Muse

Excuse me. Are you happy with that, Park? Yeah, what's wrong with that? You're way outside the line. You're taking up two spaces. I'm, like, an inch over the line. No, you're a foot over the line. You're taking up two spaces, and the next car is also going to be taking up two spaces. Then you're going to leave, and then that car is going to get blamed. This is chaos. Society can't function like this. What? You have to be in the lines the way it's supposed to be. Hey, here's an idea. Why don't you mind your own business? Well, I suppose that's an idea Not a very good one, though. Oh, no? Just say, you know what? I'll do better next time. I did fine. I did fine. No, that's not fine. I don't need to do better. You didn't do fine. You need to do better. No, I did fine. You need to do better. That's not an open field. It's not a farm, okay? Just park your car. Park your car between the lines. It's not that hard. Look, just pull in between the lines.

Why don't you stay between the lines of your own business, huh? Why don't you stay confined within the lines of not being an a**hole? Because you're way over that line, all right?

The only person who's the a**hole here is the pig parker.

A pig parker. Yes. So you're calling me a pig. A pig parker. Hey, you know what? Have a real nice day. Okay, I will.

I'm sure you will too at everyone else's expense. T!

T!

T! B!

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B! T!

T! T! T! T!

T! T! T! T! T! Everybody's looking forward to the weekend.

Is this for real? It's called the dark web. It's where you can find all the cool stuff.

The enormity of their flat brain, the enormity of their stupidity is just overwhelming.

It's like the most requested thing when I ask my Facebook what you guys want to see for me. It's like, get drunk, get drunk, get drunk, and there's a time and a place for it. And guess what? That place is now, and that time is now. Did we just become best friends?

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Friday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

I can't believe you're still on the air.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I love you.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where we have a big development this morning. We now have a microwave in the studio. i have been trying to figure out how i've been you know doing this stupid 75 hard ish thing and trying to get up a bit earlier and what that means is well there's some there's a couple of implications and it is really the implication uh there's a couple things that happen that are annoying one is that um by 7 a.m i've heard all of morning edition and now i'm just on repeat and and I don't even know what to do with my ears and my life. And the other thing is that if I make a pot of coffee at 5 a.m., it is not warm still by the time we're doing this here show, which, by the way, finds itself at episode 4,313 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. And so I realized, oh, what I need to do is get a micro-wave. Micro-wave? For the Madrona Hill studio, and it just came in the mail, and it's just absolutely adorable. It's a tiny apartment style. I'm going to take a picture of it. Yes, this is the kind of show where the show sheet today, or I should say rather the show pick, if you go to the website, go to tbtl.net, I'm guessing you're going to be seeing a picture right now of this cute little microwave that I bought that I'm very excited about. Francis Ford Coppola, he appears to still be enthusiastic about the movie Megalopolis. He has now joined the club of people who have weighed in online in one way or another on this film. We'll talk about that. And then, time permitting, I don't usually go in for, like, funny news stories.

How funny is that? That's pretty funny.

I usually wait until I'm wearing my wait, wait, don't tell me hat to do funny news stories. But there was a funny news story kind of here in the Portland area, which captured my attention this week. And we'll talk about that if we've got some time. We always have time for this guy, though. He's the longest-running cobro of the show. Are you sure? That's what they said on Ask Chiefs. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's a soulful rocker from New Hampshire who's baby-stepping. He's doing the work. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I'm very excited to talk about your night last night, not because I'm necessarily interested in what you talked about on Live Wire with your host of impressive guests on stage, but because I don't think we talked about this on the air. I think we talked about it off air. You had a very special plan involving a media blackout and a postponed watching of the Seahawks game last night. This is right up my alley. Not that we want to talk about football or the game itself. Trust me. We don't want to talk about the game itself.

Better left on. What do you mean? There was a game last night?

But the thing that.

really speaks to me is this idea of saying listen i'm busy or somehow otherwise um uh well busy um just i can't watch the game so i'm gonna try not to spoil the outcome of the game by like what several hours until you could get back home and actually watch it on a time shift a lot of hours

the game started at 5 p.m west coast and at 5 p.m west coast we're just getting ready to start our sound check for live wire in fact what i could have done andrew through the magic of the amazon prime viewing experience which by the way i've got i've got a couple of quibbles and a couple

of quibbies to talk to you about on that front yeah wrong service but um through the magic of

amazon prime because that's what the game was on last night i actually could have watched the entire first half like on my phone as i was like sound checking and talking to people and getting ready and spiffing up some of the bits i thought that would be a little disrespectful to the process of of of my job i you know a lot of people on livewire work very hard to make it happen you know each week and i i didn't want to be like the host is just looking at his cell phone for some reason to see if uh you know dk metcalf pulled that catch down that we needed for the first down or what have you so i didn't do that instead i i did like you said i went into a media blackout But what that meant was I couldn't even look at my phone for text messages from, say, like, Becca, letting me know that she had arrived safely at the theater and that they had saved a seat for her, etc. Because the text part of my phone, when there was a Seahawk game going on, particularly, I guess we call Thursday night a primetime game now in some way. It's not full of the regular slate of games. during a primetime game, everybody in my phone pretty much is going to be texting some Seahawk-related thing. So not only could I not, like, you know, like, look at any scores or, like, ESPN or the Seattle Times, that's another problem. Turns out the Seattle Times sends me about 40 emails, Andrew, per game telling me that I can go follow them live and their thoughts about the game at, like, seattletimes.com or whatever. so yeah it was really I was bobbing and weaving and the thing that makes it extra hard is I use my text program so you know my iPhone obviously I get text messages we know how that works my laptop also displays my text messages and that's how the producers of the show Livewire tell me like five minutes left four minutes go to bit etc that's where the communication happens so that's by the way adjacent to our PNW sports uh text oh adjacent to yes squad by the way by the way may i interrupt your flow for a moment

please do for a moment because you just referred to our text chain as pnw sports or whatever you just said at what point did we stop becoming the fun-loving criminals this was news to me last night as i was you didn't realize this no i was sitting next to another fun-loving criminal as i will forever call us at the eagles our pal camaro kev yeah and he mentioned something about the text chain and he called it pnw sports and i said what are you talking about we're the fun loving criminals well named after longtime producer kevin cremen of the seattle mariners broadcast i agree and then but see i don't i'm on a i'm on an android so you whatever you name yours doesn't come through to me i just name my text chains whatever i want to name them and it's my own personal business so we've been operating under a different what happened to the criminals

I think and I don't want to throw anyone under any buses because I know this person will hear

this oh I will throw everybody I need a bigger bus I think DFTB at some point because there's

also a weirdness with this text chain where sometimes it kind of goes away and then comes back and sometimes you have to kind of reconstitute it like sometimes i can't find it on my phone so i just start a new text and i try to from memory put everyone on the chain who i've been texting

with if that makes any sense well i do remember about it was about a year ago or maybe slightly more that and again you're trying not to throw people under buses i i'm pretty sure david renamed it pnw sports because he got a new phone number i remember you are you oh that was it that was but are you sure you didn't though it doesn't seem like that's not i think that's a that's a

different yeah no i mean i'm i'm obviously heavily invested in the kevin kremen narrative around around the sports group so you know what happened was david got a new phone he i think added it he i think he reconstituted the group it was so that his new number was reflected all right he called it pnw sports i thought that was a perfectly reasonable name you know things change where we differ um that's where in the words of in the words of is it martica well she was toy soldier who did seasons change i've been so long without you but uh who does can you uh hey hey google who does the song seasons change it's like an 80s uh female group of some kind anyway things change it was pnw sports i didn't really feel like i didn't feel like litigating the criminal aspect of it we all moved on but that's funny because no you know that might be the first time i've ever even referred to it andrew well i thought we'd all did not we did not move on this

was new information to me last night i was shocked i'm still shocked i'm shook and shocked and i wish

i mean honestly i wish they wouldn't have like i wish they wouldn't have told you you could have just we could have just sundown you i mean in my in my phone it's called the fun loving criminal

so here's the deal i um we haven't all moved on i am still here i don't believe in change i would like to litigate this right now because like you said david from the basement dftb he is probably listening right now expose he's literally he's oh nice he's literally one of my favorite people i have a lot of respect for him having said that david this is not okay first of all the amount of disrespect we are showing to kevin cremen is just it's just it's mind-boggling to me right now honestly this cremen erasure will not stand on this show and and and all and also and just the fact that i've been just bopping along thinking i'm a fun loving criminal for like 12 to 18 You know what you are, basically? When that's been stripped from me.

You're Wile E. Coyote, and you had no idea that you've been standing out in space this whole time. You were running after the Roadrunner. You thought you were still on terra firma. And you, my friend, just realized you're 100 feet off the desert floor.

