Muse

You are a precious beast, going about the work that you have, chomping on little bugs in the grass. Look at you go, just one after the other, chomping, chomping, chomping. You are a happy little guy, and it makes me happy. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad I'm here. What a gift it is to be alive. If you weren't scared of me, I'd try to be your friend. But you probably are. But you go.

TBTL! Excuse me, who even are you?

Type A, I'm not. Comfortable, caring, and serious about our relationship, I am.

We do not know each other. This is all happening so fast. Can I get pregnant from this? The backstory for that one I thought was like, you crazy frat brother.

I keep hearing you say when you do the snort laugh that you gotta stop doing the snort laugh and I don't want you to stop doing the snort laugh. I love the snort laugh. It's a laugh. I love all the laughs.

Mom, it's not real. It's a jib jab.

Let the filibustering begin. Well, all right, hello, good morning And welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. It's an audiophiles nightmare. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

First things first, I love my job.

Coming to you from San Francisco, California.

California got sunshine.

In the shadow of Coit Tower and just a short but cold swim from Alcatraz, where California does got sunshine. But because this is San Francisco, there's, of course, a bit of fog out there. Cloud fog. On the bay, I'm guessing it will dissipate by the time I'm down there. in a boat under the Golden Gate Bridge observing the people who distribute the cremated remains of people who have passed away in San Francisco but are not able to identify next of kin. That's my plan for the rest of the day. So I'm going to enjoy the easy part of my day right now, which is called episode 4,266 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. I wanted to do some television reviewing yesterday, and we sort of ran out of time.

I don't even own a television.

Now, there is a show that I got so deeply into on Monday night, I guess it was, that I had very low expectations for, and it greatly exceeded them. I hate to say it, it was kind of cool. And I also realized something this morning. Something that I've known for years, probably, it's been in the back of my head, But it was fully confirmed this morning about a mistake that I've been making almost every morning of my life during my adulthood. I've made a huge mistake. I'm finally ready to change my ways. And it starts today, my friends. Oh, also, of course, we're going to talk to this guy, longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I have been telling him for years. I'm talking since the earliest days that we collaborated on TBTL.

You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you

And it's finally starting to sink in He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now Good morning, my friend

Good morning, Luke Can you remind me of something? Are we allowed to use the phrase, a sexual 9-11 on this show?

Is that how John Mayer described his lovemaking with Jessica Simpson? I believe that was sexual napalm, which was

Oh, really? I didn't know what you were referring to

Free 9-11, I think that was Oh, I didn't know what you were talking about. That was the go-to.

Oh, wow. Now I want to deconstruct that, but then I want to reconstruct it, and then I want to say nothing about it. Hide it. I came across a drop.

Send it to Yucca Mountain.

Emphasis on the yucca. Yeah, that's a real yucca mountain. I came across a drop yesterday that I almost put in today's intro, but I already had something in there about pregnancy, and I thought maybe that's a little bit, that's too fresh of drops. But I don't think I've ever used this before, and I just found this buried. I just found this buried in the back of one of my audio folders and it made me laugh so hard

that's like a sexual 9-11 in my opinion or a sexual Cuban Missile Crisis at the least that is from

that is from Veep of course you recognize that as Tony Hale's voice can you play that again please sorry I was getting the music going it is so good

that's like a sexual 9-11 in my opinion yeah Thank you.

You know, or a sexual Cuban missile crisis at the least. You know that, like, we're going to talk TV later in the show, but I have, on my to-do list for, I'm not exaggerating, years now has been start at episode one of Veep and get serious about watching this thing that has generated so much tape for our show and that, I mean, I think I watched the first season or two, But like considering the fact that the vice president of the United States may very well become the president of the United States because of issues with POTUS.

Yes, exactly. Because the president stepped down, I think was actually I think that season one that the show gets very confusing. I mean, it's confusing for me to remember everything that happens across whatever eight seasons or whatever it is. Maybe I'm exaggerating. But yeah, I believe that might be like kind of the earliest kind of driving narrative in it is that the president is stepping down or maybe maybe that's season two. But yeah, there's a it was amazing after that weekend, four lifetimes or maybe three weeks ago when Biden stepped down, how everybody was drawing out the parallels between real life and that show.

It's also just so funny Like I don't know why it is that there are so many nights Where I'm trying to think well what should I watch And then it's you know Usually the mariners have disappointed me And so now it's 8.30 And I'm like well what should I watch And it's like an unbelievably well written Funny hilarious show That also feels somewhat relevant to our times Or Keith Morrison walking along a deserted highway Talking about some person who met an untimely end And for some reason And I go in the direction of Keith Morrison and Dateline NBC. I don't know what sort of, maybe it's just like I want to turn my brain off. And Veep, funny as it is, is so densely kind of layered and the plot is so dense that, I don't know, maybe it feels like work to me. But everything I hear and see from Veep constantly reminds me that I want to go watch more Veep.

Well, maybe it's also that you just watch the Mariners get murdered and that's put sort of murder on your mind.

Yeah, we're talking about a true crime, except we know who the suspect is.

Unfortunately, I was a witness. It's the middle part of our order. Yeah, I was a witness to that murder last night. Oh, you went to the game. Yeah, very disappointing.

Disappointing outcome. I guess I had a much better experience with getting that information, which was I was on my flight, and for some reason, and I had purchased the Wi-Fi, or let's be honest, the Columbia Broadcasting System had purchased the Wi-Fi, but it was being kind of, I don't know, it was a little glitchy. And so I was in the MLB app. Usually the Wi-Fi is sufficient for me to listen to the games on my Sirius XM app because there's no visuals. You know, you can't really stream Netflix much on these Wi-Fis on these airplanes. But you can usually, an audio product you can kind of get away with. So I was trying to listen to it on Sirius. It was one nothing. But, you know, I was feeling like, you know, this is the Detroit Tigers. And also this is the renewed, rejuvenated Mariners. and so anyway i was trying to listen and then that wouldn't work and then i was trying to just look at it on the mlb app and it was just freezing up and freezing up and it kept just telling me it was the fourth inning i was like i know it's not the fourth thing anymore and then i finally got my laptop up and working and then it was just like oh mariners lost final score whatever the final score was so i went from like being like we got a chance at this to just compressing like eight innings or maybe six innings of kind of emotional turmoil for me right down to just like oh well that's what happened and now i can move on with my life which i guess is sort of the better outcome

