Muse

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

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

In no way do I want to appear pushy here, but please, shut up That's a no from me, dog

There are two types of people in this world Those who like Neil Diamond and those who don't My ex-wife loves him

You know something? That was pretty funny

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

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

well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a tuesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live tastes like soot and hot water i'm hooked my name is luke burbank i am your host it is our turn coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above the mighty columbia where boy has it gotten chilly all of a sudden around here i've got not one uh not two heaters going i've got a actually a blanket slung over my lap to

try to stay warm isn't there a blanket somewhere you should be feeling with your farts it's working

though that's all i'll say about that and here we go everyone with episode 4585 in a collector series And let the fun begin. We tried to talk about this yesterday, and we ran out of time. Which might be related to the fact that we'll probably never win a podcast Golden Globes Award.

We are living in the midst of a podcast boom.

Yes, there is a Golden Globe for podcasting. They've announced the 25 podcasts that are nominated for the Golden Globe in podcasting. We are not on the list, but it turns out there might be a way to pay to play. We will get into that also. So I think last night I zeroed in on what I think is currently my least favorite advertising campaign. I think we found the worst one going currently.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

So we will get into that. And, you know, I just want to be very transparent. I'll be very open and honest with the listeners today. I know you hear me right now and you think, God, that guy's full of energy. But it's an act, my friends. uh it's a facade because i'm very tired i got up at three in the morning to go watch them make tofu in portland today we're just blowing through nap time aren't we so i may pass out at any moment during the show um and i hope you'll all forgive me for that i'm gonna do my best and go as long as i can today but i'm very very sleepy thankfully we've got this guy uh longest running cobra of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships He got a healthy 11 hours of sleep last night.

In short, things are going extremely well for him.

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

I was 20 days away, Luke. I was 20 days away from matching. Maybe even less. I stopped counting. I was so close. My top streak is 182 days, and I was in the 160s. And once again, around midnight last night, I did the Wordle.

Maybe that's part of the problem.

I mean, it worked for $160. Yeah, but not for $161. No, it didn't. So, yeah, this happened to me the other day. I've been doing them at night more and more, honestly. But the other day and then last night, same deal. I went through all five turns, and I realized, uh-oh, I only have one more turn in the morning. And this time, I knew there were two options that I could see, at least. There were two wolves inside this wordle. Yeah, and I chose wrong this morning. And I'll be honest with you, if it doesn't feel like a day setter, you know what I mean? It's just like, you don't want to play. I mean, I'm not going to not play. I don't feel like, you know, sometimes with that other game, Connections, what they come up with is so unbelievably ridiculous. Yeah, it's kind of like things that I thought smelled like coffee. or something like what are you talking about but you know connections is connections it's a word or it's not for the most part there's been some controversy it was just a word and uh i chose the wrong one so here we are i'm sorry

Hey, that reminds me, though. Go ahead. Just, you know what? Six-letter pitchers and catchers report for Wordle sooner than you'd think.

Yes, five letters. Five, that's how many. That's why.

Another thing holding me back in the game. I don't know how many letters.

You keep adding letters to it. Well, you know what? We could maybe create a list here, Luke. The top five worst Wordle experiences. I don't know if that's it. That maybe is shoehorning in our little plan here. But thank you for reminding us.

Can you remind the listeners of what you're talking about?

Yeah, so a couple of weeks ago or last week or something, we got a voicemail from listener Bobby who wanted to share top five beers and meaning like kind of beer experiences. A beer you have at the ballpark, a beer you have when you're camping or whatever, which led to a conversation about top five popcorn experiences. And you and I are looking for more submissions along those lines because we're going to be pre-recording a couple of shows when I'm traveling next week. And so I was trying to think of good examples because they don't have to all be food or drink related. And I was thinking like I'm not going to flesh these out right now, but like you could do like top top five underrated smells. I think that's an interesting one. I've been pondering this. And again, maybe somebody will put together their own list. But like the idea of an underrated smell, I think, is interesting because obviously like coffee in the morning is not going to be on that list because that's a very properly or possibly even overrated smell. right so what are the top five underrated smells in your life when you say overrated i mean maybe not overrated but rated correctly people aren't people aren't overlooking it right okay it's not slept on as they say it's not underappreciated it's very appreciated right whereas i think like for example i would i would suggest that like the smell of like a two cycle engine starting up is an underrated smell i don't think that's i mean maybe in other parts of the country maybe if i was still where i grew up people would talk about that smell more often but i feel like that is not one that the two-stroke engine smell especially you combine that are motorboats usually two-stroke too because i feel like that's a smell the smell of gasoline and water on a

motorboat yeah i think it might depend on the particular kind of um of of outboard but yeah that that smell of and because you know you're you're you're pressing my experience with every two-stroke engine is always i'm pressing that little kind of you know reservoir of fuel and then i'm right there is it the prime yeah i'm priming it a little bit you know but like there's usually there oftentimes there's a little kind of rubber bubble that holds a little bit of the fuel and i'm pressing that i'm like well this dadgum thing ain't gonna start you know i'm wrenching on it you're gonna flood it luke this isn't starting gosh darn it and then i hit that thing again it's and right when i i'm about to give up it it jumps to life and yeah you got a little bit of that that fuel smell i mean i do think in our childhood wouldn't you agree that um gasoline and cigarettes in in moderation were two really great smells as a kid i never thought about the smell of cigarettes

as being a good smell until either i was a smoker or an ex-smoker where i would just and it and with cigarette smoke especially and obviously mileage will vary on this depending on your relationship with this smell but for me it has to be like really like a cigarette really far away that just sort of catches the wind a little bit like donovan and it walks to you it can't be a don

like you don't want to be in a room with it right no and in fact when i was a kid i remember i had a couple of friends who like their dads smoked or let's be honest their stepdads smoked and that was like i didn't like that i didn't like being stuck in a car with the windows up in a like a dotson b210 with the windows up and a cigarette going and kzok on the radio that gave me bad feelings. But that being said, because I didn't grow up in a household where people were smoking, occasionally a cigarette that wasn't being forced upon me too close in a confined space, I liked the smell of that

too. Do you think it's weird that they're changing the warning label on cigarettes in the United States to say warning, smoking is going to make you look too cool? That's a new directive if I understand it correctly.

It's a fire hose of norms violations, Andrew. Every day there's a new

or being violated that's the one that seemed just like it went just a step too far i almost got i

almost bought a pack of cigarettes for my french guy costume on saturday but then i ended up just forgetting to but i thought like i don't think i've ever bought it i mean i probably smoked i probably in my life i bet i've smoked 30 cigarettes total um but i don't know i bet you a pack of cigarettes has got to be what 15 bucks yeah i think so i was talking to somebody about that

recently somebody who said they bought a pack of cigarettes for a friend or something and he was He's like, I smoked when I was young. He's like, they were $2 a pack when I started. I'm like, yeah, me too. Gas was $1 a gallon, and cigarettes were $2 a pack. And cigarettes, of course, have ballooned even faster than the price of gas because of all the taxes and the... the things people are doing to try to dissuade people from starting the habit. But it would have been amazing if you started smoking for your Halloween costume and Becca was like, hey, you know, you look a lot younger when you smoke. And next thing you know, you're just like, you're changing everything.

Okay, speaking of Becca and of Wordle.

Can I just give out the phone number? Oh, please. If people want to submit some sort of a top five list, we are looking to record maybe early next week or later this week. So if you have any kind of goofy ideas like that, email me. andrew at tbtl.net or call it in the voicemail line 206-414-8285. That spells T-B-T-L. Go on, Luke. Sorry.

You can always leave a message at Farmer's Axe. I made the mistake of watching that Detroiters the other day where the plot is that they need to rerecord a jingle for a grocery store called Farmer's Axe because the Sam Richardson character had, he sang the song originally with his ex-girlfriend. Yes, there's so much chemistry, right? But in the watching of the show, I ended up being subjected to, you can always get a deal at Farmer's Axe. I've just been walking around singing, you can always get a deal at Farmer's Axe for like four days.

Anytime you mention Detroiters, I just think, ah, time for a rewatch. Also, by the way, I am enjoying you and I had a quick conversation off air. I'm not caught up, but I did finish watching episode one, and I'm about like more than halfway through episode two of The Chair Company. They're not long. I don't know why I stopped it halfway through, but I'm so glad that the show has a bit of a plot. Like it's not just, I compared it to Friendship when we first talked because it just seemed like the whole point was just to create cringe without a lot of-

By the way, the movie, not the concept. For people that are unfamiliar.

No, I was talking about the concept. I stand corrected. They seem good for a while and they get real cringey. No, yeah, sorry. The movie with also Tim Robinson in it. But anyway, what I like about this TV show is that it's not just a meandering collection of bad decisions that don't make sense. Like, there is a bunch of bad decisions, but at least there's a reason for it. And there's this noir mystery that sort of pushes it forward.

There's a mystery afoot, which I agree with you. Like, I think that was the thing that some of the other stuff is missing, particularly friendship. Although I stand by friendship. I found it entertaining. The concept or the movie? Neither. Okay. The place in Wisconsin. where i truly finally felt like myself truly the mayor of french the unelected mayor of friendship currently seeking a third term um oh uh i just want to can i blow your mind please yes yes mark's walking out of the room uh so you know in the uh in the television show the chair company in the hbo program the chair company um i don't know how much you remember from the first episode but tim robinson's character works uh at this company and what they do is they design and build malls and he's got like a guy who i think maybe works for him a sort of older gentleman who has who's kind of kind of got like an odd like almost like a hippie zen quality he's talking very calmly to

him i think doesn't he have like a lanyard with like a bubbles yes it becomes a problem yes so he's he was passed over for the promotion that robinson's character gets and so but he's like very zen about it and he says listen i work too much anyway i need to have some fun that's why i put this little uh thing of liquid bubbles around my neck so i can blow them in the office yes well

you know that's jim downey the guy who put this in your life oh jeff epstein the financier

the guy who's famous from his appearance on the conan podcast for saying jeff epstein the financier finance that's your guy you know now that you say that i can connect it like sometimes you point that out and i'm like i don't even see it but yes in my mind's eye now that you say that because years have passed i think since probably that that that bit of him on conan that's gone viral i think is a few years old right i think it is because i had to do like some some cross

referencing like i looked a picture jim downey was an snl writer in fact there's a new documentary coming out about him which i've always been a little bit i have to say that boy this is this is not really enlightening the listeners much uh my my my evolving thoughts on jim downey and a tv show very few of them seen that have seen the chair company but the thing i always kind of said about jim downey was he is a sort of a patron saint he's a very revered character in the world of snl because he worked there for many many years and he famously he wrote all of the cold opens that was sort of his job if i understand right or at least like one of his main jobs and i've always thought that the cold opens other than maybe being kind of funny because it's an impression are often to me the least inventive part of snl and so i've always had this thing with this guy jim downey which is like oh i know all the cast members love him and they go on about downey and he's this legend but i'm like but are those cold opens that funny well now him first of all him saying the financier jeff epstein and him being this kind of weirdo character on the chair company the rehabilitation of Jim Downey's reputation with me and me alone

is it's it's a foot do you think I mean I wasn't going to do this but should we play the clip that we keep on referencing now this is something that because of all the Epstein news recently um it's been just it's almost unavoidable this clip from um Conan O'Brien's podcast yeah which i'm looking for the date here i see that this was posted this particular version was posted to youtube at least a year ago um should we play it it's yeah why not they're all just sitting around it's like it's conan and jim and then some other guests who i i don't know if you recognize them

i think it's probably sona movcesian and um and uh matt the other sona and matt are the kind of two

ogs i guess you could say sidekicks and uh that's right you know i thought there were guests over there i don't listen to that show but everybody yeah matt gorley yes okay take a listen they're

many many uh figures in our society who contribute an enormous amount to our culture and people who have unconventional personal lives um and and yet they seem exempt from criticism you know uh jeffrey epstein wait a minute wait a minute no no let me finish jeffrey epstein i see it no one no one you know uh uh criticizes him and yet oh wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute is a

double standard it's wrong hold on hold on much has been said much has been said about jeffrey

epstein terrible things jeff i'm talking about jeff epstein the new york financier

yes we're talking about the same jeff epstein no yes no yes i what i never i never heard oh it was a big story in the news huge no yes for you to say no one ever said yes jeff epstein yes the financier the island yes he had an island that i've never been to yeah i i'm pretty sure with

respect if there was some news about jeff epstein i would have heard no i don't know where you what

rock you've been under it was a huge story and i have to jeff epstein is i have to tell you he's

gone he's dead what do you mean he's dead he's dead he's dead sorry nice try if jeff anyway it It goes on from there. I didn't know. Did you want to hear the whole thing, Luke? It's longer than I remembered.

