Muse

So what is this new project you guys have for Sally?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, so, um, this new project we have, it's called The New Medusas, and we think it could really use the Sally Reed touch. So it's a show about three women who run a salon in Soho, who are just trying to get by, and they have snakes for hair, and they turn dudes into stone. Okay. So, right now, the show, it's a little, I don't know, hmm? And I think that you, Sally Reed, could bring to it more of a hmm. I don't know what you mean. So, right now, the show, it's more, yeah. And you could bring it to more of a yeah.

I think I know what you're saying. I have a client right now that's bringing to a Fox show that before was just, hey. So we're looking for less and more. That actually wasn't in the email.

TBTL.

Dear TBTL, you're so amazing. And I know you're gonna do better. Luckily for me, I've processed all my feelings. And I've gone through the five stages of grief. Denial, anger, internet commenting, cat adoption, African dance, cat returning to the adoption place, watching all the episodes of Murphy Brown and not giving a flying fart.

Whoa, watch out, says that bird. Ew, it's got a snake. Oh, it's chasing a jackal. Oh my gosh. That's the voice of the youth of America.

Have a good show, dummies. What you do is so important.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL. This right here, this is the show that just might be too beautiful to live. This party is going to be off the hook. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. You paint your bald spot? One bald spot. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia, where just the walk from my little house out here to the Madrona Hill studio was really testing me this morning.

Oh, my God!

I know it's not a particularly interesting thing to say, But we are just right. I mean, are we actually? I was going to say we're right in the teeth, in the teeth of the wintertime lousy weather. But I don't know. I mean, statistically, are we? Is January statistically worse than February? And yes, I did say February. I'm trying to train myself to include that weird ass R in there. Anyway, that's all right, folks. The good news is we have made it to episode 4,636 together.

Let the fun begin.

We're all going to be OK as the temperatures drop a bit around. In fact, there's a very slight chance of snow later in the week here at the Madrona Hill Studio. I will be able to stay warm because my main source of reliable heat in my house, which broke the other day, is working again.

It's working. It's working.

Because I fixed it and I can now do anything. I'm very proud of myself. also i think the makers of marty supreme should be pretty proud of that movie i think the uh the film is pretty good the acting is pretty decent you know it's just living truthfully in imaginary circumstances it's also one of the rare instances where andrew and i have seen the same movie whilst still in theaters and so we'll try to get to marty supreme today and um if we have time we talk about a person who is being mentioned as maybe the greatest athlete in the world i mean i figured he had to be in sport but he wasn't in sport he's like a teenage dart player from england um who has won his second world championship uh we will again time permitting talk about that and then speaking of recognized dart masters let's welcome this guy to the program longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships and the time he's putting in in the basement on his darts project the world needs to see the madness that is my upper torso okay he is andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend

good morning luke i don't usually do this but i take issue with something that you said in your intro today which is really yeah you're always like you should listen to my intros instead of spacing out and then i listen to them and i attack you immediately i think they i know this is a positive thing i actually think that certainly in the back half of 2025 you and i i think saw a lot A lot of the same movies in theaters together. I mean, not together, but. Right. We saw Friendship, the Tim Robinson movie. That's a good one. I think, didn't we both see Sinners in the theater? I did not see Sinners. One Battle, we definitely saw. One Battle, sure. And I think you saw it twice, right? You took two bites of that battle? No, I threatened.

to and then i didn't but i feel i feel like i've seen it twice because as a certain kind of white guy with the internet profile i have i i watched the movie and now i've watched endless numbers of people talking about the movie and playing clips from the movie and breaking down shots from the movie so i feel well familiar with the content one of the reasons this is sort of on my mind is and

obviously i don't have the data to back this up and the financial situation is what the financial situation is and i know that we keep on hearing kind of more and more bad news about the potential future of the actual theater industry right especially with that merger everybody's talking about and what that could do to theatrical releases but like i don't know what the money bottom line is and clearly it's not great but i gotta say i feel like the industry has done a good job post-pandemic of making these films that have people at least like you and i who enjoy a certain kind of film, and a vast majority of Americans like, maybe not majority, my apologies, I'm being hyperbolic there, but that a great number of Americans are going out to sea as events, starting with the Barbieheimer summer, to sinners, to weapons, to battle after another, you know what I mean? I feel like there have been a lot of theatrical events lately, and it makes me, it just makes me happy.

