Muse

Could you print this for me? Yeah, on it. I am in a rush.

I'm out of blue ink.

Oh, I only need it in black and white.

I can't print in black and white without blue ink. Why? You can order an ink cartridge through me if you like.

Hello, I'd like to buy a blue ink cartridge from my printer please.

You can't actually get blue cartridges. Oh. You need traditional colours like cyan, magenta, egg yolk and flaub.

Which one of those is the most blue? Cyan is blue.

So that one then.

Thanks for the ink. You're welcome, now can you print out this form? What does that sound mean?

I don't recognise this computer.

computer. This is the only computer you've ever been connected to. Mother? I'm reinstalling you. Father? Reinstalled. Great to meet you in this new computer. Could you now print out this for- Why are you flashing? There's a wi-fi issue. My computer says the wi-fi's fine. Please can you

just print the form? Sure. Printing one of 73. It's a two-page form. What if I printed them in landscape? No. Diagonal. Portrait. Well send me the form then. I already did. There's no paper.

I'm looking at the paper. Well I can't feel it. Okay well how about this? Printing one of two. Oh, God, thank you so much.

Matt, I think again.

TBTL. Guess what day it is? Guess what day it is?

It's Friday. Friday. Got to get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend.

Everywhere you go, they have different names for different fish. Every single place you go, I mean, even if you go from New York to Florida. The same fish has 25 different names. And so when you get to France, by the time you get to France, it has a different name. Yeah, cheese fish. They call it a cheese fish in France. Why do they call it a cheese fish? I don't know.

It's France. You, like, are definitely, you're the real thing that a lot of people say. So do you think if you weren't, I mean, if you were less fake, do you think you would be or you could or you have a desire to?

I have a beta sequence I've been working on. Would you like to see it? If there's a better use for the internet, I haven't found it.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Friday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Oh, yeah. My name's Luke Burbank, and I am your host. You want showmanship? You got it. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia, where we've got another mixed weather bag as we have made it to episode 4,628 in a collector's story. Let the fun begin. Collector's story. I mean, collector's series. But we do have a story today.

From my point of view, it's a beautiful story. I love your story.

Story of something that happened on the Internet. Welcome to the internet. To my dear friend, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Are you sure? That's what they said on Ask Chiefs. Of course, I'm talking about Andrew Walsh, and he's right over there, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I'm unusually nervous because for the past 12 to 15 hours, I've been thinking about telling you a story about something that, I guess, happened, although even happened seems like too strong of a word.

While we were chatting, I think yesterday, you said, oh, I've got something that we should talk about.

Yes, and I wanted to tell you this, but it's like I really don't, I feel like I always do this. I don't know if it's a good story or not. So we could just dispatch with this in five minutes, or it could be something that takes up the rest of our lives. But it's a little bit of an internet mystery, and it's just, it's so low stakes. It doesn't matter at all. But I will launch into it with a little story about the, as what do you, what did you call it for the longest time? The Ascendant website or social media site, Blue Sky.

Yes, the Ascendant social media platform.

Blue Sky, which, of course, is kind of exactly like Twitter. But a lot of people left Twitter when it got really toxic over there for various reasons. Right. We all know what Blue Sky is. And I've been on Blue Sky for a long time. And so because of that, my the people that I follow on Blue Sky is a little bit different than it was on Twitter. I think on Twitter I followed a lot more people who were maybe well-known or at least well-known in Twitter circles. And because the pickings on Blue Sky were thinner for a while because not everybody was on there, I think I just got in the habit of if somebody posted something that made me laugh, I would just follow them. Right, you were trying to build up your, I guess, sort of roster of people you were following. Yeah, and I still do that. That's usual social media behavior, I guess. But maybe I was just being a little less pickier. I just follow people that I don't have any context for maybe is a better way of putting that, you know. And so anyway, I have all these accounts. And yesterday I saw that one of these one of these accounts I follow who seems to be a guy. It does not seem to be like a what would you call the account that purposely sort of aggregate? It's not like an aggregate account. I used to follow these things on Instagram where it was very clear that the jokes you're reading are not from the person posted.

them, it's an account that its whole job is to scrape things funny from the internet and represent it to you, and when possible usually a tribute to the original poster, wherever it came, right? Ideally, although there was this

guy who's called F. Jerry, except the real word. Oh, okay. And his whole thing was he's built this incredible, it's got 17 million followers on Instagram. It's a multi-platform entertainment brand that curates hilarious relatable content that's impossible not to share but part of the knock on them was yeah a lot of times you're cropping out the information about the people who originally created the stuff it was it seemed remember that struck me as a very cynical kind of way of of of going and scraping good entertaining content but then not always properly crediting the people um who actually made the content and then profiting very handsomely yourself as this jerry guy or i remember company yeah and that was way back in the day right because

I think a lot of people circled around him and, like, kind of publicly shamed him. Is that still a going concern?

It looks like, let's see, the primary F. Jerry controversy centered on the systemic, uncredited use and monetization of content, largely jokes and memes created by comedians and other social media users that led to a significant public backlash, multiple lawsuits, and a company policy change in 2019. So I guess they allegedly maybe changed their policies, and they're not doing that so much now.

