Muse

Excuse me, can I talk to you for a second? How can I help you? My date's eating all the fully loaded nachos. All the ones with the meat and cheese and everything. The ones that are fully loaded, she's hogging them. So I'm mostly getting just like, just chips. Like mostly just chips, like nothing on them. But like a little bit of cheese and maybe one little nugget of meat.

Okay. Can you say something to her? Say what? Maybe go up to the table and just say like, Hey, stop that! Or like, hey, that's not allowed. You want me to go over and say stop eating the meat on the chips? No, just say the restaurant has a rule.

It's not you. It's the rule the restaurant has that if you get an item to share, you can't. One person can't just eat all the fully loaded ones. Like, don't look around. Find the one with the most meat and always eat that one.

Can't you just ask her to share with you? Can't you just say the restaurant has a rule? TBTL!

In the next hour, we will present information that's both shocking and enlightening. You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You're a miracle. Your stories have none of that.

I'm a Grammy Emmy Tony and Webby Award winning and nominated songwriter, artist, designer, director, editor, animator, producer, collector, party thrower.

That was great. That was good. You went for it. I appreciate that.

You embarrassed me in front of Derek Jeter.

You embarrassed yourself in front of Derek Jeter. And I also think it wouldn't hurt you to talk to a therapist about your bathroom issues,

because there's clearly something going on there.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Be careful, though. It's spicy. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. And I'm going to get all anecdotal on you. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia. I'm an activist and house party enthusiast. It's a gray Tuesday here in the Pacific Northwest, but it's actually, for once, it's kind of toasty and warm here in the studio. Take it to coming out here early and just turning on all these heaters just so that it's, you know, properly podcast here and bring you episode 4405 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. It is funny that my dad's here working this week on the house and he is, you know, carrying heavy things and doing stuff. And I'll go down into the house and the heat will all be off because he's doing real stuff and I'm freezing. I'm like, can we please turn the heat on? I don't know if you know, I'm a podcaster. I don't do anything that generates enough body heat for us to turn the heat off, good sir. Speaking of podcasting, I learned what not to do while podcasting. i learned this yesterday about i don't know four minutes into the show i've made a huge mistake we'll talk about that and we're going to talk to this guy longest running co-bro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships soulful rocker from new hampshire and a guy who honestly is not taking any more crap this morning i don't want any more at any time during the day from anyone that includes me he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning

my friend good morning luke have i told you that um coffee smells like cabbage to me now now yeah this is a this is a development that has been sort of i'm is this a side effect of your med that's what i'm trying to figure out and i think this hopefully will maybe lead into something that you want to talk about in a moment too because i heard you mention it in your intro But I've spent the introduction of today's show reading a thread on Reddit that says sense of smell, methotrexate, double question mark. And I'm on this drug called methotrexate for my rheumatoid arthritis. And I think people use this drug for other things, too. I think I think it's also used in conjunction with other drugs when dealing with cancer and stuff. I think I think it's a pretty I think it's a pretty powerful drug. Like, I don't, you know, I'm not a pharmacist, but it's weird. Amateur pharmacist. The way I, yeah. I mean, I've dabbled. I called you Dr. Feelgood. Yeah, I mean, there was that experience I had with the emotion sickness medication that I'm blanking on the name of right now. What is the name? Dramamine. My Dramamine story from a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I remember that.

I can't forget it as much as I've been trying to.

You know, I heard from a listener who struggled with some pretty after me telling that story about how badly that drug messed me up when I sort of in college purposely overdosed on it to have sort of a.

trippy experience with some friends and miss your chance by the way to spend some quality time with a co-ed because my my brain was so messed up i literally didn't know what she had handed me um and uh somebody said you know i struggled with addiction and some really really powerful scary dangerous drugs and the one that i kept returning to was dramamine because it was accessible and and told in this email told some very personal stories about scary stories about friends finding him just like wandering around and like it really messes up your your brain grapes i'm yeah glad i only did it once i guess but anyway let's go back to modern pharmacy and and the and and my legal course of prescription medicines these days uh anyway methotrexate taking it because it's prescribed it's a weird thing i take it one day a week but i take eight pills i take four in the morning and four at night uh one day a very strange thing it is a

Very strange thing. Take one a day.

Right? Isn't it strange how these chemicals work? Anyway, all I know is recently, and I've been taking this since the fall, I think. Or let's see here. No, it's winter now. So I was maybe taking this since early fall or something. Yeah, like I just started noticing that things smelled weird. I have this plug-in air freshener, like a real basic plug-in air freshener, like Febreze or Glade. Are we talking Glade here? Maybe Glade. If you smelled it, you would have delved it. No, if you smelled it, you would have recognized it as like, oh, this is the lobby of a hotel. You know what I mean? It's a very generic-y kind of smell.

Can I ask without it sounding overly judgmental, did you purchase this? Like, I'm curious about the journey where you went into a store, maybe a grocery store, and went down that aisle that's got all the, like, non-grocery items, and you said you went with an air wick, you went with a glade. I feel like those are the kind of smells that our generation has turned its back on with a snarl.

They're definitely very basic. They're basic bee smells.

We're burning candles here now. We're smudging, what's that, Santa Paula or whatever that kind of little piece of wood is that everybody likes to burn now?

Yeah, no, this is not hipster in any way, but it is, you know, we have a litter box in the basement, and I keep it very clean. But I always have this sneaky feeling like if I'm gone on vacation for a while, you know, more than like a few days or something, you come back and then you're like you're smelling your house. You're like, you know, do I smell something earthy in here? Does it does it you know what I mean? Like, does it smell like we have pets? I don't like to smell like you have pets when you walk into a house. That should be seen, but not smell. That's right. And so I so I bought one of these things and I plugged it in. And it's a little bit strong when you first plug it in. But I plugged it in in my bathroom downstairs, which is kind of near where we keep the cat litter box. And, like, for my downstairs bathroom smell, like, it's a clean smell. It smells like linen or something like that, you know? Like, it's fine. Like, again, I'm not – I didn't do it to win any kind of cool guy awards.

Well, good, because you're not.

Yeah. And so I – but the thing about it is it's a very distinct smell, you know? Like, it's that – like I said, let's just say it's, like, that fresh laundry smell or whatever they describe it as. but like it now smells like nothing like that it smells a little bit like burning or like not not even burning but like almost a sulfury kind of smell and then I know have you gotten Genevieve in there to get nostrils on this it's well I've told her about it I don't know about that specific thing but I started noticing like sometimes if coffee is brewing upstairs and what is one of the best smells in the world right a new pot of coffee brewing it'll smell like weird like like I said like cabbage or something which is a real bummer what a major bummer yeah it's a pretty big bummer

i will sometimes get up uh because i have to use the restroom and it's really early i'm you know i make the coffee the night before i don't know if you're familiar with tomorrow's coffee andrew it's a whole lifestyle yeah i will get up in the morning and i will go switch on the coffee maker and i will get back in bed because i know that the smell of coffee will 30 to 40 minutes from then will help give me the, in the words of a Prairie Home Companion, the courage to get up and do what needs to be done. So the fact that you are not getting to enjoy that is a major bummer.

Yeah, I do the same thing, or I will sometimes even program it to start about a half hour before I'm supposed to wake up, so that I wake up and you smell the cough and you're like, ooh, that's a reason to live. That's what I'm looking for these days.

