fooled by the rocks that i've got exactly i'm still jenny from the block and so and i remember the react that was a huge hit if i recall but also i do remember there was pushback right away like why is this woman making this argument so strongly because you clearly are not jenny from the block like there seems to be something in her that she's she feels like she constantly must try to prove to people or

convince people establish her bonafides that that she has good bronx bonafides bronxafides

is what they call them i really is that a show hey if you know you know if you know you know bronxafides um so anyway it's like it's anna gets it this is the part where andrew says bronxafides it's such a it's such a strange thing and you do get the i mean this might not be true i might want to take this back but you sort of get the impression that the people who are arguing so who are protesting so much about their about their possibly more cushy background or the people who you know you know didn't have the hard background that they're bragging about your vanilla ices of the world and maybe your j-lo's or whatever and so yeah that that's always seems to have been something that sort of is like her whole thing and now she's like tripling down on it in what could be sort of a you know like the whole it sounds like this whole project is sort of like i don't think she's made a record in 10 years or more or something and then she even describes this sort of as like i i don't want to put it in her mouth if she didn't say this but like you sort of get the impression that this is sort of her her opus sort of her wrapping up of if not a career an era of her career this new album i think she her original album was this is me then and now this one this is me now so it's all kind of like full circle as yeah as a human as an artist like that must be compelling to do or whatever but like this obsession with no i'm the person who who um really has street cred let's just call it that or bronx cred or whatever it is bronx of fides um but then when you're like i believe the world will be calling it bronx of fides going forward but like the but the fact that you're like the furthest from that like that kind of that bums me out but does doesn't bum me out as much as i've heard that she like sort of punches down or like does not see the humanity and people who are quote unquote below her like that that really does suck for for me to hear because I basically I always root for celebrities to be likable and for their relationships to last I think you're sort of a similar way like I want celebrities to sort of buck the trend and say like no true you know true love or however you see it I don't want to make it sound like breaking up or divorcing somebody is necessarily a failure because sometimes relationships just go that direction that's fine too I don't want to you know for real I think that's important to say like This stuff shows up in a lot of different shapes and forms. But anyway, I always think, wouldn't it be really great if, what, 30 years from now, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are in their, what would it be, 70s or 80s or whatever it is? And still just be kind of casually a couple who are out of the spotlight, but they made it work like that.

Paul and a real Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn type of sitch.

Yeah, that always makes me happy. Absolutely. So I always kind of root for that kind of stuff.

And I don't think there's any indication that their love is hitting any kind of, isn't hitting the skids at all.

Well, did you hear about the part where he finds out during the documentary that she had shared? Sorry, now let's just get the claws out. Ooh, explicit. She like, apparently. and again this could all be kayfabe i haven't seen it but like like apparently he finds out while the cameras are rolling that she had shared his love some of her some of his love notes that he wrote to her she shared them with other artists for inspiration for lyrics or something like that was it fat joe did she share it with fat joe it was probably fat joe and it certainly wasn't the dun kings and that's where it really that's where it really hurts i mean to me like all of this is just through the lens of that Dunkin' Donuts commercial because like we saw her in the, she was working. I mean, that is like kind of part of the storyline in that Dunkings commercial with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. They're trying to crash the record that we're now talking about right now. Fat Joe is in the studio with her.

Well, he's listed as one of the producers on This Is Me Now and on the movie. Yeah. Not the documentary, but the like music video movie. Yeah, they collaborated. And that was another thing too. You just actually we'd reached a nice end point For this so let me just It's only 90 minutes into the show The other thing Too is my understanding is The reason that I'm so fascinated with this Andrew is because in a certain way with the Documentary She's doing something I think her attempt is to do something that I Actually always enjoy when it Comes to content which is really Pulling the curtain back so if They're rolling on the moment where Ben Affleck finds out that she has kind of overshared some of their personal life with some people and we get to see how he really feels about it. Like, I find that content very, very compelling.

That's true.

And so I think that one of the other things that they include in the movie, in the documentary, is a couple of people that are helping produce the music video movie are listing to J-Lo all the people that have turned her down. And it's like a long list. It's like so-and-so, and these are all famous people, obviously, so-and-so is a no, so-and-so is a no, this person can't make it, this person would love to, but they're otherwise booked, and that's also being kind of memefied, but it's funny because it would appear that all those people kind of knew something.

Yeah, like you're putting that up there like, look, I had to prove myself against all these naysayers, like all the haters. We were talking about that last week.

It only works when the haters were wrong. If the haters were right, if Bill Hader turned you down and he literally knew what he was doing, if the haters were hating in the right direction, your film really falls apart. And that seems to be what has happened here. Like, I love everything about this documentary idea, except for the fact that all of the doubters were right. And that really kind of pulls the rug out from the whole thing.

Although that's kind of an amazing move, too. Like, I could sort of see myself doing that, like kind of like listing. They said I couldn't host a podcast. They said I couldn't start my own business. They said I couldn't be on KUOW's Week in Review.

They said I couldn't shave my entire beard the morning of a KUOW appearance.