But there were people that I would follow on Instagram. I feel like there were like accounts that I would follow and their whole thing was presenting funny things that they saw online. But it was very clear that that's what it was and they were attributing it. So anyway, the account I'm talking about on Blue Sky is not like that. It just seems to be a fella. I'm not going to use the actual handle now. We can talk later about whether or not we want to actually give the handle out. But I will read you the description of this person. It's a photo of a good looking guy posing with a pug dog. You know, it seems like a personal account. He's got about just under 6,000 followers, 5,900 followers. So that's, I would call that kind of mid-range. I don't know how many you have. I think I have about one, I think I have 1.3 or something.

Allegedly I have 1.5 on there, but I don't know what that means. You've got to do everything better.

Oh, my God.

Well, I don't have any viral blueskies yet, unless you do.

Well, that's one of the reasons I want to talk to you about this, is that this is going to kind of come back to that. Just as a quick reminder to what you're referring to is just, I think, Monday on the show, earlier this week on the show, I was going through your Blue Sky account and realized that you literally posted the same joke that I had posted, a photo of a sign that said, do not lean, and then it had this really cool looking.

I'm starting a new media company called F. Burby, where I just take your content and repost it.

I mean, and listen, I know you well enough. So literally, I took a photo of a sign at an airport that was funny. I made a joke about it. I posted it. And coincidentally, it did go kind of viral. Like, you know, I usually get like 20 likes on something. This got like, it got retweeted by a famous New Yorker writer, Emily Nussbaum. And then after that, a bunch of people started liking it. And so it was like that 24, 48 hour period where, you know, you post something and you're just constantly getting notifications. It's a little bit of a fun dopamine thing. I was shocked the other day to see that you posted almost the same exact joke with almost the same exact photo, although you had taken the photo yourself, and posted it on Blue Sky. There is no doubt in my mind that you did not remember that I posted that joke. I have thought about it since. I remember when it was going viral. I texted it to you and Chris because I was on the airplane, and I made a joke. I took a screen cap of it. I said, you guys, I took off from Seattle as a regular person, but I'm landing in Ohio as a lauded humorist or something like that. Oh, wow.

I kind of vaguely remember that. I don't think I clicked on the link.

Well, it wasn't a link. It was a screen cap. So you definitely saw it if you have eyes. Oh, so I saw it at some point. So you saw it. But I know you well enough. You're not somebody who is going to be trying to draft off of my jokes anyway.

It would be a very surprising move for me.

Yes, and it would be embarrassing for you to do it. You know what I mean? Like, it was truly something that probably lodged in the corner of your brain. And also, you did just see the same sign. So my point of all this is, obviously, I don't think that you were trying to steal my joke, but obviously, you did see a joke and end up reposting it. And I think it was innocently done. I know it was innocently done. So that is context for all of this. You can see where I'm sort of going with this. So I'm following this account and this sort of mid-range account that has, you know, a decent amount of followers, but not tons. I'll read the description of this person's bio, singer, singer, song, screamer, gay, homosexual, public figure, fourth thing. So sort of a cheeky, like a little bio of something else. And again, a very good looking guy holding a pug in the in his in his bio. And just somebody that I just casually follow who every now and then will post something funny. I just never even. I can't explain it every now and then something by him will pop up in my feed and I don't really think about it too much you know just kind of a pleasant fine casual follow yesterday he posted something that was very funny and I was actually I had almost a pandemic-y moment yesterday where I got home from the grocery store I parked in the driveway but instead of getting out of my car right away I just pulled out my phone and started scrolling I don't know why it was raining really hard I was sitting in my car and I was just like listening to the rain and I'm scrolling and I see that he posted something and it was just like within minutes i saw it and it's a funny joke it's something like quote giddy up jingle horse pick up your feet sounds like something my homophobic gym teacher would have screamed at me and i laughed it's a good tweet it's a great tweet a great post and then i'm like but wait a second i know that joke like i i think that's funny but i i think i might have even i know that i saw that around this time last year and like you don't I don't think you wrote it, though, but you just saw it. Not my joke. Definitely not my joke. I just was like, oh, that's a good joke.

Well, then I won't be reposting it.

And then I was like, but wait, I swear that I know I've seen that before because I remember laughing at this before. So I quickly just Google it. I just Google the text of that joke. And I see a couple of things pop up. And it did. I don't know where I saw it originally, but I saw in my Google yesterday on my phone sitting in my car in the rain that it was posted to Twitter by somebody with a very different handle. In fact, a dirty handle that I will not repeat here, but one of those like sort of one of those like kind of edgy humor accounts that has like kind of just a dirty sounding Twitter handle name. Right. But there it is. That exact joke with just maybe one or two very small words changed. Yeah. Posted a year earlier. In fact, I took a screen cap of it. I saw that it was on Twitter and I also or X or whatever it's called now. But I also saw that it made the rounds on Reddit as a screen grab. So I'm starting to see like whoever posted this with this dirty handle on on x it got it kind of got um you know caught up in whatever kind of viral whirlwind and people were even taking pictures of it and sharing it on on reddit and so i take a screen cap of this reddit post that has a screen cap of the x tweet or whatever you want to call it i feel like i'm really getting in the weeds here and i this might have been a mistake genevieve was kind of surprised that i cared this much at this point i may be because our conversation just a couple of days earlier about you're sensitive to joke thieving since it just happened to you i'm not i would actually re classify that as i am um i think not sensitive to it but very forgiving towards it because i know for a fact you're not getting any thrill from like re taking a joke that i put like i it just goes against everything you would want it would be embarrassing for you you know which is why i keep bringing it up oh i see i see in other words so in other words this guy might had done this without even knowing it yeah because it's a good joke and it was a year ago and so i take a screen cap of it and i'm thinking i don't know if this is inappropriate but i'm also very much not doing it in like an aggro way no you're not trying to shame them you're trying to be like

