Muse

Hey, how come you never play your guitar anymore?

I'll tell you the truth, Dad. I wasn't good at it right away, so I quit. I hope you're not mad.

Son, come here. Of course I'm not mad. If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your shortwave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we'll go inside and watch TV.

What's on?

It doesn't matter. hey tv child look into my eyes hereby intervention i want your attention jokes do some okay what

makes you laugh comedy obviously and sometimes tragedy light tragedy erectile dysfunction non-fatal hunting accidents waving at someone you think you know but it turns out to be a stranger That sort of thing.

Sure, it's done in the name of comedy, but is debasing ourselves really that hilarious? I don't know, man.

Don't you kind of feel like a sellout? Can you really call it a sellout when they give you a free Tesla for doing the show? And boom goes the dynamite. Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Two bros. Bro, hit it up. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. they just want you to be normal and clearly you're not coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above the mighty columbia where it is an absolutely disgusting day weather wise didn't know you like to get wet though sideways wind sideways rain i mean i guess wind is always sideways if you've got wind that's coming straight down or straight up you got a problem i should probably put the cinder block on the hot tub cover but we know what an aesthetic guy i am and that i don't like the look of that so we're just going to all cross our fingers together here on episode 4635 in a collector's series let the fun begin i may have and this this is serious now i'm not just sometimes i i'll maybe i'll employ a little bit of creative exaggeration just to build the drama on the show you know just to kind of keep things interesting i am not being hyperbolic or exaggerating when i say i may have accidentally purchased a firearm on the internet the other day.

Oh my God, that's so crazy. Why?

I will unpack that a little bit. Also, speaking of the internet, I used the internet. I used YouTube last night to figure out how to fix something in my house that I really needed to fix because, you know, it's cold here in January in southern Washington. I'm learning. I'm kind of proud of myself, although I did injure myself also in the process of making this repair. So we'll get into all of that, and we'll talk to this guy, longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's not Spider-Pig anymore. He's Harry Plopper. Also known as Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. If I tell you that I had a dream involving a banana last night, and I want to talk to you about it, will you promise me you won't accuse this dream of being Freudian in some way? Could this be like a banana really was a banana in my dream? Or will you not even entertain that, and therefore I should just skip the topic?

What did the banana, was the banana talking to a, like a peach? Or some kind of a, what was Georgia O'Keeffe always painting? You know, like that sort of flower, or like a...

Back away, banana breath. What the hell did you just eat, a banana?

Let's try to be adults about this, Luke. Tell me about your phallic dream. So I'm making love to this banana, right? And it is hot. It is steamy. I'm picturing it right now. You know that I don't, and actually I want to talk to you about several fruit-related topics before we get into your new career as an arms dealer, apparently, or maybe an arms acquirer. War dog. Yeah, but you know I don't like bananas, right? Do you know that?

It's a textural thing or a flavor thing?

I think it's mostly a textural thing, and it's probably, maybe it just got in my head at some point, Because I feel like when I was a very little kid, it was common for me to, I don't know why I said four like that, to cut up bananas and put them in my cereal. This was a memory that you uncovered that buried memory when we were talking about fruit and cereal a few weeks ago. And so I know there was a time I ate bananas, and I think bananas are an incredibly healthy food, right? And so there's a reason why we might encourage kids to eat them. But at some point, I was just like, I am done with this. And, like, it ranks pretty high up there for something that comes from the ground, you know, like for something that is, like, literally a whole food.

It grows on the ground, man.

That is.

is just a totally natural, you know, non-animal thing. You would think that, well, I can handle it, but, like, bananas really ick me out. But last night, in my dream, I was at a restaurant. I think I had been dining with Nora McInerney, by the way. She made an appearance in the dream. But then I was sitting at the table by myself, and somebody, like, maybe with the check or with a dessert situation, it was like a fancy restaurant, and they brought me just a banana. But it was a brand-new, very fresh banana. And in the dream, I was like, I don't like bananas, but look at this thing. Like, I'm in a fancy restaurant. This is the best banana that you're going to get. Nora forced you to eat it.

She was like, I'm picking you up from the airport with a banana.

That's right. Nora, well, never mind. But anyway, in the dream, Nora's not there anymore, but I just remember thinking, like, if you're ever going to eat a banana, this would be the banana to try. Like, it's a fresh one. It's like it's not. And even in the dream, I'm thinking it's not like this is one of those brown bananas as somebody who's been carrying around in their purse for three days and then offers it to you at the DMV, which isn't something that happened to me, but it feels like something that could happen to me. This is the pristine version of a banana, and in the banana, I peel it, I peel it, and it looks very fresh. There are no spots or anything, and I believe I took the tiniest little bite of it, and I don't remember really what happens next, whether I loved it or hated it. I think it was basically fine, and I woke up, but i'm wondering as we do continue to explore the new year here on january 6th is there meaning in this is this about yes there is trying new things new phallic things yes there it's absolutely

what that means um eggplants also count yes i think of other highly sexualized emojis what i dreamt about the night before as a matter of fact well okay so i don't look i don't want to loop you into my shenanigans but something that i have been trying to do a little bit more of late and and you reminded me now or i'm thinking about this in the context of 2026 is i'm trying to eat mushrooms a little bit more because i've never really liked mushrooms i certainly am not like a guy who likes a big portobello mushroom type of thing or even those what do you call those just kind of stand the standard mushroom that we grew up with that was in a lot of salads and

stuff just kind of a large table mushrooms table mushrooms i'm just joking because you told me about table syrup i know you're talking about that i think they're just like white mushrooms

probably right if you buy them at the store because like if you grew up in the 80s as we did in a in an as i did in a not particularly adventurous food culture there were no like chanterelles there were no like lobster or whatever you know what i mean like all this exotic mushrooms that we're foraging now and that we're putting in in things that was not part of the experience mushrooms were just like that one dusty ass white mushroom that i did not like the taste of as a kid that was the kind of default setting on mushrooms and you're and you're talking

about having them specifically kind of raw on a salad not sauteed up with butter or whatever

i even when they were sauteed up with butter or in something that was cooked i'm talking about them in any form or fashion okay gotcha cooked or raw i never liked the the taste of them and And then it was just one of those things, and you can identify with this, Andrew, which is like, I didn't like it in childhood, and I just kind of carried that into adulthood with me. And then, particularly when I started becoming a person who mostly doesn't eat meat, very often the substitute for that is like, a portobello steak, or something that seemed real mushroomy to me. And so I just was continuing, continued on, I'm 49, staring down the barrel of 50 here, i've just always been like now miss me with those mushrooms and becca was saying you know you might want to really like re-examine that because there's a lot of different mushrooms other than a portobello and like that whatever that white mushroom is that we were talking about and a lot of them are much more subtle in their flavor they're they take on the flavor of whatever they're being cooked in like and if i just started i thought if i just start trying them in small amounts and not just always saying hold the mushrooms if i order something that has mushrooms in it i might be able to over time kind of acclimate to that you know um and so i've been

doing that and it's kind of working so weird i had a dream about maybe that's what's going on maybe the more interesting part of this story is you and i have achieved some sort of a two-man pluribus where you're actually trying to eat mushrooms and i'm having a dream about it

well i was just going to say i'll try to eat mushrooms and you try to eat bananas no okay

i just i don't think that i'm ready i think the banana can maybe be symbolic and maybe i can try new things but not a literal banana i'm not going to go that far obviously the difference also is

that there aren't like for me not eating mushrooms is actually like a sort of a you know it's a sort of structural problem in my in a lot of my dining experience because if i'm looking

Thank you.

at the menu at the restaurant or I'm going somewhere. In fact, we, uh, went, Becca and I went, uh, to a kind of a birthday get together in Portland during the holidays. And the, um, it was a lovely, lovely evening, but the, the people who were hosting were kind enough to have like a meat course and then a vegetarian course. And then of course the vegetarian course is like portobello mushroom. I mean, I'm sure if you liked these, if you liked portobello mushrooms, these were, these were the greatest portobello stuffed portobello mushroom cap you've ever seen. like these folks were real gourmands, but I just like get in there and I look over and I'm like, so like if I could kind of just, and again, what I've been doing is like, if I order Thai food, I'm not holding the mushrooms. Cause a lot of times those will be, I don't know what exactly those mushrooms are called, but I, they're, they're pretty, they're pretty subtle and pretty mild. And I'm just trying to kind of like not constantly avoid mushrooms and then start eating them and have it not be such a it actually reminds me well this is a weird comparison but like i was listening to uh our buddy chris hayes's podcast this morning why is this happening really good episode about self-driving cars and like just where the technology is at and what's really going on with it and one of the things that the um guy he was interviewing was saying was that the experience that most people have is the first time they're in a self-driving car it's like a mind-blowing experience you're videotaping it on your phone you're like calling your friends which is exactly what i did i made a whole i think like hey dummies video in a waymo in san francisco but when i was in la for christmas with addy i exclusively took waymos because by the way they were cheaper than lifts and ubers which is 100 like zuckerberg just subsidizing it like there's no way that that thing is cheaper to operate currently than like an uber but is waymo zuckerberg

I don't think I realized that

I think it might be Google It's probably not Zuckerberg It's Sergei and Larry But I told you that when I was in Miami And I went to that unexpectedly fancy dinner Friggin Sergei Brin was sitting next to me No I don't think you told me that Or if so I forgot Yeah when I was in Miami Well because somebody said that's Sergei Brin And I looked over and it was the guy You know what he looks like

I have no idea I mean, I'm going to take a stab in the dark here and guess that he's white. He is white.

