Muse

look daddy i like you like i like you that's the thing i like you too daddy there's a lot of things about me you don't know anything about daddy things you wouldn't understand things you couldn't understand things you shouldn't understand i don't understand

T-B-T-L

I was shaking My tummy was shaking My head was shaking My arms were shaking My legs, my feet too

In no way do I want to appear pushy here But please, shut up

That's a no from me, dog There are two types of people in this world Those who like Neil Diamond and those who don't

My ex-wife loves him You know something?

That was pretty funny

you should think about being a comedian my friend is a blackjack dealer and on his forearm he has a tattoo of an ace and a jack you see i'm a blackjack player on my forearm i'm gonna get a tattoo of a 10 and a 2 and then maybe later a king you know how someone might describe a situation

that's unpleasant or confined as being like a prison this is what they're referring to

Well, all right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Don't miss the Sausage Fest. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. As Jay would say, he's got flow. Coming to you from absolutely gorgeous San Diego, California. I'm in San Diego. where you can see Point Loma in the distance across Coronado. It is just an absolutely spectacular morning here. Interesting, I was listening to the public radio station here in San Diego this morning, and they have something right after they do the traffic. They have the surf report. If you want an indication that you're no longer in southern Washington state, where, as I understand it, it's rainy and gray and pretty lousy today. It's listening to the surf report on the local public radio station in the morning. Anyway, here we are. It's time for episode 4,379 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Interesting flight coming down here. We actually flew over some of the affected areas of the greater Los Angeles area. And then also, as we were landing in San Diego, something happened that was kind of shocking to me, actually. Oh, and by the way, Alaska Airlines is on my list right now. They are on my list for something that, of the many times I've been unrelatable here on the show, this may be the most unrelatable quibble that I have. But I'm guessing it'll come up because it's been burning, burning on my heart and my mind this whole morning. In fact, I was texting our friend Broadcast Barry about I needed to vent. and uh anyway we'll probably get into that also speaking of the haters and the losers me in this case so i didn't know this but apparently there is a guy who has been hating on bob dillard in an intense and focused way for almost the entirety of bob dylan's career i feel like a bird showing over these haters you feel me though and this guy is now once again kind of having his moment because Bob Dylan or at least the idea of Bob Dylan is having its moment because of that new film that's out about him so we'll try to talk about that too and we will definitely talk to this guy longest running co-bro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships he is in fact a soulful rocker from New Hampshire he's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now good

morning my friend good morning Luke I have a question that I'm going to ask you carefully here as to not get us off track so early because there's interesting things to talk about today including your flight but you mentioning your flight and flying over Los Angeles where all the fires are raging and you seeing that from above reminded me of something much much much much much more frivolous from the weekend that I have a legit question about and you are the perfect cynic to ask this question of i was watching one of those ridiculous nfl games this weekend that i told you by the way that i was looking forward to i watched so many of those

games this weekend even though i was i was such a no but on friday about that super wild card weekend i was like this is a bunch of bullshit i don't know if i've ever watched more nfl games in one weekend i don't know what was going on i also love that you and i are leaning into the

Super Wild Card Weekend Nomenclature Not nomenclature Terminology Terminology Terminology Terminology

Terminology

And I did not realize that this is the first year that they dropped that branding. I heard one announcer. You're not calling it that anymore? No, it was just Wild Card Weekend. It used to be called Super Wild Card Weekend. And I think this is the first year they changed it. Yet it's the first year that you and I leaned into it. But we're getting all the closer dangerously to speaking too much about football, which is not why I bring this up. I bring this up to talk about air traffic control. Because during one of the games, one of the bigger NFL games this weekend, They stopped play temporarily because there was a drone in the sky over the stadium, whatever stadium it was. I want, well, no, I'm not even going to guess. It doesn't matter what game it was, but they stopped play, essentially. Oh, wow. And they called it a security thing. You know, it wasn't a dome, obviously.

I wonder if it was the Tampa game because, oh, wait. So this was a closed, this stadium had a roof.

No, I was going to say it was not a dome. It was an open-air stadium. Well, that narrows it down. Yeah.

Because what were the stadiums? What were the teams that were playing outside? Pittsburgh was outside?

Yeah, but that was in Baltimore.

Okay, but that's also an outdoor. It might have been Philly.

That was Philly's outdoor. So anyway, it doesn't matter which game it was or which stadium, but they stopped play. They said there's a temporary stop and play for security reasons. When a drone goes overhead, they have to stop play for security reasons. And I'm curious. And you see why I set you up as a as one of my more cynical friends when it comes to this kind of stuff. Is it about security that they stop play there or what percentage of it is about security and what percentage of it is we don't want people taking like amazing drone footage of our game. And we don't want to let the game continue so that that drone above can capture potentially good footage of a cool play that devalues the product that we're putting out there as the NFL.

Well, or option three, it's Bill Belichick spying on both teams to integrate it into his new offense at North Carolina.

Good point. By the way, oh, we can't do it. We kind of heard some rumblings that he might there's a chance that now that he's there, NFL teams are sniffing around and he might not even coach a single snap. There could be. I know that rumor. You heard that, too.

I did. I thought, well, because I mean, I mean, you know, peace and love to our friends in the Tar Heel state. Like, I will I will admit to you that Bill Belichick, considered by some to be the greatest NFL coach of all time, although he I think he lost some luster when old Tommy B left. Oh, my gosh. Thoughts on that. Tom Brady is not the Tom Brady of broadcasting, if that makes any sense. It does. I had never, until last night, Andrew, when I was here at the Westin in the gas lamp, I had never actually watched a game, believe it or not, where Tom Brady was one of the announcers. I don't know how that has happened. He just didn't call any Seahawks games this year. The Seahawks didn't play any marquee enough games that I watched.

That's not true. No, he did. I'll look this up. I could be wrong. I could be wrong.

It must have been one of the games that I didn't watch.

Okay, yeah.

But as far as I have any conscious memory of, this was the first time that I was in a position where I was kind of giving it a fair amount of my concentration and experiencing Tom Brady as a football analyst. And it was rough. It made me so uncomfortable. because it's and by the way he's now this is at the end of the season I mean he should be better at this but he is listen the guy has a lot of great qualities in the sort of you know physically gifted department and he understands how the game of football works and you know I've never heard anything about him being a particularly bad dude but what he's not is good in casual conversation and you know you'd think well these NFL games it's not casual conversation it isn't and yet it still relies on some of it and that's where just you can just hear him just absolutely the gears just turning as he's trying to think how do regular people sound when they talk when he's talking to ian eagle or whoever his his uh you know co-host is i forget what the small talk was but it was just brutal absolutely like the other guy was saying you know oh it was about they didn't know where they were going to be assigned for their game next week by the way this is a big topic of conversation for all nfl announcers they're endlessly fascinated with the fact that during this time of year it is unclear to them where they will be the next week it's kind

of interesting i think it's kind of interesting it's all podcasty as they sort of like figure out like well will i be getting will i be getting that chowder that i love in new england or or what have you i don't mind them talking about that i'm i'm okay with it except i heard every

sing andrew i told you nobody power used super wild card weekend like i did this weekend and every single announcer of every single game at some point.

was like, we don't know where we're going next week. And by the time, I'm going to keep going with Ian Eagle as a guess. I don't really know if that's who Tom Brady's partner is.

I know that it's Kevin Burkhart sometimes. I'm looking that up now. And by the way, I know that because it says here that the Seahawks game that he called was the Buffalo Bills game. Brady and Burkhart did the Seahawks-Bills game.

And I think that was a game where I was either traveling or working or just knew it was going to be brutal.

Or listening on the radio, right?

Maybe on the radio. Somehow I experienced that game from afar, and I was glad I did because it wasn't great for us. So, yeah, I missed Tom Brady calling it. But there was this point at which the Kevin Burkhart character was going, yeah, we could be heading anywhere next week. We just don't know. We could be going here or there. And then Tom Brady's going, yeah, we might be going here. We might be going there. And then like Burkhart would say something and then you could hear Tom Brady trying to like think of his next thing and then just restating whatever it was, maybe in like a slightly modified form. Again, I'm not saying this to try to be mean to Tom Brady because I don't I'm not a Tom Brady hater per se. In fact, the most humanized he ever was to me was when he drunkenly got off the Tampa Bay Super Bowl party boat and could barely form a sentence. I've never felt closer to Tom Brady than in that moment. I just it's it's interesting to realize he does have feet of clay when it comes to this one thing, which is now like, you know, talking into the microphone and kind of analyzing slash contextualizing these football games. It's not his forte. And it's he just seems like he's so good at everything. It's it's interesting to experience a thing he's not good at.