I think it delivers. I think that's high comedy. I don't even need to say this to our listeners. They get it. They're smart people. The joke there, please, is not about the activities of one Jeffrey Epstein at all. It's about a guy who just had a friend who is a New York financier and was in the real dark about a real big news story in our world. So there's a documentary coming out about Jim Downey, which I am now, like, before I would have said, ah, pish posh, The guy who writes the cold opens on SNL are used to. But now I'm like, oh, the guy that I like from the chair company and the guy who made a funny financier joke to me. So I may check that out.

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I know you've been trying to get to something related to possibly Becca and Wordle. But I did want to ask, because this has come up before, and I don't want to put you on the spot because I'm kind of looking it up on the fly. but I also wonder the era that Jim was doing the cold opens and if I don't know that role in this was he somebody who helped like sort of invent that because if he was there in the 70s and he was sort of like the godfather of that kind of idea you definitely understand that but then you know like you I'm not a huge fan of them in the modern era because it's just like it doesn't really seem to be funny it seems to be like a literal blow by blow we've taken the transcript of a press conference and we just have people re-enacting it sort of you know so I don't know

kind of what his role is I think the story was that he did it you know he had that job in the 70s or 80s and then I think didn't like went away did something else and then I remember it being a story that they had like brought him back okay or reassigned him to that or something I remember that being one of the plot lines about SNL at some point was like they brought back the guy who made the cold open, you know, legendary or something like that. Now, I have sent you, to your text message, Andrew, to your text service, I have sent you a screenshot of Becca's completion of the Wordle today. And I don't know what any of this means, and this is probably going to be terrible imaginary radio, but I want to narrate for you what she and I were texting about when you said that this broke your streak. I said, was today's Wordle really hard? And she said, well, not for me. But, and then I said, it broke Andrew's 160 day streak And she emphasized that And then she said, I had an unfair advantage And I said, which is, question mark And then she just sent me this screen Whatever you call that Of how hers went So I guess it took her She got it in four Four out of six And it looks like it's like nothing And then all of a sudden, she just kind of lands it or something. She goes, do you know what the word is? And then I made a guess, and I was wrong. And then she said, show Andrew that screenshot.

This is interesting, because I also— I don't know what that means.

Does that mean anything to you, this screenshot?

It does now. And I don't want to spoil it for our listeners. But, okay, so first of all, it means that on Becca's first turn, as on my first turn, neither one of us got any of the letters right. I will tell people what my start—well, maybe I won't if people are trying to figure it out. But basically I use the same exact starting word every single day because so far it hasn't hit and I feel like I need to. It's got three vowels in it, which I like. So none of my usual letters hit on anything. That's why they're all gray. Now I'm wondering if Becca and I tried the same second word because she and I both got yellows for our second and third position. That means that those letters exist somewhere in that word, but they're not in the right position at that point then she starts to get a lot of greens for her third try and then solves it on her fourth and there is something about today's word that would make it more top of mind for a becca type person i will say but i'm trying to be vague and i think i'm achieving it no i mean this is

it's good of you uh to not spoil this because people are in fact this morning when i was at the tofu company uh and uh was we were waiting for something to happen or whatever i look over and our producer has his phone and i think oh he's probably texting new york he's probably doing some sort of important cbs business and he's on the wordle yes so this is a this is a a drumbeat in the lives of many people including our listeners and so i do want to be careful that we don't yes on this morning i mean it's so fresh it's piping hot fresh andrew this it's hot and

fresh out the kitchen uh this wordle so we got to be careful um and two other people on my text chain by the way uh have busted out as well oh wow so this is another we're in another quarter situation it's it's one of those where um there's just a lot of once you sort of figure out the the base of the word there's a whole bunch of options that could that's why i had killer on my last try there were at least two more that i could choose from and i and it ended up being one of the two that i identified and i just chose the wrong one by the way do you want me to text you what the word is so that you can understand what Becca's talking about? Yeah, sure, and also

she did send me her second word and I guess if I give that out on the air, that's also a hint, so we just have to kind of be vague

about it. Yeah, maybe that's for you and I, maybe, yeah.

It's for our private collection. Okay. Anyway, a couple, the update on tofu is that it's a very interesting process. I don't, are you a tofu guy, Andrew? Do you ever mess with tofu when you're doing a stir fry or anything?

I don't usually make it i think sometimes genevieve has the because there's two different ways you can make tofu right like i i didn't grow up with it so and i don't when you say make you mean you mean cook it

not actually like at your house grind up the soybean that's what that's what i mean like

genevieve will sometimes get some stuff that is like it's like kind of pre-cooked in a certain way and so you only have to kind of heat it up on the skillet and then there's other stuff that's way more jiggly right that you have to really be careful yeah that would be firm there's there's

extra firm and then there's there's a range of how firm it is I guess there maybe there's soft

would be the I thought there was also some stuff that was almost like almost like pre-browned although maybe I'm mistaken about that but all that is to say I don't cook with it all that often I used to think I used to I used to be averse to it I think I'd never had it before and it doesn't look very good raw to me but um Genevieve will throw it in some dishes sometimes

but kind of I have to say I kind of grew up with the same mindset around it which was well first of all it wasn't something we really ate in our house and then it was for you know it was one of those food types that got kind of like caught up in the along with like maybe sprouts and other things that were seen as like healthy and quote-unquote weird and only weird because like a lot of folks in America weren't used to eating it's a big thing in other parts of the world but I didn't have real thoughts on it one way or the other when I stopped eating meat I started having a few more thoughts on it like i started occasionally buying it and i would i was not buying the right kind i was buying the kind that still had a lot of moisture in it which you then have to either put in a tofu press or put between a number of books to get all of the the moisture out of it so that it's really compact and then you can dice it up and kind of stir fry it and it's actually really yummy and has some like i don't know um whatever you call it structure to it then i realized oh you can just buy this kind that's extra firm it's already been basically like compacted down to a very dense little brick of something. And the thing about tofu is it mostly is just something that is high protein and that, um, picks up the flavor of whatever is around it. So if you were making a yummy stir fry and you had some nice extra firm tofu cut up in there, it would pretty much just taste like the stuff that you were already cooking. That's what I thought all tofu was about until I had.

some tofu today made by hand in front of my very eyeballs at this place Oda tofu in Portland which is the longest continuously operated tofu production place in America which is kind of random that it's in Portland and it is a crazy process it's so simple so I go in and there are just these all of these big kind of plastic huge plastic tubs of soybeans that are just soaking in water and they've been soaking for like 16 hours and then those beans are drained and then put into a a grinder that kind of grinds them into a just so chopped up you know much finer thing then they're kind of put in this roaster um and then they're put into this other like expressor kind of machine that like has this inflatable bladder in it that basically pushes all of the chopped up and roasted soybeans which is now kind of this milk it's basically soy milk but it's still got husks and stuff and so then that goes through this strainer and then you have like pure soy milk which then is taken over um and uh they put this uh kind of chemical in it that's made out of seawater which is that's the big thing they do there that i guess other places don't do is they use this particular kind of what this is a coagulant it causes the soy milk to turn into curds and whey i thought that was just for little miss muffet and having seen whey i don't know what she was doing eating her curds and whey curds i could get whey miss me with that well a moment on the lips a lifetime on the hips yes exactly yes but so then you take this um you take this kind of uh again you would this part of of the process would not be for you andrew it's very much in that kind of um textural zone that you don't really like but then you you kind of stir up the the the curds and whey and then the process of taking this thing that looks kind of like cottage cheese basically and forming it into these totally solid bricks if you're doing like a firm tofu it was so satisfying i feel like you would love this part of the process because you scoop it all into these metal trays that have all of these drainage holes in them and they're made they're custom made to have these little indentations like bricks of tofu and you scoop in all of this imagine just like a person does this is a part of the process person human does all human so they this place between this place we were at and they have one other little production place in portland between the two of them and like five or six people or whatever it is they make about six thousand pounds of fresh tofu every single morning and it doesn't it only lasts for like a week you got to eat it right then pretty much or take it home and like and uh you take all these like kind of this slurry of these curds and whey and then you start scooping it into this cheesecloth lined big rectangular box and you

kind of smooth it out and then you fold the cheesecloth over it and then you put this big weighted lid on top of it and all of the whey all the liquid starts draining out the sides And you put it under this hydraulic press which you hit and it goes and it goes And it like compacts it And then you turn the hydraulic press off, you pull it back out, you take the lid off You undo the cheesecloth And you wring out the cheesecloth Because the cheesecloth that's on top has been absorbing a tremendous amount of this way You get the cheesecloth all wrung out and dry You put it all back on, you put it back together You put it back under the press You hit it again By the fourth time-ish that you've done this This thing has gone from being this like imagine it's a giant slurry of cottage cheese to a solid beautiful brick of this tofu and it's like and then you you put it on this wood board thing and then you dunk it in water then you cut it in the water and then you have this brick of this tofu which i was like is it like a cookie

cutter cutting i wonder because there is in those perfect squares is it like one these squares are

a little bit less perfect because they're cut by hand so the kind of i so the whole thing about this place is that it's not mass produced so the stuff that you yeah the stuff that you would get if you were to walk into sars super saver and grab a thing of tofu would very likely be made at a very large scale and a perfectly cut brick you know sealed in a certain kind of thing it would have been used a different um enzyme or not enzyme but a different coagulant to um to basically cause the curds in a way to separate out because he's using the traditional japanese kind but because of that you can't do machines with you guys have like a person standing there like watching it it's very labor intensive but then the guy's like and of course they're filming all of this and they're like you guys like take a bite so i'm just holding a brick of tofu and i'm like inside i'm like do i want to take this bite that's intense it's intense and uh but of course you know i am uh I'm there to be hopefully somewhat entertaining and to be game. So I said, okay. So I take a bite. And I. We'll tell you, Andrew, it was actually really tasty and didn't taste like any other kind of tofu I've had before. It was very, very light, very clean. But then at the end, there was just this nuttiness to it because it was just basically soybeans and water. That's pretty much it. Tastes like soot. And hot water. I'm hooked. It was really tasty. And then it was actually, it's a pretty cute story because this place has been in Portland for 100 years, and it was owned by this family, the Ota family. That's why it's called Ota Tofu. And so the guy who owns it now with his mom, his name is Justin, and he was a professional baseball player. He was drafted by the Texas Rangers.