Then did the name Sergey Brin tip you off?

Yes. But he's one of the most famous tech bros. But no, I don't know that. But I would have no. That's just I'm face blind anyway. But there's also people just like, I have no idea what Sergey Brin looks like.

He's sort of in the, you know, he's in that echelon of those of those sorts of guys. I mean, that's why I would also recognize. um well like i said i would recognize uh larry ellison well i got a lot of reasons to recognize larry ellison chiefly his kid bought the tv network i worked for but all that is to say i had that experience that they were talking about on chris's show today about like by the i mean the the first waymo that i took in la this christmas and i took a lot of them i could not have been less sort of i couldn't have been taking note of the fact that it was a robot less yeah I just got in and I was just on my phone or I was listening to my music and just kind of by the way that's something that's also pretty cool with these things is that you know you can stream your music through them and so you know you walk up to the thing and it's got this spinning kind of I don't know if it's LED but it's got a spinning display that'll say LB because that's I guess how I'm logged into Waymo because sometimes there'll be a few of them so it'll be spinning a bit that's the one for me your phone just says unlock you hit unlock on the thing it unlocks the doors of the car you get and it says happy holidays uh luke and you sit in that you want to know what i was the most blown away by and this is actually the simplest part of this technology forget like autonomous driving and like all of the things the car has to figure out you know what blew my mind heated on like what's well kind of a version of that i got like on one of the trips i noticed that it was like a little warmer in the car than i needed it to be so i got on the app i turned the temperature down to 65 degrees and then the the next day when i got in a waymo it was 65 degrees oh that is interesting it knows my temperature and then i changed it because i was a little cold i made it like 68 degrees and then 24 hours later i get a different waymo 68 degrees like something about that like basically like my the profile of what i want that cocoon to feel like and the fact that it just like chirped right into my spotify i mean again And I don't want to say dystopian, but there's a certain kind of Blade Runner-ification. I mean, the most Blade Runner I got was like Christmas Eve. Addie and I, we went and got dinner at the Dresden Room in Los Feliz, which was really fun. We went back to her house for a bit. And then I jump in the Waymo, and I'm heading back to my hotel. And it's... like i think it's blue christmas by elvis is playing on the stereo in the driverless car speeding through la at about 11 50 p.m on christmas eve and if it did if that didn't feel

like johnny cab i don't know what no kidding by the way leaning wasn't playing at the dresden was she because you mentioned you saw her in la too and that's one of her i think favorite venues to

play in as prom i love that place yeah no they didn't have any live music on christmas eve

at the old uh as somebody one time described a booth to me this was in ohio not specifically about the dresden room but i think a booth you could plan a murder in that's my favorite kind of booth you can sit in right don't they have some of those nice round like it's like big old

school steakhouse booths on the one side of the yeah i think they might have remodeled the dining area the funny thing i was saying to addy was because she made the reservation i don't know if i'd ever been in the restaurant side of the dresden room because i was always like i lived in LA and an era, uh, and also in a kind of, this is embarrassing to admit, but like the Dresden room plays a big role in the movie swingers. They really liked that place. And, um, so of course that went into my brain as like a cool thing. And, uh, so when I first moved to LA, me and the mummy and other people, we were constantly going to the Dresden room, but the bar side, the side you're talking about that has like this kind of great seating. And there was this, uh, married duo, marty and elaine yeah that played there for years that were kind of you know uh kind of a um would you how would you describe the music of marty and elaine a little bit they were like a two

kind of lounge singer but you know but no but the booth i was i mean i've been on both sides but the booths i was talking about were on the dining room side which was a really old school if i remember that i would be shocked if they got rid of them but some of those like almost full circle red leather booths with yeah they're white now with a oh maybe they always were maybe i'm misremembering that but okay well then they're the same ones but like in a white tablecloth classic kind of like la kind of old school i just it was awesome i love both sides of that but just there's something

about and by the way it's christmas eve so there's nobody on the streets of los angeles it's just totally like it's me and the waymo and a song from 75 years ago yeah right and and And the empty streets of 2025 Los Angeles as we just kind of sort of speed through the night. And all that is to say, Andrew, in the way that I became quickly, it no longer felt like a huge experience to be in a driverless car. I want to get to that same place with mushrooms.

Yeah, sure. Or I mean, when you were telling the driverless car thing, I was thinking about the first time I was on an airplane that I remembered. I think I flew when I was a tiny tot. But when I was like a 20, you know, like I think my first real flight as a, you know, a conscious person or whatever was in my very early 20s. And I just I mean, I I was out of my mind. I was out of my mind. The fact that I was that going to like a job interview and interlocking that was going out to out to visit my friend Paul in Boston where I would even where on that same trip I would meet Genevieve. in fact so uh about 25 years ago almost uh almost exactly um but anyway yeah but i just remember being i remember being so nervous i was like picking at something on my face and then as we took off i realized i was bleeding from my face oh my god i was like i had all this nervous energy about it and of course it's not like that when you just get on a flight down you're just like grumpy because the seat in front of you're just like hoping the whole time that the guy with the backwards ball cap in front of you isn't going to put a seat back on your knees you know it's just like it could not be less less of an exciting a moment so anyway sorry to cut you off you just want to normalize mushrooms and i want to i want even though i like mushrooms and i like i'll saute up mushrooms or mushrooms and onions or something from time to time and i don't i like them raw um i totally understand that you know what i mean that's how i would never be like oh my god how could you not like mushrooms i mean they're weird man like even if you don't like the flavor like the texture the texture raw is completely different than the texture when it's

cooked and they're both pretty weird now this raises the question when you were talking about bananas earlier i was wondering how do you mess with avocado then because i think the consist i think the texture of avocado was i mean i like avocado fine i like guacamole guacamole um as george takai would say takai would say on i was listening to a lot of the howard stern show last night as i was working on my pellet stove and it's like you want to talk about sometimes you You know, our show obviously is a weird kind of digression upon a digression upon a digression. But, like, when you hear Steve Nowicki doing his George Takei impression saying guacamole to Howard Stern, you've really entered, like, a pretty big digression that I was extremely there for, by the way.

But to answer your question about guacamoles, are they weird to you? Yeah, kind of. Like, I don't mess with them too much. I make a summer salad that calls for them but just kind of diced up so it's not too – it doesn't.

It doesn't kind of – they don't break down too much in the salad and give it too much of a creamy effect.

So that's the basic thing you're trying to avoid is creaminess, whether it's in cottage cheese or bananas, that kind of creamy thing is what you're – that's what you're put off by.

Yeah, and then – well, I probably added too much detail there. In this particular salad, I just like everything to be very individualized and crispy and whatever. And so I don't want it to get too – but, you know, an avocado will break down a little bit to give it a little bit of a different texture. But for the most part, you ask how I mess up with them. I really don't. I don't avoid them. But if it's a chips and guac or chips and salsa, I'm chips and salsa like 100% of the time. I don't crave guacamole. What about that corn salad you make? That's the one I'm talking about. Oh, okay. So that's why I kind of – I realize I'm rat-holing on it. But what I like to do with that salad is I like to cut everything. So that's a corn and bean salad, but it also has some vegetables, tomatoes or whatever, and avocado. And I try to cut it so it's all very similar sizes. You know what I mean? And so I get really kind of into that. And so with the avocado, I do that thing where you cut the avocado in half. It is a very fun thing to prepare, isn't it, avocado? You cut it in half, and then I cut it within its shell. Oh, I didn't even know that was a thing. I cut a grid inside the shell. So it still has the outer kind of rough skin on it? Yeah, I'm calling it a shell, but like a skin. So if you imagine I'm holding it, and it's facing you, like a Georgia O'Keeffe. and then I take a little paring knife and I go zing, zing, zing, zing and I make a bunch of lines up and down and I make a bunch of lines across it and then I flip it inside I use my thumbs and I push the skin inside out and then all of those things fall out Did you like invent this technique or did somebody teach you this at some point? Literally no idea Because I've never heard of this

It actually makes some sense

Somebody must have told me to do it this way

because I wouldn't have invented this Because you could be playing a dangerous game, which is sometimes if the avocado is not totally ripe, it may not detach from the skin as easily as you would hope, you know? So, like, when you do that, you've got to hope that the avocado is going to play along with what you've already committed to.

Yeah, somebody or something told me to do that at one point for, I don't know if it was for this recipe or something else. And of course, when you push it out now, you kind of, depending on where the avocado chunk was, you could have a kind of a long, almost like a longish French fry of it or something. So you might want to kind of dice it again into little bits.

