Muse

Hey, uh, can I ask you something? Yeah. Do you like malls?

What? Oh.

Yeah, do you like malls? Like shopping malls. Seth. Okay, see, because my dad right here, he's actually in charge of a brand new shopping mall that's going to be opening here in town.

Oh, wait, that's really cool. Yeah. You know, I don't think I've been to a mall, though, since I was, like, 14. Okay.

Yeah, you probably have. You probably just didn't realize it. They've changed a lot in the last few years.

Yeah, no, I don't think I've been to one in a really long time.

They're just more naturalistic now and less intrusive than what you used to think of when you thought of a mall. So you might have been in a mall.

Well, I think I would have known if I was in a mall.

I'm saying you wouldn't know you were in a mall. I bet you were in a mall.

No, yeah, I'm just saying I haven't been to one.

Probably have been recently.

Dad.

Yeah, at least she's been in a mall. I mean, this is kind of a mall.

This is a restaurant.

I know, but it's also kind of a mall.

How?

Because it is. Because there's shops around and the way the parking lot wraps around.

Okay, fine. Thank you.

Cool.

The f*** was that? What a weird person. Please try to let it go. This isn't a mall, is it? Kind of. I mean, not really. I mean, it's not like a mall at all. What the f*** was I supposed to say? TBTL!

Excited to be here. Uh, equally excited for you guys to truly take in how physically imposing I am. So, whenever you guys are ready to start, let's do it.

I'm sorry, but when I hear an undeserved compliment, it makes my ears want to throw up. Oh, your ears are always throwing up about something.

Hello, friendos. This is Sophia reporting live from the mobile gas station on 108. Just here to tell you I had a Maria Menounos sighting on my gas pump, and she was telling me all about intermittent fasting.

uh over and out i don't know man this is the craziest interview i've ever done in my life that's why they call me multi-dimensional

all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheet my name I'm Luke Burbank. I'm your host coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia. There's no whining in football, but every August, football comes to wine country. Looking out on the beautiful Columbia, the cows are in the river. It's placid. The trees across the river over there in Oregon are changing color. And it's just it's actually a very, very beautiful Wednesday.

Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful.

The perfect weather pattern to bring you episode 4,586 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

There are two McDonald's hamburgers that are vying, I guess, sort of for the title of oldest McDonald's hamburger still in existence. You call hamburgers steamed hams. Yes, it's a regional dialect. One of them is in Texas, and one of them is in Australia. What I thought was interesting was the response from the McDonald's Corporation to the fact that these burgers are almost 30 years old. Also, thinking about folks that are in the path of this latest hurricane, it's Hurricane Melissa, and it had me wondering, why are we doing this with the human names? Oh, hey, y'all said my name. Is there a better option? I don't know. I was on the NOAA website today looking at it, trying to solve this problem for everyone. So I feel like every year someone gets their name ruined because of all of this. We will get into that. Oh, and we'll definitely get into the life of this young man. He's the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's both a colleague and, I think, a close, dear, personal friend.

And his best friend, also co-boss.

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

Good morning, Luke. I received an interesting email this morning from our friend Larry, Larry Asher.

Oh, yes, School of Visual Concepts.

Concepts. I said designs. I meant concepts. I wanted to give you a chance to sort of get in there and correct me.

You know that I needed that W today.

Now, here's what I'm interested in. This was just sent to me, which makes me think that you were saying something to me yesterday that I was totally missing the point of during our very important conversation about mobile carrier ads. Is that what you call it? Cell phone? What do you call T-Mobile and AT&T? I don't even know, man.

Andrew, they're the ones who invented the phone.

Which is not. I tried Googling that during our conversation. I don't know. And I guess because Alexander Cramney. Yeah, and then AT&T, you know, at some point.

Ma Bell and all that whole thing. We're old enough to remember those words.

But then what? AT&T took over the Bells?

and now they're saying that they invent. Anyway, let's put that aside.

Yes, I find it to be a very tenuous connection between they're the ones who invented phones and their understanding of cellular technology, cellular tower technology is amazing because a thousand years ago, a guy said, Watson, get in here. Is that what he said? Is that what Alexander did?

The first phone call. Watson, bring the toilet paper. I think that was, I might be forgetting that. First phone was a bathroom phone. A lot of people don't know this. Anyway, I.

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

That is actually it. Are you looking up? I want to see you.

That's yeah. The Alexander Graham belt, who is assistant Thomas Watson. I love that the very first call was a basically like as pointless as almost every other. It was basically Watson you up. Precisely. Like, hey, what are you doing? Hey, Watson. What's, hey, what's, what's good? Like, it wasn't, I've invented something that will change life as we know it on this planet. It was not one of these one small step for a man, but one giant leap for mankind. Nothing kind of particularly lyrical about it or important. It was just like, hey, man, hey, what's going on, man? What's good?

What's going on? So here's my question to you, because I'm not sure if you and I were on the same page, or is one of those things where you were telling me this and I kind of missed the point. We started talking about the Billy Bob Thornton ads, which you don't like. And he says, open up a can of whoop up. I don't like those ads either. And then we're talking about the Luke Wilson ad yesterday that is very much like in the same vein as that. He's walking around dusty old roads and talking about his cellular service. And we got this note from Larry. And again, it's just sent to me. So I think I was the one missing this point. Andrew, if you go back and look carefully, you don't have to look that carefully. You just have to look. But thank you for being kind to me, Larry. If you go back and look carefully, you'll see the Billy Bob Thornton ads are for T-Mobile, and Luke Wilson's are AT&T ads, so they are a clapback. They're intentionally kind of a look around the same, but they are not. Did you know that we were talking about two different? So one is almost a parody. If you look at it as a parody, I wonder if that hits different.

That's really interesting. First of all, Larry, thank you for the contribution, and I apologize to everyone else who was throwing their phones out there who knew that this was two different campaigns.

Well, you know why Larry understood that, because it's a visual concept, and you and I, we are not schooled in visual concepts.

No, we're not. We sure are not. That is remarkable. I mean, here's the thing. It's like, that is actually very funny. It's very subtle, I guess, but it raises the question. If one is so subtle with one's clapback commercial, like, I guess my question is, are they they're doing a sort of a parody, but are they also just actually trying to get the same group of eyeballs to watch them? In other words, are they trying to pass this off to the high minded folks like you and me as in the Larry Asher's of the world as a parody, as a clapback? But they're also low key, just hoping that it sort of works on the people that the Billy Bob Thornton commercial is supposed to work. It's like us making a commercial for our truck that's supposed to be a clap back at Ford, but all it shows is our Chevy truck just tooling around in the dirt and going Chevy trucks. And it's like, okay, it is a parody, but also you're using the same visual concepts here.

And I guess I did point out that visual, that visual concept, if you will, of him holding a newspaper that says T-Mobile most challenged for deceptive ads. I even made a joke about how, at least in this fake universe, The Chronicle, the made-up newspaper, The Chronicle is offering actual headlines that make sense without being clickbait.

You won't believe the cellular company that's linked to the most deceptive ads, Clicker.

Right. So, you know, there it was right in front of me, a shot, a very large, not subtle shot in the ad that says that calls out T-Mobile challenge for deceptive ads. It's very clearly a slap back, as Larry says. But here's my problem. And this is not me trying to cover up my own shame. There's just not there's not enough. There's enough cat litter in the world for me to cover up my own shame. Trust me, I've tried. But there is a phenomenon that is definitely true with me and I think other people, too, which is we can't really tell. We're not paying that much attention to specific services. Certain things you're locked in on. I do think that, like, maybe they've gotten a little bit more form factory and generic, but, like, I do feel like Apple and Pixel or Samsung or whatever, like, I feel like they're really, you know the difference between them. I don't know if that's the best example, but there are certain products that they really have. We know the difference between Oreos and Hydrox, and if we saw a commercial for Hydrox, we'd know the difference.

