Muse

He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions. What? Patience, my son. To summon your power for the conflict to come, you must first have power over that which conflicts you.

Okay, am I the only one who finds these sayings just a little bit formulaic?

If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right. It's... Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage... Your rage will become your master? That's what you were going to say, right? Right? Not necessarily.

TBTL!

For our viewing pleasure, I packed Terms of E. Oh, love it. Then we're going to bring it up with a little fried greens to the T. And then Hope floats with Sandy B. Yes. Does somebody die in that one? They die in all of them. Good.

This need you have to be the smartest guy in the room is off-putting.

Hey, you sound like you might be a little bit jealous, babe. You know, and I know a little something about being jealous because people have been jealous of me my entire life.

I know these guys are annoying, but that's all I got.

I'm doing the work. I'm baby-stepping. I'm not a slacker. So come on over. Take a ride in my hot air balloon. It'll take you wherever you want to go. I promise.

Well, all right, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Meet the next generation of podcast stars. My name's Luke Burbank. I am your host. He's got ribs like he just does. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it's another gorgeous October day, October the 15th. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. Cows are in the river. I've got my patented Paddington sweater on for good luck. And we're ready, folks. We're ready for episode 4576 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

They say nature abhors a vacuum. And this time of year, at least as has been the case of late, I don't exactly know what to do with myself on a day when there's not a Mariners game to obsess over and think about and watch and pace and stand on my deck looking at the TV from outside the house in the rain. That was just exactly what happened yesterday. They didn't have a baseball game. And so I had to watch some regular television or at least HBO, whatever we call HBO these days. I love television. I've got to have that thing on 24 7. I love the patter. And I watched two programs, two very, very different programs on HBO last night, which I want to talk about. Oh, and I definitely want to talk to this guy, longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships and now his dog-watching service. When the neighbors asked, will you take care of our dogs, he and Genevieve said, I got the time if you got the diapers. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. That's not the only animal news that is in the headlines today, of course. Everybody is talking about it. Today, of course, is the three-year anniversary of bingos coming home with Genevieve and I, that means it's also the three-year anniversary of the time the Mariners and Astros played 18 innings of baseball. That's how I can always remember the date, October 15th. So, yeah, a lot of Dr. Doolittle stuff going.

And much like our acquisition of Geno Saras, would you say that the jury is still out on if getting bingo was a good idea or not?

It's working out. I would say it's working out pretty well right now.

I don't know if I've ever met someone who loves their cat more than you love Bingo the cat. He's a special guy. He's a special guy.

He is my dude. I had a, I don't even want to talk about this. Luke. He's your rotten soldier. Dude, I had the most awful dream about Bingo last night. Oh, no. As bad as you, I don't even want to even talk about what happened in the dream. But let's just say it didn't end well. And I woke up in such a bad place that I had forgotten it was his anniversary. I went to bed thinking, oh, I got to tell Genevieve in the morning because I don't I don't think she remembers the date of the of the 18 inning baseball game like I do. And so I went to bed last night thinking, oh, I got to tell Genevieve about that in the morning. But instead, when I woke up, I just said, ah, because I was so scared of the bad.

Now, did you then once you realized that the bad dream was not, in fact, real life, then did you feel that wave of relief that I always talk about? like i've said on the show many times i'm not saying i want to have a bad dream but i will tell you that the difference in how i feel when i realize oh that was a bad dream versus oh that was a good dream you know really i'm walking around feeling kind of like i'm playing with house money when i learned that that dodge that bad

The bad dream I was having was not actually real life, and vice versa when I have one of those ones that I've won the lottery or something.

I feel like I've had, first of all, I don't have the vice versa thing. Good dreams stay with me for a while throughout the day. I love it. Sometimes I can kind of still, like, ride the endorphins of a good dream, even though it didn't really, even though whatever happened in that dream didn't really happen. As far as we know, I don't know. Brains in a jar, et cetera. How about yet? Or yet, exactly. Bad dreams can go both ways. It could be that, like, whoa, I'm glad I'm waking up from that nightmare and that it's not real. But then sometimes dreams just, I don't know, this one just concerned me. And I don't, you know, you mentioned at the top of the show or as you introduced me that we did start our official dog watching duties yesterday. Our neighbors are out of town for a little bit, so we're watching their two dogs. And Veeves and I went over there last night. And, you know, I take great responsibility with these things. You know, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back. In fact, sometimes maybe that's that's one of the one of the reasons I worry about being an actual dog owner of my own or being an actual dog owner, I guess I should say, is that I think the best dogs are the chill dogs who you can take anywhere and do go everywhere with their human companions. I assume we don't say owners. I don't know. But I am such a ball of anxiety that I feel like I would have good intentions for my dog were I raising a dog, but that my anxiety about the dog's safety might wear off on the dog. Right, right. In the same way, I honestly feel that I'm a mess a little bit because of my parents' anxiety about keeping us safe and protected and a little bit overprotected. I think that's one of the reasons I'm such a basket case, so I always worry, will I do that to a dog? And it's honestly one of the reasons I kind of didn't want kids as well. I didn't want them to pick up my worst qualities.

I think it's much more likely in human children because of, you know, what's the word? Genetics. Like, I think that my sense is, and we've probably got some vets, some veterinarians in the audience who maybe have some real knowledge on this. But I feel like your dog, if you ever are to get a dog, I don't think that they will be anxious because you are anxious. Whereas I think if you have a human child, you could very much, because you're telling them, and by the way, they also presumably would speak your same language at some point. If you're telling them there's a lot of danger out there, et cetera. I mean, you wouldn't be trying to do that. You're just saying your general kind of vibe or whatever could maybe rub off on them. I think it's less likely to rub off on a dog than a human child.

That's funny. You don't think so? I just, I can't think of an example. Dogs are more about the vibes, do you think? I mean, not more than a child, especially if you're talking about actual genetics, if it's a, you know, a blood relative, biological child. But I do think that I've been around people where dogs are kind of like even good intentioned owners, but are like kind of high strung. They can tend to kind of have high strung dogs. Have you never noticed that before?

Yeah, I guess I always wonder if that's the puppy or the egg in that you've got those people that are just always sort of yelling at their dog because the dog's always doing something, and you're like, is the dog always doing something because they're always yelling at it, or are they always yelling at it because it's always kind of doing something? Right. I can tell you that's not the most fun energy to be around. Household, where the dog is always being yelled at when you least expect it as the visitor.

Yeah, I just, and again, I can't think of a specific example. That would never be your household. Yeah, no, that is true. But I do. Anyway, those are concerns I have, whether they're found or not. But yesterday, you know, Vives and I, it was we went over and said hello to the neighbors during the day before they took off. And so I got to say hello to the dogs. It wasn't the first time, but it was one of the first times that I got to meet Maggie, the three year old dog on the same side as the fence as her. because we're fence friends. We talk and pet through this chain link fence. And I kind of have this compulsion, almost an addiction to chain link. Have I ever told you about that before?

I actually had heard that you had battled that successfully.

I feel like I will always be an addict, though, in a certain way. You're a grateful chain link addict in recovery.

And that's, you know.

But anyway, it was really sweet. I mean, these dogs love people. They're very high-energy dogs. One of them, I think, is a puppy less than a year old, but is going to be a very big dog. So I mentioned a puppy to you on the show the other day, and I think you were picturing it.

I better stay on the porch then. I'm not going to try to run with him.

That's very, very smart. Also, no fear. I'm just going to throw that out there, too. Sure.

If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes, Andrew. You know that I always say that.

You get a really nice view of a sweet ass.

I mean, honestly, I guess if that's what you're into, it's kind of great. yeah exactly part of the human centipede is your preference i assume i assume front human but that's

just me yeah yeah but uh it's funny because they refer

to goose that's the other dog's name is a puppy but the puppy is bigger than probably most dogs i like that name for a dog i do too and i love both i also once had a dog named flea so i just you know a good monosyllabic well monosyllabic and naming a dog for a different animal oh and a different animal sure yeah um but yeah so yesterday we went over there in the in the evening veves and i once the neighbors had left and just uh just like played we we played some cards and watch some columbo oh my god did we wait now were those dogs cheer were those dogs

cheating at poker because i recently saw i saw some cctv footage of dogs playing poker and i

don't think that game was on the level man do you remember that john mulaney and pete davidson bit that they did on weekend update where they were talking about the movie the mule with clint Eastwood and how Clint Eastwood wrote and directed it and also he has not one but two

menage a trois in this film as a person of a very very advanced age exactly and of course he wrote

and they kept saying and he wrote it we watched this episode of Columbo that neither one of us had seen before it just happened to be coming on Pluto TV we didn't choose it but we were very excited when we saw that Faye Dunaway guest starred in this one wow yes and she's great

She seems very Hollywood to me. No criticism of Columbo, but she seems like she'd be too good for that.

Well, yeah, they would bring in some pretty big names. And the thing is, this was also a later one, too. So I'm thinking this was pretty late 80s, if not very early 90s. And we see at the beginning that it's written in – no, not directed, but it's written by Peter Falk. And we're like, oh, I didn't know Columbo wrote his own Columbos now.

and then this is the one where Columbo drops his jockstrap in the gym and it's just like a sail

for like a sailboat oh yeah right well that's kind of what I'm getting at is you will not believe every episode of Columbo I've ever seen he talks about or at least it's implied that he has a wife Mrs. Columbo back at home they even made a tv show they made a tv show called Mrs. Columbo do

you know that I think this is the first time realizing Columbo's his last name yeah what I don't know why I thought it was Columbo Johnson.

It's not the first time you're realizing that because it was a big thing. Well, it was a big topic, at least at one point, that there was a fake. Columbo doesn't officially have a first name, but there's a fake trivia question out there that somebody put in their trivia book about Columbo's first name. And they put it in there as a trap because they believed that the Trivial Pursuit people were stealing their intellectual property from their books. You don't remember this?

this is the second time i'm learning that colombo is not his first name i was blown away by the

story and i think i'm gonna get right i mean this is years ago luke years and years yeah yeah um that we would have talked about this but they ended up winning their suit because they said we made up basically what you and i would call a factoid right a fake fact yeah they put some

bad information into the system to see if it got hoovered up and then it got hoovered up yes and

i'm pretty sure i have that the right way as far as who was who was suing whom all of that is to say Columbo makes out with Faye Dunaway in this so much at one point he's like you don't even see all of these wiping this lipstick off like we're like what happened to Mrs. Columbo why in this one are you like because she's she's the suspect right and she's trying to woo him Columbo just

has an indentation on his ring finger where he's quickly trying to pull off his wedding ring yeah

what's that David Berman line let me ask you about that tan line on your ring finger there you go Um, so anyway, we're over there, uh, watching Columbo, just being like, of course, even I just keep turning to each other and he wrote it. That's amazing.

It's like, come on, Peter Falk, you dog. I did not, I, that's surprising to me only because I feel like, you know, the only person who seems less likely to do that would be Tony Shalhoub if he wrote an episode of Monk. Yeah. I mean, I know they're both like, they're both quirky detectives and there's, I'm sure the similarities have been pointed out many many times but like i just think of them both both peter falk and tony shalhoub as deeply like good dudes yeah like their characters are good dudes i think they were they seem like good dudes in real life i know more about tony shalhoub than i do about peter falk but it's just funny peter falk doesn't strike me as basically like a horndog

well what's the kiss fade done away i i think he i think he screwed the canon in a lot of ways in this episode i'm sitting here thinking i don't want to spoil it but i'm talking about it literally episode of television i love it i'm talking about i want tonight i come to you wanting to talk about

the chair company which debuted three days ago you're worried about spoiling colombo it is he

also let's just say this because again i know a lot of people have this dvr'd on their pluto tv there's a big not unlike chinatown twist ending to this whoa well which i don't think is

Yeah, I don't think that's a coincidence. And Columbo goes rogue. Columbo lets some people off the hook. Columbo basically files some false reports because he's caught feelings for Faye Dunaway and another character in the show. I am just like, some justice is served.

Wait, Columbo, the character.

He lets somebody off the hook. He lets somebody, he turns, he turns away and lets somebody, he suggests that she fly to another country to get out of trouble because he wants to cut her a break.

That's got to be the Faye Dunaway character, right?

No, it's not. It's not Faye Dunaway. Faye Dunaway, she signs a confession to say, you know what? Screw spoilers. Yeah. So she works in this chair company, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

That I actually do have to be a little careful about.

You do, actually, to me, because I don't want it kind of, not spoiled, but I don't want it kind of ruined.

Yeah, you don't want to go in with an opinion.

