Muse

Well, well, well, well, well. If it isn't the big-time hotshot lawyer, man. Oh, my God. I do not have time for you. Yeah, sir, we both have busy schedules, so I'll make this quick. A shot mince words with you for long. I am challenging you, sir, to a duel.

I accept. Are you serious? No, I accept your challenge.

Do you want time to think it over?

No. Nope, nope, nope, not at all. What time were you thinking of dueling?

Anytime is good, really. I don't know. You don't have time, because you would have to go out and get a proper gun.

No, I have a gun. I actually keep one right here in the drawer.

You got one right there? I don't need to see it.

I like to keep it loaded, because you never know who's going to walk into a law office these days.

Safety first. So, let's rethink some things. TBTL.

Good afternoon and welcome to Judgment City. You've just had quite a little journey, so for now, relax and enjoy the ride.

I swear, every time this guy talks, all I hear is a turkey goblin. You look like a matlock. No, I look like a young Paul Newman dressed as Matlock. It's not great. It's fantastic. You totally undersold it. The pageantry, the costumes, wow.

Now, that is obviously what is clear that our view is we don't support that view.

It stinks.

All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

This song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the world.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host, coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio where we've got both of the heaters running, but it is cold in here. I'm trying to keep my hands in operation here so I can play these little audio drops. It's like a frid- Frid- Frid- Frid- Frid-

Frid-

Your frid- Frid- It's like a frid- Frid- Frid- Frid- Frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- It's like a frid- like that's some kind of nautical term maybe anyway here we are it's episode 4381 in a collector's series let the fun begin i was in san diego yesterday very different weather situation down there i'm not going to lie to you and of course had to fly back on my beloved alaska airlines back up here to the madrona hill studio and um it's it's really hard when an institution a company that i've loved so deeply is doing me so dirty right now i'm talking about my pitched

battle with my favorite airline i'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore also um i've

been trying to get to this story for the last two days about a guy who has been like sort of a professional bob dylan criticizer so explain that like there's this dude who's probably about bob dylan's age and for a significant portion of his life and career which is encompasses the same amount of time of bob dylan's life and career they've been in this bizarre sort of enemies but it's almost i don't know it's like uh who was that movie that um best of enemies that was about like gore vidal and william f buckley they're sort of best of enemies they seem to be on each other's nerves all the time but also have a familiarity anyway we'll talk about this and we'll play you some tape of these two guys talking on the phone from back in the like 1960s or something also we're going to talk to this guy longest running co-bro of the show please welcome the wickedly talented he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning

luke i was a little distracted during your intro i don't know if you saw this we don't have time to get into it here at the top of the show but maybe uh later on or maybe even tomorrow i got a very long email from a listener about some sky jinx that her husband was directly involved with and i gotta be honest with you it's a very very long story all in text and when i see a very long email like this i'm like this is probably a good story but maybe a little bit too long for tbtl but i was on the edge of my seat during your intro reading this thing in fact the audio levels were jacked up at the beginning of the show i gotta fix that later because i was so sucked into these sky jinks so more on that maybe later today or later in the week i um i mentioned this

the other day just in passing at the top of the show i said something like you know alaska airlines is on my list or whatever and then uh our our friend lynn long long time supporter of and contributor to the show was on the ascendant social media platform blue sky yesterday he was cutting and pasting or he was maybe reposting something said is this what you're mad

at alaska airlines about and i was i said yes but for more selfish reasons per usual and then a listener said something like i'm shocked and then i was like really okay you're going a little hard okay i get to make the jokes about how i'm selfish nobody else does that's how this works

trying to figure out because okay can i tell you my emotional journey with the story that i don't know you mentioned i think the first time you introduced it on the show maybe in monday's intro you said that like you're mad at the airline but then you said but it also like sort of well luke i believe you said it underscores your unrelatability because you love using that word i believe uh-huh it emphasizes that and then i read you said if you thought i was unrelatable before wait till you hear this story then i'm like oh i don't know i don't know if we want to hear this story and so right now where i am is i can't tell where the kayfabe is i know that alaska you truly love alaska airlines i truly love them i also know that you have a financial

relationship with them i don't anymore andrew oh you don't oh okay so everything's after 9 p.m Andrew. We can say whatever we want.

That's why I was like, okay. Whoa, hey, what? What happened? What just happened?

I don't want to ruin your day, Andrew. I don't want to make anyone have the worst day of their life at their job. Do you have any idea

what I'm doing here? No, okay. I wondered why that just came out of your mouth. Okay, you're doing something that I am not getting again.

Tim Robinson on a ghost tour. Oh, the ghost tour. And the guy says, this is the last tour so we can, things can get a little racy. We can say whatever we want. and then Tim Robinson becomes obsessed.

Sure, I am familiar with that sketch. But when that just flew out of your mouth a second ago, which I am beeping, I was shocked. But all of this is to say, when you mentioned that this conversation got moved to social media where companies and people can be tagged in things, I got a little bit nervous because I wasn't sure if you were being outed speaking. But again, the hand doesn't feed you anymore, so bite away, I suppose.

The hand hasn't fed me for a long time other than just I do genuinely like the product and, you know, I've got friends that work there, and we've got friends that work there, our friend Captain Will. I mean, you know, so it's like, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to be overly critical of a Northwest treasure, but I will tell you that I'm also trying to see if I can find this message that Lynn sent to me, because some of the specifics were kind of lost on me, but here's, I'll just try to break it down. This is the unrelatable piece of it, Andrew. I was very obsessed with getting to a certain level of airline status with this airline this year. Yes. It used to be that the highest level of airline status was called Gold 75K. And that meant you had to fly 75,000 miles in a year to get that status. And what that just generally means is a lot of little perks, like, you know, you don't have to pay for your bags. And you can pick your seat in Coach, usually being one of the better parts of Coach. And it means that on certain flights, you might get bumped up to first class. Then they rolled out something called 100K, which I know you're not supposed to do math on the radio, but that's 25K more than 75K. Slow down, Einstein. And suddenly, E equals 100K squared. So then all of a sudden, now there's a group of folks that are actually in front of me in the line. and uh for all not for all of those things but for the getting to be in first class part which well i want to preface all this by saying there i know this is unrelatable because it's like you know you know flying in first class is a is a lucky thing when it ever happens to anyone and the idea that i'm part of my anger would be related to something about first class or whatever which actually it's weirdly it's not i mean this all sounds very very kind of unrelatable except if you are flying constantly thus like getting to you know get your luggage onto the airplane overhead because you got to get on the plane first let's say um or not having to wait in certain lines it actually really does accrete to a different kind of experience over the course of a year so that's my defense of why i even care about this stuff did you say accrete

yeah it solidifies into something i don't i don't know that word add it to the list of words for 2025 that we'll be reviewing 12 months from now maybe it's all these little experiences that

harden into a big block of experience that is a better experience so um at least that's what i

think let's look it up let's start with an e do you think i was actually wondering if there was any wordle implications here is it a five it's an a word it's an a it's a crete it's a crete

to grow by accumulations or coalescence oh interesting okay yeah it's totally unfamiliar

with that word um and it looks like it's six letters so it does me no good in wordle so i'm

forget it there's absolutely no utility to you using any brain any of your uh storage space for that so anyway all that is to say i know that that's the reason i'm saying this is unrelated is because everything that i'm talking about is is bougie-ness at a certain level or being very cosseted or whatever but it's just like jesus cost Cosseted, that's the kind of way. No, go ahead, sorry, sorry. Carefully cosseted, I think. Let's just keep doing it. Cosseted. This is good for me, actually, because I use... I think cosseted is to be carefully handled. To be... Cosseted. Cared for and protected in an overindulgent way. You are two for two, my friend. I better quit. Quit while I'm ahead. I'm batting 1,000, but that is not going to last. That's like somebody gets... Somebody goes, you know, three for four in their first game of the season, and then they're batting, you know, 750 or something. They're leading the batting race for the, whatever. Okay, so all that is to say, I know that a lot of this is just like really, I mean, first world problem doesn't begin to describe it. But basically, once there was this thing that was the 100,000 mile people, which like our friend broadcast Barry is, although he cheated by marrying a man from Australia. I think that's cheating. I think that's dirty pool Barry because he now, and buying a house in Hawaii.

because there will always be an asterisk next to his name that's all i'm saying you are the sammy

sosa of getting to 100k no i mean barry just flies like every time i'm texting with barry he's like i'm somewhere over guam yeah what but um so so this 100k thing is and i actually i didn't i didn't make it to that level the last couple of years since they rolled it out but i asked barry i was like hey man what's is this worth it because this is another 25 000 miles that you got to go out and like just spend time on airplanes or whatever and he said well these are the things that you can get uh if you do that one you will probably you know hopefully if there's some empty seats up in first class you might get moved up there also you get a free membership to the lounge which is like 500 bucks a year or something and is the kind of thing that like most of the time i you know i'm not at the airport early enough to in fact it wouldn't probably net out for you andrew because you don't fly a ton a ton but if you did you should you would definitely be a person who should join that lounge because you do get to the airport a couple hours early you've actually got some time to kill and it's a very nice place to relax and they've got soup i was gonna say and they have soup you know i love soup oh man i'm not kidding you i go i go i go hard in the paint on that soup when i do

use the lounge why do you think the lounges are so soup centric of all like kind of because you would think okay yeah like grazing you know kind of an hors d'oeuvre situation soup does not usually fit into like a grazing situation yet my experience in my very very limited experience which i think i've always been with you in these lounges is soup is really the the main feature the soup is the gem of the experience which is there are not a lot of pho restaurants and lounges are the only places

that super center stage that's a really good point and super crackers that never that never

that never left the dream state if i remember right open my own franchise but uh that's a

great question i wonder if some of it is because it's just it's cozy and also you can put it out and you can leave it as long as you have it on a low heat yeah you can kind of set it and forget it and then just keep refilling it and it gives people something to do and but um i i'll tell you, some of the only time that I'll eat soup outside of the home is if I happen to be in one of those Alaska Airlines lounges. So anyway, that's like, I think that's like 500 bucks a year or something. That's a significant cost. And then also, um, this, I think I actually said this to you on the show, but like the other, or you could, and I actually didn't realize this was an either or. I thought this was all part of the, all part of the, uh, swag bag of making it to this thing. yeah uh was you could bestow not the status that you have of 100k but you could bestow mvp gold upon one person you know you get the golden ticket and mvp gold is below the 75 whatever but it's just better it's like you don't have to pay for your bags you can pick your seat okay which is a pretty big improvement i mean my advice in all this even though i'm kind of grumping about this airline is if you are somebody who is has any reason to travel at all if you can possibly make it happen try to only fly on the same airline like because you might save a little bit of money here and there by by jumping on a different uh carrier because it's a little cheaper but like the big the big difference for the people that have a sl for the people having a less horrible travel experience it's usually because they're only flying on the same airline and they have a little bit of status such that they can again like pick their seat before the flight or Okay, so we're getting to the end of the year, getting to the end of 2024, and I realize that I am at like 90, I'm going to be at like 92,000 miles. I'm going to need a cool 8,000 miles to get to this little number that I've now decided is the goal. What if it was just eight?