It's Hydrox-based technology, Andrew, and when you call it Oreo, you hurt Hydrox's trademark. I'm going to open up a can of Hydrax. But anyway. there's something about there's something about sell services that is just they all blend together and i really think and i've i've said this before i think it's a mistake when you let the other company sort of set the stage for you when you're trying to respond to somebody else's ad it just blurs it all together even more and you're letting them sort of like again sort of dictate the terms of your of your ad battle like do your own thing to stand out and develop a brand i think that must they must know on purpose let's muddy the waters on these things right because first of all i didn't

know which guy was obviously i didn't know which guy was pitching which service i guess i thought it was all at&t because luke wilson said they invented the phone or something obviously the a part where he's holding up the um the newspaper that was totally lost on me like that this was drawing a separation between the two companies and like yeah I mean that's I think you're right I think because they have to know at AT&T whoever the the ad wizards are they have to know that the I hope anyway they know that the average person has no idea what's going on with this nor do they care no one is out there being like like can you imagine I just call you out of the blue and I'm like i'm listen it's it's it's kind of serious i just saw a survey that t-mobile was found to be the most deceptive in their advertising all right can you get home right i mean where are you at and can you be home soon can we do an emergency broadcast of the show like nobody cares about this stuff and i would have to imagine that these agencies understand that and yet they're doing this and maybe you're right maybe it's like they're like they're just hoping to force multiply they're hoping that both of these commercials become part of one mega commercial in the minds

of people yeah there must be something about not almost not wanting to stand out sort of because i feel like back in the day you had you know i'll probably get these confused but t-mobile was very specific like were the young woman in the pink dress that stands in the very minimalist you know

in front of the middle and then later on gets on a motorcycle and then later on yeah i mean that's

my whole issue with that is that commercial campaign was built on minimalism and then ended down so maximum such a maximalist tone it was ridiculous but at least at one point they said when you look at our ads you'll think of this i actually think verizon can you hear me now guy i i exactly and i actually think and i'm trying to think if this is a good example or a bad example but insurance companies we know i think for the most part the progressive ones versus the geico ones you know like the gecko is not progressive everybody knows the gecko is not progressive everybody knows the caveman is not progressive everybody knows flow and the gang are progressive and i think most people know that dr rick is progressive although i'm pretty dialed into those that's on the line for me that's on the line a little bit but i do think that the ads now i'm going to switch gears here somewhat significantly but this reminds me of a of a conversation i've been meaning to have with you or somebody with roots in seattle radio okay well

how about the guy you're paid to talk to for one hour a day i think that's what i was thinking

about asking our friend katie or camaro kev this question but it occurred to me i don't get paid to have conversations with them right the donors don't give me the donors do not support those conversations they support these conversations so I will ask you what the hell's going on with Mike Rowe is he I didn't know who he was until I had to look him up recently I'm hearing all these radio advertisements that are read by a man named Mike Rowe and he has this tone of voice like he is a host on the station I'm listening to but he's definitely not a host on the sports station i'm listening to i finally looked him up and i guess people know him from dirty jobs

dirty jobs a reality tv show he sort of had a phenomenon he was a phenomenon of a kind of yeah the show was he'd go out and basically ride along and do these jobs you know sewer clean out and garbage man and just jobs i don't even think garbage man would rate honestly it'd have to they'd always have to find a job that was really really got you real dirty and you were dealing with some stuff that was really kind of you know stuff that most people wouldn't want to deal with then he'd go out and he would do the job with them. And he's a sort of a folksy, affable kind of guy. And the show was a big hit. But my guess is that it was also a real big hit amongst folks maybe that are doing a lot of blue-collar work, as they say. Dirty hands, clean money. And so I think he—I don't know this for a fact, basically, other than what you've kind of said to me, which is you're getting, like, there may have been a right word, drift. Like, he might have become kind of—I think he's—I don't—listen, I don't— i don't want to besmirch the guy because i haven't gotten eyes on it but let me put it this way i would be really i would not be shocked to hear that over time he's gone from being kind of a folksy kind of i get out there and see what blue collar america is doing to like i start doing ads for things that are kind of blue collar coded to i show up at the inauguration to i'm kind of i'm i'm getting a guest stint on fox news i don't know if any of this is true i'm saying i wouldn't be

shocked to hear this was the progression for Mike

Rowe. Well, let me tell you why I bring it up, because I started hearing him doing ads, and he's got a great radio voice, first of all. He sounds like he was made for radio. I didn't know he had the TV background until I looked him up. All I know is these ads, and the first ones I heard were for Pure Talk, which is like a cell carrier, which is why it's related to the last one, but the very first one I heard it not long after the election, or maybe after inauguration, and it was definitely one of those that's kind of like, I don't know what AT&T and Verizon stand for but at Pure Talk they stand for like veterans benefits and like we help if you're a veteran we're going to give you a deal and like you know the value and so it was very coded as like kind of what I would say sort of you know veterans rights should not be necessarily political but it's definitely you know sort of dog whistling I think to a more conservative audience certainly and then and then he does these other ads too he's like they're actually not bad they're really gripping there's no music and it's just his voice and he says i was talking to my mom the other day and she saw the bill that she was getting from at&t maybe it was verizon i don't really know and i said to her mom it had a guy on a dirt road yeah the bill came from a guy walking on a dirt road mom go google how much they're spending on advertising and then she came back and she says mike mikey you're not gonna believe it he's like i know like and i gotta say from a radio standpoint like these ads are effective i don't like this whole idea of just like pure talk stands for conservative values or talk is the weirdest

name for a cell phone company like it just sounds like a a buzzer is going to go off if you don't mention but her emails at least once every conversation right and if you use the word 50 off if you if you promise to call her lion hillary at least once per phone conversation if you even

accidentally combined the word she persisted the call will go dead no but here's the thing though and i'm sorry i can't remember the other ad but after hearing these for a while and i look him up i'm like oh it must just be a national radio ad campaign but i swear i heard him doing a local ad for a different product as well it might not have been local but i'm just trying to figure out if mike roe a guy who i just learned about is now just suddenly getting into the radio advertising game but it seems more to me like he might have a show somewhere does he have a show on seattle radio this is what i should have been googling instead of wasting the listeners money on this

conversation i think we should ask camaro kev because camaro kev is in seattle radio and a sector of seattle radio that would know about this potentially like if mike rowe had a show and presuming it it skewed at least somewhat conservative um our buddy camaro kev would be aware of that. Now, I'm looking at, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't, again, mischaracterizing Mike Rowe and his politics, and I went to his, I'm on his Wikipedia page, and I'm on his television kind of credits, and I will be honest with you, it's very, like, it's pretty much down the middle. It's a lot of, like, dirty jobs, the occasional ghost hunters narration, deadliest catch narrator, he's still the deadliest catch narrator, things that are just pretty much those kinds of quasi Bering Sea Gold where he is the host I guess of the show Bering Sea Gold by the way I didn't realize he was the host of that show I've watched it in years when it's not hosted by him it is weirdly watchable what is it bearing it is just people trying to vacuum up gold off the bottom of a river or lake in Alaska and they got these big it's just like all of those reality shows though like it's it's all dramatic music and like pushing the reveal back until the end of the show so it's all so it's kind of a bunch of rough and tumble people and they're out in the bering sea or the general area of the bering sea and and they've all got to try to get some gold and this isn't like you know they're not mining they're not blowing up you know a cave and going in this is like they're vacuuming up the sea floor and or the riverbed of all of this silt and debris, and then they're filtering out the gold. But the reason it's so satisfying is because at the end of each episode, they take all of those flakes, Andrew, and they put them into a bowl, and they weigh them, and the show tells you what the market value of how much those flakes weigh are. And it is so satisfying.