I don't think that I pay quite as much attention to the announcers as you do because I'm like, most of these games I was puttering in some way. Not all of them, but most of them I'm puttering in some way or like I'm like cooking and it's on on my laptop and my laptop isn't that loud. Let Walsh cook. I'm sort of just let Walsh cook famously. Yes, I'm stirring my eggs and sausage in the morning. um but uh so it doesn't bother me as much but just from listening to you know like as a as a p1 of the levitard show and other you know just other sports radio i will say a lot of conversation was you know a lot of people were talking about this when he made his debut i remember i was in croatia at the time and i know the game that i didn't hear it or watch it but the game that he called I know it was Browns versus somebody because it was a Browns game. And a lot of people, you know, people were pretty brutalizing him. God, I'm having trouble speaking today. This is not how words work, Walsh. Sorry, it's a Monday. I'm a little fuzzy in the brain. But people were pretty brutal in their analysis of him. But I do remember, like, hearing people saying, but there's good stuff there. He just needs the reps. And that's something that, like, as a broadcaster, as a clearly a struggling broadcaster, I always appreciate, like, give somebody time to grow into their broadcasting voice. That's just necessary. I do think some people are better out of the gate than others. I know the worm has, for some reason, turned on Tony Romo. I still like him. I love him.

I don't understand the haters and the losers, second reference today, who are anti-Tony Romo. I think I like him a lot.

But have you heard that as well? you're not hearing that from me right like there are haters and losers out there and i i i maintain my fandom of hearing him if i turn on a broadcast like he's one of the few voices that stands out to me that i will pay more attention to and he was good right out of the box brady a lot of people were saying and maybe this is just because they're broadcasters and they want to stay on the good side of them but like um who is our um uh our uh she hosted uh garbage time for a while although that was a long time ago oh katie nolan katie nolan did a whole bit on levitar just sort of like giving him like kind of pointers or whatever it's kind of stood out in my brain it was pretty funny but like basically everybody was saying like yeah a lot of work to do here but decent bones basically with repetition he'll get there when i hear him now he does stand out but just in a sort of flat way and the one thing that you said that i can relate to from my less intense sort of monitoring of the situation is acting like a human it just always sounds a little like Like he's doesn't he and this goes if he's in a TV commercial, if I see him bantering about something like, you know, in between plays, it always just seems very wooden. And that does stand out to me. Aside from that, though, I'm not paying probably close enough attention to get kind of like irked by the whole thing.

Well, yeah, I'm I would say I'm definitely my I'm south of irked, but north of where I was before yesterday. just in that I had never like I literally had a moment of like who's this guy with the kind of odd accent who's doing the call because that's the other thing isn't he from like Los Gatos, California or something. I don't know. I don't understand where Tom Brady's accent is also kind of mysterious to me. It's maybe his four years in Michigan were formative in some way. Like I can't quite place it. It doesn't sound Bay Area to me. It's he just he's got a kind of a it's a little bit of an odd affect just vocally. And and yeah, I just had heard a lot of people speculating. There's a there's a some pretty good sports shows podcast that The Athletic puts out that I listen to sometimes and one of them was a kind of mid-season critique or analysis of like all of the announcers and like basically you know who's who's ascending and who's falling and what what's going to happen in the world of announcing which sounds like an unbelievably niche conversation but I was so into it dude I was like painting over shitty wallpaper in my upstairs bedroom just Like, I will listen to a seven hour podcast about this, about with Greg Olson, who was supposed to be who was kind of the number one commentary guy until Tom Brady decided to just come in and Bigfoot him. But then Greg Olson was a good soldier. But now where does Greg Olson go? Like, this is this is the content that I really crave, if I'm being honest. But anyways, I still hadn't heard any of the Tom Brady stuff. So I was just I couldn't actually think about it in terms of my own experience with it. And last night I was just like, it's it's serviceable if you're watching a Pac-12, which rest in power, if you're watching a Pac-2 game, if you're watching Oregon State, Washington State, and they had grabbed like, you know, I don't know, somebody who had like been on one of the teams. That's one of the things about, and I know you probably don't watch a ton of college football. The funny thing about the college football on the regional level is there will be guys that that's where you're kind of building your resume if you're a former player. And oftentimes if you played at one of the schools in the league and you weren't particularly notable in the pros, you can still get further. Like, let's just say you were a big star in the Pac-12, but then you never really materialized in the NFL, but you're well-known. You have a lot of cachet in the Pac-12. You'll get to call, like, a Utah-Washington State game. It'll be like, Michael Bumpus is here. By the way, classic example. Michael Bumpus, not—I mean, he might have had, like, a game in the pros, but, like, big star at Washington State. And he's, you know—and by the way, I think he's pretty good at what he does. But all that is to say Tom Brady was operating at about the level of somebody I thought that should have been calling a Pac-12 game between a non-marquee Pac-12 game, not a playoff game that was like, you know, pretty important one that was going on.

Yeah, I guess that is an example. Again, there are other there are other players who jump right to NFL broadcasting. Not everybody comes up through that. But you're right. He has this sort of sound of that. I could see that it just again, like to me, it's just sort of flat. Like if I'm listening, I can sort of not think about I could sit here and just not think about the announcers all day. I could think about them or not think about them all day. But there is something about that. Tom Brady. Was it last night's game? Was it the Bucs game? No, it wasn't the Bucs game. Was it whatever? It was some game yesterday. I did notice, I'm like, oh, there's Tom Brady, because it stands out almost like, yeah, if something has a texture that, this is such a weird way of, wow, am I stoned on a Monday morning? I feel like the Tom Brady, what he brings to broadcast is if you're kind of like running your hand across something and it's got some sort of mild texture to it, and then you just hit sort of a flat, a smooth area. Yes.

that's the whatever you're smoking smoke the same amount of it tomorrow because that is an extremely that's an extremely good way to describe it it's like you're you're sort of like experiencing this one kind of texture of the the sonic texture of the game and then all of a sudden something's different in the texture hey speaking of texture yeah let's move did you see no we're not moving

oh did you see i told everybody i wasn't gonna turn the whole thing did you see no i think this

is kind of interesting actually this is not about football this is about a person who i believe may have ocd and i felt like it was being misunderstood or misdescribed last night did you see the kicker for the commanders grooming his hair before he put his helmet on before he kicked the final kick

you know again like to be i i was i was like kind of last night i watched that game exactly how i wanted to which is uh not how you would have wanted to but i came home from my pop-up gig and I was like oh I'm gonna get cozy I'm gonna have a few beers I'm gonna make I made like some stupid cheapo casserole but I just it was just something that had like a bunch don't overspend on casserole well no I mean I I made it myself I I painted myself into the corner of having to tell you what I was cooking which I didn't want to do because I was making that poor man's chicken parmesan again which is like yum it's not a frozen thing it's like I'm it's a very very simple, dumb thing. I call it poor man's chicken parmesan. but um it's just a very very simple thing but it has steps involved it's like gonna boil the noodles heat up the chicken you know it's like whatever it's like it's something that is like it was exactly what i wanted to do last i wanted to dial up the game because i was very interested in watching baker by the way this maybe speaks to my maybe my pathetic seahawks fandom or maybe just speaks to how much beer i had by the end of that game last night i swear watching baker lose that game and baker did lose that game in such a bakery way but also to see flashes yes and also to see flashes of baker connecting with mike evans in this way that like i was just like this is everything that i lived as a browns fan and i was devastated at the end of that i was so

mad at you last night for making me care i was i was in this freaking hotel room at the west end watching this game i literally almost texted you to say thanks a lot for making that thanks for making me feel some kind of way about this game were you bummed you're like dude i was gonna say

bummed that might have been the most and then when he doinked it in all i know and it hit the like because i don't know if you realize this i don't think the announcers mentioned this zane gonzalez was a browns kicker for a small period of time and he killed us i believe i could be wrong about this i think this has come up on the show before i think he destroyed us by missing some kicks in a in a new orleans in an important new orleans game years ago whatever zane gonzalez i could be wrong i'm often wrong about this shit but for some reason that name stands out to me as a kicker that i hated who wore a browns uniform for a while and for him to win that game over baker yesterday because when i'm when i'm rooting for baker i'm rooting for the for the for like the browns that could have been basically or the what did i call it one I'm going to text message to you, the Browns de-estima of one of Baker Mayfield.

It's like the man in the high castle. It's a sort of counterfactual. It's a counterfactual where it's like if the Browns management weren't so terrible and ownership, weren't so horrible and accepting of somebody who, by all accounts, is a sexual predator and bad at football, if they weren't those people, what could have happened? What could have been? We're just letting it play out in this other dimension.

And Baker had a great season. He threw, I think I mentioned this on the show recently, like he threw more touchdown passes this season than I think any Browns quarterback had thrown since maybe the maybe the pre Super Bowl era or maybe the 60s or 70s. Anyway, he had a really good season and I was like really rooting hard for him. And so to lose the game sort of in that fashion, I was so bummed last night. And just like you, then you're just like, dude, you just watched the Tampa Bay Buccaneers lose to the Washington Commanders. You don't you don't have the right to have feelings about this. This is not right.