Yeah, and I like not knowing too much about what a show is about, and it's still pretty fresh. But basically, Faye Dunaway and a woman that we are heavily, well, that they infer heavily is her lesbian lover, plan a murder of a man who is seeing both of them, okay? I can't remember which one he's cheating on and which one he's cheating with.

I thought this was kind of a progressive plot line until I realized it was just two lesbians but actually who are crazy for the D who have to kill a guy because he was getting with both of them.

Well, it turns it's more complicated than that. And I think he's I think above board, he's Faye Dunaway's partner or boyfriend or something. I don't know. But then we see that he's also stepping out with this other woman, maybe slightly younger woman. I'm not sure. Yeah, definitely younger woman. And then we realize that the two women are sort of in cahoots to murder him. And then there's a lot of like kind of scenes that would make it and lines that would make you think that these are these two women are lovers. and so they murder him they do all these things, we don't have to get into the detail but let's just say a heated blanket is involved to try to convince the authorities that the time of death is something other, it's actually pretty ingenious it's very ingenious

it's like Encyclopedia Brown but with much higher stakes as it usually is we noticed that heated blanket box in Bugs Meany's clubhouse he was trying to keep the cadaver who killed Bugs Meany

anyway

Bugs Meaning would have been doing the killing.

Who killed Bugs Meaning? It could be the show title. That's good. All of that is to use. Please, buddy. So they kill this guy. Then Columbo starts investigating. He has a suspicion about Faye Dunaway. She's really laying it on thick and hitting on him. I thought that he was just kind of stringing her along. I thought he was above it all, and I thought he was not telling her about his wife because he was just kind of playing her in the same way she thought she was playing him. But he never mentions his wife. There's plenty of scenes where he's like in a coffee shop bar, which I'd never seen before also. Like he's got friends in this bar in this episode, which is strange, and he's always drinking coffee there. But he's always, ah, tough case, tough case. And he's like, he's clearly not thinking about Mrs. Columbo. She's just out of the picture, apparently. I don't know what's going on there. Maybe they have an understanding. Maybe they have an understanding. And it becomes clear that, no, Columbo really is conflicted in this case. He has indeed caught feelings, as one does with Faye Dunaway, who looks great, by the way. And so he's got some conflicted emotions involved here. And then at the very end, he kind of does catch Faye Dunaway in some lie or something. And she sort of makes it, by not saying too much, she basically says, I will confess if you let this other person that you're now sniffing around go. And we as the audience still think that these two are lovers, but that's the big Chinatown reveal. They are not lovers. They are mother and daughter. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And so, and this man- That's a great twist. And very much like Chinatown, this man is not in the family the way Chinatown was. That was very, very dark. But this was a man who was abusing them or is certainly abusing her, the daughter, in like some pretty horrific ways and threatening them and threatening their lives. So we learn at the end that they had to kill this man because he was going to potentially kill them or hurt them very, very badly. He was a very, very bad man. And so in doing all of this, Columbo basically lets the daughter go. He says, you travel to Paris a lot. You should go to Paris. I heard there's some good things going on there this week. Okay, the imitation didn't start good and it got worse. But that's the spoiler-full version of that. It was a pretty...

interesting episode it was unlike most episodes i've seen you can really feel peter falk's writing hand in it especially when he's making out with faye dunaway i mean that does yeah it's like the

the idea that the faye dunaway character would be sort of honey honey potting him yeah yeah um i'm looking at the cast um and this did also feature i don't know if it was a bit part or not uh it was called it's all in the game by the way i believe was this this this episode jonathan banks who you may recognize from uh better call saul and breaking bad um he was in he was in this uh a long time ago again probably just maybe a sort of a bit part he that guy was also in beverly hills cop that's where i always remembered him from i was going through to see if there's anybody else in this episode other than faye dunaway and peter falk that i recognized i'm wondering i'm wondering

if he plays he might play the murder victim or the muck duck victim oh he's oh oh he's uh oh from Better Call Saul he's what's his name Bob not Bob I don't know whatever his name is Mike Ehrmantrout Mike Ehrmantrout of course oh wow I wonder if he was the murder victim or the muck duck victim I gotta look into that

anyway we were all watching television last night Andrew some of it from a more modern era but I will be careful when I talk about the chair company this is the new thing from like the I think you should leave folks it's starring tim robinson and uh i i know you don't want me to give you any expectations i will just here's what i'll say in the most general way that i can i really enjoyed it and i enjoyed it for um i did not enjoy it for the exact reasons that i was expecting you know because one of the things about anything that comes out of the i think you should leave universe is the question of like how close does it hue to that style of comedy the kind of style that that tim robinson and um zach canaan the kind of co-creators of that show really lean into which is like awkwardness and people behaving at very extreme levels and um and so like with that with that movie friendship i i think i maybe liked friendship more than you did or i don't know what remind me of your opinion that was the one with paul rudd and tim robinson that it's kind of like the show but also kind of

not yeah i wasn't a huge fan of it as a movie i just felt like um yeah a lot of questionable motivations I didn't think it was funny enough to dismiss a lot of the questionable decisions in it if that makes sense if it's a ridiculous comedy then you're not exploring certain questions like well why would this character do this why does this fit into their care but it was also taking itself kind of seriously I felt like it was stuck yeah I wasn't I didn't hate it but I didn't love

it that's interesting I didn't think about it from that perspective like you basically that movie we're talking about now you thought that it was it didn't really have enough internal logic which is okay maybe if something is just totally a spoof yeah but if it's trying to say anything serious about masculinity or desire or whatever then it has to be a little bit more like it was it was too unserious to be serious but too serious to be properly unserious yeah and it really starts

off just like well why is he married to this woman like what we never see any attraction between them or any hint or when we do i don't think it's very successful anyway just a whole bunch of things like that why would Paul Rudd's character want him to come over there you think that he's going to be the type of guy who collects oddballs but that's not really the case either like it's just like none of none of it fit together in any way that makes sense which that's really funny because

I feel like but like that movie that's so much more the argument that I'm making about things usually like I'm going like well why would that person do that and I don't know if they've just got me so in the bag that I was like I don't know I like the soundtrack then they zeroed in on those power lines you know but you're you make a good point about that movie anyway um i i guess again i'm now i'm i really don't want to i don't want to like say too much about it uh because i don't want to impact your experience with it but um i uh watch and i'm glad that i watched it oh good i think it's like maybe i don't know if it's like six or seven episodes this first one was like about a half hour and it also felt to me like they kind of packed a lot into this half hour like i was i i was quite intrigued to watch the next one next week when it comes out and i have the sense that it is one of those kind of shows that they're not just i don't know if that's an hbo thing versus i guess is netflix really the the main one that just like when when a netflix show comes out it's all there that's kind of their whole that's their deal is that they're going to give you every single episode whereas like hbo and stuff they want to try to get you coming back to hbo each

week for the episode drop i know that netflix can drop an entire series all at once i don't know if they always do well they don't well like obviously they did some live programming with millennia and stuff you can't drop all of that at once yeah um i do i cannot think of an instance where hbo has dropped an entire series at once i mean i could be wrong you know me i don't follow the stuff that closely but when i think of hbo almost all of the stuff we talk about is a week by week thing right like whether it's I mean, going back to The Sopranos, obviously, but that was a much different media era. But even now, White Lotus, like you're everybody's the brilliance of it is everybody's on the edge of their seats for the next Game of Thrones or whatever it is.

Yeah, I I go back and forth. Like if you can get a critical mass of people like talk, like if you're into a show or if somebody in our friend group is and then we're kind of like talking about it in between the episodes and getting excited. I mean, the peak of that, of course, was the Sopranos, which was like an absolute event in my life. We would literally like me and my first ex-wife and my buddy, the colonel, we'd all get together in L.A. We would literally cook food, you know, that seemed vaguely like something they might eat on the Sopranos. We had T-shirts that said, I love Johnny Cakes. It was like a whole thing. A lot of strudel. A huge amount of strudel. Right. Other classic Italian foods.

It's the only non-Italian food I can think of in the moment. This is good. it read it read it read but then it stopped it read and then it stopped we sometimes we just need

to leave them and then move on yes anyway um uh yeah i do i so i guess i sort of on the one hand i do like the um i like the network being kind of withholding but there is always the danger that i might lose my momentum with something i mean and it doesn't take much with me i have a very short attention span and i have a lot going on typically so hopefully i'll stay with this but There are many examples of where I've had a show that I'm watching and then I get distracted and then I just like, I forget that I didn't even watch the last three episodes of something.

Yeah, unfortunately, I've done that. I'm embarrassed to name the number of shows I've done that with. You brought up Peacemaker the other day and I'm pretty sure looking back now, I said I watched the entire first series, but I think I might have forgot to watch the last two episodes of that. So before I watch season two, I've really got to kind of catch up on that. And I've done that Downton Abbey. I think I maybe watched the first two seasons and then just gave up before watching the last episode of season two. There are just certain shows where it's kind of like, I can say I watched an entire season or two of it. But really, it's like those last few episodes. If I lose my momentum, the seasons change, my rhythms change. Exactly. They're just going to be lost.

Yeah. Well, the other thing I watched, so I finished with that. And I guess I'll give HBO credit on this. By the way, do you all have, do you have HBO at your house? Yes. Do you do that thing? Have you noticed that the baseball games have been on HBO? Already there have been some on HBO? All of the games, all of the National League games are on HBO.

All the National League games. No, I didn't. I think I remember last year at one point turning on HBO and realizing, oh, I can watch this. But obviously it didn't have anything to do with the Mariners. I don't know if I did or not. Oh, that'd be great. It'd be awesome if it was for the AL.

Well, yeah, like we couldn't find. So my mom, you know, and I actually for that matter, we're pretty interested in how the Phillies were doing. And after like a Mariner game or something, or I don't know, maybe it was the day there was no M's game. I was trying to find the Phillies and it was nowhere on my Fubo universe, even though that usually gets everything. And as a last resort, I was like, there's no way it's on HBO. And then like it was live streaming on HBO. But then also I saw something about TBS in the corner, like maybe they're simulcasting on. But also that's weird to me because I would think that like, is it? I mean, Fox has the whole postseason contract, right? I don't know. Does Fox own TBS? i i can't answer any of those questions there's it's something there was something to me very unsettling about watching live baseball on hbo and in fact that was exactly that was also that's also the sound it makes when otani hits the ball i mean that was by the way something else yesterday not to get into baseball convo but like i was watching that uh dodgers brewers game and they are filming it this is again i don't know if this is exclusive to hbo my my my hunch is that i'm just watching hbo just one of the places you can see this for whatever weird media contract reason and i'm just watching it on hbo and it's being you know it's also playing certainly it's playing in wisconsin on local television and it's playing on you know some network maybe tbs or whatever but they were using a filter on their camera like they're filming otani he's taking some practice swings before he goes up he's going to be the first hitter for the dodgers they're playing in milwaukee so the dodgers are hitting first i thought it was an ai version of otani i thought it was like you know that you pointed out that like beats by dre ad yeah i can't vote i still cannot believe that yes imagine this imagine that you are in your home stadium like you're a milwaukee brewers fan and you're going to watch your team uh or let's just say you're a milwaukee brewers fan you're watching at home let's say you just got done answering the question to ponder on wisconsin 106 yes and now you're shifting into brewers watching possibly at the what was the name of that bar we like five o'clock somewhere possibly at its five o'clock somewhere and your brewers batters are coming up to the plate and behind them is a giant banner

of a very uncanny-appearing Shohei Otani. Like, it's an image of him, but it looks like it's been through about nine Instagram filters. He's facing away from the camera so you can see the earbud in his ear. Right. And you were pointing out, Andrew, that people on Reddit were upset about this, Mets fans, because, like, just imagine that basically the main guy on your rival's team is now, he's the main poster behind all of your hitters hitting, and this is what I had forgotten until you reminded me of it. And this was a decision the owners of the Milwaukee Brewers made.

They had to have. So you saw this same ad during the Brewers game. I'm a little confused. Oh, yeah, it was on last night. You and I were talking about this via text message because we saw this in Toronto. What is it called? The Johnson Center? It's not the Johnson Center. Rogers Center. The Rogers Center. Bob Irwin Trout. That one's going to live with me for a while, as will the Johnson Center. But, yeah, in the Rogers Center, here you have two teams. Neither one of them have Otani on their team, but there's this big Beats by Dre ad on the digital billboard right behind home plate that has a picture of Otani. And I was just telling you, like, can you imagine if here in Seattle there was some Mike Trout contract, especially when he was really hot, you know, and we were such rivals with the Angels? Can you imagine watching the Mariners and just seeing a big picture of Mike Trout or even Mike Irwin Trout behind the plate? I need Mike something Trout. But I just can't believe that we live in a world where people are just like, yeah, put an opposing star player's face huge behind our players.

