Muse

I will not tolerate monkeys living on campus. If I wanted to run a monkey hotel, I'd install a banana buffet. I'd use vines as elevators, and I'd put tail holes in the bathrobes, and I'd lower all the shower knobs. Well, you've really thought this through. And now it's your turn. Brainstorm. Idea shower. Spray your solutions all over me. Well, we could seal all the vents and then pump the ducts with some kind of gas that... knocks out monkeys. Monkey knockout gas. Now, that's the kind of grounded, sensible thinking I want to see this year.

TBTL! Don't you latte-sipping leeches understand? I've seen enough of these Hollywood super hunks. We need a dumpy, unappealing loser, an everyman.

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

I have never heard someone say so many wrong things, one after the other, consecutively, in a row. There is something about the soul of a snake.

Call Kenny Loggins, because you're in the danger zone from Top Gun. Just be careful.

No. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen, and the it that you heard was the things that these people just said.

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, a show that just might be too beautiful to live. What is this? Only my favorite podcast of all time. My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets?

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it's another absolutely gorgeous day. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. I was out in the back 40 yesterday putting up hog wire, which is without a doubt the most macho thing that I can say that I was doing. Now, did I buy pre-constructed sections of hogwire fencing from the Home Depot? Yes, that's what I did. But I was able to casually mention to one of the CBS producers I work with. They had sent me over a script revision. I said, sorry, this took me a minute to get to. I was out putting up hogwire fencing around the garden. and I just the feeling of pride and masculinity and rugged individualism that I felt in sending that very misleading response was really something you can tell I'm still I'm still have the adrenaline coursing through my veins as we arrive here at episode 4206 in the collector series like to celebrate the episode by this the world's weakest desk bell hit this thing is really on its last legs. We don't have this sound

effect, though, thankfully. Let the fun begin.

Which indicates that we are at the part of the show where I tell you what episode number we are on. The roast of Tom Brady was a big old story for Netflix. Boom! Roasted. They had it at the, I think, the forum, what used to be called the forum in L.A., where the Lakers used to play back in the day. It was this huge thing. But now Tom Brady says he sort of wishes he would not have participated in that roast. I wish I hadn't done that. I'm not shocked. I'm not shocked at all. It's turned into, I think, a bit of a debacle and has me really rethinking what is the value of that sort of stuff. I used to be quite taken with those celebrity roasts and now I'm less taken with them. So we'll get into that. Oh, and we're going to talk to this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depiction. of the Tall Ships. What a bloody treat. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I feel like a sellout. I'm ashamed of myself right now. What'd you do? What'd I do? I'm going to go get a haircut later on this afternoon. I really desperately need it. Ever since I've started kind of losing my hair, the idea of my hair being long is a real problem. When I had a lot of hair, my hair was long a lot of the time, And it had this sort of, like, crazy professorial kind of look to it that I appreciated. Maybe even made me seem like a little bit dangerous, Luke. That was probably when you met me, right? You probably thought I was a little bit dangerous.

Yeah, I was like, God, who is this misunderstood genius who doesn't fit into any conventional boxes with his wild man hair?

Keeps on yelling, I could really use a win here!

Mm-hmm. But, yeah, so I've had a— Who's this Kirkland brand Paul Giamatti I'm dealing with?

Hey, he's a Kirkland brand Andrew Walsh, as far as I'm concerned. I was going to say, I really need this haircut. You know they use real Paul Giamatti. They just put a different label on it. I know. You save so much. I come home and I pour the Giamatti into other bottles so that nobody will know. Right. Yeah. So I've really been looking forward to my haircut this afternoon.

But I kind of ran in here at the last minute and I looked at myself in the screen that you and I share to do this show. And I realized, like, it's just it was just like I couldn't do anything with it. It was like in the area where I have very thin hair, it was long and stringy and I was trying to just make it work. I hope that none of this ends up on Instagram anyway. But as you were doing your intro, I ran out and I grabbed a hat. And I'll tell you what, and this is.

You're behatted now and you weren't. Exactly. When the show started, like when the audio for the show started, you were sans chapeau, and now you are avec chapeau.

First of all, way to flex. I'm going to trust that you said that correctly.

I really guessed on avec. Does avec mean with? I don't know, man. I know sans means you don't have it. Yeah. I was thinking about that this morning because they were talking about Doctors Without Borders, and for some reason the reporter decided to clarify also known as MSF, which I believe is probably like medicine, song, frontier or something. I don't know why they needed to clarify what the letters are in French, but had me thinking about sans. Now, avec, let's see, avec.

While you look that up, I'll just sort of complete my thought here and just say the truth is, and this is something that I hold dear in my life. Hey, nice, congratulations with your little bell there. I do not like to wear hats defensively. This is the truth about me. But as somebody who has my entire life enjoyed wearing hats, even when I had a full head of hair, in fact, I had very thick hair as a young person, I loved wearing hats. I'm looking back now. I had grandparents and aunts and uncles in my life who said, you're going to go bald if you wear a ball cap all the time. I would point to my dad.

It was something they said a lot in the 80s. Yes. I remember hearing that, too, thinking it's a lot of pressure to put on a kid. And also, I'm on a baseball team. We have to wear these Domino's pizza hats.

Right. Also, I don't think my dad wears a lot of hats. And look at that. Like, this is my future grandma. Just like gesture gestures to my right by my dad who has my hairline now. But all of that is to say, as somebody who is losing my hair, it's like, OK, I'm losing my hair that it is what it is like. I'm not I'm not on the catwalk out here anyway. So if I'm wearing a hat, it's because I'm in the mood to wear a hat or because I like that hat. I don't like wearing a hat to hide something. It makes me feel like a fake.

Well, you don't want to be, as they say, hat fishing people. That's exactly what they say. That's a term. I did not invent that term. Oh, I thought you were just making that up. That's a term that sometimes people will use to say, like, if you went on a date with a guy and he was wearing a ball cap and it was your first date. and then you later found out that he was sans hair as opposed to avec hair, I don't know how to say hair in French, then he may have hat-fished you. He may have given you one sort of impression because of the cap and then later revealed that he did not have a lot of hair under there.

You know, that's a real thing. Now, I am not in the dating scene or on the dating scene. I'm nowhere near the dating scene.

In the dating scene on Cape Cod.

with jay allison i'm of the dating scene but the dating scene is not of me um but uh i i do sort of think about that at times even i can't explain it like i think there are times where i subconsciously probably take my hat off around somebody that i don't know that well or that i'm just meeting or something just because it does even in a non-romantic way i don't like the idea of somebody knowing me for a while and then me taking off my hat and then thinking like oh you were really hiding something under there weren't you i'm not trying to deception by hat i am what i am and i'm fine with that but on some days let's face it our hair is less flattering than others i'm going to get a haircut i put this out actually this is now this is leaving the listeners out of this but i don't know how well you can see my hat luke you have your screen up there yeah you've got a little

there's a little robot on there who looks like he's like throwing a paper airplane but instead it looks like it's like an f-14 jet or something how close did i get it's a dart jenna sorry i was

trying to move my mic and i muted i did that the robot is throwing a dart here let me take it off but don't look at my hat it looks like whoa god you're bald so let me tell you about this ad that's a cool little logo i really like that you know who made this logo who the robots Genevieve used AI to make it. She wanted to get, because I play darts a lot. Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets? I also made, in fact, I, this is a whole conversation. So Genevieve wanted to make me a dart bot hat, so she went into some AI program and typed in, you know, robot throwing darts or whatever, and then it spat out various designs.