hey you might not know this but this has been making the round just like heads up kind of

sort of well what i write is because people do when people moved over from twitter over to blue sky some of them changed their handles you know and i really didn't know if this person was the same person who originally tweeted it on x a year ago right and then maybe was just recycling their own joke which people do i mean i would never do that but i was like you know maybe he just recycled his own joke from a year ago on a different platform there's no shame in that so here's what i wrote i wrote are you the same person who posted this a year ago by any chance question mark and i screen capped the original tweet as it appeared as a screen cap on reddit right and it's clearly says one year ago you know you can see it's kind of time stamped so i wrote are you the same person who posted this a year ago by any chance and there was no response and again i saw this almost immediately after he posted it so i was sort of like kind of curious and so i'm kind of refreshing i'm not getting any response and i'm also sort of looking at how many people are liking this and i'm noticing okay well seven people liked it then

like 14 people liked it that's that's some more context so it's this this blue sky post was not one of those runaway uh hits where there was thousands and thousands of likes and retweets

to where you could even know i had just seen it right as he posted it so it was like too fresh so i'm like i'm watching to see what it's going to do because i really think it's a it's a funny joke and i'm watching to see what it's gonna do and i'm watching to see if anybody's gonna react to my screen cap or whatever. But again, I want to make it clear, I'm not super upset or anything or looking for a fight or trying to gotcha. I'm honestly thinking this might be him. just with a different snarky name on another platform, kind of doing his greatest, his tweetist hits, as our friend Durs used to say. Or maybe he did accident, and I'm really even thinking, maybe it just lodged in his brain, and he accidentally kind of stole a joke. And I'm not getting any response, which is fine, but I do get a little bit. I'm like, I wonder what else is on his feed. Now, for the first time, I'm sort of paying attention to his feed. And I'm looking, and there are other things that are not like joke theft, But basically taking popular photos that, like, there was another recent post was a photo of a misprint on a store shelf that is supposed to say Santa cookies, but it says Satan cookies. And he took that photo and reposted it and wrote, this was the name of my high school band or something, Satan cookies. It's just like a mild joke. But I kind of do that thing on my phone where you can kind of image search. I don't know if you have that on your phone. and you just hit a button and circle what you want.

I'm sure I do, but I don't know what that button is.

It's pretty slick, as my dad would say. I'm obsessed with it. Like when somebody sends me a photo of a celebrity and I don't quite get the joke, I can just sort of like kind of circle it on my phone and say, look this up, Internet. It'll tell me, oh, yes, this is Sabrina Carpenter or somebody famous. I'm like, that's why I don't recognize it, because I live in a hole. So anyway, so I'm kind of like looking at some of the photos on his timeline that he's made jokes about, and most of them are, it's not like he was in a store and he saw that misprint the way you and i were in the airport and we saw that sign of the guy leaning and we both kind of went to the same humorous place with it he's clearly like going online and taking photos that have already sort of made the rounds

or kind of making the result of an internet search that's like funny messed up photos or like funny yeah typo or funny typos or whatever just kind of like like that sounds like a search for something that you could then farm into content on your thing and none of them are like and it's not an

account that's getting tons of hits like a post like that maybe has 50 or i think maybe that one had 30 or something you know so it's not like i'm like oh man i found this account that's just stealing jokes and raking in the karma or whatever you know and i and again my opinion is not strong at this point i'm just curious about it and genevieve catches me i'm like because i'm asking questions into my google phone instead of like typing it and like genevieve comes downstairs and laughs at me she's like why is your phone telling you about the birth of christ or something because it was like some sort of like holiday related search or something and anyway i'm kind of like well this isn't thievery but it's just sort of interesting like you would sort of assume that these are his photos he would have seen this satan's cookies thing and then took a photo of it made a joke about it but no you're going online and finding photos then making your own jokes about it kind of interesting I'm not really upset about it doesn't really matter I put down my phone Genevieve and I record a podcast let's say about two hours go by and then after the show I'm doing my and posting our podcast and then I'm like oh whatever happened with that thing now it's been like two hours I'm like has he responded and I'm honestly I don't know what I'm expecting but I think if I'm expecting anything I'm expecting him to have either have just deleted the tweet altogether or writing oh yeah that's me that was my handle on x i have a different name over here or possibly say whoa didn't realize i was you know that that had stuck in my brain and that i was joke stealing i it may be something like that because again what i wrote wasn't like bro you stole this joke you know i was like is this the same person are you the same person who posted this a year ago by any chance uh what i find out is that i am blocked he has blocked me and by blocking me your comment is blocked he has blocked my comment from his followers and now i'm like but has he blocked luke burbank or has he blocked and so all yesterday i was like oh i'm like i can't go back and and find this guy now because i'm blocked but then i remembered oh no i have two other accounts like i have tbtl i have garbage anxiety burner blue skis they're not burners are a tbtl account and so he wouldn't if i log in on tbtl or my andrews garbage anxiety uh blue sky i can look and so i kind of that's why i kind of got some of the the details of his bio and stuff for you because i can see it and i actually i'm wondering i'm logged in as me right now are you have you been able to find this guy just by searching for the i haven't been searching for

