Muse

So you were saying earlier that some people, they don't, uh, like the sound of this music? Really? Oh. People get fully mad. Oh. The thing no one appreciates is these are the original recordings. Oh. Uh-huh. You can't get that warm sound anymore. You know, the bass, the treble, the mids.

Oh, that, right, yeah. Oh. Here. Oh, that, okay. Yeah. that's the uh that's mids right yeah yeah wow that's really got that yeah thing on it well it's not on it it's in it oh yeah i like it a lot yeah some people they're just so ignorant to music it's kind of sad i would say totally tbtl

well there probably won't be anyone here and if there is they'll probably think i'm some kind of

jerk for morning just two potatoes. It's your lucky day. You just found a USB flash drive in the parking lot. Let the fun begin. Brother, who are you? What are you doing? I'm with the news,

dude. See, this is exactly the problem with lamestream media. Leave half of what you see and just a little bit of what you hear, and monkey see, monkey do. It could be all over you.

Poop, buddy, scoop, scoop. Poop, poop. I could really use a win here.

well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a monday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live this whole conversation bothers me my name is luke burbank i am your host oh wow coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above the mighty columbia looking at a beautiful summer day here in late june california got sunshine um let's see here it is late june right do we consider the 24th to be late june i'll tell you what it is it's the time of year when i consume what it turns out is a truly upsetting amount of root beer gotta have that root beer i was in safeway the other day and i noticed that they were selling uh they were offering a promotional deal and it was if you bought two like 18 packs of of root beer cans of diet root beer of zero sugar root beer you got a third one for free now i want to stress i live alone mostly and um that's a lot of root beer for one guy but i couldn't pass up the deal um that you know you buy it was you save 9.99 if you if you get that third one for free and so i i got all three of them and i i brought them home and i thought well this is i'm gonna be good on root beer for probably i don't know the next three to four years and i'm down to like one of the containers now i've burned through two of the three gotta have that root beer zero sugar a and w root beers and i gotta tell you the technology has come a long way i would absolutely recommend i would also absolutely recommend this right here which is episode 4,234 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

I'm not just here to talk about excessive root beer consumption. I'm here to talk about the story of what happened to me on Friday when I was trying to do something nice and tip somebody and things got really weird.

It's a beautiful story. I love your story.

It involved me driving down a country road, chasing someone down. It got weird. We'll talk about it. also will talk to this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships when he's lying in bed and he's kind of visualizing the show as he often does. He's thinking about the perfect expression of this program when the show is hitting on all cylinders, what it sounds like, what it feels like, what it smells like. It's

like in Batman, the original one with Jack Nicholson. He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining

me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke. Do you think this is a real question based on your observations and anecdotes about sugar-free root beer you gotta have it my friend you've just gotta have that gotta have that root beer so let me before i ask the question let me set up how i go about my life when i am in a restaurant or bar or eating and they ask me what i want to drink i say a coke or a pepsi i get regular coke and regular pepsi i don't drink tons of soda in my life but if i do i'm not i'm not going to drink diet soda i don't really like diet soda that much um and do you think that that is becoming almost is rarity too strong of a word do you think that the majority or even possibly the vast majority of people when ordering a cola with their lunch or dinner um so specifically like kind of outside the home when you're talking to a server or somebody working at a diner or whatever you

Do you think the vast majority or even the simple majority of Americans order a Diet Coke? What about the super majority? What about a plurality? Let's start with the simple majority, work our way up to a vast majority, and then hit everything on the way. But for real, do you think most people just instinctively say Diet Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Coke?

That's a great question. It's hard for me to separate out my experience from that of the average American or the average server in America, because that's always my go-to would be some sort of diet soda product if I'm ordering a soda. But I also think that there's a big part. How do I, I'm going to, I want to say this. How do I say this in a way that doesn't end up leading me down a regrettable road? I think a lot, I think a lot of America thinks about their calorie consumption very differently than I do. And that's not saying that I'm doing it right or wrong or whatever. I think a lot of people, when they go out to eat, they just are like, what sounds good, both in the solid and the liquid department? Don't open a restaurant.

Don't open a restaurant. The solid, you opened up the menu at Burbs.

Hey, Andrew, listen. This could finally bring together two things you hate. Bowel talk and restaurants that have just two-word names. What if I open a restaurant that's called Liquid and Solid?

Liquid and Solid. You open up the menu.

Liquid ampersand solid.

That reminds me. I have so much to say. Well, hold on.

Sinkers and floaters.

There's a restaurant here in Seattle called Burbs. I think it's a, I think it might be.

Yes, I took a picture of it once. There's a version of it that's down by the stadium.

Right, and that is closed already. I can't believe it.

I saw the note in the paper that it was like very popular and yet somehow closed all in the span of like a year.

It had a different name and different ownership. I'm sure it's a different establishment, but it's like this very good location. It's right by the stadium. It's got all this outdoor seating. And before every baseball game, it's always filled. I only went in there once, and it was a zoo. It's the exact kind of place I like to avoid because the crowd is there. And then they sell it, and it becomes a place called Burbs, which is notable. Some listeners even send it to me like, look, it's like Luke. I'm like, it is like Luke. And then all, I think maybe halfway through last season, I could be wrong about that, but certainly all of this season totally shuttered this just prime piece of real estate. I know it's hard to make money in the restaurant business. I know that the margins are small, even for a place that seems very popular, but it's amazing to have this beautiful piece of real estate where people would have burgers and drinks before and after the game just sitting there empty. Having said that, I'm not done with my talk about cola yet because the reason is sort of on my mind isn't just your root beer talk, but I was at a restaurant this week. kind of more of a bar having lunch and i ordered a coke and i had to specify that because the other person i was with got a diet coke so i always have to specify i want a regular coke and when they brought me my refill later it was a diet coke and i just think that that's i think the instinct for like a bartender or a waiter or whoever pushes the button on that thing i'll bet you if coke is the number one button and diet coke is the number two button i'll bet you the number two button is more instinctual and i don't and here's the thing you were trying to like kind of be careful about you know how people in america think about sugar intake or whatever and obviously you know you can look around we clearly consume way too much sugar in this country but i honestly think it's not even i don't even think it's rational and again this is just a theory on my part i think the person who might like get a you know even maybe even on a daily basis get like a bunch of like kind of like you know starbucks or dunkin donuts type of coffee that has a lot more sugar in it or whatever like they still will get the diet coke later not even because it's rational but just because they like flavor maybe they like the flavor or they've just been saying diet coke for so long and it's not even about like hey i'm counting my calories i just think that diet coke might be i mean listen this is googleable but if we google it what are we going to talk about today

you know you chasing people down a road i am right now looking at a website called world populationreview.com oh yeah i love that most popular soda by state 2024 okay the average american drinks 39.6 gallons of soda every year that equals about 480 cans of soda in 365 days

i find that also hard to believe say it again slower say it again slower and breathier if you

can the average american drinks 39 let's just round up the average according to this yeah the average american drinks 40 gallons of soda a year which equals 480 cans of soda which means that's like more than a can of soda per day now i know i started the show by saying i've consumed an unholy amount of zero sugar root beer lately but that's that's unusual for me like and i think i put myself in the middle range of soda drinkers i don't think i average like one and a half cans of soda a day. Doesn't 480 cans a year sound really hot? high it seems really high now like i said i'm not a big soda drinker though and we know people who like really get and i think you used to be a kind of a like a a regular diet coke drinker right didn't you get into a habit where you have zero diet coke and we have friends who are like passionate about it like would not get through their day without like three diet cokes well placed throughout the day or something me i'm not i don't keep a lot of like that in the house um but if i go to see a movie i'm probably getting the biggest soda and getting a refill so like you know how does that skew the numbers when you look at my intake at the end of a year you know like he didn't like drink a can of soda a day but when he did home but when he drank like i'm personally i'm personally

tearing through like 50 something cans of soda between these three gigantic you know half racks or whatever 18 packs of diet soda so i guess you know look there's there's a month and a half of of soda drinking or almost two months of soda drinking that I'm going to knock out in like a week or something. So I guess the numbers are kind of funny. This is by way of eat this, not that. They were the original source for this information. They said, we used Google Trends to find the most popular drink in every state. So now World Population Review is citing this eat this, not that. So again, take this with a grain of Splenda. Okay. Let's see. uh alabama dr pepper alaska oh this isn't just soda this is just drink this is just the thing that they are saying people drink the most of uh in their particular state so in alabama they say

it's dr pepper but this is based on google searches yeah i don't like this i don't like

yeah there's no way red bull is the number one drink of alaska i'm you know maybe people are

googling where to get red bull in alaska or something i don't know i don't like the fact that this is based on Google Trends, and I'm really sorry. I'm really interested in this topic, and I'm not trying to cut it off at the knees. No, no, no, but you're right. I don't like this list. Like, yeah, yeah.

I don't want to live in a world where the number one drink in Maryland is Jones Soda. I'm sorry, do they even make that anymore?