The future is here, Andrew.

You know what, Luke? I'm dipping into this space and want to talk about feeling a little bit guilty about doing something is yesterday on After These Messages, I was working on a show that was based on a certain theme, but in my research, I stumbled on a couple of... Absolutely. And I'm going to swear here, earn that explicit label. I ran across a couple of absolutely batshit commercials, one from the 90s and one from the 70s. And they had nothing to do with with the show yesterday, but I really wanted to show them to Genevieve. So I made a new segment for the show called That's Batshit. And I needed a I needed music for that. And usually I'd find something punny. We usually are trying to find music for that show, something from the 80s or whatever. Well, I tried that AI program that Marissa used to send us those Star Wars songs. Now, this doesn't sound like the 80s, but I put in various prompts, probably spat out. You know, I kept trial and error. I maybe tried 10 different ones. None of them were quite right. But this is the new That's Bat Shit theme.

That's Bat Shit.

So that's me. really good so that's now my intro to the new segment that's batshit and i gotta say i really did feel like yeah i mean this this is just for a podcast i do for free with genevieve literally in my basement like whatever but you could see how this erodes the jobs for actual musicians because i used this program and there were other programs that you could pay for that are much more professional for literal radio jingles they didn't work for me because i didn't feel like paying for them and learning about them i was just trying to do this and like literally like 10 minutes before the show i came up with that or the the robots did and it occurred to me that like yeah this is a real problem like i i was never personally going to pay somebody to come up with a jingle for after these messages but somebody in some production house was and now

they just have ai that's incredible first of all that's actually a pretty good piece of music can you play it again yeah sure i actually like the intro it feels like i don't know tame impala or something like i'm trying to think of it wasn't what i was expecting but like no you know it yeah it reminds me of a song that comes on my like summertime algorithm that i can't quite uh remember the name of but can you play it one more time yeah i kind of like when the beat drops

that's bad shit

that sound is weird did you tell it to put no i love that weird whistle sound did you tell it

to put that in no all and i gave it the most simple instructions possible i was what i was trying to get my original idea was i wanted like a magic 105.7 i wanted like a classic radio oldies station acapella jingle but like whatever program i was using just simply could not process that somebody would want the kicksy sound like that is just not part of the algorithm the computers are not cooperating with that directive like we're not exactly are you sure you want to do that andrew um so anyway it just kept on spitting out various things and i kept trying to guide it but this one was very basic i just said you know i can't remember this particular one but i probably said acapella and it never gave me real acapella but um short radio jingle and then you can type in lyrics and i just typed in the lyrics that's batshit and again it gave me a whole bunch that i rejected but that's the one that i ended up sticking with i i while i think it reminds me by

the way of a washed out song can i just try to play this really quick i don't know if this is even the song that i'm looking for but let's see if i can no that's not it but there is there is a washed out song that sounds exactly like that's batshit from the award-winning podcast after these

messages do you i mean do you want to do this right now if i were do you want to give me a prompt for a song and then i it'll take it about maybe 30 seconds to 60 seconds to actually kind of come up with something so we'd have to tap dance a little bit how about this um i want to

talk about the roast of tom brady yes and how it was he's now saying he sort of he would never do it again and he is appears to be sort of regretting participating in this thing so like maybe a song about and this comes up a lot like we'll use the song i'm sorry that old kind of you know oldie but is there a song about like regretting things or you know like we play that jerry springer i wish i hadn't done that like how about how about a song called i wish i hadn't done that okay let me come up on the show pretty that comes up fairly frequently when someone or honestly one of us is

walking something back so let me ask you this so what we can do is we can put in prompts for different sounds of of music you know type genres whatever style but then there's a couple of options here whereas we can write our own lyrics like listener marissa did or we can make an instrumental i don't think we want to do that or we can have the computer auto generate lyrics now this is not something i tried yesterday because i didn't want lyrics do you want to have the computer come up with the um theme around apologies yes can we have it try to

Does it know enough? to write a song saying, I wish I, I've made a mistake in the style of Tom Brady. Does it have a sense of like Tom Brady's manner of being in the world? He was pretty, he's a pretty famous person. He's, he's probably written a memoir that's been ingested at some point by the, by the, the AI folks. While you're typing this in, I'll mention that the other day when I was listening to public radio, I was hearing some They were playing this Latest generation of one of these AI programs And I guess I also read a headline About it that says it's a real leap forward Like it's like there's And I forget even who this is if it's ChatGPT But one of the newer ones is Basically people are saying it's like the Spike Jones movie Her where Scarlett Johansson is the voice Of this I guess You know sort of AI program who Joaquin Phoenix kind of falls in love with and the thing that stood out to me was the person doing the story said they played a version of the voice of this person you know this AI program chatbot thing and they said you can use it you can also make it sound you can change what the vibe of the voice is how the person talking to you sounds including you can make them angrier and I thought what would ever be the reason for wanting the chat bot to talk to you in an angrier way yeah like i'm surprised that's even on the menu i guess you know takes all kinds maybe there's somebody out there that that's their kink but it was like the person said you can make the you can make the chat bot you know funnier or or laughier or angrier angrier that's a weird thing for the chat bot to be well certain people are motivated by different things luke sometimes i guess if it's a productivity thing maybe you need it to be

like kind of cracking the whip on you as it were so couldn't you hear like me needing to be hollered at and like just like to like couldn't you see me like kind of alone in my apartment like i hope not just being like andrew you you haven't been a good boy you're well known for being a person who does

not enjoy being hollered at no that is true it's one of the very first things we learned about you

on the show but what if that my dark secret is actually i i need it so okay here's what i've done okay i typed in here here was my prompt a song about a famous football player who is sorry and apologizes and then i i tried uh using pop as the genre pop music okay um and then and that i just put on total auto generate lyrics and then i put in two more where i've used all those same prompts but i wrote in the actual lyric field i wish i hadn't done that and so i don't know if it's going to build build lyrics around that so let's start with the ones where i didn't give it any lyrics this is called second chance victory okay and all of these all of these are 32 seconds long so i don't know okay

every game you played was a test of your might fell from grace not your best it's a fumble in the light

a fumble in the light

I assume that maybe if you pay for the service it goes more than the 32 seconds because they all just cut off like that but that is way more built out than I thought it was going to be Wow. Way more.

First of all, it's good to hear that the posies are still getting worse. Is that what they sound like? A little bit. A little frosting on the beater kind of vibe going on with that. Wow.

So that was called Second Chance Victory. Would you like to hear Field of Apologies? And we haven't even gotten to the ones where I actually typed in I wish I hadn't done that. I'm excited about that. This is still, though. Oh, my gosh. This is just from the ground up. This is all computer. Field of Apologies, which I sort of already like that title.