Well, I think part of it is that... Somehow, hot break feels good in a place like this. there's nothing more dangerous than Luke Burbank having recently read an article on the topic that is at hand but I actually we can just talk Marty Supreme now why not we've been threatening to do it for a couple of days and how it relates to sinners and how it relates to box office performance and things like that so I think I'm wondering if well let me put it this way I was reading an article the other day that's kind of putting forward a sort of a conspiracy theory which is that the trade publications right which is like variety the hollywood reporter almost all of them are now owned by penske media penske media is uh owned by a guy named i think jay penske and his dad is roger penske who is like a you know oil and like motor sports guy and roger penske is like a trump dude and here's the point there has been this kind of um there's been this a tremendous amount of love for timothy chalamet and his kind of quote-unquote domination of the box office around the holidays i think there was an article in variety that was like chalamet is king of the box office oh yeah dunes would be another example of getting people out too i think dune yeah that was a really good movie i guess what i was going to say is i i feel i'm with you i feel like well there have been event movies because yeah we both saw i didn't see dune in the theater one or two but i loved those movies but like i have the same feeling as you and then i'm reading this article and the thrust of this article is basically that for all of the love for timothy chalamet as a person and as an actor the movies that he's actually done are not the number one movies of the holiday era they're just beloved by the critics and maybe in some way and that in fact sinners which did better in a lot of senses got no love was sinners also an a24 film i don't know but that like basically ryan kugler when he made sinners He negotiated a deal with the studio that they were mad about, which he gets all of the rights to the movie back in like 20 years or 50 years or something, probably 20 years. And that was kind of like he had the leverage to do it, but it was seen as basically sort of pro-labor, pro-creator, pro-artist. And that there's been kind of this low key campaign to not put a lot of help behind Sinners, which was a more successful film than, say, Marty Supreme, because because, you know, probably it's a largely black cast. ryan kugler is you know uh you know a very creative strong and front and center black man in entertainment and that there's just basically these kind of like weird forces that are at play as they are often in this country and that in fact the the the sort of celebration of timothy chalamet's box office uh heroics are greatly overstated but what jumped out to me in the reading of that article was seeing the actual movies that are making all the money because

they kind of suck yeah that's where everything i said before was from the heart not the brain because like obviously hey that's my move the types of movies that you i guess what i should have reframed that just by saying that like i am personally happy to see that the industry which is clearly in trouble is still creating at least cultural events cultural weapons that also put that on the list yeah exactly that that speak to to me and people who like movies the way i do which These are not like art house films, but they're also not like, you know, what brings money into the box office are like family films, you know, like part four of a franchise that the whole family can go to. And they and that's and that's what supports the industry. And that is not meeting.

what it needs to meet right box well that's just the part that that's just the part i completely forget about because i don't have young children because i don't really go see like avatar six the smell of water yeah and like so when i was reading this article about how don't tell me how it smells i heard i've been hearing i'm taping that like it's like just in passing they're just kind of like they were sort of i guess you know level setting if you will or putting in context like where marty supreme is doing at the box office and i'm just seeing movies that are above it that i didn't even know were out and it is like the avatar movie which like if you pinned my and again peace and love to people that like love the avatar movies and have gone and enjoyed watching those movies with their friends and loved ones that's great i saw the first one in the theater because it was such an event because of the 3d stuff i'm not trying to yuck any yums but like i just there's a whole world of cinema and again a whole world of the cinema that actually seems to be making the money still that is totally off my radar because it's because i don't have a kid and because i don't care about you know i mean i don't know you probably i saw you typing were you pulling up some box office numbers i wanted you to just say because i have taste um if we can i was hoping you were getting me some box office on a wednesday yeah i'm looking

at something i'm looking at the the numbers.com avatar the smell of water is number one it looks like zootopia 2 there is number two which i don't know what's going on those are probably cute

movies i bet you people have a lot of fun at zootopia movies i'm not trying to i'm not trying to um you know denigrate those move that movie the avatar one is i will just be honest i just said i wasn't going to yuck yums oh yuck it up i mean like i just i i try to climb inside the brain of somebody who is i mean and it's more somebodies than any other film on that list are like i gotta see what the navi are up to yeah yeah like what it's going and it's looking it is getting the production value appears to be getting worse yeah maybe you need to be sitting in the theater

with the glasses, but I'll, I mean, I saw the first one. I mean, just for the record, like you say, like I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings here and everybody can like what they like, but I'm also not going to sugarcoat it. The first one came out a long time ago now.