But what about, what about the, this is the, to me, the ultimate cool guy move when you're dealing with an avocado. And I would cut, I would cut them maybe differently. Not that I think this is the, the great technique, but what I had, what I saw the first time, what I saw, as my mom might say, was, you know, you sort of buy set, you cut the avocado in half. and then you kind of twist it. You open it up, so now you're holding one side of the avocado that does not have any pit in it and then the other side has a pit that's protruding and then you see the cool guy move where you just like thwunk the knife, the corner of the knife into the pit and then you pull it out.

Oh, the corner of the knife. I just do the flat sharpen. I just like throw it in there like... Somehow I guess I never thought that would like

grab it enough. I've always been like... I've always tried to use the little L corner of the knife because somehow in my mind... That seemed more – you're getting more surface area? I don't know. Well, no.

I wonder if that makes more sense because my thing is I love doing that. It's so satisfying when that knife goes into the pit. And then I twist the knife so it kind of – like you use the torque, right? I love all of that. I love all of that. That's some of my favorite vegetable interplay right there.

What this is making me think of when we're talking about your famous corn salad is that the summer is – Yeah. It will happen, Andrew. It will. It doesn't feel like it today, but at some point we'll be eating corn salad and watching baseball.

But my thing is then when you have the avocado pit on the sharp edge of a very, very sharp knife, then I'm always kind of like, now what have you done to yourself, Walsh? You've got to be very careful getting it off the knife.

Grab this slippery ball off of this sharp implement.

Right? Like, sometimes what I'll do is I have that compost little tin on my counter, so sometimes I try to use the corner of the tin to knock it off. What are you doing, just, like, being very careful and grabbing it?

I'm grabbing it carefully, but I'm also wondering, is this the time where I put this avocado pit in some kind of a glass, like a sixth grader with toothpicks, and grow a new avocado? I don't know if that's how that works, but I feel like avocados are not cheap, and I'm holding the building blocks of a new avocado, the building block i should say of a new avocado why are we not all and again probably has to do with like uh temperature and you know what region you're in but like i don't think i'm really in the avocado belt of america but i do feel like am i holding another free avocado here that i'm just throwing out Thank you.

That's a really good point. I get that way with garlic sometimes. Sometimes I threw some old garlic into just like a flower pot that happened to be empty but was still like above my sink or whatever. And sure as heck, it started growing, and I was very excited about that. But then I kind of didn't have the follow through to actually like get it to the next level of growth. One more question. Actually, you had some things in your intro that I'm actually very interested in hearing about, so I don't know why I would bring this up now. But I wanted to ask you if you like grapefruit because it never occurred to me that people wouldn't like grapefruit. But then I saw some anti-grapefruit sentiment online the other day, and somebody, and I'll never forget this, I think, somebody said, because I really like grapefruit, but somebody said eating a grapefruit is like eating an orange that's combined with a car tire. And I was like, oh, I guess I do understand that. It's kind of hard to get all the, you know, like get a clean, clean piece of the fruit without like a rind sticking to it. I mean, I really love it, but I guess I understand why people wouldn't.

It would never occur to me in a million years to buy a grapefruit. Oh, I bought one yesterday. But if I was at a breakfast buffet type of situation or whatever, and there was some sliced up whatever you do, sliced is kind of the wrong way to describe it, it would seem, because you are doing a bit of an extraction process, an excision of the meat of the grapefruit. Anyway, if there was grapefruit that someone had prepared, I would throw a piece on my plate. it's always more tart than i expect it to be and so that for me is the problem with grapefruit as part of the breakfast experience or any other experience if i'm eating it with other things is it's a real pucker factor right so like i have a bite of this grapefruit and now it's like now my whole my my mouth is going on my taste buds are going on a we've veered off the road pretty in a pretty extreme fashion of whatever else i was eating i do like grapefruit juice and if it's ever like a um let's say if i was in vegas like you are soon to be my friend i cannot wait for that's right i'll be there on monday i cannot wait to hear about it i'm so excited but if i were in vegas and i were going to have a little morning uh like a champagne type of cocktail or even like a vodka cocktail i would go with a greyhound potentially yeah that's or i would go with a champagne and grapefruit juice so i'm not a i'm not anti-grapefruit but like i i've never bought a grapefruit in the store other than maybe some specific thing that was happening, like cooking. It would never occur to me to have a grapefruit around for just eating, for just snacking.

I literally have a stopwatch here. I'm going to do this under 30 seconds because it's the world's most boring story, and then we're going to either thank the donors or you're going to talk about something more interesting that you promoted at the beginning of the show. I think I can do this in probably 20 seconds, but I'm going to put a limit at 30. you don't hear it we're up to one second already yesterday uh late last night before going to bed i wanted a little snack i had half of a grapefruit left over in the uh fruit drawer and so i took that out and i ate it but it wasn't quite enough for me so then i went back to the fruit drawer and i grabbed a little orange one of those little mini oranges i can't remember what you call them and i ate that thing yeah it was like a cutie and it was so unbelievably good because my mouth was prepared for all this. Oh, I'm already over 30 seconds. All right, I'm done. And I've got follow-ups. I can't believe I couldn't get that. That was 34 seconds I wasted the first few. Well, that's an interesting idea.

So in other words, you had, the grapefruit was so tart that by comparison the little mandarin orange or whatever it was was like a sugar bounty. It tasted

like a covenant with God. It was so good. It was like, you know how

like when you grow up. I grew up with a covenant with God, which is how I got a child at 17,

by the way. I phrased that the wrong way. But I mean that like, you know how when they would describe like the Garden of Eden before original sin, everything was so good. Our human minds in the modern world couldn't even imagine what it would be like to be in the Garden of Eden or to eat the fruits of the trees. That is what that little satsuma tastes like yesterday. And I loved the grapefruit but i didn't realize that i was playing games with my taste buds so one follow-up

is i didn't realize you have a fruit drawer in your refrigerator i have two drawers in my refrigerator and one of them is for veggies and the other is for cheese because i eat a lot of cheese so one's the and if my dad's over and he's got like turkey lunch meat or something there's like the meat and cheese drawer and then there's the vegetable drawer there is no fruit drawer part of it is because i guess i don't eat nearly as much fruit as you but also um i'm not sure like if i am keeping the fruit in the fridge or out of the fridge so you're a fruit in the fridge is that does that preserve it longer and i by the way i have one more thing i want to say this topic after you answer that question well unfortunately i mean i'm not going to set a clock for this because if we're going to do this we're going to do this like i you know that i am somebody who does not like to get into like you're doing it wrong you're eating it wrong when it comes to food or whatnot everybody should just eat it the way they want to eat and if somebody says they don't like a food i'm certainly not somebody who's going to say oh you're wrong like mushrooms are great or whatever because i have all of my weird food stuff too but do you remember when we had our friend Cassie on the show and I think this I think we had this conversation on the air she was talking about how she doesn't like fruit like generally speaking she's not a fruit person until she tried a grape that you guys both bonded over that's why I can't remember that cotton candy grape from Trader Joe's or something maybe it was started off on her Instagram I just bought some of those but she was just like you know I'm not a fruit girl but like I do love these grapes or whatever and like I don't want to tell somebody like oh if you don't like fruit you're doing it wrong you should try it this way but I think about that all the time because i think people who think they don't like fruit need to put that fruit in the refrigerator i do not like warm fruit like the idea of having a bowl of oranges and apples on the table like that does nothing for me i love an ice cold apple out of the out of the fruit drawer i love an ice cold orange out of the fruit drawer like to me that is the beauty of these

fruits warm fruit has no place in my life it doesn't because there's a lot of debate around tomatoes and if putting tomatoes in the refrigerator which does preserve them i saw uh kenji lopez alt talking about this recently like you put a tomato in the refrigerator it will preserve the tomato for longer but there is a school of thought that it also kind of damp it tamps down the flavor i believe that i believe that and the thing beck always tells me is like you just keep whatever it is you're buying that's a perishable fruit or vegetable you just treat it in the home environment the way that it was treated at the grocery store. That's what she tells me. So if it was in some kind of cooling case, that's what you put it in. If it wasn't, you don't. But what I've noticed is stuff keeps a lot longer if I put it in the refrigerator because sometimes it takes me a while to get through stuff. I'm a big refrigerator putter in her. Now, the other thing that I just ordered, and this could lead us into a whole other conversation about other things I've been purchasing on TikTok, is I bought these little, like, sort of Tupperware containers. I think it's a set of five or six of them of varying sizes. What they have in each one is a little metal basket that's inside the Tupperware container. And the entire point is when you get your fruits home, I should say, so I just was at Trader Joe's recently, and I bought some of those grapes you were talking about, and I bought some blueberries. And what you do is you just dump those. you take them right out of the plastic container they've been in, you put them right into one of these little Tupperware things that has a strainer in it. You put it in your sink, you fill it up with water, you let it just soak for a little while and clean off the fruit. And then you pull that strainer out, you dump the dirty water out, which by the way, shockingly dirty. Like the blueberries, because sometimes, let's be honest, I know we should all be washing our fruits and veggie. Sometimes I'm hungry. Sometimes I'm lazy. And so, um, anyway, I did that with this. I got these in the mail, these little things, and I immediately put these blueberries into one of them and I filled it up with water. I just let it kind of set there for a little while. Then I came and I pulled it out just like I'd seen on Tik TOK. And then I looked at the water. I was shocked at how murky that water was, dumped it out and then put the, the strainer with the blueberries back in the thing, put the lid on it and put it into my refrigerator. So I, my point is, I think I'm going to become a refrigerated fruit man like you've been recommending that's is the strainer