Right, I think they do, but what soda-

There's no way Jones Soda is the number one drink in Maryland, just based on scale. Right, exactly. They just don't, they're not making enough of it for Marylanders, for Terrapins, to be like yeah we're having more of this than anything else so yeah forget that list so we're we're as as we often are Andrew we're left with more questions than answers I don't know if the diet so what I do know is that when I order a diet coke at a place and then I'm getting a refill they will always double check with me go that was that that was diet coke right or was that diet coke and I'll be honest with you um sometimes I feel judged because the way I take it is they're going this guy's drinking diet coke all right well hey you know give it a shot i guess anything helps they're like look at me like oh i mean and by the way that's often been when i'm also having a large amount of whiskey like an order for me sometimes would be like a double jameson neat and then a diet coke in a pint glass next to it and that would be probably when i would get the most kind of confusion around the what's going on with the soda like uh and i did have a joke that i would like to deploy in those situations uh my body is a temple uh which uh usually went over

pretty well with the bartenders but anyway my version of that joke which is probably not podcast ready but i said it to genevieve once this is so that's fine we can workshop things here this is so politically incorrect that i'm gonna say it and then you're gonna have to tell me i thought you

meant it wasn't funny enough for the podcast you're saying it's too edgy for the it's way too edgy one

time i was eating i don't know what i was eating but i was just like all right i don't even know what we were eating at the time but obviously genevieve knows what my dietary habits are and at one point i said my body is a temple and then i paused and said government whoa

do we have to beep that one like i don't know too too edgy i mean it's it's it's dark because it's true and sometimes we've got a laugh so we don't cry um i thought you were gonna say my body

is a temple of doom oh no that would be probably more family friendly i i want to tell you this

story of my tipping gone awry but also what you just uh were saying about um about the joke being too edgy had me thinking about something totally unrelated and that will probably bog the show down should we should i skip the totally unrelated thing that will bog the show down and just get

right to the tipping story i feel like sometimes the magic of the show lives in these crevasses of things we shouldn't talk about.

Well, I'll try to make this crevasse like in the movie Touching the Void when the guy falls into the crevasse but somehow survives. I'll hope that the listeners survive this tumble into a crevasse of conversation, which is the episode of This American Life called The Other Guy. is one of the best hours of radio I have listened to in years and years and I would highly highly recommend it I almost skipped it because it had a guest host and I'm a big Ira Glass fan and it was not a guest host whose name I was familiar with and I just thought you know for me the special sauce of that show is kind of one sort of thing and I was like I don't really know if the guest host is going to be doing the thing that I like and so I waited and then finally I was out of shows to listen to so I did And it is designed in a laboratory for me, Andrew The first story is about the dude who made the varsity basketball team as a sophomore instead of Michael Jordan And who has become, in Michael Jordan's origin story, the loser who the coach picked instead of Jordan And everything Jordan's done subsequent to that has been to prove the coach wrong about picking this guy Leroy Smith and poorly or swithers over here like what did i do right is this one of those things where jordan

is because i'm not as you know um yeah kind of living in the in the world of jordan i didn't grow up following this stuff but when i learned from people talking about that jordan documentary during the pandemic was that he uses everything as a little chip on his shoulder to a comedic level at this point and so is he still like bringing up this guy like is this guy on the losing end of Jordan talking crap?

He is absolutely the tip. He's receiving the tip of the Jordan spear of like self-created kind of motivational narrative. And the examples of the times when Jordan brings this guy up. In fact, there was a limited release Nike Air Jordan that was the like Jordan on one side and then like Leroy Smith on the other side of the shoe. Like, like Jordan invited Leroy Smith to his Hall of Fame acceptance speech and then roasted him. Like, it's crazy. I call Jordan an a-hole, man. I mean, seriously, like the guy, I mean, the guy hung the moon for me as a kid, but he seems like a pretty. What I think it really is, is that to be the level of greatness at a sport like Michael Jordan or like even Kobe Bryant, you have to really actually be socially very unhinged. Like that's all the all the all the information that's emerged about Kobe Bryant is the same way. It's like there's people that are good at something and then there's people that just like to get to a certain level of this. It's we're no longer talking about natural talent. We're talking about being socially maladjusted in a way that causes you to take the natural talent you have and then just like obsess and obsess and obsess in a way that is pretty life ruining in almost every other aspect of your own life. You mean of your own life?

And honestly, the life of the people who come in contact with you and sometimes and also the life of the kid who just wanted to make the basketball team in nineteen.

Yeah, Leroy Smith, who's just like, what the hell? Like, he gets invited to this Hall of Fame acceptance speech and doesn't know that Michael Jordan is going to specifically talk about him and tell the coach of the high school team, man, you messed up. And then everyone laughs, and the camera cuts to Leroy Smith.

I know. It's like, what did I do?

Here's the point that the guest host made that I thought was really genius was, and by the way, I forget this guy's name, but he's really good, and I will listen to anything he does. going forward um but uh but he said you'd think Leroy would be the guy obsessed with high school and not Michael Jordan yeah you know Michael Jordan's Michael Jordan Leroy Leroy is the guy that had he did actually play some professional basketball but it was like overseas you know he he he is not a like he you know he has not become an NBA Hall of Famer Michael Jordan has which one is still talking about the North Carolina basketball team circa sophomore year it's Michael Jordan

By the way, quick flowers to me. I just was guessing what year Michael Jordan might have been a senior in high school. I'm sorry. Would he have been a senior in this story? Sophomore in this story.

He doesn't make varsity as a sophomore, which is his origin story.

I said 79. I see he started college in 81, so I was so damn close to being right about that. So there it is.

Very good.

That's good.

So that's story number one, right? Now, just imagine you're a Luke Burbank and you went into this episode skeptical, kind of like, I don't know. Is this going to be for me? Do I do I am I going to enjoy this first story? It's about Michael Jordan. OK, that's near and dear to my heart and basketball. Second story, it's about this promotion that Chipotle had where in about six American cities, they would designate a little two block distance. And if during a certain month, you logged the most miles of running on those two blocks with using this app called Strava, which is an app that tracks your running, you would win a year's supply of Chipotle, a free year of Chipotle bowls. And it's the story of this guy who in D.C.

who kind of starts getting into this, like, competition and just basically loses his mind over the course of a month battling this other dude over who's going to run the most distance over two blocks in D.C. to win this Chipotle, which neither of them even really care about the Chipotle.

But it's a specific two blocks, so there's a bunch of Chipotle heads that are all there trying to run back and forth and back and forth at the same time?

Mostly it sounds like it's these two guys, and they really only cross paths on the final day. Like, because one guy runs in the morning and one guy runs at night, but they can monitor each other's progress on this Strava app. It's just amazing cat and mouse game, a really well-told story. And again, involves kind of, I'm not like some super, you know, ultra runner like these guys. But again, Chipotle, it's a well-told story. It's jogging. It's like all this stuff that I care about. Story number three, Simon Rich. Oh, you love Simon Rich. That's Rich. I think Simon Rich is one of the funniest writers In America today Simon Rich wrote a book Called The Last Girlfriend on Earth About a guy who is dating the last woman On planet Earth and every other guy is hitting On her but she doesn't understand that they're Hitting on her and it is the funniest I mean just the book in general But Simon Rich's writing I just love it He also wrote a sketch once for SNL that didn't Make it to air Of like A guy I think it was either Shaquille Neil of Charles Barkley was hosting and a guy had a Tempur-Pedic mattress and every time he would come home from work and there was like a Shaquille O'Neal impression in the Tempur-Pedic mattress every time he would come home and he couldn't figure out what was going on, which I thought was also very funny. I love Simon Rich so much. This was what Simon Rich is talking about. He's talking to David Kestenbaum, who I love David Kestenbaum's work as well, about AI, which we all heard a lot of stories about AI. This is where, when you told your joke, Andrew, that was maybe too dark for TBTL, it made me think of some of these headlines that Simon Rich was talking about for The Onion that were written by AI. Because Simon Rich is friends with somebody who was an early developer of a particular AI before they put up the guardrails. When we think of ChatGPT, and I didn't actually really know this, the version of ChatGPT that we might deal with, you and I, Andrew, or that our listeners might use to make, like, I don't know if they use ChatGPT to make that Andy Rooney voice or whatever. I've actually never used, the funny part is I've never actually used ChatGPT for all the talk about it. But basically those versions that people use have a lot of guardrails on them and make them kind of humorless and kind of lame. But that's because they've had guardrails put on them. The earliest version, Simon Rich tells the story of being at a wedding and this buddy of his who's a computer programmer and has a laptop with him at the wedding. And as Simon Rich says, the very fact of this guy having a laptop with him at the wedding tells you a lot about this guy. And it just had this white screen, a very rudimentary screen with, I get the sense it was one of a blinking cursor. Think about war games or something. And the guy was just like, I got to tell you guys about this. And it was basically one of the first pretty functional AI things Or chat GPT or whatever we call it And so they just spend the whole wedding weekend Everyone just being like have it write a poem in this person's style And then eventually they have it write a poem in its own style

And they publish these poems and the poems are devastating They are unbelievably well written And very very like There's somebody in there kind of vibe right Because this thing doesn't have the guardrails on it That we have put on them So if you try to have, like, AI write a joke right now, it's not a great joke. This one, he had this one, Write Fake Onion Headlines, and I wish I could remember them for you right now. But they are so funny, and some of them are so inappropriate. Like, you can't believe the computer wrote these jokes, like these headlines. Like, I was driving to go down and see Becca, and I was just, like, literally almost cry laughing at these Onion Headlines written by a friggin' computer program.