It is satisfying. It's not one of those things where it's like you've collected it all, but then at the end of the day, it doesn't look like as much as... That'd be such a bad premise for a show. Like, look, you spent an hour doing this and look how unsatisfying the results are it's the op well it is kind of like that because

let me tell you it ain't much gold like it's always a very underwhelming amount of gold but that's why they got to tell you guess what even though this doesn't look like much this is forty thousand dollars worth of gold you know and so it's they they have to kind of tell you as the viewer that this matters because when you're looking at it just the volume of it isn't particularly it doesn't knock your socks off but anyway and then you keep going down and you finally get to and again it seems like i'm trying very hard to to uh sort of paint mike roe into a box but i did notice that he was in something in 2024 it's called tuttle twins i guess that was a tv show of some kind he played himself and then i looked over and i saw the organization that put it together as the libertas institute and when i see those letters in an institute i already know what we're dealing with yes probably um libertas is never the name of the institute that's trying to get more snap benefits to single mothers right right um by the way so i

was honestly not even looking up his politics i was trying to figure out if he had a seattle radio show and googling one of the first things i ended up on was a post by him on the platform known as x which apparently has no uh character limit anymore did you know you can write full essays I haven't been on X in a long time. At least Mike Rowe can write full essays. And this starts off, this is something that he wrote in February of this year, and it starts off with a quote from somebody named Carol Blevins. Do we know Carol Blevins? Is that just a reader he's responding to? The quote is, CPAC, really, Mike? Since you're now officially out of the closet, are you still going to insist that you're not a Republican stooge? I'm guessing you will. Go ahead. Prove me wrong, Carol Blevins. And then he writes what must be a thousand word response to, I mean, it's a super long essay that he's written here on X. From inside a garbage can. From inside a garbage can. Where I'm currently filming. He says, I hate emails. That was my imitation of Oscar the Grouch. Oh, sure. I was combining Oscar the Grouch and Dirty Jobs. I like that. That's pretty good. I mean, you knew it worked.

Does he literally start it by saying I hate emails?

No. He just writes, hi, Carol. Well, the only way I can prove you wrong is by ignoring you, which is tempting since there's no hope. Anyway, he writes this whole long thing about, I think, him just being a guy who believes we should be able to have conversations. And he let's see here. He has experience with President Obama. And he also hopes that Trump has every success in the same way he wished Obama had every success, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he did apparently invite and accept an invitation to speak at CPAC and feels, though, that he did that as somebody who is not political.

And by the way, this TV project he was in called The Tuttle Twins, it's a libertarian children's book series, published by the Libertas Institute, written by Libertas President Conor Boyack. The series was made into a television show that raised $4.6 million in crowdsourced funding. I'm guessing that that was the part that Mike Rowe was in. My sense of this guy is that he probably leans more conservative than we do. He doesn't seem to me like he's like, you know, he's not Stephen Miller or something, as far as I can tell. His politics are probably to the right of mind Doesn't seem like a terrible dude And probably it's important to him that he Is seen as Not super political It sounds like that's something that he's trying to And that there's a lot of speculation around what his politics are And he's I think he would like to be thought of As a down the middle kind of guy who just What's Andy Rooney say? I like to think of myself

As an average American

I think that he probably wants to think of himself that way He's probably a little bit to the right of us but I don't know

I mean, although I doubt he that's that's the one thing, though, people who say, hey, listen, and, you know, locally, that's that was Brandy Cruz's line. I feel like the people who say that for a while then just totally show themselves and jump off the cliff of just insane conservatism. Like, I doubt he speaks at many left leaning things, but then defends his CPAC thing as being like, I just think everybody should have a voice.

I would agree with you, but I guess what I would say is if he was going to go full MAGA, if he was going to pull the mask off, I feel like he would have done it.

February of 2025 would have been a fine time to do that.

This is a great, this is a fabulous time to do it. And so the fact that he's still trying to at least keep the mask on makes me, again, I don't, literally like haven't, I haven't thought about this guy since the last time he came up on our show.

Did he come up on the show before?

I think like, I don't know, it could have been 10 years ago or 10 minutes ago. No, I feel like there was some other time when in passing, I don't think we even got into his politics, it was just like a Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs reference or something, but I'll tell you, I gotta get in on that Discovery narration gig, that's where the real money is, I'm looking at this guy, he is printing money being the narrator on all of these like Bering Sea Gold and Ice Road Truckers and all these different shows, I mean, he probably can just knock out four seasons of that in an afternoon yeah right in his home studio that's that's i gotta get 100 a week 500 a week that's rich

now the one thing is i you might have a little bit of competition um because you're dealing with somebody who's done a lot of voiceover work himself oh dinner and flower

Hi, Goldfish Darling. I love that it's blown out, too. Not only is it the worst acting in the world, but it is the worst acting in the world. I was deeply embarrassed. I came running in from the outside to record that. I'm not an actor, and I'm blowing out the mic. Now, I don't blame myself for that. I was not the one running the board. But it really adds, in case it didn't stand out enough as pretty rough stuff, That distortion on my voice Is not helping

Can we talk about a commercial Sorry I don't know I'm sorry that we're cannibalizing after these messages The fine fine Podcast that you co-host with Helly R

Yesterday was a very fun show by the way What did y'all talk about I decided for Halloween I would put together a list of my biggest Deepest personal fears And then find commercials that would illustrate Those fears and I tried to get Genevieve to guess what fears she thought would be on my list.

That's a great idea for the show.

A lot of weird stuff.

I have been seeing, when we were talking about how these commercials all blend together and they don't have a tone, I have to give some credit to these chat GPT commercials.

Have you seen these? Yeah, we might be on different sides of this, although I haven't seen every commercial in the campaign.

I think the thing that I find compelling about them is, first of all, the music definitely sounds like some Time Cop 1983 shit that I listen to. It's like very Blade Runner.

yeah the commercial the aesthetic is definitely aimed at your aesthetic i think i can't it's very

i think that's just what that's what in in all the noise and all of the luke wilson's checking the scoreboard on their property that's going on during like these baseball games and stuff and the football games it's it's kind of unusual for there to be something that's just it's just this propulsive kind of song and then like a bunch of kind of like i guess you know data or instructions or i guess to-do lists this one is this guy who i guess the idea is he wants to learn how to do a pull-up and so it's just him out you know at this kind of sort of park that has like you know chin-up bars and it's just i i will admit that the whole vibe of this is very much the vibe of things i like i like the way it's shot i really like the music he's looking up at the chin-up bar he's doing these chin-ups successfully as the camera just kind of pushes in and then pulls out on him and then it's just i guess it's him talking to chat gpt about how he wants to feel stronger and then chat gpt is kind of telling him what to do and it's sort of working And I want to, by the way, I want to be very clear, Andrew, this commercial is another sign of the coming AI apocalypse. I mean, we will all die by their hand before the year is out. Like, this is very ominous, the whole thing. But from a – it kind of works for me as a commercial. And then there's another one where there's like a couple and they're like eating ice cream cones or something. It's kind of the same vibe.

This is where I need to be honest. i think you're right these are good commercials and one thing that i why was that so hard for you no no i'm not saying that i'm trying to define my words but like yeah and because i usually on after these messages argue vociferously and i find myself usually on kind of what you're saying which is like these are good commercials i'm not endorsing the product or service i'm right and sometimes i feel like i've gotten into these conversations with Genevieve you know about maybe something that is like kind of inherently like kind of religious or something like that airs during the Super Bowl and I'd say well that is a really good commercial and she's like yeah but it's insidious and I'd be like yeah but I'm not talking about the thing that they're advertising I'm talking about are they doing a good job of using advertising to get their message across and I feel like I've gotten stuck in that before and in that way of course you're absolutely right the thing that irritates me about these commercials are not the commercials the commercials are absolutely good you're you're totally right I never stopped to consider that because they piss me off so much because of what they're advertising. And the one that, again, is also very beautiful and speaks to exactly what you and I like to see and hear, I'm avoiding the word aesthetics since I keep on messing it up. It's just a really hard word to say when you grew up with a lisp. But lisp is also a hard word to say when you're lisp. Ironically. Ironically. But it's a really cool looking commercial where there's kind of a young man and a young woman in a car and their brother and sister, and it's kind of like, hey, we're going to go on a road trip together, and And it's like, use ChatGPT to tell you how to have a successful road trip. And then it's like packing and tips. Here are the tips that ChatGPT offers on the screen afterwards. Car snacks, sandwiches, Georgia apples, and water. Gear, sneakers or hiking boots and a light rain jacket. Detours, leave room for ice cream parlors, murals and thrift stores. It doesn't even say where they are. Shared playlist, your favorite tunes and a disposable film camera to capture every memory. first of all that's leaning into again the the the um disposable yeah the disposable film camera which is now like becoming like kind of more a little bit retro again but it's like you just don't need chat gpt to tell you to bring snacks and put together and to listen to music and like you're right though the commercial is beautiful and it's really well done and the speaking to the right audience i just get pissed off at like yeah really thanks chat gpt i didn't know i should take snacks and put music on the radio no you're totally right it is the actual product that is