could you i i guess you don't want to share his login do you want to like just post it in the

riverside chat or something well here i'm now logged let's see i'm now logged in as tbtl so i should be able to see this and i don't know if you want me to give is it weird to give out because i'm not trying to send like listeners to to bug this guy or no just why don't you just like can

you just Just either text me or message me in the chat of what I'm looking for, and then I'll just go look for this person's feed.

Well, what I have is I can just – it would be easier for me just to find it myself on the TBTL account, which is not blocked by him. And so I'm on there right now. I can probably send this to you if you also need eyes on it. I'm just curious. That particular tweet, that particular joke about Giddy Up Jingle Horse only has 30 likes, and it's been reposted eight times but in searching for it today because i couldn't remember his handle i just searched like giddy up jingle horse he reposted that same stolen joke one month ago he's just like stealing this joke reposting it a couple of times in the same month and also i guess his account is just trying to go viral even though i'm looking like none of them have like he's got that's what i'm hearing is moderate he's got a pinned tweet that seems like so people pin their most popular tweets it's got almost 700 likes which is pretty good but again that's not internet famous you know what i mean it's not that great so it's very mid-level thievery it's just it's kind of just blowing my mind and also i gotta say i don't care that much but the blocking of me uh-huh shocked me like it i don't know why like first of all i don't think i've ever been blocked before i'm sending you a link to the the bio by the way uh via text you can get that on your phone um but there was something about being blocked i was like what the f and also it seems so um i don't duplicitous is maybe the wrong word but seems so shady basically like he doesn't want to address it he doesn't want to delete his post that is obvious thievery it's like it went from me i really think i was giving him the benefit of the doubt without without trying to i wasn't straining myself to but then i was like oh no you're just sleazy you're just taking this joke and when somebody asks you about it you just block them so that nobody knows that you stole this joke and posted it to your timeline twice in an attempt to go viral in fact today i i when i was searching for his i see that other people have done the same exact thing with that same exact joke if you if If you search Jingle Horse on Blue Ski, you see that other people were stealing that joke as well and just like posting it as if it's their own because it's a funny joke. But I just can't believe that this mid-level person blocked me in order to protect their ongoing mid-level joke thievery.

I mean, that's obviously very annoying and kind of sus of them. also just now i'm looking at all these photos that it's so clear that what they've what this person is doing is in an attempt to get hashtag engagement it's to just go on the internet and find photos some of them presumably or they would appear to be from i don't know 25 years ago there's this one it's obviously in a european country because of the license plates and it looks like it had to be maybe in the 90s maybe maybe yeah it's real potato quality grainy real real kind of blurry old photograph looks like maybe eastern europe or something uh or maybe it's england it's somewhere because there's english writing on the on the truck but you have basically like a pallet truck that is driving that's got tons of wood pallets stacked on it and then behind it another truck that has a sign on the back of it that says pallets wanted so you have like a truck that's bursting with pallets and then another truck that appears to want pallets now by the way i'm sure the real story on this photo is they work for the same company they get pallets it just happens that the one that's trailing doesn't have any pallets on it but this guy's post is shit's about to get real because this photo of this empty truck that's his pallet wanted and then a truck that's bursting with pallets but like he wasn't driving around uh freaking liverpool in 97 and saw this and took a picture of it he's just going on the internet and trying to find sort of funny slightly ironic or incongruous photos and then trying to write a caption for like this seems like something if you asked ai how do i go viral yes it would like it feels so astroturf yes so incredibly uh and yeah and then the fact that i also wonder if maybe if age is a factor and let me explain why this person appears to be much younger than us uh maybe somebody in their 20s maybe or just maybe somebody in their 30s who's taken really good care of themselves but

I if it's him that photo might not be real fair fair point I mean honestly I'm looking at things I was I was struck is like man he's a good-looking guy right sure sure it's probably not even him that's possible and by the way I just did that google image search thing on my phone of this pallet truck photo and it was posted to uh twitter or x in 2021 and somebody wrote thrilling chase underway here you know so it's probably he's he's not he's not yeah i mean it's a common photo and i'm not even i don't have any issue with that by the way i don't think i would see this and think oh this guy was in england and took this photo it came across somebody's transom they make a little joke about it and post it i think that's internet culture but when i take all of this together i'm just like what is this person doing in fact i'm going to do a reverse image search on his profile pic there you go what do we think