so I think and I'm you know we've referenced it enough times that I will leave in the conversation around my joke but I think I'll probably take out the joke that I said before do you not want I mean based on no no I based on your reaction to it it seems like maybe it's not it's not appropriate and also it's a very dark topic I will say because I'm going to cut it out I will just say that it was not like filthy in nature is a geo political in nature but very dark regarding some famous temples what i was going to say was uh i am now potentially taking this in a um in another place that is and i don't want to spoof on this but i don't know if you heard i'm sure you read this story that some people some i think administrators at columbia university are in trouble because during a a conference that

That was about, you know, I think the Jewish experience on campus or something along the lines of that or anti-Semitism on campus. Some administrators were trading text messages with each other and they're in trouble now. That was like very, at best, dismissive, if not mocking of some of the things that people were saying. Right. And did you are you familiar with this story at all? I just was reading it yesterday or something. And of course, Columbia has had, you know, kind of, yeah, well, schools in session was in the headlines a lot because of the protests and everything. So it's very much like kind of in the headlines right now. But I think the interesting thing about this is these a couple of these administrators were texting back and forth. But I think the way that they were caught was I believe it was a student. I'm not sure. But a person behind one of the administrators was basically, I believe, taking photos of the woman's cell phone while she's texting during this event, which really just sort of makes you really think about like when we are texting anything in public

or doing anything on public like first of all don't use large print first of all do not use large because mostly that's that's just supposed to be i just see people on tiktok zooming in on other people's phones at either baseball games or on airplanes where the people are cheating oh that's right that was a whole thing ridiculous crap into their phones yeah yeah exactly so i

guess we've already addressed it in a way i just brought it up because you're talking about some guy who shows up at a wedding with a laptop and i was just picturing like i'm like i would like to be behind that person to see what happens on that laptop but um anyway yeah i mean here you have some real real world um implications i guess also being uh being sort of exposed on social media as being either a creep or even maybe just a philanderer i guess is also a real world implication but yeah i was just sort of thinking like how many times and again i don't go around you know mocking people via text message all that often but like the the lack of privacy involved and also like nobody's you know in this story obviously the big part of the story is these leaders or these administrators at the school were doing something inappropriate but also i would sort of like to hear about the story of like how do we feel about people just like taking photos of what we're texting when we think we're having a private text conversation well it's a little bit like that

sort of left-wing activist who went and like you know her move is to cozy up to people like sam alito and his wife or you know various kind of conservative folks and pretend like she's a conservative but she's secretly miked and then she publishes the conversations they have you saw this

no i did not i mean i'm this i think her name is laura wagner maybe okay i mean this is sort of reminiscent of who is that who is that right-wing troll who was doing this like 10 years ago yeah

I forget his name and that's a good thing I think my mind is spun Yeah, it's it's it's exactly that but on the left and it's well of course and this is how everything happens for me when it's that guy I'm like that's that sucks. Also. I feel like he's actually putting out deceptive information It's not just that he's doing something that's probably maybe not fully above board in terms of how he's recording people It's James something. Yeah, it is does that does that help narrow it down the most common name among

Yeah, you are right about that though. Yeah, but like it's not for me with him

It's not only that he is doing this underhanded recording But then I also feel like he does take the tape out of context this woman who is doing it from the left Well first of all, I feel like the Alitos are kind of deserve some being put on front street and I just my my tendency towards liberalism makes me more forgiving of her Which I don't know how I feel about that the fact that I have a kind of a double standard based on the you know the political perspective of the person who's doing it um can i just read you i found a couple of these ai generated onion headlines um these this isn't even the full list this is simon rich had submitted something to time magazine that included a couple of them i think they like i said i think that he and his friends put a whole book together of this ai program was called code da vinci 2 and it's they turned it off by the way like it was like too hot for tv like like it's been turned off like it's not one of the ones that's out there right now but these are about getting

canceled it's like i'm just trying to tell my jokes and now i'm getting turned they had it

write a poem about being turned off and it was devastating here are some onion headlines i don't even know these are the funniest ones are just the ones i have that were written by this a code davinci 002 experts warn that war in ukraine could become even more boring oh my god budget of new batman movie swells to 200 million as director insists on using real batman story of woman who rescues shelter dog with severely matted fur will inspire you to open a new tab and visit another website i mean so here's this one has a swear at it rural town up in arms over depiction in summer in summer blockbuster cow f***ers.

this is a computer wrote those you see I'd have a beer with that computer I'd

elect that computer president anyway let's see oh good 30 minutes into the show before we had our first cow bleepers yeah that's at least something hey let's thank some dazzling donors and I do want to tell you this story of of some confusion between me and somebody that I was trying to give some gratuity last week in a minute.

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.

All right. We are getting down to it here on our list of dazzling donors. Sorry, I paused there, Andrew, because right as I said that to you, I looked out the window, and one of the neighborhood feral cats was just staring directly into my soul. Oh, did you get a photo of it? I'm going to try right now. Hey, buddy. Hey, hey, hey, hey.

Oh, Scarcey? Trying to take your soul, but you're trying to take the cat's soul by taking a photo.

I'm trying to get it to look at me.

Look at me when I'm talking to you, neighborhood cat. I'm the feral captain now. That's right.

Is it still there?

That sounds so cutely distracting. He's frozen.

He's running around now. He is loving life, though, because... I love that. you mowed the field down the other day and now there's probably it's probably mouse yeah probably like a gd old uh golden corral of mice down there now all flushed out all the cats to get crazy um i'm the captain now but colleen peterson is the dazzling donor now of course dazzling donors are donating a dazzling amount of dough and we appreciate it so much we are mere weeks away from, I don't want to stress you out, Andrew, but we're mere weeks away from the TBTL-a-thon 15. Thank you for being a 10. And it's going to be a fun week. But the model that we have followed on this show, I would say pioneered, is the donor model that people like Colleen Peterson, thankfully, are participating in. It's pronounced Worcester, by the way. Sorry, Colleen Worcester of St. Paul, Minnesota. Gotcha. Colleen says, being so late, I can use the new term 20 to refer to myself and my partner who have been listening since shortly after Andrew joined as official co-bro. I see, Andrew, this is, I think you made this up, right?

Just on like Friday's show? I think that was because of Amy and Chad. Yes, and I think they said, what do you call a couple of tens? And we said a 20, and now Colleen is already claiming that term, and I love it. Use it. It's great.

I mean, honestly, this show is the way that it's so fluid and reactive in real time. It's like an AI model. It's learning exponentially at all times. The Colleen Peterson is finally sentient and is realizing that Colleen and Andrew are 20s. Nice. What you do is so important as I completed a PhD program in epidemiology.

Wait, hold on one second. I don't know for sure that Colleen's partner is also named Andrew. I don't know. Oh, sorry. I think you just shipped me and Colleen, which is, I don't think how that goes.

That's going to come as, I'm assuming bad news to Genevieve, but I don't know, actually.

I don't know.

That you're currently pursuing other options in Minnesota, possibly with Colleen.

Genevieve has options, as we all know. I'm probably holding her back. I don't know. Absolutely. Thank you for the catch.

Colleen's partner is not Andrew. You're Andrew. I don't know. I don't believe I know Colleen's partner's name, but I know that they are a 20. together, Colleen and the partner. Then Colleen says, what you do is so important. As I completed a PhD program in epidemiology, you kept me sane, kept me sort of up to date on current events, and helped me pretend like I had a social life with my friends, Luke and Andrew. As a social behavioral epidemiologist working in transportation safety, Andrew, what do you make of that? I'm into it. Yes, this is right up my alley. Very relevant to your interest. I'm the nerd who gets excited by all the NHTSA messages during baseball. That's the NHTSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. There is a lot of NHTSA stuff going on during both the baseball games. And when I listen to my Dreamland radio, which is this radio station, if you will call it that, that's on Sonos. that's just all it is is art bell shows old art bell shows but they do have ad breaks because sonos the the hardware company also has some sort of a content side and they have this dreamland radio and it's almost all nitza ads when they're not talking about aliens yeah i don't know if i've

heard a lot of nitza stuff i mean obviously i've been hearing a lot of the car seat ads you know like the child that might be.

NHTSA. That might be NHTSA. I mean, think about it. Car seat. Car safety.