But let's talk about Zane Gonzalez and his his obsessive. And I use that term advisedly, like his obsessive hair straightening. like i was watching it on national television i was like oh this is a person who has who has an obsessive compulsive tick that clearly is related to the pressure of this moment and it was very interesting to watch it unfold and then later i saw on like tiktok or something like espn or something tweeting the clip out not tweeting it but posting it on tiktok and saying like gotta get that hair right or something i was like no no no that's not what's happening here like this is like this is a compulsive tick we're witnessing yeah all of that is that's right i sorry i started

my jag there by telling you what i was cooking but it my experience of that game was me like kind of puttering around the kitchen watching it feeling cozy but also not like you know not staring at the screen constantly so i just i did not remember that at all until you said that i'm like that's right it was just sort of a you you uncovered a memory of me of him like kind of walking right it was him like kind of walking out onto the field to do the kick done yeah and he kept messing with his hair and then he finally puts his helmet on i didn't really like note it at the

time but it really did stand out it was like first of all his hair is very short so there's it's not like the kind of hair that you could even move it very much noticeably he didn't have like a part in his hair and then like a swoop of hair that he was getting just right it was him kind of pushing his pretty short hair over in a way that was indistinguishable visually and then he'd start to put his helmet on and then he'd take his helmet off and then he would smush his hair over again two or three times and then he would start to put his helmet on then he would take it off he did that probably five or six times as he walked out to kick the ball i'm seeing an

article here the real reason why zane gonzalez okay what are they saying here so well this is one of those janky websites what am i oh i'm on for the win i you that's the usa today um kind of sports blog here but it's like one of those things where it's more ads and photos than text And you can't tell where the text of the article is and where the text of, like, some sort of, like, ZurbNet shit is going on here. But let's see here. Yeah. A lot of folks notice Gonzalo is adjusting his hair a lot before putting on his helmet. Why did he do that? Was it good luck? Oh, my gosh. This is like a lot of people like to make baked potatoes. But why do they make baked potatoes? Is it because it reminds them of childhood or because they aren't getting enough starch? It turns out he's been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder or OCD. So that might have been the reason. This is terribly written. But, yeah, so there you go. I guess he is publicly.

Again, no, no, you know, no shade or whatever. I'm not trying to make light of it, but it was very clear that that's what was going on. And I thought it was interesting that ESPN, somebody at the helm of the ESPN TikTok did not understand that it wasn't just like, got to get the hair right. Like, you'll look at the guy doing this and you're like, yeah, this is in a different category and probably not something that we that we want to blast out as something kind of cutesy, but more as maybe you want to talk about awareness or something. But it's I just was like, is anyone at the wheel? Andrew, can I? I'm sorry. Can I take this to a totally unnecessary and slightly grim place on the subject of like how bad the media is right now, or at least parts of the media are?

Yes. But if you're going to get off the Zane Gonzalez thing, I just want to say again, I just watched it again in the context of this quote that he told ESPN in 2017. It makes you a perfectionist and more detail oriented on the field, the OCD. Then he says off the field, it's a pain in the butt. And then I'm rewatching this. And like, again, I sort of saw this yesterday and made this somewhere in the back of my brain. And I clocked it a little bit, but rewatching it now, like he goes to put on his helmet several times in a row and then like takes off, like he kind of, the helmet almost breaches his head. Then he takes it off and he met, this is very, very humanizing to me. And now it makes me feel terrible for any times that I hated Zane Gonzalez.

No, you are, listen, two things can be true. Yeah. He can, he can suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder and you could hate him for missing kicks as a clean ground, my friend.

But I also wonder if if you struggle with something like this, I mean, listen, the pain of anybody who misses an important field goal when this is your job and your position, it's probably a kind of pain that I have no associate that I can't even associate with. Like, it's going to suck no matter what. But I do wonder if struggling, you know, with an actual disorder makes that pain even even more painful for him. But what were you going to say about the broadcast?

Oh, God. No, it wasn't about the broadcast. which is about the general state of journalism because you were you were mentioning how in whatever that article you were just reading that was like he has mentioned he has obsessive compulsive disorder this could be part of it it's like no shit Sherlock but like again sorry this is I mean left turn doesn't even begin to describe how unrelated to anything we've been talking about today is but it's just like it's the zerg netification of the news by way of the internet By way of no one's minding the store By way of like It's just the death of quality Information and every once in a while I just Bump up against it in a way that just Frustrates me so deeply So This all starts yesterday Andrew when I'm still Back at my house sorry for all of the Sirens here we happen to be located In an Area near the federal building The federal courthouse here in San Diego And apparently there's a lot of emergency activity that goes on around here but yesterday i'm listening to a story on weekend edition by congressional reporter barbara sprunt at npr and the story is about basically how there's been swatting going on this it's about the questions of the safety of people in congress and i was immediately annoyed because two of the examples she uses are republicans and one of them is marjorie taylor green and the reason i was frustrated is because you could listen to that and you could think it's the republicans who are under some kind of unique threat when i would say if anything it's quite the opposite in terms of typically speaking which sort of political affiliation leans towards threats of violence right so it's just like barbara and her editor need to in my mind run this through the filter of what are we actually like not only what is the information but what is the larger impression we are giving with this piece if we do a story about how congress is under threat and the two primary examples we use are republicans how does that read to the to the listening audience and and so and so then she says and sometimes these so someone had swatted marjorie taylor green's home i.e they had called in like a bomb threat or a something to her home that was not real so emergency services responded you know and uh and i think it's barbara in her piece says and these uh these events are not or these events can be deadly and then it cuts to a clip of marjorie taylor green and she is saying yes when someone was when they were responding to this bomb threat

my home uh someone passed away in an accident and i was like that's a really weird way to describe that what do you mean someone passed away in an accident interesting huh and so can i guess or

should i just let you roll you know give give it a guess it what were they making some sort of argument about like um the first responders coming to her house so therefore they were not able to

respond to another place where somebody lost their life no but i would have absolutely also expected that um that is a very very solid guess what it was and i was like this is a weird and i said to becca i was like she's saying that in a very weird parsed way and i go i promise you i know what happened these jacked up militarized first responders by the way the barber's front piece is not even the journalism i'm mad at we haven't even gotten to that yet these jacked up militarized swat people that are driving these like up up armor up ram wrapped vehicles and are wearing a hundred thousand dollars of body armor at all times while they were racing the scene of this they probably killed someone on the roadway they probably crashed into someone with one of their bullshit vehicles and that person is probably dead and that's probably the the death that this swatting led to because of the quote accident. And so I had a little downtime at the airport and I did a little search. Sure enough, 65 year old woman killed by one of these SWAT people hitting her in her car and killing her. So first of all, the death that was caused by the, the, the, the swatting and nobody should be swatting even Marjorie Taylor Greene. We shouldn't be doing any of that stuff, but the death, I mean, the, I guess you could say that it wouldn't have happened if not for the initial call by the way these came from like russia or something they think i mean this isn't even like you know aoc fans in the u.s or like swatting marjorie taylor green this is stuff that's happening literally in other parts of the country or the world rather but like the death was some by my lights some out of control emergency law enforcement vehicle that probably weighs four times what it should because it's all up armored driving at some in some unsafe manner towards a thing that wasn't even real and then hitting someone and this kind of stuff happens all the time it happened in seattle with the police officer responding to something and killing a pedestrian because he was exceeding the speed limit he was only recently fired after like how many years of that incident happening

i'm gonna say at least two and you know that's the one also that they were um caught on tape immediately after that, literally laughing about it.

And that guy didn't lose his job yet, by the way.

The person who was laughing, the commander or whoever it was who had a connection.

I don't believe that person has lost their job. What do you say? This is not a— Here's the journalism piece.

This isn't a high-value one or something. He referred to human life that way.

Yeah, he was assessing the value of the victim based on her age, which is— Yeah, social standing. It's beyond the pale of anything that we could even criticize because it's so manifestly bad. But here's the journalism piece, Andrew. And this is, I think, really what everyone tuned in on this Monday to hear. On this day that everything else is going so great in the country and they like to turn to TBTL for just a little sunlight, just a little kind of moment of zen and fun. So I find this article because I wanted to figure out what happened with this. So I'm Googling around and I get to this ABC article. Maybe it's even from the local ABC station in wherever, Georgia or something. and the headline is woman dies after she collides with SWAT vehicle

after she collides

yeah after she crashes into SWAT vehicle and I thought well that is different than what I thought it was I thought I was like well that's you know I mean that's terribly unfortunate but I guess it could have been a little bit of a different scene than I had pictured in my mind and I had to read all the way the Zerg down this article Andrew through like 11 weirdly broken up paragraphs and ads for like a you know some kind of foot pain relief etc to find upon second reference that the vehicle very much crashed into her and i when i tell you that i wanted to like i found the person who wrote the article and i wanted to just like and this is about this is not even related to that incident this is related to a lot of feelings that i just carry around all the time about the state of this country you know this person at whatever the local abc affiliate or whatever it was that i was so close to just like sitting in pdx like sending them the most excoriating unhinged email saying do you not effing understand how big of a difference it is who crashed into whom if she crashed in of the SWAT thing, it's one thing. If they crashed into her, which is what happened, it's another thing. And like, how dare you be so careless with your job of writing this article that you just think that those both mean the same thing and that the first reference to it is that she was the one essentially at fault versus the real story, which is this other person was in my mind very likely at fault just based on what I know about the world. I was like, I was just sitting there burning up in the airport yesterday over this thing that I have no connection to because of what is just a general kind of, I don't know if you'd call it anxiety or anger or something that I'm just kind of walking around with all the time in my back pocket.