If you want my heart on the field, I'll confess. Oh, if I've played it rough, baby, I'm sorry now. Never meant to fall short. Let my fans down. While I'm on this stage, admit my every mess. If you want my heart, hear my heartfelt address.

I mean, I hate that kind of music.

It started off kind of Coldplay-ish, but then it kind of went like Ed Sheeran. Very emo. Wow, okay, I do love the title. The song I could take or leave, the title, what is it, Field of Apologies?

Yeah, Field of Apologies is honestly, can I use that for my book title?

If you apologize it, they will come, I believe is the takeaway from that. Field of Apologies.

I mean, that is an amazing title. Okay, so what do we have next?

I wish I had tried. Okay, it looks like this one, I hope they're not all that sort of emo-y guy voice. This one, it looks like, this one is called, so the next two that you'll hear, I actually tried to encourage you to use the phrase, I wish I hadn't done that. I don't know if it's going to work or not. This one is called Regretful Fame, and this one says electronic dance, pop, and dance. So hopefully maybe a slightly different sound.

I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I hadn't done that. are these real words can you tell i apologize to a girl and i liked it andrew

I was going to make an Iconopop joke. Oh, yeah.

No, that's very Iconopop. You're right.

So aside from the lyrics that I put in, is the rest of that gibberish, or do I have old man ears? Were there other real words in there? I don't know. I was too busy. You were dancing.

I was too busy dancing. I was too busy chair dancing here.

One more. One more. Yeah, one more. Last one. Again, I gave it the prompt this time. I wish I hadn't done that. And this one is called, this one is called Regretful Glory. And it's, I like this. It says pop, but R&B and contemporary R&B. So this might be a very, hope this is a fresh sound.

I never heard

Are those words? I heard the word regret in there somewhere That was the strangest thing

It was like It kept almost being words And then kind of not

I feel that way about both the last ones yeah do we have to pay more to get words real words well the first two generated real words it's almost like when i give it the actual lyrics but i don't give it enough lyrics then it just starts going into making word sounds as opposed to words the first two we played when i gave it no prompt for lyrics it actually like kind of made it kind of made some coherent sense but Anyway, that's what we're up against, people. Wow.

I mean, it is... This is what I said last time this came up, is that, yeah, okay, those songs are all slightly off, but again, the brute force of this, and by that I mean the sheer numbers, the fact that you quickly typed something into a computer and within 10 seconds we had all of those options, it just, to me, it's like it's a numbers game. In other words, we can generate now so much of this stuff so quickly that even if only 0.0001% of it is actually good, there's still so much of it being created that you're going to get a lot of that. You know what I mean? And it's going to get better and better over time. It's going to keep learning. And it's, you know, I shudder to think about the point where also, because, you know, we have this kind of running joke about people AI-ing us and creating content. But at what point will the AI be good enough that it can just do this podcast? And will that be instead of us? And will that be something that listeners really care about if it's us or if it's the A.I.?

You think that a robot could tell a story as good as mine, Luke? I find that incredibly hard to believe. To go back to the music thing, and I think I'm just restating something that I alluded to earlier and probably said on earlier shows. But, you know, when you were talking about this as sort of a, I don't know, kind of a caution from a cautionary standpoint. and you're like you know what will this mean for music i never think of it as it's going to take away it's going to change the experience of what i listen to when it's the end of the day and i want to listen to something on spotify or my record player like i just don't think that i'm going to be in most cases like jamming out to which is how i listen to music jamming out to this music as an as in my off time for an enjoyable artistic experience or whatever i think the real danger here is exactly what we're talking about we're talking about like first of all the people who are in the trenches you know like people who are who have talent have musical talent or whatnot but have to make a goddamn living and how do you make a living off of that stuff well you make you make songs for car commercials or whatever or maybe you are an indie band that is making the music that you like but the only way you can afford to do that is because you hit it big because chrysler you know championed one of your songs or licensed one of your songs and i sort of feel like that's where this really hurts the most not the not the not the rolling stones or the taylor swifts you know but the but the people who are sort of more in the trenches and i think that that is worrisome i heard a very

interesting conversation on the ezra klein show recently between ezra and a guy named neile patel who i think is maybe the founder of like uh what is it the decoder i think or he hosts the decoder podcast and he's the uh editor of the verge and they're both super duper smart and the thing that they were saying about ai was it's going to he thinks this guy nila patel was saying he thinks it's going to replace a lot of just kind of like shitty online content that's currently being Created by humans but is very mid Like promotional Copy for a thing There is this whole kind of layer Of job Right now a job that humans are doing And also if you look at the legal profession A lot of lawyers, particularly Lawyers who are starting out Are just spending a lot of time just going through paperwork And so there are these kinds of These jobs that it could do Pretty well, what it probably still can't do For a long time is the high level stuff Like it's not going to write you know it's not going to be writing um the column that ezra klein writes for the new york times but it might be able to write the promotional material for i don't know some company that makes seeds that i'm buying on instagram or something i don't know that's not to that's not to speak ill of seed sheet andrew because i'm telling you i love those people if these seeds actually grow i want to give these people a uh as far as just the overall experience so far i'm giving them two thumbs up the seed sheet company um yeah it was like so i i got these seeds in the mail sorry to change the subject but this is this is something the ai could never do andrew always keep them guessing see we the ai program would have continued on with some kind of interesting conversation around the topic at hand but i just pivoted right to seeds that i ordered in the mail recently also

keeping your hands in the dirt is a good way to like kind of you know fend off the robot revolution

back it's about grounding every morning now i go out and i just bury my feet in the in the soil and i just connect with nature and um it's been really good for me but yeah they i was i ordered these seeds off of off of the internet and uh they they showed up and it's this big fabric that's like the fabric itself is supposed to keep weeds from growing and then spaced out in the fabric are these little pods and so you you nail the thing down and you water and then the seed pods kind of release and there you go you're growing your garden but what was so great was each little section came in its own ziploc bag with a little cute sign that you can stick in the ground and like it was very user-friendly like it was exactly what i what i needed and their whole i'm just doing a free ad for them now their whole thing is something like we grow gardeners and i will give them credit like gardening was something that was very intimidating to me it probably shouldn't have been I don't think it's that hard but I just had never really tried it and now that I got this help of putting down this fabric now what I'm doing is actually it didn't fill up my whole raised planter bed area but now I went to Home Depot and I bought my own fabric and my own starts and now I'm going to actually you know put in the rest of this vegetable garden and try to get it going and even if this year fails at least I'll have the infrastructure in place I'm putting up this fencing around it to keep the deer out like and i don't think i would have done any of it if i didn't see this ad on instagram because that it was it was intimidating to me as a thing but it made it seem easier to do with this product that i bought and so for that alone i'm i'm giving them

a big thumbs up you know what that reminds me of a little bit um and i i can say this now because i'm not in the pocket of big prepared meals but we used to do a lot of ads don't call it the keurig of meal delivery what did we do we did uh hello fresh i think we did hello fresh and maybe another one too and like i never said anything untrue in those ads we did the british one too which was

hello fresh hello did you say hello it's just all bangers and mash hello fresh like if you like that

kind of thing the service was good it paid off it did what it said it was going to do yeah me personally you know this i'm a weirdo i like going to the grocery store i like all the little processes of cooking and puttering around so having a bunch of stuff done for me in advance it didn't solve a problem that I had necessarily having said that I did legitimately use some of them and they really did and again I'm not only this might have been hello fresh it might have been one of the other ones I'm not trying to play favorites here but the best part of the experience for me was following some of these

recipes and learning things that i could then bring towards cooking my own food later uh what