there just for the cleaning purposes or also is there some sort of um advantage to having the fruit like kind of not sitting on a just like the bottom of a tupperware i think it's probably

this just there i think it's promoted as just being something that's a little bit easier to kind of clean them and i will say i'm interested it did it did feel to me like an easier process then I don't know I guess I could have put I could I could have just I mean there's a bunch of things you could do because you know like the blueberries they come in that plastic container whatever you call that that disposable kind of thing in the bottom of it I don't like

that I don't like that diaper I gotta be honest so it's like what do you do when you get the

blueberries home what are you doing with them are you putting them into a different container and washing them are you washing them in that weird diaperized container and leaving them in

they're like what's your process for blueberries i'm probably soaking them in that container because it's already kind of like colander-esque like you said right it's got a bunch of slits in it so i will probably soak them i will like you know like get them you know with cold water really rinse them off in that and then maybe let them dry in that or i think i may be likely to then take like my colander i've got a couple colanders always kicking around i'll probably dump them into a colander and shake him up a little bit.

and set them on a towel for a little bit, then transfer them into some sort of an old soup container or a Tupperware of some sort or something and seal them up and put it in the fridge. That's what I'm doing with my berries. Honestly, with those, I'm probably then mixing them up into some pineapple and stuff. But that is definitely a lot of fruit talk. But yeah, I definitely, as far as preserving it, like putting it in the refrigerator to preserve it, to be honest, I go through fruit so quickly, it's not about extending the life of it. It's just that I don't want to bite into a warm apple or a warm orange like it just doesn't hold any appeal to me well i need to get because you know

2025 was the year of me eating more fruit and it really did happen and it really was um i found it to be an enjoyable experience and now 2026 is a year of me dialing in my fruit game so by the time this summer hits which i really think of as fruit season i'm gonna have a whole you know me and my systems usually which involves internet purchases i'm gonna just have a whole like it's going to be like a cross-section of a city when you open my refrigerator. It's going to be all these different layers, levels. It's going to be like a West Anderton. It's going to be like the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in there with my different fruits that are chilling in their different containers that I've

bought from China. You're going to make a fruit salad that has mushrooms and fruit in it.

You're like, look, I'm better now. That's going to be my new diet. It's going to be the all mushroom and fruit diet. Alright, let's do this. Let's thank some donors and then, if you don't mind, we'll stay on the topic of my internet purchasing because this is a real thing, Andrew, that I'm – I don't know what's going on with this. I don't know what is going to go on with this, but I need to tell you about it coming up here. All right. Speaking of those donors, let's get to thanking them. They are keeping TBTL on the air five days a week. This is 100% listener-supported podcasting, and it's thanks to folks like John Smith of Tacoma, Washington. We have got to get pronouncers on these names.

Are you sure you got that one?

I would not put it past me to somehow fumble the bag even on John Smith, but I hopefully got that one right. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. Thanks, John. Thanks to Eliza Kurtz, who's in Wilmington, Delaware. Eliza, thank you. Yeah, Wilmington, Delaware. That's got to have some sort of American revolutionary connotation, right? Don't you think there must have been some? Well, I guess George Washington was crossing the Delaware River, right, in that famous painting. I wonder if he was going to Wilmington. Was there a battle of Wilmington? Seems like there must have been. It just sounds very kind of fundamental to the formation of this country.

The Battle of Wilmington. Well, this is Civil War, though, and is it the wrong Wilmington? Yeah, this is going to be Wilmington, North Carolina. So there is a Battle of Wilmington, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Eliza. I do not believe she is a veteran of that war. Do we know where Eliza was during the Battle of Wilmington?

Can she account for her whereabouts? What I like is that you're asking the right questions. Thank you. Michael Muelling is in Mount Lake Terrace, Washington, home of zero Civil War or American Revolution battles. You know, that's something that I was thinking about diving back into this week, because it's just, as I mentioned at the top of the show, and this is not shocking, it is just the weather is rough right now. It's getting dark. It's still very dark, very early. It's like stay indoors kind of season weather. I was thinking about jumping back into that Ken Burns. Which one? Revolutionary War doc I started watching it at my folks house On like Thanksgiving night or something Or maybe the night before Thanksgiving Is that his latest?

That's his latest thing? Yes, it's his latest

And I think it's the American Revolution Because he's done the Civil War

That was one of his big His two most famous ones I would say Were probably Civil War and Baseball, right? And this would have been in the late 90s, early 2000s maybe?

Yeah, I think this one is American Revolution And I mean, what, I mean, this is probably part of the aging process or whatever, and it's not a particularly novel thing to say, but man, I do like those shows. Like there's, I mean, there's just such an incredibly vast amount of stuff that I just don't know about the history of our country. And I'm never going to be a historian and I'm never going to be a deep diver on these things. But as somebody who likes to know about one inch of information about a broad range of things, the Ken Burns stuff is kind of perfect. because you know there's just like i understand generally speaking that we fought the british you know to like establish this place as an independent nation but like that's about the depth of my knowledge yeah there was some tea involved yes and i'll spill it and i don't care who hears i did watch also uh death by lightning during my uh little break which is really good would recommend what is that um it is the story of uh it's the story of james garfield being shot and the man who shot him and garfield is played by michael shannon and the man who shot him is played by one of the main dudes from succession i didn't watch succession like the main son the oldest son on succession did you watch succession i did but

And you're talking about the character actor. I mean, the guy who's like, it's, I'm sorry, not character actor. He's the method actor. He's British in real life. Oh, I think we're maybe talking about somebody else. It's Death by Lightning. I'll look here. Death by Lightning.

Yeah, Death by Lightning. So speaking of how much I don't know about American history, I don't think I realized that, like, Garfield was shot.

So it's Matthew McFadden. He's not one of the sons. Matthew McFadden. He plays like an in-law. He plays a son in-law. Oh, okay. Sorry about that. Yeah, no problem.

I clearly did not you're clearly not a bowler or whatever he says um yeah so that guy Matthew McFadden is great in it as is of course Michael Shannon as is Nick Offerman is really good in it so it's it's like and I'm not our best beards I mean I've seen the best beards of my time to have it insane um and it's not a spoiler to say that like Garfield was shot although kind of for me it was because I don't think I would have known that if you if you um you know if you woke me up out of a dead sleep three weeks ago and said like name u.s presidents who were shot in office garfield wouldn't have been at the top of the list but it's a crazy story because at least as the way it's told in this show death by lightning um which by the way the reason for that name is because somebody's asking i think garfield about if he's worried about being assassinated in office and he says that's like worrying about death by lightning you just can't go around being afraid of it all the time and the story of this the matthew mcfaden character is like he's just this guy who was likely mentally ill but just kind of like always getting into trouble and kind of just like always had these big ideas that he couldn't quite um deliver on and he had like stolen money from his family had this long-suffering sister he was sort of in and out of jail and institutions, but also kind of fancied himself a political, he basically what happens is he gets it in his head, the Matthew McFadden character, that he's helped get James Garfield elected because he was allowed to like make a kind of a small speech at a very small political event somewhere that Garfield wasn't even at, but it goes into his kind of, you know, his brain chemistry. And, uh, and eventually because he's feeling slighted by the Garfield presidency and he's not getting his time his face time with this president that he feels he's elected he ends up like killing him but um also Garfield didn't die right away like he gets shot but then he's alive for like another month and there's this like terrible doctor that like is just doing these procedures on him that are probably hastening his death versus helping anyway it's a really well done it's like I think three-parter but um death by lightning would recommend okay on the subject of mount lake terrace yeah i would

recommend the tv show death by lightning i am just now like in this moment starting to work on some sort of a theory and i don't even know what the theory is but i need your help okay kind of completing it or at least creating the boundaries around it um so i did not know that there's this new movie slash mini series or whatever about a guy named garfield i was at the theater the other day and i saw a trailer for a new adaptation a new adaptation of withering heights do you know the main character in withering heights heathcliff heathcliff is there something going on with the orange cats is there is this like some are they warming us up for a great cartoon cats of my youth

that's right something is going on if you bring in riffraff and mungo we got a situation here oh man good point i like your theory i'm here for you also sarah newlon of bothell washington is here for it hey thank you sarah appreciate that thanks sarah thanks to uh myra lovell of portland oregon hey nice that's just down the just down interstate 5 from me um and if the wind does what it's trying to do my hot tub cover may be down by

your house keep an eye out oh myra myra is the one who's keeping an eye out if you see yeah if

you see a hot tub cover people many people sent me uh links to amazon uh straps that you can buy and i saw those and then i then got distracted but i need to do that or or because otherwise i need to just keep doing this cinder block thing which really does bother me while we are thanking

donors here i would like to thank the anonymous listener who sent me a bag of bit of honey candy i got Yeah, there was a package directly from Amazon in our P.O. box yesterday, and I was like, what is this? It was kind of heavy, and it was shaky, and so I opened it up right away, and it was a whole bag of Biddo Honey. Am I hitting the O weird? Yes, I think you're saying it right. No, I think you're saying it exactly right. Biddo Honey. Biddo Honey.