Now it's like you're in a dacha somewhere, just with boiling cabbage.

boiling away it's very strange and it's not always like that so if let me put it this way if i were to take like a bag of coffee beans berries coffee beans broadcast coffee broadcast coffee and i coffee sponsor of tbtl and i bury like my nose in it which is something i like to do not actually burying your nose in berries coffee well don't i did my nose doesn't touch the beans and i'm concerned you're gonna come over and never have coffee again no no this tastes like nostril

um but uh i'm also on a drug that makes coffee smell like your nostrils yeah that's interesting

wait you're not supposed to snort the beans supposed to grind it then snort it uh anyway like if i do that it'll smell like coffee beans it'll smell nice it's not like my it's not like everything is destroyed but it is especially i think when things are cooking maybe a little bit and i wonder if that has to do with you know this plug-in thing being a plug-in thing i i don't know but oh because heat is being applied to it but i'm seeing some of it i'm not seeing anything official saying oh yeah this is one of the official side effects i saw one thing that was like kind of quasi intelligent saying that some people report in an increased sense of smell with methotrexate and so the first post i saw was like i typed in something like methotrexate sense of smell and it's kind of like do i have bad body odor from methotrexate and there was like an article saying you know what happens is sometimes you have a more strong sense of smell and therefore you it changes your perception of the world and yourself and so you might think that you have a body odor thank goodness that does not seem to be the the situation with me somehow taking seven showers a

day has eliminated any issues with not only any body odor but also your biome yes exactly many healthy things that do live on the surface of your skin are all gone now i i mean these are the

cleanest skin flakes you'll ever see as i just the hair that's dirty as i just turned into one of those marvel characters at the middle of end game or whatever i'm talking about i mean that's but

hey but in but in all seriousness like smell is so vital how we navigate our world obviously it's you know it's a way that we we taste things it's a way that we sort of are attracted to people or maybe um you know repulsed from people i worry about this a little bit although she seems to putting up a pretty good front if not but becca is a like a super smeller has an incredibly keen sense of smell i think it's part of why she's really really good at um at at cooking and also at like tasting things like if we have a glass of wine she's like knows exactly the all the different elements uh because she has a really really keen sense of smell but that's a lot of pressure and i didn't really fully grasp it until pretty long into the relationship and it's like I try to you know I try to handle my business but it's like she is constantly going like oh I wonder what that smell is and then it takes me you know another 30 seconds before I get whatever it is that she's noticing anyway all that is to say I hope that this is something that will correct itself at some point because that's actually a pretty bad side effect it's not

great but honestly like I was sort of thinking about this today and of course I brought it up because i was thinking about it is like as i was genevieve was taking off some nail polish today um this morning and i kind of passed her desk and it was such a strong smell but it didn't smell like nail polish remover at all and i said well now what is that smell i smell she's like well i'm removing my nail polish i'm like oh my god that doesn't sound that doesn't smell anything like nail polish to me she's like well it is this like a scented one she's like it doesn't really smell like nail polish to me either like well okay now back to zero on on these theories so But it was very strong and not in a bad way. And I almost wonder if it's just like a more acute sense of smell that is also thus changing the way things smell to me. Like there's no way to compare smells to another person. Well, here's what you have to do, obviously.

You have to smell some cabbage.

Well, maybe you'll start drinking cabbage water in the morning.

If you smell a cabbage and it smells like coffee, I think we've started to really kind of narrow this down.

Yeah, maybe everything just went topsy-turvy.

The old cabbage switcheroo, sir.

But I will say you said it sounds like a terrible side effect, but I think about, like, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, like, it doesn't seem like the worst side effect in the world. Like, it's not great, but, like, I sort of think about, and not to be corny here, but, like, lately I've just been feeling really good. And I was mentioning this to Chris Hayes when we were talking with him at Town Hall. He asked me how I was feeling, and I was like, good. You know, I was thinking I had we'd given him a little one of those little TBTL sound machines, right? I had one or two kicking in this closet, but it was in this box in the bottom of this really hard to get into closet. I'm just saying this so that Chris knows how hard I worked for it. But I was like, he'll never hear this.

He's out promoting his number one bestseller book.

That's right. So anyway, so I'm like pulling these boxes out of this really hard to get to place. And like and some of them are really heavy because one of them is one of these boxes is my museum of archaic technology or whatever. So it's got like you and Fred Armisen. She's like, oh, and I'm pulling this thing out. But like, you know, it's heavy, but completely doable. And I had a moment of just like, I literally, literally would not have been able to do this this summer, you know? And so because of that, I'm like, well, coffee smells like cabbage, you know? Like, I'm 48. I've avoided some pretty major health stuff in my life. I've been really, really lucky. Had my first health scare this summer. It was not great, but we got it under control, you know? So sense of smell. I can live with this. I think I was.

kind of putting in perspective but it is a weird thing that i thought you would find interesting because again we taught we didn't we do a whole show or a series of shows about people's favorite

smells like smell is really important it's huge i mean let me reframe it it's not i'm not i guess i hear what you're saying and i'm not trying to say it's the worst side effect you could be experiencing but what i think is it's less trivial than it might sound at first if you said my sense of smell has kind of changed from being on this medicine that's greatly helped me with my mobility it would be like well that's that's great that's a great trade-off but it but also if you start to really think about it like how important smell is like what if suddenly you know the not to get weirdly personal into your relationship but like just imagine your sense of smell change and you suddenly don't really like enjoy the biome of the person you're with you know cats i'm with like or the cats you're with maybe more critically i don't know what your love life is like i don't know what goes on but you know what i mean like or a food that you really really love suddenly the taste of changes for you so you're right it's not the worst and it sounds like you'll definitely take it on balance but i do think it's kind of a sneaky uh a sneaky side effect in that it might have more impact than than you might think speaking of uh you were just one last thing i was going to say

i'm not trying to extend this out but only because i can hear people maybe like theorizing on this i will mention i had covid for the first time at the end of september because i was just looking at my calendar how you made it that far what's that i don't know how you made it that far into life yeah into life into these these times this is this these american lives i uh anyway i'm sorry sorry to extend this out further but i just wanted to say that like you know that is something that we've heard a lot about right like covet affected smell and taste now the thing is i did hasn't affected taste at all which i'm glad of um and that was terrible taste i still have i still love

the doors just keep making me listen to money hey you know i've that was not a fair joke go after the doors i was grasping for something i've been i've been enjoying the heck out of your jazz

recommendations it really and truly charles mingus out of this um but anyway so i i don't know that's another thing to maybe consider because that that so we were in philadelphia the very last weekend of september going into october but it sort of seems like this didn't really start hitting me until january so i feel like that's probably not related but maybe that makes more sense than than a side effect of this drug but anyway what what were you gonna say well i i started the show by

saying um i learned yesterday something that is in all these years of broadcasting i should already have known this but i for some reason yesterday uh failed to realize that getting a ping on my phone from my health care provider kaiser permanente when they said oh you've got a new test result uh is not that just like it's three minutes into our recording session is not when i should just click on that i mean people actually i was gonna say people might be surprised to learn this but they've listened to the show they would be unsurprised to learn that even while you and i are talking and i think we're very engaged in the conversation there are times where maybe we dash off an email here or there or you know uh hex an empire or whatever whatever needs to be done I really do try to not allow myself to get super distracted because I feel like, you know, this is our job and I want to try to do a good job. But every once in a while, I can only speak for myself. I'm guilty of of getting a note from someone or something, maybe, you know, Becca checking in or live wire. And I feel like, well, I'll just while Andrew's talking, I'm both listening and I'm also going to hit a little like, yeah, that works for me or whatever.

Can I before I even find out what you're going to say, can I just say there was a moment of yesterday's show that I actually thought about later that I did something to you that was truly unintentional but I noticed it and it was my grandfather used to do this thing where he would be telling a story and then he would just throw in some ridiculous line or something like that to check to see if you're listening and yesterday we were I was telling such a long boring story about troubleshooting a new laptop computer and at one point I I asked you a question in the middle of it like a rhetorical question I'm like, what does it always ask us, Luke, when we're logging on to Riverside or something? And I could see for a split second that, and I did not do it on purpose. I'm bad with eye contact, so I'm often not looking directly at the camera or the screen. And I saw you sort of like, uh, what was the question? And then you pulled it out. I could be wrong about it, but it was like one of those moments where I was like, oh, shit, I think I just caught him unawares. And I seriously was not trying to catch you unawares.