Again, assuming that that's not some sort of system-wide contract. Oh, an MLB contract. An MLB contract for what goes there. Because, by the way, if I remember right, I don't even think that's a real thing in the stadium. I think it's chroma key. You know what I mean?

I know some of them are. You think those in the background of the action? Yeah, that would make sense.

I think that so that they can just superimpose whatever they want on there. So there is a possibility that that's some sort of a contract with the league-wide. Because here's what would make me so mad. would be if that was just pure greed by the like the the owners of the Milwaukee Brewers who are saying like oh yeah well anybody's money is good here even if it's basically trolling our guys by putting their main guy behind us while we're hitting but I wonder now that we're talking about if that isn't because I've been seeing it everywhere you know I wonder if that isn't maybe

league wide let me jump in here and say you might be right but if you are right I feel like it might be a post-season thing because one thing i do enjoy is watching emplers i enjoy emplers yes no i do isn't that one of them that's another one that has yeah that's what i was going to say like when you watch other when you watch baseball games you see local yeah ads like because i it struck me i don't know if i mentioned this to you or not probably not because it's not interesting well anyway i was watching a reds game in cincinnati and i saw they had cintas you know the company Sintas the uniform company Sintas and you know my family's business was a big customer of Sintas so I grew up knowing of Sintas and I remember this summer making the connection for the first time in my life Sintas Cincinnati I never realized that Sintas is based in Cincinnati

and that's probably why this is the first time hearing that Sintas has a first name Sintas has

a first name it's Cincinnati Ohio but anyway so anyway my point is and you know this too with the Templer's example, like often these ads are representative of local markets, something that I love. I love the localness of, you know, baseball markets and sort of seeing those ads for their fan base. So you're right, though, maybe for the postseason. And if these are superimposed, then maybe they're just saying, hey, listen, MLB is picking up these contracts now and we'll put Otani's face wherever the hell we want. Either way, I think it's mad disrespectful.

I do too they should probably have a policy that says we can do ads but one of the things you can't put up is like basically I mean it's it's in a way it's sort of electioneering right you can't stand there next to the poll like the polling place with the sign it's too close to where it's happening like you shouldn't be able to show one of the players particularly the players that are in the postseason show their face in an ad that's right behind where either they or other players might be playing you know it just seems a little too close to the action certainly would it would make me super furious um what i was going to say about hbo is it was effective last night i got into the hbo universe and they kept me there i went there to watch the chair company and then it said you may also like and then it reminded me that there was something that i really wanted to watch which is called the alabama solution it is a very serious documentary about incarcerated people in the state of alabama it's made by andrew jarecki who's the guy that made uh the jinx oh okay yeah yeah i think we always forget i think jarecki also actually made what was that really you know super hard-hitting doc about the i want to be careful with how i say it because we don't need to get too into it but he made another hbo documentary about a predator who also was like a birthday clown in like upstate new york that was kind of a huge sensation and of course i can't remember the name of this not john wayne gacy not john wayne gacy but it was it was a it was somebody who again was was found to be very predatory but they'd also it was anyway that was I forget that documentary that was kind of like before Even maybe like the making Making a murderer or you know what I mean Like there was that sort of there was a run Of these like documentary Series that were Just like everybody was talking about And they were like there were almost like cultural Moments anyway that was Andrew Jarecki and then he did The Jynx and now I think he's One of the people behind this thing the Alabama Solution but I mean it's a really

Jarecki also do I remember this right didn't he Make a non documentary movie that was basically based on Robert, what's the name of the guy in the jinx? Robert Durst. Durst. Didn't he make a movie

Capturing the Freedmans, by the way?

That's the name of that movie. And then Durst saw it and said, oh, I trust you. Why don't you make a documentary about me?

Yes, exactly. Yes, I believe that is exactly how that went down. Yeah. Well, anyway, this is an Andrew Jarecki thing. And it is, you know, it's a tough watch because of the injustice of the whole thing, but it's also really fascinating because a lot of uh inmates now have gotten access to cell phones and so basically what it's it's it's talking about how unbelievably messed up the alabama the the jail system is in the state of alabama as it is in many places but particularly in alabama and how impossible it is to get any kind of clear uh insight into what's really going on within these prisons because they're they're run by uh people who have their own motivations you know whether it's the guards or the administration and they are certainly not going to um tell on themselves and when you have you know inmates who are who are being brutally beaten by guards and things like that um there's just no accountability and then you introduce this thing of these cell phones and then suddenly you've got these um these incarcerated people who are organizing uh by cell phone and having these meetings and starting something called uh this halifax project where they're sort of like basically educating themselves on the law and it's like very inspiring and also very infuriating because you know there are some really inspirational things that happen in the movie and then there's also just some some points where you realize just how um just how broken the system is and how hard it is to really really have to make effective uh progress and then also just to hear people the way people the way that people who are not incarcerated or have never been touched by that world talk about people who are incarcerated as just there's absolutely no chance that anyone would ever be in jail unless they did something horrific you know and like some of the charges there's a one of the people that's in the in the movie and i again i don't it's like a documentary are there spoilers but somebody who's central to the to the documentary who was in jail for many many years the crime was burglary three the crime was breaking into an unoccupied building and it was unclear if he'd even stolen anything now andrew i hope you're sitting down this person happened to be black in alabama i know that's going to be shocking to you that that that does not appear that this person was treated fairly under the law but like this guy was in jail for many many years and then stuff happens while he's in jail we should have never been in this particular level of security what he did probably should have been maybe probation but anyway it's just it's inspiring and also really frustrating um but it's an important watch so I just want to throw that out there the Alabama solution um you know it's I think it's I when I watched it I guess here was my thought why aren't more people talking about what is in this film you know like this is a really this is you you finish the movie thinking like I can't believe this is happening in this country that will I mean that's really saying something by the way in this day and age with everything that's always happening but like uh yeah so just wanted to say

maybe you know what it is it's a little um it's a little yin it's a little yang it's a little bit of both you watch the chair company you watch the alabama solution you're sort of stimulating all parts of your brain and emotional life in the same night thanks to home box office when are they gonna start just calling it home box office again yes i would i would sign go back to that while

we're talking on media now that it's not the top of the show anymore i want to ask you about a commercial i've been meaning to ask you this anyway i didn't want to do this at the top of the show because i did this at the top of the other podcast i recorded yesterday with genevieve which is actually explicitly about commercials but i need your take on something in all of your baseball watching recently have you seen a short cute little commercial for indeed the job seeking app where there is a an interviewer you know somebody who's interviewing job candidates sitting behind her desk and she's a bit stern looking and she's got a big bowl of baseballs with question marks sitting on her desk and she's throwing them at the person who's um you know applying for a job have you seen this commercial

no i have i've been hearing this is a weird way to to respond i've been hearing a lot of indeed commercials between the innings as i'm like pacing around my house so i'm aware they're doing a big buy, but I guess I didn't note that someone was throwing baseballs at someone. Yes, so

I thought this was pretty cute, because what happens is, and I'm going to find a link here for you, and I'm going to show it to you, and then I'm going to play the audio. It's not critical. I'm sending this to you, by the way, via text, if you want to play along. Is it called Curveballs? It is. I know that if you're finding one link online, there's a broken link to it, if it's an iSpot, but I just sent you the YouTube one. i went through all of this yesterday but basically it's a very i the first time i saw this commercial it brought a smile to my face because this woman is throwing these uh balls these baseballs at the person who's interviewing and he's like dodging them you know he's sitting in this chair the balls are coming at him but then at the end he gets i've definitely not seen this he's he's got the indeed app and so now he can handle these curveballs and so that is represented by him having a giant, a comedically giant baseball mitt that he's catching. Now suddenly he can catch these balls.

What if you were prepared for all those interview curveballs? Practice the interview before the interview.

Indeed, Career Scout, I guess, is a way of practicing the interview before the interview. And it's funny, he pulls out this big mitt and he's got this smile on his face and And it's a pretty good analogy, except now it's driving me crazy. And do you know why it's driving me crazy, Luke?

Because he's not wearing a catcher's mitt?

No, because you're not throwing curveballs in an attempt to make them difficult to catch. You throw curveballs in an attempt to make them difficult to hit. I feel like he should have a giant bat, not a giant mitt. Now, a curveball could be hard. I couldn't catch a curveball, probably. I mean, I understand. But the point of a curveball is not to fool the catcher. It's to fool the batter. And even though I laugh at his giant glove, I feel like it should be a giant bat.

That's a good point. Also, it is not a catcher's mitt, which it also should be. Because you know what, actually? Then the analogy works. Because catchers do catch curveballs.

Yeah, they do catch them. And you do need to make sure that you don't let one buy you or whatever, especially if it's in the dirt.

How did Kyle Raleigh not get nominated for a gold glove at Ketcher? It's zero pass balls this year. I don't know. How did Dylan Moore get the gold glove last year? Utility gold glove, Andrew, obviously. That's like Onus Wagner won that back in the day.

I feel like that was the first ironic golden glove ever given. I don't feel like that's not talked about enough.

Can I hit you with more commercial talk? I think this will be less interesting to you than it is to me, but you've seen this State Farm commercial with the running back, Derrick Henry, and it's like, you know, it's Jake from State Farm, and basically they're saying, like, you need this Henry, but instead you're, like, with the other insurance, you're gonna get, instead of this Henry, that being Derrick Henry, you get this other Henry, that's like, Henry VIII or something, and he's being all crazy.

Having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like needing the strength of this King Henry, but getting that King Henry.

Huzzah! Salimitations! I'm here to lead with the team. No, no, I don't want it! No! Sorcery!

It's just basically a guy who's dressed like Henry VIII, or King Henry, and he's just doing things that aren't helpful on the football field. King Henry is played by, do you remember that podcast, Dead Eyes? Oh, yeah! Is that Dead Eyes? That's Connor Ratliff. That's Connor Ratliff.

Oh, I need to know. That's funny.

Glad to see Dead Eyes is doing well out there in the world.

I don't actually think I've ever seen Connor Ratcliff. Ratliff. Ratliff you had been telling me about that podcast years ago and I never kind of just took the leap to get into it those limited series sometimes it's harder for me to get into when I especially when I'm just listening to this kind of constant stream of whatever sports stuff and but then he was on comedy bang bang a couple of times and he was just so delightful I'm like I gotta go back and listen to that podcast and I listened to the first season and a little bit of the second season as they were sort of coming out of the pandemic and then sort of never never finished i gotta say that is an argument tell me what you let's talk about podcasting in the podcasting industry a little bit here luke one of my favorite topics everybody loves seasons right there are reasons why there are reasons for the seasons luke even shows like ours for a reason andrew that's right that's the show title i kneel for the seasons i stand yeah um you Even shows like ours that are essentially friends chatting will like kind of the podcast industry is sort of like just made it sort of common to say, well, we're going to release this in seasons and then we're going to take some time off and then we're going to call it season two. And there might be marketing reasons for that. There might be just like catching my breath reasons for that or what have you. It makes sense when there's like a narrative storyline, if it's a documentary style thing and season one is about one investigation and season two is about something else. But then other podcasts, I'm not exactly sure why they do them. And I will say that Dead Eyes, even though I was listening to the whole thing years after it was made, there was something about trying to switch over to season two that it was like such a roadblock for me. Like he started season two with an interview with Ira Glass about podcasting. And then it just suddenly felt like, well, we've just lost the urgency here or something. And it just, like, it stopped for me. And I'm sure the rest of it's good. I'm not trying to dunk on them, but it's just maybe cautionary.