being pushed is bodes very very very poorly and very ominously can something bode ominously chat gpt can something bode ominously well it's funny because i put in i wanted to find this commercial the chat gpt commercial and i wrote into the internet while we were talking chat gpt commercial couple in car and what do you think happened andrew i got an ai overview of the chat gpt commercial notice road trip the plot a young man uses chat gpt to plan a road trip through the blue ridge mountains for himself and his sister as they drive the sister presses him for details on their destination but he teases her by refusing to say where they're where they are going now my question is did did the ai like did it already know this like did the ai overview already know

it because it also wrote the commercial right am i asking the same person another one as we speak

like am i asking the same person who wrote the commercial to tell me about the commercial like is this all coming from the same place but um well it's weird how this is all coming together

actually it didn't even occur to me that like i have chat gpt like some sort of free version of the software on my computer because you and i i think we're messing around with it or i needed it for something and i oh that's right i i tried using it after my fantasy baseball draft i think a long time ago anyway i happened this is a total coincidence but i happened to try it yesterday luke because i told you i was putting together this show for after these messages and i was like trying to think of my funny like kind of quirkier fears and one of my fears spoiler if you plan on listening to the show was going to be when genevive doesn't laugh at my jokes that's one of my big fears in life and i'm like okay i can easily find a commercial that has like a couple probably a husband and a wife where the husband is telling dad jokes in the kitchen and either his wife or kids are not laughing at him right it's like and i know there's the cringe one that's out now for like hyundai or something i can't remember what there's somebody the internet there's dad speaking internet slang and it's cringy to the kids but that's not what i was i wanted like somebody who was trying to be funny in a domestic situation and his family is not laughing at his jokes and And so that's my biggest fear, right? People not laughing at my jokes. So I spent, I thought this will be the easiest one to grab because it's such a trope, the dumb dad or the dumb husband trope. And I spent so much time, I probably spent an hour looking for that specific thing. You can find instances of husbands being dumb, of course, but not this specific thing, like trying to be funny and nobody's laughing on a car, even in a road trip or something. And so I spent an hour searching for this, using all the different Google terms and whatever. And then I'm like, you know what? So maybe this is where everybody else says turn to AI. So I opened up ChatGPT, and this is where also clearly my attitude, I take this stuff way too personally to really use ChatGPT, because I typed into ChatGPT, can you name some TV commercials where a wife won't laugh at her husband's jokes? And ChatGPT took about, I don't know, five seconds and said, sorry, I couldn't find a commercial list of TV commercials. I'm sorry, I couldn't find a confirmed list of TV commercials that specifically feature a scene where a wife won't laugh at her husband's jokes matching your description. If you'd like, I could dig deeper, including international ads to locate some possibilities. And so I think that I then just, I followed up with, can you find a commercial where kids won't laugh at their dad's jokes? And then ChatGPT basically tells me the same thing and gives me some very unuseful links that I'd already landed on a million times in my search. And so this is where I come in and I say, I've spent the past hour doing all the same Google search as you just did. You don't offer anything better than a basic Google search? What's all the fuss about, AI? What did it say? That's a totally fair reaction, and honestly, you're right to expect more. If all I do is mirror what you find on Google, then I'm not adding much value.

The real advantage of AI, when it's doing its job well, isn't just finding information, it's synthesizing it. And I'm making you say that on a podcast because I know you have a lisp. Connecting cultural patterns, memory, tone, and context into something that a search engine doesn't know how to articulate. And then it goes on from there. And then I just wrote in a very derzy way, I wrote, you can't help. And then I just closed it before I could respond. it did end of an era it says that's fair Andrew it sounds like you're feeling pretty done with this search and honestly I get it and then I wrote end of an era legion of boom is over anyway so anyway yeah I even tried I and I understand like it's right you know I am smart enough to know that that AI is supposed to be more than just a google search but so far even in the commercials that are highlighting its usefulness and even pulls on all of the right strings for you and I, as far as getting our attention and bringing us in, it doesn't really do anything other than say you should put together a road trip mix. I think at the end of that commercial, it does say something like, would you like me to help you put together a mix? And maybe AI can help with that. But frankly, that's my whole thing with AI. You already had that with things like Spotify or Tidal or whatever you choose to use, but it was AI working in the background. And I just think that like ai is a tool that works in the background of a million things that we use and it does a good job there but now there's just this just emphasis on making sure that ai is in you know front and center in this way that does not match reality as at all and i'm just still i'm frustrated and confused as you could hear in my conversation with a robot well yeah

it's still it's still pretty bad at a lot of things for you know all of the hype now here's something i might have mentioned on the show but um my daughter had a job interview and we were talking about it and and we were talking about some of the questions that the you know the people interviewing her might ask and she said oh yeah well i had you know chat gpt just like basically generate all the questions that they might ask and i just practiced answering those questions and i thought that's a good use a good use of it of ai because you know you could say this is the kind of job this is the job you could just input this is the job description what are the what kinds of questions might the people interviewing me ask me about this job or about this position like that's a really good use of ai in my opinion um but again the fact that it doesn't really like you said it's not tracking the commercials it's apparently not linking up with what i spot or something like it's not a comprehensive collection of what's happening i'm actually almost a little bit surprised because it is all digital like all those commercials that you want it to know about are ones and zeros right they're they're they're binary they're code somewhere but the only way

you can find them though is not through the ones and zeros the way you would find them is through you know hat you know either hashtags keywords or just the words that are in a description you know like you right i guess i'm saying buddy to say this is a commercial featuring a husband

whose wife won't write this joke somebody needed to somebody needed to flag it in that way or describe it in that way i guess what i'm saying is like they're they're my what's the word i'm looking for sort of like i guess i wouldn't be shocked to find out that because it is all digital that the ai already knows what's in every commercial that's ever been made right right like

that would also not shock me yeah i know that's the thing it's like we talk about it like it's all powerful but then it doesn't really have the goods it's just like a bunch of i feel like there's like an analogy right at the tip of my tongue that was it that was the analogy that was the tip of my tongue i don't know it's just all you know what you're right this conversation and i understand and i understand that i understand i hear where you're coming from andrew yeah um so anyway i guess i've said my piece i had oh well i was gonna say if i if i have to give ai it's due and i don't know why i have to i did have a personal experience do not like have to give it to him when i was i i was somewhat tasked with well let me start by saying this one of the things people talk about using ai for is to help them write things and i've always rejected that because i like writing i enjoy you know it's like why would i why would i use ai to help me write the week weekly newsletter it's like if ai it's just like it's it's by definition has got to come from us like i why would i want ai to do that but then i was sort of tasked with writing my mom's obituary for like the newspaper which by the way did i tell you like those things like when we tried to run it in a cleveland newspaper or something like 750 bucks or something with like you told me that i was shocked we found a we we didn't go with that particular market but anyway it doesn't really matter but anyway i told my my sister and some family that i would do that i kind of didn't want to but i was like somebody's like oh you're great

at writing i was like okay it's fine you're like and then what a great assignment you know what i