It's like, can we just taxi around a little bit?

Can I just ride on the wing, sir, for a moment?

Can you just take me from SeaTac up to, let's just say the U District? Okay, go ahead.

Right.

Can I take it over to a different part of Tukwila?

Right, exactly. So, like, I'm thinking, like, maybe we stop off at Lover's very briefly. Yes. We hit the Denny's and then we're back. Yes, perfect. Okay.

So, anyway, so I'm like, okay, I'm pretty close to this silly thing, so I might as well go ahead and just, I was going to, like, book a flight somewhere, like I did two years ago. That was to get to the 75K. I was like, I'm going to book a flight to Germany or something or whatever. Or, you know what I'll do? Becca and I will go to like Miami because that's a really far flight and if we go there and back it'll get me to 8,000 miles because of certain it's not literally 4,000 miles away but because of how the how they basically calculate the miles it would have gotten me there and in fact I booked these tickets I booked us a round trip trip to Miami um before New Year's because it has to be in calendar year 2024 and I had booked this whole thing and I called in and I was talking to somebody about it I was asking something about the mileage and the woman on the phone who was very nice said oh you know what actually if you're only doing this flight pretty much to get to this number of miles you know you can just buy the miles and there are some special category it's called like e e it's i always want to say eqc but it's not it's like ech or something they're like you can just buy these miles and it will be cheaper than the plane tickets um but it and then you don't have to actually sit on the airplane and they also have this other thing which are these carbon offset things where you can if you're trying to get now I don't think that's exactly what I did believe it or not I think I did it through this other program but one of the other things they offer is if you are trying to get to a certain mileage number and you don't want to actually sit on the airplane you can just buy it and it's it's the Alaska Airlines promotes it as a carbon offset which is does not stand up to any kind of scrutiny as a concept like this idea that you bought a seat on a plane but then you didn't go on the plane I mean you're not really buying a seat but the idea that you gave alaska airlines money and they gave you miles but then you didn't fly so somehow the environment wins is a really really thin premise they didn't ground the plane that's what i'm saying the plane is still going wherever it was going to go no planes were grounded in the creation of this film i'm sorry like so but whatever if we want to if we're trying we're talking about it at least if we're talking about it something's happening so this was the this was the blue sky that Lynn shared with me. Somebody was basically talking about how this carbon offset thing is pretty sus, right? But this is where this relates to me and my selfishness, which is I go ahead and I pay the money, I cancel the trip, which was a hassle because some of the tickets were non-refundable so now I have all this credit. I've got all this money in this Alaska account that I don't really want or need because most of my travel is paid for by work, but it's because I couldn't get my money back on the Miami trip all of it and i go ahead and i buy the last 8 000 miles and i get i'm a hundred thousand mile boy and i'm all excited and uh on sunday when i'm on my way to fly to san diego i go into the lounge and you know me andrew there's nothing i like more than strolling into somewhere thinking i'm

king of the castle i'm like all right everybody everybody just calm down yes i'm here where's the soup mr what you clear a path to the soup oh mr steel your soup is here now that is a show title i am like i mean and this is the thing andrew i had 10 minutes before my flight was boarding i didn't have enough time like because you can if you go to this lounge you can just pay money straight up pay i don't know it's like 40 or 50 bucks to like hang out in there or if you have guest passes like i they give me a certain number of these guest passes every year but they're you know you only get so many of them you can use them but in my mind it's like to use that on something less than like a two-hour layover is such a waste i need to be able to absolutely drain their soup

supplies now that's interesting it is limited it is you have to think about the yeah limits if you're

not like if you don't have the membership if you have the membership it doesn't matter you go in there for 30 seconds because it's you know you go as much as you want i haven't had the membership for the last few years because i've been too cheap to pay for it so i am going in there and the people are so nice um the person at the front i'm like yeah i'm a 100k and so how do i sign up for the um how do i you know am i am i on the list now or something and she's like looking she's oh i don't see you she goes sometimes you have to call them and select it or something and i'm i'm i'm being nice to this person i really am but i'm inside i'm being like oh you poor fool you have no idea who you're talking to you have no idea the level of importance of a person who has flown 92 000 miles and then purchased 8 000 miles of eqc points or whatever and i'm like well how about this and then she brings over her supervisor and they're looking and they can't find it and again i'm being totally honest i was totally nice i was not chippy i was like it was all fine and they were like well do you want to use one of your guest passes i was like i've only got like 10 minutes that would be kind of a waste i want to save those for if i'm ever traveling with pores like Andrew. i want to be able to share this literally my thought i was like well if andrew and i are flying for work sweet and and we need to go to one of these i need to have these like i have a mem i'm a member i'm not only a i'm not only a client i'm also the owner whatever the hell he says um so i this is this is the part that in retrospect is really funny andrew i'm just operating with the confidence of a guy who knows he's holding the best pair of cards you know like i'm holding the nuts as they say but i'm just humoring everyone by by pretending to think about my bet even though i know like i'm like i'm 100k baby like i own this place and so i go well how about this i really says i go how about this guys how about i just sneak over there and i grab a coke zero and i'm out of your hair and they both laugh and like of course yeah right and i go and i go and i get my coke zero and i like get my bag and they're like well thanks for being 100k they're being so, like, so nice to me. I was going to say solicitous, but I'm kind of medium on that word.

We got you right where we want you.

I think I might have. Yeah, I'm like the Seahawks on the two-yard line. You know what I mean? Kicking a 60-yard field goal. Anyway, so I get, you know, I'm on my way, and then, like, I think, like, I was in San Diego, and I decided, okay, I'm going to take a minute. I'm going to call Ask Airlines. I'm going to tell them that, yes, I will take possession now of my of my benefits and i call them and i get um a person you know nice enough but not not overly solicitous but but pretty nice who um is like oh were these organic miles and i go organic miles and she's like yeah did you fly all 100 000 miles i was like well no i i flew 92 000 miles and then i which is also i think not actually true more on that in a moment because i think i'm getting these miles on my credit card, right? I have one of those Alaska credit cards, and I think that feeds into my overall tally. So the term organic is itself, I think, very, very questionable.

So that number 92, well, you said we'll get into it more in a minute, but it could have been like you bought something from Ikea and that added some miles, and you probably didn't even fly those full 92.

I believe that's, yes, I think that's part of it. According to Barry, too, because he and I, listen, he was the first person I

called. He should be on this call right now. He should be here. I should be calm.

Honestly, live from Manhattan, Kansas.

Yes, right.

So I'm like, she goes, what were they, organic miles? And I go, well, no, I mean, I flew 92,000 of them, which is what I thought at the time. And I bought 8,000. And she goes, yeah, these extra benefits only apply to an organic 100,000 miles. And I was like, organic? And I was like, do you have a supervisor? And then she puts me on the phone with her supervisor. And I'm like.

so maybe you maybe you'll get to this but just so you know what my question is now whether you want to answer answer it now or if it's coming up is then what are the benefits of buying these extra 8 000 miles or whatever it was it just knocks you like the 70k or that that third tier

one what it means is i still will have if if there is a waiting list of people to be upgraded into first class i would be above somebody who has let's say 75 000 okay so that applies status

as far as seating.

The upgrade thing applies. Oh, I got free food on the fly. I was not in first class flying home, but they gave me like a tapas box for free.

Okay, so little things like that, but the big one is not unlimited access to the lounge.

Which I really was calculating because the amount that I had to pay for the extra miles was not nothing. And I was like, well, but it's minus $500 because you're getting this free lounge thing. I'm like, I'm going to make Becca MVP gold And then she's really going to finally love me Like I was like this is You know I had a whole thing going in my mind And again I was wrong about that Because you basically get to pick There's this list of these like weird crazy benefits That you can pick either free lounge Bestow MVP gold upon someone Free wifi for the year And there's one other one that's like No direct eye contact from the staff Yeah right

So okay so

I am now I get transferred to Heidi the supervisor and I already know this is not going to go well because it's not her fault she was trying to be helpful but the person who i initially talked to puts me on hold and then says after a pretty long time says uh thank you sorry for the long hold i've explained to heidi what's going on here's heidi and i was like already like no no no i don't want you explaining to heidi what's going on i need to be the tip of that spear i need to be the first person because i have a whole tone of voice i'm using here i have a whole way there's this is a listen this this is a whole system and it can't be messed up by you explaining to heidi this guy's mad because he bought 8 000 miles he's not getting his free stuff that is not the narrative we're pitching here this starts months ago with a boy named luke who had a dream of being 100k once In 1990 in Astoria, a young man and his coosh ball had a dream. Thank you.

They had driven to Astoria in a very, very problematic Ford Econoline van. They had to stop often to refill it with water because it was overheating. There were no seatbelts for the children.

They might have dragged a piano back home. Hard to say.