I just looked down, and I did not like what I saw. So, David, let's talk about this. Let's maybe take this offline and have some conversations. And see, you know, you mentioned change, Luke. Nothing is permanent. Maybe there's some more change in the future. The future is not written.

That's my favorite thing to say on this show and to hope for, although actually I hope the future of how things are leaning, let's just say, electorally ever so slightly are portending good things. Okay, so back to last night. It turns out, Andrew, I don't think there has been another time that I've actually had to ignore my phone for this duration of time because not only did I have to ignore my phone starting at 5 p.m., But then on my laptop computer during the show, I'm interviewing these guests and I'm trying to kind of run this whole operation and I'm trying to see the timing cues and I'm trying to make sure that I don't see any extra like little heartbroken emoji or like party horn emoji or anything popping up in the threads of these other text chains. And then also, the thing that was really, really getting in my head was I see this push notification from the Seattle Times And it just says, Seahawks slow start And then, I got out of it, I minimized it But what I knew was I knew that that headline was either going to be Seahawks slow start dooms them to loss to 49ers Or Seahawks slow start erased by incredible second half

Yes, right, right

I thought it was unlikely it was door number two, but I was clinging to hope. So I managed to not get anything more spoiled than that. I knew they had a slow start, but I didn't know what the end of that sentence was. But I did feel really kind of bad because, again, it's like I didn't get a chance to say bye to Becca after the show because I was talking to some people that were there and had come up to say hi after the program. I couldn't, like, text her, oh, hey, you know, safe drive home or whatever. like i couldn't my hawk squad that's always very active my sister hannah's going on a little mini cruise for celebrate her 40th and like i couldn't enjoy those photos i was really i felt like i was being very kind of you know distant from all these conversations not to mention our friend chat sports chat um and even when i got home i couldn't look at my phone because now i'm watching the game on amazon and the game is still going on and if i normally my move would be i'm watching the game I'm two-screen experiencing it. I'm watching the game, but I'm on my phone. I'm firing off all kinds of fire texts and funny and insightful observations about the fact that Witherspoon is becoming a huge liability on so many levels to us. Just absolutely, just terribly undisciplined player.

Mr. Fingers?

Mr. Two ridiculous penalties two weeks ago that extended drives, and just bad penalties, and then pushing the guy. I mean, we got lucky that they don't have the high-res cameras, apparently, back in New York for this replay thing. Which, again, not to get bogged down, but I'm usually sending these texts that are related to things in the game. I couldn't do any of that. I'm just sitting there at my house watching my Amazon, which is, by the way, was glitchy. It was doing this thing where it would play every three seconds. I would just get this little three dots. They could go three seconds, and then... three seconds during this is it frozen the screen is frozen or it's like it's buffering kind of a thing but you're is it stopping the gameplay yes it is wow and it was weird because it was really

annoying but it also felt like i was an nfl defensive coordinator because you know like they're watching game tape and they're pausing it to see where everyone's distributed it was doing that to me unintentionally and what i was able to see was like okay tyler's open right now Is Gino going to identify that Or is he going to check down to Charbonnet Like

That's a very glass half full Approach To that experience other people would be just so mad That their game was being interrupted every three seconds

Well it was annoying and it was where I saw the limits Of this you know This internet age that we live in although what I had to do Then was like X out get out Of Amazon Prime go to a different app Go back to Amazon Prime then it Was fine unless I fast forwarded in which case it would get weird again and this is the my quibble my big quibble with them is when you fast forward on the amazon prime app which i had a lot of reason to do last night because i'm watching the game like five hours later it does not show you on the screen what you are fast forwarding through if that makes any sense it just shows you a time code so yeah so you can't like on you know obviously i've talked a lot about my displeasure with the xfinity corporation but i will give them this much if you're fast forwarding a football game you're seeing the football game in fast motion right then you know where to stop amazon prime at least as it related to this particular thing i was watching last night you could not just scrub through the thing that's that's frustrating it's so annoying so i'm like i'm i'm like okay i don't know how many kfs yeah yeah i'm just guessing at it and also about two out of every maybe four times that i would do a fast forward project it would then get back into this mode of like Three seconds of content, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Three seconds of content, dot, dot, dot, dot. So it was, you know what I'd call it, Andrew? Subprime. That's what I would call that experience. Subprime.

Here, you know, I was thinking of you last night because I was watching the game live. And I was at the Eagles Club watching it there. So, you know, that's a different kind of watching experience for me. I always have to make a decision. Am I going to, like, stay home and usually, like, by myself and, like, watch it on TV, which I can do, like, seamlessly because I also – Amazon Prime is one of the few kind of services that we sign up for that actually works for me, is advantageous for me.

It's like, why not enjoy it in the comfort of your home because you can't.

As opposed to, like, when they bump one of the baseball games over to Apple or Apple TV or whatever, and then I don't have Apple TV and it irritates me. Anyway, so Amazon Prime, I enjoy – it's actually – it's a pretty good – I feel like it's, generally speaking, a pretty good product. So I could have stayed home, and I was very much on the fence until, like, literally 15 minutes before the game. Like, I could stay home and really lock into this game and just be by myself, have some snacks or whatever. Or – and this is what I've been leaning towards more often when given the opportunity – go to the Eagles. probably not be able to have as intelligent of a conversation about what happened during the game afterwards because i'm kind of also talking to people or people are talking to you or whatever but you know what it's more social and i think i made the right decision by going to the eagles especially given yesterday's game and like i'm very you and i mentioned this before the show and i'm for whatever it's worth i'm not even tempted to get into the details of the game there's no point in that we're not here to recap and i don't think that's what most of our listeners want today But having said that, it was a bad game. And when I say it was a bad game, I don't just mean the end of the—I'm just not counting the result here. I'm talking about, generally speaking, it was a poor performance by the Seahawks, and it was not fun to watch. I'd say especially that first half, it felt very much like the Thursday night football product that were generally—that is sort of stereotyped now.

Two mediocre teams being mediocre, except I guess you could argue San Francisco had like 20 points, so they weren't being mediocre.

But also, like, you know, a lot of players and, you know, former players will also blame that on, yeah, it's because we're tired because most of us played on Sunday and that's not enough rest. Like, there's a reason why the game isn't as good. And so anyway, and also, yeah, the games that they pick for Thursday night are not, like, comparable, let's say, to, like, Sunday night football, which are going to be much more marquee matchups. But anyway, my point is I knew from talking with you yesterday that you were going to be jumping through a whole bunch of hoops to kind of time shift this game and that it was going to be a pain in the ass. And this is something that I have a lot of experience with. I used to do this all the time. I remember running through an airport with Genevieve to get into a taxi cab and get home before the game is spoiled for us and putting blinders up to our face because we were passing a sports bar in the airport. I remember we're flying back from somewhere on a Sunday. I'm like, don't look, Genevieve, don't look. I'm like.

jack ryan in patriot games i'm like get down when we saw tv in the corner you're like lott leaving

sodom and gomorrah i like that i made that reference to you off air yesterday and i still

don't make it on air and then you explained it to me and i still don't fully it has to do with

salt in a generally homophobic book it's a moment of extreme homophobia oh great well then i'm gonna i'm gonna distance myself from that i think if lot's family looks back at sodom and gomorrah they will be turned to pillars of salt and uh i think it's like uh i definitely think his wife

maybe does supposedly wow and that's bad right because like because i love salt and certainly i'm like oh that's kind of there are worse fates no this is a bad this is turning into a pillar of salt in a bad way okay it's not like turning into a pillar of cottage cheese like that's how you'd have to update that for me i'd be like ew i don't want to do that okay so all of that is to say i felt like i had a i i was tempted to reach out to you and i dismissed the notion pretty quickly but let me let me get at just a little bit more context for this conversation about two weeks ago i think the seahawks were playing detroit and the outcome of that game was also disappointing but it was a good game to watch like the seahawks were plucky they kept coming back it was a good interesting game and even though as a seahawks fan i was disappointed at the end of it it was a good game and we had we got a note from our friend anita who is still out in croatian so

Wait, Anita is to this day in Croatia?

Anita is still in Croatia, yes. She can't find her way home. We ghosted her. She's not coming back.

We all ghosted her. She doesn't know we're back here yet. No, I think she's finally been like, you know what? I'm ready to get a good night's sleep. I don't need to be next to that CPAP machine.

I don't need it. Exactly. No, but Anita had reached out and said, hey, guys, just a reminder or something. She said it in a very sweet way, but I can't watch the Seahawks game live. I'm like a day off of you guys or whatever. And so I'm time shifting it. And so, you know, thanks for not spoiling it on our on our text thread with all of our wordle friends. That's an interesting idea. Right. And so I was like, well, that's smart. And in my head, I'm thinking, oh, you know, Anita's doesn't know yet that the Seahawks lost, but she has a good game ahead of her. And last night, all of that is to say, I'm like, this game sucks. Like in so many ways, like as a Seahawks fan, it definitely sucked. And even just generally speaking, the first half was just kind of like, and I mean, I guess if you're whatever. Or if you're a San Francisco fan, maybe you loved some of the stuff that happened there. But my point is, definitely, we want to see a MAGA guy prosper.