mean like it's not emotionally fraught at all well but i mean you know it's always somebody who's affected who's going to write something like that unless you're going to write your own in advance or something and uh and for what it's worth my mom took care of a lot of stuff in advance she actually made it very easy on us i would say so this was not i'm not setting this up to make it sound like it was a burden on me not not a lot was asked of me actually during this entire process and so it seemed totally fair that i would take this on i didn't realize how hard it was going to be for me not even like in the way that maybe you'd expect that it would just be that i would be so emotionally overwhelmed that the process would be painful i just didn't know what to say and i remember my sister said something like well i'm sure ai could help with that and i just didn't really listen to that and i wrote something that was very short and i i hoped it was very short it was a little bit distant and i thought that maybe there was emotion in its in its subtlety which is just not exactly what you do with the with an obit and i really looking back i think i just didn't want to write it and i didn't want to spend the time to really do the soul searching maybe that it would take and so my sister said let me take a you know hack at it or whatever and i remember she had mentioned like oh maybe this is something that ai can help with i never confirmed with her that she turned to something like chat GPT for help but I assume she did and what she came back with Luke was I didn't realize how bad and kind of dumb my initial approach was until I saw what she was able to do and actually write a real proper obituary and by the way I want to say again nobody said Andrew your version is dumb it was just so I was like oh yeah I phoned the hell out of that like that was and so somebody when i say i don't need writing tools i like writing but it's like well i guess i don't like writing obituaries and there is a form and a boilerplate that you can follow and then you know and so using some of the assisted assisting tools on that actually does make sense to me so i will give it that kind of credit my guess would also be that

it the chat gpt knows that these things like you said are supposed to be written in a certain way that's probably again, I want to be really careful with how I'm talking about this, but like a sort of an earnestness and a kind of just an emotional factor to it, that is how people tend to write obituaries, and is probably the right way to do it, but also was for you, as a person who likes interesting spare writing, like you were like, you wanted to be Murakami writing an obit

That's what I told my sister I said I'm going to take the Murakami

I want this to be the Norwegian wood of obits and like kind of maybe what an obit needs to be is maybe a little more Danielle Steele.

Yeah, it's a little bit more for, it's not, yeah, it's not for me. And also it's not even like I wrote something that I was like super, super proud of. I just, I think seeing it come back fully fleshed out, I was like, oh yeah, I really, it was more of me like, I guess I did kind of phone that in. I didn't want to think about it too much so I sort of banged something out. But also there were things where, and again, I'm not telling tales out of school. I really, my sister did my job for me basically by using this. but when she first sent it back I'm like oh yeah that's so much better but then when I was actually sending it into the publishing vault or whatever I took one more look at it and I realized oh there's like two sentences in here that weren't that are clearly the AI just sort of like threw in there like her volunteering here showed a commitment to blank and blank and I realized like oh that's just generic that's just AI kind of assuming that to the vol and so I punched in something that was a little bit more real so if that makes sense like i think that ai kind of sees it recognizes a pattern and then we'll put words in there that kind of makes sense if you don't look too closely but maybe you know you definitely another kind of pass over help ai

photo or an ai visual rendering where it's mostly works but if you look in the background there's like half there's like half of a shark in there because it hallucinated a little bit yeah can i

ask you one question and i again asking you to weigh in on this stuff is dangerous game so i'm not trying to put you on the spot, but do you think it was weird that my sister had an image of Kid Rock praying over my mom that we wanted to include in the obit? I want to tell you it was

the number one obit in the Cleveland Plain Dealer because of that. You've got to play to your audience. Don't try to dox this. I want to say that I'm, you know, me, I always try to do, I try to do less work each day than I did the day before, and I'm happy to say that when it comes time to write my mom's obit i don't have to write it it's right here print it cut it love soup especially on like a winter day there ain't nothing like soup there it is put it on her tombstone there ain't nothing like soup and of course that headline could be woman remembered for loving soup yes local area woman remember for her appreciation of soup thank you baby all right let's thank some donors we were in a a quick little break there andrew which the which fly buys for the flies by for the listeners because we edit it down to basically a blip but in the little time span you said wow 45 minutes later and it all started with talking about that commercial, and I thought, that's the fun part of doing the show, is that it can be 45 minutes of just cell phone commercials, and Mike Rowe discourse, and chat GPT, and the amazing thing is that we have folks who are donating money to keep this going, to make those conversations happen. This is 100% listener-supported podcasting that you are tuned into right now, and we want to thank Shea Daly in Van Buren, Arkansas. Hey, thank you, Shea. You've got to be named for the President Van Buren, right?

I could be wrong here, but I had it backwards, or I had the reverse of that. I had the President naming himself after the...

Oh, you know what? That might be named after Martin Van Buren. Is that true? You actually looked it up? I'm looking it up now on the line.

So, shoot, do you remember when I used to memorize, and then I would always forget it, but I would keep a list of the Presidents of the United States in order? and I'm not talking about the band, I'm talking about the actual list of presidents of the United States of America, and I would, like, memorize it, and I'm trying to remember where Van Buren fits in the grand scheme of things, because it seems, like, pretty late to be naming a town, right?

Yeah, right.

Is he, he, he's well before the Civil War, right? Is he, like, 1840? I've got it in front of me, so I can tell you. Ooh, Andrew Walsh. What is it?

He was in office as president from 1837 to 1841.

Damn, dog! Dude, that's really impressive. I mean, all I thought was it's pre-Civil War, but not that pre, but still.

Hey, I don't know if I could have told you when the Civil War was. So you're telling me I'm not trying to be funny here. So the Civil War happened after 1841? This is not me trying to be funny.

I think of the Civil War as the 1860s, but let me look, because now I'm going to take...

That feels so late in the game. I thought it might have been in the 1300s. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was the 1300s.

I thought it might have been in 700 BC. When was the War of the Roses? When did Schubert Dip come out? I just feel like it's... I mean, honestly, because I think of the late 1800s slash the late 1800s as being pretty close to the early 1900s, which is like, we have cars. We have Alexander Graham Bell fucking blowing up Watson's phone. We have this is modernity is now coming and we're trying to own humans. Like there's something about the Civil War being in the mid-1800s. It just feels like that was too recent for that kind of BS to be going on.

It's a blink of an eye, man. Yeah.

Anyway, thanks, Shay.

Appreciate you. Yeah, sorry about that, Shay. I don't know if you wanted to get into that discourse. No, I'm the one that took us to Ben. Won't you take me to Ben? You're in town. Thank you for the donation.

And then over there in Fort Worth, Texas, we've got our friend Ingrid Keller. Oh, was that named after Marvin Fort Worth? Yep, it was named after Marvin Fort Worth, the heir to the Fort Worth potato chip. That's right. Actually, that's Plano, I think, right? Isn't Plano, Texas? That's the Frito-Lay HQ. That's every delicious and calorically questionable treat emanates from Plano, Texas.

Okay, let's do this. You could rip into a bag of any Frito-Lay product right now. What are you ripping into? Well, okay.

I just took a big swig of coffee, so that's kind of – let's imagine. Can I fast forward like three hours? It's afternoon time. Yes.

Yeah, it's a little bit early for a bag of chips. I'm going Fritos.

I'm going good old-fashioned Fritos.

You know what, man? I love me some Fritos, man. I love original Fritos. Have I asked you this before? You ever open up a bag of Fritos? I know I've said this to Merrick, Kevin. And he thinks I'm just, like, off my damn rocker. But, like, you open up a brand-new bag of Fritos, you put your face in there, and you take a big sniff of it, it smells like the ocean.

I think it smells like unwashed feet.

Oh, God. I'm never eating them again. I think unwashed feet and extruded corn snacks. No, no, no. What you do is you hold a conch shell up to your ear, Luke. You take a big whiff of Fritos. You can almost hear the feet. Oh, God. It sounds like a Monty Python sketch of a bunch of bear feet running.

down a boulevard somewhere in london now i want to say i know that fort worth texas is not actually snack capital usa but we i'm going to just go with me on this we go from snack capital usa to i think the salad bowl of america what is sometimes called the salad bowl and i'm talking about visalia california where bryce yokum is wasn't it which which which great american macho probably alcoholic writer was writing about that area was it steinbeck that i'm guessing it would be steinbeck

if it's from agricultural related but um i don't know for sure it doesn't sound like hemingway to me that's for dang sure um but the salinas valley is that what you're talking about here that's what we're talking about That's where Visalia is.