It's funny. okay this is now like in typical tbtl style this is now multiple layers of different conversations that were both on air and off air but before we started recording today's show i said to you oh i want to talk to you about basically like i went on a journey yesterday and you said to me yeah i noticed you were somewhere else a little bit but i just figured it was maybe jet lag or the travel or something and it's so interesting it's interesting to me how tuned into each other's vibrations we probably are just by virtue of doing this so many hours a week um but um yeah so basically what happened was yesterday i get this little ping on my phone from kaiser as everyone knows i had that colonoscopy uh two weeks ago now which has been both fascinating to the listeners and also generated a lot of ire people i think that there are a couple people who think that well it's weird it seems to have generated a strong response a strong response from a couple of people who i don't really think we're actually listening to what we were saying or i was saying i will admit to one thing and this is to the side of the point of what happened yesterday i guess there's some people out there who wanted to point out that if you do the kind of less invasive test which is to say you submit a stool sample and you have a polyp in your colon that will actually the stool sample should theoretically note that because that's the whole design i don't want to get too graphic but basically there are things there are things or indications that they should pick up with the test whereas i was saying well thank goodness i got this like very involved procedure which you know had all this like deprivation going into it um because they found this little polyp that they didn't seem too worried about and thank god they found it because they wouldn't have otherwise so i want to correct the record i guess they would maybe would have found it had i done the less invasive

test can i just jump on there one second because you and i kind of we were learning about this at the same time you've had yours i haven't but like it was presented to us by both of our doctors as like well the gold standard my doctor called exactly the gold standard is you go and you get the colonoscopy and that way if we do find anything we can take it out if you do the at-home test and you submit a sample then if it does flag anything then you're gonna have to get the colonoscopy anyway right so you and i were like oh i think we're doing the right thing by choosing the the actual full on colonoscopy the first time this person who wrote in was like well that sort of dismisses the idea of all the pressure that is on the health care system right now and if there are ways we can like have people take these tests at home it actually will kind of like encourage more people to do the at-home test first as opposed to jumping right to the colonoscopy would actually be better for the system overall i thought it was an interesting email that was a that was from a listener who works in the health care industry and seems to know what they're talking about and i'm sorry i don't have their name in front of me it was an interesting perspective that i

had not considered so for whatever it's worth so colonoscopy talk has been tearing this podcast apart yeah um and uh anyway so uh so as i just mentioned and as you figured out if you listened two weeks ago or whatever um they took out this little thing they found in there the doctor seemed extremely unworried when uh when he came and talked to me afterwards and uh everything seemed to be in great shape. And then yesterday I get this update and I press on the button and then suddenly I'm at some kind of like PDF, right? Uh, which is the patho, maybe it's a pathologist. It's whoever looks, you know, this gets sent off. So it's whoever looks at the thing and it's very medical the way it's written out. And what I notice is that it, it doesn't say anything definitively on there, like good news or bad news, right? It's very technical terms around what the nature of this little thing was upon analysis and then it says something in there I'm kind of trying to half remember this now but it said something like results omitted or something it had something in there where it was like it's this kind of thing, doesn't explain what this kind of thing means, and then it's like results omitted or something, something that made me think, I wonder why would you omit that why would you not put whatever in there that's a little odd, and so this is where andrew i did the stupidest thing that you can do which is while talking to you i then highlighted the word that was the description of this particular little thing they took out of my body and plugged it into the internet and did not love what the internet was saying and uh uh you know and then i'm like on wikipedia and i'm being a little vague here intentionally because i don't want to i'm for the record by the way things are fine it turns out but But, in the moment, I'm like, huh, that's a weird word I've never seen before, and then you plug it into the internet, and then you get to Wikipedia, and then it's like linking to something else, and suddenly you're like jumping around these pages, and you're just kind of like, as I'm talking to you about resetting the time on the computer, I'm also thinking, am I entering a completely new phase of my life health-wise? and uh the the good news is that uh when i got done with the show i was like okay well well first of all i was like what do i like how do i what do i do about this exactly do i just like immediately call kaiser and like get somebody on the phone you know the doctor or the whoever the person who looked at the sample was or whatever um or do i give it a day or do i just

go down to the Eagles in Rainier, Oregon, and just start getting drunk? Like, what's the recommended response to information that seems a little ominous?

Butt-chugging seems to be in order.

Do I stop butt-chugging? Do I do more butt-chugging? Exactly, it's a fine line. I literally was like, I wonder, you know, and of course, I'm spinning this up in my mind into sort of a bigger deal than it turned out to be, thankfully. But I'm just like, okay, I guess what I really need to do is just give them a call and get to the so to speak get to the bottom of this but i really did kind of have this moment of thinking like is this something that i don't even really want to get into today like it's nothing is there going to be anything different tomorrow and do i want to have an additional day where i'm just like the before and after of what i think might be a kind of a serious situation and right as i'm about to call them i get a new email from them that is now not written in medical ease yeah and And it just basically says, look, this thing that we, first of all, and this is to their credit. They're like right there at the top of the like the top of the little diagnosis, the little description of what they're like. You don't have any cancer. This thing we took out is totally benign. Like, that's all the good news. The bad news is it's the kind of thing that is, you know, also associated with cancer, like down the line. So our recommendation is that you get another one of these things in three years. That was the extent of it. so the good news is everything was fine everything was benign i i wish they would have led with that email if they would have just sent me an email in the first place i would have been fine but in the again in the googling and then the wikipedia and the jumping around and seeing words that were again a little a little unnerving um it was uh i i guess my point in all that is to say apologies if i was a little off yesterday i have learned my lesson uh and that is uh don't open don't open medical updates while you're also trying to co-host a podcast let me ask you a

question here and what does riverside always ask us when we log in luke oh no he's totally deer in the headlights i caught me again i scared him again um you know what that sounds like a little bit to me and i wonder if they're just using different language do you remember when

i had those issues with some yes i was thinking of you literally this is the layers of it andrew I'm talking to you on the show yesterday and I'm thinking about my potential health scare and I'm thinking about your potential health scare with the stuff that you had going on that was, if I can say this, and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe was described as potentially precancerous.

They called it precancerous. They found something on my tongue. They were concerned about it. I had this pretty awful kind of, I guess, surgery. It wasn't probably awful compared to what other people have done, but I'm a wimp.

I would like you to give yourself a little grace on them getting into your mouth and cutting out part of your tongue.

It was unpleasant. Yeah, and the first time, I don't think I had them knock me all the way out because it's not that kind of a procedure. The next time, I was just like, I brought my own mallet. I'm like, you bang me on the head with this until I am unconscious.

You brought in a coconut tree with three coconuts that were just ready to fall at any moment and stood under it.

They were so ripe and ready. No, but the first time, so they took it out, and then they send it to the lab, and it comes back. They're like, we don't like this. It's not cancer, but it does have these mutated cells that are like what we would describe as pre-cancerous. And also, we didn't get clean edges, so we want to go back in and get the rest of it. And I was a smoker at that time, and that's literally when I stopped smoking. Like, boom, just like that, I quit smoking. And so that was really, really scary for me.

That's why I stopped butt chugging.

It was just the scare I needed. See, that's weird. Then I started butt chugging. Because it's always like one or the other.

Yeah, it's conservation of butt chugging.

Usually when you go to a lot of... First, I want to state that neither I nor any member of my fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, have ever been involved in butt-chucking or the use of alcohol enemas.

A lot of people, I know it's kind of cliche at this point, but if you go to sort of a support group for quitting smoking, everybody's butt-chugging. Yeah. Because it's just kind of like... That's how you know where the meeting is.

It's usually like a church and there's just people standing around outside the basement door butt-chugging.

You know, that must be different. And back in the day, it was like very classic, like an AA meeting. It was like almost a cliche that everybody there was smoking because a lot of people were probably smoking and drinking during that era anyway. And then when you quit drinking, you really leaned into the smoking. I knew some people in my family who went through that. But I guess that can't be the case anymore. If you think about the buildings where these meetings are held, people aren't smoking in the basements of churches or what have you.

Definitely not indoors. But I remember being a kid and on Aurora, not super far from where you all live now, a little more towards like where that Jack in the Box is on 85th. There must have been there must have been an AA meeting that met, you know, in one of those buildings. And I as a kid, you know, because we'd be driving up and down Aurora all the time, you just always see a bunch of people standing.

around outside on aurora smoking and just with those white styrofoam cups of probably just

brutally bad black coffee yes yes with with powder creamer in it just came out and like you wonder

why people relapse like this is the substitute but i would see them and i didn't of course i didn't know what like recovery was or any of that stuff but i i remember just you're just riding by trying to watch the lonely guy down the block seriously i was like what's what is going on here and why are there all these people standing around outside doing this weird stuff but um Anyway, it is strange, though, Andrew, that I was literally thinking about you and your journey with that as I was on my own brief journey with this, which, again, would have probably been much less of a deal in my mind if I wasn't also trying to co-host this show. Which again, I know to the listeners, it seems like really how much brain power does this take? But it was like, what I really felt like was, and maybe this is where I was wrong because you noted I was obviously, I really thought I am the master of compartmentalizing. I was like, I am so good at compartmentalizing that even as my life was, and I'm not trying to be glib, and I want to be clear, kind of like you were talking about, Andrew, with both of us having been really privileged in our lives that our health has been relatively okay. I want to be clear. There are people all the time getting extremely dire diagnoses, and I just had basically a misreading of a medical chart that had me kind of stressed. I want to be really acknowledging that there are really bad things happening to people all the time, and I don't want to try to lump myself in with them. But yeah, I thought that I was really good at playing it off. I was like, I'm doing this, but I guess I wasn't doing it as effectively as I thought I was.