We'd love to see the Joey Bosa's best story.

I just did not want you, I was just like, he's going through so many hoops to do this, and it's such a shit game. I wanted to somehow warn you without totally blowing it up. I really did.

For my mental health.

In a certain way, I don't know. what you were doing the beauty of the best moment that you probably had was when you first sat down on your couch and you had no idea it was like schrodinger's thursday night football right you

had no idea i did have an idea though i knew seahawks slow start that's true yeah yeah so

you didn't even get that moment of bliss of no like having no didn't even get that moment and i'm just like he is just gonna jump through all these crappy hoops he's gonna be on stage he's gonna be trying to like selectively read things i used to do this oh something popped up oh it's from dad it's not about the browns okay i can sort of you like putting your i literally answer

can i be honest with you i don't even know why or how this works but there were a couple times

where i was like looking with one eye yes yes you literally why is that a thing i think because you're like it's like i'm gonna squint and just sort of look at one word and see if it's i'm

looking for hadden i'm looking for the last name hadden because that's our executive producer i'm like i'm actively somehow my eye and i'm you know this is i guess a blessing is able to sort of blur out everything that's not Haddon's and just like get to the Haddon okay yeah and hit that

text unfortunately interact with that then Marquise Haddon fumbled in the end zone and he was

when did we even promote that guy off the friggin practice squad so anyway um I just I just wanted

you to know about my moral conundrum because I was like this is he's going through a lot right now to

get to a really bad game and right like you could have saved me I mean this is a real this is this This is a, you know, in terms of the stakes of our lives, which, mercifully, Andrew, are very low.

Definitely.

This is a kind of a moral quandary because, like, if you could save your friend from investing four hours in something that's going to ultimately be very distasteful, do you make the executive decision to save them from that even though you're overriding their stated desire to not have the game quote-unquote spoiled?

Yeah, exactly. And maybe next time if you're doing something like this and I think I'm going to be watching the game live, maybe we can have some sort of a maybe some sort of a safe word sort of like that. Or maybe I can even, you know, like maybe I can reach out to you in a way that sort of tests the temperature and be like, do you want to know?

Is this a two-way street if the roles are revered? Can we have this as a pact between friends and colleagues and small business owners that because.

Because honest with you, honestly, I am okay with that. I'm okay with having the game spoiled if they lose. In other words, I'm okay with, like, if, you know, I've got a whole thing and it's like I'm going to watch the game and I'm time-shifting for some reason and then they lose, I'm okay with you saying, like, you might want to sit this one out, buddy.

Or if it's bad quality play. Like, I would not have done that to you on the Detroit game, which they lost.

We scored a lot of points. We had some wins on the field.

That's an important game to watch as a Seahawks fan, I think. You saw aspects of the team. But you didn't have that last night. You don't need to watch Geno throw two interceptions.

Yeah. I mean, I'm going to tell you here on the record and in front of the listeners that I'm okay with you letting me know on that if it happens again in this way. And can I let you know on that if it happens in the reverse somehow?

Let's take this as a case-by-case situation, And I will check in if you're doing it again, because first of all, it's rare that I'm time shifting anymore. Like I've sort of just given up the ghost on that because, you know, if the most games, let's say, are during the one o'clock window on Sundays, I usually can't see those at all anyway. But I'm around a bunch of other people when I'm volunteering. And so we're like checking the score. Like I just it would be way too hard for me to try to do a media blackout on that and obnoxious, I think, around those people. If I was like, don't tell me, don't tell me, I'm going to watch the game at home.

Well, that's the thing. Listen, I don't want to throw Anita under any sort of bus, but that's an ask, you know? Like, hey, could we not spoil it in the text chain? Because what constitutes a spoiler? Being like, amazing job by, you know, DK or whatever. like like i think to me the responsibility and i'll say this to anita's face probably i think the responsibility if you're trying to not have it spoiled is to as to yourself sort of step away from the discourse now i do like the idea that was smart of anita to say hey i'm i'm time shifting here like what i could have done is gone into my various i mean because you know that our text chain pnw sports you know that everybody was devastated by the lack of commentary from me last night yeah It was noticeable. There was a Luke-shaped hole in the discourse.

I have a very important – listen, I have a very important – I don't even want to call it a correction because I wasn't mistaken. I was – I misrepresented Anita. I actually have two big updates on this. All right, go for it. Because you're analyzing Anita's move here, I need to be honest with you. For the sake of my storytelling – and yes, Luke, I am a storyteller. I'm a story crafter first. I craft the story and then I tell it sometimes you just say something believe it or not in an expedient manner even a manner even I do and I know that's hard to believe but the truth is Anita did not request us to not spoil the game for her a couple weeks ago she wrote after the fact hey I appreciate you guys not spoiling the game last night because I've time shifted it and I'm about to sit down and watch it now she was actually it was a nice way of kind of reminding us that in the future we shouldn't and now I'm also remembering a member of our Wordle group might not have seen that and last night the chain was blowing up with spoilers so sorry Anita but a few weeks ago at least we

honored your request. See that checks out with the Anita that I know who's just one of the absolute kindest best people you could ever meet on this planet. Right. And so that's because what I was going to say is I do like the idea though of letting everyone know again this is real main character energy like as if anyone gives a flip if i'm in the discourse or not but i like the idea of being like hey everyone uh just so you know i'm i'm gonna try to time shift this um have fun i'm gonna i'll rejoin you i'll rejoin your regularly scheduled programming when i get a chance um again that that that that assumes that anyone cares if you're in the conversation or not which honestly probably nobody does i think i used to do that mostly it was with hawk squad actually i even texted hawk squad this morning and said hey sorry i was a little distant last night that's because i was trying to do this other thing because you know it's my family and i love them and everybody gets excited about stuff and we share both sports and personal related things in this chain and there was again i don't think anyone noticed my absence on any of these threads except me because i kept what i really learned andrew is golly i'm addicted to this phone like the amount of times that i reached for the phone out of some sort of muscle memory some sort of like instinctive movement that I'm not even like it's not even conscious and then realize no no no no don't and don't also don't even look at emails because the Seattle Times keeps bombing you with emails about like updates on the score and stuff I was like this is the longest I've probably gone without really using this phone in the way that I typically do and it is not a great indicator as far as my reliance on this to soothe me at all times.

Yeah, I've told you I found myself recently because I don't think I'm...

is bad at that no you're not and i know because sometimes i'll text you and you won't see it for

up to 20 minutes and i don't know what that's like sometimes i just don't respond to sometimes i see it and i just don't respond um no there are definitely times where i'm just like yeah i can set my phone down for a while but then there are also times where just like and i don't know if it's a certain time of the day like you know one of the things that i've sort of replaced like twitter with as far as like sort of obsessive phone checking is like the little games that I play on my phone, the New York Times games, right? Like Wordle first, Strand second, if I'm really jonesing I might dip into connections but I'm still basically at

war with the connections. I like connections because I think it's the one I'm the best at. But it's such bullshit it's just such. Well I guess I have the same bullshit brain as whoever makes connections

I'm trying to think what the last one was that was so oh well one of them, I mentioned it on the show, it was kind of like things you put on Bratwurst and one of the answers was brat because they were trying to trick us with brat like you want you want me to engage with that like you're you're it's so disingenuous i just i get so you're disrespecting andrew's

duplication investigation with that kind of a clue i take it so personally so anyway i try to

not give them the clicks but either way there will be a time of the day when like if i do wordle early which i did today like i'm gonna go upstairs and eat some lunch in a little bit in fact we get through this goddamn show so i can go upstairs and eat food in a little bit i'm gonna go uh eat lunch and i'm gonna instinctively want to play wordle but it's already burned for the day it's done and now i'm like now what am i gonna do and so i'm gonna like go to instagram and i'm gonna refresh and be like i've already seen all of this shit and then i'm just gonna refresh it again and i'm gonna see a whole bunch of like stuff i don't like the amount of stuff that i see on instagram that i don't care about is staggering just staggering but i'm just so in the habit and then like you kind of wear these grooves into instagram especially stories Like if you're usually watching these friends stories, then those are the ones that are going to be fed to you first. And it's kind of like I can do this thing now where I'm not even paying attention to whose account I'm on. Like the stories are just rolling through. But then I see something and I know I can tell without looking whose story is this, like whether it's promoting this or it's a rant about this or whatever. I'm just like, I don't need any of this content, but I just need my I need my my thumb and my eyes to be locked into this phone right now. And it's really, I hate that instinct Especially it gives you that empty feeling