Like Biddo O'Rourke. One day we'll turn Texas, Andrew. One day. Is Biddo O'Rourke a show title?

Thank you for the Secretary of Transportation Candies. Um, was that, was he, that's what he held for a while there, right? Wasn't he?

Oh no, that's a Buddha judge, Buddha judge.

Why do I get a judge used?

Beto was the, uh, Beto was the guy who almost won a Senate seat out of Texas. That's against Ted Cruz and is, is sort of, you know, still kind of knocks around as an idea of a, of a Democrat that might be able to win in Texas.

Right. I don't, I think that's cause the names both came with B I'm getting hot. My face is flushing. Let's just move on after that blunder.

You know who is not judging us on that? Elizabeth Siddle, who's in Washington, D.C. Although, who knows? Being in D.C., Elizabeth could be a D.C. power player. Yes, she might be judging me the most. She might know Buttigieg. Yeah. Maybe, yeah. Maybe she's gone from judging us the least to judging us the most. I don't know. But critically, Elizabeth is donating to the show and helping us do this. So thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you to all of our donors for making TBTL possible. We absolutely could not do this without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. So the other day, Andrew, I was on TikTok as I am want to do, although I'm really going to try to work on that like this week and also this year. I'm committing myself to a project of reading a physical book or magazine for one hour a day. which is time that right now I just spend oftentimes just mindlessly looking at my screen. Like, far too much of my time off in the holidays. I mean, I had a really great time. I got to spend some time, obviously, with my daughter. I got to spend some time with Becca. I got to see family and friends. It was a really nice time off for me, and I got to really connect with a lot of people. I also connected way too much with staring at my phone because I felt like, well, I'm on vacation, and this is fun for me, and I like to just, like, you know, this is how i relax now but i feel my brain atrophying you know um and my attention span i should say i'm really atrophying and so one of the things i'm really going to try to do i think you're so much better about this than i am because you like you know you read books and um i i get the sense well i don't know what your general thing is my sense is you do it sometimes to fall

asleep maybe i do read i always fall asleep with my phone in my hand and but reading the book right Book up, yeah, because I think if I were scrolling a social media site, I don't think that would – I just don't think it would put me to sleep. But I really do enjoy reading books. I mean, I read them on my phone. It's weird. I consider that reading.

I don't think there's anything wrong with it being on the phone at all.

For me, like I miss a physical book, and I almost went and got a physical copy of the book I'm reading right now. But the thing is, like my eyesight is so bad. And also, if I'm going to bed, I don't want to have a light on in the room while Genevieve is trying to sleep, you know. And then if I'm going out to read somewhere, honestly, like if it's a somewhat ill-lit restaurant or something that I'm holding the book up to my face, like I kind of need it on my phone now.

Yeah, I mean, we could, I got a tight two hours on places I can't see in anymore, my friend. Like, it's just absolutely wild to me, like how much low light impacts my ability to read like anything. But I definitely consider, like, when I say reading a physical book, maybe because I like the kind of romance of that, but also maybe reading on my phone, although I don't trust myself to be reading on my phone and then not switch over to something that's a little bit more kind of like instant gratification, maybe. Especially if you're getting notifications. Totally. So I'm going to really try. And my house is full of books that I have intended to read and magazines. I mean, certainly I have the work side of it. Like I, I'm always going to be probably working on a book or two for live wire, but I, I just want to really commit myself to spending an hour a day, just sitting in and reading and it doesn't have to be anything heavy, but just to try to see if I can kind of re like rewire my brain a little bit back to where that's enough for it. Because it's just like just eating junk food all the time. Eventually you need everything to be so flavor blasted just for it to taste like anything. and I just need to but anyway all that is to say I wasn't doing that during the break I was on the internet a lot on my phone and a lot of it was TikTok and I saw this this ad popped up and it was for this little like bb gun that was like the size of imagine it's like the size of a credit card in terms of its you know

It's a rectangle, but it unfolds and turns into kind of like the shape of like a number seven. It's thicker than a credit card, right? So it's like in its, it's a rectangle that if you looked at it straight on, it looks like a credit card size thing. But if you turned it on its edge, you'd be like, oh no, it's a lot thicker than that. But you unlock it and you open it up and it kind of turns into a little like a number seven. and the bottom part is a handle and it has a little trigger on it and you pull back this thing and it's a little gun. It's a little BB gun. And I saw this guy, you know, doing some ad where he's out in his yard and he's got some kind of a little like target setup that's like a tin plate or something. And he's opened up this little BB gun and he's pulled back the thing and he kind of shoots it at the tin plate and it goes, plink. And I thought, oh, that's kind of a clever design. And my first thought was, i bet you my nephews would get a kick out of this if they came over like it's this kind of little small thing but it turns into like a little bb gun and i even was like looking i was scrolling down through the webs like the whatever it is inside tiktok of this thing they're trying to sell me and it was like comes with two plastic balls or something because in the bay in the in the hand like the um the handle of this little bb gun there's a little container supposedly for your ammo and it said it even comes with a couple of like plastic balls or something and i was like okay and then it was i was like well how much does this cost because this is kind of a clever little device i don't know how much bb guns cost anymore but it was 25 okay super cheap right and it was like made in the usa so and so you know like i didn't love the fact that i think it was you know like liberty you know liberty times or something it was like that's weird i don't like that stuff but it's 25 it looks kind of fun again i just thought like oh when jack and abe or little luke are over and we went out in the yard and maybe shot this at some like shot this at some tin cans or something it could be kind of fun and it's 25 so i hit buy and then i'm like as i continue scrolling and by the way it's so frictionless with the tiktok shop you know they've got my information in there they've got my address it's like it's one of those things where it just takes and i will tell you this everything i've ever bought in the tiktok shop has shown up first of all very quickly weirdly enough like it all comes from china but there must be warehouses in the united states because like i was telling you about those um those tupperwares with the that i'm putting the fruit in i probably put that order in five days ago and they're already at my house one of them with blueberries in it so this is all some as my dad would say chinese bullshit but it's also somehow already over here which is kind of weird and they have i will give them credit they the tiktok shop itself has a very good system for keeping you posted at all times about

what's going on with the thing you just bought oh yeah like they've clearly identified that something that stresses people out about buying weird crap on the internet is the feeling of like is it going to show up or not? Um, or you know, is, did I just like throw my money away? And so like right after you buy something, you get this update in your email and then they're kind of like, they're, they're keeping you posted on the fact that it's in transit, uh, and that it's been delivered. Like, it's a very kind of like, I guess you might say high touch kind of thing where they're just really, again, they're really, so, so for instance, yeah, I'm just looking, I'm scrolling back through some of my purchase history. And so this was, I guess, technically the company that I bought this from is called Madavin. It says that we're getting your order ready to be shipped $25.99. And then if shipping is $5.99, $31.98. Okay. So because I ordered the, because what happens on TikTok and the rest of the internet is, we all know this now, if you make the mistake of buying something or putting something in a cart, you will now just get a billion ads for the same thing yeah even though you already bought it exactly which is one of the things that's pointed out is like not the greatest system like here's what we've got they bought a thing now let's just keep showing them that thing it's like well i already have that thing so literally the second that i hit buy on this 25 bb gun now the as i'm scroll continuing to scroll through tiktok every single ad is for this bb gun but here's the thing it's not all the same ad it's not the same guy it's like different people talking about this thing and it's different colors of this little bb gun and there's you know what i mean and what these are i i get the sense that there's something where like on tiktok anyone who wants to can just make an ad for a product like i guess you buy the product maybe and then you you make your own ad for it and what you're hoping is that your ad is compelling because every time somebody buys it if they click on your link you get a little small percentage of the sale or something like you know there's a lot of this that goes on online now I don't know if it's called affiliate marketing or whatever but like so what I'm getting now is just like literally 10 to 20 alternative ads for this clearly this same little bb gun that I've bought but I'm still unclear on like what the propulsion is do you

still have the name of it in front of you because I'm googling around and I cannot I'm trying to spell Madovin and I am not

finding anything. Well, that's not going to be any help because that's like a let's see I'm trying to find

While you look for that, I want to say while you were describing pulling this thing out that's about the size of a credit card I was picturing like a slightly bigger version of the cassette tapes that we would put in Sound Blaster the transformer that was a boombox but his chest was like a cassette player holder and then there were different... I had the Eagle one, the one that was a cassette tape that turned into It was some sort of a robot bird.