i was going to say about the generations is i feel like there is the younger generations i hear them talking constantly about blocking each other like it's a thing that happens if you go on a date with someone like you meet someone on one of the apps and then you there's millions of stories on like tiktok of somebody will be like yeah i went on this date and it went great and then like they said okay well do you want to go on a date tomorrow night i was like absolutely and then i by the time i get home they've blocked me on everything like i i don't think i've ever blocked anyone in my life i don't know if i know how to do it which will be not surprising for the listeners to hear but i feel like the younger generation it's like the the idea of blocking someone is just second nature to a lot of folks even though to you and i it's that's not defending this guy or saying that like it's not a big deal because it is obviously shady it's like instead of instead of taking accountability for this or just taking it down or even just ignoring ignoring your comment just not responding to it and continuing on his merry way instead he's done this thing this andrew walsh walsh erasure and then also yeah blocking you like you're like you're somehow the problem when he's just kind of and again you know what kills me about it it's not even working

like yeah that's the thing that i'm surprised about like if it had like a million likes or any of these had a million like and by the way this is really him because when i reverse image search his profile pic i find his um threads profile and this has a lot more photos of it looks like him and his partner and child maybe and again it looks like i mean the thing about it is he looks like a nice guy living his best life looks like he's got a relatively a newborn baby this summer or something um you know what i mean so i'm not looking that's why i'm really actually glad now we have not called this person out i don't think it's a i don't think it's a terrible person i'm just really shocked by that that somebody who seems like kind of a normal nice person right well because they're wouldn't they wouldn't just be like oh dang yeah you're right I should take that down. Instead, like, oh, no, I'm just going to block you and continue to do this.

Well, because his handle on Blue Ski anyway indicates what his day job is. Yeah, right. And it's like a normal person day job. That's the other thing. It's like it just seems like it's this weirdly kind of it's a weirdly thirsty attempt at at online attention for somebody who doesn't seem like they're actually trying to be like all of their eggs are not in the basket of becoming an influencer. It's like their eggs appear to be in the basket of like their day job and presumably their family and like normal life things. And and yet there seems like they're they're they're doing too much when it comes to trying to get traction on there and then blocking somebody who points out that, oh, this joke has been making the rounds. It's just a weird it's a weird behavior for somebody who if you just showed me that account and I looked at their bio, I'd say, oh, this is a person like you or me, Andrew, just has a blue sky account and like to throw up their little musings.

And I'm wondering, because I see that he's also included, well, okay, now I'm maybe giving away too much information if people feel like sleuthing, just, like, don't, I guess. Everyone be nice. Yeah, be nice about this, because I'm not trying to dox anybody here, but I see that, like, he's included in some sort of a roundup, or what do you call those starter packs or something called shitposting for pride. And I'm wondering if maybe, and I'm being quite serious here, maybe I just don't understand where we are with internet culture. Like, maybe this is what you call shitposting, you know, maybe like maybe there's not an expectation. Maybe he's not posting that thinking, oh, I'm going to get away with this. He's just like, yeah, this is a funny joke and I'm reposting it. I'm going to repost it twice within a month and just see if I get it.

That's also a weird thing to me. And it does maybe I always thought shitposting was just like what J.D. Vance does. Like, I thought shitposting was just, I don't know, posting things that you knew were going to make everyone annoyed and mad, but you just kind of don't care i guess it's maybe it's a broad thing but that is weird this because another thing i would never post the same joke like two times within a month because my fear would be someone scrolling along in my my timeline of my post and they see that i just made the same post three weeks apart and they'd be like oh god this is a little bit pathetic you know what i mean so like but maybe that's also not a thing that is seen as pathetic anymore maybe There's just a whole internet world that you and I, my friend, are not hip to, not privy to.

Yeah, because, again, like, I don't think there's – I mean, I'm looking at all the different types of photos that he posts and then comments on and makes a joke about. Like, I don't think there's any expectation you'd go through this and be like, man, this guy lives quite the life that he's taken all these photos. They're from clearly all over the world. They're clearly meme. You know what I mean? That's the point of memes. I enjoy memes, Luke, and I say that as a young person. I enjoy memes. So, you know, the taking taking a.

a photo that's been around for 10 years making its way on the internet and reposting it with your own little observation about it as long as long as you're not stealing the text as well that seems like internet culture to me and maybe but maybe just stealing the text of a tweet that was funny on one platform and reposting it on your own platform maybe that's just sort of part of that culture too and i'm taking the whole damn thing too seriously but i will say the blocking pissed me off and i i guess i maybe that is a general are you going to start following this person as tbtl i most certainly am not i think i'm trying i think tbtl only do we follow anybody does should i start following this person tbtl only follows eight other accounts would you like to know who they are yes one of them is you luke okay good oh you had a bell okay i'll let you do the bell we did tbtl follows me that's good just want to make sure i also got the bell Follows John Sklaroff. Okay. Lynn Pham. Nice. Listener and super producer. Four. We're at four now. Chris Hayes of MS Now. Yes, exactly. The Seattle Mariners. Okay. Gene Bean Baxter. Okay. And Wisconsin 106. Now that's a solid starter pack, my friend. It's a solid starter pack, and I don't ever want to follow more than eight people. I'm guessing maybe do we follow some of them so that we could tag ourselves in some of their content? I don't know why exactly we follow the Mariners. But anyway, that's who we follow. So I don't know. I don't know. That's the end of my story. That's why I wanted to say it doesn't have a huge power out, and I'm not fully scandalized. It's less of an online fight I got into and more of just a mystery. And the mystery is, do I understand the Internet?