I have, what I've described on the show A lot is kind of my loop You know, and occasionally The different Characters in the loop will change Or move around, but it's like, it'll be like It used to be when I was on Twitter It'd be like, check Twitter See if my latest tweet is getting any love And then it'd be like, I'm going there For this little dopamine pellet And then it's like, check email Is there an email in there that somehow gives me a positive feeling about some future project or what have you. And then it would be, I don't know if Facebook was ever in the loop or not, but it's just like going, searching around to these little spots and then looking for something and then not getting it and then going to the next spot to try to get it and then to the next spot to try to get it. And definitely for me, TikTok is the worst one now. Not because, and oddly enough, I don't get the same dopamine pellet from TikTok because I'm not posting anything there. So it has nothing to do with me hoping somebody thought that I did a thing that was good on there It's this other thing that I can't quite describe that, you know, you have some of the greatest scientific minds I mean literally some of the greatest scientific minds of our era Doing their best work to figure out how to make me addicted to this shit It's working because of this thing that happens in the human brain when you feel like you've discovered something It drops a big bunch of dopamine on you And so, and then things like TikTok are designed to create that experience and then eventually get you really reliant on it. And I am unfortunately at this moment pretty reliant on it. Now, the good news is I was able to break the thing from Twitter and I've never gone back and I don't miss it. Now, maybe it's because I'm using TikTok like some sort of suboxone on that whole sitch. But like I do sort of like you stopping smoking and I don't, maybe it's glib to put these on the same level or whatever. I think stopping smoking is much harder than stopping Twitter or TikTok. But, like, for instance, the TikTok ban that's on the horizon, I think it's going to be, like, in January or December or something.

That's what they say if they don't sell the company.

Right. But, I mean, I don't know why ByteDance—I mean, I guess the only reason ByteDance would sell the company is because the U.S. is their biggest market. And if they can't be in the U.S., there's no value in the company or there's less value. So it's better to get some money out of it than not. I guess that would be their calculation. But, like, let's say they don't and they just get banned in the U.S. I have very mixed feelings about that because I do get a tremendous amount of entertainment out of TikTok. And also probably it being shit canned in the U.S. would be the best thing that ever happened to my day. And I don't actually know what I would reply. it with in the immediate it's oddly enough instagram has never been that for me throughout its existence and it is for a lot of people it's people really love instagram i've never fully clicked with it for some reason the way that i did with twitter and the way that i have

with tiktok so i'm really glad the conversation came in this direction because i there's something i want to talk to you about a news story i heard on morning edition today that i'm assuming you heard too if you said that you were listening to both the original not today andrew because guess what i did today i slept in slept in so actually i hope maybe you don't know about this story because i think i'm going to get a reaction out of you from it i was watching the football game till

one in the morning that's why i was at such loose ends this morning because i slept in all the way

until 7 30 my whole morning was off so you know how there are several um kind of lawsuits against tiktok brought by various states um and it's the the lawsuits are sort of talking about the the practices of tiktok and saying that like the the executives there and the creators of tiktok And the managers of TikTok knew some of the effects on what their product would have, the effects their product would have on, like, teenagers and, like, sort of how addictive TikTok can be. And so that's, like, sort of the basis of these lawsuits. And I don't know if you saw this, Luke, but one of the states that's engaged with this is the state of Kentucky. And there are certain documents that are part of this lawsuit where chunks of it were redacted because the authorities kind of went into a sort of confidentiality agreement. I don't know how this all works, but you know how it is when you're filing paperwork, big chunks of it are redacted for the sake of the lawsuit. Well, there was a reporter, a public radio, a local public radio reporter in Kentucky who was reviewing those documents and copied and pasted the documents from, I believe, the Kentucky prosecutor's website or whatever it would be, wherever it was stored, and then pasted it into their own Word document or whatever, and it unredacted it. Whoever redacted it in Kentucky did it incorrectly. So when this reporter copied and pasted it into their own document, suddenly they had it all revealed to them. And it's all this stuff about company executives knowing exactly like how many videos the average person has to see before they get, quote unquote, addicted. How they say these measures that we've built into our app that are supposed to sort of like kind of keep people grounded instead of going overboard with this. Other bullshit. They said literally it's like it doesn't affect that. It only affects our PR relations or public relations or whatever. So anyway, all this shit. And then what I love here, and I was just looking this up, is the response. So then NPR is like, well, we have this information now. Like the actual network did a story on this based on the reporting of this reporter at the local Kentucky station. And this is the statement from TikTok. It's highly irresponsible of NPR to publish information that is under a court seal. Unfortunately, this complaint cherry picks misleading quotes and takes outdated documents out of context and misrepresent our commitment to community safety. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, dude. Your ass was just revealed. And yes, it was like a glitch in the Kentucky system. But either way, for your response as a company to say that it's irresponsible of reporters to read something that is readable is ridiculous.

ridiculous i mean i'm i'm unshocked to hear about them doing this and yet still it's just so gross i'm talking about not the pushback on npr by the way shout out to our pal bobby allen uh for the the piece along with sylvia goodman and dara kerr over there at npr uh breaking some news it sounds like with this um but uh yeah i've been with two things one all of this this kind of thing is detailed in our friend chris's latest book the sirens call which is his i mean one of the sort of i i don't want to say what the thesis of the book is because because maybe i'm wrong about it but a big part of the idea of the book is like what companies now sell is not stuff it's attention that's the most valuable thing out there and it's our attention so if a company can figure out how to make us look at something for an extra minute they can sell our attention to advertisers and other people which is the attention economy and it only makes sense that the you know that all of the that's where that's the product that they now sell and so they are going to be so freaking good at mining that at mining my attention i'm also thinking about jamie loftus's really good podcast it's out right now called the 16th minute of fame which is sort of ostensibly about like people that got famous on the internet and then what happened to them after that but it's really about a lot more it's about the media she's got a whole episode andrew that's just so great it's about basically like the pivot to video which is if you worked in the media particularly if you worked in like radio or print there was this point where everybody decided this was probably around the same time maybe we were doing maybe it was a little after the Bryant Park project but there was this point in time where it was like everybody that was working in any part of the media was told we've got to pivot to video you got to start making videos about this stuff like that's all anyone's watching because Mark Zuckerberg had like said something about how like the most of the views on Facebook now were video which by the way that data was complete bullshit it turned out but like entire newsrooms got laid off and then a bunch of 20 year olds got hired to make videos and got paid like poverty wages to do it you know and then she talks a lot about just the again the people and the science behind getting us addicted to these platforms and talks to some really smart people about it so I would recommend checking out 16th minute and also ordering or pre-ordering Chris's book because it's really good

and copying and pasting any redacted information you find online just see what you can find out there folks thank you for being a ten thank you indeed for being a ten this is where we thank and recognize

and honor some of our tbtl donors these people are keeping tbtl happening five days a week i was talking to uh some of my friends at livewire yesterday my good buddy deniel blake he's our sound engineer for the recordings and i said something about the podcast and he said you do that like every day or something and i was like yeah five days a week i said yesterday was like episode 4 300 and something then ebon our other tech guy was like what did you tell them that i'm

also running a main recording and two backups at all times on every single show we do i'll tell

you andrew how do i i want to be a true story i want to be delicate with this i want to be very delicate with this you are the gold standard this is where your anxiety works for us that's what

you are the absolute gold to work for you that's how you are the absolute gold standard of

redundancy and i love it because there have been issues at times in other projects i've worked on where it's literally the recording has failed to occur and it has not been occur and i would love it if you just you could teach like a master class like whatever that platform is that like you know friggin yo-yo ma is on and steve martin and everybody else that real high-end kind of educational video stuff yours could just be like making sure you get the recording and now they

They probably had to kick Woody Allen out of that club. There's probably like a space for me now.

I'm sure there's – I'm sure they're down a master who needs to clap. I do feel like your presentation would be short and sweet. It would be like, I'd add one more Zoom.

I would just be like, well, two pieces of advice here. Number one, go off your meds, and number two, record in five places at once. Although, as I say that, the interesting thing is probably – I'm not joking. When I record this podcast with you from our homes, which like, you know, if today's show crashed and burned, we could probably recreate a show.

I don't know if you'd ever get this magic back.

But when I was sorry about my microphone there. But when I was in Philadelphia, we literally only had one recording going. And it is true. It's like now I actually feel like a bit of a fraud there, because if that had crashed and burned, I don't know what we would have done. And that's such a more important thing to document. I thought about that, by the way.

And this is what I did to calm myself for for that recording, because I was like, Andrew's got Andrew's got the Rona. He's dressed up like the Phantom of the Opera. He's in a balcony. We rented this gear from a random trap house. Like I was like, if it doesn't work, if the recording doesn't work, we're just going to call this a beautiful once in a lifetime moment between us and the people in that room. And that's just it. That's art, baby. That's what happens. I literally went through that process so that I wouldn't spin out on questions of the recording.