i mean listen though we're going against a tigers team with a rookie pitcher with like a six five seven era or something coming into that game i mean nobody's got an answer for that luke

i mean what are you gonna do the big question is did you have any more run-ins at the stadium

let's see there uh i almost got into a fight with our friend ders uh because he well he invited us to the game and i don't understand why he'd invite us to a game where we're gonna lose like that it seems like um if you're gonna invite us to a game like make it a good one you know is that is

that a lot is there at least some sort of bark in the park or were they throwing a hot dog off

the roof they actually did do that i miss gram lakes we were way up in the um we were way up in like the 300 level which is actually nice i mean that sort of sounds you know usually like you say nosebleed seats is a bad thing but honestly i'm a big fan of that ballpark and The 300 level is very nice when you're up there behind home plate. But I did run to use the restroom right as Brock Heward was announcing that he was going to be throwing hot dogs off the upper level with little parachutes on them for everybody. So I missed that. But also, I was up too high. You don't let the Brock Hewardness of it all or the hot doggedness of it all. I thought he thought it's kind of cute.

I do. It's weird. I think it's cute and it bothers me.

You don't like people to have fun when the Mariners are losing. Is that part of it?

Well, that's part of it. As I've described, Mariners games are basically a dog park where occasionally baseball happens, usually by the other team. But I guess we've talked about this a little bit. And listen, we were the tip of the spear in terms of kind of performative hot dog enjoyment. But I don't know. There's something about it just feels like it feels like it's designed to do exactly what it did, which was get a bunch of attention on you know various tiktoks and espn and get a load of this they're throwing hot dogs off the roof with little parachutes on them and how delightful is that here's the thing it is delightful i don't know why it bothers me it just feels it feels cringe to me for some reason maybe because i feel like i've personally i i only consume hot dogs unironically now okay that's what i'm trying to say and this kind of there's something about it being you know it's like if they were throwing bacon off of there on a parachute i'd feel like hmm, okay, they're trying to be extremely online with this. And yet I also think it's adorable and good for whoever thought it up because that's their job, try to do things to generate interest in this team. And they had an idea, and it's generated interest in the team. So I don't know what my problem is.

A few things on this. First of all, my love of hot dogs was never ironic, and I don't think that we brought it irony to the show. I'm not even joking. I just love hot dogs. I grew up eating hot dogs. I will agree that hot dog culture, like the idea that the word hot dog in and of itself, is kind of funny or like, hey, isn't it funny that I put a shoelace on this hot dog or like whatever, like we've all been through like the major hot dog memes of 2018 or whenever it was super hot or the arguing about what goes on a hot dog. I agree that that part of our culture was certainly overblown and it made me less interested in leaning into my own love of hot dogs. Having said that, like cultural appropriation for me, exactly as a hot dog American, it It felt like Dylan Moore walking up to reggae music in honor. You know that he's doing that, right? It's in honor of, is it in honor of J.P. Crawford? Yeah, when he plays shortstop for J.P., he walks up. I heard that on the radio the other day, and I was like, that's not right.

Did you clear that with J.P.?

Yeah, that's not. He's also wearing a sombrero, which is also interesting. Oh, speaking of, Polanco might have been wearing a golden sombrero by the end of the night, too. I can't remember how that last at-bat went. Rango? speaking of um but i will say this like hot dogs and ballparks doesn't feel like that's part of like some sort of a he he he we're talking about glizzy's he he he joke to me it's like sure

hot dogs have always one of the sacred temples of the experience of hot dogs yeah and like you

know if it wasn't that it was you know maybe not at t-mobile but like you know other places have hot dog cannons i definitely prefer hot dogs being thrown with parachutes than hot dog cannons did any

Any of them, I guess they probably don't come close to you if you're in the 300 level.

No, they throw them off the 300 level. So I was using the restroom when this was happening, but also it didn't really matter because they can't fall up. You know what I mean? Unlike my career. Can't really fall up. My career, Three Easy Steps, the Andrew Walsh story. Exactly.

I'd only seen clips of it, but I'd never seen. I didn't know if literally someone went up on some sort of part of the lighting structure or something. I wasn't clear on what the apex of this was, but it sounds like it's off the 300 level, kind of leaning over and then just tossing them down to the levels below.

And I think the broadcasters do it. At least they used to. I think, like, because Aaron Goldsmith, I know, was, like, leaning out and, like, throwing hot dogs out of the booth.

Now, do the parachutes, because you remember when you had those little, like, army men with a parachute on there? I love those so much. But sometimes, I mean, it's so satisfying if you packed the parachute right and you gave it a toss and it fully opened up. But there was a lot of times where it kind of wouldn't, the cord would. This is probably why you won't catch me skydiving, because of my experience. I lost a lot of good men in my backyard in Northgate, throwing them off of a tree and the parachute not properly opening. There's a monument there now, I believe. What happens if one of the parachutes doesn't open properly? Like, do the parachutes seem to function with these hot dogs?

I think so. I've only, I think I've been in a couple of games where this is happening, but I've only been in a position to actually kind of witness it once. And that was on the Father's Day game. We were sitting out kind of along the third baseline and kind of pushed out, kind of getting close to the pole. Not quite there, but if you can sort of picture that area. And so that gave us a decent view of the hot dogs coming down. So they're coming down from like the 300 level, which is kind of behind home plate. And then, you know, down the baselines halfway or something like that. And so from our vantage point, we could see where they were coming down. We could not catch any because they weren't dropping any there. But for the most part, it looked successful. I didn't think anybody was getting bonked. But like one thing that did drive, believe it or not, I think it drove Genevieve more crazy than me, which is very odd given our personalities, is a few of the hot dogs got like tangled up in where they.