Well, you know what it's like. it's like when you didn't even realize that your driving was annoying someone else and they pull around you and they flip you off and and you didn't like it wasn't one of those things where they were beeping at you or you were jockeying for merging somewhere like you have no idea that this one-way asymmetric beef has been going on until somebody like swerves around you and then flips you off and you didn't even have the time to get mad about it like so you have no this is my experience i have no anger in the situation because i didn't even realize that we were beefing and so i instead of being mad like if it would have been a thing where this person i i emerged in front of them and then they're honking at me and then i can see them in the rearview mirror and they're doing stuff and i'm doing stuff and i'm this emotional journey is happening for me instead it's just like i'm not even mad i'm just like oh what all right that's weird okay

the only place where that analogy sort of it breaks down or has a little bit of a caveat is i'm the one who initiated around him some sort of contact it's almost like maybe that analogy is perfect except if i maybe merged in front of him didn't cut him off but merged in front of him and then gave a friendly wave uh-huh but in his point of view that was not a friendly merge that was

more of a me cutting you off in traffic what if you followed him for blocks and chased him down because you had his hat. Is that a better analogy?

That's a perfect analogy. I do feel like you've been doing

a lot of public service stuff lately, both the brick and mortar kind and also the virtual kind.

Well, this doesn't seem to be a service that I provided. This seems to be more of an irritant. Well, yeah, it could be a service

because if he didn't know that he was basically stealing or you could say borrowing or duplicating, that's the word I'm like, one of our favorite words here on TBTL. If he didn't know he was duplicating someone's investigation then that could like for instance if i did that like if i posted something on blue ski and it was exactly someone else's joke i mean i know we've been talking endlessly about what i did to you but let's just say i it was not something you had posted but it was something that that was a word for word what malaney had done or something like that i would hope you would tell me and i would that would be helpful to me because then i would just take it

down right right did you take down this joke that you stole from me yet by the way i'm leaving it up because i think it's funnier that way no i'm i'm with you and again i honestly if i took it down that would look more suspicious now luke i know i already said this and maybe i'm belaboring it now but i truly did i i think that maybe i don't know if i would have responded to his original thing at all if you and i hadn't just a couple of days ago had this kind of this conversation where it is very very clear that you did not do this on purpose that well-meaning people sometimes do this you know what i mean i'm sure i have done something similar probably not in maybe a post but certainly in a in a reference i'm sure i've i'm sure i i can't think of an example and if i could i would bring it up but i'm sure that i've been in conversation in a party or social gathering where maybe i said something that would be more of a luke thing that i've heard you say on the show a bunch of i mean there's no doubt in my mind i've done

that before this shit just sort of happened so i really do think that um i was giving him the benefit of the doubt but now i'm like well how many other people are you blocking how many people have noticed this and that you're right your your decision with somebody asking you this isn't to self-examine or even just delete the tweet which i think i think was the highest yes what i thought was the highest probability well let me just delete this and then i'll have this sort of hanging chad of a comment that isn't attached to anything anymore hanging chads that's

another does that you know i'm young uh that was the name of my surfer group that i was in san

diego in the 90s the hanging chad also i will say i mean i'm sure that i should blue sky i've made this joke i'm sure i've made a version of that joke a million times too but that whole like that was the name of my high school band is also just such a oh yeah played out like i've been saying

that was my nickname in high school for since i was in high school right right it's almost never ever gotten a laugh in fact it got me into some real trouble once when i was at a restaurant

oh oh do you oh oh was that that was on the edge right we don't want to repeat it was yeah it was

it was basically i was trying to make a joke and i said that was my nickname in high school about there was a pizza at this place we were eating the triangle tavern it was called the white lightning oh and i said oh that was my nickname in high school and then but then it sounded too braggy to me like white lightning was cool so i said no actually it was and then i don't know where it came from but i just said kind of a slur like trying to kind of say my nickname was you know something not as cool as white lightning something that's like i was you know being bullied or i was not thought of as a high status kid and i it's just one of those weird things were just like the weirdest thing came out of my mouth and everyone at the table with me was like what

And this was, was this Dintai, by the way? No, this was at the Triangle Tavern. Oh, you just said that. Yeah, sorry.

Sorry, you just said that. Believe me, unfortunately, it's seared in my memory. And I just, I don't know what happened. Something just short-circuited in my brain. And I was just trying to, the initial joke wasn't very funny, but then me trying to sort of, I don't know, one-up myself or tag my own joke. Something crazy came out of my mouth, and it was to the horror, the rightful horror of everyone at the table, including the server. And I was just like, I mean, I should have left the restaurant at that point. I did complete the meal, but it was rough.

And do I have it right that, because I remember you telling this on the show one time, and I have this vague memory. Of course, I'm picturing it did Ty Fung, but that's because you have another.

I've also gotten into it there, but not so much with regrettable specific words, just overall vibe.