Yeah, I will say I was on it because I even recorded. Well, this doesn't even matter. Good Lord. But, you know, there was there is a complication in how I was going to record this. I knew that you were going to be coming out. Both of us were in weird costumes, right? I'll call them weird. And so we didn't want to, like, let people see us before our entrances, as it were. But I also knew that you were going to we were playing like probably like an hour, an hour and a half of music as people filled into the auditorium. And then at some point you were going to come in and the music was going to stop and you were going to do sort of a pre-show. Let's get the crowd sort of pumped up type of situation. And then you were going to introduce me. And none of that ends up being on the actual podcast, but I wanted a recording of it. And so I even made sure we have, like, a file somewhere that has, like, 90 minutes of just, like, house music or whatever you were playing, party music. Swedish house mafia. I wish I was going with it was the very, very end you coming in as Ben Franklin and warming up the crowd a little bit. So I was on top of it. Like as far as, and I want everything, but it's just technology. You never know if something isn't going to work.

And I want you to know that like me doing that mental exercise was not because I had any, I was doubting you at all. I just was like, I know that this is, this is a, this kind of uncharted territory for us with this particular kind of recording. and like i could either like text andrew right now at four in the morning and be like should i go get one more zoom so we have a like daisy chain of zooms and i was like no it'll be what it is it'll be fine and if it's not fine that'll also be fine it'll work out you know i was just trying to like but but also i and i was going to say to you hey can you record the pre-show but then i was like i don't want to make another hassle for this guy and yet you were andrew you were i did record

it somewhere i don't know i need to if that's important for us i need to find them no i don't

I don't think it was particularly entertaining content, but I should have assumed that you were also being the completest that I know you to be, which is to just like, I'm always, boy, this is such a boring place to take this as we're trying to thank Kate Odage or Adage of Berkeley, California. Hey, thanks, Kate. Thank you, Kate, for donating. Also, Jason Krogh of Puyallup, Washington. Nice. We love it. We love it down there off of Highway 18, I think. Maybe? I don't know. It's been a while. Heather Woodford's in Gilbert, Arizona.

I just watched Who's Eating Gilbert Grape? Or What's Eating Gilbert Grape? I said it in a filthy way, didn't I? That was a mistake. My apologies.

That movie, I wonder, does it hold up because it gets into some stuff around, I think, body type? I haven't watched it in a long time. Putting aside whatever, the Johnny Deppness of it. And also the Leo DiCaprio. I mean, as I say it out loud, there's a lot of things about that movie that could, upon viewing in 2024, because Leo DiCaprio is playing somebody who's like sort of intellectually. Yeah, neurodivergent. Developmentally delayed. Definitely. Yeah. I mean.

And not and not slightly, like significantly, like his character. And like you have Leo playing him. And it's like, I don't know if you would cast somebody who's not neurodivergent doing that role. but it's also and same with the mom who you said who you said is like a very very large woman and a big part of it is about her not leaving her house and how the town laughs at her but it's also I was asking myself that the whole time too because I don't think I've ever seen this movie before it's the type of movie I would have been very into in like the 90s when it came out but I just never saw it and it's like clearly the filmmakers are being very loving toward these characters like deliberately very very loving and that's humanizing humanizing and what's at the heart of the movie is like truly like this family that sticks together through some really hard time like it is a huge heart of a movie but i do wonder if you would make these same choices in 2024

i don't think you would i remember seeing that movie in a theater and like really enjoying it really thinking it was a well-made film yeah um and uh and and not recognizing leo dicaprio i might have told this story young the last time this movie came up but my my clocking of leo dicaprio was he was on growing pains he was added like at that point in a sitcom's life where they're just like throwing anything at the wall to try to get one more season out of it i forgot about that he was like a plucky orphan named luke and he had like a middle part hair like i had at the time and he had like wore like flannel like i did at the time and i was like wow this is a pretty cool customer so i was aware of a something called a leo dicaprio and then i had heard that he was in this movie called what's eating gilbert grape and and then i watched the movie and i don't know i don't even know if at any point i figured out that was the guy from growing because i thought he did a very effective job of portraying this you know particular character and he had aged a little bit and anyway i i remember having a very positive thought about that movie but again it's it's got a lot of stuff in it that is that is likely in 2024 we would probably handle it differently but that doesn't mean i'm not trying to you know cancel that movie or anything i'm just wondering yeah

Yeah, no, I had that question the whole time, too. And also, I thought it was interesting. I don't know what the I don't know what people point to is sort of the origin of the manic pixie dream girl. But Juliette Lewis is like very much exactly that. She's like this free spirit who you can't pin her down and she rolls.

By the way, exactly like that in real life. In my brief time of knowing her. I mean, it was shocking to me how much she was Juliette Lewis out of a movie. Lewis, like I think I told you we were she was coming in from Ojai. and she drives like a Ram charger or whatever, some giant ass muscle car just because she thinks it's fun and none of this felt put on either none of it felt like Juliette Lewis was like, I've got to be quirky

It all felt very, very just grounded in who she is. And she was like super nice, but just really, really like one of the characters she might play in a movie.

I remember you mentioned, I think you said this off air to me, that she's most like her character from Natural Born Killers. Is that what you said? That was the vibe that you got?

We did have to shackle her for much of the interview, just for safety of the crew. I remember you saying that, yeah. And myself. And Christopher Corey of Washington District of Columbia. And not so much that Christopher was there, but Christopher loves the show. He's donating. And if Juliette Lewis were to Natural Born Killing Me, then we wouldn't have a TBTL probably. And that would be a bummer for Chris. So that was really on my mind when we were doing that shoot. Also, Mary Simpson was on my mind. Mary is in Seattle, Washington.

It's beautiful here.

Thanks, Mary. And then Barbie DeVere is in Nevada City. Wait for it. California. They love to zig when you think they're going to zag. tomorrow we'll have a donor on Monday rather from California City, Nevada it's going to blow your god damn mind anyway thank you to all of our donors for keeping TPTL going we could not do this without you hello and welcome to Top Story all I was going to say before we got into the donors was I really appreciate your completism Andrew because I find it so weird When I'm filming Or doing a different kind of media project And something fun Interesting is happening and nobody's rolling On it It's like tape is so cheap It's surprising how many times I have to

It's so cheap it's not even tape anymore

It's like I'm surprised at how often I have to say or not say But ask someone like oh can we roll on this Can we be recording this Like it's like I mean this is like You know the This American this American life-ification of all media now, at least the media that I consume, but it's all, maybe it's the radio lab-ification of all the media I consume that's a better example, but it's like all of the good stuff is before you're talking or after you're talking or when someone breaks into the conversation, you know what I mean, that's like all I feel like it's just a known thing now, like ABR always be rolling, like I'm glad you were rolling on the Philly show even for 90 minutes of Swedish house mafia, something could have happened that was interesting, it didn't

but it could have i don't like it when it feels forced though and i don't know why i need to go after you know i just gave the folks at morning edition some big put-ups for their reporting on that tiktok story but like so i often will listen to the podcast called up first which is like a i don't know 10 to 12 minute sort of like it's like three big it's like morning edition if it were a 12 minute podcast with just three stories for the day right and um sometimes and it's like the rotating hosts of morning edition um and so often if it's steve inskeep it'll begin with like something that don't you say anything bad about my stevie something that i love that man theory i should love which is a little bit of like off the cuff banter that sounds like it could be cut but like it just never sounds authentic to me it always sounds like i will say this we know that this we're rolling on this and maybe if we're cute we'll use it and so it just never i don't know man the authenticity is just it's it's hard to well i get the whole relatability thing it's just hard

to like recreate that to me is a different that's a that's a horse of a different feather like i here's the thing about inskeep he is and again as somebody who knows him to some degree he is he is just genuinely like the like i feel like he he is not he has not run a bunch of focus group testing on kind of what the relatability factor is and so when he's being dorky or dad ish or whatever ish i know that that comes from a very genuine place for him there are other people who shall remain somewhat named who i think take a little bit more of a clinical approach to that sort of thing and that sort of doesn't land for me yeah you know what i'm saying yeah yeah well i

didn't mean to pick him out in particular again he seems like a very nice guy i've never met him but like there are just these moments where it's kind of like i know exactly i know exactly what you guys want you want the the radiolabification or the i mean what i mean casualness i actually think that like and i haven't listened to this show in a long time but i feel like the daily has little moments of that right oh hugely yeah and it's i listen to it on the daily speaking

of which andrew i was going to say yeah if you'd like to get a little hit a little a little hit of the news of the day the headlines as it were you can listen to the headlines on the new york times app hosted by our friend tracy mumford no shit she's hosting that you got a whole ass show on

there oh my god i didn't know that i gotta listen i love trace i haven't talked to her in like 10

years tracy is like uh like a an emerging star on the new york times audio app hosting a thing called the headlines which is basically up first but hosted by someone we know oh man i gotta

listen to that the well um well deserved to tracy was a colleague of ours at a great public media i guess it hasn't been 10 years but it's been a while the other thing and again this

gets us no closer to the top story but the other day i said i was i was surprised that you didn't know about taylor lorenz the internet speculator that's not true she's not a speculator it's a person who knows a lot about the internet it's because i would think you're are you an alexandra

petrie fan from the post i know of alexandra and from her um uh interactions with like elon i think She was like a friend of Elon and then sort of like kind of has battled him a lot.