Well, yeah, I wouldn't say you were off. There were a moment at the beginning where I just thought you were multitasking. Like I just thought that – well, you got back from England. Like you're probably just catching up on emails or something. I just thought I happened to catch you in a moment of reading something. But, yeah, and I don't know why I'm thinking about this again. But, like, just talking about this journey of, like, Googling something, it's, like, so dangerous. I was telling you – I was looking at this. And, again, it was a Reddit thread. Like I hear it, okay? Like I understand it's a Reddit thread. But immediately, one of the things that somebody is responding to about a sense of smell is you definitely should get an MRI to rule out brain tumors. And it's just it's amazing how fast the Internet goes to brain tumor. It's just like zero to brain tumor in 0.1 seconds. Right. That and Nazi, of course, in this day and age, maybe maybe it's maybe it's not so far fetched. But back in the day, we used to go and rest your tumor. It was never long in a comment thread, even before we had some Nazis in positions of power in this country, that it was just like so quickly a conversation devolved to people accusing each other of being Nazis, and same with brain tumors, I would say.

yeah I'm I feel like again I feel really lucky that because the privilege of having good health I am also not a person who's you know doing Google MD as people might call it a lot but you know it's a known thing like don't don't Google your symptoms because like you said it will immediately end up in some

very very dire sort of place speaking of Nazis I don't like I hate what comes

next well I mean yeah you know what actually as I start to say this like it probably will this it's not getting lighter when i when that's the transition my dad and i are now watching this uh show called rogue heroes can i just do an anti-ad for britbox by the way and can i do an anti-ad for all streamers for a moment like get it together streaming services please so uh my dad and i started watching this show called rogue heroes the first season um i don't know six months ago or a year ago and it's basically i think it's based on a book but it's the kind of i think it's semi-true but also kind of fictionalized now story of this particular group of like british soldiers they were called the sas and this was in world war ii and they started out like in north africa and they were like basically kind of not officially on the record anywhere for the british army but they were out just doing these crazy kind of guerrilla missions and stuff and they were as you might imagine Andrew a band of misfits that nobody thought you know could ever accomplish anything and yet in their own kind of broken way they get it done were they would you almost

describe them as inglorious bastards some things or ingenious bastards I

believe was what my mom thought it was once during charades I've told you that one of the great stories from our family is at we were doing charades and it was too easy there's like family charades and so addie decided to mix it up by throwing in some truly hard to act out movies that is ingenious or inglorious that is impossible and i think it what addie wrote in inglorious bastards my mom read it as ingenious bastards just imagine my mother i do believe she had stopped drinking at this point which i don't know if that was helping or hurting but she was trying to act out in Ingenious bastards.

And probably was familiar with the idea of it being a film, even? Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Oh, God, Annie.

No, no, no, no, no. What has she done to this family? Well, she knew it was a film because it was listed probably as a film, you know, like on the little slip of paper.

But she can't do a Christoph Waltz or something like that. She has no context for anything with the two words.

She had no idea that the noted director Eli Roth was playing the bear.

Yeah, right.

In the movie. But anyway, so this show is called Rogue Heroes, and we watched the first season through MGM. I had to, like, the MGM streaming network or whatever, and so I subscribed to it at the time. You know, whatever, it's five bucks a month, but the show is pretty fun. It's, you know, it's a little predictable, but enjoyable. And because, I don't know if my mom's going to hear this or not, but it's probably better than what we were watching on Sunday night with me and my mom which was and my dad which was we had gone on BritBox to try to stream some kind of a show we start watching and I go when is this even from and they're like I don't know 2000 and I go how did you find out about this mom she goes oh I checked the DVD out from the library I'm like oh this is like this is the content that we're that we're watching is based on a DVD that available at the kitsap public library and anyway so that was some bbc show that we watched on sunday night i was kind of minimally interested in rogue heroes much better but this is the thing so last night uh my dad's like hey there's a new season of rogue heroes out which he had thankfully it turns out pirated per his per his usual activities but i was like i i'm paying for mgm still or or whatever and i have this nice fancy tv setup and like let's just let's try to enjoy this uh you know as mother nature intended by like the streaming services i'm paying for watching it on this tv not hooking up the laptop which is mirrored to the tv which the sound sometimes doesn't want to sync and you've got to have the laptop open the laptop can't be asleep but you got to turn the laptop away from us so that it's not like kind of distracting i mean you know this you know this game better than anyone and so all this is to say like i'm i have this mgm thing somehow it's not it they're in season two my dad has the whole second season like illegally pirated to his laptop i can't even get the second season on this stupid streaming service i'm paying for they're telling me it's on amazon i go on amazon amazon i swear to god like amazon doesn't have it But then I start searching around in the apps, and apparently Sling TV is trying to – do you know Sling TV is trying to be a streamer now?

Everybody's making their own content. Is that what you mean, that they're making their own content?

No, but they're not making this. This was made by, like, whoever the production company is that MGM hired. I'm just saying, can you – remember Sling TV?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that Sling TV went away. they had those really good ads with um nick offerman and um america's favorite couple i'm blanking on his wife's name um megan malali megan malali and so i feel like they've been sort of relevant in the conversation for a while i've never messed around with it but sling tv was sort of it's isn't sling tv like a fubo if sling tv is like an alternative to your fubo basically

right well yes exactly but it was back in the day you would get you would you would i guess rent maybe because i had it you would rent this very sizable box at your house that you would hook up to your television that would allow you if you were somewhere else to hack into the mainframe of your television via sling tv and watch what was on your television this is now easy and normal and you don't need a box for this as far as i understand it but back in those days that was sling tv's it was to me it was a it was a hardware company it's like we what we made what we have made is this box that that like allows you to warg into your television when you're not at home at your TV that was the whole sales pitch around sling TV so it's so weird to me to think of them as now being in the content game because they weren't in the content they were in the looking at your content that

you were getting from someone else game Luke can I tell you a memory that I just unlocked which was a time in the 1980s 90s where we suddenly had the ability to check our phone messages from anywhere you would call your own phone number get the answering machine mash down the six button or something like that and then it would be like suddenly you've unlocked the ability to play a tape from across the country and you can actually listen to the messages that were physically physically on the on the small little tape right magnetic tape that was in your foyer in in valley city ohio and like then it was like oh no i don't know we've just come a

long way baby sorry right and then it was i have voicemail but then it was of that then it

like i've got voicemail that i can also check from anywhere yeah like calling my voice but that seemed like well that's not going to get fancier than this yeah that's it like we've now we've we've we've achieved the singularity as it relates to voice messages i have a voicemail box somewhere it's not a physical i remember you know i'm sure you remember this too you would come home from like a long family trip and you would walk in to your house and you would go walk over to that answering machine and you would hit play on it and there would be so many messages or even at the

end of the day though i mean that was i sometimes i think about how as technology changes we take away more and more narrative devices for like storytellers and like movies and tv because that was a thing i'm even trying to think like i'm thinking of batman returns i feel like that was like catwoman comes home and checks her answering machine i don't know why that's the one that sticks in my head but like that was such a way of of advancing a story was like seeing this person check their voicemail when they get home and then you're learning something about the character and like you can't really do that anymore but that was a that was something that kind of gives me a warm cozy feeling like coming home and then checking the messages it's been a long time

anyway speaking of speaking of narrative device i was trying to explain to my dad expositional devices last night like they decided to give one of these characters on rogue heroes a cute dog that he can then explain everything that we the viewers need to understand about the mission

yeah at least they tried to what i really hate in those things i hate exposition so so much it's like one of my least favorite things it's just like i'm such a show don't tell type of person and um i hate it when you have a bunch of experts and i don't watch a lot of procedurals or something i assume this happens on those shows a lot you have a bunch of experts and let's just say you know uh crime solving and they're explaining to each other processes it's like how did you get out of the academy like you guys you're all just speaking shop it would be like me like suddenly there's a camera on me and i'm explaining to you how to dial up riverside or something like that like we use it every day set up riverside or how to set up are you wearing headphones um anyway anyway all of that to say i want to be the iced tea of this podcast speaking of narrative uh devices go back to your story though so i'm curious where this is going and i want you to know that rogue heroes has a 100 on the tone on the tomato meter on rotten tomatoes

only it's pretty good honestly but yeah for what it is how many popcorns is it but literally they