Thank you.

a weird way to say that sentence i don't think my brain is quite working this life um but i uh you know like there were things i'm trying to think like maybe even things i do all the time now like shocking a pan like a skillet like to clean a skillet like get it you know when i'm done cooking something instead of like putting it right in into the um into the sink or whatever you get it really hot again and you you pour some wine or really cold water or something really cold in there and you shock it and then all that that stuff kind of comes up naturally kind of deglazing it yeah and sometimes yeah if you're doing it during the cooking process it's more like deglazing and then you're kind of using that essence of the food but i also just do it as a way at the end of my at the end of my cooking to kind of get my skillet clean and there are various things like that that i learned from these you know prepared box meal cooking kits or whatever and it sort of sounds like it's doing the same thing for you out in the garden right now you're buying your own supplies

and yeah like it wasn't that complicated of a thing it was like you put down this fabric which which doesn't allow the weeds to grow and then you cut I mean this is what I'm doing with the other part and then you just cut holes in it where you want to plant like a cherry tomato plant it's like this is not super hard stuff but there was something about going from when I bought this place there was this kind of sizable raised bed that somebody had built but it was just like how all this tall grass growing it like no one had tried to grow any vegetables in there for a long time and so the first step was weed whacking down the whole thing and then getting a rototiller and then rototilling up all the roots of all that grass so that it was just back to being like good soil and that was a brutal afternoon by the way that was really some hard work but I did that but then it was like okay but I don't know the next step like how much fertilizer do I use and how far apart do the seeds need to be and like there were just too many unknowns for me and then I saw this stupid thing on Instagram and I thought well that looks pretty easy and then in the process of getting that and putting it out I looked at it and I realized oh this is really easy it's just you put this fabric down and then you cut and you know you nail it down with these stakes and then you just cut holes in it where you want to put the plants and then you put the plants in there and then you water it so it demystified it enough for me that now I feel very Empowered to try to do this thing And again I don't know if Any of this stuff is going to work or grow this year But the good news is I don't have to Go in and mow down all this grass And rototill this now every single year And I'm putting up this fencing Which I'm pretty proud of I'll send you a picture later Andrew Yeah we can use it as a show pic You know like it's the kind of thing that I would Normally ask Walt To help me with but I'm trying I'm 48 years old I figured it's about time I start trying to do some of this stuff myself, and it also involves me, I bought these pre-made sections of fencing from Home Depot, which don't exactly measure out, in other words, they're like four foot by six foot, but one of the things that I'm trying to span is not, you know, it doesn't divide evenly into six feet, so what I'm going to have to actually do is take one of them apart, cut it, I had to buy these like wire cutters and basically modify one of these panels so that's the big project for today after the show we'll see if I can pull that off but but yeah no I'm this whole thing has been it's been it's been a good experience for me and kind of empowering and if I get one cherry tomato out of this thing I go out there pick my cherry tomato cut it in half put a little salt on it that will have made this whole project probably no no you should Tom and Jerry that you

gotta like take the little tiny tomato but treat it like a full tomato give yourself a tiny little knife and like cut little slices off do i want to put on a bib yeah right exactly like it's a bean one thing and again i don't pretend to know much of anything about gardening or farming or anything but one one tip i think i can offer you is you want to shock your garden if you can like get it get it as hot as possible and then pour some cold white wine on

it that's or just go just do some gardening shirtless yes that'll shock that thing okay i

I didn't know where you're going with that. I was just enjoying the image.

Yeah, so that'll be another plot line over the summer to talk about is how my little garden is growing. Okay, let's thank some dazzling donors. And then I do want to talk about this Tom Brady thing because I think you, once again, Andrew, you've been sort of ahead of my curve on something. And I want to give you your propers.

Create a song called Razzle Dazzle with 1950s style female vocals is what I told the machines. This is one of two songs that spit out.

I think I like our razzle-dazzle better.

Well, I mean, I think the thing is this stands as kind of evidence that we still need to raise money this year to afford the version of the AI that uses real work.

Yes, I know. See, there's something weird. I did put in the lyrics, just the lyrics, razzle-dazzle, and somehow that confuses it. They just make up. They never say razzle-dazzle. They just make sounds.

Do you remember that Italian singer who made a song? This was in, like, the 70s that sounded like English. But it was gibberish. No. Fake English song. I believe it was like a big Adriano Celentano, an Italian musician, rose to international prominence in 1972 with his gibberish hit song called Prison Colin Sinane Cusel. He sang it fully in gibberish, but it was made to sound completely American. Let me play this for you a little bit. Okay. This is let's see if we can find. Okay, it might take a second here because I'm probably going to, okay, here we go. Let me try to get to the music.

So there you go.

So it's not... This guy was ahead of the AI.

In a certain way, it's not unlike scatting, right?

Yeah, no, that's a good point. Yeah. I kind of like it. It's a catchy song, right?

Now, let me ask you this.

I did kind of say girls there. He did kind of slip up.

Do you think if he performed this many times over, it was always exactly the same? Or do you think because it wasn't real words that there's a lot more improv involved?

Great question. I don't know. I mean, I had mostly forgotten about this thing existing until a moment ago. So we do want to thank our first dazzling donor today. And by the way, these are the folks that are donating a dazzling amount of dough. And we really do appreciate it. We want to thank BK Bleakley in San Diego, California.

I do think it's interesting that BK, the initials B, the letter B and the letter K, BK offered a pronouncer, B-K, and then wrote, don't laugh, someone once asked.

But BK did not provide a pronouncer for their last name.

Bleakley, right.

I'm going with Bleakley.

Yeah. I can't think of an alternate pronunciation.

a bk's in san diego and says hey friendos i started listening in 2014 2015 because luke is right up there with paula on my list of favorite wait wait don't tell me panelists oh thanks bk that's high praise because the number one question that i get from people about wait wait don't tell me is what is it like working with paula poundstone i've said this a million times but we had her on

the show was it sometime in the last year luke and i can't remember what the impetus for it was Oh, is that some of the story about her in a restaurant and creating an awkward moment with the shoot the glass, Alan. Oh, Alan Rickman, Alan Rickman. And I had caught wind of that on Twitter. And so you asked her to be on the show. And I don't think I'd ever done. I don't think she'd ever been on the show with me before. I don't think I'd ever met her before. And that was that honestly has got to be one of my top five TBTL moments for me personally. I just remember my face wanting to fall off from laughing so much.

I just saw on TikTok recently, like, Paula from literally 30 years ago doing a stand-up bit about Pop-Tarts. Me too. Which is in the zeitgeist, maybe because of the Seinfeld movie or something.