NHTSA. I'd like to use my donor message to make a similar PSA to people who must drive or choose to drive. Please also choose to slow down. Speed really does kill. Even small increases in speed mean a lot longer stopping distance and greater force of impact. It really comes down to physics, and you can't outmaneuver physics, even if you're part of the 80% of people who think they are a better than average driver. Yeah. That's one of those, that's one of those stats. I actually was very proud of this. We were interviewing somebody on live wire who was talking about the way that we tend to, as people overestimate our abilities at certain things. And she basically said, you know, people overestimate their ability at driving their ability at sex their ability at you know being funny and i said uh but what if you really are above average on all those yeah right which i thought was a pretty good spoof um but we do tend to 80 of us can't be better than average at driving just the math doesn't math on that so everybody slow down you know i have a thing on my car that is like it's called an interlock

device uh-huh it's the interlocking hey my uncle my uncle had one of those on his car too do you

do you remember that i don't know why this simpsons this one joke from the simpsons has lived in my head for so many years but it's like lenny carl and lenny are sitting around like a campfire and one of them has invented something called the internet and he goes it's the it's an internetting you put in your shorts so you don't have to wear your underwear like he's invented the internet but it's a very very real world thing about an internetting in your shorts on my car i have all kinds of fancy cruise control and anti-crash and i love by the way the cruise control um because it's it's it's very it's somewhere between self-driving and just the kind of cruise control that maybe your dad had or something. But it's very dynamic right? It's pretty dynamic and what you can do is you can tell it hey I don't ever want to get more than three car lengths. I want to stay at least three car lengths in front of, behind any car that's in front of me. Or you can do two or one. Or you can say I want

to ride that bumper. Exactly

I don't like that. I'm a three car length guy right? I don't want

to be. I want to show this person what's what

No. It's like I really am like, I'm a real like a Hans Molman. It's all Simpsons today all the time. I'm a real, I'm a pretty mellow driver. I think to Becca's annoyance, I said one time, I go, well, you know how I kind of drive slow, and she goes, yeah. Oh, really? And I was like, oh, that's been noted. Okay. Yeah, I am a very, I mean, on the freeway, I'm doing the speed limit maybe plus two miles an hour, but if I am in, like, a neighborhood, if I'm, this sounds like I'm trying to, like, humble brag or something, but, like, I am just a I'm a very very cautious driver I don't know why it's not I'm not doing it intentionally but like I'm a very slow driver if I'm around people cars bikes people getting out of their cars like the street that Becca lives on in the south water front of Portland it's a pretty active area and like I would never drive the speed limit down that street because it scares me that someone's gonna like

pop out or something a cat somebody on a bike I am anything here's why I really am a better driver than everybody else Uh-huh. You're in the 80%. Exactly. Obviously, I say that somewhat jokingly, but here's where I am. So I don't drive all that often anymore. But I am somebody who grew up being a very aggressive driver. It was both a game and a challenge, and I'm not proud of that. And we've talked before about me struggling with some kind of road rage issues and just kind of for whatever reason, growing up in the in in the era and and whatever other influences I had. I think I grew up being kind of a very aggressive driver, especially on the highways where, you know, I get really mad at people who are, you know, like driving too slow in the fast lane, which I still think you unless you're passing, don't be in that lane, whatever. but now I'm 47 years old every time I drive in the car I am very conscientious of just like what a what a huge dangerous piece of machinery this can potentially be I live in a city with very small residential streets and a lot of cyclists on the busier streets and so I drive very same with you when I'm going through like the little neighborhoods here the residential streets that have all the mini roundabouts and them. I am driving so slowly on those streets and feeling good about it and feeling good about myself and being happy, you know, happily taking in the scenery and driving slowly. Having said that, being a former sort of aggressive driver, I also know how to stay out of people's way. on the highway if that makes sense you know what i mean like i feel like especially here in the

pacific northwest you're not in the far left lane doing exactly it's always been very notable to me

and i think you know people say this a lot and as somebody who's lived in various places uh as a driver and especially kind of in the northeast and then coming to seattle i was shocked by how people will just like kind of like be in their own world and just putter i don't have the confidence

for that yeah just leave you know what i mean like how do you hang in the left lane at the speed limit when people are like racing up behind you like i i have to get into the middle lane or the right lane because i don't like people right behind me who want to go faster than me it's a

deeply uncomfortable feeling and i've heard from some people who actually say well i'm police you know like they're like well they shouldn't be going that fast i'm going the speed limit it's like your job is not to police other people also it seems like it's not super safe for you it is

not safe there are some crazy crazy fools out here exactly but here's the thing so my i know that my car has this radar system and this like auto braking thing so I'll tell it okay speed limit 70 I'll set it at like 73 and I'll say try I'm telling my car try to go 73 if you can and and that's what it does and then if there's a car three car lengths in front of me it just slows down to whatever that car is doing and it never goes over 73 it's just always reacting to the traffic around it but I don't trust it a lot of times to stop because what I think I've realized is I must start breaking again this all sounds like a humble brag and it's not it's just an it's a conversation around physics I guess which is of course brought up by Colleen like I will be looking at the car you can see the traffic is starting to slow down on the freeway right like you can see the brake lights up ahead of you and now I'm looking at my car's speedometer and I see I'm still doing 73 and I see where those cars are and I and I look at this green illuminated thing that tells me the car is doing its cruise controlling right I know that it's going to stop the car before I hit those cars but I it's so stressful to just let the car do it if I'm moving

fast but I think that's good I mean honestly you're not it's not supposed to be a self-driving car so I can never get to the point though where I'm just like

it's got it like I don't know if I'll I guess my thought is in 20 years when we Do you have self-driving cars? I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to hand over full control because I don't trust the thing. And every once in a while, it's happened where I'm letting it do its thing, and then we're still kind of going too fast, and it's getting close. It starts going, it's like telling me, hey, hit the brakes. And I'm like, yeah, genius.

You do it.

You were supposed to be hitting the brakes.

See, yeah, no, I think, I mean, based on just what you've told me, like that technology is good for when traffic is moving. But you as the human being, when you see that there is a major standstill or something up there you're not supposed to be cruising along at 70 and then the car suddenly realizes three cars ahead of it that it's really coming to an abrupt stop like that is exactly why

we still need the human element in there but it's supposed to be able to figure that out i mean think about it it's like it's supposed to be doing exactly what i do as a driver which is we're going this fast but now the thing in front of us isn't moving therefore the physics are stop start braking right now i think i start braking earlier than is maximally efficient if that makes sense maybe because i think this thing is set on because by the way there are a lot of other times we're just in normal traffic it's just it's braking and it's fine i don't hit anything i haven't ever hit anything in this car but it's braking after i would like later in the game but it's safely braking and not hitting the car meaning i think i'm braking early because i'm a nervous nelly

but it's cruise control it's not self-driving and that's my point like let's say that you have it like the point of a self-driving car is it should be able to like use all of its technology to see oh there's a building or a brick wall more than three cars ahead you know so that the car can sort of detect that and start a more gradual slowdown you're not using self-driving you're using a pretty souped-up version of cruise control but a cruise control by definition you're supposed to be cruising and so therefore if there's a car driving slightly slower up ahead in three car lengths it'll start to slow down i don't think the cruise control you're supposed to just be like oh it'll just totally stop when traffic is you know significantly slower or fully stopped if you see a jam up ahead that was how the salesman pitched it to me and one of the things

he said was it's great in traffic which he's actually not wrong about because if you're in like stop and go traffic or or kind of like almost stop and go traffic i'll just set it at like 20 miles an hour and then you don't have to constantly work the break in the gas yeah it's just kind of like inching along but i think you're right the problem is i i didn't want to pay the full price so i got ted cruise control so the car goes to mexico every time there's a natural disaster in Texas every time the power goes out yeah it's caught at the airport try to go to Mexico it's nice complimenting Trump good yeah that's right thank you Colleen for supporting the program Colleen says come to the Minnesota State Fair power out nice thanks Colleen we will hopefully see you there if not this year then very very soon maestro on your mark

Get set. Get set. Now ready.

Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle. Look who it is. It's our friend David Kreutz in Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan. I'm guessing that Setagaya is the neighborhood or I'm going to say prefecture, but I don't know what prefecture really means. I just feel like I hear that referenced as far as neighborhoods in Japanese cities. Yeah.

In the same way, like I might say I'm from Wallingford in Seattle.

Yeah, but that's only from just having heard that word. A district under the government of a prefect, Japan is divided into 47 prefectures. I don't think, by the way, he's in a prefecture. I think that's just he's in a neighborhood in Tokyo.

It's a special ward, according to Wikipedia, a special ward in Tokyo. Just in the same way Robin was a special ward to Batman, which has been a theme on this show. That's exactly right. That's the third Batman reference.

That's right. You know, it's sort of...

Batman, the original one with Jack Nicholson.

David says, sorry this is so late. I have a really cool excuse. I'm a terrible procrastinator. Wait, wait, that's actually a terrible excuse.

It says a really good excuse, not a cool excuse.

Oh, did I say cool? Yeah, you're just thinking about how cool. I'm really struggling today. No, I'm sorry.

I'm not trying to call you out. No, no, no. That one is kind of a, it feels like there's a difference there. But were you thinking about how cool you are or how cool I am maybe? That's got to be distracting for you. It never even occurred to me that it's a liability to have me on the show.