And they were right. All of these things have just been Massive, massive failures And I wish I'd just taken a moment to hear them

I think it'll be interesting to see If Because J-Lo is nothing if not A very savvy entertainer and performer I mean she's had a tremendous amount of success By way of I think hard work And reading What the kind of vibe is Maybe these movies in this album Are like a notable misstep But like it will be interesting to see how she responds to all of this and if and not even on the like PR side of it in terms of like is she going to make another concert movie or whatever you want to call it on the like personal level the next time that Ben Affleck and J-Lo go out to get dinner I wonder if there is any part of J-Lo's brain that will be kind of telling her hey maybe maybe eye contact with the server maybe like be a little more friendly to the person that opened the door for you when you got to the restaurant. Like, I just wonder if this is the kind of thing that might actually live in her head a little bit so that she is maybe a little bit nicer to the people in her life who, who previously she wasn't really ranking as important, or if it just will harden her approach that all of the small people, and I'm putting that in quotes, are, are sort of out to get her and beneath her and i i wonder if this will have any impact on her actual behavior in the real world

that's interesting i mean i don't mean to be um uh a naysayer about that or a hater but um if i sort of feel like where she is in her life and her popularity and everything like if that if that change happens i feel like it might be short-lived like i just it seems like you know maybe she got burned in this moment was it james corden by the way who we were i'm sort of thinking of like wasn't he like publicly roasted for yeah like for he returned an egg that wasn't cooked to perfection or something

And then all these other stories came out about him being pretty rude to servers. Yeah, not particularly.

I believe it might have involved an order his wife made at a particular restaurant in New York. And then they were, by all accounts, not nice about sending it back, et cetera. And then I will say this. I also think the owner of that restaurant, which I can't call back to mine off the top of my head, also seemed a little extra.

Yeah, I definitely used that as a moment to them.

He didn't miss the chance to get into the discourse with that. Right, right. But you're right. Yeah, that was kind of a public reckoning, if you will, for James Corden and his wife allegedly being less nice to servers than they should have been or could have been.

Yeah, and you wonder, like, hey, maybe for something like James Corden, maybe that does change the way he acts a little bit. Does it change fundamentally who he is, or does it just make him realize there are cameras on me? Which I'm fine with. Yeah, either way.

If it's totally externally motivated, but it changes how you are to the servers. If you're only doing it because you don't want to get roasted on TikTok, I'll take it.

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 did not get to talk Portland Pickles, but we will talk about it tomorrow because it just delighted me all weekend.

Yes, I want to say that that story, you sometimes talk about how certain stories that pop up in the news cycle remind listeners of TBTL because it clicks or checks a bunch of boxes or whatever. There was a moment yesterday where my phone kept buzzing and every time I opened it up, it was a text message. It was an email. It was an Instagram DM or whatever. There was just one moment when something went viral that was specific to our kind of universe here or a joke that we like to come back to that everybody thought of us right away, and that's always sort of a fun moment. So I want to talk to you about that tomorrow. Also, I love that it's the pickles. I know. We've got to get you down to a pickles game, Andrew. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we'll be going down there for various baseball games. A couple of baseball events. Yeah, watch the space. Okay, so let me play this one voicemail for you here, Luke, and then we'll get out of here. I think this was just like, I think it was last week. You were talking. You were telling and talking. So you were talking me. I do both. You were talking me about. You talking to me?

Hey, you talking to me?

I'm trying to do less Travis Bickle in my life because it's such a go-to. Is that what that's from? You talking to me? You talked about, yeah, that's him, I think And it's like, you know, my whole Bowling nickname being the hard Reigns I need to rethink my Relationship with Travis Bickle quote Anyway, so you Were talking on this show about an experience You had on stage during A taping, a very special taping of Livewire Very special Last weekend, where, I'm sorry, who were you Interviewing again? I'm blanking on her name It was not Jennifer Aniston, but when you were starting To get sort of heckled Oh, Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl Strayed.

For the record, I wasn't being heckled. Cheryl Strayed was. Everyone in the room agreed I did an amazing job.

There was somebody up in the balcony who was kind of yelling down at her during the interview saying, why are you putting your mother-in-law in front street with this personal essay or whatever? It was just like a thing, and you talked about how you had to react to that on stage, and it was somewhat awkward. And I made an offhand, a comment about you having the Hells Angels as security guards, which was, I guess, you had to tell me what I was referencing. Altamont, I believe, was the festival with the Rolling Stones and things went sideways and they had the Hells Angels as security guards. So anyway, I made that brief reference, which led Julia to have a memory she wanted to share with us.

Oh, hey, Luke and Andrew. This is Julia here in Hells Arts. And I just want to thank you for your heckler broadcast, talking about Hell's Angels as bouncers. One of the things that happens when you get old is you remember stories from your past. My mom comes up to do these. Or forget them. So I know that when we were younger, our parents did these concerts at Satsup. They helped with the concert organizing. And apparently, one of those, the Allman Brothers stole her family's truck, which is very strange. But in this case...