Well, it's sort of the thing where they often say that, like, everyone has one good book in them or one good movie in them. And, you know, certainly what had happened, for folks that don't remember this podcast, this guy, Connor Ratliff, had been cast in and then basically fired from the HBO. Speaking, everything comes back to home box office today, Andrew. i think it was band of brothers this you know one of those world war ii kind of shows tom hanks was the like executive director producer or something and they kind of fired this guy because the word the rumor he heard is that tom hanks had basically watched some of the footage or watched some of his performance and said that he had dead eyes and they had so he had lost this job which was like a huge huge opportunity for him and so he goes back into this whole podcast kind of exploring the question of like why did he get fired from this thing does he have dead eyes what was tom hanks talking about and it's very it's it's very intriguing and listenable and you're like you said you're kind of along for the ride because you want to know what what really happened he eventually talks to tom hanks it's great and i totally understand it was a big hit podcast too so i could totally see being like okay we made this thing it's really popular and now there's a chance to strike while the iron is hot like okay people you got people's ears now let's do something else cool and and bring them along and then the challenge it's like it's like somebody make it's like somebody writing their second book or somebody making their second film they had their whole life to think of that first movie idea or have that experience that that story they've been telling at every party and then it's like once you get that one out of there it's like well what's the next one and i think that's probably a little bit of what was going on there and this one

was interesting because i know because i've heard that he eventually talks to tom hanks but he doesn't talk to tom hanks in the first season oh really no he doesn't i'm wearing this together yeah you're you might have made it further did you hear i guess i did i made it to the tom hanks conversation i am yeah no i just listened to it this summer when i was doing yard work and i still have not heard tom hanks on i know that he eventually makes it on but um not in the first season i don't know how long it takes it basically i know season two begins with a short episode with him trying to get advice from ira glass how to make season two successful or something like that and i don't know i know it's also possible i skipped ahead i wonder if maybe you did or you

i might have listened to season one and then when it was it was such a phenomenon that there was literally a buzz like hey he got tom hanks and i might have just like i think i think what's actually very possible is i just parachuted in for the tom hanks episode because i wanted some

uh you know resolution to the whole thing i would too if it were easy enough or if i if it just came across like on on tiktok or something like hell hell yeah and that's kind of what i mean it stopped feeling like i gotta listen to this all in order at a certain point it's kind of like all right you're it was fun as you were starting to drag it out a little bit and see at the end of season one like really just using it as an excuse to meander and talk to your famous friends or whatever i i never i never listened to an episode and thought oh that one didn't hit for me even at the end of season one where basically they have to shut down production because of covid and he's sort of reacting to it in real time, and I listened to it years later, five years later, it was still really compelling stuff, but there was just something about, like, even though the podcasts were right, the episodes were next to each other in my podcatcher, and my life hadn't changed, I hadn't put down the phone for a year or whatever, it just, the energy just felt different, and I was just kind of like, you've signaled to me, I remember I had a program director, a guy that I would later find out, years and years and years later, I'd meet a friend named Luke, and it turns out that Luke didn't like this program director, because public radio is a small world. But I do think about some of the things he told me early in my career that are interesting, which is like he was not a big fan of, and I was, I'm going to talk out of both sides of my mouth here. I disagreed with him at the time, but it might be what I'm arguing right now, which is like he was not a big fan of like at the end of a radio show.

to have a bunch of credits and celebrating the end of the show. Basically, I remember him talking about this folk show that I worked on. It was like this three-hour thing that had this cult following. And then at the end of the show, the host would do this whole closing of the show and do credits and all these things. And the program director was like, you're kind of telling the audience, it's over, you can turn off the radio now, where we really want them to just keep on listening to whatever is up next. So just try to make it more of a flow of programming. That makes sense from a program director's standpoint. You just want to keep them there.

his goal of having his station listened to continuously is different than the goal of the show

which is a creative endeavor and that is the difference because I think you and I would feel differently about that of course you want to close it out you want to play words by doves you want to say good luck to all you want those like kind of benchmarky things that so I'm with you creatively but maybe I'm sort of arguing about like kind of like don't give the audience an excuse to like turn away from your podcast because you've decided to break it up

or just do yeah do what we've done which is do five of these a week a very questionable quality don't ever give the audience a chance to look away because there's just always another one coming down the pipe because i'll do it until you stop please stop i speak for the listeners when i say please stop here are some people andrew who are hoping we don't please stop presumably anyway because these are people the names i'm about to read to you are donors who are supporting our show financially and um they're doing this voluntarily and it means a lot to us this is a hundred percent listener-supported podcasting. It's supported by listeners like Jennifer Johnson over there in Sisters, Oregon.

Thank you. Did we just have somebody in Sisters, Oregon, or was I peeping ahead at the list? I think you might have been peeping ahead. No, you told me not to do that.

Now, I wanted to say what I know about Sisters, Oregon is I think you drive past there on your way to Bend, Oregon, but I was so kind of wrong about Spanaway, Washington, yesterday. I thought it was the gateway to Mount Rainier, and it's kind of not. I mean, it is in a certain way, but it's not what it's known for. I'm leery about relying on my memory of geography, which has never been great and is probably getting worse.

Can I ask you a question about your youth and about fast, casual dining of your youth? Please. Did you grow up, at least was there a period of time in maybe the late 80s or early 90s that you remember a chicken chain called Sister's Chicken that had... I'm pretty sure this was a Dave Thomas joint. because we, growing up in Ohio, there were Wendy's, of course, and then there was this chicken place that was like a KFC rival, and we were not a big KFC family, but then I just remember this place called Sisters came on the scene.

Sisters Chicken and Biscuits?

I don't remember it being called Biscuits, so I'm not sure. Are you seeing it? Does it have any connection to Wendy's? It does, absolutely. There's a spin-off. Okay, great. Okay, good. Yeah, what can you tell me about it? Because I'm only sort of just remembering this, and I didn't look it up before I started talking about it. Well, here's what the internet says.

Let's see. Wendy's founded the fried chicken chain Sisters Chicken and Biscuits in 1978 and sold it to its largest franchisor in 1987.

Oh, okay, 87. Okay, interesting.

People are on Reddit saying, anyone remember a place called Sisters Chicken and Biscuits? I miss it so much. Let's see. I've heard, although I don't know it to be true because I haven't actually looked it up. That sounds like, this sounds exactly like how I do my research, Andrew. I've heard, although I don't know it to be true because I haven't actually looked it up, but a few of their restaurants still remain. But here in Columbus, Ohio, they all disappeared. The chicken was delicious. The biscuits were yummy. And I loved their cream chicken over a biscuit, as well as many other menu items.

You know, now that we say this, Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, he had Ohio roots, maybe. And maybe that's why.

Yeah, Dublin, Ohio, right? It was a Dublin.

Okay, yeah.

From whence Wendy's came. That's another thing, by the way, about that show, The Chair Company. It's set in Ohio. Oh, really? Oh, that's interesting. A lot of Canton, Ohio references going on.

Oh, interesting, yeah. I've got to check that out. I kind of forgot that that was debuting yesterday.

Jennifer Johnson, thank you. Thanks also to Kelsey Neal, or Chelsea Neal. I don't know what we're doing with that H. I don't know how big of a factor that H is in that name. But we thank you very much over there in Seattle, Washington, for supporting TBTL. oh and then it's our pal i call him tt troy tortorich of lake stevens washington tom thumb market territory thank you troy uh thanks to summer martinez in puyallup washington i'll do the puyallup uh-huh um catherine palacios is in houston texas gosh catherine thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for

riding along with us as we have talked so much baseball and talked so disparatively about the baseball team that's based in your city we love you and we appreciate you and your generosity and the good news is there we have new teams to be obsessed with now that's right exactly uh thanks also to todd thorsgaard who's in saint paul minnesota boy does thorsgaard ever sound like a name you'd find in old saint paul minnesota ballard or saint paul that's yes that's right But either St. Paul or St. Paul West, which is what I call Ballard. Thank you so much to our donors. Thanks for making TVTL possible. We could not do this thing without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Okay, Andrew, we're finally going to talk about this thing that I've had on the show sheet forever. Good. Which is this. It's an AI video program called Sora. and it was written up in the New York Times. Let me see if I can get to that, into a better version of the article that I can actually get to because of the, when's the AI gonna fix my computer talking to my New York Times account, Andrew? This was an article written by Brian X. Chan in the Times. AI video generators are now so good you can no longer trust your eyes. And the one that they tend to focus on is this app called Sora. It's a free app on iPhones. uh it's i think it's actually uh it's made by uh open ai which they're the folks that made chat gpt and like you hear a lot about like ai obviously you hear a lot about like you know deep fakes and things like that and i will say that heretofore most of the stuff that's been generated my eyes were able to sort of catch it pretty quickly as being uh computer generated or a deep fake or whatever and they were not super duper convincing and but also i would say that i am somebody who's terminally online and even though i'm reaching the advanced stage of 50 this year i would put again this is a sad this is a sad flex but i would put my ability i would put my just the thousand the 10 000 reps i've put in on looking at internet slop i'd put that up against most people's therefore i'm pretty versed in it and this i started noticing on tiktok i don't know a week or two ago before i saw this article i started noticing these truly nuts videos where the only reason i knew that they were ai was because i knew that the people that were in the videos were alive either at different times or not necessarily part or were not doing whatever it was they were doing in the video in other words it was not that the person didn't look like the person that they were or that the video was glitchy or that it looked animated it was not because of how the video actually appeared it was because of the content in the video i knew was not possible one of the videos i started seeing a bunch or style of videos tons of videos of the

late scientist stephen hawking in his kind of wheelchair that he was you know quite known to be in for all those years and that we can all kind of picture dropping in on a half pipe that you would use for skateboarding and doing a couple of really successful trip tricks and then some very unsuccessful tricks and like looking and like it was basically like imagine the x games but they but they got steven hawking dropping in more like tony hawking exactly i want to keep making i want to keep building on that joke but then i also don't strudel exactly steven hawking tony hawking and you know what that might have been part of whoever made this thing because by the way this is like i said a free app on your phone and you can start i've seen other videos now saying hey if you want to know how to use this app and start making videos in a minute here's the tutorial so i started seeing those i started seeing ones where like mr rogers is riding a bike and then he falls off the bike and he starts swearing and doing a bunch of un-mister rogersly stuff there's one where he's like interviewing tupac he's he's mr it's mr rogers and he's on the set of like mr rogers neighborhood but he's talking to tupac but then i forget exactly what he says but it's clearly a setup for a deez nuts joke on tupac so he's asking in a very mr rogerian fan of sort of style of like if tupac likes something and then tupac's answering very earnestly that he does and then what tupac doesn't realize that he set mr rogers up for a deez nuts

joke and i just i know that this isn't really our kind of humor but i think i found it here

did you find it i think i did i'm not i don't think it's overly i don't think it's overly gross

i've never seen i by the way just so you know i've never seen this before you've you've mentioned this to me uh when we're talking about the story offline and so i haven't looked it up i'm playing this cold but it does look like i found something on instagram here that has mr rogers and it was made with sora these clips get deleted what's up my neighbor what did you call me no i'm just messing with you my neighbor my neighbor my mother neighbor man you wild fred you know i was wondering could i uh get the pass just one time please no no mr rogers

That's one thing I can't hand out, even in the neighborhood. Fair enough. But you're still cool with me.

You know what, Pac? I think I'm ready to leave this white-ass neighborhood.

So what's this game called again? This shit here is Connect Four Loko. I win, you drink. You win, I drink. Well, let's get neighborly. Like this, chin tuck. Step, pop the jab, bring it right back. Real simple. Slip, roll with it, then hook. All about staying ready. You never know. Teaching him out of box. And it helps you feel prepared and content. Exactly, Mr. Rodgers.

Now they're standing out on the street somewhere.

It's thug life out here, Fred, dog. I got you.

Yeah, they're playing with trains.

What the fuck we doing, Fred?

I'm not sure why the cameras are still rolling. Oh, no, Luke. So these don't have the D's nuts joke. But honestly, wow, I just went on a real journey. I was sort of delighted by that.