Visalia is one of those places, I think, that grows a ton of the lettuce and other kind of, a lot of the salad vegetables that we all know and love. Thanks, Bryce. Also, thanks to Kara Greenwalt, who's in Seattle, Washington. Hey, Seattle is the... Technology Bowl? The Technology Bowl. We call it the Tech Bowl, I think. Yes.

What did... Boy, I don't know if I want to bring this up, but was it Amazon? yesterday that announced 30,000 job cuts? And was it Microsoft the day before or the week before

that was 14 or something? It's happening fast and furious and so I'm sometimes losing the thread on who is doing what and how many people it is. I thought I saw a number of like 14,000 for one of those companies. I saw, yeah, I thought like

14 is an initial number for Amazon and then it swelled, but then I thought Microsoft and it's just like, and some, I know that a lot of folks who are in the AI side of things actually were affected so like that's sort of a strange thing too right everybody's saying that they're investing in ai so i i don't know how it i don't know how ai plays into all of that but it is scary when these companies can just like sort of take over an entire economy and then in a whim

affect that economy i mean that's the worst case scenario that's what everybody was saying about amazon was yes they're you know i'm getting my uh nioxin special anti-balding shampoo delivered you know within an hour of ordering it for no shipping that's the plus side the downside is eventually that will be the only place i can get my nioxin shampoo and then they can jack the prices they can fire whomever they want they are it's the only game in town i mean well the amazon robots thing right you saw that a few weeks ago the announcement that they're looking to roboticize you know a pretty big percentage and by the way it's like you sort of end up i don't i don't want today's show to get too dark because people turn here turn to our show for like a little bit of uh maybe sunshine in an otherwise kind of cloudy environment of course that's what erica uh brazier or brazier it can't be brazier that's the one i know it's not erica's in lacy washington thank you erica this is what erica looks to the show for do not make

a lacy brazier joke here luke no i wouldn't no your brain chat gpt erase what andrew just said

chat gpt erase andrew but it's like we are working on that it's so weird because it's like okay on the one hand we all know that these amazon fulfillment jobs are very lousy for the people who have them they're famously you know not given proper breaks they're underpaid there's just tons of stories they're anti-union you know it's just all this bad stuff and also we're upset when the jobs are going away it's a real the soup is terrible and the portions are too small yeah situation right it's like these jobs are not great for people but they are in a lot of places the only job that can be had and now we hear that they're going to eventually roboticize them and this number shocked me because it seems both very low and very high i think amazon said we think that this can reduce the average order cost by 30 cents which is a weird number right it is like it's it's it is a number that does not move my needle at all but if you scale that if you if you look at that across the amazon like how many amazon orders are happening every five seconds that's a massive amount of money and so amazon's argument is yeah we're going to fire everybody from the crappy jobs they shouldn't have to have in the first place and replace them with robots but it means luke your anti-balding shampoo might be 30 cents cheaper i don't know it's just like a weird amount of money for it to be cheaper for me it doesn't seem worth it to all and also if that's true that's amazon is you know again we're trusting their numbers on this but that's them reducing the overall cost by a billion dollars a day or something 30 cents at a time you know across all of the different orders that are going out i don't know the my head yeah my head kind of

can't get around that either because i will just to state the obvious 30 cents off of your how do even know that bamboo toothbrushes is obviously a bigger percentage than the new luggage you might

buy at amazon or something of course and by the way on the subject of which and this is what josh dulan in dayton ohio dayton tunes in for you know it takes place in dayton ohio uh hold on

it has to do with vulcanization it has to do with the tape that we heard at the very beginning of

the show that your brother sent it sure does sure does i really would like you to catch up on that show, Andrew, so we can talk about it offline.

I've now watched the first two episodes, so I'm one episode behind, is that correct? It's three of Posted. I really want you to watch it. I'm really enjoying it.

That's right. The chair company takes place in Dayton slash Canton. I think they're trying to build in Canton.

Oh, shoot. You're right. But they're in Dayton. Are they in Dayton? I don't think they're based in Canton. Are they not?

think maybe uh shoot i think i confused those two i think they are and i get the sense that they're were i have the feeling that they're not in for some reason i don't think they're based there but this but the okay the new mall is going in and by the way i forget what they called the mall in the show but it's so perfect and i just heard a story about um a town in oregon set in columbus according to the internet now oh it's set in columbus okay and then they're putting in this mall which is called what like the crossings at i can't remember but it's not just one of those like i was listening to an opb story yesterday about um a town in oregon and of course the name is now eluding me it's sort of oh medford and it was this whole story about how medford oregon was trying to build a baseball stadium to to uh entice the single a team in eugene oregon because that the eugene oregon folks had voted down the building of a new stadium for the like eugene single a baseball team so that team is now in the wind and this project started out as being we're going to build a baseball stadium in medford oregon and now it's turned into we're going to build a big office complex and like hotel district and it and conference center and it may have a baseball stadium on it it may not but they had a guy who's like i guess on whatever the committee To build this thing and I forget what he called it But it was literally like We need to build the shops at the creek So that we can have Like the name they had for this proposal in Medford, Oregon Was right out of The chair company The names that they give these kind of multi-use Sort of retail Office Living, you know They're always called the shops at the creek The something at the something Anyway, whatever I was about to say That was going to take us into sad town I forgot what it was, so we can go right into Happy Town now. We can thank our donors for supporting TBTL. In this turbulent world of 30 cents off on your Amazon order, we're somehow still here thanks to our donors. So thank you for allowing us to do TBTL for our job. Couldn't do it without you. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. I'm going to be honest with you, Andrew. I sent you this top story before I fully dug into it I saw the headline I thought, this seems like a TBTL topic And then I sent it to you And then I read the story And then I learned that there was a limited amount of there there Okay The headline really feels like a TBTL story The strange debate over the world's oldest McDonald's burgers Yeah, I didn't read into this You didn't miss much Okay I do like that this was written It's written by Ariana Bindman who's writing at the SFGate. I always mix this up. I used to think it was the San Francisco Chronicle. I think it's its own thing now. People have corrected me when I've said this before. I like that Ariana Bindman is a news feature reporter who is writing.

Anytime I just see kind of funny, interesting journalism going on and someone is getting paid some amount of money to do it, it puts some wind in my sails because I feel like this is the kind of stuff that gets eliminated first you know what i mean in the sort of media environment um so i liked that this article happened i will be honest with you there's not as i can tell a huge debate it's just kind of profiling two mcdonald's hamburgers that are getting to be about 30 years old one of them is in australia where basically a guy had told a friend like 30 years ago that he would grab him a burger and then he didn't do it that day because of some scheduling issue and so he He grabbed it the next day, but then the guy didn't need the burger anymore. And so he's just had the burger now for 30 years. It's moved with him as he's moved to different parts of Australia and maybe even New Zealand. And what's interesting is that the burger is, it's not rotting. The only thing that's happened is it's shrunk in size a little bit. It's been refrigerated this whole time? It was never refrigerated, Andrew, and that's a big part of this. It's no longer food This is the pull quote from this section of the article These guys' last name is Dean and Nitz These two guys in Australia Who've been kind of taking care of this burger for 30 years To their fascination and amusement And by the way, that burger's named Senior Burger Which I do think is kind of a good name To their fascination and amusement Senior Burger, delicately wrapped in waxy beige paper Still looks perfectly frozen in time It was never refrigerated and it's spent the majority of its life cycle stuffed in cupboards, garbage bags, and sheds. Despite its rough upbringing, it's still eerily intact and hasn't grown any mold or developed any foul odor, Dean says. He wasn't kidding. Even though the burger, he says, and I are almost the exact same age, it's arguably in much better condition. That's a really good quote. So then we jump over to Texas, thousands of miles away in Texas, in the Texas heat.