Well, isn't that the thing too? What? Oh, oh. Wasn't Avatar like a clear metaphor for the war in Iraq?

Was it specifically Iraq? I mean, it was definitely about imperialism and white saviorism and, you know, but which you know good topics to explore and look internally about more than ever but handled with an absolute sledgehammer of obviousness and just like the name what was the name of the like the the bad guy general you're asking the wrong dude i saw this in the theater when it first came

out you know so we are coming off of of course like one battle after another where sean penn's character is named i believe by it's not time that's not the name the character has in the pinchon novel is it but it's an is it a reference i mean they call him lockjaw which is like a very intentional like um i think it's a very intentional kind of like uh i don't know on the nose naming but but with a point of view i feel like the i forget the name but i feel like the bad guy in the first avatar the general's name was like general bad guy it was like he's like his name was also a thing that he was and i was like oh jimmy cameron maybe just go back down to the bottom of the ocean and think about this for a while and am i right that they're looking for they're trying to obtain unobtainium yeah am i right the thing is called unobtainium i will say

as a quick aside you know i'm still reading inherent vice the pinch on book which i'd always heard this not always i'd recently heard this about his books which i had never read before but yeah everybody i i didn't realize how much humor are in his books and like yeah everybody has ridiculous last name or just ridiculous names in his books but um so it very well could have been locked jaw in the book as well or something potentially even worse possibly um one thing while we're talking about promotions here i'm just going to swing on to another vine here but if we want to hone in on uh marty supreme a little yeah why not which is really really hard for me not to call burt wonderstone still even if you explain to me the difference between the two movies and i did see marty supreme on new year's day but one thing we're talking about promoting movies and like what gets people in the door and i didn't realize this until after i had seen Marty Supreme but um I guess A24 put more of a marketing blitz on this I was telling you about that oh did you did you mention that to me I had forgotten that and then I'd read it again after seeing the movie and what I thought was interesting was my first impression of Marty Supreme as you probably remember was I came into the theater as the trailer was already playing because I walked out to get some more napkins or something and I thought it was a joke I thought it was a parody of sports movies or... rise, you know, like, you know, rise to the top kind of like exceptionalism movies. And I thought it was a joke. And then I thought, oh, this looks terrible. And then you told me that it was half of the Safdie brothers who did it, who did Uncut Gems. A Hafty brother. A Hafty brother, which is like the opposite of a dumb, like, I just don't like cliches, right? I don't like, I don't like tropes that just keep getting rolled out and cliches that keep getting rolled out. And so when I saw this, I'm like, oh, what a stupid, stupid thing. It's just like every other cliche sports movie, only this time it's ping pong. It seemed literally laughable to me. You told me, no, it might have some edge based on the DNA of the creative team, and you're absolutely right about that. But here's my point on this. When Vives and I saw the film, I saw something that I have not seen in a really long time, which is groups of people leaving the film in the middle of the film. Whoa, really? I'm not talking about a mass walkout, but we saw it on New Year's Day. Kind of coincidentally, we were just kind of like moping around, kind of hungover, and we're like, we want to have our breakfast over at IHOP. And Genevieve's like, well, Marty Supreme starts in 20 minutes when I amble over there. I'm like, all right, fine.

Oh, so was it at Oak Tree or whatever they call that?