What?

Yeah, and played baseball in the minors. And his mom was an optometrist. And his mom, they're Japanese-American, and his mom would go to this kind of thing that happens in Portland that's a lot of kind of middle-aged Japanese-American folks and then a lot of elderly Japanese American folks and the more middle-aged Japanese American folks make these big meals, these big lunch meals and all of the elders kind of get together and everyone sits around and has traditional Japanese food and they hang out and they tell stories and it's just a great chance for folks in the community to bond and this, Sharon is the name of the mom she's like an optometrist in Beaverton but she meets this woman who's by herself making this tofu this woman mrs otta and she's working 80 hours a week making this tofu and she's like yeah i'm uh i'm pretty old i'm gonna stop doing this now and this woman this optometrist was like so moved and also had been eating this tofu her whole life growing up in portland that she was like we this thing cannot stop happening so she calls her son who's now living in virginia at the time he's out of baseball and she says we should buy this tofu company and you should move back here and we'll run it together so that's what they've been doing for the last however many years and like they didn't know anything about making tofu it's like a very again it's very simple but it's also very time consuming and like a pretty crazy like i was telling him i go this is the opposite of passive income you know in the business world all the all the business bros all the rising grinders like you just got to get passive income man you got to get your money working for you it's like this is the opposite this is active income every single dime you get out of this is because you stood there he said to me he goes i was a professional baseball player and this making tofu is so much harder than being a professional baseball player

was physically is there any connection between being a baseball player and being the son of an

optometrist do you think is there another baseball player who's the son of an optometrist no i'm just

thinking about how important it is to see the ball yeah i'm not even joking did you say he's a pitcher

or or i think he was i i think he was a like i don't think he was a pitcher okay but he was i I think he was a DH, actually, because I looked up some of his stats. Oh, but check this out. Check out this optometry moment. That is connected. I think you're right. Although she was wearing glasses.

Well, you got to. I don't know. I mean. You got to sell the product.

Do I trust an optometrist that needs glasses?

Good call.

So we're filming. So I'm doing a taste test with the mom, Sharon. By the way, I ended up eating so much tofu before like 8 a.m. today. Let's just say more tofu than I've ever consumed before 8 a.m. in my life. but she put it like this amazing like miso glaze on it and stuff it was so delicious so incredibly delicious but we're um we're standing around she's setting up the food for us and we're in the production facility so there's all kinds of steam and things are going off and heat and whatever and uh our producer anthony who also had a camera set up was like we're in the middle of the taste as he goes sorry everyone my camera lens totally fogged up and i was like oh okay So we need to start over, and I'm looking around, and I look, and I go, like, oh, there's a paper towel. I go, here, do you want a paper towel? She goes, no, no, no, no, don't do a paper towel. She goes, there's cheesecloth over there. Use that. And Anthony's like, yes. And I go, oh, look at you knowing about cameras. She goes, no, I was an optometrist, and I know what you're not supposed to use on a lens. Ah, right. I was like, all right, fair point. Fair enough. Fair point, Sharon. Yes. But anyway, that was my morning, learning so much about tofu, so much more than I ever thought I would know. and it was real like you know those mr rogers or sesame street little things where they'd show you a crayon being made or a saxophone getting made i love that shit so much and like when i first showed up at i think i got there at like 4 30 and then i realized this is mostly going to be b-roll and that just means stuff that i'm not actually involved in that's our camera guys getting footage of the thing and i was like so my first thought is i could have watched the end of the world series i didn't have to go to bed at 10 p.m because i didn't have to be here at 4 30 a.m but then i started watching the process and i was so mesmerized by it i found it to be actually totally fascinating and i was like this is i'm lucky to have this job i like that i got to go see this thing being made at under the dark of night, and now I could be insufferable at parties when the topic of tofu

comes up. I like that for myself. You mentioned that they make it in the morning. Obviously, you were there in the morning, but is there a reason? Do they stop at a certain time of day, and is there a reason it has to be morning intensive, or it's just their schedule that

they chose? A lot of it goes out to restaurants. A lot of the customers are restaurants and other kind of food service. It goes out to grocery stores. They also have a retail location. people can just that was another crazy thing it's like 7 45 and people are just walking in to buy their tofu for the day from this little counter like i was like man i've never been that organized that i am getting my tofu checked off my to-do list at 7 45 a.m but i think it i think it has to do with you know having it be ready to go and he said it's kind of like fresh bread you know it's like you make it that day it tastes better that day yeah yeah that makes people buy it that So I think that's the early start part of it.

Okay. I had a little, you know, let me process my feelings on something here. Please. If you don't mind. So yesterday at some point, I was on my phone, I think on Blue Sky. And this is one of those things where you just never know when a message, a general message that you put on social media is actually going to sort of take root with somebody. and I will say that maybe I'm because of the fall I'm just in a mood to make food I got home from the bar on Saturday night we're all at the Eagles having a few drinks and I took off kind of early I'll bet you I got home I'm gonna guess around 10 30 maybe 11 o'clock at night at the latest and I had some vegetables I had to clean up and put away and it was one of those things where you pull on a little piece of thread and then everything kind of unravels on you. I was literally just cutting the ends of some celery off because I needed to clean it and put it away and then I thought oh well then I'll put these celery scraps in my compost bag that I keep in the freezer that I can, not a compost bag but it like has onion bits and celery bits and other vegetable bits that I will someday turn into a stock right along with like some chicken or turkey or something. Tell them the bone collector called. Exactly and then I'm like oh I'm kind of running out of room in this bag I got to make stock pretty soon. This all happens very quickly. Next thing you know, I'm thinking, well, I still have to use up my stock from last Thanksgiving or whatever it was or last winter at some point. So then I pull all the stock out. And again, this is at night after the bar. And then I'm like, oh, well, I could turn this into like matzo ball soup. So I find like matzo mix, you know, pre-made matzo mix that we usually keep on hand. Next thing you know, like Genevieve comes home several hours later and she's like, it smells so good in here. And I'm like stirring a thing of matzo ball soup at like literally one in the morning.

If things don't work out, Andrew, for you and Genevieve, and I hope they do, will you please move here and make matzo ball soup? Make some midnight matzo. Saturday nights at midnight, I would love nothing more than to come stumbling in from the Madrona Hill studio and smell matzo ball soup.

Never thought that this would be my USA up all night moment. That's what USA up all night should have been about. People just making soup late at night. But anyway, so there must be something going on with me because then that was Saturday night. Then Sunday, I'm like, well, we'll just have the matzo ball soup for dinner. But then I kind of couldn't help myself. I stopped at the grocery store and just got just very basic, just got like some chicken thighs to roast and some veggies and stuff. And again, that's probably the season speaking to me. But I woke up yesterday, Monday, with plenty of food in the fridge like I just, you know, but then I'm scrolling and The New York Times just randomly tweets out a recipe for a chicken curry. Now, I don't cook all that often, and when I do, I'm kind of like just, you know, pretty much in the pattern of cooking the things I already know how to make, sort of. You know, like I kind of keep making – I learned how to make chicken fried rice five, ten years ago or something, so I make that a lot. So I'm not saying that I make only boring things, but I don't get out of my comfort zone all that often. And I just saw this recipe pop up for a chicken curry, and I'm like, God, I really love the flavor of curry. I happened to have made rice the night before because I was like, maybe this goes well with chicken. So I had this thing of, like, white rice in the fridge. I'm just like, God, chicken curry would be so good on that. And so I ran to the store, grabbed the few ingredients we didn't have. I was surprised to see that we had most of them here. And, you know, it took me a little bit longer than the instructions say it will because I'm pretty slow on things. But I really enjoyed my time making it. But I got to say, by the time the curry was done and I was putting it on my rice, it was just okay. And I got to remember that the first time you make a recipe, even if it's just okay, that gives you something to build on. Because I'd never made it before, so I didn't know what to fix for or what to do. I also think that maybe it didn't have as much flavor as I thought. And I'm like, well, our curry powder is kind of old. I do think that spices lose their flavor. I probably should have doubled this. I probably could have cooked the chicken with the onions a little bit more.

you know to change the texture and like i know that going back into it i will if i save this recipe i will improve upon it over time but right now i've got this whole thing of curry in my fridge that i'm pretty mad about again it's not bad it's not bad to eat but i just i was looking forward to that really strong curry flavor so much and i just got to remember like don't throw in the towel on the recipe just build on it but i don't know you're probably like that too i assume oh hugely

Almost everything that I make the first time is lousy And it takes a long time to improve And again, I have a far narrower range of things that I can make than you This was me last night I think I'm also in a fall foodie mood I talked about this on the show a couple of weeks ago I'm 49 years old, soon to be 50 It's remarkable that I'm finally arriving at this point in my life Of just going, what do I have in the kitchen right now or in the pantry or whatever. What can I make with that? And like I noticed yesterday that I had some russet potatoes that I'd had for a while. They're going to start growing eyes pretty soon. So I thought, let me do something with those. And I decided, oh, I like these fondant potatoes where you basically, you peel the potatoes, you cut them up into kind of like, you know, sort of medallions but thicker. And you salt them liberally on both sides. And then you get some olive oil going in a pan and you basically kind of sear off both sides of them. and then you put some stock in there. I also had rosemary randomly, so I had potatoes and rosemary. So I was like, the rosemary is critical for this thing because it just infuses it. So you get a nice brown on both sides of the kind of slices of potato and then you put some stock in there or some veggie stock, which is what I had, and then you put some big pats of butter, giant amounts of butter, and then you cook that whole thing for like 20 minutes.

In the oven? You've taken it off the stovetop now?