lighting rigs or no you know what they were they're the um you know how they have those sort of like they're not drones but they're nets well they're cameras that run along these tethers for like all the great shots of the field you know you see them zipping back and forth you know i don't know i

don't think i've been to the stadium since that has become part of baseball coverage no i know i

know you sat because i remember talking about him with you sitting out in the um out in the outfield they've been there for a long time now i was i was telling you so it's a camera it's kind of like a camera that moves around on a cable yeah yeah they run they kind of run a I think again I think they run kind of down the baselines I think a little bit but I remember just sitting in in the outfield with you uh one time kind of in in right field and kind of like noticing those things kind of zipping along the lines yeah they they go pretty fast but anyway the problem is that some of the hot dog you know some of the parachute strings got caught up in those cables and so I remember Genevieve saying like I can't pay attention to anything except for that hot dog that's just sort of like dangling out there and there are a couple of those and then one of them ended up coming down she's like okay one down but then the rest of the game i think she was just transfixed by that one can i ask you can i switch gears and move really yes oh yeah sorry add one

more quick yeah one more quick no fun observation which is honestly like if i caught one of those hot dogs i would be delighted by the experience i'm not even lying but then my immediate next thought would be no condiments really folks like a dry ass hot dog because the problem is you can't you don't know what people like on their hot dog also that may really add to the potential stainage like you can't send a hot dog you know down from the 300 level that's just like brimming with relish and mustard and ketchup and all the things I like on a hot dog so it's a that's a dry dog and now what you've done is you've now created a situation where someone got a hot dog which is awesome but now they've got to go figure out how do I get some how do I

get something to put on this hot dog yeah although people might just if you get it you just run up and you find the nearest stand and you throw stuff on it that doesn't bother me quite as much but let me ask you about this because i have some like i have no issues with the hot dog parachutes i think it's cute i don't even feel bad when i don't get one i'm like i don't know i have mixed emotions about free food anyway like it's fine it's fun it's a visual you know it's visually stimulating

i want to be clear my problem is with myself right and how dead inside i am i i want everyone to enjoy this um as much as they want to because i do think it's actually pretty cute i don't know

why it bothers me i got problems but there are other things that i dislike as far as like the non-baseball entertainment um one thing i've complained about since since like kind of day one of being a mariners fan when i didn't even know much about baseball but still felt like we should be more excited about what's going on on the field um but then they throw up on the jumbotron like the the the boat race you know the hydro boat race or hydroplane and it's just a cartoon it's just a it's just a red it's a cartoon of a red boat a cartoon of a yellow boat and a cartoon of a green boat and everybody gets super they i guess everybody just chooses a favorite and you're just like so excited about like who's gonna win this cartoon of a boat race and like there's literally nothing that ties it to the real world at all it's like it's like the crowd going crazy over a tom and jerry cartoon or something and it always drove me bananas because it would be like if you weren't in the stadium if you were at the concessions or something and then you heard that you'd say oh my god the crowd is coming alive something amazing must be happening finally finally in this game and then you're like oh no no the crowd only cares about this cartoon like that's always driven me bananas having said that Luke do you know about the newest form of entertainment that they introduced this year aside from the hot dogs but another race I have not been

to the stadium this year so I'm this is all new to me you haven't heard about this and you might

poo-poo this as well and that that is your prerogative but it brings me delight and joy they have um created a foot race akin to the washington nationals like president's race like kind of along the warning track exactly it's a mascot race only this one is um it's a the salmon run they call it which first of all like calling it a salmon run like i love that play on words and how you know and that it's got a connection to like they're not just like i mean let's face it they're borrowing this idea from other teams but at least they were able to find a clever way to localize it salmon runs being something that are kind of famously part of the ecological uh culture around here um and so they have these four fish that come out now this is where it gets corny but i i don't care i'm all in on this they have represent like four different kinds of like seattle culture sort of um like they well they have a grunge fish yeah they have a grunge fish

Can I try to name the Seattle styles of fish?

Yes. Now, I should say two of them are Seattle-related, and then two of them are slightly more. One of them is based on the name of the salmon, and then the fourth one is sort of random. But I'm also going to look it up while you try to guess.

So there is a grunge fish that has probably like a flannel tied around its waist or something?

something it's got a i believe it's got a nose ring i i don't know if the channel if the flannel is tied around the waist but there's definitely a i believe a flannel involved one like a tech a tech fish like an amazon type fish yes so here let me do this so the grunge one here it is is the sockeye salmon and now i'm gonna i'm gonna kill this for you by reading directly from the press release on the website because you're gonna hate this but the sockeye salmon is the grungy one Yes, it's wearing a flannel. It's got a nose ring, and it's got kind of a beanie cap on. Sure. It's a sockeye salmon. It's tough. It's scrappy. It's creative. Stan for Mudhoney and Soundgarden, apparently. Nice. So anyway, so that's the sockeye. That's the grunge. Now, the tech one is the silver salmon, okay? Do you want to take a guess as to what that one looks like?

Yes. Does it have a tech bro vest? Does it have a tech vest?

It looks like – you know, I can't tell what that is. It's wearing some sort of a blouse.

Is it on one of those one-wheel bike, one of those motorized one-wheel deals?

Oh, no, that's interesting. Think more old-school, like, Bill Gates-y kind. It's more – it's very based on Microsoft.

Okay, does it have, like, glasses with tape on them?

It is wearing glasses. It's wearing wired-rimmed glasses, some sort of a – yeah, I can't tell what kind of shirt that is. You know what it is? It might be, like, kind of a hoodie, like maybe a tech bro hoodie. that's what that is it's wearing headphones but like old school headphones with like the bar across the head sort of like an old school walkman um and yet and i don't see this in the photo i'm looking at now but i thought this was funny i say i noticed it was literally carrying a microsoft surface which is just like the nerdiest goddamn thing so that's the silver salmon that you got

so far in the sockeye okay is there um uh a chop salmon that wants to defund the police yes

there's a shamasa salmon is it's a little oh man the city council is going bananas by the way um trying to get to that um okay so get see okay those are the two seattle specific ones now so now i need you to think of other kinds of salmon for the there's going to be one that's going to be an easy one and then one

that's not going to be even explainable okay one that is going to be easy so we've we've done sockeye we've done silver um you'd think i would know what there's a king salmon yes exactly

congratulations i wouldn't have gotten that i don't know anything about salmon but you grew up