And that boy, holding that coosh ball that he had recently caught off of the Astoria column, He said someday I will fly And I won't just fly I'll fly at the very front of the plane So anyway I'm undeterred By the fact that this first person Has already completely salted my game By telling my story but in a non Like a non-professional way I'm a professional storyteller So I decide to still give it my best shot With Heidi, I tell her the whole thing And I'm like hey you know I had these tickets booked for Miami I was like you can look at my you know you can look at my history or whatever and i talked to somebody they were very nice but they explained i didn't actually have to do the flight if i didn't want to i could just buy the miles so i did that instead and uh and they didn't mention anything about how you know the whole and so i'm just wondering if you could make a one-time exception and just you know if i could just get the lounge membership because this was just some miscommunication and i really would have just done the flight you know and i get done and they're just like that you know that kind of pause where it's like the person is actually not considering that maybe they're just thinking about how to best, uh, bring you back to earth. But like, it was like this little pause and I'm thinking, well, maybe I've broken through to her and she's like, well, it is, it is on the website when you're buying the whatever EQC, when you're buying the EQC miles, it is on the website. So we cannot offer that to, um, we cannot offer that to you. I'm sorry. I was just like, Oh, i was like and this is andrew this is i'm not i'm not proud of this but i said okay heidi i understand i go i just want to be clear this is probably the not this is not the last you've heard of this which i don't where does that come down on the scale of like yelp review of a lifetime or you're effing with the wrong mother effer or um it's not right as i believe you it's not right like i don't know how do we feel about that this isn't the last you've heard of this not the last you've heard from me like i didn't want i didn't want it to seem threatening i just wanted it to be like this listen i understand why you're and i'd never i didn't get mad i didn't raise my voice i didn't get i didn't get testy other than to say i just want to let you know that this is

not the end of this story i feel like i mean as as the king you you are merely the heir to the throne is the king of the guy who says awkward things when he's upset or feels wronged yeah i can totally associate with the words coming out of your mouth and not exactly as you meant them having said that i don't like that phrase because i know what you mean which is you're going to keep on working on this but heidi doesn't have to be involved you know what i mean you might be going over heidi's head you might be talking to yeah oh believe me i am like heidi as i get the right email address Heidi might have heard the last of this because maybe her shift is about to end so the thing that's off about that is it sort of puts it sounds like it puts Heidi in the crosshairs a little bit in a way that I don't think anybody you me or the listeners

want yeah no I definitely didn't want her to feel like I was coming for her specifically although by the way be better at your job Heidi like there's a there's a way to let people down you know there's a way to let people down I think And this is the same thing that happens in a lot of different professions Where if you do it long enough I think you just keep seeing people on their worst day And it can become very corrosive And I can understand that intellectually And I think the same thing would happen to me probably But it's like if you're the person whose job it is To tell a lot of people who are having a bad day That their day just got slightly worse I think that there's I don't know I think that there's a tact That can be brought to that That was not being brought to this conversation in my experience

Oh, interesting. I thought you were saying something else. I thought you were justifying Heidi's detachment by saying when you're meeting people on their worst day, maybe at first you bring a lot more empathy to the job, but after a while you become somewhat calloused because no matter how much you kind of coddle people, they're still just going to sort of dump their emotions on you. So you might just start to, like I say, kind of build a callous up and just be straightforward with people, not unlike letting a player go in Moneyball. um have you seen movie or the book well i guess it's in both but i'm referring to it's like there's a couple of iconic scenes in moneyball where they're teaching um uh oh lord jonah hill jonah hill's character just to be like completely detached like you don't when it's time to trade somebody or say you're not you're not taking the field today because we're shipping you off to to st louis to seattle to you to see it so because you're 42 Thank you. I do, and you had one good season in the Venezuelan League when you were 31, when you may have been using PEDs.

Exactly, exactly. So anyway, I thought you were defending that as sort of— I wasn't. I could see that, too.

I was saying that it's a hazard of a lot of jobs, but the people that are really good at their jobs manage to avoid it. They manage to somehow maintain their humanity. And when they're letting people down, they do it in a way that the people still feel kind of seen and heard. This didn't feel like that to me. Okay. So this is, so, so my annoyance is really just kind of, is kind of petty and whatever. I wanted to get to go to this lounge for free and I didn't read the fine print. Okay. That's my annoyance. But then this carbon offset thing, this is what Barry brought up with me. And I don't want to get Barry put on any no fly list, but sorry, this is your absolute Barry's thing was like, you know, you can buy these, like these, there's just whatever the sort of special kinds of miles are that are the things that, that, that determine what your status is. Those, you can buy those with the carbon offset but if they're not considered quote-unquote organic then what you are doing is you are really really lowering to the degree that there was any even slight benefit to the environment which there wasn't but let's just say even from just a pure window dressing standpoint to the degree that these carbon like you just carbon offset by your miles and then get your status or whatever but you actually don't get the benefits you are really really like de-incentivizing or disincentivizing people from even doing this kabuki environmental thing like it should just be the case that if you get to the number you got to the number and again the part about that's actually really pernicious is this carbon thing like again that's the premise on the idea that the carbon thing actually does anything so maybe my argument is kind of like all over the place but it's like don't roll out this like bullshit pretend environmental policy and And then also make it so that people are not incentivized to use the bullshit environmental policy because they won't get their free lounge access.

I honestly think from listening to this story, the most pernicious thing is that you had a plan based on the words of somebody who represents that company. You changed your plan. Now, I do have one question here. And this doesn't totally let that representative off the hook, but you were ready to make this flight to Miami, which nothing, nothing at all suspicious about a flight to Miami and then turning around and just coming right back to. And you're like, oh, for some reason, my suitcase is 100 pounds lighter. No, it's heavier when I come back. No, no. Yeah, that's not right. Why would you fly to Miami?

You know anything about the drug trade, sir?

You know what? I'm going to pack up my suitcase full of drugs in Seattle. Andrew, I have bad news.

into Miami Beach for your new business model that you're launching of smuggling cocaine into Miami

I will say that uh Vives and I um on a quasi recent trip to Mexico I remember I had like some edibles on me somewhere and we were talking we kept on joking around as we were in line like to go through customs like in Mexico I'm just like we're doing it Vives we're the ones who are smuggling smuggling drugs into Mexico can we can we make it work um by the way did I tell you this Also, while we were waiting in that line, like in Mexico, but ready to go through customs where you push the button and you find out if they're going to do like a random search. And I don't even know what happens if they catch you with some gummies. I assume they take them and you go on your way. But I don't know. But I saw what we eat them in front of you. Yes. And they tell you what colors taste like. We saw the telltale sign of an empty gummy wrapper on the ground as we were shuffling through.

I'll hide it in my stomach.

And I'm pretty sure there was only – I think there was only one, but I was like, Veev, somebody got nervous. But anyway, all of that is to say, yeah, I find – oh, my question for clarification is you were ready to make this plan to fly to Miami. Yeah. This person said, you know, you can just buy the miles, same difference, whatever. This person led you astray. Did you buy them from that person or did you take that person's advice then go to the website where Heidi is saying all the rules are laid out? because I guess that could be an argument for Heidi if I'm representing that point of view. Absolutely.

Listen, though, by the letter I did, I had to go to the website. I mean, it gets, Andrew, are you ready? It gets more complicated.

Oh, good. I'm glad I led it to here.

The first, because the first person who I was talking to who was really nice was like, I think you can buy these miles. And then I kept going to the website and it kept crashing and there was all this thing. And then she had to talk to a supervisor. And it turns out you had to be, at that moment when I was talking to her, I was not within 10,000 miles of the goal. I was in like, let's say 89,000 miles. And you can't even get in The website won't even let you in there Unless you're within 10,000 So I had to literally finish my trip and then get the credit for the miles And then I was within Shooting distance of it or whatever But all that is to say I did go to the website I should have read the fine print That's where it's on me ultimately I don't think I was I don't think that um, you know, this was, this, this was on me for not reading the fine print. That being said, I just think it's a very weird way to parse this. And also again, back to the sort of the carbon credit thing is the thing that I think is really BS. Like you make this thing that you're to kind of greenwash your stuff a little bit, but then you, but then you're still so committed to getting that $500 for the lounge membership that you're not going to let those people who are buying these carbon offsets actually get the same kind of perks and benefits because you have you've decided that that's not organic or something i just thought that was a really really that's a bad look and

i'm totally freestyling here i have no idea if there's any truth in this but i would not be shocked to know that these so-called carbon offsets also tally up in some way that look good in some sort of government filings or well they look bad in front of the trump administration

well but they're actually gonna hide them they're like can you roll coal like cory 10 boom in the hiding place um yeah they're right exactly like you roll cool we laugh so we don't cry but uh

yeah you know what i mean i'm sure in some sort of filings or in so certainly in some sort of corporate brag rag or you know what i mean like uh presentations they talk about everything they're

doing for the environment yeah um and so i so what i am going to do by the way is i am going to write i'm going to write an email to somebody there i'm going to send it into the void i'm going to try to figure out who and i'm going to state my case and i am going to include my auto signature that says i work in the media daytime emmy signature for the record I took that off I mean, I've already said this about my I have an auto signature that I actually don't use very much unless I'm trying to indicate to the person that there is some reason that they might want to prioritize a response to me and that it just says media stuff I tend to do and it just lists the places that I do stories for or whatever and I don't use that honestly, I just don't know believe it or not I don't know how to make it happen automatically on my email and so the only I it's I have to opt into it and so generally if I'm emailing with you and John I don't opt into it I just like send it uh my regular email but sometimes if I'm emailing an airline and I'm hoping that they'll kind of be like well maybe we don't want to mess with this guy I will absolutely opt into it that being said I do find it I don't know whatever I don't need to get it I don't need to I don't need to yuck any yums there are some autos there are some auto signatures that doth protest too much that i've seen sometimes like for instance if i had put if i had daytime emmy award-winning you know broadcaster as my auto signature i mean that would be pretty brutal it's brutal enough that i even have one listing my my my work jobs but uh which is different than my volunteer jobs my work jobs i uh i don't think i've seen maybe because we

we dance in different circles but i don't think i've seen a signature as you describe it now i'm getting close to pushing you into an area that you so clearly just made it you made it obvious that you don't want to talk about but like i'm trying to think of examples of signatures that seem like they go signatures that go too hard signatures are doing too much right exactly um so well you know what you know what it really is

it's not even an it's it's actually it's actually less an email signature although i have seen those certainly you know what it really can be sometimes is like blue sky bio or before that twitter bio where it's like just like i don't know i don't know that's a little bit more relatable i know you're talking about everybody gets to live that everybody should just live their life and do whatever they want honestly but it's like sometimes it'll be like you know somebody who has fewer followers than me online which is not very many by the way i'm not i'm not um particularly noted social media person but it'll be a person who's and then it'll be like you look at their bio and it'll just be like who's who reps them for speaking inquiries this person for for fiction this person for non-fiction this person i'm like wow you got a lot of people handling this career that appears

to be kind of in neutral um i see i was like what is luke's uh blue sky bio also i realized that when i started blue sky i was also on mastodon i we were throwing a bunch of stuff up there and i never thought that i didn't know that guy would be the one that would stick and i realized i need to change my banner photo it's just some like it's a photo of some it was like at a ups store i think and you know how the ups store sometimes they'll put down they'll tape down a little piece of paper so you can sign the receipts and you don't have to like run the pen across the hard countertop you know what i mean you need a little cushion sometimes so it's just like somebody put down a piece of paper but then of course a million customers doodled all over it and it's got scribbles and at the time it seemed like kind of a nice little photo to make my banner but i look at it now and it just looks like garbage and it looks like scribbles and i'm embarrassed as my social media presence continues to narrow down to just be blue sky and flicker i need to make sure that those are pretty polished images out there but having said that i wanted to see what your um what your bio is on blue sky and i see that you have somebody's been watching the detroiters a the more crim of podcasting not the more crim just Mort Krim of podcasting, yes. He was a real guy, though, right? He was a real Detroit broadcaster. Or is, is? I said was. I think was.