I did not have any of those, but I thought those were, within the entire Transformers universe, the coolest Transformers were the tapes that went in Soundwave. Soundwave, yeah, yeah. I loved those things. Okay, I'm getting a little closer. I'm finding the original, let's see, buy again. I don't want to buy it. Please don't try to sell it to me again. Oh, yeah, you're never going to see the end of these ads now. Yeah, I'm trying to get, what I'm going to do, Andrew, is I'm going to take a picture of it and just send it to you. This is not going to really help because this is the little BB gun or whatever it is in its box that it comes in, so it's not actually in the form, but this will just give you a sense of kind of, like, you know what I mean? This is it folded up and in like a little shipping package. Okay, so here's the thing. As I continue to see these ads, what I can't figure out is like, how does this BB gun work? because one thing is, as you know, BB guns are either you pump them up a bunch so that you build up some pressure to shoot the BB.

You need air usually, yeah.

Like an airsoft gun. Or some of them might even have like a little canister that you can put in there that's replaceable that's going to like charge the thing up.

Like a CO2 canister, yeah.

CO2 canister. Something needs to propel the BB. And I'm like, what I can't figure out about the design of this little BB gun is like how the BB is propelled. like like like because i'm keep looking at the design and as i keep getting more ads for it i keep looking through various different people trying to sell me again this same little 25 dollar bb gun and finally i see a guy and he's showing this thing off and he's going like here's where the bullets go and he pops open i guess you would call the barrel the top part of the number seven and he pulls out a full-on 22 caliber bullet puts it in the barrel clicks this little foldable gun back together pulls back a little again i don't know gun terminology i've never owned a gun i've never tried to own a real gun he pulls back a little thing and he fully shoots a .22 bullet at something in his yard. Not a BB, a .22 caliber thing. And the sound that the gun makes is a gun-ass sound. And it's definitely this one.

It's definitely this guy that you bought.

It's definitely this one. And by the way, when you...

For $25, a .22?

Well, that's okay. So this is what I'm... Okay, this was the whole journey. Me thinking I was buying a BB gun and being like, $25 is really cheap.

I love how absolutely useless this screen cap you sent me was. There's no name on it or anything. Like, you sent me an image of it, but, like, it says $25.99. But, like, what is it listed as? What does the listing say?

Let me tell you what it says. This is in Shopify. It says, you know what it's called? Black.

Okay, Black.

That's the name of the product.

It literally just says. So if I type in Black Gun, and first of all, I also love the fact that I'm now typing in all kinds of guns into my browser. You just sent me an email with the subject line gun, which is really we're really going to be on some watch list. Well, OK, I think I actually just we're going to be recruited, not on watch lists.

OK, let's see. I don't know. I'm trying to I might be able to find it later. I know I'm sorry that was not helpful, but that's like as close as I can get to whatever the original. If you were if we were scrolling my stupid TikTok feed, we'd be seeing nothing but ads for this thing. but so here's the deal all of a sudden i'm like well that wouldn't part of this makes sense now because there's no way to pump this thing up there's no way to shoot the bb okay there's no place for a canister to go but a bullet has its own propulsion device in it that's part of how a bullet works and if you have a basically what do you call the not the trigger but is it the hammer what do you call the part that comes down and basically like activates the Thank you.

We probably have at least a few people out there who know from firearms and are like, oh, my God, this is humiliating for them. But, like, you know, the thing that gets cocked back, and then what that does is that makes contact, that strikes the back of the bullet, which creates an explosion, which propels the bullet, right? So, I'm now, like—

Yeah, because the bullet has its— Yeah, I'm sorry, but— The bullet is propelling itself. The bullet has the propellant in it. A BB gun or a pellet gun, the gun has the propellant, which is air of some sort.

Yeah, the BB is not itself, like, a projectile.

And by the way, I found the video of this thing that you're talking about. I'm going to actually play this for real. And this is not saying you have this.

And I don't know if this is the specific.

It looks like it's called Life Card. The Life Card unfolded. It looks exactly like what you described. Okay, this is exactly.

This is the Life Card. It's an assassination weapon that can hold a single bullet and have a silencer attached.

It looks like a card. Let me tell you this. Yes. I promise you that wasn't the ad that I watched.

No, but is this the one that you saw later, though, that scared you?

No, I've never heard the word assassination weapon.

But I see it folds like a little seven, and then he's putting what looks like a bullet in there. Like you said, it looks like a .22 caliber, although I certainly don't know these things either. And they're out in a field somewhere, and they are shooting cans.

This is the life card. It's an assassination weapon that can hold a single bullet and have a silencer attached. It looks like a card, but when opened, it transforms into a gun.

Okay, this is interesting. It looks like... this is weird so there's a whole bunch of attachments for it including this one guy has a silencer on it uh other people have other like almost like um sites that they've added to it so it's like this tiny little thing that you can continue to build out i do wonder if you're in some sort of part of the internet where they're getting around laws by selling one thing that is legal to sell online with like this without a background check but then you continue to build up around it and the next thing you know you have a very dangerous weapon on your hands i have no idea washington's gun just stay away from james garfield um well this i did help him

get elected though so i think i have a certain amount of access i'm super curious as to what

the hell you bought because this would not be legal to sell something that takes bullets like this for 26 dollars on tiktok like that's just not that's okay so that's the other big part of

So, again, just to reiterate, the first ad that I saw, I think they must have had a silencer on it because it sounded like a BB gun when the guy fired it. And certainly nobody called it an assassin weapon that holds one bullet. I would have been like, miss me with that.

Yeah, of course.

Like, literally and figuratively, also miss me with that if you're bringing an assassin's bullet. But so, so again, I think the first one that I saw, the ad that I saw, I think the guy must've had a silencer on there. I didn't realize this so that it made it sound when he was firing this thing, like a BB gun, right? It didn't sound like it didn't have the, the, the, the explosive sound of firing a bullet. And then as I continue to see more ads for it and continue to try to figure out, what did I just buy? Like, how does this thing work? then it became at some point like i became aware that this is possibly something that fires a 22 caliber bullets one at a time like so you know it's it's like a you know you keep a couple in the handle or you could and then you can put them in the barrel but then i was like okay is it legal that i just bought that like am i allowed to buy that on the internet and it turns out in washington state yes like i was like do i have to register if i have a 22 caliber gun do i have to register it in the state of washington the answer is no andrew you don't have to register any guns in the state of washington if you now if you buy a gun from like a you know a gun store or a wholesaler or whatever they're supposed to have paperwork around it but like as far as federal registry right am i this much of an idiot um what i i did a cursory googling of this and what it sounded like to me was in the state of washington like for instance if this thing shows up and it's a gun technically speaking i don't have to register it in the state of washington i don't have to like call up the governor and say uh uh you know and by the way i would be very surprised if there's very stringent federal gun legislation considering how powerful the nra has been as a lobbying organization i mean what are the federal gun laws of the moment i'm not sure on that actually Because I feel like there are some places that it's pretty unregulated. There's some states where it's pretty wild west, right?

Yeah, I would assume. And by the way, I'm doing a lot of Googling on this. I have a report for you, but it's not going to clear everything up, but it's going to get us a little bit closer to what's going on, if you're interested.

The end of this, not the end of the story, but the place where we're at in the story is, I can't even if I accidentally bought something that could theoretically fire a 20

caliber bullet. Well, first of all, I'm just going to throw it out when it gets here, but also there's no way that can be $25. No. Like I think I probably just got ripped off. Like I'm very curious about what is going to arrive at my house because while I'm a little unsettled that I may have purchased a firearm off the internet, I also cannot believe in a universe. I refuse to believe in a universe where i can order a functioning firearm of any caliber for 25 like whatever is going to show up is going to be such again to go back to old walt b it's going to be such chinese bullshit that it actually it actually is a calming effect for me like it's actually calming me down because whatever like i had a moment of being like holy shit did i just violate the law here accidentally did i just do something illegal by buying a real firearm off the internet without going through the proper channels or whatever. Um, that was my, that was a real fear that I had. And then I was like, wait a minute, it can't be $25. Whatever they're going to send me is going to be so janky. It is going to be so non-functional that I don't think I actually have to be that worried. I think I want to get it in the mail so that I can open it and tell you about it and tell the audience about it and then probably throw it out immediately or keep it because I bet you