Yeah. And a sense of anxiety and a sense of sort of helplessness or may, I don't know if hopelessness is too strong of a word, but certainly that like, it feels like there's not a lot you can do. And it goes back to, like, I feel like in the past year especially, I have several times talked about how Instagram posts from people that I agree with were just starting to get to me too much. You know what I mean? Just too many people just screaming into the void. And also like this sort of and again, it must have something to do with the folks I follow who and the people I'm describing here, I just want to restate this, are people whose political and worldview, I guess, would kind of come from the left. And in most cases, I agree with and have and are just like either hammering home a specific issue, just like just, you know, important issues like in many cases, like what's going on in Gaza. And I think in that case specifically, it's just kind of like people are watching something they feel that is just absolutely abhorrent, and they have a feeling like they need to do something. Somebody needs to do something, and the only tool they have from their perch in Strongsville, Ohio, or wherever it is, is to just like post on Instagram because it's the only outlet they had. and for me as I'm scrolling and I just read you know slide after slide after slide after slide after slide of this and also then there's that sort of tone of like the the people who are sort of lecturing to the rest of us like let me explain to you why you should feel this way or whatever like it just started to really get to me and I don't I don't enjoy that in my social media doesn't mean that I disagree with these people but I just think it really comes from the sense of just like i don't i don't know what to do here like really bad shit is happening and like you know certainly since the election like i've been in i don't know man i feel like my personality has changed since the election i'm not joking like i feel like i'm really really battling going back to the very curmudgeonly if you can believe it like as a young man luke i was way more curmudgeonly than i am now i don't know if you could wrap your head around that or not but like i had a really really really bleak view of human nature and humankind as a young person it doesn't mean that I was going out like I wasn't a nihilist I wasn't you know but like I just internally logically if you just looked at human nature and the way people segregate themselves that's the wrong word sort of like the way people will always find outsiders there will always be a weaker class like there's just like I was just thinking about this this morning while listening to the news like a very immature conversation i had with a teacher at a pretty young age probably probably too old of an age to come into this with such naivete but i grew up in a pretty sheltered environment and without like kind of a lot of i don't know like a diversity of opinions or backgrounds or whatever where i grew up and i remember as probably in middle school or maybe very very early high

school saying to a teacher something along the lines of like well we just need generally speaking sort of like more integration and just like if everybody almost like making this really silly childish argument for like well what if race didn't exist what if we're all just like co-mingling so much that you don't have these dividing lines which is a really silly it's a very immature kind of approach to that but as a young person and I remember my teacher who I would I don't remember anything about this woman other than I liked her and she was a straight shooter and she said to me not in front of the whole class I said this to her privately as she was at my desk for some reason we were working on a paper or something and I remember saying that I'm just like well maybe if we just eliminate the divisions we can't even tell the difference between people anymore like we won't have this and she said well they'll just go after people with glasses then or something else and i remember just being like wow it's it is literally human nature to find a find a a a

weak a difference a difference in a week whether real real or or or created you know out of like obviously people talk about this a lot that race is a construct like we'll find something to decide who is the in-group and who's the out-group.

Yes, and I'm sorry I'm rambling here because I'm clearly all over the place, but I think that that maybe had... I don't know if what she said stuck with me because it shocked me or because it fit in with some notions that I was probably already maybe having in the back of my head, but it really it really stuck with me. And so anyway, I grew. I'm 48 years old now. I've had a lot of life. I've met a lot of different kinds of people. I've read a few more books. Hopefully I'm not that naive anymore. but now that I just sort of look at where we are as a nation and frankly as a world you're just kind of like yeah how can I have faith in humankind at all anymore like I'm literally losing my faith in humankind I mean this is getting really heavy we could talk about drones over the over the Ravens game again if you want to but like I'm literally talking about losing my faith in humankind for the second time in my life and I kind of don't know what to do with those feelings and so if you're having to bring it back together if you're having these overwhelming urges to write into write into an editor for the second time in a week i know your first one though that was a that wasn't an angry email but like clarifying uh glass cell park right and i don't think you should have any regret regrets over that or regerts over that but all of that is to say i think a lot of us are really struggling with what to do with this feeling of and i'll go back to saying the word helplessness again because it's like well what the hell are we supposed to do like we look around it doesn't feel fake it doesn't feel like oh somebody stole an election or this isn't who we are it's who we are right it's who we are and you can define we however

you want right yes uh that's i think about this a lot with the supreme court actually just this idea of like because now we all talk about well we all i mean people in from our persuasion we talk about the supreme court as being this kind of you know sort of this this thing that's in the pocket for donald trump and that is also just like bad people and it's like well uh what is it six of them are but it's like it's not that's not the whole court that's just the people that have the voting majority right now there is an elena kegan on there you know there are other people there is a katunji brown jackson there are great there are people that i have a tremendous amount of respect for that are on that court but we just say the court now and the court it's just like boo the court and i don't know why that it's i just feel like that's a microcosm of the american people like yes it is us as a country we did do this but like you didn't

do this i didn't do this yeah i mean but but i guess that i mean when you talk about when you talk about the microcosm of the court and then you broaden it out to say that also reflects the electorate like that's a really good point i don't i not that we're debating here i don't have any i don't have any counterpoint to that that's a good way of looking at it except the way the systems are built it's kind of like well it kind of doesn't matter if it's a razor thin margin if one side just can completely kind of trample the other as far and and that's how it feels to me and again maybe this is just my person i i i don't know man i i'm just struggling with this generally speaking, as we all are, most of us are like, I don't know what I like, let's say we get through these four years, and then somebody else who's more responsible as an office, ideally a Democrat, right? But like somebody who's not a demagogue, and just like just one of the most dangerous people like on the planet, right? Like, how do we look back at this? I'm old enough now to be looking back nostalgically at times when I thought I was that I thought I was already a completely um uh kind of developed adult you know i'm at this age now where i'm looking back at myself at other adult ages and i seem so young which is kind of a new feeling for me like feeling like i was a kid when i was in my 30s but like when i was in my 30s i was like well this is it yes i'm done you know and then looking back at that time this feels like it has to be it though

like is there any like we're freaking almost 50 dude like i just can't imagine looking back at

this and being like so young but ideally we will right and and the world around us and i kind of don't know what to look forward to other than like well hopefully we correct it a little bit again but when you just look at the broad scheme of things it's hard to see it's hard to see it bend towards

justice as we paraphrase a lot you know yeah well i mean just the and i we're not going to settle this here and i want to i want to oh speaking of man's inhumanity to man i'll just tell you that uh when we'll just if we can we'll just slide over we'll go from that into a different conversation about people being bad to each other when our plane was landing here in san diego i was on the uh like right side of the plane on the window and i was i was the i happened to have gotten upgraded um prayers up thanks alaska airlines it was the last nice thing alaska airlines would do for me in a long time but anyway i was so i am essentially like almost where the cockpit is i'm as close to the cockpit as you can be on the airplane bulkhead Well, yeah, the very front row of first class is the bulkhead, which is why I always, if there are some empty seats and I'm getting upgraded, I'm a 1F man like my father and his father before him, because it's even extra leg room, even by first class standards. We love it, because if you need to use the restroom, the other person does not have to get up, but you can be on the window. It's a pretty good spot to be in. I feel very privileged, et cetera, et cetera. we're land we're starting to land we're coming in and i look over and all the way across i'm not great with the geography of san diego but there's of course a huge kind of sort of bay in that that the downtown san diego kind of is built along and you've got coronado and you've got various naval stuff going on and anyway all this stuff over the water and then way in the far distance easily five miles away as the crow flies i look over and i see a green light flashing and it flashes right into my eye and my first thought was oh they're opening a nightclub over there like i thought oh it's one of those it's some kind of a uh you know thing that's being you know shot up into the sky in order to um promote something because that was the only you know your mind wants to find a rational explanation for something in a moment like that, or in a weird moment. Like, so I just thought, Oh, they're promoting a nightclub way over there on that peninsula out in the water. And then I realized, Oh, I was waiting for this green thing to whatever this like cycle to cycle through again, like one of those searchlights or whatever you call those things. Spotlights. I was waiting for it to cycle through again. Cause I was like, wow, that's pretty intense from over there. And guess what, Andrew, it never showed up again. Why? Because it was a green laser that somebody five miles away was trying to shine at the cockpit of the plane I was in. And it just so happened to hit me because I was very close to the cockpit and it was a wild experience. I could not believe that that actually just happened.