In three, two, one. Hey, Andrew, did you know a prefecture is a designated district, but not a neighborhood? Did you know it's a special ward, but not just like a neighborhood in Japan? Sorry this is so late. I have a really good excuse. I'm a terrible procrastinator. Wait, that's a terrible excuse. Anyway, this year, instead of a message, I have a humble request. Every day you thank the donors, which is awesome. And I love hearing people's messages and your commentary and occasional tangents. David, as you've learned today, that's really the, those conversational crevasses are the, are what, it's like a, um, what are those English muffins that everybody loves that have the nooks and crannies? Um, Thomas's? Thomas's. Those, the, the, the nooks and crannies of TBTL are really where it's at. that's really it captures all the butter and it's delicious now i really want to english muffin lots of nooks and crannies um okay uh but some while some tens love razzle dazzle and thank you baby some of us dozens of us enjoy them less huh that's interesting i can't imagine a world in which someone doesn't love this music normally i just grin and bear it or skip over it but the songs are used every show and it would mean missing the thank you messages i'm surprised to to hear that it actively bothers david to that degree i would think it's just kind of a non like for instance i hate the intro music they use for the howard stern show i've been wanting to talk to you about that i think it's a song called american nightmare by rob zombie and it's awful

it's literally one of my favorite parts of that show i'm not even joking when i hear that come on because when i dabbled when you know a few years ago when i was like listening to it a little bit kind of on the reg for a very short window one summer um i remember hearing that music and it being like and i knew i recognized it as rob zombie right away although i didn't know the song that's not my genre i wouldn't listen to that like just in my downtime i think it might have by the

way been on the private parts soundtrack or something i think maybe that's how it entered

their universe but um there's something about how much howard loves and then you later on in the show mentioned that you you how much you dislike it and then i you know i don't i don't think we ever really chatted about it and then the other day i think i told you i wanted to just like listen to a little bit of again and i always have to start it from the beginning because even though it is not the type of music that i like or would listen to at all somehow like it does get me like ready for the show and like i like how much howard loves it and i like the way he sings over it and

i kind of the way it starts with that yeah yeah there's like a little yeah and there's something

about it and it's kind of like it's almost like this is a weird place to take this but I remember a conversation I had with Jonah Lehrer like 20 years ago where he was talking about he was on like his first book tour or whatever when he was still like touring and wasn't accused of plagiarizing himself which is still an interesting thing to wrap your head around but anyway he I remember him having a conversation with me and Veve and him talking about he's like you know my little secret is I kind of like Chili's but I never go to Chili's but I like going on book tour because then I go to all the Chili's that are in the airport because I don't have any options this is before all the airports started rolling out kind of nicer fare and it was more like chain restaurants or whatever and he was kind of like my little secret is like I kind of like Chili's so I like being in the airport because all I can do is go to Chili's and that's kind of how I am with this Rob Zombie song Like, it's my little moment to listen to Rob Zombie, but only in the context of the first 45 to 60 seconds of the Howard Stern show, because I'm not going to be listening to it anywhere else. I don't know why it works for me, but it just does.

Dig deep down from Planet X. Yeah. 13 ghosts in the devil's head. Step right up and feel the fire. Hardcore love of the never dead. Call me the American nightmare. Call me the American dream. Call me your soul corrupted. Call me everything you need. Yeah, mother effer. Yeah. Who do you love? Yeah, mother effer, who do you love? Black boots, stomp and penetrate. Yeah, lust and the death gone in your head. Rat pack, mine degenerated. 13 ghosts, sing the body red. I mean, it is an upbeat number, and I will give them that. Here's the thing. I'm with you, Andrew, in that I don't like this song. I would never listen to this song, but I like that it tells me the Howard Stern show is about to begin. And similarly, I'm surprised that David Kreutz of the Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan neighborhood hasn't also attached and imprinted to our donor music in the same way. Like, you don't have to like the music, but it tells you there's about to be, first of all, the honoring of people who are supporting the show financially, and second of all, a fascinating conversation, a tangential conversation between you and I about something or the like. In other words, you would think at some point David's love of TBTL would supersede his dislike of those songs but i don't think that's happened it must be something about music too

because like i remember when we first started playing the doogie hauser theme under emails and that was about 20 i remember that was one of the things i think we started doing around the time we joined apm i just kind of happened to remember that was when i was like kind of like hey i got more time on my hands luke let me screw around with things i don't know we just like started doing it for some reason and it was around that time and i remember people hated the doogie music so much but like we've never gotten any complaints about like top story which We play about as much Razzle Dazzle as Top Story goes, maybe a little bit longer before we fade it out. So I think there's something about music that is just like so subjective that people have stronger reactions to it.

I guess so. David says, my humble request is this. Could there be a three to four song rotation? Maybe one song per week. I don't want to leave you with all the work, David. You know us too well. We're not about doing work here or looking up songs. So David says, I emailed a list of possible alternatives along with YouTube links for your consideration. Maybe some other 10s have some ideas, too. Anyway, thanks for considering it. And keep up the great work. Arigato and sayonara for now. David, you have this list of songs in front of you, Andrew. Can you rip through a couple of the possibilities? And if one of them seems promising, maybe we could do a little practice run?

It's a huge list, so I don't know if we really want to click on any of them, but I'll tell you what they are. If you want me to stop and play some of them, you can let me know.

Please let American Nightmare be on there.

It says American Nightmare. It says House of a Thousand Corpses theme. It says House of a Thousand Corpses closing credits theme, which I don't know how much different that is. I'm out of my Rob Zombie knowledge, man. I believe he directed those films. Yeah, okay. Razzle Dazzle, apparently from Chicago the Musical. Wait, he doesn't like our Razzle Dazzle, but wants some. He wants a Jerry Orbach version of Razzle Dazzle. Do you want to hear that?

You mean Lumiere from, you mean Lumiere from, no, from, oh, Beauty and the Beast? Oh, is that Jerry Orbach? Oh, I see. Jerry Orbach's greatest role outside of Law and Order, I feel, was playing Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast.

We have a Razzle Dazzle Rose by Camera Obscura. I like them.

Oh, I do love them.

Razzle Dazzle by Heat Wave, Razzle Dazzle by Deep Purple, Dazzle by Suzy and the Banshees. Ooh, I'd listen to that. I was wondering if Suzy and the Banshees was too scary for you when you were a young person.

You know, I was afraid of Suzy and the Banshees as a kid, but I do love, what's that song, Kiss Them for Me? I don't know what the song's actually called.

I think it might be called Kiss Them for Me.

I love that. I love Peekaboo by them, which is also kind of a little ominous. Oh, yeah.

They're very kind of a little gothy. Hold My Life by The Replacements, which I really like that song. I'm not sure exactly. Oh, I do like that song, too. I can't figure out why that's a dazzler. Maybe I don't remember the lyrics that well. Old Devil Moon by Tony Bennett. That's interesting. And then there's a song called Thank You by Dido. I know there's a lot of D's, dude. The Alanis Morissette Thank You song We used to We played around with that for a while Remember we were playing Alanis Morissette's Thank You

Oh yeah, sure I think I was

Did we actually use that for the donors, right? We did for a long time Before we settled on the Thank You Baby song

Yeah, I'm just looking for Things that I have here that say Thank you To see if I could find that That Alanis song. Oh, I can just click on it here if you want. So I had like edited it just to the thank you part at some point.

I remember that. Yeah, no, we did use that for a while, yeah. So anyway, the list goes on.

Those are all good suggestions. David, what I'll say about this is, and we're not anywhere, I don't think we're actually, we've got some important things on the horizon, such as TVTelthon15, thank you for being a 10, and some big announcements that will happen that week, et cetera. But watch this space because Andrew and I have been kicking around some musical ideas or some ideas about the music on the show related to, you know, keeping it fresh and fun and flirty and also making it so we don't keep getting taken down in Bulgaria on YouTube.

Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Although Razzle Dazzle does get flagged sometimes.

I'm just saying, David, you may not have to suffer through Razzle Dazzle for the rest of your life as a TBTL listener, because we may have to make, at some point, some changes just so that we can keep from getting in trouble in various places for using copywritten music. Yeah, exactly. So you may get your way one way or the other.

It may just be me singing Razzle Dazzle, so look forward to that.

Don't sing it too well, though. No, I can't.

Because then you'll get pulled.

Anyway, David, thank you for your support. Appreciate you. and arigato and sayonara to you as well. Hello and welcome to Top Story. It's David's second least favorite thing that plays on the show. What if he's like, this is a list of things I don't enjoy. I don't enjoy the razzle-dazzle music. I don't enjoy the Top Story sounder and get rid of that catch my disease. Get rid of all of the hallmarks of the show. Okay, so I will try to, So this story is a little bit complicated, Andrew, so I'll try to make it concise and not as complicated for the listeners and for you. But basically, you know how last week I had my dude Jerry out here brush hogging, cutting down all the tall grass. I live on this kind of big hill, and a lot of the property makes it sound like when you and John come here for TBTL15, I think you're going to be surprised by a couple of things. One, you're going to be surprised at how close my neighbors are. I live essentially in a cul-de-sac you know I don't live like out on some kind of rural farm like environment but somehow within the fact that I'm in a cul-de-sac I also have like an acre plus of property most of which I can't even really access because it's like hilly and kind of some trees and stuff and it gets this long grass on it that needs to be dealt with with some sort of a tractor device and so I got this guy Jerry coming out well last week I mentioned to you that he was here working but he also had a cane going on his tractor and i thought that was just because he's like 80 something but no it's because he had a full ankle replacement and he's and so he's dealing with that and so he can't move around as much so he had another guy here helping him with the weed eating the weed whacking and this dude was out there for all of thursday it just like going to town it was a warm day this is kind of thankless work you're covered in you know debris from just like weed whacking all of these areas where the grass has grown up on the hill and in these places that are hard to get to and in amidst these rocks and stuff like the reason that the grass had gotten very long in these places because it's a major hassle to deal with and I hadn't wanted to deal with it so um what happened was uh they finished all the stuff that involved the tractor on thursday but jerry was like this guy's gonna come back his name was josh josh is gonna come back on friday and finish up the weed whacking stuff because he was so tired after thursday he literally had to stop he was like had hit the point of exhaustion and josh is probably i'm gonna say maybe five years older than me maybe mid 50s somebody who definitely looks like they've put in some hard years right and definitely been working some pretty physical labor throughout their life so it's friday uh morning and josh is back here early he's got his wife is actually here waiting for him they had like parked their vehicle kind of up on my road and he's out there and he's just going to work and he's not only is he doing a good job but he's actually weed whacking some