Okay. But this is what I found out. No, is, is. Oh, okay. Is he, like, on the nightly news there? I thought he was retired.

Oh, I'm sorry. He is alive. That's what I meant. Oh, yes, yes. Okay, of course, because he was still on the Detroiters a couple years ago, yes.

But this is what I found out about Mort Krim that I was surprised by. is I have always, excuse me, I've always told people that the Bill Curtis, who is the announcer on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and a pal of mine, wonderful, wonderful man.

Put that in the email signature.

That he, Daytime Emmy Award winning journalist and real Bill Curtis knower, person who receives a Christmas card from Bill and Donna Curtis every year. I have gone around telling people that bill curtis was the inspiration for the character anchorman because uh that's what i had heard from somewhere and because bill was kind of in a way like as far as the local you know he was a chicago you know he was a chicago news anchor for years and years and then he hosted all these shows that he also his company produces which were like you know uh like uh there was i forget what the the crime ones where it was kind of before it was before the true crime wave really sort of had reached its its apex but you know there was this one show that bill did american justice i think it was called where he was always walking down the steps of like the new york district court down there at one center street and he would get to the bottom step and he would say like but sometimes dead men do tell tales yeah whatever and like anyway i love bill curse i love all of all of his stuff. I still, by the way, I still watch American Greed. American Greed is great. It's narrated by Stacey Keech. It's produced by Bill Curtis or by his company. And, um, and it's, it's nice because whereas sometimes the true crime shows, the, the, the events are too troubling. Like people really lost their lives. Families really lost a loved one. It's a really harrowing thing. And I do feel bad about getting entertained by that. But American Greed is just like, they invested their money with a cocaine cowboy, you know? And it's just like lots of shots of a guy driving like a cigar boat in biscayne bay like it's like okay i'm sorry some people lost their money but nobody lost their life over this but anyway all that is to say i was under the impression that bill curtis was the kit was sort of the the character or the real person that the character of anchorman was based on but that's mort crim is claiming that and mort crim may have he wrote a whole book i think it's called like anchorman or the anchorman or whatever so So I might have been – I mean, Bill Curtis has gotten plenty of flowers in his life, but I might have been adding one to his accolades that he wasn't necessarily actually the – he was not maybe the inspiration for Anchorman.

Well, I have some questions. First of all, do you have any recollection why you were attaching that to Bill Curtis? Was it – like do you remember somebody telling you that or is it just something that you –

I think Bill told me that.

Oh, okay. Well, that's like the most interesting answer.

No, I mean I don't think he told me. I don't think he told me that he was the inspiration.

He put in the Christmas card. He signed Bill. You would know if you got Bill and Donna's Christmas card, Andrew, which you clearly don't. I'm looking here. Now somebody named Harold Green, the internet, is giving the credit to. The physical appearance of Rod and Burgundy character may have been modeled after real-life news anchorman Harold Green. So, I mean, I'm sure it's a composite anyway.

The Mark Crimm one is confusing to me because I don't think that Will Ferrell or Adam McKay spent any significant time in Detroit.

Now, here is, okay, I've got to allow ads here. I'm allowing ads. I just used that for YouTube. I'll allow it. Anchorman, now this is from WRKR Rock and Roll, I'm assuming in Detroit, although I don't know where WRKR is. anchorman inspiration was a detroit news anchor from the 1980s and they're associating with mort crim um now i will say i did not google mort crim you know anchorman i just wrote who is the basis or who is anchorman based on and i'm getting harold green and some articles uh saying it was mort crim but i don't know what they're um you know i don't i don't know what they're basing this on other than maybe mort crim i mean i love this idea of like bill and mort and this harold guy just all Going around like sort of telling their Own versions of I am Anchorman

And, of course, because you rarely cross-reference these things, it's totally believable. It's like a white guy with a sort of baritone wearing a suit, and you can kind of make the leap. Like, immediately when I thought it was Bill Critters, I was like, well, that makes perfect sense, you know? But now, with it being potentially more crimp, that also makes perfect sense.

Here, let me just, let me, okay, I'm still, it's very important that you and everybody understand what I am quoting here. And I'm quoting 107.7 FM WRKR rock and roll dot com. But according to this article, it says in an interview, I clearly overlooked from 2013. By the way, this is written in the first person of the, you know, what whoever was both running the board for the morning show, writing this blog post and probably also cleaning out the coffee pots in the lunchroom says in an interview. I clearly overlooked from 2013. Will Ferrell said he loosely based his Ron Burgundy character on Mort Krim, news anchor at WDIV in Detroit, though the initial inspiration for the movie came from Krim's time in Philadelphia. The character traits were those of the man who took Detroit news by storm for 19 years. So, whatever.

Why is this important now? Is Anchorman set? I always thought it was set in California, right?

Yeah, isn't it? Is it Sacramento? I mean, I've only seen that movie once, but people are obsessed with it, isn't it? Yeah. I think it's, like, kind of iconically in, I want to say, Sacramento.

Yeah. Because I just, for some reason, I feel like that character would have been written by somebody who... Sorry. God damn it.

God damn it. Sorry to cut you off. I knew I was getting that wrong.

You were in the right state.

Yeah.

But, like, the... Well, I didn't even know. I didn't know where it was. I knew it was in the state of California. but I feel like that's the kind of character that you write because you grew up in a town and you had your local newscaster that you watched every night with your parents and so for me somehow the question of did Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and I don't even know actually who's credited with writing Anchorman I kind of associate them with it but it could be somebody that grew up in Philly and just was watching Mort Crimm when they were a kid and it kind of went into their memory banks or something

that wasn't your most unrelatable story

all right let's thank some donors these are the incredible wonderful generous people who are supporting tbtl with a donation of their dough and it's how this can be my job and your job and tbtl employee numero uno john sklaroff's job thanks to folks like sarah hogan in denver colorado thank you sarah interesting that's happened interesting thing has happened since our time in denver andrew since our brief wonderful week there where we then did that live hangout was that uh somebody brought along their friend this denver news anchor speaking of tv news people kyle clark who was really a fun guy to hang out with and and um and was like you know was ride or die was like was like you know in it to win it for the whole time and uh like we were going to third locations and stuff with him and people were noticing people were like oh are you the guy from tv but the thing i have to be honest with you i wasn't before that night particularly familiar with kyle but since then he's become a phenomenon yeah because he hosted

that debate uh right yeah is it um is it klobuchar i get i get some of my no klobuchar's minnesota

that's minnesota right um but he he just he's been like he's just basically um been as you might say speaking truth to power in various you know for like just through his show and through these debates that he's moderated and just through like interviews he's done where he's really just like you know sort of not let politicians who are prone to lying get out of you know get out of things and stuff like it's just funny because once we hung out with that guy then i swear to god every time i would look on my phone on tiktok or something there'd be like news anchor owns you know like owns politician i'd be like that was a guy from tbtl denver i don't know why i said

klobuchar i know i we're talking about bamey i'm not talking about bamey i meant bobert sorry about that i think the o sounds in their names got me confused i'm embarrassed about that i don't oh yeah that's the wrong side of the aisle i i knew i knew it wasn't bamey i call her bamey Do you remember when she was running for president People called her Bayme, Klobuchar B-A-E, like bay

Oh no

That really stuck with me for some reason That and Joe Mentum Really stuck with me But not enough to That's a really embarrassing confusion Klobuchar and Boebert, sorry about that

Klobuchar Has not at any time been accused Of being overly amorous At a performance of Beetlejuice

There was something about a salad on an airplane that I think was over.

blown yeah that was probably over i don't you know we don't have to litigate that right now i was thinking about something like that the other day what what was i oh you know i watched the martha stewart this is what it was i watched the martha stewart doc on um netflix by the way would recommend really it's made by it's made by rj cutler you know he made the war room remember that doc yeah he was talking about great doc like it's this is a good documentary this martha stewart one it's not like uh i don't think she signed off i don't think she had like like you know final cut on it i don't i i didn't watch the credits but i'm guessing she wasn't the executive producer because i think she was kind of mad about it that makes a huge difference in this day and age yes and that's and and we have to clarify that now right because so many of these documentaries that come out are actually just a even like you know that michael jordan won the last dance and stuff there if the person who is the subject of the documentary has the final say on it it is then a hagiography right exactly so i don't think this was that right the tom brady one god have mercy so yeah so this one is not that it's actually really well done and a really interesting i mean first of all i didn't realize this she was done extremely dirty on that stock thing with the prison time like that was a really really and guess who guess who decided to make an example of martha stewart andrew james comey a young jim comey not that young probably i mean he was he's looking he was younger than us now when he's you know all six foot seven of him is in there because basically what happened was they were trying to get martha stewart on some sort of insider trading and the fact of the matter was she didn't do insider trading so they couldn't prove that they didn't have a case so then they went back and got her on when they had called her in to question her about the insider trading she had said some things to them that they deemed to be untrue so it wasn't even that she had done a crime it's that they accused her of lying to them about the crime she didn't do and that's what they were able to get that's what they were able to get her like i don't know what it was three months in jail on is that what it was three months it wasn't even a year okay i don't think i don't think it was a year but um maybe it was longer than that but it wasn't it wasn't longer than a year um but the thing the reason i was thinking about this as it relates to klobuchar and i really was thinking about this thing with klobuchar and the salad on the airplane or whatever that was because that was a story where amy klobuchar was was was seen as being less than kind to one of her staffers and it blew up and then the then the next wave of the story was we would never say that if it was a man because if men are rude to their underlings they're just being you know decisive and assertive and i i i both agree that that is the case but i also don't necessarily like that the argument goes so because we're okay with men being rude to people that are their subordinates therefore equality is women being rude to their