When you mentioned that at the top of the show, or maybe I saw it on the show sheet, I kind of can't remember the order of things. I was kind of curious. I wasn't sure if it was related to, I thought maybe this happened when you were over L.A. or something. when you were so now I thought it had to do with some emergency measures because the thing that strikes me about this and this is not what should strike me about this but the fact that it's green is interesting I literally this weekend while we were playing with bingo's favorite toy this red laser toy right which he literally will find and bring over to us and drop at our feet if we are ignoring him too much as if that cat couldn't get here is amazing um but anyway I was like why don't they make these in more colors like why is it always red and i even have this thought i might have even said it out loud to genevieve like maybe maybe they just don't you know maybe it has something to do with like i don't know wait literal wavelengths or infrared somethings infrared somethings god i love that record infrared somethings was that rem ah you know

i feel like it was like was that before or after murmur i feel like it was spin doctors

Little red something. Anyway, I just, I wasn't so, I didn't know, like, I assume there must be some difference between red and other color lasers. Maybe red goes further. I'm not sure, because I always picture them being red. I'm stuck here on a weird thing.

I think green lasers are brighter, better visibility in all lighting conditions, ideal for outdoor use. Green light also scatters more in the atmosphere than red light does, which is why amateur astronomers often use green laser pens to point out features. I've only heard – because this was kind of a thing that was happening for a while where there was, like, people with these green lasers on the ground trying to shine them in pilots' eyes. Oh, and they're always green?

You knew back then that they were green?

I'd always heard it referred to as green. I'd never heard of any other color. I have no idea.

This is the first I'm hearing – I mean, this is not the first I'm hearing about people screwing with planes in this way, and I've heard that it's very dangerous. But I always just pictured red. I didn't know that green was even an option. Anyway, that's not the point of your story, but that is pretty messed up.

It was just, it was, I mean, I've already told the whole story. That's it. There's no amazing end to it other than just this moment of like, it's weird when your brain is trying to, when your brain is trying to fit something into a context of other things it knows about. so again it's like it's a sunday night do you think that they're promoting a nightclub it's also like like the fact that i was just like man that's a that's a banging club happening over there in that otherwise residential neighborhood far away from us that was totally the story of my brain and i didn't even realize what had gone on until i realized it wasn't happening anymore right like it wasn't on some loop where you could see it going around and every 15 seconds it made its little thing it was just a one-time thing that went right into my eye luckily it didn't do any damage that i can tell it didn't like maybe it hit me at the right angle or the

wrong angle but i mean i looked right into it like they definitely shined that thing into the window

of one f of that alaska airlines flight yeah and yeah just for the sake of messing with planes

i was like do i tell the pilots about it i mean what can they really do about it i also didn't want to like if there was something if there was a report i needed to fill out by the way this shows you my level of civic engagement it it's it's called almost emailing an editor for abcnews.com and almost telling the pilots about a possible terrorist event i was like i had this urge just

to pound and pound on the cockpit door until they opened it up there's a little green men outside yeah calm down shatner

hey let's thank some donors i don't know if they knew they were sponsoring today's content but generally speaking they support tbtl and what we do apologies for everything i said before no

no no no no no no no just for some of it not for everything yeah no i was talking about everything

regarding football that's a we really did and again andrew i want to take the uh i want to take the l on this the l in luke stands for loss today i brought up football or at least i took us to a place with football and then immediately pivoted into a deadly accident involving marjorie taylor green and what did i expect would happen well let me just say this to wrap up because i

am embarrassed about that i just rambled and rambled and and talked about um losing faith in humanity which is a very heavy thing to say on a monday i think what is happening here is we are getting close to inauguration day i think i woke up this morning i was like wait when is that is that this week and i knew i know it's not but for a second and i think that may be part of it is like listen we're gonna have a long four years for people who care about things the way that we care about things and i think we're all spinning in our own way and you guys got to hear me spin out there for a little bit so my apologies i think it's a very very that's a very natural thing

andrew and i think our listeners can relate so please be nice to yourself about that and i mean i'm the one who was saying that i have anger that i don't know what to do with yeah that's not a spin out or a crash out as the kids say now i don't know what is um i know what is a very generous thing and that is what tyler teton of federal way washington is doing which is supporting the show tyler thank you very much appreciate you i have one of our yo go ahead sorry what were you gonna say one of our what so what i was just gonna make a lap and a low hanging and obvious joke that he's one of our grandest donors ah because the teton i was gonna

offer some information for tyler that might be relevant even better is um crash test dummies are coming to federal way on february 8th i happen to see an ad for that this weekend and I was distributing it amongst interested.

Once there was a guy who donated money to a podcast.

There you go. Now, here's the quiz for you. For some reason, this came up with, I don't know why I was talking to Camaro Kev and Roden about this a few weeks ago, and I don't know why it's been on my mind lately, but we've been talking about bands that sort of fit into that category. Spin Doctors, which I brought up already once on the show today. Crash Test Dummies.

A lot of spin doctors talk today.

Yeah, it really is. Oh, I think we were talking about, I think a while back, Kevin and I were talking about the intersection of Blues Traveler and what's the other one? Counting Crows? Very close. I would put Counting Crows as the third leg of the stool. You have Darius Rutker.

Hootie and the Blowfish?

Did I get his name right? Darius Rutker? Wow, I came very close. Yes, Hootie and the Blowfish. Weird that I can think of his name before Hootie. But either way.

Well, he's had a very, very successful solo career covering that one Old Crow Medicine show song. He's had an entire solo career called Doing Wagon Wheel.

But anyway, can you name the other Crash Test Dummies single? Because I believe they had two hits.

Okay, so that song, the one I just sang is called, I think it's literally called Mm-mm-mm-mm. Is that correct?

I think so. I think so.

They had another one?

let me see here if i'm right that was popular i believe that i would have heard of

interesting i mean i'm sure in here i'm sure it's playing in the eqc ad right well i i saw

an instagram ad for it if you can believe it the name of the record was god shuffled his feet okay um let's see here maybe i'm wrong about this i thought they had one other hit that we all

sort of you know got you're not thinking of like the you're not thinking of spin doctors who had jimmy olsen's blues but then also had pocket full of kryptonite but then no no that's the same one sorry but then also had little miss can't be wrong and also had

two princes two princes exactly they had three here god shuffled his feet album maybe i'm wrong about this i set this up as a quiz and god shuffled um swimming in your ocean no now i've

got are you thinking of dish walla tell me all your thoughts on god because i'd really like to meet her luke mind blown think about it think about it okay anyway i guess i don't i guess i

don't have an answer to my own quiz question i thought eliza kurtz knows the answer eliza

kurtz help me save me in wilmington delaware thank you eliza eliza if you have so the the the thing you and camaro and rodent were talking about was basically like bands from that era who had a surprising number of hits or specifically two hits although maybe people would think of

them as a one hit i don't know how it came up but here's what i know okay at one point i was watching an arizona rams game with camaro and v's back to see if the seahawks had any chance of making it to the to the play i was watching that game we were watching that game together the three of us and for some reason i believe john popper came up and kevin let me know that john popper was lives in like north bend or yeah because he was arrested with a van full of guns up in like some community in north seattle like really recently no like here let's see here how did

this john popper do's escape because dude i wrote an entire college paper on the video for the blues

traveler song the hook a blues traveler singer arrested near spokane county line this is from the spokesman review one of your favorite papers to write into i believe um in glasser park march of 2007 blues travel blues traveler singer and harmonica player john popper arrested the vehicle he was riding in was uh clocked going 111 miles per hour um i don't know about the guns thing that's just sue camaro kev if i'm slandering him suck it in suck it in if you're in tintin or amblin oh is that really the lyrics oh i didn't realize that oh it is anyway sure is that's what got us onto that which then got us under the little miss can't be wrong for some reason i probably had the darius rucker that was written about his stepmother who he had a bad relationship

with no i didn't spin doctor little miss yeah she told him apparently that he would never amount to anything in the music industry and he wrote little miss can't be wrong about his stepmom wow little

bacon um or what was that kid's name like kind of little bacon who's that little kid who's like yelling at his stepmom in in family swap that he used to use as a drop all the time his well yeah

Not his real mom, but, yes, his wife swap, his, like, pretend mom for the week. But, yeah, that was some real little bit. You're right. Spin Doctors with some real little bacon energy.

You know what? Spin Doctors walks a little bacon could run. I am sorry. I'm going to shut up now. Let's get going. That's actually great. I actually like that.