And also, I mean, again, I didn't get eyes on those ones you just played, but I can picture them in my mind. and now you had a lot of you had a lot of heads up going in that this is ai generated yeah if you were scrolling i mean they're fairly convincing right yeah definitely and i'm not even joking

when i say and i'm you know already ruining these words as i think about them later in the day but like that obviously that's janky obviously that's fake obviously we're going to be talking about like the danger of being able to pass off things that seem real but also when i was watching that

i was feeling delighted right you weren't feeling like i'm seeing an ai program that was told hey have tupac and mr rogers have a conversation that would be unusual where they substitute the word neighborhood for a different n-word that we don't say yes and then the large language model just did it that isn't what you felt like you're watching you felt like you were watching two people that you sort of like two friends and like a thing that could have happened because you know mr rogers was a friend to all and then tupac had a lot of sides to him you know so like it was an imagined world that you kind of almost want to live in yeah you love these guys and you love

these guys together you immediately love their fake friendship and one of the things a big area

that they people have been using this program for that i've been seeing also for a while and again really what's different about this to me is it's getting so so good at the actual video at the voices at the so a lot of it is sports related right now so what it'll be is like a press conference where let's just say like let's say the mariners have a have a game where they don't play very well how do i i can't even speak of these mariners without being worried i'm jinxing here's what i'm going to say it'll be a player from a team doing a press conference after the game where they're saying the thing as a fan you would hope they would say we fell into that trap

before tbtl recently you were looking for some post-game quote from i think a manager or a player

yeah and then you're like oh here it is here and you hit john schneider the manager of the blue Yeah. And then you're like, oh, shoot, this is fake. Yeah. And they're doing there's one that I saw that was that was Detroit Tigers. So the algorithm on TikTok knows that I'm obsessed with Mariners content right now. And also I'm obsessed with the content that relates to whatever team they're playing. And by obsessed, I just mean I must let it run a five tenths of a second longer, which the algorithm learns means I'm engaged with it. so i was getting like after detroit i think maybe lost the second game at home or something or maybe i i was getting what looked like shaky cell phone video of the manager of the detroit tigers i guess that was aj hinch walking up the down the aisles of the team plane berating the tigers players who are sitting there nervously and kind of like not making eye contact and it totally looked like somebody had videotaped AJ Hinch yelling at the Tigers players like it's the craziest thing to fake or spoof but it also had this it looked real it sounded real it was like oh shit it took me like 30 seconds and the only reason that I knew is because and I don't know how much longer they have to do this they put a tiny watermark on these things it is this little kind of like it almost looks like a poppy flower but it's white and it's the logo of this Sora app and it doesn't start when you first start seeing the video you don't see this watermark you have to watch enough of the video and it literally the watermark pops up for one half of a second it just kind of it sort of it appears and then it fades out and it and it appears and fades out on a different part of the phone screen that you're looking at it doesn't always show up in the same place and so what i know now is if i see a video and i'm like it's too good to be true because the person is being too honest or it's two people that i don't necessarily think of having been in the same context or just basically if it's something that i'm like i can't believe i'm actually seeing this right now now my new thing my brain has been trained to do is start looking around the screen for this sora watermark to just like very almost imperceptibly show up and then leave but it is like the second they stop putting that watermark up

Thank you.

I mean, again, the only thing I could do is use context clues or use larger context, just kind of go like, did Stephen Hawking ever participate in the X game? My brain tells me no. So that video has got to be fake. But that's what I'm doing. That's the only way for me to know if they stop putting these watermarks on things.

Yeah, I'm scrolling through this article, too. First of all, one quick note to the New York Times. If you're going to put in your lead paragraph an example like this, the thing can generate realistic looking videos with artificial intelligence by typing in a simple description like police body cam footage of a dog being arrested for stealing ribeye at Costco. You better make that a hyperlink. I want to see that now. I seriously have been Googling that. I'm like, why aren't they linking to that? And I realize that they're just pulling that out of thin air. There are so many real life examples. don't tempt me with police body cam footage of a dog being arrested for stealing ribeye at costco and then make me create i now need to download this app so that i can see what that looks like

yeah that's i mean don't don't write me a check that your butt can't cash new york times about

a dog stealing a butt roast yeah but anyway but you know like there are just things that i see a lot of on reddit i spend a lot of time on reddit and there's a lot of like um a lot of dash cam footage not police dash cam footage just dash cam footage right because a lot of people a lot of drivers have those little cameras in their cars now and then when something ridiculous happens on the road somebody cuts somebody off and it leads to some sort of accident or something often like uh in a in a sub called uh instant karma you'll see that stuff like somebody's a total jerk on the road and then they cut somebody off and they go spinning off the road or something you see a lot of that kind of stuff well of course ai i mean that's the type of thing where it's already shaky footage and i'm looking at an ai creation of that of something similar to that in this new york times article and yeah like there's literally nothing in here that would make me think that that's fake except for like you said the sora thing that's sort of kind of coming on and

then going away across the screen and as he writes about uh in this piece uh people have figured also how to crop that at how to crop that watermark out now too so somebody if there's a sora video i I mean, it's literally anything that a person could possibly imagine as a scenario can now be created in a pretty believable way. And again, we're quickly getting, we're rapidly getting to the point where really the only way to know if something's fake is to just ask yourself, is it possible this thing really happened? And how did I not hear about it? And then you got to go out and you got to start cross-referencing it a bunch. You've got to immediately go to like CNN or some other news feed to go like, oh, did, you know, the Statue of Liberty collapse into, you know, New York Harbor or whatever. Like we're at the point now where it's going to have to be us being smart enough to realize that anything that we see now online that seems like a crazy extreme moment or something that's deeply shocking or surprising, you're going to have to immediately go and try to cross reference it with something else. because you cannot believe your eyes anymore because it's getting it's getting so convincing and i mean i'm not saying anything particularly useful here but it's just like it is really unsettling to me because it's like again i feel like i am i am such a power user of the internet and particularly of these short form video things like tiktok that i i feel like i'm i am like i'm very very very or at least i'm in the 10 of people who can quickly identify what is and is not real but you know who's not my parents and a lot of other people and like i just feel like this stuff is fool if this stuff is starting to fool me we got some real problems well yeah and that's where

i was just thinking right now like i don't even want to keep going on this because i just spin out of control pretty quickly but i mean it's it's you can't divorce this from the conversation of before the technology was here to create all kinds of stuff that is making us feel like we can't believe what we're seeing with our eyes for the past decade or two i feel like the groundwork It was being laid of just like people saying, oh, we can just say whatever we want to the populace and also consolidate media in a way that my reality here in Seattle is different than when I go home to Ohio and I hear the same information being told to me from people who watch Fox News all the time. And like there's already without the help of AI, there is already this widening gap between what people can agree on as being real. I mean, whether you're talking about just the norms of politics, but also just the facts of what's going on. And there is already this growing divide in our country about people just saying, nope, I don't what the fact that you're telling me doesn't fit in with my worldview. So I'm going to say I don't believe The New York Times, you know, and it's just like and we already had that. And then you're throwing this on top of it. How can it not feel? I'm somebody who. really has not just resisted but truly believed that overreaction to technological developments it has just been something that happens with every generation and it's always overblown i just said overreaction is overblown obviously that means the same thing but you know what i'm saying like yeah if people were concerned about either pushing the limits of sexuality in the in pop music in the 80s or 90s i'd be like whatever elvis was doing that in the 60s and they were saying the same shit people talking about oh mtv is gonna rot the brains i'm like people were saying the same thing about the andy griffith show i don't know if i can actually back that up with facts but you know what i mean like new media for every generation no man just dressing like a trollop showed a little bit more ankle than i think was appropriate but but you know what i'm

saying right like you can back me up on this there's always a moral panic there's always often surrounds technology and also creative output and it's all it's it's very predictable and it almost

always turns out to not be true both a moral and a technological one as well you know like i just also a moral panic about the technology about yeah and like in this case i started with sort of the the moral stuff about the sexuality but it's not only that but it's also just about like i remember concerns about well the mtv generation isn't going to have any kind of ability to hold a thought for more than a minute because of everything being so chopped up and it's so fast-paced or whatever you know what i mean comic books and comic books as well yeah national

outrage against the idea of comic books because it was going to rot the brains of kids and they were going to no longer be able to read anything long form

yeah and so anyway I've always felt like oh this stuff like we just roll with this as a society and so maybe I'm just one now that I'm you know solidly middle aged maybe I'm just falling into the trap that everybody else did but it really feels different now and there's such a specific political moment that is coinciding with that seems like just terrifying

right because it's not a question of like elvis is shaking his hips and we think that it's going to it's going to start a fire in the loins of the youth of america that's one thing and by the way that's silliness but but we could all agree that like if we saw footage of elvis shaking his shaking his legs or you know gyrating in a certain way we we all agreed that the footage we were watching was actually elvis and he was actually gyrating and now you could agree you could think that that was dangerous for society you could say it's not dangerous for society you could be on either side of that argument but the essential footage of elvis doing his gyration was not was not itself something that we had to wonder if it was even real yeah there we we for the longest of times we didn't agree on things and of course we are a nation that's had a civil war we have been deeply divided in the past but we we haven't also had to reckon with this idea that I could generate my own video of Elvis gyrating, and I could use it as the evidence of why I believe the way I believe, and I could have totally made it up and invented it, or I could make it up and invent it and send it out, and then other people could see it and believe it's real, and that would inform how they feel about it, and then someone else makes their own video. It's like, if we can't even agree on the source material and then how we feel about that, we got some real problems.

Yeah. And even without AI, you just have a whole bunch of people that believe Portland, Oregon, where my friend went to a feminist vegan fragrance convention like last weekend while the rest of the world hears that Portland is burning and that rebels are taking over the ICE headquarters. It's just like – and that's without AI. That's just the propaganda that's going on.

Right. Something that I, I mean, I'm not a student of history and I'm certainly not a student of like totalitarianism and things like that, you know, dictatorships and autocracies. But like everyone else, I've been forced to have somewhat of a crash course on it. And something that I didn't really understand that tends to be out of the playbook of a, of an autocrat is I will, I guess I had to guess, I would say, well, they try to control the media and make the media talk about them the way they like. And yes, that is certainly something that, you know, the current president very much would like. He's he would really like everyone to say nice things about him in the media at all times. And he's trying to bring his boot down on places that aren't doing that. But the bigger thing, and I guess this is pretty typical, is it's actually just to get as many people as possible to disbelieve everything. Like disbelieving everything is as powerful a way of controlling people as getting them to believe your thing and getting them to believe your news outlets. It's like I used to just think it was like he's just trying to make Fox News the number one and only watched a network in America. And there's actually something like sort of almost more powerful, which is just don't every everybody in the media is lying at all times. Everything is you can't trust anything at all, because then once you once you get people to cross that bridge with you in their minds, they no longer believe literally anything. Then you can then you're not held accountable for anything because, oh, the media said it. Well, it's a lie because that's what the media does. And then you've actually really like you really weaponized it in this way that I certainly. didn't see coming i didn't understand that as a thing but now i see it all the time when i talk to people whether it's when i'm doing my job or otherwise like just those people that are just like if you were to tell them you know that something had happened and they like you said it doesn't fit into their pre-existing idea of the world um they'll just say well that's the media lying to you and it's like well did you actually read the article or have you cross-reference it or have you seen how many places are saying have you seen that fox news is actually saying it's a real thing i mean they're not happy about it but they acknowledge that it's actually the thing or whatever it's like it just gives people this ability to not have to interact with any kind of data points that they don't want to interact with because it it messes with their preconceived

notion yes and i'm trying personally over here on the left to not apply that to everything too just because i guess somebody's awful and wrong 99.9 of the time if something if some not just dismissing inconvenient truths oh we should make a movie speaking of documentaries called inconvenient truths it could be a sequel anyway um i'm trying really hard not to just dismiss things that might not fit my worldview just because it doesn't um doesn't fit yeah let's

go from sad news and bad news to a little bit better news uh this is down in southern california in the palisades you remember for some reason this came up on the show a couple weeks back the sinclair dinosaur yes i had totally forgotten about it until you brought it up recently and why did that come up in the first place did i just mentioning it that i thought they were i

know no i know i i'm suddenly remembering because you and i were on some sort of a deep discourse i will call it on the tv show dinosaurs oh yeah and we learned that all the characters were named or a bunch of the characters were named after or inspired by petrol companies, right? Right. And one of them is named Sinclair. And you said, oh, Sinclair is a gas station. I was like, I didn't know that. And you said they're the ones with the little, you know, dinosaurs, like literally little statues of dinosaurs that you pass as you pull into their gas stations.

So there was a Sinclair station. It's in Brentwood, but it's, you know, it's in this part of, I guess it's east of the Palisades, But it's an area that was this is, by the way, Ashwarya Kavi writing in The New York Times, a stolen 50 pound dinosaur named Claire is returned after outrage. And basically the story goes that you've got this guy who had owned this Sinclair gas station for years and years in the area. And I'm not sure if there was OK. It became Sinclair seven years ago. This guy's named John Fawcett. He's owned the gas station for years. About seven years ago, it became a Sinclair oil franchise. And some of the regular customers asked this owner of this now Sinclair station if he was going to get one of those fiberglass dinosaur statues. Oh, yeah. And he said he said that he would love to. But he said they're impossible to find. You can't get them. And that is when one of his customers, a guy named Keith Salmon, invited Mr. Fawcett to his production company offices in Santa Monica. I would love to show you something, Mr. Fawcett recalled him saying. So I went to his office and there was Claire. This guy had basically somehow found this five foot by eight apatosaurus or maybe a brontosaurus. Sinclair says it's aware of conflicting opinions among paleontologists. Basically, this guy who had some kind of prop company had gotten his hands on one of these green Sinclair dinosaurs. I never said dinosaur in a weird way until I had a professor who said it in a weird way, and now I kind of can't unring that bell. But so everybody fell in. They named the dinosaur Claire.

And this was a dinosaur that was a specific Sinclair dinosaur at some point. This wasn't just a dinosaur that sort of looked like a Sinclair dinosaur?