You take it off the stovetop, and then you bake that, basically, and the potatoes, like, absorb up, like, the stock and the butter and the rosemary flavor, and they're just these, like, incredibly flavorful medallions of, um, of, of, of, of basically butter and salt and rosemary. They're really delicious. That sounds great. So I had that going, and then I was like, but I want to make something else, but I was like, I had some dry pasta, and I had some canned tuna, and I was like, you know what I could do? I could do like a tuna pasta or something, but I didn't have any peas, which I thought usually goes in that, but I did have some frozen vegetables, like a big bag of Costco frozen vegetables. Those are the only veggies I had because I've basically burned through or thrown out all of my veggies right now. so i fish out all of the broccoli from the like this was a bag of like broccoli cauliflower

carrots and something else you just dumped all the veggies on your coke mirror and started like sorting them out i did exactly reds blues i smashed them up with my costco card why is there an image of david bowie staring up at me while i prepare my dinner i um i i but then i was like

You know what I don't think that these I don't think that broccoli Is going to be all that hot Like it's frozen broccoli From Costco It's been in my The bag had never been opened But still It's like frozen broccoli From Costco That's been in my freezer For six months So then I thought Oh well I'll roast it So I found out From the internet That you can Did you know this You can I mean you can roast Frozen broccoli I didn't know that

I made That's literally One of the things I roasted on Sunday Was broccoli But it wasn't frozen I love roasted broccoli so much

I gotta get into it Because I have to tell you Even this was pretty okay And if it had been fresh broccoli Unfrozen it would have been amazing But I basically Hit these frozen clumps of broccoli With olive oil and then some salt and pepper And some other little herbs or whatever And then I like roasted it Roasted the living tweedle out of it To the point where it actually was pretty good Like it had a little bit of crunch to it And then I made up the pasta And then save some of the pasta And then I made a little kind of a sauce Like a cream sauce Out of stuff I had And then I put the tuna And the broccoli in And mix it up And it was like super good And again this is like This is real bachelor arms cooking I mean this is dry pasta And some butter And some other things And something frozen out of the freezer Like this is not going to win a James Beard award But what was gratifying about it For me was every single thing that I ate last night came from something that was existing in my kitchen and it had not been gone out and purchased because my my whole thing with cooking is if I ever actually make something I go to the store I spend a hundred dollars on ingredients including some sort of a spice that I didn't have that the recipe calls for and what I'm learning now is I'm just figuring out a little bit more not not a lot more but a little bit more of how to just combine things what will probably work how I can oh I don't have that thing that's okay I can use this thing instead like

I'm getting, again, I'm still at a first-grade level with this, but I'm at a first-grade level now of being able to look around the kitchen and go, hey, what would be good that I could just make that's here right now? And that was actually pretty gratifying as I was watching just an awful Monday night football game and trying to understand why I couldn't make myself care about the baseball game until later, until I rode a blue ski and then had to delete the blue ski because of how actually interesting the baseball game was.

I would like to hear more on that. I just, um, I'm just having a day with my internet games, Luke, because, um, what happened? And again, no, literally people say nobody cares about your fantasy teams, but I've been really stuck in the middle and I really messed up my draft. Well, it's less about last night. It was more Sunday. I think it was Sunday night. What happened was basically all day Sunday, they give you a percentage of your chance to win, of your likelihood to win. And all of the players that I played were really panning out. I didn't leave any huge numbers on my bench except for Waddle. He was coming off an injury, so I left him on my bench. And then he did end up performing better than a wide receiver that I did play. I'm getting into too much detail here. But I'm telling you, Sunday, it was like you have a 75% chance of winning, a 90% chance of winning. It went up to 94% chance of winning because a lot of the players that my opponent played were sort of busting out. And then another reason to hate the Green Bay Packers, Sunday night, a tight end named Tucker Craft got 36-plus points. He was beastly. That is so much for a tight end. A tight end could, on a regular day or week, get you maybe eight points or something, you know, maybe up to 15, maybe, but like 36 points from a tight end. And I opened up my phone at one point, and I was like, oh, I now only have a 60% chance of winning. And then as – I didn't even watch the game yesterday. I just kept looking down. I don't know who else they had, but it was enough. It was basically this Tucker Craft that broke me. And then last night, at some point late at night, I looked down and I saw, oh, I've officially lost my bid. It was just a really bad week. Like, I don't think I can pull out of my slump now. So I sort of feel like my fantasy football season is essentially over. I feel like my world streak is over. I just maybe I should find more fulfilling things to do, like cooking more curry. Yes, exactly.

Up your curry game. Well, so what happened to me last night.

Up your curry game.

last night I was as I was making all this food and stuff I was like start off watching Monday Night Football and it was you know it's like uh the Kansas City Chiefs against the Washington Commanders and the thing is the Commanders they're really good quarterback is hurt so it's Marcus Mariota and it's like the Commanders don't have a real good chance in this game and in fact they ended up losing by kind of a lot but I found myself like watching this football game knowing also there was a World Series game on but being more interested in a blowout Monday Night Football game and then writing on blue sky like basically i don't know what i was trying to do roast mlb or something roast mlb like a broccoli florette like i go something like i'd rather watch a football game with the corpse of marcus mariotta in it than the world series involving two teams that aren't my team which was really how i felt when i wrote that blue ski and then eventually the monday night football game ended and then i was getting ready for bed but because heaven forbid i'm doing the dishes without something to look at switch over to the world series game which turns out is a corker is a hell of a game and i'm very much drawn into it and then i have to go and delete my blue sky post because i couldn't stand behind it because it is i didn't even get to watch the worst night of the for me to put that that blue sky out to say like baseball is boring yeah no it was an 18 inning world series game it was full of crazy like people getting thrown out at home like it was a it was a totally riveting game and and i i obviously was i was loud wrong with my with my blue sky post but um before when i was still in football mode andrew i saw a commercial that uh i don't have right in front of me if i was more organized tell me about it if i know it i might be able to find it i'm sure you can it's not obscure at all it's part of the i want to say these are like at&t ads though they're the ones that i've mostly seen billy bob thornton

doing but now they got luke wilson roped in on this yes i saw that with genevieve while we were playing cards i don't think the sound was on or maybe we were talking over and i'm like oh they're bringing luke wilson into the can of whoop up campaign thank you exactly say that in it i knew he says something equally bad here let me see if i can find this so for people that don't

know there this is this is an at&t campaign and the first ones we've seen the ones we've noted have had billy bob thornton walking around it's like he's they're always walking around on a road that seems like it's the dirt.

road that goes underneath a series of power lines in like the woods like that like so that the power workers can get to the power lines kind of a thing and it's billy bob thornton walking around he goes at&t pretty much opened a can of whoop up on the other on the on the competitors it's like no one says a can of whoop up i guess they might say can of whoop ass but it's just like this like it's like it's something it's this like idea of masculinity to me that's annoying like i'm i'm tough i'm i'm as big as all of texas and i'm out here and i'm opening a can of whoop-up and then you throw luke wilson and last time i saw him he was shaving his head to needle in the hay in the

freaking tenon bombs well i will now i will give them credit for this and i haven't we'll play the audio here in a second he's like kind of out looks like maybe he's out on a on the front porch of an of some sort of like uh you know farmer's house estate or something like that but at one point he holds up a newspaper called the chronicle and the headline is very very big it says t-mobile most challenged for deceptive ads and i gotta say that's not the one i'm referencing by the way oh okay i'll play this one in a second it goes by pretty quickly but i'm just like every time i see something like that in like a cartoon or a commercial or a movie i'm just like at least the in in this reality headlines aren't clickbait at least the headline is t-mobile most challenged for deceptive ads like the seattle times would write that you won't believe this phone company as being challenged for deceptive ads. Let's take a listen to this. I think this is the one that I did see the other day.

AT&T's been carrying America's calls since 1876. When you've been around that long, you can spot a hustle coming from a mile away. T-Mobile is the master of breaking promises. While T-Mobile stays caught up in untruths, AT&T keeps building what matters, America's most reliable network. Right, Graham?

When you compare... very end you see a dog that's not the one though that's not the one you know i have the one here

do you want me to play it for you it's from okay the first thing is like i know that the wilson brothers luke wilson and owen wilson are from texas i know they're famously that's where they became friends i believe with uh wes anderson and everything so i guess it's not completely made up but like i don't when i'm thinking culturally texas i don't think luke wilson like i don't think of him as be it a guy who's out there just like you know kicking a cow turd on a hot day Like, it's just funny that they, like, they're really, I feel like they're really leaning into this part of Luke Wilson's personality that I don't, like I said, I think of him as the guy shaving his head to the Elliott Smith song in Tenenbaums.

You see him as more hipster-coated?

Yes, in my mind. So, okay, so this commercial, in this one, it's set at the same location, okay, where he, actually, I believe he may start out on the porch, but he's gonna go on a walk, he's gonna be out on the dirt road with his dog, and he's going to, it's like, these commercials, I feel like they have to have something that's right on the edge of being kind of bawdy or something.

I need to tell facts from fertilizer.

I keep my boots clean by rolling with AT&T. Yes, let me just go back to the beginning there. I got in a little late. This is Luke Wilson telling us about how he knows how to tell facts from fertilizer.

When you grow up out here, you learn to tell facts from fertilizer.

I keep my boots clean by rolling with AT&T, you know. First of all, that line makes absolutely no sense. I keep my boots clean by rolling with AT&T.

Yeah, did you not know about this? This is a service they provide now.

Oh, okay, I stand corrected once again.

They're mostly still in the sort of mobile network market, but they also have a boot cleaning service.

Because they were acquired by Skydance. That's my understanding of the situation. As part of one of their new KPIs is some amount of boot cleaning. Like, how did that line, who are the ad wizards who came up with this one, how did that line survive the arena of all of the different, like, ideas and revisions for this script? I keep my boots clean by rolling with AT&T. It's just a nonsensical line. Okay, now he's walking up this dirt road. He's got the dog with him.

From fertilizer. I keep my boots clean by rolling with AT&T. You know, the company that invented the telephone, AT&T's America's first network, and it's still the best.

That's not me talking. That's the scoreboard, just the fastest, most. And that's where Luke Wilson does something truly remarkable. He raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes that he's just been walking with. And then in the distance, as I wrote on Blue Sky, in the deep interior of his Texas property, he has apparently erected a high school football-style scoreboard that only relates to speed and reliability of the major cellular carriers.

Well, he's very dedicated to the message.

It's weathered, by the way. It's like he put this up years ago.

and occasionally wanders his property to pull out his binoculars to stare at it from a distance. He could just walk up to it, but he wants to look at it from a certain distance, a certain remove, so he can just check in for himself who has the fastest, most reliable network. This is a thing we are led to believe is happening on Luke Wilson's property in Texas.

Well, listen, I don't want to talk down to you, but they do make pre-stressed scoreboards now, so he didn't have to know that. Oh, you know I'll be buying one, by the way. I'll be buying one within the week. They come, so it looks like they've been around. Patina. Yeah, dusty patina.

That sounds like something that I would buy off of Instagram.

Right, it does. It's a vibe. By the way, this is a total aside, but you must have seen this. This was kind of big news, I guess, yesterday, I think I saw it in the Seattle Times, and now I'm looking at a KUW headline. That Uncle Sam billboard on I-5, we talked about it on the show when it went, I guess I need to give a little bit of background here. This is a famous billboard that has been in the same family. In what area is it, Luke, would you say?

You'd kind of call it Vader, Washington kind of area. And it was called Hamilton's Corner was kind of the name for it.

And it was this big billboard with a picture, like a hand-painted picture of Uncle Sam. And it would have these very conservative messages on it for decades, right? You grew up with that billboard.

For my whole life growing up, it always had crazy conservative, like unhinged writing on it. You know, it would be that kind of letter board where you can change the letters. And, yeah, so that was years and years, decades of my life.

And then it kind of stalled out. I remember the last messages were when it had something to do with both, like, having to mask at a restaurant, I believe, or have your vax card at a restaurant. I think it was something like we didn't die to have to show our paperwork to buy food. For food, yeah, exactly.

And then I think one side was, the side going north was, how many Americans will we leave behind in Ukraine? Exactly.

So that really timestamps. And then it just stayed there for a while. And then we saw that they were selling that property that the sign was on. And then I think we did talk on the show that a Native American group bought it, right? A local tribe. A local tribe. And now they have changed the message. Now it just says Native land, hashtag Chehalis with a picture of Uncle Sam. And so I love it, right? It doesn't have to be like, hey, we're going to try to zing back or whatever, but this is native land.