measure the i think audience response in popcorn so it's 80 i am so close to calling my mother

right now to see if she could remember this conversation that happened the other day at my house that i am can't quite pull together but i told you how she's obsessed with rotten tomatoes yeah like that's what she that's her her kind of it's become her bible if you will for and and you and i were talking about something and i believe you were saying it's not really for you i forget 21 grams 21 grams that movie and then uh my mom for some reason was like was like i guess listen to that episode or something and then was saying how many how what how many rotten tomatoes it had or how fresh it was on rotten tomatoes even though she's never seen the movie we were last the other night she was talking about she was relaying to me a text chain with her and her girlfriends in philadelphia she is still friends with a group of maybe like six or seven women who she went to like grade school and middle school and high school with and she goes on vacation with these women sometimes and it's actually very adorable but like they have this kind of running text chain and one of her friends had said something like we just watched some movie called like the shack which i would and my mom was like i know your dad and i watch we don't like that movie or we didn't think that movie was very good and i was like i don't i've never heard of this movie i guess it's maybe sort of like christian coded or something in some way but uh she just was like obsessed with what the shack's rotten tomato this movie the shack how many rotten tomatoes are me fresh tomatoes head or i don't know obviously i don't look at rotten tomatoes much but i find the fact that this has become such an important bellwether for my mother in her life at age like 72 or three or whatever a real plot twist i did not see this being something like multiple times a week my mother is going on rotten tomatoes to find out what something's

freshness rating is now i assume the shack is spelled s-h-a-q is this yes exactly it sounds up it sounds up your alley i um i keep on trying to lead you back to this but i'm not sure if maybe the story's over but you were you were giving an anti-ad for britbox and i'm well roast their ass

burn their ass i want to hear this you know because i listen to a lot of public radio i hear a lot of ads for britbox they're a heavy heavy supporter i mean on that level i should i should give them a break because any listen any support that public radio can get right now is a good thing um but i hear a lot of britbox ads and then but i i feel that it is deceptive because the ads for brit

Thank you.

would lead one to believe that any content that is you know been played on the BBC or other kind of you know ITV things like that would be available and it's very much not the case it is a random smattering of the things that they have decided to put on there and sometimes it'll just be like you know the Father Brown mysteries but season four episode five like explain the utility of that, please. Other streamers are doing

that too, but there's something, and I'm not a BritBox person, but there's something especially galling about BritBox doing that, and I don't know why.

I expect better from the Brits, is what I think, and their boxes.

It's weird that, like, and it is frustrating, but it'll be like, okay, 30 Rock was on this platform, and now it was on Hulu, now it's on Netflix, or whatever. That happens sometimes. Or Genevieve will, like, have, like, two seats, because Genevieve watches more, like, kind of new television than i do um but it'll be like she's like i don't know they only have seasons three through five of this thing that i'm trying to catch up on and i don't know and that's always frustrating no matter what the streamer is but there's something about britbox that really makes it sound and i don't know why just good marketing on their part or assumptions on mine but britbox sounds like it should be more of a complete set it's kind of like it's unlocking all of the content for people who have a very specific need it's not like your mgm which has a whole bunch of maybe classic movies and some new programming or whatever or even paramount plus or whatever heroes yeah and whatever like okay like i guess i don't expect as much but like brick box should be a box full of everything that you need to complete your very specific you know desire in television which is

british shows and i think also it what what plays a role in my conception of it is this idea that the BBC is publicly funded which by the way I'm probably I'm probably loud wrong about the sort of funding mechanism I think of you know the BBC as being this amazing organization one of the many ways in which I see England is or the UK is as outclassing America like a robust public media system be it the BBC radio be it the BBC television so I think of all of it as being PBS right that's how like that's where my mind categorizes it and therefore if it is all just like if it's all just public television that's free for everyone in england and uh which again i don't think that this is actually the case this is just how i think of it then it should all just be throw it all into the brit box please and i would like to watch it uh as opposed to uh you know getting again this and this is really this is ultimately what my gripe is all about is just we ended up having to watch like a very kind of like stepped on low res version of rogue heroes last night with kind of a slightly laggy screen and funky audio because uh because i could not locate this thing anywhere streaming even though i'm many of the services i've already mentioned i'm still paying some kind of subscription for and i don't know it just feels like it's it's somehow spiritually related to the fact that internet search is bad now i feel like i know those aren't related concepts but they feel the same the fact that good search the era of good search is over it also feels like the era of easy tv watching is over if we're talking about something that is not just the number one show on netflix right now we're talking about something that is either a little more obscure or had a longer run like where would you even go can you get all of 30 rock somewhere theoretically

now i believe all of 30 rock is yeah and 30 rock's a weird example because i don't think it was ever segmented like some of the seasons are here and some of the seasons are there that's the thing that I specifically dislike. But I do know that, and I don't remember where it is right now, but I do believe that the entire catalog of 30 Rock has bounced between Hulu and Netflix, if not once, more than once. So that is available. And I'm also looking, people are like, where is season two of Rogue Heroes streaming on MGM Plus yet? Like, you're right on this. It doesn't seem like there's any definitive answers. Can I just say one thing?

Thank God I'm related to one of the great content thieves of our time. He's the real Thomas Crown of getting British television.

And speaking of, actually, I want to ask you something, because it's so rare that I'm downloading illicit content these days because we pay for so many streamers. But I was watching some illicitly downloaded stuff last night that I want to ask you about. But I did want to just clean up one thing that I said before. It sounded like I was saying you get BritBox, you have access to every single episode of every single British TV show ever made in the history of mankind. Obviously, I know that that is not the case.

If I don't see a guy pumping up a bicycle tube that also makes a woman's breast gets larger, I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Where do they come up with this stuff? I don't know. But I was just going to say, obviously, I don't expect that. That is ridiculous.

I'm talking specifically about the shifting sands of these streamers. And like you were saying specifically. You're Luther. You're Poldark. Of course. Luther is one that I'm supposed to watch. I actually really want to get into Luther. Okay. But I did want to tell you, two of the streamers we do not pay for is RR or is Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus and Minus. and I did

I'm getting Apple minus currently

I'm getting Apple minus it's called it's called downloading it off off of a a website that keeps on moving around but anyway pirate based it actually is there are others anyway all of that is to say I finally spent this weekend re-watching all of season one of Severance because I'd watched season one but I wanted to re-watch it I wanted an onboarding for season two and then last night Genevieve got home from her travels she watched the last she recapped with me the last three episodes or re-watched the last three episodes and then we began season two last night but I've only I'm only one episode into season two before we start analyzing where are you on your journey

I am almost caught up I think I might have missed the latest on Sunday night because I was busy watching the Inspector Lindley with my parents

okay I think there's five 20 years ago

starring a young Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey, but this time as a possible

murderer. No spoilers.

So all that is to say, I'm like maybe one

episode behind. Yeah, I think there are five episodes so far in season two, and I believe it sounds like maybe you've watched four of them, and I've watched one.

I am so glad. Can I just tell you quickly? Yeah, did you catch up before launching, by the way? I had a long argument with you in my head the other night that I didn't bring you in on because there was no purpose, but now, here we are, so let's do it. I was watching severance and i wanted so badly to talk about it with you both on the show and off the show i just wanted to be like dude what do you think about you know this that and the other but then i was like i was like but if i there's when i was thinking of basically saying to you like hey man would you mind getting on severance because then we can talk about but then i was like i know that one of the things you don't love is people telling you when and where to watch what so then i was like just leave him just let him you know what just let him come to it or let him arrive in his own time to severance and you were that was exactly what was happening and now we can talk at some point about severance i'm so stoked about yeah i just i honestly just don't you know what's

very strange is you think a show like that it's classic couples stuff right binge watching something together you'd think like when genevieve is home that's when i would do that when genevieve is home like we don't watch tv together that much well you guys are severed

though yeah exactly your innies are watching it together but you have absolutely no idea about

you say that maybe we are watching it we have gotten into like playing cards and watching just like kind of crappy tv and that that i love i love playing cards with genevieve it's such a great playing like we just play gin rummy all the time and it's just like such a good way of just being with somebody like kind of chilling you can talk i just made the sound tim robinson's character

makes when he's being sent home from the dating show because of the zip line

but it's supposed to be nice but anyway when genevieve's not here you'd think oh then all the more i'd just be playing video games and darts and not watching tv but somehow genevieve being gone i was like well maybe now would be the time oh did you get sent home um and maybe

that would be something really bad is gonna happen i was just thinking like maybe now would be the

time to kind of catch up on a bunch of these i know genevieve doesn't want to re-watch all of season one anyway and that way i sort of like have the freedom to sort of like pause it whenever i want not that i can't with genevieve there but it's like there were moments where like i was folding clothes and like sort of standing in front of the TV watching it by myself like I guess my TV watching habits are just so weird it's like easier for me to watch it by myself but I was happy to binge all of one I don't know how I feel about season two yet I've only watched the first episode and I watched it after binging three of the old episodes first so you start that's where you start to enter the sort of bleary-eyed phase of binge watching and like I don't know like the vibe i don't know my initial reaction to episode one is uh you better be going somewhere with this

counselor this i'll allow it this is what i was going to say without i'm not spoiling anything because i'll be honest with you i have no idea what's going on you know i'm like almost caught up and it's i'm no more like aware of the so-called plot than i was at episode one of season two if that makes any sense and i've i'm having literally that was the thing i wanted to say to you i was Like, I hope he watches this so that I can say to him, this better be going somewhere.