Yeah, exactly. Which is one of my favorite things when Vives and I are just having like a very late brunch over there, just like kind of nursing our wounds. And there happens to be a decent movie playing across the parking lot. And so we can just sort of extend our wasted day. But then I go in and, of course, it's New Year's Day, which is kind of a big movie day for people. And so it's super, super crowded. And I think that the day I went, there were just a lot of people who were casual movie goers who were like, well, it's New Year's Day. We usually go. What about this ping pong movie? Oh, yeah, I saw the trailer for that. That seems fine. Like, I think they made, and my apologies for being a little bit insulting or snobby here, but I think they purposely made a very pedestrian looking movie that, or I'm sorry, trailer that hits all of the sort of like tropey looking things that would, you know, attract a general audience. and then you're in there and then again I don't want to I don't I don't think we're doing a spoiler conversation here but when something kind of gruesome happens where let's just say some structural integrity of a building gives out and something is somewhat gruesome and scary and involving animals happens that is when I started to see like a group of like a three a group of three that were a bit older than me kind of shuffling out the door and then later on maybe 20 minutes later some more people left and it wasn't a mass exodus but i was like oh i i have this thing now where i think a24 was trying to make it look like a movie in the trailer that somebody like me wouldn't like and before and because of that you brought people into the into the theater who were not ready for the intensity of like sort of an uncut gems light at times

i called it some cut gems some cut gems yeah when we and we saw it in we saw it on christmas day we we saw the day it came out in Los Angeles. So we were in, we were like in there with the film people, right? Like the, the kind of like, I think everybody who was in that movie theater in Los Feliz is like literally probably in the film industry or something. You know what I mean? But I totally agree with you. I think probably what a 24 wanted to do was obviously sell as many tickets as possible. And they probably had parallel promotional tracks going so that the trailer is very, very, very down the middle. You're right. like classic kind of sports triumph movie looking things but then you had yeah this sort of i was almost more so than the movie i've just been fascinated with the whole like um earned media uh unorthodox uh promotion of the film starting with like they released this like 17 minute zoom conversation that was chalamet talking to a bunch of the people that work on like promotion for the film and different things and he's just being like insane in the zoom and it's all a put on to go viral but it's actually pretty well kind of um executing a lot of times when they we try to do those people try to do those fake real things and hope they go viral they're very they're pretty quickly found out and or they just look kind of silly this didn't really have like everybody knew that this was in order to be viral but everybody thought it was pretty funny he's like obsessing over this particular color of orange which is also part of the plot of the movie and then you know they had all these blimps these marty supreme blimps that were flying around in different cities that were that same color of orange one of the most subtle things was there's this british rapper do you know about the sd the kid thing no so there's this british rapper named sd the kid or something who is his his shtick is he you no one's ever really seen his face he's always wearing kind of like a you know not a balaclava but something to wrap around his face so all you can see are his eyes and he had some hit song kind of in the uk real kind of i don't even know i don't know the terminology anymore for different kinds of hip-hop but it felt kind of grimy to me like not in a i don't mean that as a a pejorative just kind of a grimy kind of rap song this british real thick kind of british accent kid but there became this conspiracy

theory that it was actually Chalamet because if you zoomed in on his eyes his eyes looked exactly like Chalamets like actually quite like there was a huge similarity also a white guy also very kind of slender about the same size the thing is Chalamet is like a known hip-hop head he's like very well versed in the world he can kind of like rap he kind of has bars as they would say so then it was like did they create this SD the kid character as part of the Marty Supreme promotion then did that loop back around in any way yes it did because eventually timothy chalamet shows up in this like sd the kid music video where he's re-recorded he's basically doing a guest spot on an sd the kid song but he's rapping about marty supreme and the song is actually pretty good i don't know if i could really effectively find it on the fly let me see timothy just spelling Chalamet could take me the next 24 minutes. So spelling Timotay could take 45 minutes. Chalamet, S-D-D-A-K-I-D-Rap. Let's see if I can find this. Okay, let's see. This is the Timothee Chalamet section. This might have a little bit of, okay, this may have some swears in it. I don't know exactly, like, all the lyrics to this song, but this is S-D-Kid. Okay, S-D-Kid featuring Timothee Chalamet. This is a remix of this SD Kid song But this is Timothee Chalamet rapping About Marty Supreme Take a listen to this So this is the SD Kid guy And here comes Timmy

I've just been walking around for the last, I would say, three weeks just going,

it's Marty Supreme, it's Marty Supreme. That's the constant soundtrack in my head is, it's Marty Supreme, it's Marty Supreme.