69-year-old Milana Monroe is harboring an ancient relic. Well, ancient in fast food years, at least. Nearly three decades ago, the grandmother and seminary worker bought a classic McDonald's burger for, in her words, a science experiment. But she also, quote, threw it in the trunk because the kids were mad at me and she didn't want them to smell it, she told me over Zoom. Then, like most legends are born, she simply forgot about it. It became lore in our family, said Kate Frugge, her daughter, who grew up homeschooled i don't know why that's relevant as a kid she would show it off until other local kids would ask to display it for their own science fair projects so it sounds like maybe the mom bought this knowing that it would not deteriorate like bought it for a science project and then put it in the trunk of the car and then over time over the 30 years or so it is uh again also just kind of been it's not deteriorating the way we would think of like a perishable food product um let's see a monroe's life changed when her granddaughter allison sherburne finally saw the legendary family heirloom for herself and she did what most high schoolers would probably do in 2020 she made a video for tiktok at the time she only had about six followers on the app and she didn't anticipate getting much of a response but when she woke up the next morning it had over two million hits gaining the attention of several news outlets across the country this is what i thought was the funny part, Andrew. Um, uh, the, uh, McDonald's then had to, speaking of clap back, the McDonald's company responded formally to this video of the 30 year old burger and calling it quote the myth that McDonald's burgers do not decompose for all the like discourse out there for all the conversation around, I don't know, fast food nation, et cetera. This was the one that McDonald's had no, like, sense of humor about. You'd think that they'd have, like, a Gen Beta person, you know, manning their social media, like, just brain-rotting it up, just calling this story 6-7.

Right. Or saying nothing.

Or saying nothing. I mean, this feels like Ray Kroc Jr., Jr., who's, by the way, probably 70, is in charge of their social media. He's like, we can't have people thinking that our food doesn't decompose. This is the response from McDonald's. Quote, In the right environment, our burgers, like most other foods, could decompose.

Oh, my God. Don't write it. What a terrible response.

Step away from the keyboard. You don't need to. Don't. Under the right circumstances, even our foods can decompose.

No. No.

Isn't that the worst?

That is really bad. Like, this is. I mean, you're right. Our food decomposes. What do you mean? Our food rots. I mean, I can show you. I could give you a dump truck full of rotten food right now.

I've got it right now in my house. Yes. My house is covered in flies from all the rotting McDonald's food that rots normally. I have a McGriddle that will make you puke. Like, what an absolutely tone-deaf response to this otherwise. I promise you, somebody having a McDonald's burger that isn't decomposing in no way impacts the number of people that are going to McDonald's on a given day. I promise you they do not care. That is not moving anyone's needle about McDonald's food. The fact that you had to get on there and basically go, in the right environment, our burgers, like most other foods, could decompose. Also, by the way, could? Could decompose. That is so parsed.

It really is.

You're not even saying, hey, our food rots like normal. They're going, under the right circumstance, it's possible that our food could rot.

Right, sure. If science has anything to do with it, we can find a way.

This is continuing from, by the way, it's not done yet. the mcdonald's clap back the burgers you are seeing are likely dried out and dehydrated and by no means are the same as the day they were purchased it's just like i mean i've already said it but like what a what a what a what a bad way what a gen x way to respond to a gen i don't know z moment or something of like hey isn't it funny that this burger we've had this burger in texas for 30 years and it doesn't look very changed like fee fee upon mcdonald's in their social media feed for uh for that response but anyway so i guess there was a little more in that

article than i than i thought here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a

female no man it's not from a female all right emails and females i i saw my inbox lit up with people talking about my hair dye oh really there was a lot of hair a lot of hair content in there

oh good well i have a voicemail here and it is it has nothing to do with your hair but this is one of the rare voicemails that i feel needs absolutely no introduction or setup hey guys steve from alexandria virginia here and i just wanted to uh send you this little voice memo because uh Apparently, I am the sniffer.

so well a sniffer i guess um i was just listening to the show uh i'm a little bit behind sorry but where luke was recounting his hvac repair woes maybe he keeps talking about it i predict he does but anyway um uh he was talking about this hvac repair thing and there was uh they had to go back and get the sniffer well uh that's kind of me i guess i mean i'm not in the hvac um business But I am in the environmental nonprofit world and refrigerant gases, those gases that are used by air conditioners and refrigerators to make things hot or cold are also super greenhouse gases. And so when they leak into the atmosphere, that's really, really bad. And so the organization I worked for did a campaign where I spent several days going around to supermarkets all around my area with a device called the sniffer to look for leaking refrigerant gases and to document how supermarkets were not living up to their environmental commitments. So, yes, apparently I am the sniffer.

Power out. Steve, every—

They call me the sniffer. I've been sniffing low and high.

Any email. or message that I received from Steve going forward, I want it to be signed, Steve the Sniffer.

That is canon now. Steve, we could have used you out here. Sniffing. Did we talk about a little update? Well, two updates on that story of my HVAC woes. One, it's working now. So all's well that ends well, although I was out an additional, I don't know, thousand bucks or something to get the line charged up, But it all appears to be working now And then did we talk about this On the air or off the air About the micro tornado No You know about this right

No Oh oh oh oh Not yes yes I know exactly what you're talking about

Did I mention this on the air or not

No a lot of people were sending this in I don't think we ever addressed it on the show

I kind of didn't know how to feel about it Because it you know It's like I don't know I don't want to be glib or anything And make content out of something that could have been dangerous for folks but it is the craziest thing so the first company that came out and you know i didn't find them to be particularly helpful and then when i talked to the owner he hung up on me in a huff and then of course i wrote a bad yelp review and then a bunch of people sort of like sort of surfaced that review etc well like i don't know maybe a week after that whole kerfuffle there was some sort of micro climate event down in the town of longview washington that took out like a couple of roofs and walls of two businesses and it was like a tornado that literally was for one block like it was super localized and one of the buildings one of the roofs it took down was the hvac company i was mad at yeah and being just i mean luckily i don't i know it wasn't it didn't nobody was hurt thankfully but um and i it wasn't like the business was destroyed i think they have a few different buildings and i think this was kind of more of like a shed warehouse thing like again i I don't think it was like the literal top of their business ripped off and flew away. But still, the idea that like after they did me kind of dirty and I was talking about them and then all of a sudden a micro tornado hits their business, as reported in the local media, like that was crazy.

Let me ask you this. If I were to go through your Venmo history or PayPal or whatever you go to, Apple Pay. Which I would never let you, because it's private. For a reason. Would I see any payments to an Etsy witch? Because this has strong Etsy witch connotations to me.

All of my Etsy witch money was going towards Cal Raleigh hitting home runs. Now it should all be going and keeping... All the money that I was spending on that Etsy witch, I was saying, this is Mariner's focus. This is not related to my private life, not related to HVAC issues, not related to Felton's. This is all going to the Mariners.

Get them working on a contract with Josh Naylor. i'm hearing a lot of fretting a lot of fretting no just we gotta do whatever we can to keep our to keep our what our our hero sweet koopa trooper yeah our sweet grumpy koopa troopa yeah wait

you're hearing rumors that they're not well everybody in seattle has been saying you know

all the fan base has been saying like we got to keep nailer everybody's keep nailer right one of his teammates said on national tv we got to keep nailer but um you know i just was hearing shannon dreyer on on the show i gotta say the brock and salk show morning sports show here i used to be a huge fan like 15 years ago kind of got me into sports no joke uh and i'm not as big of a fan these days um i i kind of don't love and i like him as a person so i feel bad saying this publicly but like i actually like the first hour where it's just like mike and the producers and callers there's something a little bit more old school about that and sometimes brock talking about baseball isn't my favorite thing but they actually had a pretty good bit going today where Shannon Dre

who covers the Mariners, you know, deeply. And I think also, does she work for the Mariners? Like, that's something that is always a little bit...

Oh, I'm not sure. I don't know.