This is what I was a little bit unclear on. Because it says, the guy says, I would love to show you something. I go to his office, and there was Claire. Mr. Fawcett did not find out how the customer had ended up with the 5x8 Apatosaurus. I know I just read this part. But he gladly accepted the present from Mr. Salmon.

Oh, it says here that he then took it and then painted it green and installed it. So this must have just been a prop dinosaur for something else. And he made it look like one of those classic Sinclairs. I'm also learning that Sinclair, which is still a going concern, no longer provides the dinosaurs for their gas stations. Like, Luke, I am not joking. If like there are two gas stations next to each other, I am going to just instinctively, I'm going to go into the one with the giant toy dinosaur.

And I didn't realize this because, you know, the towns that I live nearby here in southern Washington, you know, there are definitely there's significant economic headwinds on those towns. and uh you know there's a lot about them that i sometimes wish was a little maybe bougier or whatever but i will tell you this longview washington not one andrew but two green fiberglass dinosaurs in front of their sinclares we are sinclair rich

nice well around here lock them down my friend seriously because that's what happened to this

dinosaur named claire uh somebody by the way people would you know take their like they would dress the dinosaur up for the holidays i've noticed that by the way with the dinosaurs that are down the singular dinosaurs that are down in the town by me people will like you know during college or i should say high school graduation time the people dress them up like a graduate with the hat on people will put like a lei like a hawaiian flower thing on them like people love to take pictures with them they really kind of be now listen i want to also mention the whole thing is premised on the idea that we are extracting resources from the earth lighting them on fire raising the temperature of this planet and we're doing it with cute dead dinosaur no fair enough it's a hundred percent messed up it's a little bit like my my whole

complaint about like using an a personified pig to serve your pork ribs right precisely it is like

i want to be clear that it's all cute until you do even one second of critical thinking i want to do critical but that's why we don't do one second of critical thinking because we can keep having fun with the cutesy dinosaur right so that was kind of the scene down there in brentwood people love the dinosaur and then um the dinosaur was stolen um they had security footage of it they think it happened at about 2 30 on a saturday security footage showed a person with a jacket hood up cutting the metal that kept the dinosaur secured to the ground then loading the dinosaur in the back of a white pickup truck by the way the new york times repeatedly refers to the dinosaur as her i don't know what obviously we've been talking a lot about the um honorifics of the new york times lately uh i guess the honorifics allow for them to what personify this fiberglass dinosaur i guess they're just having fun with this they're having fun it would be funny if they referred to her as ms claire or just the dinosaur or the object instead of it kind of yeah yeah but um so the dinosaur was missing for a long time the uh the community was of course uh devastated uh Jamie Lee Curtis. What? Even stepped up. Jamie Lee Curtis got on Instagram and wrote, Hey, you with your fancy truck, comma, really? She captioned the video. This is the video of the theft of Claire. You need to steal the dinosaur from in front of the Sinclair gas station? Really? Not cool, dude. Not cool. I guess she lives nearby, huh? Yeah, she lives in Pacific Palisades. She's got that yogurt money, you know, and would visit, I guess, this service station. um apparently the the story of the stolen dinosaur went far and wide enough that the the owner of the gas station got a call from the lapd an officer asked him if he wanted to file a report he had assumed that there was no getting the dinosaur back so it hadn't even occurred to him to file a police report and then after like a huge community outpouring of grief and about the disappearance of claire claire turned up i think this is now last tuesday deposited in the early hours wrapped in a cloth much in the same way that she had been taken and I believe there was even a note that was attached to the dinosaur apologizing for stealing the dinosaur and asking that they not file charges against whoever stole the dinosaur

so it was a mysterious return as well as I didn't expect this twist ending I thought the police were going to find it online you know somebody trying to sell it on

ebay or something like that or the dark web no the person who would appear that the person who stole it uh or someone near them uh had a change of heart and saw that uh you know there was this big community outpouring and everyone was sad about it and they brought the dinosaur back apparently and they included i can't now locate the part in the article it says it in the headline the theft of a beloved dinosaur statue upset residents of a los angeles neighborhood that was damaged by wildfires earlier this year then she was returned with an apology so i know there i i somewhere in this article that i can't get to right now there was literally i think the actual verbatim of what they wrote in the apology but my memory of it is they apologized for stealing the dinosaur and they asked that they not press charges now i'm just stumbling on what might

be the funniest part of this article which was a correction that was made a few days ago an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the stolen dinosaur statue that was returned to a gas station in los angeles it's claire not claire it's claire without an e not claire with an e so they even had to issue a correction for misspelling the dinosaur's name and of course they left the e

off because that's like sinclair right oh so it's like the last part oh ice the last part of the word

claire i'm an idiot i wasn't with claire well no no i just putting that together i just put that

together here too so you're not i don't think but what's our what's our listen i you're just mad because then they put it in a dodgers uniform aren't you have you gotten to that part of the that's where i knew we were going to lose you oh no i didn't even see that oh but they're not

the dodgers are not paying the dinosaurs a deferred payment situation it looks like somebody said that the Dodgers just are able to they're just able to they're just able to like coast through the regular season on 50% battery and then just like go full power in the playoffs of course well listen keep going I was just gonna say I think I even saw a headline in the New York Times today that was like the Dodgers they're already counting the days to the win of the World Series they're not even technically in the World Series yet and it's like only seven more wins to be crowned the world champions again or something along those lines.

I was like, my goodness. Would you say that you dislike the Dodgers more than the Yankees? Is that because of the Dodgers aspect?

That's a tough one, Luke. I'm not ready to go on the record on that right now. Let's just say there's a lot of hate in my heart.

Because for my whole baseball rooting era of my life, because the Mariners are in the American League, i've always had a big target on the new york yankees they've always been the 800 pound gorilla in the room in the league and they've always been and and the dodgers i mean first of all i actually liked the dodgers when i moved to la because they were not at that point super successful like they hadn't been good since the 80s so it wasn't like you're going in and rooting for like again a team that's been going to the world series six seven seasons in a row because i'm just outspending everyone they were they i loved the stadium the physical stadium um not its history andrew not how it got to chavez ravine but like the actual stadium i thought was very sort of cool i loved that i could walk there from my house i was you know i was really leaning into the los

angeles experience when you walked there how did you get into the stadium because that was always my big disappointment in la when i got there and i was trying to walk there and i couldn't i couldn't figure out why and i realized oh because it's like just surrounded by parking like you can't

actually walk through can i mean you can because you can go pre-funk at the shortstop and then walk to the game i can't remember how we did it but i mean i know that you do not have to enter the stadium complex in a car but that's what it's designed for i see i wish i had known that millions and millions and millions of parking spaces that ring out from around the stadium but all that is to say i just didn't think about the dodgers as the enemy team to me until i moved away and honestly you put a little bit of your evil inside me and i thought well if i I'm going to apply, if the rules that I'm going to apply to the Yankees, in other words, I don't find it as sporting when a team can afford to just outspend everyone and therefore just have the best team because they just have more money than everyone and they can just keep getting any good player that comes available. I was like, well, that also very much applies to the Dodgers, if not more than the Yankees right now.

Especially right now. I do think it's even, I mean, I was even looking up, like I was there in 2015. What was their 2015 season like? I was like, maybe that was more of a down year. Nope. In 2015, they went to the divisionals NLDS for the third year in a row or something. You know what I mean? These teams don't know what it's like not to go to the playoffs. And now, like I say, the Dodgers have the situation where they just don't they don't even have to really start playing until October. It sort of seems like it's just like it's a it's a cheat code to steal that parlance.

And every single time, like a new player, particularly a player maybe from Japan or just like somebody who there's like a kind of a almost a sort of sweepstakes to try to get them. Either they're a big free agent or there's someone exotic from somewhere else who's got all these skills and they're going to revolutionize the game. And we're like, there's every team is lining up to be like, maybe they'll choose us. And then it's just like, why are we even doing this? We know they're going to the Dodgers. Right. Yeah. It's all – and so – and then there was like they've been doing something to sort of court the White House or something. That's why you're calling them the Dodgers?

Oh, well, yeah. Well, they – I mean they were the world champions last year obviously or they won the World Series. And so teams often will go to the White House. I realize that. But also in the – in this era, I would really hope that my team wouldn't. And that's one thing, you know, that – Oh, we haven't thought about that. I have. Are you kidding me? don't think i've thought about that that if the mariners win the first time this is occurring to me no no no i've been thinking about this i i listen we have a lot of things to worry about before that's a real consideration i think but i have thought like for as hard as i've been on dodgers and dodgers fans for like kind of supporting this team that like just had a ball at the white house with with trump um and and then also some of the politics specifically of some of the players on their team which i take issue with and again do we want to do we do i

I want to know how famous Golden Glover Dylan Moore votes. No, probably not. Like, you know, like there's just like how much hypocrisy would I have to eat? You know what I mean? Depending on how my team would act in that situation. But I don't have to worry about that right now. And so, yeah, I do kind of group them in and call them the Dodgers. But they just sort of, yeah, they just rankle me in a lot of different ways.

Well, because you were talking about how they don't even have to really play their hardest until the playoffs. And then they just come in and, like, you know, are just 2-0 on the road against what many people think is the best team in baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers. And that does speak to what you're saying. And then also—and yes, by the way, we have shifted into the baseball portion of the show, and that's fine. I've got the Paddington sweater on to prove it. Yeah, how did I—how did this happen? I did this. I did this. Do you remember what the transition was? Yeah, because Claire the Dinosaur— Oh, yeah. When they reach the owner of the Sinclair station, when the New York Times reaches him, he's sitting in his car. He's next to Claire, and Claire has been festooned in Dodger balloons and a Dodger uniform, the dinosaur. And I asked you if that made you mad, and then I asked you if you dislike the Dodgers more than the Yankees. But here's where I'm going with all this. There was just a line in The Athletic a couple weeks ago about the Yankees. And it was just about, like, you know, I don't know how the Yankees were doing or something about contracts or their players or whatever. and then they just said like i'm paraphrasing here but they were they sort of start to go talk about like the window of opportunity for a team you know and that normally means like your team has gotten managed to get together some good players and these players are under contract for a while and you've now got this like maybe a couple of years or three four years where you're really in the conversation about maybe winning at all and then this person just writer for the athletics goes well the window there is no window of opportunity for the yankees the window of opportunity for the Yankees never closes yeah yeah and they were being honest and I was like yeah and that's why I hate them yeah because the rest of us I mean the Mariners might we might get it might be in a two-year window we might be in a three-year window the Yankees window it it's not a window it's a lifestyle and the same thing for the Dodgers you know like and when did our window

open is a question I've been asking myself too is did our window open this year or did our window opened in 2022 and we're still somewhere in the middle of the window our window opened when josh

naylor refused to put on the cleveland guardian celebratory t-shirt and alienated the franchise and then was and then was sent on a journey to arizona and then eventually here to just be an absolute incredible badass and i use that term advisedly yes complimentary i love this is how great josh naylor is when my daughter and i are now texting and she she had um something going on the other day it was a important moment for her and it went well and she just sends me to tell me that it went well she just sends me a picture of josh naylor clearly possibly high definitely maybe drunk smoking a cigar wearing a kraken jersey oh yeah i think i don't know if i saw

that picture he's holding a bud i don't know if i've seen that photo but i've seen him in a kraken

jersey that's great it's the best it's pure joy and it's like my daughter did not know there was a thing called josh nailer three weeks ago my daughter who lives in los angeles and the fact and it was josh nailer and then it was this picture and then apostrophe ed it nailed it she's using josh nailer as a verb nice and that happening is has that that to me is that special

I told you that I'm going as sexy Josh Naylor for Halloween, right?

Listen, the existence of a sexy Josh Naylor presupposes the idea of an unsexy Josh Naylor, and I don't see it.

I'm going to wear the giant, giant night shirt that he wears, but I'm going to tie it up into a little knot.