It's just to the point. It's subtle. It's inoffensive. And that means it's going to drive the right crazy. It's going to drive the group of people that are always telling me to F my feelings, Andrew, absolutely up a wall because somebody put the word native and land next to each other. Right. Next to Uncle Sam. That will ruin. That will just ruin the week of a bunch of people who are so tough, Andrew, that they don't care about feelings. They're just about facts and being tough, except for they're all crying right now because someone put Native Land on a billboard they own.

Because somebody opened up a can of whoop-up, and they don't know the difference between facts and fertilizers, which is what I'm filling this blanket with.

All right, let's thank some donors. We don't need that AT&T money. We can make as much fun of those AT&T commercials as we want because we don't need their money. We get our money from the donors. That's how this whole thing works. It's 100% listener-supported. They've separated facts from fertilizer. And then they put a little bit of the fertilizer back into the facts and decided, yeah, yeah, I should support TBTL. Yeah, right. And there are folks like Cassie Palmer in Salt Lake City, Utah, of the Palmers of Andrew.

Now, I saw this coming up, so I've been thinking about it. I didn't look it up, but I did realize, oh, Cassie is part of our Utah family who usually reside, and I'm wondering if maybe Cassie has moved out of the small town to the big city. Yeah, but it's usually, and I'm hoping I'm saying it right, is it Tooelea? Is that it?

Andrew Lewis Walsh. You absolutely nailed it. I didn't say it.

I couldn't spell it for you, but that's been a project of mine, to remember how to say that.

And it has been a successful one. Cassie, thank you so much. Thanks to all of the Palmers. We love them. Thanks to Tyler Teton in Federal Way, Washington. Now, would you say, is it possible Tyler's last name is pronounced Teton? Like the mountain? Teton. Teton. Could be Teton, potentially. Teton seems like the third most likely to me, but I don't know.

I don't know if I've seen this name before. Well, let me run something by you. Can you just try this on for a second, Luke? Absolutely. So by donating to TBTL, Tyler allows us to create this podcast every day, right? Yes. Could we call him Tyler the Creator? of that we sure and then we don't have to even worry about the pronunciation that's right thank you tc in federal way we appreciate actually ttc tt c yes yeah t lower case t yeah smaller t t uppercase t smaller t uppercase c perfect thanks also to amber scrent who's in cairo michigan now i believe this has come up before because is it i'm gonna say it's caro i know there's a caro illinois that

one i'm familiar with now if it were up to me i would say caro but caro it's probably caro i think you're right it's probably caro but i don't know for sure so we've covered our bases no you know

what it's it's care how did you say it caro i just said caro it's c-a-r-o no you're absolutely right that caro illinois is one of those towns we love this in america we just love it we love taking the name of somewhere from somewhere else in the world and then putting it in america and then mispronouncing it so cairo illinois is spelled like cairo like yes yes much like there's a um there's a new delhi in louisiana that's uh delhi it's not new delhi it's delhi it's delhi like spelled like new delhi but it's pronounced delhi oh yeah there's lots of examples like that but but caro michigan is not an example of that and i apologize and this is why it's important that There's both of us here, Andrew, that it's like, you know, we can't have just one person flying this plane because if they have a medical event, we need the other person to step up. And you just stepped up there by correcting me on Cairo, Michigan.

That's right. And I think we have somebody checking in from Deanver, Colorado.

Yes, we do. That would be Sarah Hogan in good old Deanver. Deanver, Colorado. Thank you, as always, Sarah. The mile high city. Did we did I hear did we hear a rumor that Blucifer? No, you know, I was, did we hear a rumor that Blucifer was going away? But I think it was from my Uber driver one time when I was filming in Colorado. And I think the Uber driver said something to me about Blucifer and they're going to get rid of it. And I was, I was terrified at that news. I'm terrified of Blucifer, but even more terrified that they might get rid of Blucifer.

I don't think they would ever do that. But now they've leaned so far into the lore of the curse and all of the strange happenings that happened underneath the airport or something. I don't even know. I'm making stuff up now. But I just do not believe that they would get rid of Blucifer at this point.

Not to mention that I don't think Sarah Hogan would ever let that happen. Kathy McClain has less of a dog in this fight. Kathy's in Streamwood, Illinois, of course. We all know that. But I think Kathy is a team player. And if Sarah Hogan reached out to Kathy and said, I need you to sign some kind of a petition that they're going to not take Blucifer away from DIA, I bet you that Kathy would step up because Kathy's that. We see that Kathy has stepped up to support TBTL.

So we know that Kathy is, you know, spoiling for good trouble. I wonder if it's too much to ask. And it might be too much to ask. And so I'm not going to ask it, but I'm just going to float it. I wonder if it's too much to ask Kathy to handcuff herself to Blucifer.

That might be. well you know what

it doesn't hurt to ask Kathy you're allowed to say no exactly no pressure I say no pressure so much Luke I probably don't say it to you because I like to apply a certain amount of pressure to you it's good for the dynamic but I cannot tell you how many times and it's usually like very small things too but I'm always like telling people I usually I'm on like a no like a two no pressures per text message clip at this point like I'm always like no pressure but if there's any chance you're in the neighborhood and you could drop my book off you know do it to it i'm at home but again absolutely no pressure i'm not in a hurry i'm always writing your book ending you're you're making a no pressure

sandwich the two slices of bread are no pressure you know what i i said to uh the guy making uh tofu this morning because we were everything was being timed out so the tofu i was telling you you you literally put it under pressure you put it under these plates these things that then have a hydraulic thing that's smooshing them down and we're the timing we're waiting on something and we're waiting on these we're going to film something else and i said oh if you're ready we could do this other thing and he kind of looks over at his machine that's pressing out a brick of tofu and i said also no pressure in and i wasn't saying that to be funny like it was a situation in which what we were waiting for was the pressure yeah we were literally waiting for this thing to pressure push down and squeeze the way out of this tofu did anybody acknowledge it

Did he acknowledge it? No, I let it go, too. It wasn't worth...

It was early in the morning. We were all tired. Yeah. Nobody wanted to be there. But I just thought, how many times when you say no pressure, is the thing you're referring to literally an actual pressure situation? Physical pressure.

Well, I did tell my friend who was driving a steamroller the other day, I said, no pressure, and then he just did that thing.

You heard that disco demolition, weren't you?

Yeah, he just tapped the end of his nose and pointed at me.

Uh-huh.

Yep. Okay.

Bergstrom is also supporting the show. Our friend dates with Kate. Also, I can now consider Kate to be blood pressure Bergstrom. That's right. Because I believe Kate's been giving us some intel on blood pressure. Kate is in Phoenix, Arizona. I bet you Kate has been in Phoenix, Arizona for a good number of years, and yet somehow this seems like new information.

Yeah, me too. I was thinking the same thing. I wasn't sure if I was going to bring my surprise at that to light or not, because I should remember that. No pressure.

If you keep forgetting where Kate lives. Kate, thank you so much for supporting the show. Thank you, everyone, for making TBTL possible. This would absolutely not be happening, if not for our donors. Thanks again. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. You know, I don't know how far we need to go into this.

Sorry, that was just a funny way to start a Top Story. I know. I'm not. It made me laugh.

I am not selling the sizzle on this topic. But basically, I do think it's kind of interesting that the Golden Globes have a podcast division, but the Golden Globes, I guess, are actually owned by Penske Media Group.

As of 2023, right? It was a somewhat relative. Somebody, when you had all the, like, kind of complaining about the Golden Globes, I think the Foreign Press Association decided just to sell it off to another company, which then ended up selling it to, or combined with Penske or something.

Yeah, and they own a bunch of entertainment kind of media. I think that they own Deadline Hollywood, Variety, IndieWire, The Rob Report.

And The Hollywood Reporter, too, I think. Am I right about that? I hope I'm wrong about that.

Here's the thing. I'm not seeing it on their Wikipedia page, but I don't know enough to. I'm probably confusing it. But also, the thing about Penske Media that always kills me is the fact that I always, I was like, I grew up with Penske Motors, and I guess the guy who owns Penske Media, Jay Penske, who, by the way, is younger than us, which I guess doesn't make him that young, just younger than us, he is the youngest son of Roger Penske, the founder of the Penske Corporation and former race car driver.

Oh, interesting. And unfortunately, Hollywood Reporter is part of Penske as well. It is? Yeah, it is.

Why'd they leave that off, this thing? I don't know.

Let's see here. It says, as of 2020, the day-to-day operations of the company are handled by Penske Media through a joint venture with Eldridge Industries. So it sounds like it's maybe not as cut and dry.

So practically just about every single, you know, I guess you could say popular or at least as far as the various outlets that report on, like, Hollywood and the movie industry and stuff, that's pretty much all of them that most people could ever name. If they could name any of them, they would be naming the Hollywood Reporter, they'd be naming Variety, you know, things like that. like i said the rob report the rob report is a magazine that i feel like you can find out where to buy the world's most expensive sailboat in a glass bottle oh i don't think i know about the rob report i think the rob report that's what their specialty is like would you like to buy a cufflink that is forty thousand dollars but is the kind of cufflink that steve mcqueen was

wearing in the movie bullet oh i see it's literally that is the the editorial focus is luxury cars jets yachts and travel i thought this was just one of those magazines that appeals about a guy named rob well that maybe appeals like that is about the industry but appeals to a certain class of clientele where the ads skew that way i see that's what the rob

report is i had not i was totally unfamiliar it's an insane magazine that i've only seen when i'm like you know so i'm waiting somewhere for something and they have a waiting area and they've just got like random magazines and i'll see the rob report it's just like it just just it should just be called stuff no one should be allowed to buy yeah yeah stuff no one should have the money for because if you have that amount of money you probably got it from by extracting it

from someone else by the way i bought a um i bought a single copy of harper's magazine the other day i used to like picking up a harper's here and there i had a subscription about a year ago i don't know if you recall it it was like a really good deal and it gives you access to like their 200 years of archives or whatever it is, 150. But all that is to say, I was like, I don't have that subscription anymore. I was in the U District. They have an actual old-school magazine store, Bulldog News. Bulldog? Yeah, and I was like, you know what? That's still there? Yeah, it's still there. God bless, right there. I really needed that W today. They sell coffee, but they also have a big magazine selection, like the old days. And I bought it, and again, I'm really glad to once a year buy a magazine and support Harper's, which I don't think is really rolling in it these days, or rolling in, I guess not rolling in it, but it isn't bringing tons of cash in, but it was $10. It was $10 for a single issue of a magazine. And I was like, wow, that is not what I would have expected in the 90s.

I've mentioned this before, but I've started subscribing to the physical copy of a magazine called The Sun, which is, I guess, you'd call it a literary magazine, but it's so unpretentious. I just absolutely love it. They're out of North Carolina, and I would highly recommend that if you're looking for a magazine. And by the way, it's pretty cheap. Like, they sent me. It's adorable. In fact, I could find it because I'm, you know, I'm auto-paying now. and they sent me um let's see here like a notification that renewal confirmation uh your subscription to the sun mailing to the address below has been renewed through our auto renewal program first of all i appreciate that when companies do that that's nice of them they go um uh your card ending in the number has been charged one dollar whoa five monthly issues What? I don't know if it's $1 a month, if it's $5. I don't know what is going on. I need to check in on them, make sure they're okay. It's less than a quarter an episode?