subordinates i i like no one being rude to their subordinates and the reason i was thinking about that was because of the martha stewart thing it is very much the case that martha stewart was a rough boss and they have footage of her just being so mean to these people that are just helping her with this she's doing a tv shoot this is after she's been sentenced to jail but she hasn't reported yet and she's trying to do this big i think it's like a thanksgiving day thing at her house or easter or whatever and she's like has a crew out there to film her doing this and these women are like i guess working for i don't even think that they're like tv producers i think they might be like domestic help in her house that she's has cutting something with and this one woman is apparently using the wrong size knife and martha stewart is she says to herself like how can you be so stupid oh my god i mean it's so much it's dude it's so me it's so mean and so i i i i emerged from this documentary viewing experience with like a lot of complicated feelings because it's like i do think that the she shouldn't have gone to jail over the stock thing that was because james comey is a bad person who i think might literally have a like a psychological problem with women where he thinks it's his job to bring them low or something i that's all i can take from the fact that he did a he did this to martha stewart for no reason i mean there's people on there going 99 out of 100 prosecutors would never bring this case like it makes no sense um and then he does that to hillary with the releasing of various things at the worst possible times comey's got problems but anyway uh comey do play that unfortunately um but uh and so anyway watching it i'm kind of like she definitely was a woman who was underestimated a lot of times in her life and was mistreated because of being a woman and also was a real bad person to some people real and like oh i hate that i hate it's i didn't know how to i literally didn't know how to feel at the end of the documentary which i guess maybe says it was actually a nuanced piece i was like i don't i don't this is not the martha stewart redemption story i was maybe looking for and it's also not the martha stewart is the queen of means

i appreciate that that's good i mean any documentary has a voice and has some point obviously but um the fact that it wasn't just kind of like this is the story that we are here to tell martha stewart got wronged or martha stewart is terrible like what you just described is way better and honestly like i'm not really into modern documentaries i mean there was a time in my life when i would have said oh yeah i love docs but since our world has become sort of like inundated with various kinds of documentaries the non-fictionalization yes all content which makes it more fictionalized what was i even just choosing the other day there was something oh well i told you before you can't we bring it up three days in a row four days in a row you bet your sweet ass we can leading up to super wild card weekend i told you i was interested in that in the latest in-season series of Hard Knocks or in-season, I guess, season of Hard Knocks that looked at the AFC North. And last night I found myself kind of in between things. I think I was making myself a fried bologna sandwich last night. I got some sort of halal bologna from the SARS Super Saver this weekend. It actually comes, like you have to cut it yourself. It comes in like a little, like a bologna.

You actually have to be there when the head of household slaughters the bologna?

That is true, yes. Anyway, all that is to say, I bought this little, I bought this like bologna you slice yourself, a type of bologna that I've never bought myself, never sliced my own bologna before, you'd be surprised to hear. And then last night, I'm like looking at it, I'm like, do I want this? What am I going to do with this loaf of bologna? And then I'm like, I'm going to fry this baby up with some eggs. And so anyway, yesterday, I fried up some bologna and eggs, made myself a little sandwich on white bread. It was quite good. and I sat down behind my laptop in the kitchen and I said, what am I going to watch? I got about, I don't know, 20 minutes or something. I get into one of these things that I always threaten to watch instead of re-watching an episode of The Sopranos and I paused for quite some time on The Hard Knocks and I almost hit play and I was like, no, like, I just know it's not going to be good. Like, I know what it's going to be. It's immediately going to be so cheesy because the reality TV, which seems already like an archaic term but the reality tvification of our culture over the past like 30 years now has really destroyed anything that isn't like the best documentary you know what i mean like i know what it's gonna be it's gonna be michael it's gonna be it's gonna be classically michael garrett um speaking to the tv and just say um no but uh miles garrett or just it's just gonna be i just i i knew i'm like you know what this is gonna piss me off within five minutes of watching it because everybody knows how to how to present themselves into a camera

these liab shriver yes over you know with the stentorian i did see something with miles garrett the other day that legitimately warmed my freaking heart though so it was a guy who i think maybe plays for the ravens named like rose his alignment offensive lineman named like rosen camp or something oh rosen penis um and uh he was that's a joke that's a fletch joke um it is rosen it's rosen something and uh he was walking off the field actually it might have been it might have been kind of in between plays but he goes up to a miles garrett and he says something like because there's this thing where a lot of these guys will trade jerseys at the end of the game

that's why i think at the end of the game i'm pretty sure they were trading so you know this clip yeah actually i've only heard it paraphrased i don't know if i heard the actual audio but go

It's really sweet. The guy, Rosen, whatever, says, you know, I know that I'm just kind of a nobody, but would you want to trade jerseys after the game? And Miles Garrett says, hey, man, you're playing in this league. You're contributing. You're on a winning team. You're not a nobody. I got you. It was just like this quick little moment, but, you know, it was not for public consumption.

But Miles Garrett, I believe, was miked up for that game, which is why it was captured, I believe. Well, maybe it will.

Well, then maybe that's –

The guy knew.

I mean, obviously that's the only way it could have been recorded, But does that mean, is Miles Garrett, is he playing three-dimensional chess? Did he know because he was mic'd up? Was he giving a speech there because he knew that there was ears on him, so he was going to be the best Miles Garrett he could be?

I mean, listen, if you have a microphone on you, you're going to present in a certain way. Like, even us on this show, as transparent as we are, you and I would have conversations if the microphones were turned off, maybe that we wouldn't otherwise. Not that we're lying or being disingenuous, But you should be conscientious of where you should be conscious of when there's a microphone on you. So to a degree, he probably knew. But I also think that Miles Garrett is legitimately a good man. And I like to think he would also. And I don't know how this pertains to a lineman's work, but it may be somebody was just exaggerating on sports radio. But I swear I heard the following week, which might have been a playoff game, that lineman for the was it the Ravens? He like really balled out in some way. or at least somebody was claiming that he had a really, really good statement. I love it.

He's wearing the Miles Garrett jersey under his jersey.

Right, exactly.

Like you got your Superman pajamas on under your school clothes.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway.

Thanks, Sarah. Thanks to Bridget Schaub of Chicago, Illinois.

Hey, Bridget. Long, long time. Long time.

That's where Bill Curtis is from.

And Bridget joined us on stage at our show at, was it the Virgin Hotel? Oh, really? We did a...

That night was a blur. Although you were the one that was on a lot of cold medicine. Why is it a blur for me?

Yeah.

I know we had Serengeti there.

That's right. He and I were sipping some cough syrup. Sure.

Julie Brown is in Renton, Washington. Downtown, Julie Brown. Thank you very much. Never heard that before. That's what I was going to say. Kathy McClain checking in from Streamwood, Illinois.

Hey, Kathy. Good to see you, man. Beautiful.

Two Illinoisans today on the list. Thanks also to Chad Wilson. in Seattle, Washington Chad, good to see you

thank you again, thank you as always

and then Katie Marie Harnish now this is the thing we have thanked Katie Harnish many times I'm wondering if the Marie feels new yes, we're leaning in

as a rebranding

and I love it, I'm interested I'm intrigued I'm curious, I'm intrigued, that's what I was looking for Katie Marie Harnish, thank you thanks to all of our donors for making TV Teal happen today we could not do this without you hello and welcome to top story all right um are we gonna uh get into this uh bob dylan thing

we have no choice we're already over an hour into the show wow i know the good news is i'm

all out of takes i used all my takes up on the airline talk so this is just going to be kind of a straight recitation of this story, which of course I can't easily click on because the New York Times website thinks that I'm not subscribing to them, even though I am. Oh God, the pains of modern life. Let me just go to my, you know, I'm paying for the New York Times, Andrew, but now I have to go to a gray market site to paste the link from the New York Times into the gray market site so that i can then look at it because on this computer that i'm using i'm not

logged into my new york times account i can't i just can't um i just can't get mad at the new york times over this this seems to be a problem with your computer management like i log into the new york times thousands of times a day i don't have this issue on different on different uh newspapers or different uh computers well certainly my phone and then my main computer

i guess and the computer well i don't have any problems on my phone yeah it's just somehow i'm not logged in on this thing uh it's thinking about it anyway here's the point uh everybody knows complete unknown that movie is i've still have not seen that and i've been meaning to um no desire

to see that movie that to me no desire oh it's the epitome of the type of movies like when i sort of found myself sliding into movie snobbery and unearned film snobbery as a as a young person And it was like, I think it was these types of biopics that kind of pushed me over the edge of never wanting to see one of these kind of like cliche retail. I mean, I'm sure it's going to fit every single beat of every like music biopic. I just am not into biopics.

I, well, I, one, I, you know, and I'm going out on a limb here. I enjoy the music of Bob Dylan. Although, did I tell you this? I recently found out that Becca does not.

No.

And the thing that's troubling about that is I have made her listen to a lot of Bob Dylan in the car.

Well, that speaks well of how much she likes you then, right?

Yeah, that's a good way to take it, I guess. You know, for me, a Bob Dylan is like, when I can't think of anything to listen to, I'll go like, in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks. But anyway, I had no idea any of this was going on, but there's a writer for the New York Times, Corey Kilgannon, and he wrote this article, Bob Dylan is having a Hollywood moment. His number one hater is ready. And then the subheadline is A.J. Weberman sifted through the prophetic singer's trash In search of meaning He turned on him as a sellout And has spent decades trying to reclaim him for the counterculture There's just like a picture of this dude A.J. Weberman Who has been just obsessed with Bob Dylan And sort of like I presume at some point a fan of But then turned his back on Bob Dylan for not being progressive enough in his music for turning his back on like liberal ideals he really hated nashville skyline because it's kind of a country record and has no i think nashville

skyline has zero or almost zero like any any kind of political bend to it where bob dylan came up in the tradition of like phil oaks and um woody guthrie right and other people who were using there.

music and their folk music specifically to speak truth to power the opening of this piece is

phenomenal by the way at a recent showing of a complete unknown the new bob dylan biopic a cheerful group of young women settled in to watch the delicately handsome timothy chalamet impersonate the singer they barely noticed the 80 year old man sitting next to them armored in a winter coat and a hat he never removed then the film began this is all made up the man braid at the screen it's not what you think it is you're scum and so aj webberman's full-throated annotation of the film continued for two hours and 20 minutes replete with dark interpretations of lyrics and references to how dylan and the film intersected with such things as communism the bay of pigs invasion the cia and barry goldwater the group of women exchanged confused glances but said nothing

I can't believe they didn't move seats.

Can you believe? Of all the people to be stuck, other than you, Andrew, to be stuck watching a complete unknown with, a guy who's got a 40 to 50 year history of obsessing over Bob Dylan is sitting next to you just yelling, you're a scum. That's not how that happened.