Oh, yeah, definitely do a little. By the way, my mom is trying to steal our valor or my valor on the fact that we call, at least my brothers and I call Josh Naylor the Hobbit. You've gotten into this. He's like a Koopa Trooper, right?

he's like one of those that's what i thought at first because i love him he's like he's he's got these short little legs and i have this gif that look and he's got those eyebrows that come down and he's stealing bases and he's running his little legs but he shouldn't be stealing these

bases but he is yeah he's amazing and we loved him but i i think early on i don't know if it was david or somebody that i text with a lot about the marriage we started calling him a hobbit because he's kind of not particularly tall he's a little on the rounder side but he's incredible at what he gets done and then we get this text from my mom saying we call him my mom says after he hit his home run the other day my mom says the hobbit did it we call him that because of his build and i said mom we've been calling him that all season and then my mom says i had no idea luke i called him the hobbit to your dad and he agreed and then i was mad at walter because i when walter has been watching the game with me, like in the playoffs, and it's just been me and Walt, I have been calling him the Hobbit to my dad, and my dad knew that, and yet he

just like allowed my mom to steal you wanted your dad to say hey you can't make that joke that's

luke's joke in the privacy yeah if you see something say something i want him to say stop the tape this is a bad hug this is a bad hug your son luke is already using that and that's fine you can use it too but you don't i can't have you thinking you invented that well i also

and again this is your fam i last thing i need to do is get involved in your family drama i have enough drama-rama you know me luke my life is already filled with drama yeah but i was a little bit i saw you guys um chatting a little bit about this in the text chain that we're all on the sports text chain and i was a little bit confused because i remember earlier in the regular season your brother saying my dad likes altuve the houston astro my dad likes altuve because he thinks he's a hobbit so then i was confused i don't go how i didn't remember that oh yeah your brother threw that out there and i was kind of like yeah i could sort of see that so we already have walt b calling i thought el tuve the hobbit and again i know that everybody's doing this online talk now but maybe it's like el tuve oh this is actually this was literally your brother's joke i almost stole your brother's joke he wrote he wrote el tuve the hobbit derogatory and then Naylor, the Hobbit, complimentary.

That's right. Yeah. Hobbit has so many different implications. You could be Hobbit. We could be Hobbit negative, Hobbit neutral. What was that thing that was going around for a long time? Chaotic neutral.

Yeah, I can't remember what that grid is called. And that's a D&D thing, right? I think it took me a long time to realize that. Oh, really?

I don't think I ever got that far in it. Now, let me just ask you this, sir, here as we are winding things up on this Wednesday. And let's play.

I do want to play one quick voicemail at the end just to keep the listeners in the game.

Hold on. Let me activate the proper sound effect for that, and then we'll jump over to—hold on. You're on my screen. My video feed of you is blocking my ability to play this audio.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

All right, what do you have in the emails and females department?

Well, I apologize. I didn't mean to cut off your thought. Oh, no, we'll come back to it. Okay, you'll come back to it. You'll hang on to that. Okay, I just wanted—we hadn't played a voicemail in a while. And this isn't related to anything that we're talking about right now. It just delighted me, Luke. And this is from listener Laura.

Hello, Luke and Andrew. This is Laura, listener Laura in Madison, Wisconsin. And I was reminded by Luke's comment about the moon being out during the day. It immediately reminded me of a camp song. Sung for many years by me and many other campers at Far View Ranch Camp, Marysville, California. Don't worry, it's short, but I am going to sing it for you. Of course, as an adult, I listen to this song and I kind of think, you know, it's a little bit judgmental of the moon's choices and, you know, who are we to judge. But anyway, I still like it. So here goes. Mr. Moon, Mr. Moon, you're out too soon. The sun is still in the sky. Go back to your bed and cover up your head And wait till the day goes by Okay, power out

I like the little judgmental warning on that as well Moon, you can do whatever you want But this is just a little ditty we have

Yeah, yeah, that is a little But I mean, it is like you're kind of putting the moon in its place, I guess, right?

Yeah, you're kind of saying go back to bed and come out when we're ready for you And it's kind of like, what, does the moon not have autonomy?

Stay in your lane, moon We don't think of you as a daytime entity Right So here was my question before we jumped into the emails and emails Thank you, by the way, was that Laura?

That was Laura, yeah, thanks Laura

I would listen to an entire show where listeners just sang camp songs

Yeah, it's so nice She has a nice voice too

Yeah, I'm a fan of the whole oeuvre What do you think will happen to the Seattle Mariners baseball team today at 5pm local when we play against the Toronto Blue Jays. We are leading 2-0 in the series. We are sending, I think it's Castillo, right? We're sending Castillo out tonight?

That's my understanding. Luke, I can't, I'll be honest, I'm not trying to be difficult here. Shane Bieber, I believe. Shane Bieber. And I got to say, that's the only thing. Justin's brother. Yeah, Justin, wait, hold on. It's not Justin Bieber. It's like, because that would change how I feel. That'd be distracting. That would be distracting. There will be a Beats by Dre Justin Bieber ad. By the way, tonight will be a really good way to test your theory that that Otani ad is green screened on and part of an MLB package, because we know what ads we see at T-Mobile. And will we see Hemplers, or will we see Beats by Dre? Great question. That's one thing I'll be looking for. Everybody watch for it. Yeah. I don't want to predict, Luke, because I don't...

I haven't really been digging into the X's and O's. My whole thing has just been sort of like protecting my feelings and everything. So I'll ask you what you're expecting. I will say that when I heard the name Shane Bieber, and am I right? I know that name because he used to be with Cleveland for a long time, right? I believe so. Like an ace with Cleveland. And so I hear Shane Bieber. I'm like, oh, no. But I'm also like, oh, wait. But they also started a rookie before him earlier in the series when it was more important. And so Shane Bieber must not be the Shane Bieber that instills fear in my heart. What do you know about this matchup?

I don't know very much about it. Yeah, I know he was a Cleveland Guardian and has been good in the past. I feel like all of the, it seems like anyway, all of the kind of predictions, the way that we try to make sense of these things before they happen, these baseball games when there's this much pressure, is this like, well, this person's ERA is this. And so therefore, and their ERA against this team is a number. And now because of that, we know who will win. And it just seems like it all kind of goes out the window. The Mariners were supposed to lose the first game because they were coming in on no rest and they didn't have anyone they could throw out there as a pitcher other than Bryce Miller, who might be part Wild Thornberry on his father's side. I wanted to find a picture of him. And when he used to have, when his mustache used to be bigger and his hair used to be wilder, he looked like the dad from the Wild Thornberries. but anyway um i guess my point is to me it's less about the matchup and just about the the luck the how the ball bounces on a given night like so so here's the thing now it's like the mariners are the ones that are theoretically in the advantage position we're playing at home we have a much more rested castillo coming in our bullpen has not been overly taxed in the last couple of games because we've had good starting pitching performances um we have a good home record so there's all this all this stuff that now seems to be piling up on the side of well the mariners should should do pretty well tonight or you know and then that's when i always get nervous yes i always get nervous when there when there's whenever there's something that we think is kind of a foregone conclusion something else that has been pointed out by many blue jays fans who are popping up on my feed on tiktok is the blue jays did sweep the mariners in seattle this year so they're very capable of that i didn't recall that and i don't think that like you're going to keep vlad guerrero jr down all series i don't think that their best hitters are going to um you know are going to struggle throughout they're going to come back and and really let me put it this way if i'm the blue jays here's here's all i'm thinking about with the rest of the series we got to win two out of three we just got to win two out of three because you win two out of three you take the you take the the series back to toronto and now for toronto playing a

winner takes all well wait if we if we take no wait you know sorry i was thinking of a i was

thinking of a five-game series yeah yeah so it's three games in seattle and two games in toronto right is that the rest of the series if necessary yeah so still two out of three so the the theory holds except not exactly the way i was thinking two out of three and we're there we're done two out of three we don't go back to toronto to away toronto wins two out of three oh if they win two out of three if i'm toronto i'm just thinking two out of three yeah in seattle two out of three get the series back to toronto just win two out of three like because you know winning three out of three feels really daunting and hard to do so i guess i'm just saying like i believe it or not if i'm the blue jays i would not be in full freakout mode yet no i wouldn't either because

it's kind of like the shoes on the other foot like yeah they there was like oh man if only the mariners could steal one game at the famous johnson center uh-huh i feel so bad about that Um, but you know, then we see what happened because the one team was maybe more confident and who knows, I'm, there's a million different reasons and just like, I'm just, yeah, I'm just in that mode now. Like, again, I don't think it's, I think with the Dodgers, you just have a lineup that is just up and down. What, what is John's, uh, uh, less steroid baby too or whatever. Like that's basically the, uh, your team, the team. It's just like up and down the lineup. Like, when Freddie Freeman is, like, your third best player or whatever, it's just like that you're not even talking about regular baseball anymore. But with the rest of these teams, especially this particular series, I just can't help but just think, like, the old Mariners t-shirts used to say, anything can happen. And that's why I'm not necessarily, like, feeling, like, super confident going into this. And also just thinking, like, what are the chances that we're actually just going to win four games in a row against this very good team? But I will remain hopeful. I'll also be interested in seeing if, you know, as we're going now we're playing baseball in Seattle on October 15th, like the marine layer is is going to be more of a factor than it was midsummer, I'm going to say.

Will they have the roof opener closed? I guess is the question. That's supposedly an MLB decision. Did you know that?

No, I did not. You mean for the playoffs or for the entire for the entire season?

I don't know about the whole season, but they mentioned it on the broadcast.

other night because when we were playing in at the johnson center they had the roof closed for the first game that we won and then they had it opened for the second game and the announcer said we know that mlb is who makes the decision on open or close but it sure is interesting that the blue jays play a lot better with the roof open and now here it is open oh really i would

think that that would be a team's decision because the team i would make all the other decisions

about their ballpark that's interesting i would i mean that's what they said that's what they said on sg no i mean that's what they said on the broadcast but that was also the same broadcast that told me today's game was going to be at 4 p.m for the mariners which i will go to my grave saying that because i know i looked at it and i was mad because they were showing our games were always going to be happening earlier than the dodgers games and i formed a whole theory but um back to tonight uh because of the fact that i think there's a huge risk of the mariners and our fans and everyone the baseball knowers now being overconfident for the mariners and the fact that the blue jays you know have sort of had a couple of unlucky games all now my thinking is that the mariners i could see the blue jays winning this game there's there's a lot of sort of like i would call it sideline there's a lot of stuff going on on the sides of this story that make me think that this is absolutely a game the mariners could lose which is why i think the mariners are going to win by a lot all roads lead me to thinking that a lot the very fact that i suspect that the mariners might not win makes me think they'll probably win like here's what i'm saying if i was going into this like and it never even occurred to me that the blue jays might win if i was going into it thinking god we're already up 2-0 we've got this if i was thinking all of that that would be a recipe for the mariners losing but the fact that i am thinking all that and that i am uncomfortable and that i am not enjoying this that means that they will probably the fact that there is a there's a counter current of thought that the blue jays are just fine, and the Blue Jays, in fact, have the Mariners right where they want them, and that if the Blue Jays win tonight, now the Mariners are suddenly on their back foot, because one more win by the Blue Jays, and the series is tied all of a sudden, and now what are we going to do? Because of all of that, that leads me back to I think the Mariners are just going to absolutely pummel them tonight.

Alright, this reminds me, I think this clip puts it best, what you're

saying. Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I'm not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.

Right? Is that kind of what you're saying?

I am saying that the Blue Jays have fallen victim to one of the oldest mistakes in history. Second only to never get in a land war in Asia.

All I know is the Mariners have built up an immunity to Iocane powder. That's all I know.