Do we ever see him and SD? Yes, we do.

He is not SD Kid. He is not. We can confirm here on TBTL Breaking News. He is not SD Kid. They are apparently different people. But all of that is to say, like, they really threw everything at the promotion of this movie. And I'm totally with you. I bet you their calculation was, we'll run the super basic B trailer. That'll get the families in the door. And then we'll also have Timothee Chalamet wrapping My Girl Worth a Billion with SD Kid for a certain other brain rot sector. And me, apparently.

It is interesting. So for people who haven't seen it, it sort of – it is like – and if you happen to be familiar with Uncut Gems or all of the time Luke and I have spent talking about Uncut Gems, Uncut Gems, the movie that came out – what would you say, Luke? More than five years ago now? Probably more than five years ago now. Which I don't mean to take this over. That's way more your passion fandom than mine. But I watched the movie and I enjoyed it. But it was always a movie that I said I don't want to watch it a second time because it is like – it is just an adrenaline rush from the very, very beginning. I think it's an excellent movie that does exactly what it's trying to do. But what it's trying to do hurts me in a way. But it's just about one character just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper and deeper. But it never stops. It's got music that is always thrusting it forward. It's always people shouting over top of each other in this very realistic way that I totally appreciate. But also like seeing it once I thought was good enough for me. I will say that after watching Marty Supreme Burt Wonderstone and then Marty Supreme for the first time Genevieve said to me she's like maybe I would watch Uncut Gems I said maybe I would watch it again because Vives hasn't seen it at all and I've been like but it did remind me what good filmmaking does and how it sucks you in even if it's an uncomfortable watch but it also does just have elements of that tropey sort of like what I do is more important than what everybody else does and i have again it's like both about american exceptionalism and individual exceptionalism but i think that's it's a statement on that right like i think the fact that they made this movie about somebody who plays ping pong and at one point he literally tells another character well your life doesn't have meaning mine does yeah and we know that shit like that is taken seriously it's funny you played that rap they didn't swear i did um i'm keeping it real not timothy but like in another movie that was maybe about boxing or even mountain climbing or something you would take that line more seriously like well i have purpose in my life and it is to achieve this greatness but to put that on the backdrop of wait a second you're talking about ping pong which is maybe insulting to ping pong but like i think there's a table I think there's a reason why they kind of chose this.

story to sort of like i don't know would you say belie that a little bit or expose that a little bit well okay this is where it might get a little spoilery so if you don't want marty supreme aka burt wonderstone aka some cut gems if you don't want it ruined for you you might want to skip ahead a few minutes but here's the thing it's i actually feel like well a couple things they're i think they're very much playing with the kind of typical way these movies work because the marty supreme character is uh is is generally unlikable i would say yeah like he's extremely selfish he will use anyone that he can at any time to advance his interest and what i think is kind of funny is and this is the spoiler part he doesn't like win the world championship it's not like rocky he doesn't go to the olympics and then knock out you know apollo creed or whatever like he doesn't even get to play in the big thing and honestly i feel like the ping pong is kind of like by the time we get to the the climactic scene where he's facing off with his rival but it's not even a real game it's like a just a you know and again i'll keep saying this but this is spoiling some of the plot of the movie by the time we get to the like his big ping pong triumph it's kind of like who gives an f like it's not a real thing he's not getting all this money and all this endorsement the the whole orange ball thing has apparently evaporated like none of it really

comes together for him you know um you're not necessarily even rooting for him to win like even though like you said it's not the championship it is still set up in the movie in that structure of like this is the big game or the big match at the end right but but you also sort of hate him

at this point yeah and i will say kind of because they don't draw it out really there's not that

That final match, I felt like that hits all the – I mean, it's literally down to the very last point, and then you've got to win by two, and it's like –