Michael Muelling loves it. He's in Mount Lake Terrace, Washington. Thank you, Michael. Also, a big thanks to Serena Roberts, who's in Tacoma, Washington.

I know some bands have to be coming to Tacoma pretty soon. I just don't know who they are right now.

Well, I mean, that's the thing. You've got, because of the expansion of the local casino scene, you have the Emerald Queen Casino, the Northwest's, what, biggest and best in the Northwest or whatever they say, that's straight up Tacoma. That's when you're on I-5 and you are driving through the heart of Tacoma, basically that's right there then you've got the muckleshoot that's out in that's out in more auburn area so you've got different you know if they're coming to eqc there's a good chance they're

coming to where serena is in tacoma oh my god you know who's coming to this is crazy where's he coming uh to come albert no airport tavern music hall mickey avalon on january oh my do you want

ago my degeneracy yes is it a time machine is it a time machine that will take me back to 20 years ago when i was just vibing with mickey avalon and living in la and and not living that lifestyle but certainly admiring the debauched nature of mickey avalon's whole scene i remember a very

debauched i don't know if you remember this night a very debauched night of him he he was up here at the show box and you and me and a big group of friends went a long time ago that was a mickey where's the airport music hall airport tavern music hall is um is that in the in like south seattle or something well no it's tacoma washington sorry i was looking up upcoming shows in tacoma in case serena wanted to go there i wonder what that would be like for those of you

who don't know mickey avalon is this kind of i guess you would say rapper would be his style of music i don't know rapping sing rapping but like it's kind of over the place but he was just this kind of like real kind of heroin thin white guy with a bunch of tattoos who was just doing these songs that were actually very catchy but they were just all about just a life of of drugs and and and womanizing and god knows what and it just really had a moment i want to say in the like maybe 2005 to 2010 era or something it sounds about right to me yeah but i'm wondering how that holds up because i believe my guess is mickey avalon is roughly our age like can you imagine like a shirtless tatted luke on stage still doing those songs it just feels like it's the kind of thing that doesn't it doesn't travel along with you

into your say 50s yeah exactly yeah he's almost 1975 he was born so um yeah difficult to pull off

it's not it's not it doesn't have a long shelf life like it's one thing when you're 29 and And you're just, I don't know what You're in a moment of that But as you get closer and closer To retirement I think the music is a tougher and tougher sell

Although I guess Iggy Pop would have something to say About that as well

Iggy Pop has actually just transcended All of it You know what I mean? I mean that literally I mean that unsarcastically Iggy Pop Has gone from being a total maniac You know, a younger person who was a total maniac to being a middle-aged person who's a total maniac to being a very senior citizen who remains a total maniac remains shirtless on stage and just has he's he's just pushed through to where it it now once again is transgressive what he's doing yeah the most

transgressive thing is he sold his song to royal caribbean his song about heroin yes but i mean

it's like there was 20 years in the middle where it was like all right iggy but now he's back to being like it's back to being shocking when Iggy Pop does his thing

yeah I don't know if he ever lost it I'm not deep into the Iggy Pop-ness of it all but yeah no I feel like he I don't know I wouldn't necessarily argue that he ever really kind of lost it I feel like he kind of just just doubled down and tripled down and remained true to who he is and that is who he is

absolutely and also Sarah Newlin is who she is in Bothell Washington oh for

Probably for like a day or something, right? A couple of days?

The original title for that song was Lust for a Day or a Lifetime.

Famously.

See, I was able to connect all the dots of our donor. Thanks. Thank you, Sarah. And then thanks to Myra Lovell, who's in Portland, Oregon, one of my very favorite places to fly back to tomorrow. And one of my favorite donors. Thank you, Myra. And hopefully I won't get lasered. It will be in the daytime, so I'm guessing that it'll be less likely. Although by the time I land in Portland, God knows, if it's past four o'clock, it could be getting dark again. I could be in danger once again. But thank you, Myra. We really do appreciate you. Thank you to all of our donors for making TBTL possible. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Just a quick follow-up. This is not a particularly interesting or profound thing to say, But I did we did end up flying over some of the affected areas of the greater Los Angeles area last night, which I was like really, really I was kind of obsessively tracking on my phone and nobody else seemed to care at all, which I found very odd. Like, you know, when you're you're flying on one of these flights, you can do the flight tracker. Right. So you can kind of see like where what the route of the airplane is and also where you are on that route.

it doesn't really matter for this story but i'm curious are you talking about like the actual flight aware like software that i used to use to watch the planes that would fly above us are you talking about the the app that is associated with the airline are you talking about the tv on the

back of the screen around the back of the seat rather no tv on the back of the seat on alaska airlines um anymore it's all like uh byot bring your own tablet i think bring your own device So it would be the Alaska, if you buy the Wi-Fi on your phone, actually, I don't know if you have to buy the Wi-Fi, but if you log into whatever the system is there, where you can get free texting, or you can pay eight bucks and get the Wi-Fi, you then also, once you're engaged with their Wi-Fi system, it's showing you this map. Yep. But it's on their website or whatever you want to call it. Yep, I know what you're talking about. That's what I was looking at. And because we were flying to San Diego, it's certainly not the same as flying into Los Angeles as far as the route you take. You kind of go more down central California. You come over like Palmdale and Lancaster and then eventually kind of cross the mountains near Burbank, which is actually where on the other side of those mountains is where a lot of this stuff was. And what I was struck by was I didn't actually see any flames, which is what I was expecting to see. I don't know if it's because the.

smoke was obscuring the flames. I don't know if it was because of the angle that we took. We actually missed the parts that are still actively on fire. But what I can tell you, Andrew, is we flew over the Palisades and it is eerie because think about how like the greater Los Angeles area, LA County, Ventura County, all these places, they are lit up all night. There are so many people living and there's in these homes there are so many streets there's so many street lights there's just it the grid of it all the the the illuminated grid of life in southern california when you're flying over it at seven o'clock at night is intense and then there's just this giant smoldering dead black section with nothing in it because i mean not only is there not electricity there there are no homes there there are no street lights there there's nothing it was like a it was like a moon crater of non-illumination it was really really eerie not what i was expecting at all i thought maybe again i was expecting to see a bunch of active fires and i'm not sure why it was we didn't see that if it had to do with the angle of approach or again maybe the smoke was obscuring it but again it was the it was the the the fact that this area had no street lights on no homes that were lit nothing that really brought it home to me for some bizarre reason of just how intense and and and and thorough the destruction of this area was and did you say

there was sort of there seemed to be a lack of interest from the fellow passengers well i i mean

everybody gets to live their life but i was like obsessively refreshing this thing to figure out where we were because i was like we're about to fly over the thing that is consuming the national conversation right now for good reason and a natural disaster that's on the high you know it was on an incredibly high order as far as the effect on people and most people were just kind of like watching their movies on their iPads or something I don't know what I expected them to do but it was like I was just I just felt like I was maybe the people behind me were doing something and I didn't know it I just thought it was going to be more of a conversation I almost was trying to think through, like, if I'm the pilots, do I say something? You know, like normally if you're flying past Mount Rushmore, the pilots will tell you out of the left side of the plane, you can see Mount Rushmore. I was really having this whole conversation in my head, like, is it actually socially responsible of the pilots to say, hey, in about five minutes, if you're on the right side of the plane and you look out, you'll be able to see some of the areas that were damaged by the fire. And if there's something you think you can do as far as supporting various organizations, we really encourage you to do that like is it actually socially responsible of the pilot to

sort of make us look at it you know it's a lot to ask of them i think yes and they didn't make an announcement it really probably depends on the personality of the pilot as you know from flying a lot like some personalities have much bigger personalities did i say personally some pilots have much bigger personalities than others and um uh i i think i bring this up all the time i think i just brought this up last week the new yorker cartoon of somebody sitting in their seat in an airplane and you hear the announcements saying this is your captain speaking and this is your captain singing yeah this is really i've gotten that pilot before on southwest yeah i think that um artist's name is asher i can't think of his first name right now but um anyway uh all of that is to say i could see a pilot if they had something to say if they were from there if they had some but also it is a it is a um it is a tough message and so you know i i also don't think that it's like the responsibility of the pilot to craft kind of you don't know who is yes is on totally not like what your audience is if anybody has been affected by it who doesn't you know what i mean like you gotta i i don't think it would have been out of place for somebody to say something there if it was well worded but i don't think it's their

responsibility to yeah i didn't expect them to but again i just was like we're flying over this this thing that is you know the biggest story in america i would say and and also again like i don't know to just sort of bear bear witness to it that's a weird way to put it but just i think it would be good for everyone on the plane to to look at this and to and to observe it just so that it hopefully impacts how we think about our fellow man and uh you know where we build homes and i'm not saying that to try to blame the victims the people who've lost their homes that's not even the point i mean i do think we need to have a big conversation about about where homes are rebuilt and also what amount of fire load is allowed to to develop you know in these areas and places like I mean, that's something that I didn't realize before. I mean, I sort of knew it maybe generally, but something that I've been kind of getting obsessed with, there's this article called like...