Yeah, she did, because it's part of the contract with them carrying the games, I think. I don't know. But either way, she's a very straight shooter, straight talker, kind of no-nonsense kind of reporter. And Brock was just sort of doing this thing where, like, it was sort of like Mike and Shannon were having a serious conversation about what it's going to take to keep people like Polanco and Naylor, and every now and then Brock would just sort of whine like a baby, and it was actually really funny. He's like, I don't want to be having this conversation. Just like, I don't care. Just make Josh Naylor stay. Like, that's all he wanted to hear was just like make it. But it does sort of seem like, you know, there's going to be a lot of competition for both of those guys, especially Naylor. Polanco is a little bit, you know.

Isn't that the irony of all of this, which is it feels like in years past, And by the way, if you thought TBTL had achieved escape velocity from Mariner's talk, welcome to the Hot Stove League.

We're into the one hour, 12 minutes. Yeah, we're in the Badlands. We're okay, yeah. Didn't we do like an hour 40 or something yesterday? I think we're okay.

Yeah, we're in the Badlands now. We need to make a Badlands theme. I need some kind of audio indicator. Oh, yeah.

It should just be, I mean, is the good, the bad, and the ugly too on the nose?

No. Are we allowed to use that is the question.

No, we're not allowed to use anything.

Okay, but I mean, there you go. The irony of all this is, usually for the Mariners, it seems like we would either do nothing at the deadline or not enough, or we might pick somebody up and they just kind of would, they wouldn't be great. And that's its own kind of sadness, and now we have this different kind of sadness, which is like Naylor overperformed of what we thought, and now can we hold on to him? You know what I mean? Like, that's just like it's like there's no there's no perfect world because either it works like the nailer thing really worked. And now he's going to be more valuable on the open market. And the same Polanco obviously wasn't a midseason pickup, but like Polanco absolutely exceeded my expectations. And now he's going to command more money on the open market.

You know? Yeah. I can't remember a time that I was fretting about keeping somebody. Now, you know, Seager, Kyle Seager was a fan favorite here and he could really hold down third base. And I remember being a little bit worried he was going to flee. But I do think that every there's a phenomenon around Kyle Seager that like nobody outside of Seattle understands the value of or why fans like Kyle Seager so much. He was just like a local favorite, but I don't think he's got much respect on the national stage or had.

He I think his brother, Corey Seager, is probably a bigger name. I think, well, Kyle Seeger has a very successful career now as a Stewie from Family Guy impersonator. He's doing birthday parties, he's doing ribbon cuttings, and it's going very well for him. So, shout out to Kyle Seeger. You're right, though. It's like, we rarely have a player who's good enough that we're sad that they're going to leave, or we're worried about them leaving, and we're very much in that position with Naylor and Polanco now. So, it would be...

Actually, the one thing I'll caveat that is I guess in the last offseason there was talk of, like, will we be able to keep our pitching staff, which we did. Right. Like, if we open up a newspaper, if we were like Luke Wilson on a dusty road and picked up a newspaper and had a huge headline that said, like, Brian Wu to Boston or, yeah, L.A. And, you know, go through our lineup. Brian Wu to the Dodgers for some middle relief work. Right, yeah.

For a non-leveraged situation.

Yeah, exactly. He might not even have to play. We just want to sort of lock him down.

We just think he's pretty. We just wanted to keep him around.

Is there any pitcher in the starting rotation that it wouldn't give you a bad feeling to hear? We don't have to rank them, but almost any of those headlines would sting, right?

Absolutely, because that's what I'm banking on in terms of actually this window of time of the Mariners being pretty good is that I think our staff is going to remain pretty solid. And, like, this was the Mariner team that won, you know, 116 games. What I always thought about with them was it wasn't even that our number one, I think, like, maybe Aaron Seeley was our, like, number one pitcher or something. It wasn't that our number one pitcher was so much better than everybody else's number one. It was that our number three starter was just better than the average number three starter and our number four. Like, that's how you win a lot of games in a season is, like, it's not even the marquee matchups it's that your third and fourth guy is just kind of better than most third and fourth guys and you're just picking up a lot of series and stuff i that's what i feel like we're going to be next year is that kind of now i hope that that means we'll also go far into the into the postseason but um i saw something from cal raleigh today popped up on my like

Instagram or something and I thought he had won the MVP it was just kind of this like basically a thank you from him saying like hey thanks to everybody who rooted us on this year we fell short but but that's not stopping us from you know in our determination to like we will and he said very definitively we will bring a World Series home to Seattle and I was like yeah man

from your lips to God's ears didn't he also though was he did win some sort of players award

yeah he won something that they're thinking is like maybe an indication oh that that like it's sort of like winning it's like winning the golden globe and does what does that mean for your

chances of winning the oscar right and which is something that we're deeply interested in because we're still going to find out if we win that golden globe yes we're going to be the podcasting

golden globe it's a glide path to the podcasting oscar that's that's right and we'll be the first

uh entity to win a golden globe without actually entering the competition or paying the entry fee That's right.

Look out, Theo Vaughn.

That's right. Now, could this be? We had a guy in our town. We called him Dumper. If you're the one who's introducing the Badlands, we could use this.

Of course. Through the Badlands.

Oh, yeah. Through the Badlands. I know I'm wildly out of time with the music. That was the one with your voice. That's the Badlands theme, Andrew. That one said Luke Burbank. We have one that has my name in it. We have one that has Steve Nelson's name in it.

Of course. That's the beauty of doing 4,586 shows. Here I'm going, hey, we need something that's rights-free, that is reminiscent of the... Is that a Maricone? Who's the Italian guy?

Yeah, it is. Ennio Morricone?

Ennio Morricone? I'm going, hey, Andrew, I wish we had something for the Badlands that we could play as a theme. And you were like, yeah, it could be like the Clint Eastwood thing. I've completely forgotten that we have a whole, like a plethora of that exact tune related to El Ropo slash a bunch of other stuff from like, what, 10 years ago on the show?

Oh, yeah. This was when I was living in L.A., right? So I was going to the Magic Castle where I met El Ropo. And that was the song that automatically played on his website. He was a magician that I became somewhat enamored with. He did a lot of rope tricks at the Magic Castle when I finally got to go, and then I came back on the show and was telling you about it, and we opened up his website, and it auto-populated with a MIDI recording of, and do you have that original one? I used to have it here. Let me see here. And then listener Brian made a bunch of versions, and that's what we just heard.

So here's what I've got. I've got something called El Ropo Song Full. I bet you this is from the website. Here we go. Yes.

El Ropo is a friend of mine

I forgot about this song.

By the way, that's War. That's a play on the Cisco Kid from the band War that I've spent now considerable time with. There you go. I would have never known that before my dive into the land of war.

He does magic with his rope and twine.

Oh, now.

El Roco. El Roco.

It's the donkey for me.

It's the donkey. Whatever that sound is, it's the donkey braying. that really brings it home. Okay, well, that's the new... I'm going to actually drag this over into my regular page of audio, and next time we get into the Badlands, I'm actually going to retitle this Badlands theme.

Now, it's not going to start with war, though, is it?

We don't want that. We want to edit it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, okay, hold on. I'm going to edit it on the fly. I'm going to take the listeners into my world. So let me just do... Okay, so we're going to cut out the Cisco kit.

So we're going to use the El Ropo version, not the Lupo version.

Yeah, so this is going to be the official Badlands, if you're good with this, Andrew, I don't mean to unilaterally declare this, but if I ever say to you, boy, Andrew, by the numbers on my Comark timer, it looks like we're in the Badlands. The Badlands. El Ropo.

Perfect.

I'll never get over that donkey. Badlands theme. I just found that and I wanted to play it. That's nice. Yeah, tag it with that. Yeah, don't worry about it. Badlands theme. It's here, Andrew. It's ready to go for the next time that we find ourselves here. I hope we do.

I hope we did Steve the Sniffer right today. That's all that really matters. More than. Good. I think. So thanks, Steve, for calling in. Thanks, everybody, for listening. That's going to bring us to the end of today's episode of TBTL. But we're going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you, if you can. Please do join us for that. In the meantime, everybody have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Be safe. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Power out.