How are you feeling four episodes in? Are you feeling like it's coming together?

Not yet. But, I mean, listen to the thing. It's intriguing. But it's easy to throw a bunch of balls up into the air. Yes. The trick. trick is to catch them as they're coming down that's called juggling and right now there's a lot of balls that have gone up in the air there's a lot of weird shit happening as i mentioned on the ascendant social media platform blue sky they have entered their spies like us phase they're out in the snow at some point they're all dressed up like chevy chase and dan akroyd in that movie um but uh it's it's i'm totally intrigued by the whole thing but it just ben stiller i'm given you a lot of slack on this my friend um giving you a lot of rope so i hope that you're able to by the way i have also been having a like a a one-way uh conversation with ben stiller this whole time which has also been basically me going like i'm trusting you ben stiller yeah i'm trusting you because i do think he is a very talented he's just amazing tv show creator filmmaker obviously it's a really good actor but i mean i think he's really good at thinking about entertainment right And so I, I trust him implicitly that he knows that the pitfall of these kinds of things is always, it's really easy to set up a bunch of mystery and it's really hard to like land that plane. Yeah. So I'm trusting him that he knows how to land this plane.

He's such a meticulous director too, or just like creator or whatever, like the detail.

Like Zoolander when they are fighting with the gas.

Yeah. I'm actually not the biggest fan of Zoolander, but certainly, um, certainly Tropic Thunder, like however you feel about Tropic Thunder. like when you Genevieve had that on somewhat recently and I saw big chunks of it again I've I've seen it a few times I'm sure but like it's such a big budget movie like it is the the the it's making fun it's a parody of big budget movies but in order to do that he made a big budget movie that is so amazingly done and like you just read about him being so so meticulous and you see that in in this tv series one thing that here's my overall kind of feeling about season one i've been thinking about this um the pacing of the show and the and the count the complexity of the show speeds up so much in season one right and i was really hoping that season two would be a reset i was actually thinking this before i started season two so if you look at season one and so far i think we've done a good job by the way of not spoiling anything we're just talking about sort of the overarching like kind of like tone of the show but like it begins so minimalist right yes a woman is on a table in a room she doesn't know how she got there this is the very first scene this isn't a spoiler she doesn't know how she got there a voice starts speaking to her on a speaker that's all we know then little by little and everything is in there in some sort of underground white just like you know like kind of immaculately clean cavernous warren yes

where we would take all of our publicity

photos so but but very clean and and like just in in in minimalist in the way it's directed and shot and everything it's just very beautiful in this way and then very slowly things are revealed you're hooked immediately and things are slowly revealed slowly revealed halfway through season one this snowball is rolling down the hill and the plot is getting more and more complicated and we're learning more and we're learning more and then even some of the design of the show gets more and more complicated and i'm still confused as to what the hell happened with that waffle party scene in season one why suddenly like we went from this minimalist do you remember the

waffle party yeah is that some kind of a like a perk for them or something it was a perk but

now i guess now i will give a spoiler alert on this if you haven't gotten that part and you don't know what i'm talking about maybe fast forward a little bit here but he's dying to get this waffle party and he gets it it's a one-man waffle party but remember he sits then after he eats the waffles they're like he sees a note that says cherry character uh yeah yeah exactly yeah the guy with the glasses um and then but then it says put on this mask and he puts on this crazy this is season one you must remember this i didn't go back and re-watch season one so

i think i had kind of i have a vague memory of this i sort of know this always stuck in my head

and i was glad to re-watch it because i remember always thinking like this doesn't fit with the rest of the show it's like this weird psycho sexual scene where these characters are coming

A little too wide and a little too shut.

Yeah, do you remember it now? All these characters come out wearing different masks and they do this sexy dance for him.

Because he's in that, like, he goes to some sort of-

The founder's house.

Yeah, Keir's house that's kind of Victorian or something.

But it's like a fake, it's a recreation of Keir's house and he's sitting in Keir's bedroom while these weird-ass creatures wearing masks, or these people wearing masks of creatures are doing a sexy dance for him. It does not fit at all with the rest of the series. So anyway, I was hoping that season two would be a bit of a reset. I wanted things to slow the hell down for episode one of season two.

And it's like, let's go back to the mundanity of Mark, Mark, whatever his name's life is. Let's just see him like living his outie life a little bit kind of thing.

Or whatever it is, keep the mystery, keep the intrigue, but just slow it down. And I didn't get that. Instead, it's way more complicated.

complicated again and i'm just like shit i the beauty of the show was its simplicity and its

minimalism and i would like to see a little bit more of that it is definitely racing along and getting more kind of i don't want to say surreal but just like a lot of weird stuff that i don't understand is happening that again i'm trusting the show uh creators to to sort of tie these loose ends up and explain stuff uh i will say i don't think this is spoiling anything but um you know what is his name the guy who plays cool Rick in yes Patriot I can turn off something the actor

or the character I'm not sure I forget I would you remember what the character's name is he's just such he plays the brother-in-law of the main character he's so good at playing just this is

the most annoying d-bag he just this doesn't give anything away but in this most recent episode I watched he's make trying to make the case he's you know he's just like a very selfishly motivated character who's just like basically like if if donald trump was you know ported into a guy who writes ponderous books basically that's like he's totally narcissistic and whatever but he's trying to like make the argument for some bullshit thing that he wants to do to his wife who is uh you know adam scott's character's sister i believe and he's trying to and he just says casually it's a trojan's horse and that line just it was so perfect it's like of course this guy thinks it's called trojan's

horse i mean loved it so much a big like kind of device in the first season is them reading passages or you hear his voice narrating passages as people get to know his book and they're so dumb and they're written in that way of like and i used to kind of complain about some people i followed on instagram who sort of had this way of talking like they were super super wise or above it all but are just revealing like they're just how like both selfish and kind of dumb they sound And there is one line near the beginning of the series, and I thought of you and a mutual friend who will remain nameless, where this self-absorbed character who wrote this book has written something like, your job needs you. You don't need your job. Some of the happiest times of my life was the one year that I took off work and relied on the charity of poor people somewhere. I can't remember. I can't remember. It wasn't quite that, but it was basically him saying the happiest time of my life was when I quit everything and relied on the kindness of strangers, many of whom who had less than me or whatever. And he's writing it as if he's some sort of a wizened prophet, but it just reveals him just to be the most selfish, self-indulgent character who's relying on the kindness of people who have less advantage than him.

Yeah. So, again, just to sort of wrap this up, I am totally enjoying the show and, you know, eagerly awaiting getting to see the next episode when my dad's finally – I don't think – I think it's too hard to try to start this with my dad. We're barely following rogue heroes as it is. But I tried to I tried to have my dad watch the John Oliver show last night and it was like between the British accent and the pop culture jokes. I didn't realize how kind of I thought, you know, my dad and I are very politically similar, which it's wild, actually, to think it, you know, his age and my age and based on their life experience. But like he's more wound up about the politics of this moment than I am, maybe, or like it really upsets him. I mean, it upsets me as well. But I was like, oh, you know what you're going to love? Because Chris' show is off on Monday nights So I was like, you know We've got a Chris Hayes-shaped hole in our heart For our viewing I was like, oh, you know what he'll love is John Oliver It's so, it's like It's about, you know, important topics But it's delivered with this kind of, you know Acid tongue in a way, whatever It was funny because I was like Oh man, this is flying right over this dude's head Because first of all, it's actually much more Pop culture-y than You'd realize, like, considering my dad's Not a big pop culture guy Like I was I really wanted my dad to enjoy the show and I was noticing that he was just like most of it was just too rapid fire and John Oliver actually has a fairly thick accent which I was realizing I almost had to be like kind of like focusing to really keep up with it you know again I'm a big fan of John Oliver's and I'm a big fan of that show but I thought of that as being like easily digested sort of information slash satire that would be for anybody who agrees that Donald Trump is is awful. But I was like, oh, yeah, this is not a show that me and my dad probably will really share. I was surprised to find that out.