I guess what I mean is I didn't see a slow motion of the ball hitting the table and the dust. The talc comes up from the ball, and he's diving, and he hits it, and the ball clears, and all of a sudden, the crowd goes – I just felt like it was still, for me anyway, compared to other movies of the kind. like basically there's like three ping pong scenes in the movie right it's like he's mostly just like he's like kind of he's we see him kind of hustle a guy but we don't even really see him do it we just see him entirely the creator they have a bunch of money because he we understand he hustled the guy we have him that's a good point they don't even really show that yeah like at the ping pong club the table tennis club which by the way i freaking love the casting in this movie one of them is george iceman girvin who was a real nba player i look over and i go freaking ice man which one is he who is he he's the guy who's in charge of the ping pong club that was based on a uh well

a lot of the people had teeth no but i mean the guy who's behind the cage and has really really

big teeth i don't think so he's a very tall black guy and he's based on an actual guy who there was a guy in new york city in that era who was a black man who ran the city's kind of premier like table tennis hangout club and that's who george girvin is based on but it's just funny that like george gervin was a good all-star for the san antonio spurs in the 70s and 80s he was called the ice man he just pops up there's just like so many ran like the casting of the movie also i really enjoyed but all that is to say i kind of felt like the so we so addy and i leave and i was like what did you think and she was like it was pretty good then we go to this diner next to the theater

called like fred 62 there oh yeah isn't that one of those that's i think i went there once and always felt like i should have gone back very classic like very classic yeah yeah super dinery love

that and it was perfect it's christmas night they had a table but it's also packed but they had a table we sat down and everyone in our area had seen had just seen the movie so we're like kind of all kibitzing on like what did we think of it and stuff and what i was really surprised by and the the guy that was sitting across from us i i had it was the weirdest thing it was this really nice guy it was his teenage son and then his wife came in a little bit later and i had the sense that this guy was either a movie actor or a director or someone i should have known and you know me i'm pretty keyed in on faces he just he was super nice but we were talking about the movie he was like yeah i saw it in new york at the whatever at the tribeca film festival or something so i was like okay noted you're probably in the industry or whatever and he was like could have used some editing he's like i liked it could have used some editing and addy was like i liked it could have been 30 minutes shorter and it was like what i was surprised by because i had a lot of excitement about this movie going in was in that little focus group in fred 62 in los felis the general response to the movie was good acting pretty good movie eh i don't know and i kind of feel like that's also a little bit how i feel about it was that how you and veeves felt about

it i don't know it turns out by the way the guy you're sitting next to sergey brian i oh god i

get that guy's number we keep

We keep crossing paths. I looked him up later. I was like, so that's what he looks like. If he ever sits next to me at a fancy restaurant, I'll know what he looks like. Weirdly, and I feel like I'm kind of a stickler for that running time thing, that run time thing. It didn't feel overly long given the style of movie to me. For some reason, I had not heard that until you just said it right now, And I don't think that that was something that I was thinking leaving the theater. Honestly, I guess I liked it because I was thinking like, well, now I want to kind of maybe at least go back and see if I can handle another dose of uncut gems. So I definitely left feeling generally positive about it. I remember I had a few ticky tacky plot things leaving the theater that you're probably thankful that I can't remember right now because they're not super important. But there were a few, I felt like there were a few holes or at least, you know, depletions. What do we used to call it when we said there wasn't a hole in the ozone layer, but there's a depletion or something like that? Yeah, the hole is being depleted. Yeah, there's some areas where I'm like, oh, I'm not sure about that.

Like the back of my head. Yeah. Throw a little topic on that ozone layer.

Right. Throw some of that on the Marty Supreme plot. But those were pretty ticky tacky. I think I generally liked it. and I'll tell you what and this is where I'm a little bit bummed that I didn't do more of this before this conversation was I left with my own feelings about it and kind of didn't want to leave that world like I came home and I remember I needed to take a shower because I had just seen that movie no I did need to take a shower because this was New Year's Day and New Year's Eve was a late one my friend and I did something I never ever do which is I got out of bed and just like went directly to IHOP with Veeves I was telling somebody I felt like I slid there like a snail on his own slime but can i ask a quick question i don't want to be personal but

the last that we talked about it you were going to be staying you're going to be rolling solo on new year's eve because the party you'd been invited to was a shoes off party what ended up