Yes, I was sort of, I didn't want to bring that up, but knowing that you also saw it, let's talk about it. Yeah, it's astounding, isn't it? Yeah. I think, tell me if I'm wrong about this. I think that Paula in 2024 is, you know, really established her character. She kind of comes off a little bit or it seems to me and I might be wrong about this. Maybe it's slightly more gruff. When I saw this clip of her from like the 90s, when I first saw her on television, I was kind of surprised at how her demeanor seemed less gruff. But maybe I'm mischaracterizing that. Maybe I wouldn't say that to her face. I don't know.

No, I think that I think you're right. I think that that was probably at a time, I mean, she's very made up, she's very kind of like, my guess would be that her management and the, you know, the various people that were kind of riding along with her in her career were kind of like, this is the sort of way to look and be and sound so that you'll be the most.

marketable version of yourself and i think probably who she has arrived at is the most authentic version of herself now which is the person who has like 17 cats at all times and plays ping pong has people over to play ping pong in her backyard in venice california like uh and is just a i mean and i would say this to her face a world-class eccentric yes like just one of the the more eccentric people that i know and i feel like probably in the early days of her career they were like maybe low-key the eccentricities because we want to try to get that big uh uh what was it tic-tac account i feel like she did certs at either certs or tic-tacs i feel like there was some ad that there was some big campaign that she had back in the day but anyway bk that's high praise because i think paul is the best um and so to hear that i'm also on your list that's very, very nice to hear. Even though I was already fully on board with podcasts, for the first month or so, the sheer volume of TBTL content had me questioning my life choices. How did anyone listen to this many hours per week of the same two guys chatting? Fast forward 10 years, and I'm so sad to hear music for your weekend because it means I have to live without TBTL for two whole days.

Oh. Wow, BK. That's like the sweetest thing.

We've really fully, We've fully converted BK over to a P1. BK is a P1. It took me a ridiculous number of years to join in the TBTelathon. Tonight, pants for the win. But now I'm so happy and lucky to be able to contribute at the dazzling level. We really appreciate that, BK. In my last 300 words, I want to plug ModestNeeds at ModestNeeds.org. They're a charitable organization that helps prevent folks who are on the edge from slipping into poverty oh wow they do amazing work whether you need help or want to help please

check them out i love turtles that's how bk ends this i hadn't heard of modest needs but that sounds like a great mission because you and i talk about this even off air quite a bit how poverty begets poverty i mean i think you you've said this for years and years now that it's expensive being poor i think is kind of how you put it and it's true and and we've talked about a little bit on the show too i i've seen people or known people who are either like clearly like kind of new to poverty in a certain way or new to not having a stable roof over their head and are sort of in this in between and you can really see them on a razor's edge of this going one or two ways can can we get stable can we can we get stabilization can we get a job or not because if you start slipping. Once you start slipping, it becomes just exponentially harder to crawl your way back into stability. That sounds like a great organization. Yeah, I was just reading in the

Columbian, Andrew, my paper of record here in southern Washington, about a family that moved to the area for a job. The husband and the family had a job and they were living in, coincidentally I believe the San Diego area where BK hails from and this guy had a good job and this family was living in like a fifth wheel because they could not find and their budget was not like you know they their budget would was it seemed to me a reasonable budget monthly for rent to get into a place and because of just the way the housing market is right now because the way the rental market is because of they missed one payment on a credit card so their credit had been dinged like this this was a very like high functioning group of people financially high functioning group of people that were living in a in a you know in an RV basically because of just how hard it is to find housing and and again these are people with a job now imagine you're out of work or you aren't able to work for whatever reason like it's once you once you sort of are not on the merry-go-round of of the kind of financial you know world that we live in when it's paying rent having car insurance having a functioning vehicle etc as soon as you get off of that merry-go-round for a minute it's spinning so fast it's so hard to get back on and and so this is a really really good idea for an organization modest needs to just keep people hopefully with the very bare minimum that they need to can to stay you know to stay sort of current with things because once like you were saying Andrew once you're kind of behind the eight ball financially it is it's just unbelievably difficult to get things back together like if you I used to really feel like and I would say this as sort of a point of pride I would say like if you drop me off on a corner somewhere in the US and you just like gave me my ID and you just said figure it out I always thought well I could probably build a life for myself in like a year like I'd figure it out i'd go somewhere i would get a job sweeping the floors and i would just kind of like i would just start over i don't know if i could do that anymore well One, because I'm old and I have low T, but also because just the world has changed so much. There's so many barriers. It is so much harder to to sort of just exist in this world financially than it used to be.

So did you happen to and we should think our next dazzling donor, but I got to ask you this because it was such a fascinating story. And just so I mean, not heartbreaking isn't even the word. I mean, it was but also just like frustrating. there was a story that was published by the New York Times but it was reprinted in the Seattle Times because it focused on a Seattle woman I mean it focused on her as a way of sort of like it is an example of the larger systemic problem but she lives in a car this was again I'm gonna you know this is a while back so I don't know what her current status is but she lives in a car with her adult daughter, her job, Luke, her day job, her regular like nine to five day job is working for DSHS, helping people get their benefits. And she is paid by the state, but she's not paid enough to act. And, you know, it's always a couple of things, right? I think there was a little bit of credit card debt or maybe a lot of credit card debt at one point. And then like that was the, and then a health issue. It's always like a couple of things that compound the next you know you say well for right now we'll we'll spend the night in the car and we'll get cleaned up at that campground across the way and then we'll get back on our feet but like but literally she would go to this campground to um shower in the morning so that she could go to her job and stand behind a desk and try to help other people and she wanted to tell them listen i truly understand like you know she can't and and the the the story that the reporter was with these two women who are living in their car it describes how she's waiting for a wedding party that is having like um early morning maybe it's not a wedding party maybe somebody's having um engagement photos taken at this little campground or something so this woman is sort of like waiting for them to wrap up and then has to like kind of grab her bucket of toiletries and sneak into the sneak into the latrine area so she can get cleaned up without like kind of like ruining these people's photos or calling attention to herself before she goes to work at the helping place other people in housing exactly or at least help them get their welfare benefits or whatever i don't know if it's called welfare but it's just like it's just astounding it's just astounding yeah i did not

read that story um but i'm sadly i'm not shocked to hear that because of all the other stuff that i've been seeing i mean that's that's the thing no this is i'm not saying anything profound here anything that our listeners don't already understand but there is enough wealth in this country for for for for people to have access to housing if they desire to have it that and medical care like those things are a right not a privilege and there is enough and i'm going to swear now fucking money in this country for that to happen and the the fact that it isn't happening um is is just a it's a scandal and um and it really makes me angry when i think about it um so thanks to bk for the recommendation of modestneeds.org and other places like that that are trying to help sort of do what we can for folks because there are a lot of folks that need help so thanks bk maestro this one got a lot closer didn't it yeah it did it's actually pretty He sounds like a cousin. That sounds like a cousin of the real song that lives three towns over, and you only see her about once every three years, so you have a slight crush on her,

like I did with my cousin Kellyanne in Philly. Wow, we're getting real.