Here's what I really think. I think that, and this is, you're going to be surprised to hear, this is not scientific. I think the Mariners have broken some kind of a dark magic curse I think they broke it when they went in And they beat Houston three times in Houston Towards the end of the season And that's why when I say that mantra Of the Mariners are good The Mariners have good baseball players The Mariners do good baseball plays Or whatever it is I really believe it I feel like the thing with the Mariners has always been Certainly, let's just use Julio Rodriguez as an example Julio Rodriguez has always been someone Who's had all the potential in the world and somehow plays really well and yet somehow also seemed to just absolutely wither in the most important moments. And I have to say that it's just psychological. It's not physical. We know that. And then something shifted this year as we were sort of getting into the home stretch as we're getting closer and closer to the playoffs and now in the playoffs. And you have Julio, I'm as happy to see him up there as anybody else, if not more happy. He, something changed. And again, it's not physical. Well, it's not that his hand-eye coordination is better than it used to be. It's that there is something going on inside his brain and his kind of emotional, his whatever you want to call it, like his sort of biorhythms where he's just, I don't know if he's calmer when he's up there in the clutch or if he's just thinking about the game. I don't know. Something has shifted and he is playing differently in the big moments from the plate, definitely. And I just think that goes for this team. This team, I think we exercised some sort of a demon when we went to Houston and won those three games. And I think the result is these guys, and I mean, Naylor's always had it, but even when Naylor had a game where he looked pretty bad, I think it might've been the first Toronto game where he swung out of his helmet once. And in fact, the announcers even said, you don't usually see two at-bats from Naylor like that. He doesn't usually look that fooled. He didn't look his particular best self, but because this is the new Mariners, I didn't, my mind, I didn't go, oh my God, Naylor has lost his touch. he's he's he's bamboo fatherhood does not agree with him he's up there he's bamboozled he's swinging out of his shoes he doesn't you know none of that occurred to me because i was like these mariners are good and they're good at baseball and they do good baseball plays even if sometimes they don't they're i feel like they're fundamentally a different group of people in terms of the magic around this team and that makes me think that they're going to just continue to do good.

good things like instead of always thinking about how can they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory it feels to me like this is a team that's going to figure out how to how to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat because something something spiritual has changed about this team for me and i

will say i mean the lineup is our lineup is enviable we just really need gino to wake up and and randy we need the if those guys woke up a little bit and started performing up to the level that they could perform this would be the scariest lineup for somebody not the scariest we know what the scariest lineup is it's in southern california uh but it would be a very tricky lineup because then even at the bottom of our order if you have a can zone in there you know that he can sometimes do something too yeah you know i mean it's just like it's so enviable i just really want those

guys to kind of well i will give randy credit i feel like randy's at least been getting on base occasionally like i mean yeah randy hasn't hit a home run like 103 at bats or something which seems bad considering once in the playoffs he hit 10 home runs in 20 games or something crazy at some crazy postseason stat but um gino is you know it's interesting the tide has been high enough at least since that 15 inning game where it's kind of like the vibes are good enough that i don't think people are asking questions of like is there a point where you need to actually replace gino in at-bat situations because he's not even getting really close now okay let me say he did hit that double that was almost a home run he also hit that change things he hit that dying line drive that the guy made a diving catch on which you know if that gets by the guy it's a really good hit we're really proud of gino so maybe he is maybe some small things are improving he just his physicality when he's up there is so weird to me he does not seem it's so like he's take he doesn't seem like he's taking the at bats very seriously he's always had that weird stance

where he just stands there like he's he's waiting for somebody to take his coffee order until the

wind up it's very strange and like i don't know what he's doing and obviously he wants to he does not want to be striking out on three pitches almost every time he comes to the plate but it's like it's it's kooky because i don't see anything changing about his swing about like he hasn't shortened his swing up at all he hasn't changed it's like he's not making any adjustments but he keeps having the same outcome generally speaking which he goes up there and then just it's just like three it's like two balls that are right over the middle that he didn't see coming and it's immediately oh two and then a ball in the dirt that he swings at wildly for the third strike yeah it's been they have just been the most ineffective at bats you could ever imagine and like again right now things feel so blessed that it's just kind of like well whatever but you know i wonder i wonder what like dan wilson makes of the whole thing in between a few tall beers if he's like if if his thought is like we can't keep sending a guy up there who who's hitting i mean gino's hitting like under 100 in the playoffs but that is why i do feel like that

hit that was almost a home run even though it wasn't a home run i just sort of feel like i don't know maybe that could be i don't know there's no i don't know that there's science to that but like in my heart I'm kind of like you don't you don't take him out of the lineup it's funny it's almost like he's had the opposite season of Julio right like now he was with a different team for the first half of the season but he was so good he was literally having a career season and then he came over here and he kind of got cold which used to be kind of part of the Mariners curse I don't really put I don't really group it in with that because the Mariners have gotten hot in other ways and Naylor's been so good for us and and but it's funny how Julio I was just thinking about this again today just like as you look back at the season and all the ups and downs and all the feelings that we've had all the highs and lows and just like remember like julio was invited to go to the all-star game and a bunch of people were like why is this guy invited to go to the all-star game he's got star power yeah i mean mariners fans as well as national i think baseball fans were kind of like he's yeah he's got the flashy smile and he's a he's got star power but what has he shown in this first half of the season that would make him an all-star and he said you know what i'm gonna skip out of these celebrations this year he didn't say i didn't deserve it he just said i'm gonna focus on my own stuff and then he came back and had a great second half of the season like that feels like a lifetime ago but i was just looking back at that this morning not even with a take to wrap this up but just kind of like yeah that was kind of a that's kind of a big move i think you know to say yeah i'm not going this year i'm gonna work on my own stuff and i don't know what the psychology is like going and passing up an opportunity to be in the spotlight like that and hang out with like the best players in baseball and everything but uh he just he felt something that felt like that wasn't where he belonged and then he stayed home or whatever maybe worked on his swing and then just exploded to have another season with like stats that you would look at this player's stats and think he had an amazing season but he had an amazing second

half of the season which is almost more impressive and he has continued it into the postseason yeah and andrew they keep saying this the national announcers when he's up at bat because if like if something has, again, Again, if something is psychologically shifted in Julio Rodriguez that he is now up to the moment in these big moments, which he certainly has been in the postseason, they keep pointing out he's 24 years old.

Yeah, right.

And we got him.

And we have him until he's 52, I think, his contract.

He's our guy. Yeah. This is why, to me, this feels like things have started to break the Mariners' way in a way that it just doesn't usually happen this way for us. It doesn't usually happen that we spend all the money that we had, almost all the money we have on someone who's a promising prospect, and then they're actually exceeding. I mean, some of his statistics are unprecedented in MLB. Like, I forget the exact one, but it's something like basically the amount of home runs and stolen bases he has.

Yeah, I could be wrong about this, but I think now he is the first player to go 30-30 for the first three years of his career.

his career no one's ever done that before like think about all the good players in history and no one's ever done that and the guy who's done that is our guy and he's a really good fielder and we have him under contract for a long time like that just doesn't happen to the mariners we signed richie sexton for too much money like we get jeff sir we get we get wasn't sexton wasn't

sexton the guy that we then sent to new york for buehner or something who did we send no that was kenny digger phelps phelps that's the one that was the seinfeld joke right like yes that was

the greatest traded we we did get okay we did get jay buehner for ken phelps but other than that there are not a lot of examples of where the mariners organization has gone out and they've spent a bunch of money on someone and they picked the right pony that just doesn't seem to happen to us and here it is happening to us and again this to me feels like something is shifting where it's like we're not this cursed team that's going to find a way to to mess it up it feels like we have good players who do good baseball plays and are good baseball men's this is um a little bit

off topic don't worry it's still baseball related though and mariners related specifically i had a really embarrassing huge personal revelation earlier this week that i want to talk to you about i wasn't even sure if i wanted to bring it onto the show it's mariners related it's not like embarrassing this isn't like a personal health talk or anything um this isn't about me sitting in a bathtub in the woods somewhere um but somebody posted a stat about the po the mariners postseason like we hadn't done this particular thing in the postseason since 2000 and i thought and this is somebody this is like I think it was Brent Stecker or somebody who works for ESPN and for a split second I thought oh you mean 2001 and then I looked it up I'm like wait is it does he mean 2000 and then I looked I'm like oh yeah no the Mariners were in the postseason in 2000 and 97 we talk so much not you and I but I just mean Mariners fans and keep in mind I didn't started watching baseball until 2009 so all of this is history to me i we talked so much about 1995 and 2001 that i don't think it's not like i forgot luke i don't think i knew they made it to the divisional series in 2000 and 97 as well and didn't they even win those divisional series

in 97 and 2000 i forget how those ones went so so 97 they would have still had lou pinella

managing them i think i think but again that's getting i'm getting way out over my skis there but it's like it's just so funny like we only talk about 95 in 2001 we never talk about 97 in 2000

i have no idea what happened those years i think 97 was um it was still panela and it was kind of like yeah i forget about that that year too i want to say i can look these up too if you don't want

to be put on the spot here i'm looking them up now but those are sort of like the forgotten trips

because I don't think anything super-duper dramatic. We didn't beat the Yankees, you know, to go to the ALCS like we did in 95, and then we didn't have this gaudy 116 regular season wins like we did in, like, wasn't that 2005? Was that 2005 when we had all the wins? No, it was 2001.

2001? The most wins in baseball history. Oh, wow. You know what it was? And I made a mistake before when I was setting this up. I said that they went to the divisions. I don't think so, but they did win the West. That's what I did not know. I had not realized, even though there's a banner up in T-Mobile Park, my home away from home, that says it. I had not realized that the Mariners won the West in 97 and 2000 on top of the very celebrated years, 95 and 2001 and everything they did in those years. And I don't

Did they win the West in both of those years? I can't even say for sure. Honestly, I'm so confused right now. But it was just so funny how I was like, oh, I got to read up or watch clips or whatever of 97 and 2000. They're just like middle children, literally.

I think so. I think that they were just not overly dramatic, and then we didn't get to the World Series. So it's just kind of like, you know, we don't tend to remember those years. But yeah, I feel like we are, as I said, when we won that series in Houston, I think we are now, we will be the dominant team in the AL West for, I hope anyway, at least two or three seasons. Because we've got a good squad. Again, if we can keep nails around, I think. I mean, also, you know, I mean, can he continue to play at this level, like, consistently? Like, I mean, I just feel like he is so over-delivering on what we were hoping he would do. it's just incredible you know i mean i don't know it's you just always know if he gets a hit it's

just going to be weird that i remember because i remember sitting i it was the you're right i think his bad game was kind of game one of the series i think i'm losing so much confidence and being able to like pinpoint what happened when but as opposed to the super confident person i was coming into this show but i remember saying when he was at the plate saying come on josh do something weird do something works i feel like every time he hits the ball and it's successful it's like some weird it goes in some strange direction but what he ended up doing weird that time was literally swinging out of his helmet as you said and i was like all right josh i didn't mean that weird that was that was weird in a bad way but it's just kind of like it's not like oh okay well if gino's gonna make contact then it will go out of the park or or whatever you know it's just like no nailer's gonna hit something down the line or is this gonna like is this gonna go somewhere in some no man's land here's what you're real here's what you're thinking with nailer it's like okay

he looked absolutely ridiculous on that swing but he's also gathering information yeah that's true he's gathering information on how that picture works where that ball goes and yeah he looked silly on that but he has a plan and he is gathering information even with that gino does not appear to be gathering any information he just is you know like brian nailer brian nailer i love that i started out calling him brian nailer when we got him one time npr congressional correspondent brian nailer and now i'm just calling him that in my mind josh nailer when he that swing when his helmet came off that looked like a bartolo cologne swing that was remarkably bad but again he's like i i knew that he was also learning something and that he was going to integrate that into his next swing and his next swing and his next swing and that's what's so fun about him is that even if it's not, even if in the moment you're not getting a great outcome, you know that he is working on a plan and something's going to happen at some point and that's what I'd like to see coming from Gino

Yeah, he always, Naylor always looks like he's looking into the middle distance it's my favorite thing, he always looks like he's looking into the middle distance and he's kind of grumpy about it, just like he's always a sort of

He's getting less grumpy though Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, he's a beautiful man. Which I would have worried about with the old Mariners. And this is how kooky my brain is. If this was the old Mariners instead of the new Mariners, I would have thought we need Josh Naylor to always be mildly annoyed because that's what makes him good. That's his dilithium crystal. I mean, that's seriously how my brain works. It's like we cannot have a happy Josh Naylor. A happy Josh Naylor does not function the way we need him to. And yet he is smiling. He is excited to be in Seattle. He said it in post-game press conference that people who he played with, players that have come and played in T-Mobile Field with him have said, this place is amazing, and also you seem like you're having fun, which is something they've never seen from him before. And yet he's still playing really well. That's what I mean. He doesn't have to be grumpy for the Mariners for him to play well, which I would have told you a month ago that he has to be grumpy for it to work. But that's where all of these little, I had so many different things set up. so many jinxes and weird rules because it was so rare that we ever over-performed my expectations, and now that seems to be what we generally do, which is why I think we're going to win handily today.

Okay, good. Well, and you're watching at home, right? I'm going to go meet up with at least one bud, maybe a couple of buds at a sports bar to watch the game. So I've obviously got some. I'm watching it alone in my Paddington sweater. Okay, good. Yeah, so I won't probably hear the ins and outs of the game, but I'll definitely be locked on it. So we can share our adventures tomorrow.

Tomorrow. By the way, Mariners, 2000 reached the ALCS, 2001 reached the ALCS, 2022 reached the ALDS after winning the wild card, and then 2025 reached the ALCS.

That's right. And here we are. Here we are. Yep. All right. Here's one thing I will say is don't let Felix throw out the first pitch. Not on this anniversary of the game that he threw out the first pitch and it went for 18 innings.

Wouldn't it be nice if they let him break the...

Jinx. I think we're in Jinx breaking mode. I would say do everything that we're not supposed to do, and then we win tonight, and then all of those dragons have been slayed.

That's kind of nice. I like to think about that, too.

All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you, so please, if you can, join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Stay safe. Go Mariners. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

But you must have known I was not a great fool. You would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

You've made your decision then? Not remotely, because Iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows. And Australia is entirely people with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. Truly, you have a dizzying intellect. Wait till I get going. Power out.