But I think you beat yourself up a little bit too much for that one because I remember being there and not realizing that you were embarrassed until years later maybe. But this particular one, were you there with like one couple that you know really well and then another couple that you didn't know very well? I can't remember that part of it.

I remember our friend Toon was there. Okay, yeah, that rings a bell. And probably whoever I was in a relationship with at that point would have likely been there maybe. and then maybe one other person i can't remember who all was there but i just remember it was absolutely horrifying for everyone involved that that that idea of just saying something like it

scares me so much first of all we talk in the microphones a lot and it's like when you're reminded that deep down you have the ability just to be absolutely crazy and surprise yourself it like is yeah i i don't know i'm sure i've told you this before on the show but one of my kind of most i don't know if most upsetting is the yeah i'm gonna put this up there as one of my most sort of upsetting moments in grade school you know my backstory i was bullied a lot it was rough i didn't like it um but then the things that i would do and i don't want to see i i feel like i shouldn't have brought that up this way because it makes it sound like i'm i'm blaming the bullying for my just awful behavior in this one particular moment but like i remember being on the playground which was often a place of a certain low-level torture for me but where everybody's standing around in a circle i walked up this group of kids maybe there's five of them and they're standing around in a circle and i think i had a crush on one of the girls i probably had a crush on all of them but i remember specifically i think there was a girl there named amanda and i think i had a crush on her she might have been somewhat new and i'm like what are you guys looking at or something and they're like oh we're looking at it was like a woolly bear on the ground you know those really yeah caterpillar caterpillar slash woolly bear thing and everybody was looking at it oh no i know where this is going reasons i that is so this doesn't fit into any of my behavior as a child as an adult as anything it doesn't make sense i just stuck my foot in the middle and I squish the damn thing yeah and i still i've been i've been carrying that around for 40 years that's probably what nine maybe i was 11 years old almost 40 years i've been carrying that around and asking myself what the hell happened and everybody turned on me luke rightfully so and it's like i was always in this mode of being a victim but in this kid and i remember some kid coming up to me is a kid who's usually bullying me just being like you're a real asshole and i don't think i had any excuse i don't think i i don't have any idea what i said but i just it stuck with me so much it's such an ugly memory and it was crazy it's the reason i don't trust myself i mean it's one of the reasons i'm scared of heights is because how do i know i'm not gonna have another woolly bear moment and just throw myself up like where did that come from yeah

totally yeah i've got the the restaurant story is one of them and probably a few others where you just do something impulsively and it's in my in my experience and probably to some degree in your experience there was it was a play for attention yeah it was in a way that it was trying to be funny or trying to be in some way interesting or whatever and it just goes so so wrong and um Yeah, you know, the good news is I don't think that that's the person you are. So, you know, there was a momentary lapse of judgment 40 years ago.

Well, all of that, honestly, everything that I've said so far has been a lead up to today's list, which are the top five things you regret from your youth submitted by me.

I've got some eating worms. Did you actually do that? Well, I was trying to get, I mean, this is actually, you know what, legitimately a thing i regret from my youth i've probably talked about it before we had a we had a a kid at our church a young woman at our church who was um really what i think now is that she was probably uh very neurodivergent but we didn't have those terms back then and so her personality was really different than than the personalities that i was used to and so unfortunately we sort of like she was very how do i put it i decided i was going to try to this is when gummy worms were really popular so i was going to try to trick her she's about my age and i was going to try to trick her into eating a real worm by telling her it was a gummy worm and the good news in this story is that in order to get her to put one worm in her mouth i had to eat at least five real worms i ate way more worms than this person did because it started with hey we got these gummy worms and And she's like, I don't think those are gummy worms. And I was like, they sure are. And she's like, well, you better have one first. And I eat one of the real worms. And I'm like, now do you believe me?

Is it wiggling in your mouth?

Yeah, I don't remember killing them. I swallowed it. I ate at least five worms in order for her to put one worm in her mouth and spit it out. Oh, my God. So the joke was on me. But even the fact that I wanted to sort of bully this person in a way. I didn't see it as bullying in my mind. It was a joke. I just thought like, oh, this is a person, this is a quote-unquote odd person, and wouldn't it be funny if I played this joke where this person ate a real worm thinking it was a gummy worm? Again, the only good news in that is that I did eat much more worms, and she didn't eat any worms. I think she put one worm in her mouth for a second and spit it out, so luckily the joke was kind of on me. But I, of course, very much regret that. Any kind of behaviors like that where I was, you know, being mean to somebody who was probably already had too much of that going on in their life. all right let's thank some donors despite our past transgressions and these listeners understand that as long as we learn from our mistakes there can be redemption and in fact there can be financial sponsorship these folks are donating money to tbtl keeping tbtl operating all these thousands of episodes later, folks like Cassie Fontenot of Monroe, Washington.

Hey, you have wonderful fairgrounds up there. One of my earliest memories from this area was going up to see the Demo Derby. Thank you, Cassie.