here and i think they teach you about salmon salmon in nea bay did you let it go no we ate it like I was very proud of this this was the story and I'll keep this short because I've told it a million times my friend Ben and his parents we went out to visit his uncle who was a teacher on the Nia Bay reservation and it was a very windy drive out there to Nia Bay and we got up early and we went fishing and it was cold and and I somehow managed to catch this really huge king salmon which we packed in like ice and newspaper and brought home and then my dad barbecued and it was delicious but there was also the trip where on the way back i took some dramamine because i had been so nauseous on the way up and what i didn't know at the time was dramamine is just a sleeping pill and because i was so sleepy i did not uh use the restroom when i had the chance and then i had really terrible stomach distress uh and was stuck in the car and was ripping them um and was trying to blame it on the dog zorba so anyway that is the story of me catching a king salmon one time okay so the king salmon then is it like king felix or something is it like it's

just a king it's royal okay it's royal it's uh let's see here it does it says fun fact it loves king felix for whatever that's the word okay it's a chinook king salmon i didn't know that those are i didn't know that those are interchangeable i actually didn't either i think the king salmon usually wins not always but the king salmon usually wins and just again there's a template for this there is the the fourth fish never wins it's the teddy roosevelt if you will uh that's the yeah teddy roosevelt in the nationals never wins the foot race right oh okay i'm pretty sure yeah um so the what salmon is the and i i would have never known this is a kind of salmon is it a humpy it god damn you're good yes this is seriously i have i'm actually really proud of how well I did on this quiz. I do think it's because you grew up here because I've talked to, this foot race has prompted a lot of conversations in the ballpark between me and friends who grew up here, and they're like, oh yeah, of course, we learn all the salmon in school if you grow up here.

Yeah, and the humpy is basically a salmon that is in the process of spawning in such a way that it's kind of at the end of its life, and certain humpies, if you were to catch them, you would throw them back because it's, I guess it's like the you know, maybe the meat isn't very good anymore they get red they get a big hump on their back they're just they're kind of at the end of their journey which by the way pretty dark pretty dark for that for that fish in the race like sorry humpy your your time here is done yeah well that actually makes this make sense a little bit

more because okay so humpy is the one that never wins in fact it says fun fact here has never won the race which is interesting because i'll bet you this was published before the first race was even races run dude that's right it spawned or died and i don't know how i mean there's no like good way for me to say this other than because we're talking about like kind of a cartoonization of a of a fish so i hope it's okay for me to say it this way but it's it's characteristic is that it's just like touched a little bit like it's just like it's wearing oh i see it can't really swim oh that's the problem because of everything you just said it can't swim so it's got like a one of those big orange like floaty vests on like life preserver it's got water wings on and it's got a rubber tube around its waist so that makes so and it never wins the race and its eyes are kind of like walleye it looks like they're just kind of like flopping around in different ways

I mean if you really think about the life cycle of a salmon again very dark to do this to the poor humpy like all the humpy has done is completed its mission of procreation as a salmon that's its greatest crime is it ran its race and is now ready to be done on the planet and now we gotta like put water wings on it and mock it in public as hot dogs rain down all around what kind of a sick world is this hell as hell fire rains

down um so all of these little like you know on the special salmon run website oh by the way sponsored by microsoft so that makes sense i'm just saying that now okay well now i'm now i'm listening that makes the microsoft surface uh make more sense actually though it doesn't because in a certain way like the microsoft services was part of the joke it was so funny the humpy is using azure for b2b transactions and hallucination free chat gpt oh gotcha oh but humpy so the little description on humpy is very short it says our final fish uh although we're not sure that it can swim we're excited to introduce you to the lovable humpy salmon the species is the pink humpback salmon the advantage is not applicable just an na there for advantages uh whereas like The silver salmon advantages are brilliant, savvy, and use of devices. The fun fact about Humpty is it's never won a race, and its winning song is, and I bet you you could guess what song. The Humpty Dance? The Humpty Dance, indeedly do. You did learn about that in school. You do learn a lot about salmon in school around here.

That was one of the main things I took away from my time at Washington Middle School was the Humpty Dance. Oh, I believe it. Because we did have a choir class. It was one of those, it was two classes in a row. So it was like two hours long or something And we had a choir teacher who never showed up So we would just wild out A bunch of kids totally unsupervised In the choir room with a tape deck And the Humpty Dance and other cassette tapes Were broken out Now here's something else we should move on probably But we have a big breakthrough In my personal beverage consumption In the morning times strategy But I was really proud of myself on that But the way they described the Humpty It makes it sound like that's its own species And I was under the impression that a humpy is not a species It's just a part of the life cycle Of these fish But the way that describes it It's almost like there's a salmon That has a humped back and is reddish And just goes around doing that its whole life Which could totally be true But it would mean that I have been Thinking about this whole thing completely wrong My whole life Because I just thought all salmon hit that point Because that's a sign that they've gone up the stream They've done what they're supposed to do

and they're kind of done well um i'll tell you what i can tell you on the fly here the name is humpy which is my name is sounds like an um i wasn't even trying to do that it just gets in

your brain and all the sockeye in the top please allow me to bump me that's pretty good so anyway

it's name is humpy but when it says species it's listed as a pink salmon or a slash a humpback salmon and when i google pink salmon or humpback salmon i get a wikipedia page for the pink salmon is this pink salmon or humpback salmon is a species of and then science words that i can't pronounce uh in the family of science words that i can't pronounce salmon day um it is the type of species okay yeah i'm not going to say any of these words nice try wikipedia okay so so that's

that it sounds like i might have had this slightly wrong my whole life because i was i was under the impression that that all salmon enter that phase when they're when they're you know pretty much done living but maybe it's it's its own category of fish or something i what i remember was as a kid if you were fishing and you got a humpy there was like a point where they're like yeah this one's not we're not gonna mess with this one another thing that happens is i don't know if this is specific to humpies or just all

salmon but their jaw gets very pronounced and kind of like a very skeletal I'm seeing this yes towards the end that's when you're like also kind of like all right they're they're they're not long for this world they start to just become sort of zombie-like and slightly upsetting honestly I'll