areas that i assumed i was just gonna have to do they weren't really part of the whole project he's just one of those folks that's just like gonna he's just gonna do a good job and he's gonna just take care of stuff even if you didn't ask him to and i had the thought you know it would be nice to give this guy a tip because he's working really hard and um and i just appreciate the work that he's putting in so i had um i had this cash that i had set aside to pay jerry and it was all in hundreds and so i took a hundred of it and i went down the hill to the like the weird store To get change I wanted to My thought was I'm going to Buy something at the store And I'm going to get Some change And I'm going to tip this guy Josh I'm going to tip him $40 So you

went down to the weird store and they were all out of me so that's right I did I was like there's

no way they're cashing a hundred dollars bill at this place like it is but um uh so I headed down there this is while this guy Josh is still working here he's kind of you know out there in the morning on Friday I go down and I buy some half and half and one thing that happened was this very very nice pretty elderly woman who works at the store in the morning I mean it's I think it's her family's little store um she was trying to make me my change and she was clearly shorting me by like twenty dollars and i was trying to explain to her in a really gentle way that the change wasn't totally correct without making her think i was trying to scam her yeah right she was like okay well five is ten ten is twenty twenty is forty forty is fifty and i was noticing that this was definitely coming in kind of light yeah right and i was like um yeah i go let's just re i was again And I was trying to do it because I felt like together because I also thought I'm in here with a hundred dollar bill. It's eight thirty in the morning. I'm the only person in the store. She's a very kindly kind of older woman. This would definitely be the kind of place where if you were trying to run a scam with like a counterfeit hundo. Yeah. Or one of those weird scams where you go, you do the change wrong. OK, now I'll take back the 20. I'll give you the 10 and then you hold the five. And, you know, like I wanted to make sure that I wasn't getting shorted, but she didn't get this feeling that I was being pushy about it. So I finally get the correct amount of change, which is like 90 bucks or something, give or take. So I've got this 90 bucks in my in my pocket. I put the other loose change in the center console of my car. I drive back. And when I get there, this guy, Josh, is finished what he's doing. He's getting back into the Jeep with his wife. And he's like left me a note on the door, which is the total price of the work. And I look at the price and the price is actually more than I was thinking it was going to be It turns out I don't have overall enough cash to pay for it I'm going to have to go get more cash and go find Jerry and settle up with him in person Fine, but I do say He comes down from the car and I go, oh, you know what? I'm looking at the price I need to go get more money I go, but hey, this is for you And I hand him the money I got at the store I hand him the 40 bucks And he's like, oh, thanks And he goes and he's getting in the car And I walk into my house and I realize I just gave him $90 I left the there was a 50 and 220s was $90 I was going to hang on to 50 of it right I was going to give him 40 of it but in my haste and confusion I handed him the whole

bundle of money which was $90 and this is also somewhat interesting because you're also doing the rare thing of tipping before you've paid the payment right you're like this is for you This is just a tip, but then later on, I'm going to get more money, and I'm going to pay you what I actually owe you.

And that wasn't even my plan. I thought I was going to have enough money to pay the whole amount, and then the $40 was going to be in excess. That was the idea, was here's all the money, and then, hey, this is for you. That's what I was intending to do. That isn't how it happened, because it turned out the bill was going to be more than I thought it was. So I'm handing him what I think is $40. It's $90. I realized this 10 seconds after doing it, but I'm now in my house, and I'm like, there's no way I'm going to go out there and be like, hey, actually, that wasn't supposed to be $90. That was supposed to be $40.

You lost $50. We all lose $50 in different ways, and in this case, you sort of lost $50 accidentally, but it makes you look like such a mensch, and you made somebody's day.

Yes, that was exactly what I was telling myself, to try to overcome the emotional pain of this $50 that I didn't mean to. I mean, what is that? Four bananas, Michael? So, yeah, I was just like, oh, that stings. Because $40 would have been a pretty nice tip. Yeah. But, man, $90 is like, and I did, Andrew, that's exactly what I did. I was like, $50 is a lot of money to me as a humble podcaster, but it's a lot of money to this guy. And I don't.

Are you looking for, I saw you look over your shoulder. Are you looking for the bird that is making all that noise, or is that coming from my end? that's coming from your end oh there is do you hear that do you hear it do you hear i don't

i'm getting notifications i'm worried that there's a delivery that's showing up or i'm worried that maybe it's um josh is back because he hears me talking i'm gonna hold on can we can we get hold on though do you hear this no yeah now i hear it like a oh it just stopped it's been going i heard it like a scratching like a yeah i just heard it there right no it totally stopped it was going

crazy there during your whole story some crows were going bananas outside my window i guess i thought it was coming from your end and then as soon as i said do you hear this they must be listening to me because they totally stopped silent anyway so you're most of our honestly

it's like probably most of our p1s are crows at this point which honestly you could have worse

listeners i think you know i mean they remember our faces during the fawn we're gonna accept money, and we're also going to accept vomited up rat carcasses. And trinkets and bottle caps. We have a drop-down menu if there's a shiny object or a bobble that you've located that you'd like to donate.

Everybody who gives us 50 bottle caps gets a handmade TDTL French And recognizes our faces. Exactly. Okay, so you're talking, you're back in your house, and you're kind of like, that was a mistake. Worst mistakes have been made. You're trying to make yourself feel okay about it.

But I know it's going to make this guy's week. And so I'm just like, I'm making peace with this $50, extra $50 going out the door, even though it does sting a bit. But here's the slightly complicating factor to all this, Andrew. I had come back home just to settle up with this guy and give him this tip. My long-term plan was to go down to town and go on a jog around the lake. so i go back out and i get in my car because i'm in like my little running gear and i start driving back to town and as i go up this little road away from my house i realize that i'm following him and his wife and we're the only two cars on this narrow little road that goes into my neighborhood like and it's i don't know maybe a half a mile if not longer from my door out to what would be the larger kind of like you know little highway or whatever so we now have a significant amount of time where i'm following them and it looks for all the world like i am trying to get my money back from him like i just i just pulled up gave him this exorbitant tip he and his wife leave and then all of a sudden in their rearview mirror there is my car again on the road right behind them and i'm like oh this looks so bad and it looks even worse andrew when after about i don't know three four minutes of this they literally just stop the car their jeep in the middle of the road and he gets out of the jeep and comes around to my car which is now also stopped and my window is down and he goes i rolled one and he looks at me goes man dude you just gave me 90 dollars and i was like yeah yeah yeah it worked hard you worked hard for it oh okay yeah yeah i'm i'm now i'm deaf i'm heavily committed to not admitting this was a mistake oh i thought if he was going

to open the door of like was this a mistake maybe you were going to take advantage of of slipping in and saying oh yeah i did sort of accidentally give you an extra i i i was now like fully in

magnanimous mr magnanimous mode like no you you busted your butt good you know good good i'm glad to hear it and i i didn't want to take any of the money back now this is where it gets complicated and i was going to leave this part out because it's going to overly complicate things but basically what he was doing was he was coming back to my car to tell me that if i just used this tip money for the full payment i would have enough money to pay the full amount he was basically saying and he was actually a little off on the math but what his perception of things was was like i got home and i looked at the bill and i said i don't have enough money to pay the bill but here's some money for you and his thought was oh if i just give you back this 90 you have enough money to pay the whole bill which was not accurate it wasn't accurate but what he was basically doing was just passing on this entire tip going no no just use this to pay the bill and then you're square instead of being like hey the guy gave me 90 bucks sweet i'm gonna take this and use this for something and i'm sure the guy could use the 90 bucks his math was oh you're saying you're short on the bill but like you just gave me almost a hundred dollars just use this for the bill what

are you doing yeah yeah add it to whatever he assumes you have in your pocket and exactly and

the whole thing over yeah like and which was so striking to me and i was like i was like no i don't actually have enough and i was like it's for you and he goes i can't keep this really and i go he goes i got to give you back some of this i go i go fine you know i go what you keep 50 he goes Okay, thanks, man, and he gives me back $40, just hands it through the thing to me, and I'm just like, I was very struck by that because I, you know, that's not probably how I would react if I had the same, if I was in the same situation or if I, if somehow I have some sort of like good fortune of some money coming into my life, I'm very loath to just voluntarily part with it back to the person who gave it to me. He just felt like it was too much And was, you know And so I ended up tipping him $50 When I meant to tip him $40 Which I thought was a perfectly fine outcome Yeah I didn't have to really ask him for the money back He sort of volunteered some of it back to me But then I had to say to him I go, I just want to be really clear I wasn't following you Yeah, right, yeah He goes, oh, I didn't think so I go, I was going to town Yeah I go, like, I'm going on a job

Look at the outfit I have on. He's like, yeah, yeah, sure. So then when he gives me the money back, he starts walking back to the car with his wife. When I tell you that I laid rubber out of there, Andrew, to prove that I had places to be.