They're like, why is Bernie Sanders so mad? Vacuum pennies. There's something about the photo at the top of this piece that I'm just like, oh, I see. If Bernie broke the wrong way.

there's a certain there's like there's a guy of a certain age who's been living in the tri-state area i know vermont is not new york but just go with me there's a sort of kind of there's like a white guy of a certain age who's been in the on the eastern seaboard for too long they all fuse

into the same person eventually right i thought about the intro to the story a lot luke and i wouldn't have stopped here except that you did sort of highlight it or underscored as you like to say um i i couldn't help when i read like an introduction like this which is really really well written and really puts you in the scene i always picture like so what was the real scene here because obviously the writer is there with aj right it's aj yes and so um and so i'm assuming that they are like oh this would be a good piece for the because i've never written anything journalistically before so i guess you say you know we're going to do a bunch of interviews with aj but like it would be good to have like sort of a a scene that we can set so i'm going to go see this movie with him so obviously the writer of the walk and talk cory would do would do it but but it's also it's interesting because it's print which i have zero you know what i mean it's not even like oh well i'm gonna i gotta make sure the shotgun mic is working or whatever right and so like so i'm assuming that that the reporter cory is sitting next to aj and then he's trying to clock these women's reactions probably from the backs of their heads right like there's not somebody sitting in front of the screen looking out at aj and these women and how they're all reacting anyway i just i also was sort of picturing like how did this all go down with the reporter

there it was a i mean yes that's probably you're right or i don't know i don't know if that's what you're saying but my guess is that cory kilgannon wisely and maybe his editor had the idea we should go activate this situation by like going to watch a complete unknown with a.j weberman you know like i doubt that a.j weberman was like they called him he's like i can't talk i'm going to see a complete unknown and he was like can i tag along he's like sure like i have a feeling that this they they were where they were because of the new york times uh having a good sense of what would make for good ink right yeah yeah and it is good ink yeah it absolutely is and those poor women i hope that they read this is this part of why didn't they yeah i mean unless it was a Punch the guy.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, maybe, like, I do think that, like, having assigned seats in movie theaters now makes people feel like they can't move. Like, once the movie— Oh, you're just your war on assigned seats once again.

You're scum. How does it all come back to this? So, this is how A.J. Weberman is described. He began as one of Dylan's keenest observers and fans, so intent on digging into the singer's life that he sifted through trash cans outside of 94 McDougal Street, where the singer once lived. But he became Dylan's nemesis, calling him a hoaxer and a sellout, attacking him with an obsession bordering on madness. Now that Dylan is getting a Hollywood moment, Weberman sees a renewed opportunity to advance the anti-Dylan agenda that has sustained him for decades. He's writing a new book interpreting Dylan's lyrics and answering a cascade of emails and calls asking him for his take on the film Though his garbage sifting has waned his vendetta is as strong as ever. This is quality writing my friend I mean without getting to even further bogged down all the details the basic story goes this guy whoever was kind of sort of like a Have an alt music writer, you know leftist guy who who as we've already established was a Dylan fan and then became kind of a Dylan nemesis. But what's crazy, and this is something that I did not realize, and so over the years,

He's, you know, done all this stuff where he's, you know, written things about Dylan that Dylan didn't like, or he's gone through his garbage and written about what was in his garbage and stuff. But until listener Ryan emailed me the other day and said, oh, by the way, there's tape recording of these conversations. I had no idea that, and this would obviously be A.J. Weberman. I doubt Dylan was recording these things. But there's phone calls of these two guys talking to each other. It's very interesting. one i don't think i've ever heard bob dylan because he's so famously like you know shy about doing interviews i don't know if shy is the word but he doesn't like to do them a lot reticent

look at me look at me i learned from you earlier in the show got some big words out here you know

dylan just i just don't other than i know what his singing voice sounds like but and there were probably documentaries or there's probably things out there where dylan has you know talked at length about stuff i just haven't heard them or watched them it was a weird experience to listen to Bob Dylan in an unguarded moment just talking to this guy and I mean this was a really different as is pointed out in the article this was a different time back this is 1971 this first piece of tape because like you know nowadays it's like if I have if I think Ariana Grande has sold out her ideals I'm not able to take it up with her directly like but this was the days where Bob Dylan didn't have a PR person or a PR team and you knew where he lived and you if you were this guy you could just go through his garbage outside his house i mean you probably weren't supposed to but the direct contact is what's really weird about it well you know i did not

get to listen to most of this tape and i think you might have pulled some that you'll play for me here i'm here yeah do we have any idea how or why this interview with with um dylan was set up like what how did they end up connecting i mean this guy is literally going through dylan's trash Dylan has to change his lifestyle I mean it's really intrusive It's really, really intrusive It is sick, it is wrong How he treats Dylan, it was a bit of a different Time and maybe There was a sort of a feeling of well we're all Fighting the same fight here, we're just like Approaching it differently, maybe there was some bonding There, but anyway on a more pragmatic Level, any sense of why Dylan Would spend so much time on the phone with this guy Who's harassing him? I think

Dylan's thought was if I Can talk to this guy, if I can talk some sense into him it will fix this because this guy is like writing these articles and saying all this stuff about dylan that dylan doesn't agree with i think it's factually wrong and so he the the i've listened to like half of like the longest file is 41 minutes i listen like half of it probably and like the the sense i get is that bob dylan is just kind of like he's just sort of like exasperated but thinks well if i just at least maybe if i just talk to the guy i'll be able to talk some sense and dylan is remarkably like kind of like it's almost like they're on the same level if that makes any sense like dylan is not treating him like a piece of scum he's treating him like a collaborator who he just needs to talk some sense into here's the first i don't know how the level is going to be here but this is the first little chunk of tape and this one is where i think basically dylan is finding out that this guy aj weberman is writing this big piece about him based on a conversation they had that dylan did not realize was being recorded And now Dylan is like Basically saying If you want an interview I'll do an interview If you want to sit down But he's like But just I want it above the table He keeps saying I want it above the table As opposed to under the table Yeah not a secret recording Yeah let's take a listen to this

Tape What tape? You called Naomi?

Yeah

Talking about some tape What tape was that?

No I didn't say I didn't take any tape What I did was I typed out My recollections Of our conversation together and i'm going to use it as an interview i'm going to send it out to every underground paper in america for free rather than selling it to you didn't tell me that was in an interview oh well didn't you like uh didn't you hey man you want to have an interview with me

let me know i'll give you an interview don't take uh okay okay fine i was going to let you

see it beforehand and uh because i realized that you know it wasn't taped and i don't want to i I don't want to misquote you and put words in your mouth. What about the tape?

Do you have a tape in your jacket?

No tape. No tape. I didn't have a tape in my jacket. I don't have the money for one of those concealed tape recorders. I went to the door. So I just typed up...

Okay, look, man, you want to have an interview? Yeah. You don't have an interview, but don't...

Yeah.

You know, that's sneaky shit, man.

What kind of sneaky shit, man? I mean, you come and talk to somebody and type it up, right? But you know I'm a cat who writes about respect.

It's so funny to just hear people casually saying, you know I'm a cat.

I want to bring it back, man. I love referring to people and myself as a cat, and it's just so time-stamped.

Like, cool is a word that came from that same era, sort of, right? And we stuck with that, and there's nothing weird about it. But you cannot just say, you just can't call somebody a cat or yourself a cat.

Andrew, you know I'm a cat who flies 100,000 miles on Alaska Airlines every year, man. Hey, we all want to pass as cats.

I'm writing about you. Yeah, man, I understand that. But, you know, if you want to have an interview, we can have an interview above the table, you know? And, you know, just keep it on top of the table. That's all I'm talking about. I mean, I think that I deserve that right. Sure, sure, that's fine with me. I prefer it that way, you know. That would even make it better. Although this isn't bad.

Although this isn't bad.

What I have here is really... I'd like to see it anyway. Can you bring it around? Yeah, I will. Like, uh... Well, should I bring it around now, or...? No, no, no, no, I'll pile up the weekend. How about, like, you have, like, on Monday or Tuesday? uh the trouble is that these people are expecting uh and not and not these people are expecting uh expecting something from by the way you just you

hear the wheels turning in this guy's head that he doesn't want to wait till tuesday to come have bob dylan preview this article or do the sit down so he's trying to move it up but it's like it doesn't it that's like the sound of someone who's trying to make up their story on the fly it's just well I'm just I'm thinking here that these people are this is the by the way some of the best part of the tape we're about to hear it which is the reason Bob Dylan can't meet for the weekend is because he needs to put together bookshelves

Monday I'm working man I'm building some shit you know and I really got to get it built just you know some tables and some shelves and some stuff and I got to get it done man I put it way off uh okay i'll tell him that i'll have to wait just like one week

or a day or two two days just let me see it okay let me now if i'm doing the math right two days is still within the weekend so bob bill and not a master negotiator give me a week or one day or two days or to bring it now and now i'm putting a shelf together and now he's saying just bring

it and let me see it is he sitting down to an interview or is he reviewing the thing that this

guy's already typed up i just find it amazing that we are hearing bob dylan at a point in his life and career where he's still putting together his own shelves yeah there's nobody's been putting it off he's been putting it off man he's been putting it on let me bring it over today i'll

just leave it in your mailbox okay well i'll be there i'll be at the studio today so bring it by yeah and give it to me but i can't read it okay i'll be able to do that and then i'll call you

back okay groovy all right bye-bye okay groovy groovy now i do want to point out am i right this is 1971 that these uh recordings are like but you said he's putting together his own shelves but like this might be a uh stars they're just like us like he is like his like some of his most iconic albums are already out by this point you know what i mean that's a good point well nashville skyline was was already out obviously because we talked about that as well as you know everything that made him famous and like um so anyway like he's he's still pretty he's still pretty big at this point but maybe he just wants to build his own shelves yeah that's a good point yeah that

said by the 70s he's very much bob dylan he's not like playing at the cafe wah and trying to just you know get a little um of attention for his music or whatever so this is the long tape we don't listen to a ton of this i just want to play a little more of it for you um where he kind of calls him back and they're now discussing the article dylan has read the article and there's some stuff in there that dylan wants to clarify like and why this is interesting to me is because Bob Dylan, you know, could be seen as somebody who just doesn't care at all what anyone thinks of him. Like, that's just not his bag, man. He's not that kind of cat. But in this, one of the things is he wants the guy to take out something he said about Johnny Cash, because he doesn't want Johnny Cash to think that Bob Dylan doesn't like Johnny Cash. Oh.