So I kind of missed that. Julia said that the Allman Brothers stole her family's truck. Did I just hear that right?

That's what I heard. And it also checks out. And that's not even this story. I feel like it's a very Allman Brothers thing. You never hear like, the Platters stole my parents' truck. With the Allman Brothers, you're like, yeah, I'd buy it. The B-52s stole my truck. The B-52s stole my toaster.

and it's as big as a whale and it's about to set sail I have a question for you is it the Allman Brothers who do this song that mentions a street corner that you and I stood at in Arizona I think that's the Eagles oh that's Take it easy.

I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. Got seven women on my mind.

That's the Eagles? I believe that's the Eagles. Okay, gotcha.

Or maybe just Eagles. Isn't that part of the rumor on that band? The band is just called Eagles? Smashing Eagles?

I think it's the Smashing Eagles. I'm not sure. Anyway, okay. So the Allman Brothers apparently stole the family truck. That's not this story, though. That's for another day.

My mother has remembered another story from this, which was that they did have Hells Angels as bouncers. And in that time, everyone wanted to get paid in cash. And, of course, the concertgoers paid their tickets in cash. And because of the outdoor nature and all of the Hells Angels, my mom didn't really feel safe. But she explained she had to wear all the money on her body. She was walking around. And the Hells Angels were somehow poised up on a truck filled with watermelons. It became a fight. It's just one of those stories where like, well, thanks for telling me this now when I'm old enough to really appreciate it. But thanks for everything you guys do.

And so all we know is Julia's mom is wearing the money on her body because that's the only place it feels safe. The Hell's Angels are poised up on a watermelon truck. I don't know if they are keeping Julia's mom safe or eyeing that money, but also a watermelon fight breaks out or a fight breaks out near the watermelons.

I interpret it as to be the Hells Angels are just chucking watermelons off of this truck at people, which I guess a full-on watermelon could be kind of dangerous. It could kind of hurt you, but it does, if they were slices, like if, let me put it this way. If the Hells Angels were going after me with something, I pray it's watermelons. yeah no that's true too yeah versus bullets or brass knuckles or all the other kinds of things also um no offense to the mom in this story but i'm just i don't want to i don't want to tell someone how to live their life 30 years ago or however many years ago this was but if i have a bunch of something that i'm worried the hell's angels want i'm not putting it closer to my body

well i'm still trying to figure out are we protecting the money from the hell's angels or are the Hells Angels also keeping? Because they're the security guards that are hired, right? Can you not? But the whole point is you can't trust them.

And also, were the Allman Brothers at this? Had they stolen the truck yet?

I don't know if this is related to the Allman Brothers story or if that's another story for another time. I'm not sure. I love the idea of the Hells Angels having a melon baller, though. And they're just very carefully maybe scooping out little bits of watermelon and just sort of gently tossing them into the crowd.

Hey, Snake Eyes, can I get the melon baller after you're done with it? Sure, El Diablo.

stop bringing cantaloupe nobody likes cantaloupe go ahead I was just going to tell you about my thoughts on cantaloupe

we need a new segment called things that happened to Julie's parents

yeah I know Julie hold your calls because

please honestly can we find out if the Almond Brothers were at this thing what happened to the money that your mom had like bound to her body did it make it to the intended recipient and who was that recipient uh did the hell's angels bring their own melon ballers or did they borrow some i mean there's again so often is the case on the show we find ourselves with more questions than answers and where's trace exactly i mean if there's one thing we there's one thing we we still wonder at the end of this episode of the show it's what happened to trace and did he get andrew any pens from tropical i'm you know tropical andrew i had a whole other perception of that place based on the pens you got me, which I figured it was kind of like a sort of quirky 70s breakfast cafe in Palm Springs somewhere. That place was hopping. That place was the place to see and be seen in Palm Springs.

Yeah, you know, our friend Christy Wise took me and Genevieve there and let us know about it. And she knows Palm Springs really well. I think her parents live there or have some sort of connection. And, yeah, it was a really nice – it wasn't like a club when I was there. It was just like a really nice, like, old-school, big, like, kind of dinner place, you know, like old-school booths and you – yeah.

I was – I honestly was, like, envious of those who were getting to eat there because I was on my way home to DoorDash some Greek food, which, by the way, Andrew, yes. Oh, the food was fine. did the guy picking it up drive deep into the mountains of Palm Springs for some reason before bringing the food to me yes he did maybe he was picking the olives that's why they were so fresh I still haven't told you and I will tell you tomorrow I promise some big news I have for you about the end of TV I don't mean the end of the show existence I mean how we end the show something happened to me when you were out of town Andrew Thank you.

I had a revelation about this very moment of the show, this part of the show we're doing right now that I want to talk to you about. I'll try to remember to do it on tomorrow's show.

If the point of this is it was better without me, I don't want to hear it. No, no, no. I don't want to hear it.

No, it wasn't. All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you, so please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves. Watch yourself when you're shaving, and please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

I like taking my hair out like this It reminds me like when I was 16 in the Bronx Running up and down the block That crazy little girl Be wild No limits, all dreams Power out