bet you you're right about this type of behavior but my guess and I can't I'm not confirming this my guess is maybe this behavior that you learned about is specific to that kind of salmon which is

a pink or a humpback salmon you know what i always thought was a very kind of intriguing thing because it felt like you didn't exactly know how it was going to go was i believe it might have been

the braves had the freeze you know about the freeze no no i'm interested the freeze was a guy

and i think they were looking for a new freeze recently who's just crazy fast at running like legitimately super fast at running and the bit is a regular let's be honest probably half in the bag fan is gonna race the freeze but they give the fan and this is like on the field this is like around the warning track they give the fan like a massive head start and then the free so like they give the fan like like three quarters of the way through the whole course and then the freeze starts running and the freeze like the amount of like sort of dramatic and sport-based tension of is the freeze gonna catch the person is so like i because i've i mean 90 of the time the freeze would catch the person but then every once in a while someone would beat the freeze which i thought was kind of cool that that was an option yeah because there's a realness to it like

you're you're still setting it up but you really don't know and i'm i'm oh you guess oh i was gonna you know who wrote about this our friend Dan Roth oh wait I thought it was Dave Roth for a second it's actually Dan Roth we don't know this person but yeah the Braves fans between any the former college track star I think we talked about this maybe when it was new because I think they were

hiring a new freeze not that long auditioning a new freeze but again I that's almost for me maybe I'm just in a track state of mind did you I actually meant to grab this tape and I didn't this morning, but I'm not a person who knows anything about track and field, but this thing went down at the Olympics last night, or at least it was broadcast last night. That was wild. It was this men's, I can't even tell you the exact distance, but what I can tell you is it's just under a mile, I think. So maybe, I don't know what the 1500 maybe or something. No, I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm trying to do this live on air, but anyway, there was this race, and this American, who was not in the conversation for winning it, won the gold medal, I think his last name was, like, Hawken, I think it was Hock to a girl, was in the Olympics, no, and I watched-

That's a different Olympics, I think.

yeah I bet it is I um I was I the plane landed and I was like just scrolling around the internet and I watched this race in its entirety because the whole race is like maybe two minutes long or no three minutes I know it's three minutes something because the record was three minutes and whatever and I watched this race and the thing that was I felt emotional watching it it was so dramatic because you basically have these two guys um and I'm sorry I know none of the details on this but you have these two guys one of them from norway named like ingbertson ingbertson who was really really fast and and kind of like the heel of the whole thing because he was just so much faster than everyone else that like in the heats sometimes he wouldn't even run hard he would just kind of toy with people he would like run at the back of the pack just because he thought it was fun and then he just like at the end just like run past everyone and then there was another guy i don't know from where who was seen as his one rival so it's kind of like these two really lauded runners are going to it's going to be a battle between the two of them and in the last like five seconds of the race this little american guy with a ponytail just empties out the gas tank and somehow goes from being in third place to being in first place and it is i was listening to morning edition today and a martinez was saying that he had watched it like 500 times i texted becca about it she was like i was screaming at the television the cats thought i was having an episode like it's i i highly recommend everyone go check it out although i've given you almost no useful detail again i think the guy was named like hawkinson or something i don't know is google turning up any of this i'm sorry i wasn't googling and i was just enraptured by your talent with my great story with so much useful detail i guess i'm just picturing the freeze i don't i don't know how the freeze would have done in this race but i uh yeah i didn't i don't think of myself as a you know person who gets particularly into track and field events but this one it just had that cinematic quality of the per a person who was not expected to win because that's the other thing about these races it's like there's so many international competitions and then there are the heats and then there are the

qualifiers for the olympics that you kind of have a sense of like who are the people that might possibly win this and this dude was not on that list and to see him just like find something inside because also i mean these guys are basically this is almost a mile i think but they're sprinting the whole way like it's crazy how fast they're running and for him to somehow in the last 10 seconds find some kind of glycol reserve in his body that just makes his legs go a little like everything in this guy's life changed in that three seconds olympic gold medalist and and in one of the most dramatic moments from the olympics um in uh you know instead of olympic bronze medalist which also by the way amazing if you do that amazing but like he i this i really feel like the future of this guy's life was changed you know he'll be on the Wheaties box, he'll have a motivational speaking career if you choose to. He moved into U.S. Olympics lore in this, and I'm not even going to say three seconds, probably two seconds. I thought, wow, what an interesting two seconds to change your life. And when I was jogging on the Embarcadero this morning, I channeled a lot of that energy and was just flying, and people were taking notice, Andrew.

I did not notice that, or I did not realize that the Wheaties box is still a thing. I don't actually know if it is a thing. If it is, I would love to see that Turkish pistol shooter on the cover just aiming directly at the consumer. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Cole Hawker. Oh, wow. You were close.

That's the name of the guy. Yeah, Cole Hawker, in unprecedented fashion, American Cole Hawker upset Tuesday's men's 1,500-meter final with a blistering 3 minutes, 27 seconds, 65 time, taking gold in the event. And yet another surprise, American Yared Negus took home the event's bronze medal, solidifying two American medals from the 1,500-meter run. So, yeah, New York Times, Cole Hawker stuns the world to win men's 1,500-meter gold. I stunned myself this morning, Andrew, when I realized that I have been, ever since I became a coffee drinker, I have been willfully wasting coffee. because I don't need to fill up an entire coffee mug with coffee because in my life I have almost never gotten through an entire mug of coffee. What happens is I fill it up, I get it all right with my half and half and my Splenda, and I take like four sips, which is the amount of sips that I want, and then I forget about it, and then it's cold, and then I dump it out, and then I start over again, and I fill a new cup up, and I make my little thing, and I have four sips and then there's like three quarters of a cup that's unconsumed. Now, why did I realize this this morning? Because I ordered a pot of coffee to my hotel room here because for some reason I have like $30 of like free food and beverage per day because of something having to do with Bonvoy. So I figured, you know me like for all of the ways that I am maybe not careful with money room service, getting any food brought to the room feels just like a recipe for financial ruin to me. But I also hate leaving free money on the table for places like this. So I thought, all right, I get 30 bucks a day. I bet you that's roughly what a pot of coffee will cost me. And I was right. It was $28 after the built-in gratuity. But it's so satisfying and swanky. They bring you this stainless steel pot. They bring you this proper sized coffee cup. I guess what I'm trying to say, Andrew, and maybe everyone consumes coffee differently in different amounts of coffee, I personally feel like I need to go back to this hotel room-sized cup of coffee. You can imagine it with the little saucer. It's so civilized, and it's the right amount of coffee for me. I don't know why.