Something from the recording, because they collaborate on Nashville Skyline, right? Girl in the North Country.

Something from... That's on Nashville Skyline? Maybe it's not. Oh, that might be Highway 61. No, I think it is. I think it is, and I think it's so bad. It's so bad. Listen, I don't care who knows it. I don't care if Bob hears this, if John hears this, anybody, if A.J. Weberman hears this. That collaboration is terrible to me. Like, at the end, it's like they're two cats in heat that are trying to outdo each other with how out of tune they can be with their singing.

Oh, that's right. He originally released it on the Free Will and Bob Dylan in the 60s and then revisited it with Johnny Cash as a duet in Nashville Skyline.

But so, anyway, this is a little more, we don't have to play a ton of it, but this is a little more of now that Bob Dylan has read the article and he's trying to negotiate some clarifications and corrections with this guy.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you asked me about corrections.

and all that, and I noticed that you just had a big pile of them in your hand, you know? And I was wondering, like, if you were f***ing around with me, like, on, you know? Wait, wait, wait, wait. What are you saying, man? Like, you had a big pile of them in your hand, man. You obviously had a whole lot printed up. So, I mean, like...

No, no, no. I had the concordance. I have two, I had two Xeroxes made. It cost me a dollar four cents. I had two Xeroxes of this made.

Okay, like, there's a couple things into that article, man, that I...

Can I tell you how... Yeah.

...that I kind of object to.

What, what?

One thing there about Johnny Cash, man, I don't think that's right.

You're saying Johnny Cash is in the past.

Yeah, well, I didn't say it like that, man. I didn't quite understand the article. Like, if you said in the article, you said that's past, that was the quote. But, like, it didn't really make specific whether that pertained to whether Johnny Cash is, you know, playing for the White House was in the past or whether I was digging Johnny Cash, whether that was in the past. The whole thing was kind of vague, man. I didn't want it to, you know, I didn't want it printed that I didn't dig Johnny Cash, man, because I do.

kind of interesting right yeah like this is a very human side of bob dillard who's really just kind of like worried that johnny cash is going to think he's talking shit about him yeah no kidding

and which is totally understandable yeah it's kind of literally our colleagues unlike the

martha stewart documentary where i emerged with a more complicated picture of her as a viewer i i after listening to a fair amount of this tape i kind of am like a sort of siding with like not just siding with bob dillard as it relates to this aj weberman thing because that's not even a that's not a debate like you had one person who was who's crossing every kind of journalistic line you can and really harassing someone but just of like i don't know my conception of bob dylan he seems like so much more of a normal guy listening to him talk this way yeah just you know which of course he is i mean that i i mean he can't go around just being like full bob dylan every second of every day like that would be exhausting but hearing him in this mode is kind It's kind of endearing in a way. Here's a little bit more.

Okay, okay. I'll say, you know, so I'll put down. Okay, all right.

Okay. Okay, the other thing was on Dear Landlord, man. I couldn't have said that song was written for Grossman.

No, you told me that. You said it was for Al Grossman. I remember that specifically. I said, oh, he's giving me the...

Well, man, like it wasn't all the way for Al Grossman. In fact, he wasn't even in my mind. I know. Only later, man, only later when people pointed out to me that a song might have been written for Al Grossman, I thought, well, maybe it could have been.

That's a good story to use. You're just putting me on, man. You're giving me the line, man.

No, I don't want you to put that. It was in for grossing me because it wasn't. It wasn't for anybody, man. It was an abstract song. It sure as hell it wasn't for you. It wasn't. It sure as hell it wasn't, no. I was not even aware of you at that time. Isn't landlord critic, though, in your symbolism? No, man. I wasn't aware of you at that time.

Now, this is relevant because in the Times article, it talks about the fact that one of those things, this A.J. Webberman guy is convinced that a number of the lyrics in various Dylan songs are about him. Yes. And, like, I mean, to try to find a specific meaning in a Dylan lyric or to find a coherent, you know, narrative, I think could drive you crazy. And also, I'm sure I could find things in Dylan songs that are about me if I'm looking for it.

Right, exactly. Well, I mean, that's kind of this New York Times article kind of had me feel in various kinds of ways Because it is a very interesting snapshot of a time and place Like you said, like the relationship between celebrity and non-celebrity is interesting here I also think it has something to do with the wild times of being kind of a progressive person in the 1960s You know what I mean? If this was, who's the woman who was the, like, anti-gay Oh, Anita Bryant? Yeah, exactly like dylan wouldn't have hopped on the phone with anita bryant right like there's he feels he these two swim somehow in the same waters back enough so that dylan is is gonna is gonna give him the time of day exactly this guy's an old year this guy's a young yippee at the time and and dylan is dylan and dylan came up through like you know like the it wasn't dylan was not just like writing about various things in his earliest days right he was a protest singer and so therefore he must feel like he um owes something to this guy or this guy is not like um because i as i'm reading this i'm like he just gets crazier and crazier and in a certain way you're kind of like oh this is an interesting guy on a crusade and you're like no this guy's a stalker and breaking the law probably maybe that maybe he's not actually breaking the law i don't know what laws he's breaking but it does seem like going through people's personal

if anyone should know the laws of garbage my friend

right exactly to the point where this person Bob Dylan who has a right to privacy has to start changing what he's throwing away because he's being watched like that's a really awful thing and then you read it more and more and you're like oh and this guy also thinks that he's being sung about and written about in all these songs like that is a kind of delusion Yeah. that we've seen from the radio side of things people think i mean i told you once i didn't have a lot of this but in the brief time i was on the radio we had one person who was parked outside this this radio station calling the front desk saying that they thought i was talking directly to them through the radio you know that's a real delusional thing i had a friend who um who

reached out to me to tell me like that she had finally met someone which i was really happy for her because she had you know been kind of sort of unlucky in love and and then i said oh that's amazing like who are they or whatever and then she forwarded me um a photo of an ariana grande album maybe this is part of why that name popped into my head and said uh and i was like oh lol okay who is it really and they're like no no it's ariana grande the lyrics of these songs are about me and then that was when i knew this person was descending into a mental health crisis like it's a fairly common thing for people that are suffering through certain types of mental health issues to start to think that lyrics of songs are about them you know kind of i think maybe we would call it grandiose thoughts or something eventually this person was was was was explained to me that taylor swift and ariana grande were fighting over her in their lyrics and i was like oh man it's really and i'm sure our listeners have have been through this with people before it's a really really hard thing to try to talk to somebody about objective reality when they're not living in it It's like, you go into it thinking you can prove it. Like, she was thinking that Jay-Z had stolen a bunch of her lyrics, and I was like, that she had written on a website somewhere, or like poems she had written, and I said, well, the thing is, those songs by Jay-Z were written before you put this website up. She was like, yeah, but they were saved on my computer, so we could have broken into my computer. It's like, oh, man, this is...

No, that's got a point there.

I mean, actually, that one was like, well, I can't 100% say that's not possible. I'm not trying to make it yet. All that is to say, no, but when I was reading this stuff about the A.J. Weberman, I was like, yeah, I wonder where the line for him, because he doesn't sound like what happened with that friend of mine, unfortunately, was they moved out of their place, sold all their stuff, showed up at an Ariana Grande show with their bags literally packed, thinking this was happening, they were going to get on the bus and leave. It sounds like this Weberman guy is a nutjob, but he stopped short of that. You know what I mean? Him saying these lyrics are about me, it sounds nutty, but on the other hand, one of his things is, I was walking on elizabeth street and i ran into bob dylan and then bob dylan wrote a line about like i walked past you on elizabeth street and i almost punched you out now if i'm aj weberman i could kind of see a world in which i just had a run-in with bob dylan on elizabeth street i hear a song where he says i almost punched someone out on elizabeth street i'm putting i'm connecting those dots it's a little less out there than my friend thinking ariana grande was writing about her

i think that i've told you the story before in fact i'll bet you was maybe somewhat inspired by you recounting that story about your friend but I guess if you do remember the story I have a slight update which it saddens me there's somebody who was a regular at the pop-up kitchen that I work at where we give out meals and that's a thing that I do for one hour outside on Sundays and all kinds of people come through we have a lot of regulars but people who are like various everybody needs food right so we're not getting a lot of millionaires coming through there but you have some people who are clearly living literally sleeping on the sidewalk and you have other people who have various kinds of housing or whatever in various they're in various stages of their life and there is one fella who was an older guy i'm going to put him probably in his um 60s older than me i guess i should say um kind of not you know kind of well-dressed looks like he probably has a roof over his head always wore one of those little golf caps caps that you and i always have trouble describing but like always kind of a shorter man almost like a little bit dapper in his own way never really said too much would come through always um always took coffee and then we we wouldn't really chat he was a little bit he didn't talk too much but anyway he was a friendly guy friendly enough we just didn't talk that much and he'd go through the the line and seemed like a very very i mean i hate to use this word but just kind of normal guy right and then i saw him on the bus i don't know if you remember this story me and Genevieve were on the 40 and we saw him on the bus and he was walking by me he got on the bus I was already on the bus and I kind of nodded towards him and he kind of looked a little bit surprised that I nodded towards him he took a seat somewhere else on the bus and then in a few minutes came up and sat in the seat directly behind me and Genevieve and said hey did you say hello to me or something along those lines I don't remember how he broached the conversation and I said oh yeah I see you a pop-up and he's like are you following me are you one of the people who's following me and I'm like no I'm not following you and then he gets in this whole thing about the government and somehow neo-nazis are involved and he's got there they've been after him and that's why he has to move around a lot you know and just immediately into this whole narrative but still looking at me and like asking me a couple of times i believe like and you're not one of them i'm like no man i'm just on the bus i just It's like, you know, I like giving you coffee. Like, I'll see you on Sunday or whatever. He's like, do you want to see the documentation? Do you want to see the documentation? I can bring it all on Sunday. Will you be there Sunday? I can bring it all. I'm just like, you know, whatever. Sure. You know, I didn't really say much about it. The sad part is never saw him again. Never saw him again. He was a regular who came for coffee, I think food, little bit of companionship every Sunday for probably more than a year, if not a couple of years. i had no idea the every single time i talked to him he believed that people were out to get him and this was one of one of the safe spaces for him and then him just seeing me on the bus and me acknowledging him meant that i i assume i do not think it's a coincidence that he never showed

up again after that like he that's filed now under a place that is unsafe for him yeah it's