Well, I just didn't meet very many cute girls who were like three years older than me when I was, let's say, 15 or something. Yeah, wow. We're thanking our second dazzling donor, who is Travis Worthington of Linwood, Washington. And Travis says the pronunciation is, like Trevor, only better.

Wow. Wow, that's a real shot across the bow. Peace and love to our Trevors in the audience.

Travis says, thanks to Luke, Andrew, John, and the listeners. I'm humbled to be part of the operation. For only a few hundred dollars, I got to save a podcast. Indeed. Like so many of us, I was squeezed by high prices and low wages, and I'm working harder and harder for less and less. Boy, this is a theme today, Andrew. I felt like, despite the budgetary challenges, that this is a thing that needs saving. Aw, Travis, thank you. Suggestion box. I think it's important to put the show on YouTube. I mean, I won't watch it. I listen in my car, but someone will. I look forward to seeing your colonoscopy, though. That's the first thing I'm putting on YouTube. Travis.

What kind of YouTube is this?

It's on the dark net.

Maybe I should go to a doctor, too. right there you go yeah right it's a poo tube um i would watch that maybe it was implied luke maybe i should go to a doctor to to um why are men like this oh yeah i don't know travis it's it's some some sense of invincibility but again the good news for me as as i advance in ages i feel less invincible every day therefore i am going to go get this colonoscopy and i you know i was listening to the howard stern show as i am want to do and they did a whole half hour on basically like getting your skin checked at the dermatologist for oddly shaped moles and that was like put it on the list it's another thing i gotta do whereas when i was 20 i probably thought i was gonna live forever now i'd be surprised if i live for another week which is good it's taken i'd like i don't have that sort of i don't have that headstrong sense of like i'm gonna be fine i feel like I'm not going to be fine and therefore I'm much more interested in going to the doctor

and trying to stay in front of things. Yeah. The very first thing I'm doing when we are done with this show is I'm finally again. I don't know why I have such a I don't know. Fear seems like the wrong word, but aversion to the doctor about your wrist again. Yeah. And I shouldn't get into the details of it, but like it's just it's both of my hands and wrists and thumbs are like kind of in a lot of pain and then i'm waking up in the morning with like tingles all up and down my arms and they're like kind of numbing out on me and i was talking to some folks this weekend who had very similar experiences and it sounds maybe it's like it's carpal tunnel to them although i've never heard of it striking two arms and hands at the same exact time but anyway i might be braced up but i i've been i i keep intellectually saying like yeah i'm gonna go to the doctor about this i'm gonna go to the doctor about this but i've never done the first thing i need to do which is tell my doctor about this and i just like it's so weird it's like it's like i think it's it's gonna magically happen like my like my mom is gonna make the appointment for me or

something like when i was a kid i just have like becca spraying the hand sanitizer on my hands

exactly just do this for me mommy which is just so embarrassing and i know that it's sort of stereotypical for certain types of people but like i'm embarrassed by it and so literally as soon as we say uh and good luck to all i'm going to be writing a i'm going to be writing a note in my

health portal uh-huh well andrew as i've always said on the show carpal diem yes show title where's your weak ass little bell man i can't ring it hurts my wrist too much this is the saddest bell of all time i need to get i need to upgrade anyway uh travis says you often don't like hearing how special you are to us but as the kids say let's radicalize you let it radicalize you have Have a great show, sweetie. What you do is so important.

Sweetie, have a good show. What you do is so important.

Thank you, Travis. And what you have been doing is so important, and I really appreciate you supporting the show and keeping us going here, you know? This is, yeah, this is a pretty lucky thing for us to get to do for our job, and we can only do it because of folks like Travis and BK and the other supporters of the show. So thank you very much.

hello and welcome to top story wow that sounds exactly like the original did ai do that

i have the expensive account you know me i've got the one that'll just exactly recreate

whatever audio you were playing before it's fantastic it's a it serves a need a desperate

need we had um this roast of tom brady that netflix did i didn't really i didn't quite follow what was going on with this which is netflix is really trying to get in the live kind of television space i guess they've decided that that's very important to their business plan in fact i think there was an announcement today that they're going to have two nfl games on christmas day oh that are going to be on netflix i heard some buzz and i didn't know the details

of that okay so they're going to be the net okay and that's their first foray so that's their first

foray into live NFL games as far as I know and then they've also got this everybody's in LA John Mulaney show that's live then it's but then the thing is you can also watch it on delay which I have which like you know me I love live television I love live radio I love live events I think you and I both are just fans of that whole thing and again I guess what Netflix is looking at is like Like, the highest rated television out there pretty much is NFL games, right? And the reason is because we all want to see them at the same time. So I think that they're thinking if they can get into the live entertainment business and they can pick the right things, everyone will tune in to watch it because you don't want to watch it on delay. Now, I don't know why on delay is bad for them. It seems like their whole business model is on-demand programming. But for some reason, they really want to make us all turn on our Netflix at the same time.

But it makes sense. I mean, this sounds...

like the conversations we were having constantly in 2014 and I remember it was that year because I was in Los Angeles which is of course the the the town for television and movie production but also I was like you know producing a talk show where we'd have people come on and talk about the industry and it's that was the era when everything was live remember they were trying they were trying to like networks were trying to grab viewers again by doing like Peter Pan live and And, like, the key has always been, like, no, like, we need to create these cultural events, especially back when Twitter, before, like, Twitter was X and problematic and everything, and everybody was on there. It's like, I need to be part of this because everybody's going to be tweeting about this live, and some are going to be, you know, probably catty about it, and others are just going to be enjoying it or whatever. But it's going to be a sort of a universal in-the-moment experience trying to recapture some of what you get with the Super Bowl and other huge sporting events, and now here we are again. So it does make sense to me. Like, honestly, I read part of I think I'd caught I'd caught when this John Mulaney show is pretty dang good. But I would also probably be the person that would be more tempted to watch it live. And I probably will never watch it on demand. I just don't watch that kind of content on demand. I've never checked out like Letterman's show where he was sitting down with people or any of those or Stewart's John Stewart's.

Right I didn't quite realize That when they put this Tom Brady roast On Netflix that this was a change Because previously they'd been on Comedy Central Like I didn't even I didn't do the math on that Because when it was on Comedy Central This was a popular program for Comedy Central But it'd be like, I don't know In a theater probably in New York City That probably held, I don't know 800 people or something This was a whole other level of deal going on This was Howard Stern's producer Gary Delabate was there at the event and he said, his take was Netflix probably spent more on graphics for this than Comedy Central spent on all of the roasts that it did combined. So this was really like, and again, they had it in I don't know what it's called now, but it used to be called The Forum in Los Angeles. It's in Inglewood. It's mere steps from SoFi Center, a.k.a. Hollywood Park. Rest in Power. Hollywood Park. They still have a casino there But it's not like the old racetrack with the Pink's hot dog, which was my speed. But anyway.

But it's basically a giant. It's not a football stadium. It's a giant television studio, right, that they built for the. Was it for the Chargers? I get confused. Or was it for the Rams? But like it's basically like this giant modern sporting complex and facility.