I think that's who I was thinking of when I was like, oh, I thought you were a Taylor Lorenz head. And you're like, I'm not super familiar. I think I was thinking of Alexandra Petrie.

No, wait, hold on, hold on. Petrie, no, no, forget everything I just said about Petrie. Petrie is the person who writes the kind of sometimes parody stories. And yeah, yeah. The person I was just describing is somebody else, a digital reporter that you know, who's been on Livewire recently. Forget about that. I do know of Petrie. Why do you bring this up?

Oh, are you thinking of Kara Swisher?

I have no idea why I just confused

I'm bringing it up because in my head for like three days or however long it's been after I said Taylor Lorenz and you were like not familiar and I was like I know that he's a fan or he's an admirer of this person's work and then I remembered then like literally at some point I'm doing something in my house and I go no no it was Alexandra Petrie from The Post but the thing is

I don't want to say this but I'm not a fan I feel like I'm the one person who's not a fan of the Petrie work

Do you feel like there are any women reporters that you do respect?

Now, let me let me what's easy Andrew Walsh. Easy answer. No, let me let me tell you, let me to be honest with you. I am not like familiar with her entire breadth of work, but I remember when she was writing a lot of stuff when she was sort of breaking out, I think a little bit, you know, in the pages of the post. But like with a lot of the sort of parody content and it just didn't hit for me. Right. But but she does she does a lot of different kinds of stuff now. Right. And so I can't I shouldn't say that I'm not a fan of her work. I am not a fan of that, of the sort of parody articles and stuff that she was writing for a while there. It just didn't hit for me.

I think as somebody who has been described, I think accurately as, quote, funny for public radio. i think i have a um i have a real sort of soft spot for you know a certain kind of a certain bandwidth of humor because it's the kind that i tend to engage in both on livewire and on wait wait don't tell me and if i gave a shit here um but uh no this is this is real this is raw uncut burbs uh and what we know about raw uncut burbs is that he is obsessed with megalopolis like Not with seeing it, I still haven't done that But with everything else around it In fact, last night Before I came out on stage at Livewire I was kind of thinking about what I was going to talk about And there was this one story that I was going to mention And that story involved Illegal drugs And I was going to say something like We're not talking about Let's take some mushrooms and go see Megalopolis And then I didn't say that Because I was like I don't think anyone in the crowd is even going to know what I'm talking about I think I might be the main person still interested in the megalopolis discourse i can't tell you how many people i've said oh well you know megalopolis and they've been like i have no idea what you're talking really

oh that shocks me it feels like such a i mean it seems but maybe it's just you've been hanging

out with me contractually too much and i'm bringing it up all the time it's all over the

internet i feel like and again it was like you know the sort of rough review from um that uh chris sent us from uh was it drew mcgarry i believe yeah yeah i feel like i don't know i feel like it's a real um i don't know i feel like it's a real netizen thing i feel like people who are online well andrew as a digital native i see these things differently than you do my daughter

once said that to me i think semi-jokingly she goes well dad you know i'm a digital native well

john said that i heard over john our pal and colleague john say that to you at the show you're like hey when we when you come out at the live show and turn off this music like just make sure you like i don't know what you were saying just like flick this switch on the computer or whatever And he said, no offense, but I'm a digital native. I was like, wow, that's that's coming out. That's coming out strong. It's some I am always nervous.

Shots fired to your direct supervisor.

Is that why you want to demote him?

That whole thing. We came so close to a disaster because my computer reverted to locked mode. And I wasn't looking at my phone because I was getting my Benjamin Franklin wig on.

Oh, so how do we solve that?

well John just comes running backstage and goes your computer's locked what's the code and I was like it's this and I go unless it's not and then it's this because I was like how many times have I updated this I don't know again muscle memory I'm just typing it in now and I was like well if I start hearing the intro music that's on the tape then I'll know that he got in and if not then I'll know that he didn't

I didn't, but what I didn't want to have to do was come out as frigging Ben Franklin and log into my own damn ass computer.

Exactly, that's funny. Wow, I had no idea that, oh, what a panicky feeling that must be. And then for you, I understand that feeling of just like, I type this in a hundred times a day, but now I have to tell somebody else it and I don't know what it is.

And it's like, is the second O a zero? Oh, so there's two O's, okay. Literally. It's like, I think I go, it's either this, actually the question was if a certain part of it was uppercase or lowercase.

I'm going to try Moose Man 69. Good luck. What would have two O's in there?

So my megalopolis obsession knows no bounds, and I was reading an article today about how now there's this some sort of – I didn't even watch it, Andrew, but there's somebody that's basically taken megalopolis and overlaid it in some way with a Linkin Park video. And what's funny about that is I'm not like a person who knows a lot about Linkin Park, but i do remember this video that they did for like kind of like their biggest song where they're like up in a big tower but it's like a very and they're performing and they're kind of over this city but it's like a city of the future but also kind of a historic in terms of its layout and its look and it's i i again we probably have some big lincoln park fans in the audience it's not really my kind of my music necessarily and i remember seeing the video and thinking like boy that that um definitely pretty clearly is just computerized soundstage kind of you know they didn't build a city to scale to have the lincoln park guys singing on this tower it's like very computer generated which is fine for their video but it also looks a lot like megalopolis which cost over a hundred million dollars to make and somebody has pointed out the similarities so i was reading that article and in that article i saw a little hypertext link to the fact that Francis Ford Coppola has, this was a month ago or so, apparently went online to something called Letterboxd, which is described as kind of a social media site for people that are really, really into cinema.

Can I just jump in and say when my buddy Nick Jarn was on the show when you were out in Europe, that's what sort of spawned the whole conversation that we had about movies that fit into a category of movies you would watch at a bar with the sound down. because like he's gotten obsessed with letterbox and so now i'm on letterbox now as well and a bunch of listeners have been sort of like kind of like um pinging me on there as well we set up a letterbox account not for tbtl just for me personally and i understand it's kind of a it's a fun thing to play around and you can you know it's very much focused just on cinema there doesn't seem to be a lot of mission creep there and you can like you can come up with like these silly lists or or like kind of interesting lists and categorize movies or leave your reviews and interact with people but all based on movies it's actually pretty fun i i would love to go on there

but i feel like the problem is i don't watch enough movies anymore like i couldn't keep up with the discourse because i'm not consuming enough it'd be like going on a seahawks subreddit

but you don't watch any of the games but i think the fun part would be you could just go on and just do like uh what is the screwball movie that you that you like from the 90s like it's not a i

mean i don't think it's about just screwball movie i like from the night what is the movie that every

time i say barton fink you think of the cover of this other brain donors like you could go on and just do like you could do a review of brain donors like i don't i mean i'm sure there are some people who are like maybe trying to keep up with the joneses but like it doesn't it's not just like what is in theaters right now it's about like sort of having more fun than that i think well

apparently francis ford coppola i love this like i feel like the the more that i talk about this story and the more that i think and again francis ford coppola has led a very charmed life i mean he's had a tremendous amount of success um it's been very lauded you know i think things have gone really great for franciford kobla that being said i find this to be really humanizing very humanizing that he apparently set up a letterbox to count and has made maybe one in his only diary entry was to go on and basically rank megalopolis like this he went on and gave it five stars and there's something about the guy who's the director of this enormous film that's a passion project that he's been trying to make for 40 years that he spent all of his own money on that everybody is just absolutely roasting and dragging the idea that he went on to like typed in he had to come up with a password he had to share it with john sklaroff he had to try to remember if it was a zero or no he had to i mean think about this there's probably some dual factor authentication he had to set this damn account up so he could go review his own movie and give it

five stars and as himself i want to make it very clear like as himself this isn't one of those stories where it's like some football player it's not a burner account with a fake name so he can like yeah exactly roast uh of it roast commenters or or applaud himself he's just like no i'm logged in as francis ford coppola that's my username and also i'm giving my movie five Thank you. And I'm giving my granddaughter's movie, The Last Showgirl, five stars. Those are his only reviews.