I can't imagine. Or an issue, I should say. Sorry.

I feel like I'm misunderstanding. It has been charged $1 for five monthly issues. Maybe it's... Wait, did you just start this up?

Is this them running $1 just to check the card?

No, I've been getting it for like six months now.

I don't know.

It's great, though. I would recommend it, even if I had to pay $5. I thought I was paying $5 per magazine, which I was fine with, absolutely fine with. But anyway, the story is that the Golden Globes has a podcasting category now, and to the degree that there's a controversy around it, I guess it's just that, well, first of all, the list, I don't have the list right in front of me, but it's the people that you would expect. It's it's the the the list was picked by some company that bills itself as the sort of leader in audio data. They try to say that they're like the ones who are the knowers about podcasts and their popularity and their relevance and everything. Now, that company is also owned by Penske Media, which is complicating things. So the company that's picking the podcasts for the Golden Globes, the independent company is also owned by the people that own the Golden Globe. So that's seen as a little bit of a I don't even know if conflict of interest. I don't think anyone cares about this enough for it to be a conflict of interest, if that makes sense. Like, I just don't think outside of whatever article that I saw that our colleague John Sklaroff sent us and maybe a few people in the podcast community, I don't think that this is a wedge issue for most American voters. I don't think they really care that much. But what I did, what it made me feel, well, for one thing, you can, uh, it appears you can like, there's this, uh, Penske media puts on this, uh, or one of these companies is maybe under Penske puts on this festival. I guess it's like a podcasting festival of sorts, or it's an ideas festival of some kind. And if you want to be interviewed, if you want your podcast to be on stage and be interviewed in the festival, it's like X thousands of dollars. And for $50,000, you could actually have an article about you written in one of these magazines. I don't know if it's Variety or one of them. And basically the implication was if you're willing to pay a lot of money, like a for your consideration, you know, which is what happens for like the Oscars and stuff, what happens is if you make a movie and it's nominated for an Oscar or you want it to be nominated for an Oscar, you start spending a shitload of money on what's called a for your consideration campaign where you start getting billboards in all over L.A. for your consideration. Please consider, you know, what's a movie that, Little Miss Sunshine. And then, you know, you do all these mailings and you buy these space and these magazines and you pump all this money into the Hollywood media economy trying to get the people that vote on these things to consider voting for your thing for the award. So there's some kind of a for-your-consideration festival. And if, like, if TBTL wanted to, if we wanted to spend $50,000 that we don't have, we could pretty much end up on stage being interviewed and being written up in like one of these magazines variety or something as part of this for your consideration festival. And the allegation is move ever closer to maybe find ourselves on the list of the 25 podcasts that have been nominated for a Golden Globe. I'm an ideas festival, Michael.

I think I proved that with Rob Report Mountain. Yes, with FYC. yeah so the campaign so basically you have the golden globes and they say hey we the people who own the golden globes also own tons of media that is aimed at the industry and so let's create a new category called podcasting for the golden globes and then if anybody wants to win that category the way they will need to do it and of course this is going to be aimed at the huge names in podcasting already who already get all of the ink right like you're talking about your conan o'brien's needs friends and that we're talking about earlier and i'm sure the one speaking of uh speaking of uh michael bluth

um smart lists i'm sure is one of them did you read this part the initial list that this company called luminate by the way is that the greatest name ever for a company that says they're the knowers of podcasts yeah luminate yeah um i'm gonna luminate all over this list of nominees but um they uh they didn't include smart lists in their first like their 25 nominees and then there was such a uh such a uproar that then and that was that there was like three or four other podcasts that weren't included and then they said upon further consideration we have now added them back in they've they basically added new podcasts into the list because people were so mad that like

smart list wasn't on the initial list and basically but what they're saying is is if you want to win you probably have to spend a whole bunch of money on advertising in these you know print and digital pages that are aimed at the industry and and the people who can vote and guess who owns all of those publications we do it's like such a it's yes it's such a evil genius move honestly the um shows that

the podcasts that are nominated include um this is alphabetical order 2020 from abc news 48 hours

dateline nbc here's my classic podcasts i love the classic they just i love when they started podcast when these are the basically the three big ones that invented the the format right the

medium yes exactly keith morrison one somebody found him once wandering around a field in iowa and he was holding a piece of wood that was roughly shaped like an ipod and he said i know i sound crazy but someday there's going to be a device that's roughly like the same size and weight as this piece of wood i'm holding and it's going to hold music and stories on it and and radio shows but radio shows you can listen to anytime and they're going to call it podcasting and that's why keith morrison is one of the founders of the idea of podcasting like the dateline nbc podcast if i could be clear is just the tv show dateline nbc they don't use it up at all i kind of assumed but i wasn't sure they may have listen i'm not up i'm not up to speed on this as of october 28th 2025 i know that i listened to some of the early ones and it was literally just the show now maybe they've maybe they've added some sound effects or maybe they've got a it's one of the most popular podcasts in the world which is again i don't want to i want to be careful with this that i don't just sound like i'm just i'm just jealous and and butt hurt because those are two things that i actually am but it's like the idea that like they slap dateline nbc they just take away the pictures and they just put the audio onto the internet and it's more popular than anything we've ever made does make me feel jealous and butt hurt um uh the other some of the other ones include good hang with amy polar i think that's a really good show i like that show a lot it's you know it's exactly what you think it would be it's the great amy polar talking to her really funny friends about things they did that were funny which is a good show like i'm a fan of the show uh pardon my take which is a sports show that i i see in clips on tiktok that's a barstool show but actually the guys on it are not overly barstool-y if that makes any sense they're like they're actually i think they seem like pretty good dudes who may actually have pretty decent politics and are um they know a lot about football i like them uh the uh ben shapiro show another good guy yeah solid guy ben shapiro so what are they doing about that uh golden globe so white situation they still uh well they're putting the joe rogan experience and the megan kelly show on

this list fantastic okay so so far loving the diversity uh this past weekend with theo vaughn

it's also on there i mean look it's i'm in such a glass case of emotion and also a glass castle a glass house when i say this but like theo von's podcast is the most underproduced thing in the history of the world it is theo von sitting in a room musing now it so happens that that people like theo von's musings i find them kind of incomprehensible like i just honestly kind of don't he's always like we used to have a guy in our town we called him um el chicharron and he was one of them guys you know like um he had like a three-wheel bicycle you know it's like what the fuck are you talking about like he's just saying he's just saying folksy things that like

you know but anyway do you know that my thing with him is i'm scared to listen to that show because i think i'll like it like it's hard i would be really curious throw ben shapiro out there i'm just like that's not for me you know just like whatever i don't i don't need to check that out yeah but the thing is about Theo Vaughn I don't know much about him I only started to hear about him like when we were doing shows with the text me back folks and like you and Lindy and Megan were kind of like making jokes about Theo Vaughn at that point I don't even think I really knew who he was I just heard people reacting to him and then of course I know that he's you know like he helped normalize Trump and like you know people will point to that as a huge interview on Trump's like sort of podcast tour that helped him it helped him get back in the White House or whatever and so like

Like, you know, I can't overlook those things, but, like, there is something that I think I appreciate about this particular side of the industry that sometimes it is simply kind of indescribable. Well, but I was just going to say that it's just kind of like it's pure charisma. And sometimes that charisma is weird and awkward. And when I see little clips of him, I understand how people can sort of like relate and also be like, what is this? What is this thing? You know, what is this Theo Vaughn sort of? And so that's one that is always sort of itched the back of my head. Like I should probably just learn more about him and listen to the source as opposed to listening to what everybody else is saying about him. But again, knowing that he was part of the media blitz that really, really helped the rise of fascism doesn't help me much at all either.

I mean, when the pandemic hit, and I first started spending far too much time on TikTok, I started seeing clips of this guy, and I was like, I think that guy was on Road Rules. He was like an MTV Road Rules. He might have been a real-world guy, too. And I think he was sort of a quasi-stand-up comedian, but I think he was one of those folks that when the pandemic hit, he just got a camera set up in his living room and just started talking. and I really kind of liked it at first because, again, he's folksy and he's unassuming and again, as far as the whole I don't really know where he actually comes down on Donald Trump I guess you could say he platformed him so that's where he comes down on it he put him on his show to talk to him unfortunately, he's not, I don't think read in enough to have asked Donald Trump I didn't watch the interview but I don't think he probably asked Donald Trump any actual important probing questions because that's not what he does but all that is to say I'm sort of neutral on him, but I guess that's just one of those ones where I am jealous because it's like he's doing a less prepared version of what we're doing and just thriving doing it, which means he has that much more riz, apparently, than we do.

You know, let me actually quote. I just realized you probably read our buddy Chris Hayes' op-ed in the New York Times a couple of Sundays ago.

No, I missed it. And I saw that you said to him pretty early, by the way, nice flex on like Sunday, like, hey, great piece or something. And I didn't even know the piece you were referring.

It popped up in my feed for some reason. And so I read it and it was good. And again, it's kind of an extension of talking about in terms of politics and especially the Democratic Party, how focusing differently in this attention economy, as Chris talks about, is different than it was back when the whole way of winning elections was just get as much money as possible and then just plaster traditional TV stations with your message. and it's just more complicated than that and I think near the beginning of Chris's piece he even says like, and I want to be careful not to misquote him here because he will hear it and as you know he is very punitive and he is very litigious

loves a strongly worded email more than almost anyone I've ever met, the number of strongly worded emails we have from Chris Hayes and yet he still supports the show financially

he loves to copy his lawyers on those strongly worded emails it's just nobody loves to copy their lawyers more than him no but i think he says that the most humanizing moment if not the only humanizing moment or likable moment i can't remember exactly the adjective he uses uh of of donald trump uh you know in media was talking with theo vaughn and like trump like not answering questions but like just asking theo vaughn about drugs and what different highs are like remember that and i saw clips of that as well and something like is cocaine a stronger high than alcohol or something i'm probably messing up that quote as well and so there is something about there is something like i was saying before i guess it's really hard to describe like you were saying hey it has very low production standards which sometimes that can gall me if the if there isn't talent behind it but it's like i kind of sort of appreciate although i know very little about him the idea of somebody being a complete phenomenon based purely on the uniqueness of their personality, which sort of seems to be the case with him.

Right, but that was supposed to be my thing.

Oh, right, sorry.

And it's not where I'm frigging making tofu at three in the morning. Right, sure, yeah. And judging dog Halloween costume contests. Yeah, any more on that?

I got a thank you note from somebody who said thank you for making sure we got to that yesterday. The dog talk, yes.