But that's not where they had it. Oh, I'm sorry. They had it in the Forum. The Forum is like across the parking lot from SoFi. Oh, OK. And the Forum is where like the Showtime Lakers of the 80s played. before they went downtown to the Staples Center. But it still holds like 20,000 people. The reports from this event were there were just people there in Patriots gear with their faces painted. It was a sporting event not a comedy show in a lot of ways. A lot of stuff happened during the thing. Kim Kardashian got mercilessly booed by people. It sounds like the energy in the facility, the arena, was was weird because it's a huge place where normally you'd be watching like a basketball game or something and instead you're watching a roast and this is the thing though back in the olden days when they would do the roast of so-and-so on you know comedy central i will tell you that i thought it was pretty funny i was pretty into it and i you know it's jeff ross is always considered like the roast master general or something there was there were some funny jokes this time around i will admit like there was I've probably consumed most of it now through clips and things there were some pretty funny pretty mean jokes but it so many of the jokes revolved around Tom Brady's ex-wife Gisele Bundchen who had nothing to do with this as far as I understand like presumably did not sign up to be the butt of a national joke and the jokes were highly sexualized the jokes were about her new relationship she was having with someone who's like a martial arts instructor all of this stuff that was being sort of aimed at Tom Brady there was jokes about story goes that like Tom Brady was in a relationship with someone who became pregnant this is before Giselle and they broke up he broke up with her they broke up while she was still pregnant there were jokes about him like abandoning this child like basically there were as you would say Andrew a lot of strays were getting caught by people who I mean if Tom Brady wants to go sit up there on that dais and gets roasted I guess fine but like it's kind of weird to me that all these adult people all these comedians just got up there and then just made really intense jokes about like children who had no say in it and also this woman Giselle Bündchen who is just trying to live her life and now it's being made you know again brought very much to the center of this whole thing it just this is a very unfun take on it but the whole thing just seemed to be in really poor taste to me like it's again if Tom Brady I know it probably wouldn't be fun for there to be ground rules for there to be parameters around the joking but it's just I guess what I'm trying to describe is this experience of being someone who used to think these roasts were kind of great and pretty funny now to being like a do we are we really doing this are we really just going to like say a bunch of really kind of mean-spirited stuff related to a bunch of people who did not sign up to be here that i see i didn't know any

of that i didn't have any of these details and i am purposely not going to recreate the conversation we had last time this was up but it makes me even more angry that my exposure to this was listening to another podcast where these guys were like finally comedy's back they've taken off the gloves we can be funny again the woke left isn't keeping us from speaking our minds it's like and this is what it is it's it's making fun of people who i mean i've always hated roasts like i remember being a kid and like they were they were doing those comedy central roasts way back even when i was in high school i believe and it was just never for me and i'd watch the commercials for like the old ones with like the rat pack or what was it the rat pack like you'd see commercials you could you could probably get it on vhs or dvd you know of these old rows and it's just never been a format for me i'm just not like a i don't think the type of humor that i appreciate is like real ball busting humor you know um so it's not for me i think i liked it in the past because i felt like

it was generally punching up sure yeah no that makes sense i was like well at least the people that they're that are getting made fun of are privileged people who have chosen to be there so that was always why i was like well this is pretty funny and hey it's like if we're all going to make fun of fill in the blank and they've agreed to be there that's kind of great i guess it never occurred to me though that like there are people associated with that person that have really don't deserve to be dragged through like the most i got on the plane so like uh sorry you were in the middle talking i just completely cut you off but i'll just throw this in really fast i was hearing about this they were talking about on the stern show um i was seeing ads for it i got on the airplane the guy next to me was watching it on his iPad you know he had downloaded it and it was it just felt like it was for like a few days it was just kind of everywhere in the pop culture that I consume it just felt very very ubiquitous and and again it didn't really occur to me that it's like how would it feel if you're Tom Brady's son who presumably he has a good relationship with now by the way I've seen plenty of photos of them together whatever but I'm talking about the son he had from a previous relationship where basically like these famous people are on talking about how your dad abandoned you like that just have to be kind of a bad weird feeling or you're Giselle Bündchen you're just trying to live your life and who you choose to have relationships with etc down to the like sexual positions that are going on I mean just like really really intense really personal stuff being said about you kind of in the most like sort of famous is the weird way to put it but like basically the main conversation culturally that was happening in America outside of politics for like four days was about you and the guy that you dated like and you did not agree to be a part of this again and let's unless there's something about the story I don't really know but um yeah just the whole thing now really strikes me as

being kind of in poor taste I didn't know any of this before you kind of laid it out like this that that's what the concerns were when you told me that you were adding this to the show sheet I my take was going to be like you know there's a there's a subreddit called not the onion where there are real life headlines that sound like an onion headline and i'd written down tom brady regrets the roast of tom brady because it sort of sounds like it's a mockable idea but now that you've given me the context for this and now i'm doing like the the laziest like um broadcaster thing which is i'm scrolling through buzzfeed news on this topic and reading the quotes from tom brady as he uh talked about this on the pivot podcast but i will say i like his quotes about it as they're presenting here it says i liked when the jokes were about me said tom i didn't like the way they affected my kids um you know and that's exactly probably what he thought he was going into and it says here that some of the comedians said that the talking about the kids were off limits but it sort of sounds like yeah but talking about giselle was still like kind of right a back door mom yeah exactly and then for most of them it says explaining why he signed up for the roast in the first place tom said he's always gotten a kick out of people making fun of him which i actually believe like i'm not a tom brady lover or hater one way or the other like i don't i i think he's got some you know whatever i don't know that much about him i know he really wrinkles some people and i'm always kind of like i don't know i think he's obviously an interesting human being uh in various ways i mean if nothing else just the way he lives his life but he says he didn't consider the full picture of how it would impact his loved ones and he says it was I don't know.

a good lesson for me as a parent i'm going to be a better parent as i go forward because of this and i kind of again i like it when somebody like he's probably has some major regrets right now if i have regrets over some meandering story i told that i'm like oh i didn't have a power out imagine how he feels and i know he's famous and a millionaire and all these things but he's a human being who has feelings he probably feels pretty shitty about this as a dad i don't know maybe he's saying this because it's the right thing to say but i'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and i kind of like the fact that he's going to say yeah you know what i didn't think this through how this could affect the people around me and maybe other other people other people will as well when they subject themselves to this god if only we had an ai generated song called field of regret oh man so you know i do can i just can i do this in here this is such a

apologies i'm being so two-faced now because i've both said i think this whole thing was in poor taste, but I do want to play you one joke, but it's not, it's, it's, it's not at the expense of anybody in the periphery of Tom Brady's life other than Rob Gronkowski, I guess. This was Nikki Glaser talking about how Tom Brady was part of that group of people that did those ads for that, like crypto, uh, that went completely like out of business or something. And, um, of course, Tom is up there on stage. I think he's sitting near Rob Gronkowski. This was, uh, let's see if

as well. Tom also lost $30 million in crypto. Tom, how did you fall for that? I mean, even Gronk was like, me know that not real money.