Let's slow this down. Slow this down. There's so much information here that we're just barreling over.

I'm like Cole Hawker. I'm like the freeze, just racing through this information.

What if those two just ran full speed at each other? No, so when you say you can picture it with the saucer and everything, so that leads me to believe, and I'm not even talking about the size here. Leave the size out of it. What is the shape of the cup? Is it almost like a, it's not a teacup, right? But is it more rounded at the bottom? Like right now I'm drinking out of like a traditional mug that one might have in their kitchen cupboard. In fact, this would be in my kitchen cupboard if I weren't drinking out of it. And I would describe it as a cylinder. It's not round. It's like, it's, you know, squared off at the bottom, squared off at the top. It's a cylinder with a handle coming off of it, and it says vacation in Cleveland, Ohio. You're going to love it. Are you talking about... A cup that is more like sort of like rounded on the bottom? It's more squat and it's rounder. I just sent you a picture, Andrew, of the actual cup that I'm drinking from. It's actually not a bad photograph, I'm going to tell you. And it's just, you know, if you go to a kind of a, I don't know, maybe a more old school kind of restaurant. Not an old school diner, but there's a certain kind of old school restaurant.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Maybe in a hotel where if you order coffee or order a pot of coffee, they give you this size of cup. It's almost, I don't know how to describe it, except it's much smaller than the mug that we've all been bamboozled into using. Now, I don't know. Maybe everyone else is getting through their entire mug of coffee, and it's working just fine. But what I'm realizing in my life is I don't need or I'm not going to enjoy an entire mug of coffee. That's just not how I consume it. I'm going to have three sips. Then it's going to go cold. Then I'm going to throw it out. Then I'm going to start over. I need to just radically shift the kind of mug that I'm using because this one that I have right here and I'm going to just I was going to say I can tell that's going to make a nice sound perfect size and it's on a saucer I feel can I just jump in and let the listeners know everything in my life is going better with this saucer

it's not rounded along the bottom the way like if you go to like a coffee shop and you get Americano you might be picturing sort of like a rounded like that or I was almost picturing like an old school teacup it's not like that it is a little bit round around the bottom It is squatter, but it's like a more delicate mug. It's like it's thinner as well, which doesn't have to do with the amount of coffee in there, but just like the sort of feel of it. And I got to say, this is the kind of mug that it comes out in a saucer with like a little spoon. And, you know, if you're at the type of place where it comes out with a couple of sugar cubes. Cubes of sugar. I do not put sugar in my coffee. I don't. I just drink my coffee black. That's how I prefer it. But if I'm at a place that brings a cup of coffee out like this, like this looks like an after dinner cup of coffee, like at a restaurant, they come and it comes with like a cute little thing of cream, like a tiny little boat of cream with a couple of sugar cubes. I will dress up my coffee so that I can use the cute little spoon and mix it all up and make that sound that you just made. It's a very satisfying kind of situation.

We're going to do a little ASMR here. I don't know if this is going to pay off, but I've got my coffee here. I mean, I've got my cup, rather. I've got the stainless steel carafe. I'm going to pour a little bit. Okay, that's some coffee going in. Now they've brought me a handsome little vessel for cream for half and half. I'm going to pour that in. That was totally silent. Sorry. I'm going to stir it with the small silver spoon they brought me. and now i'm gonna take a sip perfection andrew perfection nice this is what i'm gonna start doing but what it means is i've got to go when i get home i'm gonna take a long hard look at the cabinet that has all my coffee cups in it because i have been like so many americans and maybe people around the world I have been accumulating coffee mugs thinking that's what I need when what I need is whatever you call this thing. I don't know what the name for it is, but this is the size of coffee cup that I need to be getting my coffee from going forward.

So I don't want to bite your eye or step on your bit, but I would like to because I have my little setup here. It's not a bit, Andrew. This is a lifestyle. And I have my Stanley mug. and I'm going to pour some coffee in here. Let's see what this sounds like. Okay. So that's the perfect amount of coffee right there and now I'm just going to put in a little bit of sugar. Okay. There you go. And then I'm just going to take a little sip. Oh, man. Now I feel...

God, honestly, I could listen to that to fall asleep. Put that on a...

That worked out a lot better. Offer that as a white noise app. That worked out a lot better than I thought it was going to. I had to put that together on the fly. That was good. I mean, that was actually really annoying, but good. But well executed, sir.

Anyway, I'm not, like, I don't need to belabor this other than to say I'm being serious when I say I am going to. Because the problem is all of the other mugs that I have, here's what I cannot bring myself to do. Fill them up halfway. Because that would also solve the problem. Just here's the amount of coffee I need. half of this, a little cream, a little Splenda, and I'm good. There's something about if you present me or if I present myself with a coffee mug, my instinct is to fill it up. Somehow only filling it up halfway feels weird to me. So I need to just get a bunch of cups that are this size and just make that. the standard thing because i've been enjoying this coffee so much this morning andrew i'm not even kidding you part of it's that i'm in san francisco i'm looking out on the um trans uh union building and uh it's a beautiful city i'm looking at the bay it's a great place i'm enjoying uh the ambiance but it's also because i'm not drinking the dregs of a cold mug of coffee because i poured too much in and didn't get through it fast enough like i really think i need to make some take a

hard look at how i've been doing this so your little green mugs at home are that much bigger than this doesn't seem that because i like your little tin they're not tin i'm sorry they're

those enamel enamel yeah they are it's it's it's a bit of an optical illusion because they're they're they're i think they're sort of wider maybe than i think that they hold the amount of coffee that like a standard like your cleveland you know welcome to cleveland mug my guess would be they hold the same amount of coffee as your mug it's just more squat but it's wider i could

see that yeah that makes sense but that's i blame central perk i blame this whole like bowl full of