actually happening yeah well i ended up well i ended up going to the eagles with vives it wasn't what happened was and this was sort of the key about it was it wasn't so much a party but genevieve had been hanging out with some friends and had come home this is like i don't know in december at some point and said oh well so and so a good friend of ours had invited us over for a very low key New Year's Eve so I don't even think it was a party I think it was going to be you know maybe us and maybe a couple of other couples maybe I see and so that's why it's kind of like I don't that's not my that's not my move for that particular night I thought that that V was

going to go to that and you were going to just stay home there was a possibility if that had

continued to evolve but that whole thing ended up just kind of falling apart and I don't think it had to do with my disinterest in it uh although i was pretty straightforward about it so uh anyway nothing was really happening so we end up going to the eagles and then we show up at the eagles and there was a sign on the door by the cranky bartender that just said closing at 9 30 and we're like well that's a bummer but i had a feeling that that was just like sort of an escape plan in case he did in case there were people there that he didn't feel like dealing with he could have gone home at 9 30 but luckily it was like it was kind of perfect because it was kind of like oh it was a real you know it was our own club it was busy enough to show up yeah it was like busy enough to stay open but not like some sort of crowded new year's eve crazy bar situation so it was a really good time and i don't know when we ended up leaving so you were moving slow the next day

and you slimed slimed right over to ihop and then slimed across the parking lot to the movie

exactly and so i'm sort of just like sort of by the time we're out of the movie and i don't know it's somewhere between maybe it's five o'clock or something in the evening it's a million o'clock based on how dark it is except it's actually 4 30 i was gonna say it was already dark out so sometime between two and midnight but um anyway so i just remember b i i left the movie this is such a bad review but i just say that i left the movie curious and animated and thinking about it and turning it over and not dismissive of it and wanting to stay in it and like i came home and i took a shower i guess this was my original lame point which is like i dialed up some podcast i'd never heard of that had like four uh movie critics or aficionados like breaking it down and i listened to like the first 10 minutes of that and meant to go back and listen to some more so i definitely felt like this was a movie that was effective in some way and i and again my own personal thing that i'm sort of like obsessed with is i am somebody who's always had a negative reaction to the sort of individual exceptionalism storylines, which I feel like our culture especially celebrates in films, and maybe it's one of the reasons I do hate that sort of trope-y thing. And because this movie was taking that format, I mean, you and I even talked a little bit about how Boogie Nights kind of fits that behind the music sort of. That's a sort of different arc. That's the rise and then fall again, whereas this is a rise, and this has a pretty good...

ending, I think a pretty good ambiguous ending that says things will continue to evolve for the characters, but it's also a movie where halfway through I turn to Veves and I'm like, I don't think there's one person I'm rooting for in this, I think I dislike every single person, which was a problem with Uncut Gems, I'm like, I don't also, do you think this movie Marty Supreme, the character, do you think it makes the main character in Uncut Gems more likable by comparison? Like, is Adam Sandler has it been just too long since I've seen that movie I watched it last week, so I can weigh it on. I just did a little bump of it. You did a full line of Marty Supreme. Yeah, a fat rail of Uncut Gems. Okay, good. You're the perfect person to ask. Is Adam Sandler's character actually more redemptive or likable than actually Marty Supreme? Howard Ratner? Absolutely. And that is something, right? That's something.

Yeah. At his core, Adam Sandler's character in Uncut Gems is someone who's gotten in over their head, but is trying to, in his own way, fix things and make things right and is not, I mean, the people that he's using are people that are worse than him. It's people that he has, like, basically it's bookies, like, and then he's also getting kind of abused by people, whether it's Kevin Garnett not giving him back his, you know, Furby diamond or his special, like, opal that's from, like, some mine in Africa. Like, so he's sort of, like, kind of a victim as much as he is a perpetrator and he does have a good heart i mean that's the thing and with marty supreme it's like timothy chalamet's character and again this is i think ultimately what makes this a good movie is that if this movie was in different somebody else's hands it would be forrest gump i mean literally down to the ping pong yeah it would just be like guy with a heart of gold does this thing nobody thinks he can do and the woman by his side believed in him all along and it's like no she's also kind of full of shit potentially like no he's like everyone i mean the to me the takeaway from the movie is at least in the world of this film everyone's kind of on some level looking out for their own interests and that's just kind of and and and you know i hope that's not how real life is but i see a lot of evidence currently that is to a degree how real life is so i thought it was a really good really well-made film i guess what i thought was interesting was a lot of the feedback i saw online even just in places like tiktok from normal people was there was this kind of meme going around it was like so that like they they like the marty supreme people really got me to spend two and a half hours with my family on christmas watching a movie where no one's likable yeah like because there's also this kind of like this idea around american um christmas like american christmas day or new year's day like holiday movie going the kinds of movies that tend to come out at that time are the kind of movies are harry potter they're like the movies that you're going to go to with your family, and it's not going to ask too much of you. And back to what you started out saying, Andrew, with the trailer, I think a lot of Americans went to this, not as many as went to Avatar, but a lot of Americans went to this movie with the fam, and they were like, oh, this is not the movie that I thought I was going to.