What did you do? You mean you tried to go around them? Because they're still blocking the way, right? I went around them.

They're not fully blocking the road. I peeled out of there so fast. Like, I was on my way somewhere else.

Right, right.

I was not following you to get some of this money back. Well, it's easy to say once you got your money.

Yeah, I mean, you should have done that ahead. Well, here's the funny thing. Have you paid him yet? It would be funny if then you were just like- No, I'm never paying him. You just never pay him. No, I'm waiting.

Listen, Jerry's like 85. How long does he have? I'm going to wait him out, bro.

I don't like the sound of that.

Jerry's going to outlive all of us.

Maybe he felt like the tip was so big that he expected, like, maybe there would be some strings attached, some maybe even possible sexual strings attached. Ask for some sort of boudoir photos or something. that he did not feel comfortable. He didn't want to be in your debt.

Everything comes with strings attached, Andrew. That's something you learn early in life.

Including this lingerie that I want you to wear in these photos. I want you to go down to glamour shots, please.

I've got a fine collection of different feather boas you can use. I have not paid Jerry the full amount. I will probably be doing that this afternoon. But I guess the takeaway from me was, And this is going to sound, I don't know how to put this in a way that doesn't sound very patronizing, very kind of like people that are probably a little bit more on the economic margins that I am. They've got hearts of gold. I don't want to oversimplify these things, but I just want to say it was an incredibly, it was a generous act from a person who I was trying to be generous to and who I was, who I kind of, I sort of screwed up and handed them too much money. But the incredible human decency Of him being like This is $90 dude Like what are you doing I'm not keeping this Like it's too much Like I guess I would just say In my life If I receive something If I were to receive Like if Microsoft said Hey we're going to pay you X amount for something I'm never going to be like That's too much guys Now granted I'm not Microsoft You're not Microsoft

It's different This is kind of neighborly

That is fair I guess maybe I don't get You know I don't receive Personal payments from people In this particular way maybe i would react differently i don't know but i just there's something about again somebody who my perception is could absolutely do something useful with the 90 just voluntarily being like yeah now yeah this is this is not this this is more than you i didn't even know it was more than i meant to give him but it's like he's like this is too much for what this was here's some of it back that was just such a a gracious thing for him to do that i was just i was i was sort of blown away by it um and and again i never let on to him that i had accidentally given him 90 like i hope to this day he's like god that luke burbank what a generous soul even though that was

a huge that was a major mistake on my part it's sort of weird that you set your cruise control to i need my money back mode yeah right why that's even a setting that mazda design how could They have known. Very sus.

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.

You know what this is, Andrew? The Doogie Howser music. David's fourth least favorite. Exactly. Sonic moment on the program. I'm realizing, I don't think we've done emails or V-mails in a while.

We haven't done it in a really long time. I have some voicemails to play. We're probably getting a bit of a backlog. But there's something that I want to follow up on because I did leave. And I knew that I had done this on Friday. I had sort of left a loose thread that probably nobody cares about except for me and maybe partially you. But we were talking about how I listen to baseball games on various different platforms depending on the situation. And sometimes I'm listening to them on the MLB app. And each of these platforms has their own commercials and promos that they insert in kind of dynamic ads or whatever. And the MLB app one has some – they're mostly promos, not commercials. and they're for baseball, right? And one of them, I didn't even mention this one to you, one of them is always about great moments in baseball history, and it's kind of like they play, like, famous old, and some of them are actually somewhat contemporary as well, calls from major baseball games, mostly World Series games. And so you've heard these before.

It's always funny to me when it's, like, a World Series that I didn't follow at all. Yeah, right, most of them I don't have any. Crank B. Gio with the hint. It's, like, not long enough. it's not the shot heard around the world it's not like whatever bobby thompson yeah it's also not like last year it's kind of this it's like early 2000s like oh shit wait the devil rays won this

there were still called the devil rays and of course there are some that go back to like the old days like this but i know so little about baseball it kind of doesn't matter but you're right it is funny like and the

diamondbacks walk it off right okay yeah and funnily like the mariners who are also sort of i think it's funny i love the mariners but i i think probably a lot of people look at the mariners the way that we look at other expansion teams you know it's like sort of an afterthought you know i've never heard it i've never heard a mariners call before anyway so the mlb app i'm listening to the app and it's like you know the radio version of it and they'll play those things But then I mentioned that they'll also play like these weird astrology things that and I thought they were commercials. I didn't know they were baseball promos. I knew that they were related to baseball because it's like this ethereal music and a woman's soothing voice saying you walk into the clubhouse and you are respected as a leader or whatever example I gave on Friday. It's very strange and it's like it's not necessarily funny. It's just weird and I can't figure out what's going on. and I you and me and John were talking about this and then we kind of changed the topic for a little bit so that I could google around and see what's up with these things I spent a lot of time googling last episode and just during your Jerry story there I was doing more googling looking for if I can give you an audio example of this unfortunately I cannot but some listeners have given me some clarity which I think I started to realize last Friday while we were talking about which is when i'm listening to the mlb app audio only version a lot of the stuff i'm hearing are actual mlb tv promos that have a visual component to them oh that makes a lot of i'm missing out on it now i've been doing a lot of kind of clicking around in the past like 15 minutes here um to kind of enhance what dusty writes into us a listener named dusty who of course i mean how can you have a name like dusty and not love baseball uh dusty says those horoscope commercials on the mlb app are very creepy i first arrived to them similarly to you while listening to a radio broadcast of the royals on the mlb app oh i found a baseball card of a i found a 1990 donruss roy i can't remember the royals player baseball card like literally on the sidewalk on a walk with genevieve in my neighborhood yesterday what a strange what a strange find um anyway was it Brett Saberhagen? It's literally right outside my door. Do you want me to grab it and I'll tell you exactly who it is? All right, hold on one second.

Okay, I actually want to hear this. And when Andrew gets back, I'll ask him this too. But I'm very proud of myself that I was playing Trivial Pursuit with Becca this weekend. And it was, hey there. I was playing Trivial Pursuit with Becca this weekend. And one of the questions was, name three of the first five people inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And I did. I got three. Oh, wow. two out of the five i named three of them they're like the most famous it's like honus wagner um babe ruth and uh ty cobb like those are the three most famous baseball players ever from the early era then christy matthewson was another one and then i forget the fifth one but i'm feeling high on my baseball oh you know the other thing that i'm seeing on tick tock all the time now oh god andrew this is so niche and so only for me and people of my generation it's somebody who's just clipped together the introductions of the MLB All-Star games from like the 90s so it'll be like the 1997 AL starting lineup for the Major League Baseball All-Star game that's it it's not even the game it's just them introducing the people and when I tell you that it just thrills my heart to see the crime dog Fred McGriff being brought out as a San Diego Padre like I this that was at the height of my baseball obsession i'm just obsessed with watching like who was on the 19 it was so many baltimore orioles by the way mcgriff i think mcgriff was a padre it was like every year was cal ribkin jr oh yeah it was a lot of cal ribkin jr in those days but anyway i'm feeling really confident in my 90s baseball is there any chance of me guessing who this royal is

well i see i have no you know his no um historic knowledge of baseball at all so i don't know how famous this person was i'm looking at wikipedia now he i'll give you a hint so he played for several teams he was a shortstop he um there's the card i have he played for the royals and here's what i'm going to tell you he was selected to the al all-star team in 1988 as a royal so he was an all-star in 88 as a royal a royal shortstop

Okay, so obviously in 88 So it would not have been George Brett Who was a third baseman and was probably George Brett was big on the 80s The 1980 Royals team that won the World Series So 88, he's all washed up And he's also a different position I'm trying to think of who a really good Because I feel like Omar Vizquel was Well, perennially, Omar Vizquel He was a Mariner for a long time then he was a Cleveland then, we called him Indians, shortstop, who was very good.

Can I tell you that this person's a bit of a journeyman, it looks like. He didn't, I mean, again, I don't have any context for this. I can just give you the facts as they're listed on Wikipedia. But, like, he played, he didn't have, like, I don't think, like, he had a specific team that he was with for a long time. He played for the Reds for 86-87, Royals 88-91, Padres 92-93, the California Angels in 93 and then apparently took a break took a little breather and then came back to play for the Texas Rangers in 96 so no long tenures anywhere

but he was an all-star

but an all-star in 1988 now we can look at who else was on the 1988 all-star AL lineup

yeah he was not

it might have been a fallow year in other words

you said he was he was on St. Louis before that or he was on Cincinnati

when he appeared at the All-Star game, he was a Royal, he was

Kansas City. But before that, you said... Oh, before

that, he started with the Reds in 86.

Oh, Cincinnati. But he's not Barry Larkin? He's not Barry Larkin. Because Barry Larkin was an All-Star shortstop for the Reds around that time, too. Huh. I don't think I know who this person is. Can you tell me who they are?