Oh, so he's got two.

He's got two now. Says Coppola rates one other movie on Letterboxd, The Last Showgirl, which is directed by his granddaughter, Gia Coppola, and opened in September. He gives it five stars.

I mean, I guess this is—I mean, what's he going to do, give it two stars, give his own? But now the granddaughter one, is it that his granddaughter made a perfect movie, or does this—and again, I'm not—I didn't get up this morning to drag Gia Coppola, who I just learned exists. Me too, yes But like That also kind of, it's very cute It's actually very sweet behavior Let me put it this way, if my daughter put out An album or a film I would absolutely give it five stars Because I'm her dad and I love her I do think that would then have to call into question The seriousness of my rating system Because, like, this is exactly The move as a granddad Give your granddaughter's film five stars Unquestionably

Of course.

But it does then really undermine the veracity of your ranking system, right?

But it's just for the funny. I mean, it's just Letterboxd. It's not like he's a professional reviewer who's giving a filmmaker in his life five stars because it happens to be his granddaughter. It's just Letterboxd. It's like giving a heart on Instagram to somebody's story or what have you. I don't know. i just don't think that it would be different if it was like some sort of a scandal but it's just

for the right oh yeah i mean and i'm not like don't get me wrong i'm not uh this this is all stuff that makes me like francis ford coppola more yeah but i just think it's kind of funny too like it does feel like real boomer behavior online like that you know what i mean it feels it feels real boomery to me to set up an account and then have leave a total of two reviews one for your movie giving it five stars and the other for your granddaughter's movie giving it five stars and like what needle is that going to move again I sort of love how much this is just kind of spitting into the wind for Coppola like I actually admire this behavior I would

say like for me the more sort of notable thing is the thing he posted to Facebook about controlling the weather did you see yeah yeah that to me was more

he gave that negative five stars

he gave that negative five

stars I ranked that negative five stars them who are them them controlling the weather uh last thing um of the week is an article uh in the oregonian of this week about a traffic stop that happened in southeast portland the other day where the police were searching a car because they thought the people inside were acting suspiciously and uh they uncovered a lot of stuff in the car that you're not supposed to have guns uh cash things like that and they also found a large amount of drugs that were in a purse that was had printed on it this had been purchased this way the purse said

definitely not a bag of drugs and those cheeky sort of yes yeah i don't know what to call that kind of you'd get it in a gift shop and give it to your ironic humor or whatever you want to call

it like definitely not a bag of drugs it was in fact full of drugs the people in the car obviously in big trouble now with this i i am i'm i'm sort of i'm of two minds part of me thinks you know i mean as a poker player i love the bluffing strategy i do love the kind of the like what kind of person it's like if it were the case that you could just say to the cop like if it were a poker game and you could say to the cop eye to eye what are the chances i have actually put drugs in this bag that says definitely not a bag of drugs you might actually get them to stand down you might be able to make the case like, this is the last place I'm going to keep my drugs. But the problem is it's, they're cops and they're going to just unzip the bag and look in it, whether or not they even have a warrant. So the, I, I ultimately, I don't like the play here because I think you're drawing attention to the bag. This is not the place for humor and anyone who might be investigating the bag is going to be a humorless cop. And so I think I ultimately come down on the side of this was a bad idea.

Here's where I come down on. First of all, the photo, which I might use as a show pic, although did you want to use a photo of your microwave or something as a show pic? You said something at the beginning of the show.

Well, I just – you know what? I'm going to take a picture of it and send it to you. You can decide if you want to make the show post. I think it looks not unlike your microwave at your house. Don't you guys have kind of like an old-fashioned – is it a smeg? You guys have a microwave that's kind of old-fashioned looking? Or there's something in your kitchen that's old-fashioned looking?

Yeah, and now it's in the basement. But, yeah, we have a little turquoise mini little microwave that sort of is fake retro looking. Yeah, that's a cute little guy.

That's what I have. It was like 60 bucks.

Yeah, it was really affordable. Yeah.

And it was because, you know, the Madrona Hill studio, this is kind of a little office, little studio, little someday maybe tiny apartment. But I don't have a ton of counters.

so i was looking for like an apartment sized microwave microave i'm sorry please put some respect on that word i mean microave and uh it's so perfect intro i'm so happy with this thing and i i didn't i'm not saying i wanted to let my coffee get cold today i'm not saying i poured it into a cup and then let it sit out put it right i'll just put them the top shelf of the refrigerator right yeah i'm not saying i put it in the freezer for eight minutes but like right Right before you and I did the show, I put it in the microwave and I hit. Microwave? You know. Also, what's nice about this cheap-ass microwave is it doesn't have 80,000 settings.

Yes, we both have the same one, yeah.

Because, like, the one that I have in my kitchen, in my house, it's like, you know, it is probably allegedly fancier, but I can't figure out how to work the thing half of the time because it wants a lot of information for me about what I'm trying to do. And mostly, here's what I generally want to do with the microwave. I want to. I want to heat something up for between 30 seconds and one minute What I want to do generally with the microwave, Andrew Is soften up some butter, but then forget That it's in there, and take it from being Hard as a rock to some sort of scalding Lava Crucible of butter That's what I want to be able to do, and what's great about This little microwave is Because I didn't pay much money for it It hasn't got time for a lot of fancy stuff It's like, you want to do this for 30 seconds? Let's go You want to do it for another 30 seconds? That's fine too like there's just a button that says 30 seconds yeah i'm trying to think our ours might even have

a dial or something i'm trying to remember it because i don't i bet you we have the same one

andrew i'm gonna take a picture and send it to you but you don't have to use it for the show

pick if there's something else well all i was all i was gonna say was i had two things on this drug story first of all i guess the quick thing to say is by the time the cops find this bag that says definitely not a bag full of drugs the jig is up it doesn't matter like at that point it's just a little it's just a joke at that point anyway you're not it's not down to like will they open this bag or not so it doesn't matter what it says uh secondly it occurred to me we were talking about um no do i have this right knolling the other day that style of photography that came up because people were like kind of taking photos of their bins at the tsa line that sort of showed like they'll arrange all of their nice little prada products or whatever their nice belt and their handbag and whatever and then they'll take an above shot of it all arranged nicely and I was like oh yeah it reminds me of knolling that sort of like that almost Wes Anderson-y style of photography that people were really into a while back and I sort of feel like looking at this photo of like it's a classic cop photo of drugs and money and a gun and a scale and this little bag that says definitely not a bag full of drugs and it's all like kind of laid out and then taken from above I'm like oh cops were the original knollers weren't they? That's a good point It's a pretty nice photo It's kind of a nice photo We don't usually use guns as show pics But this photo does contain a gun But it's kind of a nice little photo of criminal activity

I saw one of those Not particularly knolling Although it's funny because it is TSA related I can't remember what I think it was Harrisburg, PA I was passing through the airport there a week or two ago And it was much less artistic than the one that we're referring to But it was a photo Of like a gun or something I think it was a gun That was like clearly taken on I actually don't know if it was taken on a phone Or a regular camera But it was like clearly printed out From the like printer at the TSA And it was taped up To like when you went through And it was like written on there Your TSA security confiscated this gun Like they were like so I'm going to use a bad word here They were so fucking psyched That they got a gun They could take a picture of Now, listen, I don't want somebody on the plane with a gun, but I also, my guess is that person forgot that there was a gun somewhere in their luggage. Again, that whole thing is weird to me. I'm not a pro-gun person per se, but like, I also don't feel like this, like, I'm not going to go on my rant here. We've made it a whole week without my TSA rant, so I don't need to do that here. But like, this, like, and by the way, this whole thing with the cops in Portland, like, yeah, it's funny that the bag said it's not drugs. But nine times out of ten, when the cops want to, and I'm going to include the TSA in that, nine times out of ten, when the cops or the TSA want to tell you about something that they did, watch your wallet. It's bullshit. Like, it's completely a narrative that they want to make sure you're getting, you know? And, like, we got this gun, so look at how safe we're making you. It's like, all right, maybe. I don't know. Was that guy going to use brass knuckles to, like, hijack the plane? I doubt it.

You ever worn brass knuckles? It was in a movie I was watching recently, and I was like, I don't know if I've ever even put on brass knuckles before.

No, but as a kid, I found them tremendously interesting. I mean, the whole, basically, the three things that I was most obsessed with getting my hands on and never could would have been a butterfly.

knife brass knuckles and um a throwing star or as we called it a ninja star there's something

about brass knuckles that means like it is the ultimate in close combat right like a throwing star you can still be distant i mean obviously a gun a bow and arrow a crossbow anything with a projectile like you can be distant from your enemy but like even brass knuckles there's something tough about that like i don't think i've ever fantasized about using brass knuckles I'm sure I fantasized at some point in my life about using a throwing star and, like, somehow being a hero of some story as I probably, like, save some damsel, right? But, like, I used to go to bed. To put myself to sleep, I used to, like, create these stories where I was, like, kind of the hero. Did you used to do that? I still do that. Oh, that's right. You still do that.