It's called, like, the argument for letting Malibu burn, and that sounds very aggressive, and it's not saying, like, burn down everyone's houses, but it's like, I mean, the basic problem is, it turns out, Andrew, I don't know if you know this, but the issue here is not trans firefighters. Are you sure? I know you've been saying that. To anyone who will listen, you've been saying these fires have been intense because of DEI programs.

I didn't think it was tied to DEI in some way.

I just wanted to tell you, I've been doing some research. It turns out it's not. Turns out that's not the issue. It sounds like you can't say anything anymore. It's just, you know, you have the cycles that happen. I mean, first of all, this is just an area that traditionally, like before we got here, it just burned down once every 10 years, you know, just that happened. And that kept because there were no firefighters, there were no hydrants, there was no people trying to put the fires out. There were indigenous folks, but they were kind of had it figured out. They let these burns happen because once everything burned down, then it it meant that you were never going to have a crazy bad fire because the the biomass and the fire load was relatively low. But because we now fight every single fire because we build houses everywhere and then we can't stand to have a fire there for good reason. I wouldn't want a fire burning down my house either. We then put the fires out and then the answer becomes make sure there is never an ignition. so we now we live in a tinderbox and as long as literally there's never a lightning strike or a spark anywhere we're going to be okay and clearly that isn't effective i will tell you this my latest obsession now is in trying to figure out how to fire harden my house yeah you do live in

that it's funny these stories are always um they're always personal to hear about and of course it's like we were talking about last week you and i both know a lot of people in la in the la area and it's personal in that way, but it always feels remote to me as far as my own exposure to danger. I've just been lucky in that way.

Yeah, I know that I'm centering myself in the story because all of these people have lost their homes and people from, I can't stress this enough, and everybody knows this at this point, from a wide, wide range of income spectrums. It is not exclusively the super wealthy who are losing their third home that is happening sometimes but it's a lot of people that are really really really on the margins and they're also losing their homes and they don't have nearly the ability to bounce back but so that's what's happening and then somehow my takeaway from it is google's is a metal roof good for fire hardening like i become weirdly obsessed with the like i don't know handful of people who ignored the evacuation warning and just stayed at their house with a garden hose hosing their house down like somehow that I don't know why today is so much about like unmanaged anxiety and where do we point that or where do we put it but like I see this stuff and then I think man I've been I've been working so hard and spending so much of my money on trying to fix up my little house which is by the way sitting on a hill surrounded by by wild grass like if a if a fire in the summer were to start coming up the hill it would be a really bad scene and so then I start like thinking well I need to create a defensible space around my house I need to get metal roofs I need to set up a sprinkler system like I just go into this weird mode of trying to like protect myself because I don't know what to do about my feelings around these other people who've lost their homes and lives as they knew it

you had and i think it's okay to say this because i think you mentioned on the show but i'll be i'll be a little bit veiled here you had a family member who also lives in a wooded part of the state my sister yeah okay i wasn't sure and her husband talking about that and they had a real threat like that that was one of those times where it's like oh shit this stuff really comes home it's not just something that you read about in the papers or you see you know people who are like um you know physically distant from you dealing with in a different part of the country when you were talking about like your sister weren't they like were they wetting down parts of their buildings or do they have an outbuilding or a house that they were actually hosing down or

am i am i exaggerating that no they were they were they live in in in washington state in a very wooded area kind of in the columbia gorge area it's called and there was a fire that was working its way up a like a ridge if you will and it was one of those things where and they had just finished building this incredibly beautiful home they they bought this great piece of property they lived in a yurt like with bunk beds literal bunk beds so my my sister and her husband on the lower bunk bed and then their two rapidly growing sons on the upper bunk bed and then the dog Cora in whichever bunk bed she felt like getting into that night for years. years while they saved money and got plans permits approved and basically ended up after all the sacrifice building this really lovely home and literally like the next summer there's a fire that's working its way towards them that depending on which way the wind blows could either burn their whole house down or or go harmlessly in this other direction obviously it went harmlessly in the other direction at the like 11th hour but like i mean it's just it's crazy now they live you know they live out in the in in the woods and it's sort of the kind of thing where it's i mean i don't want anything bad to happen to their house but what's so crazy it seems about a lot of these wildfires whether it's the like lahaina stuff um is in these urban environments is like urban environments burning down now like wildfire i always thought of it as a thing that happened in the woods but like now we've got uncontrolled fires within urban settings where just houses are burning down like in neighborhoods i mean that's that's the part that i'm still trying to wrap my mind around like i you know it seems incredibly remote that like your house would be in danger andrew but could you imagine a world in which seattle is burning down and you're just

like shit it's in greenwood right exactly and then the fact that i mean i know that i you and others have done a lot more reading on this probably than i have but just this idea that one article the how and now i'm an expert um no that just like that's all i need i could be i i shouldn't even say this i miss maybe misinterpreting the facts here but that it's notable that it's the buildings themselves that are carrying the fire for that the fuel the fuel that is extending it is no longer the the outskirts the vegetation the trees or whatnot in fact there are cases where there's actually green trees on the outskirts that are not burning because now it is actually the structures that are like it's it's going from structure to structure and that's the fuel that

seems to be an outlier i remember being um of all things doing a tv story about jim belushi's pot farm you know the kind of hard-hitting journalism that america turns to me for and um but what he really wanted to talk about which i kind of actually admire this was uh down where his pot farm is uh it also is near some areas of oregon that were burned by wildfire some neighborhoods in like a city or town called talent oregon and a place called i think phoenix oregon somewhat ironically and he and i went down and just walked around in these neighborhoods and it was just wild because again it was a neighborhood not dissimilar from the one you and vives live in and then to just think that this fire, these fires, if they get going within an urban environment are also not easily controlled and could just take out, you know, an entire city or whatever. I mean, it's just, it's, uh, I'm not saying anything interesting here other than just, I guess, processing live on the air, but it's just, it's just crazy. It's just, it, it just isn't, uh, it doesn't feel like the same world that I grew up in. And maybe just to go back to our kind of original to the original dark note that we started things off on um maybe that's what you maybe oh dude i didn't even get into the snoop dogg commercial that's on my last nerve can we can we end can we end on a positive note which is dunking on a snoop dogg commercial absolutely yes yes something that means nothing which is really honestly our lane instead of all of this uh heavy duty stuff that for some reason i decided to unload on a monday um okay have you noticed this andrew that snoop dog has now twice leaned into the i'm gonna say something that sounds like something extreme but i'm actually not it's something else do you know what i'm

talking about here well the first thing i think of um is a while back on instagram he said i'm going smokeless and we're like what is this gonna be like he's gonna be i think a lot of people myself included thought oh he's like advertising some sort of weed vaping thing because like it would be a big headline if snoop dog didn't smoke weed anymore but then it ended up being for those um what's the brand name i have one the smokeless fire pits um in the backyard it was all just a promotional thing which we all knew but the fact that solo stoves solo stoves yeah and i think he was sponsoring that i'm going smokeless and it got literal literally journalistic yeah enterprises had a headline, Snoop Dogg says he's going smokeless, which was just so idiotic from the outset.

So now T-Mobile is assaulting us with a commercial where Snoop Dogg is now, I guess, a news anchor, and he's like, Patrick Mahomes is hanging it up. Oh, yeah. And then everyone's like, what? And then he's like, hanging up his old cell phone carrier and moving to T-Mobile. It's like, how many times are they going to write something where the premise is Snoop Dogg says,

Thank you.

something and and you're supposed to for a brief second misinterpret it to be something truly shocking when in fact it's not truly shocking like how did that get that far up the chain at

t-mobile now have you what was i listening to a lot of it's probably sports podcasts have you heard any of the audio versions of the snoop dog um radio t-mobile commercials no and you know they were leading up to the holidays i'm sorry i'm uh being even more inarticulate again as i google around here but here i think hold on let me just see if this is it's like it's like snoop dog they had him record a bunch of phrases i'm not joking i think this might have been how they did it they had him record a bunch of phrases and then they had like some sort of like very white sounding radio guy saying stuff like this about t-mobile oh i think i saw or heard one of

And I will tell you this, I was impressed at Snoop Dogg's white guy impression.

Oh, did he see the version I'm thinking of? I don't know that he did one. He was just like, yeah, that's right, dog. And be like, hold on, Snoop. Hold on. Let me see if this is the version.

It's time to review the top three highlights of the day. I'm joined, as always, by my co-anchor, Snoop. Hey, what up, dog?