coffee as phoebe sits on a couch and sips it and composes smelly cat in her head like this is i blame friends for this this idea that we have to consume a massive amount of coffee all at once instead of a nice little susan of coffee over the course of a morning always the perfect pour the perfect temperature i'm really i'm really enjoying this you know what else i'm really enjoying the jinx too did you watch the jinx were you did you get in on that cultural phenomenon

i did because in fact i think i watched it all either in one day or maybe like one evening and then one morning because i remember i remember what was the big news that broke the day of the final i just know that he was arrested he was arrested and i remember seeing oh he's arrested i have two more episodes try to like just not read the news for two more episodes like i just binged it as it was sort of as as the the news was breaking as well if that makes sense

yeah i um i think i probably had kind of the same experience obviously it was very very compelling um docu series made by andrew jarecki and some other folks um about this guy robert durst who was an incredibly wealthy sort of scion of some rich, I think, New York family, but who had left a trail of very suspicious deaths around him, and all of the indications were that he had, you know, been murdering people but getting away with it because of his privilege. And so, you know, we all watched that series, and I thought, man, that's, I mean, what I couldn't stop thinking about was, what was the conversation between the producers of The of the film when Robert Durst went into the bathroom Still mic'd up and mumbled I killed them all like Did they like and could you imagine A world if the because I've had Versions of this happen before not on anything that Profound or important but could you Imagine if Andrew directly looked over at the sound guy And the guy was just like shrugging He did like the cut thing under his Because like you know there is actually a thing A lot of the sound guys that I work With they will cut I think it's kind of an industry thing. They will cut your mic if you have a lab on when you're going to the restroom for, you know, privacy reasons, which is a nice gesture. You know, I don't know if they had a conversation, don't ever cut his mic or what. But like I could see a world in which he's like mumbling this stuff and you look over at your sound guy and he's just like, yeah, I'm not rolling on this. He's in the bathroom. You're like, what?

He looks like Humpy the Salmon.

He's got for some reason a life ring around his belly. But so that was the jinx. Then I started seeing, I don't know, three, four months ago, more PR going on for the Jinx 2. And I thought, what do you do? Like, isn't Durst also, by the way, dead at this point? He is, yeah.

I think we even mentioned on the show, I think I started a show by asking you. I'm like, Luke, how is there going to be a Jinx 2? What is that all about?

I didn't know what it was going to be all about. I kind of thought, honestly, I was like, I was sort of like, are you just trying to get, you know, wring a little bit more money out of this kind of crazy story that you had like and again Jarecki is a very very talented director of these things he also did that one I'm not gonna remember the name off the top of my head but it was about this a really horrific person on I think on Long Island who also was like a birthday clown or something like a real very dark story of abuse and things like that if I remember right anyway Jarecki really knows what he's doing with these but for some reason I assumed he forgot what he was doing and was just putting out some sort of retread attempt at like capitalizing off of the fact that the jinx itself was like you know such a phenomenal hit for whatever reason on monday night i was scrolling around on on hbo max i refuse to dignify it by calling it max and uh and i just clicked on it was like all right the jinx too whatever we'll see it is so riveting Thank you. Because it really, first of all, it gets into the kind of when Durst went on the run. He was eventually arrested in New Orleans, but he was, he had been withdrawing all this money, like $8,000 or $9,000 at a time. So he had all this cash, but he was trying to do it, you know, under the radar of the bank system. He had this crazy, like very expensive, like latex mask that he had bought that he was going to try. He was going to try to escape to Cuba, I guess. But they've got all of this footage of him being interviewed by the police. They've got all of his. Then it's him in jail having all these jailhouse conversations with people as he's trying to put his defense together. And just the dude's vibe is, as you might imagine, not immaculate. Like it's the he's the weirdest guy of all time. But you get to hear that in these phone conversations he's having. And he's got this woman who is Deborah Chardin, who is like his second wife and kind of his loyal follower. All they wonder what her motives are. But then he's also trying to like cheat on her behind her back via jailhouse phone calls with this other person. like it just ends and it then goes into the trial um and uh and I guess my point in all this is to say I upon like watching 10 minutes of the first one I was like uh-oh I was like this might be something that takes me till four in the morning like I was like this has got that kind of quality that propulsive quality of like you know like you said you watched almost all of it in one day that I would just say it feels very much like that like if you watch the first episode I wouldn't recommend doing it starting at 10 p.m. like i did because i think i was up till about 3 a.m.

when i had to cut myself off yeah like when i turned on schindler's list for the very first time about four months ago and i started watching it around 10 30 11 o'clock at night and i'm like i was bang this out and have a nice night's rest that isn't exactly how that happened um but yeah no that that's a really compelling pitch for that show because i'll be honest with you like there was if you told me the jinx 2 was about a totally different you know narrative a totally different person because sometimes the you know sometimes those docu-series do that or if you told me that it just added more context before or after to the Durst thing I really was just not that interested at all I mean not surprisingly I don't watch that much television as it is and the television I watch often will just be like a little comfort food or whatever that I'm re-watching and so it's probably not super surprising that I wasn't like super drawn to it but honestly I mean I know I know that feeling when something just immediately gets its hooks in you well what they I mean the

producers oh the other thing they do that I actually didn't know how I felt about this exactly but it's it is sort of compelling content so Andrew Jarecki gets together at his home all of these people who are you know family members of Robert Durst's first wife who was killed and you know detectives who had worked on these cases a judge Jeanine Pirro is there of the nutcase from fox because she was the westchester da back when i think they were trying to get durst on one of these things like it's a rogues gallery of people but he's got them assembled at his house in his tv room to watch the final episode of season one when you know durst famously goes into the bathroom and mumbles and he's got this whole thing like it's clear that he's filming them to see their reaction when they see this thing happen on the episode way back 10 years ago or whenever that aired yeah whenever it aired initially so but now you're seeing the footage of this for the first time and it's very sort of it's it's pretty i don't know it's it's it's me looking at you looking at me looking at you looking at my reaction to you looking you know i mean like it's it's and also again it's it feels a little manipulative because it's like he knows something they don't know and he wants to make sure he's rolling on them when they find out the thing that he knows is in the episode that they don't know is in the episode but i was also like oh shit i want to see what the reaction from like her family is when he goes in the bathroom and admits to all these you know killings um but i was gonna say just like the producers of this and andrew andrew jarecki are clearly their their talent is with getting so much archival and like every phone call and every police interview like their public records game their foya game is strong you know so it's not one of those i i don't get that into docu-series and documentaries where there's too much reenactment like they just don't have footage of whatever the thing is and so it's just a lot of like they're just trying to cover that by you know actors doing the like these guys really have it figured out where it's so much real tape that it's just very very compelling watching so i don't know if you're looking for something to watch i would actually recommend