Up first from NPR is on there. The Daily is on there. Pod Save America. which I'm a fan of. Call Her Daddy is on there. So it's like, and Dax Shepard's on there. It's just like, you know, these really big ones. One of the things, too, that's interesting is at the bottom of this page, this is the Golden Globe's website, it says eligible podcasts are invited to submit entries via the Golden Globe's submission site. And then it's got a link, and it says submission deadline is October 31st, 2025. Now, it is a $500. submission fee to even submit your podcast but i guess this is not the final list necessarily it sounds like these have made the list but this list i don't know i guess it could it could be infinite it could get it could be the top 30 or like the 30 nominees it it seems like we could nominate tbtl if we wanted to blow 500 on it well that's what i don't understand about this list

because anybody i mean this is just like classic public radio you know what's what i'm looking for awards as well i almost said contests that makes it sound like you're going to have the morning edition hosts like singing and dancing in front of three people in spinning chairs but you know like any awards thing if you're going to submit a story for the murrow awards national or local i don't think they set a limit to how many people can apply for that they'll just take your money and your submission and then judges will decide you know which one actually wins or which ones actually win so that's why i'm a little bit confused about what this pre-list is if people are still submitting their nominations like yeah anybody can submit to this kind of stuff if you

want to pay for the submission you know what i'm surprised didn't make it and this is where i really want to go with this and where i also really want to keep this to like a few minutes because we've been doing this a long time today and we've all got places to be and by that i mean the listeners have places to be i'm surprised they didn't throw mark maron like a posthumous like uh you're going out on top because you made the greatest podcast in the history of the world podcast award like there is something and again i a little bit know mark maron he's always been really nice to me he's been nice to the show he's been on it a bunch is he done done now by the way does he have his final episode yeah obama was his final of course yeah which is pretty actually a really a really cool idea and i'm stoked that obama did it and i'm glad that worked out for them like i mean i've i've my rap on mark maron and his show and by rap i just mean my my thing on it not my knock on it but it's always just been it was so funny because he started that show right at the time that we started tbtl as a podcast and obviously uh we're doing this here right now and he became apparently the greatest podcaster in the history of the world and the kind of like i don't know and i'm just being honest now the like the way that i see the way that people talk about wtf the reverence with which they talked about it you know was so interesting to me because like i thought it was a good show and i was a regular listener for a long time i mean obviously i think that mark is super talented but like there was a point at which it just felt like okay we get it and i think when something broke inside me was the other day i was looking at something on tiktok and it said and it's just like one of these guys who's kind of a content farmer so what they do is it's a guy in his house in front of a green screen but he's always just finding something that's getting so much attention in the pop culture that then he latches on his angle to it because that through an seo thing or an algorithmic thing will start to put his content in front of people and so he was like did you know that mark maron's podcast is so influential that it's the reason that the bruce springsteen movie got married or got married got made and it was like this whole it was like mark maron didn't just have one of the most successful podcasts in history and this guy's cycling through these like magazine photos of mark maron where he's just being cool and he's like in black and white he's in a jean jacket he's just like and then it's like but it's not just his podcast um his podcast wasn't just one of those popular podcasts of all time it actually led to the bruce springsteen movie deliver me from nowhere or to somewhere or whatever by the way andrew you'll be really happy to know that every legitimate movie reviewer i've seen talking

about that movie says it is unwatchably oh my god i laughed it's getting roasted in a way that i

have not seen i've not seen a movie get roasted that bad in the public space in a long time people are critics are like drubbing it i did not know that and i don't you know i don't need to do

that Gen X thing where I got to be the first in line to hate on something but I will tell you that I saw the trailer in the movie theater I don't before weapons or something and I kind of bark laughed out loud a couple of times because it looks like it looks like Mr. Show or the people from Stella or whatever are doing a parody of a biopic and again the huge thing is just like so self-serious it's just so these things are so self-serious and it's exactly why i liked that pavement fake documentary or whatever it was because it sort of takes down this kind of

ridiculousness so the story was that mark maron's mark maron had had the writer of the book so that delivery from nowhere was actually a book that somebody wrote about bruce springsteen making nebraska and mark marin had had that person on his podcast and and was talking about the book but then some big hollywood types were such fans of mark marin show that they heard the guy talking about the book and then they reached out to the author to develop the book into a movie and there was something about this like mark marin had already had his victory lap of wtf which i think was well deserved it was a really good show and it had just been like again the the i just don't know of any podcast. should ever be talked about with reverence like i just don't think and i and certainly not us like i don't think this is a medium outside of maybe what like our friends at the um in the dark podcast did or something or maybe you know maybe really important journalistic work maybe you could be reverential about the about the impact of the work or just the reporting or whatever i mean but like i just don't think that this is a medium that should be talked about with reverence when when the intro to the show is what's up what the fuckers does he say that at the beginning of every i haven't heard that in forever it was part of the it was part of the it was part of the open

and like the last time i listened to that by the way can i put a time stamp on because i remember i was never a regular listener of that show but i remember i listened when robin williams died

i went back and i heard that was a really good interview yes because it was an interview after

he died and it was with his ghost and a lot of people were like you can't book that but but he no why couldn't you book that when you were in LA exactly actually the funny thing is I was living in LA at the time and Robin Williams had just died and everybody was saying how his previous Marc Maron appearance I don't know how many years prior was really good and so I did listen to it but like first of all it was an archived episode I listened to and it must have I lived in LA in like 2014 maybe 2015 that we could look up when Robin Williams passed but anyway that is literally it's been 10 years since I listened to an episode of what is arguably one of the most kind of foundational podcasts of the last 20 years. Again, I mean, I think I can't say this enough. I think it was a good show. When did you start podcasting? 2009, right? Sorry to interrupt.

Probably. That was probably when we were like fired from the radio. I mean, we were putting it up as a podcast the whole time. Which is when I was listening. As an only podcast product in probably 2009 or something and i've told the story a million times but like i remember i remember we had mark on tbtl from my house i think he might have been on the phone or something it was somehow like he at he was also there in person sometimes but but i remember talking to him and he was telling me like off air i think about how he was starting up a podcast and he was pretty excited about it and i think jesse thorne from the sound of young america had gone over to his house to help him like set up the microphone and stuff and he was excited because he was somebody was mailing him there was a coffee company that was paying him in coffee beans they were giving him coffee beans for mentions and i remember thinking oh oh you poor little fool we get real money over here in tbtl land from chateau san michelle and like thinking having this kind of almost just like a they're there like pat if i could just pat him on the head and say good job keep trying kid so that's woven into all of this for me uh how much i didn't understand just how big his show was going to get but again i guess it was just something about the reverence around the victory lap that's not even coming from mark maron by the way that's not him saying everyone should respect me and think i'm a god of podcasting i think he probably has the right perspective but all of the like the think pieces and the long magazine articles about like what did it mean to the culture just like was a little and then hearing that he also was he's so influential that he's also the reason movies are now made andrew because he is he has people on his show and then hollywood Oh, speaking of Hollywood, I have signed us up for a Golden Globes account.

Oh, fantastic.

And do you know that we can submit, not just in the podcast category, do you know if there's four different categories that I could submit us for right now? Yeah, what are they? Motion picture, television, individual submissions, and podcast.

Well, we can't submit motion picture. We haven't finished our film yet.

I finished many films, Andrew. I made a movie called Forbidden Love that I submitted to the Stranger Short Film Festival that involved my dog, Flea, humping people's leg when they tried to vacuum. Not a TBTL production. Who says it has to be a TBTL production?

Oh, I thought you said that we could submit.

Well, we can. I'm just going to keep 80-20 on the back end because I made it. But I'm going to cut you in for 20, so it's not a bad deal. Television. Best television series, drama. Best television series, musical. It's funny because I guess the idea is that – I mean, it's hilarious to me that this is the submission process. I mean, you were just talking about it. It's kind of like one of those journalism awards that we could have applied for in public radio. But I guess it never occurred to me that this is literally how the Golden Globes – so if we did make a TV show, we could submit it here. And then they, I guess, would potentially watch it, and then it could maybe –

So this is specifically podcast category? So, in other words, this would have to be a TV show that was based on a podcast or a film that was inspired by a podcast?

Nope. No, no. I'm sorry. I probably described it in a confusing way. So, there's four different categories. There's motion picture, television, individual submissions. And then there's just a category called podcast.

Oh, I see. So, if we went individual submissions, that would probably open up a link tree to best actor, best – do they still divide up by actor and actress and everything? Female actor. Okay. And male actor. So if I click on create submission, I agree. Hold on. I'm agreeing to the guidelines next. Eligibility. I won't read. This is very long. But yeah, I could just basically go in. Like if you were in a movie, Andrew, I could go in and I could submit you for best individual performance.

This was my confusion before. I see. So you're saying we, you mean we, the people, or just the royal we or whatever, not TBTL. Because I was like, how does TBTL work there? These are just the four basically broad categories that anybody can apply to be considered in. Okay.

Yes. In podcast, we've got narrative, scripted. This is after you click through just the main podcast page. You've got narrative, scripted, unscripted, hybrid, and then educational or informative.

Definitely not informative. What is, is there a category for leeching information out of your listeners' brains somehow? Is there a category for making your listeners? Don't forget money.

Information slash money. Money, exactly. It is crazy to me that I could actually nominate TBTL for a Golden Globes. It would be a big waste of $500. We're not going to do it. But I do think, somehow in all of that, in reading that article that John sent, and it hadn't really occurred to me that, like, that's really what they meant. that you can just, anybody can submit any podcast for a Golden Globe.

Yeah, and again, not to harp on this, but I was a little surprised that there is no, of the candidates that you listed, and again, I don't even know what to call them because I don't understand what that list is if they're still taking nominations. Maybe those are just the ones that have floated to the top that they're giving extra consideration to, but that there's none.

Right, yeah, what is that 25?

Yeah, and I don't know the makeup of any of these podcasts or who works on the show, and I'm not trying to think of everything in a binary way, But you didn't name like one show like that would be representative of anything but the white experience, really. Or I mean, you didn't mention news ones, but like for the chat ones, you mentioned Theo Vaughn or maybe smart lists or something. And again, I don't know the makeup of all of these things. But like, yeah, like is Two Dope Queens, is that on there? Is that still a going concern, by the way? I'm just pulling. I happen to hear Phoebe Robinson on a podcast recently. So I was thinking about her.

Yeah, is she promoting something? Because I just saw her on Sam's show, Sam Sanders.

Oh, I heard her on Comedy Bang Bang, and she is in a new project, and I can't remember what it was, but I will tell you that I did get my Martin Starr secret stash gummies, or whatever they're called.

Dude, did I tell you that you almost poisoned me into buying Lifesaver gummies at a movie theater for a movie that wasn't playing?

You were just thinking about the gummy conversation?

Last Friday, I do want to hear about these Martin Starr ones. I'll just do this really quick, and then... Oh, I don't have much to say.

They're fine. they're oh no they're good no i mean they're good they're i i paid a lot you know for shipping and everything i paid 27 total for five bags like a bag that you would get you would pull at like the checkout counter you know it's like not super big like you could probably you would have them in the car on your way home in traffic so you know to order them and have them shipped and everything it's not like super cost effective but they're good gummies they tasted good last friday it was

after we got done with the show and a few other things it was so unbelievably stormy here was that atmospheric river it was just gross and I had this sort of weird amount of time in my late afternoon where it was kind of like I had some stuff going on at night but I was kind of wrapped up mostly for the day of work and stuff and I just thought oh I'll go see Begonia and so I'm like Begonia near me and I see oh it's playing down at the movie theater down at the mall near me

can you remind me what that is again I'm sorry I forgot

It's the Yorgos Lanthamon film with Emma Stone in it.

We haven't talked about that. Genevieve told me that he has a new one out. Okay, I'll be seeing that.