That is the type of show that every time I watch it, I'm like, this man is literally a genius. It is such a genius show. But I never go back to it because even though it is cut with comedy and his rapier wit, like it's just usually the content is just depressing, I think. You know, I don't I don't go through this thought process like I'm going to turn this on, but then I'm not going to because I'm not emotionally ready for it. I'm just not drawn for. Because I think on the rare occasion that I'm putting something on the television or on my phone, it's pure escapism. You know what I mean? It's Brooklyn Nine-Nine or 30 Rock or something like that.

Well, this is, again, why you need to get severed.

Yes, exactly.

You know, this is obvious. Okay, and we really do need to move on. But this is so obvious. This was a point that we all realized in episode or in season one. But I guess for some reason I was reminded of it again. It's insane to think. So for the listeners who haven't watched the show Severed, very, very, like 20-second description, the idea is you can elect to have a procedure done where your mind is essentially bifurcated or severed so that when you're at work in this building, you have no idea who you are in the outside world, and when you are in the outside world, you have no idea who you are at this work environment. they're called your innie and your outie and it is such a it's such a bullshit deal for your innie because your innie has no sense of ever not being at work but also your outie has no sense of ever having to be at work and that is like for some reason i mean again i'm making the most obvious point that everyone knows about the show but it's like what a weird thing to think about like would you take that deal like because as far as your outie as far as the the outside version of you that person never has to go to work as far as they're aware of they're just living their life now meanwhile your poor innie is friggin trapped down there but like i don't know why that just some for some reason hit me recently i was like would i take that deal i mean no we have a fun job i don't need to sever this but if i had a different kind of job would i take the deal so that my audi never even thought it had to go to a job basically well that's where i i want to

get into some deeper questions i have about the show but they would really send us into spoiler territory so maybe you me and maybe i'm actually thinking of some folks maybe somebody who could get on the show with us who want to talk about this stuff like maybe we do a special bottle episode or something or that'd be so fun various theories um but i did want to say one thing that genevieve pointed out to me that i don't know if i explicitly i mean i guess i implicitly sort of understood it but when she said it in these words i was like oh yeah the the people who are or the versions of the people who are innies who are going into work and the only experience they've ever known has been in this underground facility they don't know who they are above the they don't have any context or anything the only context they have they start building the day they wake up down in this place right and Genevieve says so they're all children which is why all of the incentives tend to be childlike like hey we're gonna have I mean they're also just weird and surreal but like and they get weirder this season by the way there's a very weird watermelon related situation okay i'm interested because there are melon parties do play a big role or like a sort of a constant role in season one but they have like melon parties they have dance parties but

then like if you you know melon parties and the infinite sadness right yeah oh that's a show title

yes i had just written inglorious brit boxes but oh that's also pretty good honestly um What is it? But the idea that they're childlike or whatever. I need to write this down. Okay, that's enough. I'll get it from there. But I was just going to say that they get those little finger traps as a little toy that they get if they complete their work on time, which I really want to dig in and talk to you about my theory about the quote-unquote work that they're doing down there. Well, keep going. Oh, is there an answer? I was just going to say.

No, but what I've realized this season is obviously when they're refining, I think is the term for it, They're pulling these arbitrary groups of numbers down. That's got to be the basis for the I think you should leave sketch where he's putting the eggs in the guy.

Have you seen people remix it up where there's only they're moving eggs around? It's really funny.

But do you think that I think you should leave writers had just gotten done watching Severance and were like a weird kind of exercise that nobody understands the point of, but it's totally like obsessive?

I don't, I don't know, but I will say that every time when Genevieve and I were watching it last night, every time they're moving numbers, we just kept saying, well, 40 eggs. I've never, I've never gotten this far before.

I've never gotten this far before.

We should be watching a little bit of porn at work. Anyway, yeah, so yeah, I have theories about that. We'll save that for another day. But yeah, it is definitely, it's got me. but i do hope i hope it sort of returns to sort of its minimalistic roots because i feel like that like i think you said it really really well about throwing balls in the air with the sort of style sensibility things get too complicated too i've often gone back and i'm sure you've heard this a million times luke but talked about the t-mobile t-mobile girl of the early 2000s i think it was t-mobile she just stood on a white background in a pink dress and made a pitch for one of the cell phone companies and the whole thing was very simple images blank white background and this woman would always come out wearing some sort of a very simple kind of pink dress

oh yeah and that was it but then as it was carly folks apparently it was a t-mobile

It was T-Mobile, Andrew. Look at me. You get a melon party. As the commercials, as this campaign aged over the years, it got more and more sort of complicated. More people were on the screen. Then eventually the clear white background goes away. Then eventually she's riding a like a crawtrocket motorcycle through the streets of Beijing or something. I'm looking at it. And you're just like, how did we get here? And it's like people love starting off minimalist, but they cannot stay minimalist. And that's a weird sort of trap people fall into that I don't quite understand.

Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about it this way, but you're absolutely right. I wouldn't mind a little more, and I'm talking about season two of Severance, I wouldn't mind a little more. Like, the reason I locked in on Trojan's horse is because it is literally one of the few scenes where just, like, people are kind of, like, living their life in an outie world, just being people instead of, like, just a constant sense of bewilderment. I would describe this season as constantly bewildering. It's constantly like the characters, the innies, being in some totally confusing environment that they don't know why they're there, what's going on. I don't know as the viewer. It is intriguing. So, yeah, a little bit of just like normal life would go a long way. Just give me a little breather. Give me a moment to catch up here.

Yeah, and even if it's mysterious, like I say, like the very beginning, The very, very first moments of the show in the first episode is very confusing and mysterious. Yeah, but it's not chaotic and it's not and it's not hyper paced. And I just sort of feel like this is getting more chaotic and the pacing is just sped up so much that they can't slow it down.

We was hoping for some razzle dazzle. Razzle dazzle. That's right, man. Razzle dazzle.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go.

Hey, let's thank some of our dazzling donors today. But first, let's also thank a daily donor that in all of our and there's a lot of daily donors to keep track of in all of our systems and spread she's. We happen to miss the wonderful Amber Doherty of Baltimore, Maryland, a longtime friend of the show.

Sorry. Absolutely. My voice went. I sounded like Patrick Mahomes there for one second. You kind of did, actually. I had some coffee stuck in my throat.

I'm looking at this email from John Sklaroff that is clarifying that we need to make sure to honor Amber Doherty. So I'm not looking at your face. And you really went to a Mahomes place there.

I went full Mahomes there. Sorry about that. My throat closed up a little bit. But I just want to say I recognize Amber as being a longtime donor. Absolutely.

Thank you, Amber. We appreciate you. Thank you also to Dazzling Donor, the one, the only, the legend, the Lin Pham. The Lin Pham. It's like the Ohio State University.

Do we work for Lin? Basically, we work for Lin now, right? Essentially, yes. What is the order of, what is it, the structure? What is our company's structure?

Well, Lin is essentially the Milchick of TBTL. We report to him. Occasionally he rewards us with a waffle party. Sometimes he seems nice. Sometimes he seems stern. We're not quite sure. No, we are very sure. Yes, that Lynn has been an incredible supporter of the show in every possible way that you could financially, which is really appreciated, but also keep, you know, keeping that audio repository for so many years and pulling so many great job marsupial gurgle and just being just just being in totally and completely engaged listener to the show. Also, just on a personal level, Lynn's a friend of mine. Lynn does a lot of stuff with Livewire as well, my radio show. By the way, Lynn would—this is part of Lynn's thank you message.