Snoop number one has to be getting the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence at T-Mobile. Yeah, you should hustle down at T-Mobile like a dog chasing a squirrel chasing a nut. Nice analogy, Snoop Dogg. do love to chase squirrels and squirrels love to chase those nuts on to highlight number two with t-mobile families can save 20 every month versus the other big guys that is very impressive you know y'all can take some of those savings and buy some snoop merchandise that's exactly what

i'm planning on doing with my savings snoop now take it away snoop head to t-mobile.com so this

is a different version than what i've heard but i've heard bits of it it's like all been it's been chopped up and little bits of it but like where i swear there is a version where it's so chopped that it's just him saying something snoop-esque and then they're guys saying like slow down snoop doggy dog it is so but it's those i would love i want the oral history on

where physically snoop recorded those wild tracks yeah right like was it did he go into like first of all what was the actual duration of time that took him and did he actually go into a studio for Or was part of the deal, we're going to send a guy and a shotgun microphone out to Snoop Dogg's hotel room, and these are the 20 wild tracks we need from you, wild lines? Because the only way Snoop Dogg can be generating as much content as he is, is it just must be the kind of thing where he is literally obligated to be doing something for 15 minutes. He just rolls up somewhere, they throw up a green screen behind him, they feed him the lines, he says them three times, and he's out.

and you know I'm a little bit let me just can I just try one more of these this might be the same exact one I will give them credit that I think part of the bad sound quality of that one a little bit echoey might be like it's hard sometimes to find TV commercials online but radio commercials are especially hard to find online because nobody's archiving radio commercials publicly in that way so I think that the sound quality in that one might have been worse than even like what I've heard on podcasts it might have been whoever captured it but let's take a listen to this

with T-Mobile you can get tons of benefits and still save on every plane versus AT&T and Verizon

no this has nothing to do with Snoop Dogg sorry another example of just terrible sound quality

I want to shout out that they hired the world's best sound alike band to write a song that sounds like 1901 by the band Phoenix that commercial every time it gets me I'm like oh they used a Phoenix song nope they use something that sounds exactly like the phoenix song i don't think i can call this up

right now i think about you sometimes because i've been thinking about like is there a way i can i think about you when i'm in the shower and i'm lathering up and um usually the first thing i think of when i wake up and you're trying to make me uncomfortable you're making me more comfortable i'm getting too comfortable there is some music okay this might be it let me see if i can do this because you will be, if I can do this right, you will be so appalled. What is this?

No one gets mad at a sound-alike like old LB.

This isn't even a sound-alike, and I don't know if this is going to be right or not. But, Luke, as you know, and I can't complain about this because I'm grabbing these NFL streams. Almost every game I watch this weekend, I grab from some sort of, like, you know, gray market link, and that's probably giving it too much credit. Fubo yourself.

Just why don't you Why don't you Fubo yourself like everyone else Like I cannot tell you Andrew the reason I was able to watch Every one of these games Anytime I was just like waiting in an airport Whatever pop open my cellular phone Hit that damn Fubo app Watch whatever game is on It's a game changer The mobile thing

is tempting but honestly like the the i have a site now that's pretty locked in like once you find a stream you're pretty much good like it's not it's not terrible although it was funny you texted me you're like i was looking for this game and it turns out it's on prime i'm like oh my god i have prime i pay for prime i was watching it i was watching it on a illegal stream like i can move over and one of the things that is the most annoying about the illegal streams that i watch is and this has nothing to do with their legality it's just that they're often grabbed from the nfl network i think and the nfl network will not show commercials i don't know why what the deal is they didn't sell that time or whatever so you'll see the very beginning snippet of a commercial and then it goes to a screen that just i believe shows some sort of like i don't know sort of like black and white version of the nfl shield or logo or something like that and the loudest most obnoxious music plays on loop it is like it is like hold music if it was created literally by the devil like it is it is like it loops but it also is very intense and then it has a beat drop and i don't think i'm looking for this on the fly i've been meaning to talk to you about this for a while but i did not want to luke i didn't want to do it like this i wanted to be prepared for it i wanted to have the real audio, but I'm going to try. And if this is a failure, I'm not going to keep clicking around. If this is a failure and this is not the right music, then I am going to look for it and I'll have it for you tomorrow because it is so awful. Let's see if this is it. Yes. Ooh, nice needle drop, dude. Hold on, let's see if we get to the beat drop.

Ha, ha, ha. this doesn't get you hyped luke this doesn't get you hyped for for chargers falcons luke that so

apparently it is exactly 30 seconds and they loop that for an entire three or four minute commercial break and like you're just like you know again like i'm most of i'm doing most of my kind of football watching in the kitchen i'm maybe making coffee and hot chocolate for pop-up or i'm making dinner making eggs whatever like i'm always doing something and then i have to race across the because it's also louder than the broadcast of course so i have to race you have no idea like i am willing to give up i don't even have state secrets i am willing to give up state secrets hearing this on the loop for like four times in a row it is absolutely maddening i wonder why

from a technical standpoint they even think there needs to be music that's a good point i mean it

might be a cue so that when the if it just goes quiet me well no because somebody switches over

i mean i feel like this is all gonna be automated like i wonder why it would even because this is the nfl network so if you let's say you were paying exorbitant fees to watch but you would be seeing commercials presumably if you were watching this on real television right or is is this because they're not doing this to like paying subscribers those people are getting ads

No, that's the thing. The music that we're hearing now has nothing to do with the fact that I'm grabbing these streams illegally. It's just somebody grabbing their NFL network stream and putting it up there. So that's happening on the NFL network. That's my point, yeah, because there wouldn't be consistency. Oh, that's grotesque. No, this isn't like some bootlegger. Give me commercials. Why would a bootlegger care to do that?

Give me the Buffalo Wild Wings guy doing an obvious Will Arnett impression. Oh, God.

We're talking about sound-a-likes. I don't even know if I, the Buffalo Wild Wings one, I don't know if I've seen, but I did see Will Arnett.

Have you heard the, where the Buffalo, there's a Buffalo with wings and he is.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that commercial.

So clearly doing a Will Arnett impression, because Will Arnett is like, other than H. John Benjamin, he's the only VO artist we can turn to in these turbulent times. He's doing like everything, Reese's, whatever that truck is, Ford, it's like, it's a vibe. It's a Will Arnett vibe. And then they were like, clearly the Buffalo Wild Wings people were like, we want Will arnett we can't afford will arnett we're gonna get hire a guy to do a will arnett impression as the

buffalo he's also on screen doing stuff for dick's sporting goods now i saw that this weekend for the first time he's doing he's in some um commercials with him and the geico gecko commercial i don't know if those have maybe sunset now but like yeah will arnett man he is um just on every single commercial and i love that man but i gotta say i don't love i don't i hate the reese's commercials I hate the, like, not sorry, you're welcome. Having said all of that.

I was today years old when I learned about these.

Adulting. I've decided that adulting is my least favorite word ever. All the things, Andrew.

Would you say they're doing all the things in those ads?

But, yeah, no, that NFL music I played for you is what the NFL. It's my understanding that that is what the NFL network plays.

And I don't know why they don't play commercials. It must have to do with rights. They didn't sell that time, so they're not going to give it free to Reese's.

I know, but I feel like that's a disincentive for me.

People get mad when I say Reese's, and I think those people hate fun, by the way. I think it's so much more fun to say Reese's. I don't care. Than what, Reese's? Yeah, it's like Reese's. It's Reese's Pieces. But it's fun to say Reese's Pieces. I would have said Reese's. Reese's Pieces. Yeah, Reese's Pieces. It's fun.

Everybody just have some fun with it.

Come on.

You guys, honestly, we're one of the most fun podcasts out there. Did you hear today's show?

Come on, I've had a hell of a day.

Come on, you guys. I mean, this is a fun little frolic on a Monday.

Yeah, what are we doing? Let's get out of here.

On tomorrow's program, Andrew, I would like to talk to you about this. And I don't know if you had a chance to read it or not, but if not, maybe you will see it by tomorrow.

I scanned it, but I need to really read it.

It's a phenomenal story and a phenomenal piece of reporting that I can't believe has not gotten more attention, which is a dude who has been actively hating on Bob Dylan for 40 to 50 years, who is taking the recent ascendance of Bob Dylan's image with the Complete Unknown movie as his cue to re-engage with his lifelong project. It's every I was reading. I was like, there's no way this is real. I can't. This is amazing to me. So we'll talk about it tomorrow and also why I feel like I might have to move to San Diego, Andrew, and it involves sunshine, the military industrial complex. I bet you weren't expecting those words.

No, not at all. I really thought we're going to a weather thing there.

Nope. Well, that's listen, that's number two with a bullet, but it has to do with with shiny, shiny ships, which I'll tell you about tomorrow. In the meantime, that's going to wrap things up for today's episode. Thank you for listening. If you made it to the end tomorrow is going to be just. High fives and good feelings and San Diego energy, I promise. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves, particularly if you're in one of the affected places in this country, weather-wise, fire-wise, et cetera. And we hope to see you tomorrow when we'll be back here with more Imaginary Radio. In the meantime, please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.