where the people that are following him because he thinks i'm following because i ran into him on a bus you know like we both live in north seattle obviously so anyway you shouldn't take the bus this is why you should never be friendly to people you should this is why we should all be driving cyber trucks you should always be a heidi from alaska and never be yes thank you

manage your emotions keep all of your emotions locked away no for real though andrew that is a bummer and of course it goes without saying there's nothing you should have done differently in that scenario i mean you're just being you're living your life and you're just being a nice person hopefully the guy's okay wherever he is you know yeah i mean i shouldn't have been wearing

those um oakley sunglasses that also record everything well i mean that's although i did

see some of those that um i did kind of so you know this is hummingbird central now because we've got this hummingbird feeder and they're loving it jerry um so i've been thinking about hummingbirds a lot and i've also been thinking weirdly this is going to be a name you have no context for spencer pratt so spencer pratt was one of the characters on the mtv reality show the hills which was a huge huge things for people a generation or two behind us like i was too old for the hills but there were a lot of people that were really into it and spencer pratt married one of the other cast members from the show heidi montag and they've got kids and he was kind of the way that they framed him on the show was he was like sort of like the he was the heel he was the bad guy like everybody people didn't like him um and and i think that was amplified for the the purposes of the show obviously so he's always he's kind of like a to a certain generation if you say spencer pratt they're like oh we hate him like he was just a jerk so meanwhile he's been married to this woman for now a good number of years they have kids they have a family whatever their house burned down in the palisades thing and and um and he bizarrely enough has been narrating throughout the entire thing and has emerged as this like really interesting kind of like i don't know person slash um sort of con i keep using the word conduit for some reason today um sort of a a lens through which you can see what this looks like for people that like i don't get the sense that they lived in an overly grand home in fact one of the things that he was saying was after his house burned down was uh and i mean they lost everything he said that all every every penny they had was in this house that they had bought and he said and then everybody was writing well you're just a rich hollywood celebrity so who cares and he goes it's so funny how for the last 15 years everyone's been saying i'm broke i have no money i'm a loser yeah yeah and now my house burns down and suddenly i'm a rich hollywood he goes i'll take it because i love being a rich hollywood celebrity in your mind you know like he has a really kind of interesting He has kind of a refreshing kind of, I don't know, authenticity or something Would he be in my top five friends? Probably not But I also keep seeing him on the internet This is one of the weirdest things about this whole fire story And this does come back to Hummingbirds eventually So I guess that, I don't know, some number of years ago Five, ten years ago They had decided Actually, it might have been when The Hills was still on TV his wife heidi montag was looking to become a singer and she had recorded an album and they had apparently spent all of the money they had as a couple on producing this album like this was going to be her breakout album and it was going to set them up and it was going to really be the next phase of her career and this is you know this was the whole thing and of course the album just like flopped nobody listened to it it's now the number one album in america there has been this

crazy like internet movement with all kinds of like not famous and famous people streaming it being like we're making heidi montag's album the number one album in america and it it worked it's like that i mean maybe as of you and i having this conversation it may have slipped but it was the number one record on itunes for like a number of days across all genres and it was specifically

like people were doing it consciously to get it to spike or it just caught wind the way that b-side pavement song did and now it's their most popular song on all of the

streaming services i think what happened was it started as a project to try to help this family out in a way by elevating her music and then a funny thing happened people started really liking the song yeah people dig the song it's like a real kind of dancey it's like you know i mean paris hilton actually put out a really good song called stars are blind that actually kind of slaps, and this is sort of in that genre, in that whatever, so it's a it's an easy song to listen to, but it is burning up the charts, and anyway, it's just like, I don't know what the financials of this are, in other words, I don't know if having your song shoot to the number one on iTunes for a couple of weeks, if that equals one million dollars, or if that equals one thousand dollars, I don't understand the economics, I don't know if this has actually changed their financial situation at all, because i mean the sense you got and i really believe this was that this has absolutely ended them you know like this is pretty much the only the only asset they had in the world was their house and it's gone now and you know even if they can build it back it's they're not gonna get you know they're not gonna the state of california is not gonna give them enough money to rebuild the house etc etc but the fact that like in the burning of their house this her record has now finally been found by the public and beloved by the public like what a weird world that we live in but anyway um Spencer Pratt has those, at some point, he had some of those, like, whatever, meta glasses that were the Ray-Bans.

Yeah, Ray-Bans. I knew what I'd say. When I said Oakley's, I knew it was wrong. Thank you. Ray-Bans.

And he, there are these little, you can buy these little hummingbird feeders that sit over the glasses. But you can also film it. So if you sit very still A hummingbird will come And drink nectar out of Your sunglasses effectively Or your glasses but you can if you have those Ray-Bans You can film the whole thing And I will tell you I didn't but I considered Buying them for that specific purpose I thought what a zen thing If I can get myself Andrew to the point where I can Sit quietly enough for a hummingbird To drink out of my eye socket Have I achieved total consciousness

You have to do it on a mountaintop I don't think I would like that. I've had some, because Genevieve has a million hummingbird feeders. Well, like three, somewhere between two and a million. It's a week or four hours. It's Bob Dylan math. Get it together. And so there's one that I think Genevieve might have moved it because it was spilling too much sugar water on our deck. But there was one that was right outside our front door for a while. And kind of like if I would like go out the front door and then take a quick left to where my grill area was like on a summer evening, you know, I was like kind of passing back and forth a million times. And I don't know if some of these hummingbirds were I think they were being territorial. And I listen, I know like being scared of a hummingbird is not the most masculine thing in the world by some standards. But like when one of those guys is like right, like it would like hover like something out of a movie, almost like almost like a like a flying drone out of a sci fi movie would like hover right in front of my face, like between me and the and the and the feeder. And I don't know that I loved it, to be honest.

I'm safely behind the glass here, but I will tell you, yeah, maybe I would have to confront that if I did the Spencer Pratt eyeball thing. here's what people need to realize about animals that seem because we've coded them as not dangerous that that we don't need to be afraid of them it's just imagine if they were a different animal and by that i mean when people have like a small dog that's very out of control and trying to bite you but it's small yeah and they're like whatever he's just a little little guy it's like yeah what if that was a rat trying to bite you like what if that hummingbird was a wasp yeah like what if that hummingbird was a freaking wasp that was out to sting you you would be freaked yeah i mean they're

fascinating because they do like you can feel the energy like you can literally kind of feel the energy as they're just flapping those wings so unbelievably fast right like there's a vibration in the air and you can hear it and feel it when they're so close to your face what i don't

understand as i watch these hummingbirds who by the way have drained i'd say 60 of this nectar is gone now they are really going hard on it is why do they ever stop drinking it like i guess that's just they have some sort of satiation mechanism that tells them when it's enough but it's like to me it's like you're a hummingbird it's winter time it's cold it is it's hard out there for a hummingbird and now you just found like it's like you're it's like you're in the in the woods and you just found a a steamer full of 1000 dicks cheeseburgers and you're just like is anybody else seeing this and then you eat one and it's really good like why would you ever stop i mean i guess because you got full but you got full yeah i guess i just i feel like this is like keeping these hummingbirds literally alive and i would expect them to just drink themselves until they're like four times their normal size and they're just lying on the pavement but i guess that's what that's what satiation is for you can tell you and i have

issues with drinking why would you ever stop just keep drinking until you're laying on the floor over their eyes extended belly you know the cool thing is and this is something that i think i've said on the show before and i truly never thought about until genevieve got more and more into birds and i will mention that like as long as i've known genevieve it was sort of an it was a sort of an inside joke between the two of us she's always been interested in birds to some degree i remember we would be driving somewhere in new hampshire and like 93 from concord to boston and she would just blurt out interesting bird and point to the sky like somewhere and we'd always joke around about interesting bird and then she got more and more you know she got more and more into it as we got older in the past like 10 years or so and i remember sitting outside of our wallingford apartment and i don't know how well you remember that one luke it didn't have a lot going for it as far as an apartment is concerned but it had a really nice very lush backyard yeah small but very lush backyard and that's where genevieve would sit out on the porch and i was that's still a smoker at the time and so like i would sit out there and smoke cigarettes and veves would say oh yeah see that bird that bird there they're going to be coming around and they're going to be mad at those other birds because that's their territory and that's their tree and they have a nest in there and they're going to be hatching pretty soon or whatever. I don't remember what details Genevieve went into. I don't mean to make her sound like a savant, but she would just sit out there long enough to identify that these are the same birds. And it was such a revelation to me that sounds so stupid, but like, no, I know what you mean. Oh, it's the same birds. Literally, like I just always looked in the sky and I was like, yeah, birds, they all look alike. I don't know. They come and go. They're passing through. They're rolling stones. I always assumed they were passing through. Exactly. But no, they're the same birds. And so all of that is kind of what you realized the other day when your heart was a little bit broken because you had moved your hummingbird feeder a little bit. And then you saw the birds going to where it was. It's because they learned and they know. And so all of that is for me to say that I think that you should take some – it should be gratifying to you in a certain way that the birds drink what they need and they leave because now they know they can rely on you. You've got to keep that thing full, and they're going to keep coming back, especially in the winter but also in the other seasons. And as long as – and that's – and I think that Genevieve actually does feel quite a bit of responsibility about that, especially in the wintertime. Like these birds, she's trained these birds to come.

I'm a dependable man when it comes to his pets.

Yeah, right. This hummingbird is going to be living with Becca by the end of the week. But no, I mean, I do think, I don't know if that inspires you at all, but I mean, I think it's really, really sweet to think about in that way. And it's just scientifically true. And also it does mean that you should be thinking about like, hey, if I'm going on a trip, I got to make sure that these things are filled up because these birds, especially in this time of year, literally they're relying on it and you're kind of, you're building a relationship with them.

Yeah. you know what i hadn't thought of it that way and i like that like because i think i'm like you because i don't know anything about birds i just assume that they're in constant migration that they're literally which of course makes no sense think about they build nests they have eggs in the nest they come back they feed the babies like of course they have a neighborhood it's like the todd glass joke why would birds ever live in a shitty neighborhood it is a good it's a pretty solid spook but yeah it's like they haven't they have a neighborhood dialogue i haven't listened

to his podcast in so long. I hope he's still

doing it. He's doing some great... I see him on TikTok.

There's nobody like him. You cannot compare Todd with anybody.

Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. I think that's probably enough for one day. I've got to go out and refill this bird feeder. Yeah, you do. Yes, you do. Alright. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. So please do join us for that if you can. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Power out.