Do not use Lynn's—

Livewire. Lynn needs to have lots of people at Livewire with him on Thursday night. We are going to be at the Alberta Rose Theater. It's going to be great. Aubrey Gordon from Maintenance Phase will be there. It's going to be Carrie Farrell, the hipster grifter. Were you aware of the hipster grifter phenomenon when that was going around in, like, Gawker magazine? and all that back in the day was that on your radar no but i bet you was on veeves is you must

have been explaining this on the podcast recently so you somebody was just telling me about the hipster grifter it must have been you talking about i think i was talking to veeves maybe um

the other night when we were all i wasn't there though yeah you weren't there andrew and your presence was i did not receive an invite point is lynn fam has been uh very very very supportive of this show over the years and in every possible way that you can and we appreciate you lynn thank you so much you're the absolute best and i know you have a complicated relationship with getting attention um like most people some amount of it is good too much of it is not good so hopefully this is the right amount of attention and the right amount of thanks lynn we really do appreciate

apparently me staring at you through binoculars is too much attention everybody's so sensitive

and that is for the portland pd i'm sorry that is for the beaverton pd to the bottom of that's right

Maestro? On your mark. On your mark. Look at me.

Get set. Now ready.

Back in mid-season form. I had a little trouble yesterday.

The game slowed down.

It is, yes. I'm like Luis Castillo. I'm ready to talk about the off-season trade rumors.

Oh, wait. Has he spoken about that, really?

Apparently, the Seattle Times was pinging me with that today. We got to thank Pam Ketzner of Tacoma, Washington. Are you sure you're pronouncing that correctly? I'm trying. It rhymes with Sam or Ham. That's what Pam's pronouncer is. Pam rhymes with Sam or Ham. Thanks, Pam. Appreciate it. Thank you, Pam. Pam's in Tacoma. Pam says, in February of 2020, I retired after a 40-year career in nursing. Then COVID shut down everywhere. I started listening to TBTL and have been doing so ever since. It's funny because, you know, Pam, again, we're talking now five years ago, and yet Pam does still feel like a babe in the woods. a babe in the woods a relatively new listener yes and it was so it was so fun when pam got in on it because pam is very interactive pam is always uh reaching out with different things and so um you know particularly during the pandemic i know pam was talking a lot about what was going on in the medical field and stuff having been in that involved in that for 40 years uh pam says my two chocolate labs and i started walking all over our neighborhood taking photos and having fun what i also noted as i listened to the show i could relate to almost everything that was being talked about okay, not football. Well, good news, Pam. It's going to be a while until you have to suffer

through that. How do you feel about severance?

How do you feel about Patrick Mahomes' impression? Unintentional Patrick. In one week, my little town of Bennington, Vermont, came up twice. I got my most laughs when Luke and Andrew asked if women have prostates. Oof. And people are mad at me about colon talk. And I was out here asking if women have prostates. Often as I'm running, I get to fix listening to the co-bros. I get my fix listening to the cobros hi to my friend anna drury who's been listening since she was in her teens when the show was on the radio power out and peace i love john by the way my husband loves his yankees too well pam you can't win them all but uh but i'm glad we're glad that you like john and glad that your husband are we glad that your husband likes

the yankees you know what i have the yankees are like an afterthought to me now as far as baseball teams i hate it's kind of that's a good point you know there's one out there

last night uh john oliver i thought actually maybe the most trenchant part of the whole presentation was and again this is going to politics i apologize but it was sort of a question of like why is it the democrats uh don't seem to be pushing back in a more kind of united way against these ridiculous moves from the administration and uh hakeem jeffries was holding a press conference. Did you see this press conference?

I didn't. I saw a little clip of it, I think. I hadn't seen

it until last night, until watching John Oliver, but Hakeem Jeffries is trying to make the point that he said, what makes Aaron Judge so great is that he doesn't swing at every pitch. No, I didn't see this. And he waits until he can hit a home run. And so he waits for his pitch. And that's what we're doing. We're not swinging at every pitch that Trump puts out there. We're waiting for our pitch. And then John Oliver, who, I'm going to be honest with you, I'm assuming a producer fed this to him, goes, I don't know if you want to pick the example of a guy who hit 197 in the playoffs and lost the World Series because of his bad defense.

Yeah, that's right. He totally collapsed.

He literally dropped that ball that was like the, if I remember right, sorry, John. John Sklarif is listening. This is very painful for him. But you know what? Yankees fans are fine. Pam, your husband is fine but anyway i thought oh that's a good point that's a good burn it's like don't pick don't pick the person who again aaron judge is a very talented baseball player but who his most recent kind of contribution was less than sterling yeah right i'm trying to think of a better i'm trying

to think of a better example we're like the democrats are like well tony gwynn mike trout limping around in the outfield just like injured three weeks into the season that's a perfect yeah

that's a perfect example uh they the democrats could honestly be a first ballot hall of fame political force but instead they have never been able to stay healthy for more than 30 games at a

stretch has there ever been a baseball player who's literally taking a pistol and shot themselves in the foot because that might be a really good uh bet you there has that might be the best oh yes

Old Foot Shooter Joe played, I believe, for the... The Akron Groomsman, sure. The Akron Groomsman, that's right, exactly.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man! It's not from a female.

Alright, emails or V-mails on this Tuesday.

Yeah, I have a voicemail here from a while back that I've been excited to share with you. I'm glad we have the chance to play this here. And it's about brain mapping. With all of our medical talk recently, I know that we had some conversation about brain mapping in which I invoked the old Farside cartoon that showed some surgeons operating on somebody's brain and saying, hey, poke here, look what it does. And the patient's leg is kicking up in the air. or something. They're like, this is a fun one. But I can't remember how we ended up on that topic.

I don't remember exactly other than I had mentioned that there is a certain kind of brain surgery where they keep you awake for the procedure because they need to make sure that they're not accidentally damaging a part of your brain that maybe controls language or other things. So they're constantly, they're basically quizzing you as you're sitting there. And again, this is kind of gruesome, but you're sitting there like with your, you know, brain exposed and they're they're making sure they're checking with you over, I think, language and, you know, cogitation of this, that and the other so that they don't they don't hit that part of your brain.

Well, that is something that Teresa's husband actually went through. And this is a very interesting story.

Hi, Luke and Andrew. This is Teresa from Glenside, right outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I'm calling because yesterday we were talking about going into the brain to see which parts are used for which tasks. And my husband had brain surgery. He had a laser ablation because he has epilepsy. And thankfully, it was very successful. Nice. Um, and prior to it, to get him ready, they put him into an MRI machine for many hours. And while he was in the MRI machine, they had him do math problems. He's a math teacher. So they had him do math problems, solve math problems. So they couldn't do that. which areas of the brain were lighting up so that they could track a path around those centers so that they would not incapacitate his ability to teach math. And so that was one of the devices that they used to map out the path that the laser was going to take to remove the section in his brain that was causing the seizures. It was phenomenal. Surgery, the surgery itself was just a very small incision in his head with like the size of a pencil and it solved the problem so

it's pretty cool technology power out so i sort of miss set that up a little bit i said that teresa's husband went through the process that you were talking about which was actually but but very similar though mapping with an mri before brain surgery to to like sort of see what parts of the brain are lighting up that's that's super interesting and also i am very glad to hear that that that surgery went well because i don't you know i don't think that's a given that it always does i know some folks who've had it and so that is a that's really good news that's amazing yeah

i wonder if they could give me a surgery that would allow me to do math right yes they're like they just start mapping my brain there's like there's nothing here it's it's two cartoon birds

hitting each other with mallets how do you feel about going out to um pennsylvania and just like sitting in some of teresa's husband's classes maybe that's the maybe that's the path to learn

Maybe so. I can study at his feet. Yeah, I'm with you, Andrew. That's really cool to hear that that had a good outcome. Happy for you, Teresa, and your husband.

By the way, there is a line in, I believe it was, as I was saying, binging severance yesterday, and I believe it was in season one where, oh yeah, it's one of the pro-severance lawmakers, as it gets sort of a little bit political. It's a pro-Severance lawmaker at an event that is supposed to raise funds and awareness that would, again, be pro-Severance. And he says, before somebody takes the stage, let's change some minds.

Oh, that's clever.

And I just kept shouting that at the TV for the rest of the night because I was like, that is such a good line. It's such a good line.

All right. I could keep rehashing this. Everything you say about Severance generates five more thoughts in my head. but I won't do that right now. But we should. I like that idea of maybe when you are caught up, when we're both caught up, maybe we do a special one-off or something, but maybe we sever it from the real show. People that don't care about severance don't have to listen to it. All right, that's going to do it for today's program. Thank you, everyone. We will be right back here with more Imaginary Radio for you tomorrow, though, so please do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.