No, I do that at age 48. It'll be sometimes a basketball game, you know, where I'm hitting a three-point shot. Sometimes it's like a bar fight where I'm 100% on the side of justice, and I've been pushed too far, and I have to handle the situation. This is an actual thing I use to fall asleep in my adult life.

There is a woman who now must be somewhere between 46 and 48 years old, and her name is Christy Green. And she has no idea how many times I saved her life when I was a child. I used to think about saving her life all the time. there would be a circle of people all around like and she was she was captured by some thug with a knife and i was the only person who was both um brave enough and smart enough to um save her in this situation um any having said all of that i would say that the brass knuckle thing is not even a fantasy i would engage with because you are so up close and personal yeah it is the ultimate i

mean basically the thing with brass knuckles is you already have to be a really good fighter you You have to be good at punching someone. You've already done the heavy lift on this project. You know how to punch. You're dodging their blows. You're standing close to them. If I was good at that shit, I wouldn't need any of these weapons. Guys, I need to stand far away behind the safety of this post and throw something at them from far away where they can't hurt me. That's what we're going for here. none of this close none of this knife fight in a phone booth bullshit like yeah i've never understood like brass knuckles as a like let me put it this way if someone's approaching me and they mean me harm and they can have a throwing star they could have a knife they can have like you said a crossbow or they can have brass knuckles i am taking brass knuckles every

single time exactly you know what my favorite move was and i don't know i feel like i might have gotten this when i say my favorite move i mean like my in my imagination when i was in some sort of a like a because also i would spend like my summer days like outside in the yard with like an enertech squirt gun pretending i was in like a war zone or something right or hunting or being hunted in some in some uh you know military context and um i don't know if i got this from a star wars movie it sounds like something that maybe luke would have used the force to do but like the move of like taking a pebble or something and throwing it behind your enemy so they hear that and they turn around and then you can go save christy oh i i listen that's

such a boss move yeah misdirection the like making the sound somewhere else and they're distracted there was a movie there was like a i don't even i this is gonna go nowhere so i don't know maybe we should just start the music and i'll get i'll stop torturing this will be the

first show where you're just talking and i just slowly fade you out as i fade words by dove there's

this world there's this movie this war era movie that i watched when i was a little kid maybe one of the listeners maybe we can hive mind this and there's the plot is well not the plot but this critical scene happens where there is a sound one of the i think it's one of the good guys so i'm assuming one of the americans has this clicker and when he clicks it it sounds like a gun barrel being kind of like like like basically you're putting cocked is the word i'm looking for and i feel like what's happening is the bad guy i'm gonna say the germans if i remember my world war ii history i remember this incredibly tense scene and i'm a kid and i'm just like riveted it's these guys i feel like they're very sweaty they're in like a foxhole there's some The reveal is that the German has been coming around to what he thinks is this gun cocking. He's ready to do his worst, but it's really a guy playing this clicker thing, this little hand, it's like a piece of metal that's flexed in a way that when you press it, it makes this sound, and it somehow tricks the bad guy into coming into the wrong place because he thinks he's hearing...

one thing but he's hearing something else and then the trap is set and then he's like and then they get him or whatever and I just remember being like I gotta get my hands on one of those clickers I'm gonna need that

I'm gonna need that

I didn't need that in case I time travel to a foxhole

James DeMuth I'm gonna need one of those clickers yeah like in case

I ever need to trick a Charlie into coming thinking I'm cocking my gun maybe it had to do with the perceived amount of ammo you had or if you're out of bullets

I'm trying to figure out like Why would you invite him unless you can throw that sound somewhere? Maybe it sounded like he was out of bullets, and now is my time. I'm sorry. I don't remember. Now is my time. That was my German.

Actually, this would be very satisfying. If one of the listeners knows what the hell I'm talking about, please, could you get to me, Luke, at tbtl.net? And by the way, send us some music for your weekend while you're at it, and also any Hey Dummies questions.

And hat on a stick content as well. I just want to throw that in there. Oh, hat on a stick is another solid one. I remember, I don't know where I was introduced to that concept, but by fooling your enemy, by putting your hat on a stick. But I swear, it would be mortifying, but also super interesting if there was some sort of closed circuit cameras on my backyard as a kid. Because we would have all kinds of footage of me fighting imaginary people, like things that you cannot see. but you would see footage of me hiding behind a water tank putting my hat on a stick and like raising it above the water tank so my imaginary enemies think they could shoot the top of my head off but they couldn't luke because it was just a hat on a stick hat on a stick head on a stick i

love it i love it i love your commitment to this i was doing versions of this too in in my life with like less kind of follow-through than than you were but i was very much like this was these were thoughts that were happening in my head all the time if you have any idea what the heck fire i just described some kind of war movie my memory thinks it was in black and white it may have been the kind of thing that like my dad rented it from the shoreline public library actually my mom and dad are coming by later today on their way down to my sister sarah's house i'll ask my dad if he remembers it i doubt he would but if you know what i'm talking about so some kind of war era movie where somebody is in fact maybe they're even just using their dog tag maybe they're like I have a memory of it being some kind of piece of metal in their hand that was kind of they were using it to do something sonically that was confusing to the bad guys or by the way could have been the bad guys who were confusing the good guys I don't have a lot of specifics about this but I would love to know what that movie is and what that scene is just to kind of close the loop on my curiosity.

Well, I was going to start Googling it, but that's no fun. Let's let the listeners...

So nobody go watch Megalopolis this weekend. Everyone starts scouring the internet for World War II movies or just war movies where somebody tricks someone with a sound of what they think is maybe a rifle reloading.

Just watch every World War II movie. I'm going to ask Genevieve because she used to be really into a podcast that doesn't exist anymore that was all about war movies. And I'm blanking on the name of it. It's John Roderick and our friends from The Greatest Generation. And she would always do her homework. She would know that a podcast was coming up that talks in depth about one of these movies. And they were always like war movies, however you define a war movie, whether it's in space or here on Earth. And so she, for a period of a couple of years, just watched so many World War II era movies. Wow. I'll run this by her.

I mean, this would have had to have been somewhat well-known, because how else did it make its way into my life? Like, I'm sure this isn't a super obscure film, but I was just so young. I didn't really, you know, know what was going on. All right, that's going to do it for today's show. And that's going to do it for this week of TBTL. Thank you, everyone, for hanging out with us. We're going to be back here on Monday with more Imaginary Radio for you. So please join us for that. In the meantime, have a great weekend. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Twas the month of Trucktober and all through the Bay City, not a creature was stirring, not even gritty. The air dancers were placed on the corners worth care in hopes that the bone soon would be there. My pumpkin spice was nestled snug in its holder while visions of sales events marched in like soldiers. With hopes of big purchases and deals in a snap, I dreamed of car lots all over the map. when on my television a man caused such a clatter I dropped my auto trader to see what was the matter to the car lots he cried with shouted with flash we've got easy financing in 90 days same as cash the prices on the window as bright as new fall and snow I'd never seen them quite so low when what to my wondering eyes should appear but acres and acres of f-150s and nissan frontiers A loud-coated salesman came on with his shtick. I'm not kidding, he was laying it on thick. More skeevy than weasels, his promises they came. And honestly, how many times can this guy say my name? A Tahoe, a Ridgeline, a Sierra, a Tacoma, a Raider, a Titan, a Ranger. You look like a man who drives a Dakota. From the back of the lot to the front of the auto mall, we have trucks, trucks, trucks. and we want to sell them all with coffee and donuts i was steadily plied while the dealer pandered and continued his lies when i spied on the lot a lonely f-250 super duty with extended cab and bed liner she was really a beauty i let out a gasp and slowly turned around and the salesman smiled because he knew a sucker was found he slapped down his hand on the hood and said i knew when i met you that your taste was good with a bundle of extras this truck is of steel let's head to my office and see if we can make a deal his eyes how they twinkled his lips how they smirked he frowned at my finance and said i guess we can make this work with a swaggering strut he walked towards the back while out in the bay they put my truck on the rack when he returned he wore a tiny frown and said it looks like you'll need to put some more money down you love this truck and we want you to get it. But when we checked, you've got credit. With a tear in his eye and a tilt of his head, he said that our deal just might be dead. But there was one more thing that maybe would work. But don't get your hopes up because my manager's a jerk. Laying a finger to the side of his nose, he changed some numbers and my monthly payments rose. And when it was done, my financing went through. But I just can't shake the feeling that I might have been screwed because I heard him exclaim as I drove away in my truck, Never buy in Trucktober because you're surely getting f***ed.

Power out.