anything it doesn't work so this is interesting and i could maybe play some more audio of this so one person is talking about exactly it was a similar um a similar experience to yours it says i just saw an ad for a pocket guard which is a foldable 22 caliber pistol caliber pistol shaped like a credit card it's being sold for 25.99 it sounds like a great deal clicking on the link takes you to a website called outpeed and there's a screen i thought it was outspeed at first but it does say out peed and so that's weird and then a bunch of people are and then they're saying i think this is a scam and then all these other people are saying oh you're saying that a 26 22 caliber pistol uh being sold from a place called out peed on tiktok is a scam in other words everybody's just sort of dunking on the original poster here but now i'm on a website called and by the way i do i mean you want to talk about rip my uh ads because r.i.p to like whatever was being targeted towards me i'm not i'm no longer going to be advertised grapefruits from qfc as i scroll through tiktok clearly because i have i'm going to get nothing but gun ads it's all about tactical and it's all about tactical gear dude um but there is something so i'm on a website called trailblazer firearms oh good and they have a special page set up called The politics are amazing. Slash fake life card. Notice, warning, fake life card. We have been made aware of a copy of our life card that is not a real gun. It does not chamber a .22 WMR cartridge and does not have a serial number. It is prominently marked with a GG in place of our logo, like the letter G twice. This is a fake, not made or sold by Trailblazer Firearms. Unfortunately, the copycats use our name and our trademarks along with our photos and videos. We understand that these have been selling for around $30 or $40, and they ship directly to the customer's house. All real firearm sales must be handled through federal firearms license to complete a transfer. We only ship our guns to another FFL. So there are some laws around this. So it sounds like maybe the thing that – this is my guess as I try to put this all together in real time here. My guess is that there is this place called Trailblaze Firearms that makes something like this. that was the og and it does fire real 22 caliber bullets and now somebody has basically taken that and made a very cheap version of it that probably shoots bbs or pellets in some way i'm guessing spring loaded i'm guessing that maybe what you're getting is a really really cheap like um bb gun that maybe is a spring because that is another option for bb guns like a spring loaded one but i but those tend to i i think not be i didn't even know if they still made those i feel like that's an antiquated and not very strong propulsed bb situation right uh could be wrong about that so that's my guess is that we're now seeing these weird ads like that one i just called up that

called it an assassination weapon i think that they're like trying to i mean in a certain way i think it's a good thing that you got scammed but yeah you didn't get scammed because you wanted a little toy but i think what they're trying to do is convince people that they're selling this actual secret 22 caliber that's such a hard word for me to say gun but they're mad that somebody's ripping them off and selling a bb version online and you're like oh good i got a bb version that's what i wanted that's what i'm hoping is the case here that's what i think is the most likely

scenario because of the price point right like because of the it being so incredibly cheap that i i feel like it's gonna look pretty similar now i'm at this website of this other like gun thing that you're talking about and like it looks i think my feeling is my guess is it's going to look very similar to that and it's going to be essentially non-functional i'll be interested if

it has a gg logo that this place uh was claiming i wonder if you got that exact one or i mean at this point it could just be a million different copycats of this or whatever but again we're just hoping that you did get a copycat that's all that's all you want like you don't yeah it could By the way, I'm with you. I got my BB. My mom was very anti-gun, but I think somehow I wore my parents out. By the time I was 13 or maybe even 14, I finally got a BB gun and then kind of a couple of BB guns. And I loved them. And when I bought this house here in Seattle, I was like, is there room in my life for a BB gun now? But I still don't have a place that I would feel comfortable taking something that looks like a real gun even into my backyard and even shooting cans with it. I just think that it would freak people out. and plenty of people walk by our little yard or whatever and I don't think it would actually be dangerous the way I would do it but it could certainly look dangerous and it could also be dangerous I suppose so I'm not doing it but I have been I mean for decades now I've been thinking God could I ever get a BB gun again they are fun

yes and we had one we had like a classic like Daisy kind of BB gun or something that was like for some reason lived in my parents closet and it was definitely like you're not allowed to like i was never allowed to go get the daisy bb gun without my dad and like you know run around with it or shoot you know it at cans in the backyard as a kid or anything was even as a bb gun it was treated like a firearm basically yeah um but yeah it was just a it was a very weird experience because like yeah for me to have this kind of moment of possible realization that i have like and by the way i'm looking at the again at the website of the place that makes This thing It's $350 The real thing The real one is $350 And it looks like it gets shipped

To some sort of official dealer According to that website And then it does get registered With the government And then sold out to you

As well it should It was a very strange thing for me To actually have a moment I wouldn't call it a full panic Because I thought I can always just literally throw it out When it shows up And just like the problem is solved. But to just be like, because I guess what it really goes to is my conception of myself. Like, I am so not a gun person. I so do not want to have guns in my home. I so do not think that they make any part of our lives better. And I think that they're such an incredibly sort of pernicious force in our society. To feel like I just accidentally became a gun person was really weird for about an hour.

Yeah, no, I can imagine that. And also just thinking, what kind of a digital trail am I leaving here, honestly? Is it just weird? You know what I mean? Am I now officially on the list of somebody who bought this thing? Now I want to bring, believe it or not And I had a feeling this might happen when I looked at the show sheet And when I mentioned to you my dream last night But I want to bring this back to bananas for a second If you can believe it, I'm being serious here Have you seen these commercials That totally plays Into the idea that the world I mean it's everything that you and I hate It plays into this idea that this world is a really scary place You see this woman and she's like She just looks like a middle class woman in her 30s or something And she's walking through the streets Of what is clearly supposed to be like Portland or Seattle with rioters and homeless people. Is it a TV commercial? Yeah, we saw it on TV, I think during football games or something. There's all this violence and she's like, if you live in this world with all of these violent protests or whatever, you might feel unsafe but I have my banana. I'm going to play this for you and she's walking around with a banana, like a perfect little banana that's peeled and I don't know if she's taking a bite out of it or not but it's kind of a perfect banana peeled halfway down and she's carrying it as she walks through the streets in, I think, various scenarios.

With riots and violent looting going on all over the country, I don't feel safe leaving the house without this banana. Normally, I would be worried about this creepy guy, but I've got my banana with me. That same car has been sitting outside my house for a while now. Better keep this banana by the door.

Sounds ridiculous, right? Now, imagine this banana was capable of incapacitating an attacker from over 60 feet.

Now, I am going to stop the commercial there because I don't want them. I don't know if they're going to say the name of their brand, and I don't want to help advertise even in the most anti-advertisier way. I don't want to give their name out, but I think what it is is one of those ads that is selling, and I haven't even looked this up yet, But I think that if you then go and you look up this brand, you see that they're actually selling some kind of a gun that they're probably not allowed to sell on television. And so they insert a banana instead and make all the talking points. about a banana but then you're like what the hell is this banana commercial banana breath and then you look it up and you see that it's like some sort of a weapon yes it looks like it is i'm i'm

now i'm on the case it's a less than lethal defense pistol is what it looks like a gun though right i'm sure it looks exactly like a gun but it's something that's maybe not quite as maybe hopefully not quite as lethal but is like also what's weird is i found the same ad you're talking about it's and you might have mentioned this too, it's so clearly AI. Oh, I did not mention that,

but it does feel fake. You think that's not a real person?

Yeah, well, on Reddit, someone says, this stupid-ass AI banana shit, and as I'm watching it, I think she's AI. Interesting. I don't think that she's a real person, the alleged sort of actor in this movie. Are you watching it? I'm going to send you another one,

because for the same brand, here's another commercial, and I'd never seen this one before, and i'll play the audio here uh i'm going to just respond to your email that says gun luke and send you a link to another commercial and this is on that website i spot so it truly did air on tv it's not like a youtube thing and this guy looks like he's standing in his kitchen i'm just curious by the way uh if you think he's ai too because i didn't clock that on her but i totally believe this banana is a lethal launcher capable of shooting rock hard kinetic and tear gas mixed

with pepper chemical irritants the ammo can incapacitate an attacker from okay so it's a

whole bunch of people and they're all just holding bananas in various rooms of their house talking about uh what the banana can do it's an intro i gotta say this is where we get into the conversation about what is good advertising and what isn't like this seems like this seems so i know i use this word a lot but it's so pernicious it feeds on the you know like by whipping up fear and then feeding on those fears to sell more weapons to americans it's everything i absolutely hate

Would you feel differently about it if you knew the company was based in Scottsdale? I'm shocked. Peace and love to our listeners in Scottsdale. But that's the most Scottsdale thing I've ever seen.

But does it work as an advertisement? Absolutely. You see this thing and you're like, well, what the hell are they advertising? And next thing you know, you're on their website.

Well, you know a less, like I would say, a less sort of dangerous and horrific version of that in ads that I thought was really good. You might have talked about this on After These Messages. was the commercial where everyone's walking around with ice cream cones. And the ice cream cones are, I think they're probably supposed to be iPhones maybe or something.

Yes, I don't like that. I mean, I like that ad. You don't like that ad? I like that ad if it were advertising ice cream. That ad makes me want ice cream cones so badly, something that I never really crave. And the thing is, yeah, I think it's supposed to be like either a Samsung or some sort of anti-iPhone commercial. And it's like kind of making fun of people who have iPhones, but they're replacing their iPhones with ice cream cones. I feel like the message is muddled. And also, people like ice cream. Replace the iPhone with something that I don't like. Why? See, I had a different. It makes me want an iPhone and an ice cream cone.