It looks crazy like all of his movies, but it looks really pretty intriguing. You know how it is in a relationship. There are the movies that I have sworn to Becca I will see with her. I think it's Blue Moon, which is about the guy that was in Rogers and Hart, and then Rogers and Hart becomes Rogers and Hammerstein, Hammerstein and the guy Hart kind of gets left behind and it's Ethan Hawke it's a Richard Linkletter film so I got to see that one with Becca but I was like I can sneak Begonia in so I jump in my car Begonia's starting in 20 minutes I race down to the theater it's that thing of when Andrew you buy your movie ticket at the concessions so I get in line I get to the front and I'm going through that candy corridor that they take you through now they're routing me through at this regal or whatever it is and because of our conversation about martin star gummies i was like frick it dude i'm getting a lifesaver like lifesaver gummies i was like that sounds kind of good to me right now so i got a bag of those i got some kitkat some mini kitkats i order my popcorn i order my soda i'm getting it all the the very nice person at the

concession says uh says anything else i go oh my god i almost forgot the most important part ticket to begonia and she looks at me like but what yeah and i was like oh yeah begonia and then she's looking through the screen and she's like i don't see that here i don't think that's out yet i was like i would i think i would know i'm arguing with the person that works at the movie theater who has the screen of the movies that are playing no offense but i think i would know with respect with respect i think i'd know what movies you're playing at this movie theater that I have barely considered its existence in my lifetime. So, of course, Begonia is not playing there. And now I'm like, do I have to have these snacks? She's like, no, no, of course not. I was like, okay. She hadn't actually made the popcorn yet.

Oh, okay, and the other snacks are packaged up. Do you know what led to the mistake, though? Because you must have looked up a Showtime. You wouldn't have just showed up and been like, well, the one's going to be.

I saw a Showtime. I went on Friday. I don't know what happened because at first it looked like it was showing me the Thursday times, And then I, I actually took the initiative to click over to Friday and it showed me Friday was 320. And here's what I think was happening, Andrew. I think it was shifting me to this week. I think it comes out this week. And I think, remember, I said, there should be some kind of a law that if you're looking up something on a calendar, the default should be the day that you're actually, this is what happened to me with my doctor a while ago. like it i think that my doctor's office the calendar immediately went to the first available date and so i'm and i should have been more conscientious about what i was looking at but instead i'm just like looking at oh i see there's an availability on thursday okay i'll do that not realizing it's a thursday in three months and i think similarly when i said begonia near me it went to like thursday like a couple days from now yeah when it's gonna actually looks like the

first i can see it is this thursday october 30th so i think that the calendar was like well he only

needs to know about the times when begonia is showing we're not going to show him this week when there's no begonia so i was like fast forwarded a week and didn't realize it but then this is what happened to me i then so i i take the candies i put them back and i'm walking around and it was like i was andrew when i tell you i was bereft yeah it's like it's it's 326 it's torrentially raining and i don't even know what to do with myself did you even look at what the other options i did i would have seen roof man but it was 45 minutes into the show that's too much yeah it was the only other thing i was about to be like well will i just watch like how

to train your dragon seven yeah like literally in a situation like that sometimes watch a shit

movie whatever yeah watch anything i was there was literally nothing starting yeah if there would have been anything that i could have even possibly tolerated that would have been starting in the next 20 minutes that's what i would have done so then i walk out of the theater first of all i I think you might have even been in that mall, the world's most abandoned mall. Oh, yeah. It's basically a movie theater, a bombed-out JCPenney, and now, weirdly, a thriving food court.

Oh, really? I never went in. I should have gone in. I just remember hobbling. It was when I was still undiagnosed, but my arthritis was kicking in big time. And I just remember walking, trudging through that parking lot to get to the grocery store that's on the other end of the parking lot and walking up on little curbs and being like, why can't i not walk on curves so that is a very depressing parking lot but also it's colored by

my personal experience at that time so it's i'm like kind of walking through this like kind of depressing mall where everything is shut down pretty much just like you know like uh there's like a actually you know what i'll be honest with you there's a game store in there that seemed to be thriving a lot of people in there playing games yeah that's cool yeah that was kind of cool i was happy about that but um so then i go and get in my car and then i'm like i'm like i guess i'll just go home now but i was like and i already knew what i was going to have for dinner i knew that i was going to have another square of my vegetarian lasagna so i didn't even have like i couldn't justify like i was like well i could buy stuff for dinner but i have this whole thing of lasagna that i made the previous night i was like okay you know what i need i'm almost out of romaine lettuce that's what we'll do we'll go to safeway we'll get some romaine lettuce our

life does have a purpose you just needed a you needed a mission huh i needed something to i need

so then i go into the safeway but now i'm walking now i'm thinking about now i'm thinking about sweet treats because i had those gummies and i had those kit kats in my hot little hands and then i put them back and now i'm like you know like uh sweets delayed is sweets denied i'm like now so now i'm walking around safeway i got a bag of of hearts of romaine in one hand and i'm just like what sweet treat do i want and andrew when i tell you that i took at least 30 minutes to make my decision around cookies it was so messed up i was in the weirdest headspace i know this feeling i know this i walk so well so i walk up to i'm in the bakery and they have those like plastic like a clam shell of like 12 cookies right it's five bucks it's like really cheap and it's it's like

in the bakery area so you get the impression that they made it there maybe they made them there but it's like 12 chocolate chip cookies and I'm like I don't need 12 I know I will eat 12 if I have these in my house I'll eat them that's more than I need then there's two individually wrapped ones and those are $3.99 so I could get and I'm worried two is not going to be enough so then I'm like well I could get four of the individual of the double packs but now I'm paying more than I would to get 12 so I'm just standing there like frozen for a long time and then I'm like I know what I'll do cookie dough. I'll do the pre-made cookie dough that's on the other side of the store. So I walk over to the other side of the store and I get some pre-made cookie dough and I have my romaine lettuce and I go back to my car and I drive home and that's what I ended up doing Friday night. As I watched this crazy powerful documentary called The Perfect Neighbor on Netflix I don't know if you know about this or if people have heard about it. First of all, I just want to say trigger warning, it is emotionally wrenching It is a phenomenal piece of filmmaking I feel like the documentaries The word documentary on Netflix has gotten Really really kind of bastardized Like most of the documentaries On Netflix now are just like very quickly Thrown together it's a bunch of pre-existing Interviews or news clips And then maybe they get like one or two people To sit down people who didn't even weren't even at the thing Just like a crime expert Or whatever to just kind of like You know talk about it And then they dice it all up and they tell you We got a documentary about this thing This is not that. This is a very sad story about a shooting in Florida that happens in this neighborhood, but the entire story is told through the police body cam. And it is absolutely ridiculous.

Literally like the audio and everything. It's just from, it's all just, wow.

There's no narration. There are no talking heads being interviewed. It is purely through the body cam, and the story is told. i mean there was the police were called out to this location many many times so there was a trove a ton of body cam footage and then some stuff later on involving you know law enforcement but there is it's all just i don't know if you'd call that passive camera or verite or what you might call that but it was it's a and it's an incredibly riveting way to tell the story and it's a really powerful story addie and i were texting about it saying like i guess some people like should we even be seeing this you know like is this an invasion of privacy into the people involved because this is body cam i feel like the message that the movie portrays is so important i think that i think it's worth uh telling it in this way and it's and i hope it's worth it to the people that are that are featured in there that their their you know likenesses are are out there because i think it has an incredibly powerful message but yeah it's called the perfect neighbor

They don't even set it up by saying there's no whining in football, but sometimes football comes to wine country. There's no narration. There's nothing even like that at all.

They do have – it's weird. There's a couple of lines like that right at the beginning of the film, which I think kind of –

There's no whining in football, but every August, football comes to wine country.

Okay, so that's from The Perfect Neighbor.

That's from The Perfect Neighbor.

That's what I thought

Let's see I'm trying to find my other I need to get more I need to start watching Hard Knocks again I need to end the show How do you

How do you have these saved Are they in their Hard Knocks Are they in their Liev I feel like Liev Would be something

I would have a hard time Remembering which goes first The I or the E In Liev I think I gotta go hard This is the other one This one is less Is less great But it's when A couple of those I think they were At the time Were they Oakland Raiders I think they were The Oakland Raiders Maybe at this time And they were They're going horseback riding Oh yeah And if you want to know where we are in time They're using Old Town Road I believe

Oh okay yeah

Or maybe a fake Old Town Road This is where we were in our shared experience

Everybody ain't so free Just because he surrendered the reins doesn't mean jonathan abram doesn't still have the bit between his teeth oh god it's just just

brutal it's that same pattern i love it so you know uh we really do have to go but i will tell

you that it is across sports whether it is baseball football those are the main ones that i watch there is nothing worse than when the producers the executive producers of the sports broadcast try to get in any way creative or funny or anything with the content that precedes the actual game. You know what I mean? Like, they're experts at portraying the game, at showing us the game, at showing us all the angles, at talking to Gene Steratore. The thing of showing us the game they're masters at, or the baseball game for that matter. anything where they're trying to be filmmakers where they're trying to do something funny about like, I don't know, just like a graphic about a guy who is on a team, but he's done this thing or he's from this town. You know what I'm talking about?

Are you talking about, I think you're talking about something different than what I'm picturing, which is I'm thinking of the in-game things where they'll show the two opposing quarterbacks, but they'll animate it like they're both in school. But then one of them gets a dunce cap because they've had a bad season and the other one is rising to the top of the class. and they get a little hat that says valedictorian. I can't say that word. Valedictorian. How do you say that word? Valedictorian. Valedictorian. I have trouble with that one. I want to put an extra V in there. But anyway, is that the type of thing you're talking about?

That's a version of it, which is like, yes, it's so uncreative. It's so unbelievably uncreative. But there was something that played before one of the Mariners Blue Jays games that was on Fox that was, I think it was supposed to be kind of actually more like inspirational like will these players rise to meet the moment but it was just it was so cringe it was so unbelievably terrible and i guess i just don't watch enough national baseball broadcast to know that they also do this shit for baseball i know about the football version because that's what i'm always watching but i was just like we need to take away the keys from these sports producers to do anything that's outside of just telling us about the game and who's doing what and what points were scored, that you're great at. Anything where we're calling on you to be funny, to write like a funny skit or script or like a bit that someone's going to be doing or an animation, anything like that, it's going to get into just because Jonathan Abrams doesn't have the reins anymore, it doesn't mean the bit's not firmly between his teeth. It's like this is the worst kind of writing ever and it's getting on national television.

Some of it's getting better, though. The fonts used to be really bad until Jordan Hudson sort of started taking care of that. That honestly was a big improvement. Putting some texture in the background that looked a little bit like a leather football. I could do that in five minutes.

I don't know graphic design, but I could do that in five minutes.

How do you spell Belichick? What's that? I said, how do you spell Belichick? It was just the final cherry on top of the Jordan Hudson riffing we were doing. That's what happened there. I don't like me not being able to say that word that I tried to say a couple of minutes ago. That's not a good way to end the show, but here we are. Andrew, would it make you feel better if I said Volkswagen?

No, nothing can save me right now, Luke. I know you're having a tough day. I'm sorry, my friend. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. We are going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary. I'll be less loopy because I will not have gotten up at 3 a.m. to make tofu. And horfed tofu. And horfed too much tofu. Okay, so we'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.