the jinx too and i know that we've said this or i know this much has been made of this as far as the narrative of the jinx is concerned but i do think it's interesting especially now that um you know now that we're talking about the jinx 2 and sort of the legacy of the show and the reporting and the documentary of it all. It's funny to think that, like, if I recall, Drecki did not set out to make the Jinx one. Wasn't he approached by Durst because he had made a fictionalized account of his life? Like, for, like, a feature-length film. I cannot tell you the name of it because I didn't see it. But Durst actually said, hey, I liked the way you handled that material. I trust you I want you to make the documentary of my life I I I am not looking this up as I speak I'm pretty sure I'm right about that but it really adds another layer to it because it's not like when you think about the the impact that this you know some of these documentaries or docu-series or podcasts true crime stuff like some of them are really interesting stories and then you get to the end and there's been like nothing happens the documentary itself didn't push anything forward there's not a great resolution and you just feel the documentarians trying desperately to tie things up you know what i mean and i've been sort of like burnt by that in the podcast space before and this one you have oh my god our documentary actually led to like real life consequences for the focus of our documentaries and and you know and rightfully so and everything but then you remember like i didn't even set out to do this i wasn't a filmmaker who said i think something's up with this guy and we're going to expose it like durst approaches him

and it's kind of funny because they show a couple clips very quickly of the movie that you're referring to the the fictionalized version of robert durst's life and whatever and it looks

not great yeah like what did he see in this he's like yeah okay yeah well i mean he's just an you

know he's an egomaniacal no i yeah but i guess what i mean is it's like if like jarecki maybe really found his calling with the documentary side of life because he's very good at that like oh i see oh i see what you're saying you know what i mean like the fictionalized thing like his take i don't know if he's made other fictionalized movies i don't know if maybe he's evolved since then but it looks pretty it looks pretty lifetime you know lifetime movie or whatever it's not it doesn't seem like it's particularly expertly done but then meanwhile his whole documentary life which sounds like it came around as a bit of a surprise to him he's really good at it like it's really up his alley and yeah i mean the the other thing too that that they get into is like because the case against durst is related to a woman named susan berman who was a friend of his who um who who was found dead in los angeles and so that's actually the case that's being brought against him because the the thing with his first wife in new york is just too difficult to prosecute the thing in galveston where he and i'm sorry this is gruesome but where He, like, dismembered and, you know, killed and dismembered his neighbor. He was found not guilty on that one.

Of murder. They did say that he dismembered him, or her, I believe. Him. It was a him. Okay, yes, it's been a long time. But that was the other thing, too. Like, he stood trial for that, and they came away with saying, like, oh, yeah, no, we believe him. He didn't really kill this person, but he panicked, and so he dismembered them and hid the body, right? Am I right about that?

Yeah. And one of the most vocal jurors who was like, you know, I don't think he was guilty of murder. I feel really good about our verdict. That guy becomes Robert Durst's bestie in Houston and is like he and his wife are like cleaning his house. And when Durst goes on the run, they're like coming through and taking his computers out like this is unprecedented in American jurisprudence. Somebody from the jury becomes friends with the murderer afterwards and then becomes like their personal assistant. Like, I mean, the real takeaway from all of this is how immense wealth warps everything around it, because everyone what you realize also in these jail calls and all these people are paying attention to Durst. And it's like, what is the through like and being loyal to him and visiting him in jail and, you know, women are are are sweet talking him and are interested in him romantically. And it's just like, what is the what is the thing that he has going that other people don't? And it is wealth. It is he has something they want it or they want to be near it. And I mean, it's just crazy how that impacts, you know, somebody's life. But the other thing is they get into the whole – the kind of the story of the investigation in Los Angeles trying to piece together this cold case about this woman, Susan Berman, who died in like 2001 or something. And I don't know why this cracked me up, but the DA or the attorney assigned to this who's a cold case guy in L.A., they like cut to these two – Well, first I'd come to this law student who he hired to help him go through all of these like pieces of like 150,000 documents related to this case that were just like sitting in boxes. And in this young lawyer, he calls this young lawyer up and says, like, hey, I want you to I've heard good things. I want you to come work. for me and the young lawyer says well if you like me you're going to want to know that i have a twin brother who's also a lawyer so he like hires both of them he hires these twin brother lawyers young cub lawyers to just like go through all of the paperwork and to try to find and they said that like when they show soap when it started to go off the rails they said that when they would get really bored with the documents to treat themselves they would listen to robert durst jail calls because they were so weird and then they then it cuts to them all doing impressions of robert durst on his jail calls like it's really it's a really it's pretty entertaining content i'm trying to say to you wow well that's a compelling pitch it really is do you guys have max we i'm sorry do you have hbo max we we do have we do have the artist formerly known as hbo yes thank you very much anyway all right that is gonna do it for today's episode um but we're gonna be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you to enjoy i'll be drinking the perfect amount of coffee tomorrow morning from this hotel room once again so please do join us for that in the meantime have a great wednesday take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

so you want to be a stand-up comedian tell me what kind of jokes do you do

Well, I make phony phone calls to 1-800-Numbers, and I tell knock-knock jokes.

You tell knock-knock jokes? You can tell he's a comedian by the way he's working that microphone, you guys. You tell knock-knock jokes. Yes. Would you guys like to hear a knock-knock joke by any chance? Okay, Gregory. Lay one honest. Let's hear it.

Knock-knock.

Who's your name?

Humpty.

Humpty who?

They call me Humpty. With the knock-see. I really am kind of funky.

Greg ladies and gentlemen come on come on power out