I had a different reaction because one of the things they're having people do with the ice cream is like a bunch of stuff that ice cream cones you don't want to do. like put it up against your face or like stare into it or like smash it into something or poke it or i know what you mean the ice cream does look pretty delicious in it but it also it makes and i say this as an iphone user it makes all of the iphone users really look like sheeple who are being really kind of dumb and think they're cool but are actually just staring into an ice cream cone in some way yeah that's kind of my take on it that's definitely what

they're going for but it doesn't work for me because i think they make the ice cream cone look so so good and i just don't think they sell the point enough like you remember this so this is for google pixel so obviously going after the iphone here but um samsung a long time ago now uh had an ad that really went after the sort of quote-unquote sheepleness of iphone users and they did a better job of it by like making fun of people who wait in long long lines for the new iphone release or something and they all seem grim and miserable but they have to get their new iphone or whatever i don't really share those feelings i don't care what kinds of phones people use and so i don't buy into that whole narrative but at least for me from an advertising standpoint that made sense to me you seem like they drag they drove home this idea that and that an iphone just is a miserable existence because you're chained to that experience or whatever this just i don't know man i and i'm re-watching it now when they take the ice chrome like a woman takes an ice cream cone out of her out of her purse but it's still in perfect shape there's a woman using an ice cream cone as a phone while she's making a viral video they're showing a um they're showing these sign makers throw up this big billboard that says the all new vanilla pro and it looks like that's also part of the joke right is that you're being so vanilla by having an iphone which i think is kind of a pretty clever idea so tasty though like i i don't know i can't get over this.

I'm not saying I'm right about this. I'm just saying these are my feelings about it. This ad totally doesn't make me feel negatively about the iPhone. It makes me kind of iPhone-curious and certainly ice cream-curious. Maybe I'm just hungry, my dude. I don't know.

Well, because here's where I think – this is why I think the commercial works for me. I hate being sticky. It's one of my – I mean, nobody loves it, but I particularly hate it. I hate having food on my face. I hate having sticky food on. And so when I'm seeing someone like, and I'm watching one of these versions too of this commercial where somebody's there, people are trying to tap pay with their ice cream cone. And it's just like smashing it against the little tap pay thing. Or like, you know, somebody's like, again, trying to type into it, but their fingers just going right into it. All I feel like is all I can imagine is how sticky everyone's hands are, how melty the whole thing is. Like it actually, for me, because of how much I despise that feeling, it's creating

for me a negative association with the iPhone so you and I are exactly alike in that I hate stickiness like I'll put up with it because I like certain foods that you wouldn't put up with like I will sit down for a full thing of like ribs or something but hopefully I will make sure nobody in the room is looking at me and that I have like three paper towels exactly so I really hate that feeling too and so as somebody with a beard I don't need ice cream cones hardly ever either because then it's just really hard to get out and um and so i'm totally with you on that but i don't feel like this commercial leans into that enough because that's my problem with it because in almost every situation the ice cream looks good one exception a man goes to pick up his keys and his wallet and his ice cream cone off a table and when he picks it up you see that it's left a little bit of stickiness behind but in every other situation even when they're going to pay for something at a POS station. You see them smash the ice cream cone down, but they don't show them pulling the ice cream cone back and leaving gunk and stickiness. People are holding up to their faces, but they're pristine. If they were showing these people getting smeared by ice cream, I would be revolved.

Or if they're melting and it's hitting your hand in that way, that would be... I think you're right. I do also... I think they use the Nancy Sinatra song, Sugar Town. Oh, yeah, which I also love.

freaking i'm just such a fan of this song i luke i forgot about that i'm glad you mentioned that i love that song so much too but that also then only adds to the like makes you makes you more

excited about what everyone's doing in the commercial it really does and again as somebody

who hates everything you just said about the experience of eating ice cream only or an ice cream cone specifically only more so because of this mustache situation i got going on how did they make this commercial that is supposed to make me feel bad about another product make me feel better about two products i'm not usually interested in but again i'm not i sound like i'm arguing with you luke i'm just i just feel passionately about this but i'm not saying that you're wrong i'm just saying for me it just it just doesn't work 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-ly, emails or V-mails.

Yeah, I got a voicemail for you here, Luke, from across the pond, as it were. Why were we talking about Macbeth before the holidays?

I feel like maybe either, maybe I was mentioning Hamnet. Oh, maybe, yeah. That movie that's getting a lot of Oscar love about Shakespeare. Oh, is it? Is it getting good reviews? Shakespeare, oh yeah, hugely I wouldn't be shocked to see it actually win the Oscar Interesting, yeah

I only saw the trailer, it didn't look like a movie for me necessarily, but anyway we were talking about Macbeth and like how I think you made a reference to like, oh they call it the Scottish play because supposedly you're not

I think you said that because I couldn't remember I think you might have brought it up, like you're not it's bad luck to say the name in the theater so you say the whatever the other thing instead of saying the name of it or something

Yeah, and I feel like we both maybe fumbled our way through that, kind of not knowing what we were talking about, myself especially. And we got this voicemail from listener Avalon.

Ahoy, ahoy, friendos. This is Avalon. You're Scott 10, but I'm not Scottish, as you can tell. I'm from San Diego. But I was just listening to the latest episode of TVTL, and I had to chime in with the whole Scottish play, Don't Say Macbeth in the Theater, It's Cursed. and um i used to tour a one-man performance of macbeth called is this a dagger where a scottish a well-known beloved scottish actor played all the roles is very good we've taken it all over the world and um and he told me because he's a huge history of scotland guy that the reason why they say it's um curse

Thank you.

is not because it will actually bring you bad luck but because at the time that Macbeth came out it was so popular that there were groups of actors who traveled around the country the country being the United Kingdom and they could play they could play any all of the roles so you could you have basically a on-demand group of actors who could just bring you Macbeth so if you were you owned a theater and you're doing a show and it's not going well the producers would often be like well we could just get mcbeth in because those guys are always around or we can bring them in they're not far away and so they would say don't say it because saying mcbeth meant the show was really bad and they were going to replace it with mcbeth and over time it became known as the scottish play instead of mcbeth and don't say it because it's a curse but really it was a curse because it was so good that any new work was under threat of being replaced i hope this made sense um love you guys what you do is so important

hey thanks have a lot that's amazing right totally fascinating so in other words it was like it was sort of a job protection thing who is like if you were in a play don't give the theater owner any ideas about firing all of you and bringing just bringing old mcbeth back which was always popular uh it's called is this a dagger that was the the the one man show that that avalon was

touring with it did avalon say that because i started googling right away to figure out who she was protecting there and i was wondering if it was alan coming because he did a one-man show of mcbeth that apparently was wildly popular um but i think she said that the name of the show

was is this a dagger um which has me thinking about my one-man show is this a gun yeah right

I would make that the show title, except I don't feel like that's a good SEO for us.

It's my one-hour meditation on did I buy a gun on the internet accidentally.

Well, I will say that. I hope I didn't step all over your story there. I'm really fascinated to find out what ends up going on with this guy.

I kind of am, too. Like, A, I should be more careful about the crap I buy on the internet. I mean, that's an obvious one. but b i am genuinely very curious about what is going to get delivered to my house uh for you know 25.99 i i hope at least it's something like in other words i hope it's not a total like you know a total scam to where like literally they just never and it would appear i mean i'm getting these updates from the tiktok shop and again the tiktok shop historically has i've never bought something off of there that then hasn't arrived so i do think that they have some kind of a i don't know quality control not quality control but like there's some kind of a deal that i think if you're selling stuff through the tiktok shop you have to probably actually mail it out because otherwise you'll get kicked off of there pretty quickly but what it is that will arrive here is the real is the real question my prediction is you're gonna love it my prediction

is people who feel like it's a ripoff or a scam are looking for a more powerful gun i think you're gonna get a probably somewhat chintzy toy i mean my one thing would be if it's really chintzy maybe be careful around it especially like if it's dangerous yeah if it like you know if the bb

kind of goes out it was gonna hang fire on me exactly i don't know no i think i'll um i'm you know again we will see what actually shows up here but um but i my expectations are very low which is actually a good thing like i don't want i'm not hoping for a functioning illegal firearm no no as i'm sure a lot of the people that buy it would be it would be amazing if i end up buying

if we just end up like moving a bunch of units on this thing oh i hope not i hope i sure hope not

um so uh okay well you know we're already doing that thing we're only two days into the week andrew and we're doing that thing where it's like i'm looking at the show sheet we got to talk marty supreme at some okay yep i want to tell you about my newfound uh handy handyman status where i actually tackled something last night at my home that i'm very proud of because it's the kind of thing that i normally just like freak out and call someone you know call the fix-it guys to come out on but i fixed it it myself so we're gonna have plenty to talk about also i've accidentally turned the Madrona Hill studio into a shoes-off environment, Andrew. No, Jesus. Just some real camel's nose under the tent going on here. So much to discuss as the week continues, but we will pick this conversation up tomorrow when we bring you more imaginary radio. In the meantime, thanks for listening. Have a great Tuesday, everybody. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Yes, sir. Power out.