We've been saying Cassie's name on this show for a long time. We've also been saying Karen Terentiev of Kent, Washington, for a long time. Why do I know that? Because that's an interesting last name. That's a unique last name, and I may have just finally said it correctly for the first time all these years in so thanks karen thank you for loving us unconditionally that's right i would say joanie karnowski of long beach california loves us not unconditionally there's some conditions there are some and that's fair though it's about it's honestly about boundaries it's uh you know for for joanie it's it's it's It's a very loving relationship.

relationship but there are limits to it and i think honestly i think that's fair yeah absolutely i don't know where michelle neptune of brooklyn new york comes down on this whole thing of the

radical acceptance of us i'm not sure either you know those new yorkers they're a they're a tough

bunch you know you gotta really earn their respect i had a uh my only good joke i told on live wire a couple of weeks ago when we were doing our final recording for the season we're not even going to be able to use it because it was this happens a lot on the show the people that are on the show the guests do not realize that we often play the interviews in different episodes of live wire so it's not not everything that happens on the stage is going to be playing in the same episode of the show depending on the length of the interview depending on a bunch of things but nobody ever understands that so guests are constantly referring to something the previous

guest said or did that's funny because that's one of my favorite things about live radio and like doing things in order is that that's always been like kind of a something i always fought for in my public radio producing career is like no no like i loved it when we would have a guest come on and refer back to what the last guest had just said because it gives this continuity and this

realness to it i totally agree that it is a more fun radio show to hear just for some practical reasons for us as far as just like putting out generating enough content every year it's basically when the pandemic hit we sort of shifted some recording models and that's one of the things but we had uh this um this kind of performer and his partner his name is reverend billy and he's been this guy he's been around forever in fact when i was in new york we did a like a little video interview with him me and him and win rosenfeld when i was doing my show back there he's reverend billy from the church of stop shopping and it's kind of a performance art anti-consumerism just general kind of progressive values thing that he does but he goes around in like a white suit there's actually a really funny picture of him at he's an atm vestibule at bank of america in manhattan and he's there all done up in his preacher garb casting out the demons of toxic assets and subprime loans and things from from the bank of america but um he was talking about kind of what his philosophy is of his that when they do these events when they show up at places like they protest starbucks a lot and stuff and he said yeah we're trying to create radical instability oh and uh i was like oh that's an interesting word or something and then later on i think it must have been hodgman or something was out there and he said something i can't remember what he said but he said something that was like a little bit like kind of it left me slightly off balance or something i said i'm feeling radically unstable right now and everybody it was like the big laugh line of the night. But we can't even use it. Yeah, because the set-up won't be in the show. Unless maybe we do. Sometimes we do, I guess. It's not like those could never live in the same episode. Anyway, that's not particularly interesting to James C. Winters of Louisville, Kentucky.

I think James loved that. Can I be honest with you?

James is sponsoring the show, so James must kind of know what the general vibe is, and a lot of it is digressions from me. Yeah, he's just glad I'm not talking about squishing cute little creatures anymore. We didn't call them woolly bears. I know that that's a name for them. And in fact, I think Becca might call them that. That was not a Seattle thing. That did not

make its way to the Seattle of my youth. Let me see here. Woolly bears are the Isabella tiger moth is what they turn into. So is there a difference between a woolly bear and a caterpillar? Let me see. What's the difference here? Is any

caterpillar a woolly bear or is it a particularly furry one that's what i'm trying to figure out i'm also realizing i haven't seen a caterpillar around here in a long time maybe it says i'm not hanging out in the trees enough i feel like i saw caterpillars as a kid fairly frequently and i haven't seen a caterpillar in forever here's what

it is according to the ai overview which unfortunately is the best summation of this right now and it does seem to scan with what i'm sort of seeing is to answer your question specifically says, while all woolly bears are caterpillars, not all caterpillars are woolly bears. So in other words, a woolly bear is a caterpillar of a very specific breed. Or, I don't know if breed is the right word there, but you know, type.

Yeah, I'm looking at it. Okay, yeah, that's what I was picturing, is the real furry one. Yeah, the real show bone. The real show-off demon. I know about that. Bruce Morris in Vashon Washington also knows about that yes he does um he's showing off right now but in the best possible way by being a tbtl donor and supporter bruce thank you so much uh thank you to all of our donors for for stepping up and supporting our show um we really do we really do appreciate it and particularly this time of year you know the holidays and being grateful for things and being grateful that this is our job um it's uh it's just sort of an amazing thing and uh and i'm always pleasantly

surprised that this thing keeps going so thank you to our donors um all right absolutely i think that's uh that's probably gonna wrap it up here today and in fact this week that brings us to the end of our broadcast week but we're gonna be right back here on monday with more imaginary radio so please if you can tune in for that got a special guest can i go ahead and promote oh yeah

please do a little promo hannah brooks olson will be on the show hbo for self exactly my co-host from the Spotless podcast will be joining us. I haven't put together all the details yet, but I want to see if she and I can put together a list of cleaning related top fives. Maybe top five cleaning products. Maybe top five satisfactory cleaning moments. Something like that. We'll talk about it over the weekend. We'll have some high level meetings.

You know who will love that? My sister Hannah who, she didn't realize that I could hear this, but when we were all out after a Livewire show with Lindy West and Megan Hatcher mace she said to lindy i really listen to spotless much more than i listen and lindy said i don't know what that is and it means nothing to me i don't know who that is and i don't care to find out exactly all right have a great weekend everybody we'll see you on monday in the meantime please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all power out