See, but I mean, again, like going back to Tom Brady's quotes there, like I like the fact that he says, you can make fun of me. I don't mind when people make fun of me. And if that's true, that's a character trait that I really appreciate. And the fact that he can go up there and that Gronk can appreciate why that's funny. I mean, Gronk leans into that character anyway like that is a great joke like roasts aren't necessarily for me I'm not saying though ban them they're they're a terrible source of comedy but you're right they went totally out of bounds by by with the personal stuff about people who were not on that stage but you can have a fun like barbed roast that can be really funny me know that not real money me know that

real money I can picture Gronk also laughing his ass off at that joke I mean yeah this is a guy who's been trying to steal valor from the Navy Federal Credit Union for now going on four to five years. And how that's not being looked into more, I don't know. I feel like we're really sleeping on that one.

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.

Me know that not real money. That's like something Strong Bad would say.

That's right. Okay, I'm going to play a voicemail for you here, Luke. It's kind of a long one. It's kind of a – just kind of a – I feel like sort of a meditation on something that we talk about a lot, which is like when we see the bumper stickers or Trump flags or other things that – or like very kind of violent sayings about our governor, our Democratic governor here in Washington State, and you see it on the back of a pickup truck or whatever. Well, Bree called in with this memory.

Hey, it's listener Bree in Columbia, South Carolina. All the talk of unfortunate bumper stickers and flags and such reminded me of my experience with the Don't Tread on Me bumper sticker I thought I might share. So, despite the fact that I have lived in the Deep South since I was five, I guess I've lived in a little bit of a liberal bubble of my family. they aren't even into like the typical southern hunting and fishing my six foot three lifelong construction worker father hit a deer accidentally once and was so upset and didn't know what to do he brought it home and buried it next to the childhood dog um all that's to say is that all my life i would see these yellow don't tread on the bumper stickers with the snake And for some reason, I just assumed that they were fellow animal enthusiasts that were really into the protection of snakes, and it was a sort of like break for squirrels kind of thing. And it wasn't until fairly recently, embarrassingly recently, in my 30s, that I found out the real meaning of what the Don't Tread on Me bumper stickers were, I have to say. I liked my original interpretation better, and even now, every time I see one for a split second in my head, I have to remind myself that it is not a fellow herpetologist or snake lover. I still try to think about that rather than the actual meaning. So that's it. Power out.

I want to kind of harness that.

bad for brie because those moments where it's like it's like when you wake up and you remember that something bad is happening in your life sort of like you see that bumper sticker for a second and you have this instinct and you're just like oh oh like you're you're happy for a moment and

then sad i wonder who it was who had to clarify for brie yeah and i wish they wouldn't have i would love it if brie could just have continued going blissfully through life thinking like man tread lightly yeah let's you know look what you're pack it in pack it out that's right real some real john muir sort of vibes there of of like treating treating nature and small things

with care and being gentle take only take only photos leave only footprints luke exactly i mean

like that's the other thing too is i as i was in that voicemail i went on this whole journey in my mind which was can i try to harness that myself can i try to when i see that flag can i try to think about the person who is displaying the flag as the scared child that they were or that they are the scared person that's inside because obviously this feeling that everybody's trying to tread on you and that you've got to be bring a sidearm into the goddamn home depot speaks to a person who's deeply fearful about the world or feels deeply unsafe or out of step with the world in a way that has to be a really bad feeling i mean when someone comes someone's walking around with a shirt that says F your feelings and I did send you that art by the way

yeah I saw it I didn't see it in the moment but I saw it later

I mean that's real graphic design is my passion territory I mean is there a worse is it graphically speaking there a worse design than those F your feelings shirts but like the person that's doing all that stuff they're doing it from a place of fear right like they feel whether or not they even realize I mean the thing is the journey from being afraid of something to being angry about something is a really quick trip and I think we tend to do it because feeling afraid is a scary feeling obviously and you feel vulnerable feeling angry is a feeling of power and I think a lot of times so what you have is people that are fearful but they've converted it into anger because that feels safer to them and so my thought during this voicemail was can I try to like hold some place in my heart for the scared version of these people that are pulling two American flags and a don't tread on me on their truck but then the other thing is is it dangerous for me to hold space for them because they are an existential threat to democracy in this country like could I love them could I love them right back into the Capitol on January 6th of 2024 and you know what I mean like I don't know it I don't know the answer to the question but is it Like, are we better off trying to express love and kindness towards these people that are displaying what I think are very dangerous ideas? Or is that do we express that love and kindness at our own peril?

You know, I like your generous interpretation of these people who have like the don't tread on me bumper sticker are mostly afraid. i also think that they're stupid hypocrites because hear me out on this and this is where i always go with it and obviously i'm being a little bit arch here but like like i know that if you have a bumper sticker that says don't tread on me meaning you know keep your keep your laws off of me i can do whatever i want i know that if this person even showed up at the polls which a lot of them do they vote for people who who want to take away women's right to do what they want with their body as far as health care is concerned they vote for people who want to take away the rights of gay people and other all kinds of marginalized communities so like the fact that like you say don't tread on me so i'm supposed to believe that your ethos is small government let everybody do their own thing it isn't that it's just like no i want to be a sexist homophobe over here but you don't tell me that i can't be that it doesn't make sense it's total hypocrisy

andrew except when it comes to college swimming right right exactly right perennially huge topic for the people of longview washington driving trucks like don't tread on me unless there's somebody in the northeast who wants to swim in a college swim meet who might be trans that that is now we need to we need to tread right on over to that and deal with it because that's the number one threat to my way of life here in here in southern washington i mean yes the hypocrisy is is wild um and and again the people that are wearing the f your feeling shirts it's like man how triggered are you right now you had to put that shirt on to come to the home clearly i spend most of my days at the home depot by the way i saw one of the home depot employees in their civilian clothes the other day and it shocked me i told me that you just know so well from going I only know her from the self-checkout of the Home Depot and I saw her in her street clothes and I was like I've never seen you out of uniform. I go, this is like seeing your

teacher in the summertime she laughed i was like it literally stopped me in my tracks to see her in regular clothing that's how much i'm at the home depot these days but um i love it anyway well that was a great voicemail from brie it really was don't don't lose your try not to lose that you know that childlike sense of wonder and confusion let's be honest yes exactly mostly what powers this show so all right that's gonna do it for today's episode but guess what we're gonna be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you i think the little sluggers are playing today so oh yeah we may get an update no sorry they're playing tomorrow night i know because they're it's counter programming to live wire yeah right it's going to be at the research which i've honestly that feels like violence to me that the parkside little league of east Portland, Oregon would schedule their games opposite of my radio show recording at the Reser in Beaverton is not going to go uncommented upon by me. But anyway, so we'll have an update on that at some point down the road. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday, everyone. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Hey, dummies. This is Mariah in Chicago calling. I've been a listener since, I believe it's 2009, and I would like to say that the last few days of programming with the Barbaro drops being played, it's the best it's ever been. It's the best. It has given me pure joy, pure joy. Keep up the good work. Power out.