I can tell you. By the way, I am looking at the 88 roster for the All-Star American League. George Brett is in the number one position

there. He was. Still an All-Star in 88.

Yeah, apparently, according to this.

And we didn't even know about his pants shitting yet. He's an all-star in my heart forever, based on that story.

Roger Clemens was in there, Kel Ripken, like you just mentioned. Okay, so this person's name, are you ready? I am ready. Is Kurt Stilwell.

Huh, Kurt Stilwell. That does not ring any bells. You know what? He's a brother of Sally Sitwell, by the way. You know what? I'm realizing something. uh the royals did not win the world series in 1980 that was probably the phillies i don't know what i think maybe 84 the royals won so that would make way more sense with the george but i'm sorry to our kansas city listeners i just tried to flex and be cool about when the royals won the world

series it was definitely not in 1980 85 and 2015 okay so 85 that makes more sense with the george can you just humor me since we're now at the 80 minute mark i can i just say though i think people know where i was going with it those astrology commercials let me just finish reading that's

actually more interesting than me trying to name all stars from the 90s so dusty has confirmed what

i was starting to think on friday although i did not mention it on the show which is oh yes this is listener dusty baker dusty b um dusty bake i would have some words for dusty baker i know that you're not allowed he's a legend um and a groundbreaking uh manager but i um i don't like dusty baker i'm sorry i'll just say it um i'm not beeping that one i believe because of his association with the astros after i know that he wasn't the manager during the scandal but the way he just like was wants everybody to just forget about it made me very angry yeah what are you

looking up oh i just think that i i think dusty baker might have i think dusty baker was the hitter who went after hank aaron when hank aaron hit his 715th home run dusty baker was on deck i just find

that to be the weirdest baseball fact so here's what uh this is what dusty not baker says here our listener dusty says um once i started watching a lot of the games for the mlb at bat i finally figured out what was going on with those audio ads mlb inserts baseball branded commercials through the app the baseball zen is one of them and these i've heard too i thought it was just filler noise you'll be listening to the game and they'll take a break and then you'll just hear literally 30 seconds of baseball ambience and what i didn't realize is if you're watching that on mlb tv they have these like um baseball zen moments where like people are like slowly maybe rolling up the tarps during a rainstorm or just like this slow motion baseball zen is part of it and i would just listen i actually think i would enjoy as a visual it that really confused me as a listener for a long time because i thought i was listening to the game and for the first few games this season i thought the announcers were forgetting to turn on their mics and they were just letting a lot of game ambi until i started to realize the game ambi i'm hearing keeps it's a loop like i could sort of hear with each commercial like the same like somebody yelling something in the crowd i'm like wait a second this isn't just ambient noise so those are the baseball zen commercials and then they introduce these horoscope commercials which according to dusty absolutely do not work without the visuals do they work at all even with them he asks uh hopefully this helps some solve hopefully this helps solve some mystery and i'll just say he said he couldn't find any um internet i've been searching for a long time now like there's no version of this online i can play for you but dusty took a photo of his television and like you see a dust you see a stephen kwan he plays for the guardians right i I think you see. like a Stephen Kwan like sort of astrology card and then it says Virgo and then it's like oh you can start by having a bigger presence on your social accounts that fans get to know your personality receiving a positive reception to your growing star will help you feel more confident as you go out into the field and so it still doesn't make tons of sense but at least they're attached to a specific player and they're just reinforcing the brand and their stars and they're

just trying to probably figure out clever things to throw in there because I bet they haven't actually sold enough of the time because it's like what is the real numbers which brings me andrew here as we should be wrapping things up uh what we'll do is that ikea is at some point going to show up with some cabinets or some boxes that have not assembled cabinets in them and maybe if that happens it's a good sign that we should be done for the day but i have a theory on the subject of like very niche baseball conversations that you and i like to have i have a theory that it's not going well for the Mariners and Root Sports in the advertising department, and I don't know if it has to do with all of this fight with Xfinity, where Xfinity upped the package made that package more expensive, so now fewer people are watching. But the Mariners own the channel. Here's what I keep seeing. Prime time, in between innings, instead of just seeing wall-to-wall commercials for products and goods which there's some of that there are far too many filler commercials where it's like fair or foul yeah have you seen these these are the ones where they're sitting down

with the players and playing games with them like spinning the wheel of other sports you might play

or the yeah exactly and one of them is called fair or foul and they just like show a picture to like cal raleigh of like uh a roundabout and they're like is this fair or foul like do you like this or not like this and cal roi's like i don't know i guess they probably control traffic like he's also the worst at that though like he is very it's not in his wheelhouse i gotta say i was

really surprised i saw one with a dylan moore was like the the spin the wheel of alternative games i didn't realize that dylan moore was so likable i would have had him be like just sort of a not a huge not a big yeah just kind of a bro without much of a personality and give very stock answers but have you seen him in a few of these he's pretty charming isn't he and jp crawford's really

good in fair or foul because again the things they're asking him about i don't even know if i would have a good answer a funny answer and jp crawford's really kind of bringing it but like when i'm seeing fair or foul for the third time in like four innings i'm like they're not selling

enough lay schwab ads right now this is a lot of jen muller for the it's a lot of jen muller muller anybody by the way i love her but yeah she's the one who will host these things um also do you remember you're just getting very close to something that I used to love at the ballpark oh by the way we've gotten so many emails from people who want to know if we've been at any games where they've done hot dogs from heaven and finally on that Father's Day game I went to you've been seeing this all over social media they actually saw it in real time where they start throwing hot dogs in parachutes off from like the highest decks

I feel like that's our friend Greg Green

is probably probably it's pretty fun except a couple of them got stuck in the in the wires for the uh for the overhead cameras and then then they distracted us the rest of the game but anyway um i was going to say do you remember flashy or trashy with d flash gordon so we had a player d gordon whose nickname was flash and when i loved him he was my favorite for so long i thought he was such a personality such a lovable guy and um uh maybe it was his final year with the mariners before i think he declined pretty quickly and then went somewhere else and then went to the minors but um he would get on the jumbotron and they would do like flashy or trashy and it's kind of a similar thing only like things a little bit better than roundabouts but like you know maybe wearing maybe it would be like wearing a denim shirt and denim pants flashy or trashy and it was like fun to hear him trash like various uh various cultural um things i don't know i love

d strange gordon i love you have the most unique perspective and obsessions with mariners because of like the the era in which you got into baseball and really got into the ryan court

because you have a ryan court i think played three games maybe two with the mariners d gordon russell d gordon lady russell brandon the former dodger like i just love i i feel like

Like, you have a menagerie of mariners you care about that literally no one else has. Like, there's no other person who, if they listed their, like, ten most memorable mariners, outside of the obvious, like, the Julios or whatever. But if we get down to, like, your weird Pet Project mariners, they are the weirdest of anyone I know, and I love that.

You're saying you don't also have a Sean Figgins jersey? What, did you go for Milton Bradley? I was more of a Milton Bradley.

myself yeah anyway uh all right well thanks for setting this settling that for me dusty and thanks for the visual on that too sorry i couldn't play it for the listeners but um yeah at least now i

know what i'm listening to absolutely thank you for the clarification um well i guess uh we should probably wrap things up here although this is the one time almost always when i get these notifications that something's being delivered and the window of time andrew starts when the show starts and then goes until 5 p.m they're here at 9 45 a.m like ready to go this is the one time where they're actually later in the game so well i've been sitting i mean if you're if

you're bored i've been sitting on voicemails for weeks here that we could play if you want or if

we can get out of here and i can i think what's i want to be i want to be emotionally and i honestly let's be honest i need to put pants on before the ikea guys get here so are you not wearing pants at all are you wearing i'm not wearing my favorite pants i want to put on cooler pants for them i

I'm wearing some pants, but I don't like the look. I noticed when we were recording with John the other day, for the first time, I think maybe ever since we've been doing this visual thing, you did something. You pulled away from your desk or something for a second. I noticed that you were wearing shorts. And I almost commented on it. It's a strange thing because somehow I never pictured you broadcasting in shorts before. I could only picture you broadcasting in long pants.

I generally don't. I think it was a really hot day. And I just figured. And also we were recording at kind of an unusual time. So I think I was just like, I'm going to do this. But, you know, it's like right now, I am actually.

Full pants. Okay. Oh, those are good pants. I like those. Those are good, like, working kind of chinos.

Well, they're these pants I bought on Instagram from this brand called Impossible. Not Impossible. That's the fake meat. Imperfect. Oh, yeah, yeah. And they turned out to be imperfect in that, like, one of the buttons on the fly always whiffs out the window. So I will give them credit. They really nailed it with the name, Imperfect. Very Imperfect.

in that they have one leg and three butt cheeks for some reason.

We had a small child make these, and boy, they're imperfect.

They are not good at making pants.

That was the company that I was talking to a bot and didn't realize it.

Right, I remember that. I remember that.

Anyway, all right, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We are going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you. Please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Go Mariners. RISP. It's all about RISP and reward, my friends. Ooh, is that a late in the game show title? Late breaking show title, RISP and reward. Nice. All right. We'll see you tomorrow. Please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to you all.

Beep, beep, ribby, ribby. Power out.