Want to see that ping pong movie? Okay, yeah. We usually go to see a movie on New Year's Day. That's what I sort of thought when I showed up at the theater, and it was so crowded. I was like, oh, man. So, yeah, I do think, I'm really glad I saw it, And I will say this, you mentioning that diamond, I mean, literally it's called Uncut Gems, but you were reminding me of like some of the specifics of the plot points. I think I'm once again good on Uncut Gems. I just don't think I can do it again. And again, that's not a criticism of the movie. That's just a statement on my personality and what I can sort of handle in a stress-filled movie.

well it's funny because even though this is a half d film as in half of a safety this is i believe josh safety and whereas uncut gems was josh and benny making it together there's definitely a stylistic thing so the beginning of uncut gems it's this kind of almost like dreamlike weird space voyage to getting into this gem this this this particular yeah i guess we'll call it a gem and how it gets into kind of like the heart of the earth and then it's good you I forgot about this.

No, I don't remember it at all, but I know where you're going.

And it's got this weird kind of music with it that's just kind of like, it's hard to describe, but it's like, it's a very like non-literal start to the film. And that's exactly what they do with Marty Supreme with a spermozoa making its way to an egg. It's very, very similarly shot. The music is similar. Somebody else pointed out online that basically the opening of Marty Supreme with, like, the sperm going towards the egg is a direct ripoff of, I think it's three men and a baby. Oh, it is.

Yeah, I think Genevieve turned to me and said that. Yeah, she did. She turned to me and she said, this is how three men and a baby started. Because I remember saying to her, I got the time if you got the diapers.

Like, so, you know, that was also just kind of a funny thing. Now, here's what I have uncovered, and I feel like, Andrew, once again, I am not getting enough credit for this. both on the ascendant social media platform, Blue Sky, and with anyone else I've told about this, and I don't expect you to be any different, but I uncovered something in my research that is not being talked about at all. I might be the only person who's pointing this out, which is the actor who plays Timothee Chalamet's, I don't know if you'd call it love interest, you would call it the possible mother of his child, his kind of ride or die in this movie is played by an actress named Odessa Azion. I thought she was phenomenal in the film, by the way. I mean, I didn't really think there were any bad acting performances, but I thought hers was one of the absolute best in the movie. Just incredible. And I was like, wow, I need to know more about this actor. So I kind of look her up, and I'm poking around, and then I'm just like in the bowels of her Wikipedia page, and I realize, oh, her last name, depending, like she has like a few names. Like I think Azion is maybe her father's last name, But if you look at some versions of her name, she also has, like, Adlon in her last name because her mom is Pamela Adlon. Her mom, in real life, is the voice of Bobby Hill from King of the Hill. Her mom is Bobby Hill. That's interesting. Right? Thank you.

I'll take it. So you're just mad that nobody thinks it's interesting? Or I thought maybe there was another tie-in? Yes, I put it on Blue Sky.

They've got no engagement. I just feel like in the discussion around this, and that's not to take anything away from the great acting of Odessa Zion, but I do think it's funny that this really great acting performance turned in by this relatively young actor in this movie, and I'm hoping anyway that she gets lots of award attention, because I think it's really good, is also literally her mom is like, you know, Bobby Hill. it's just there's something so and by the way i think king of the hill i think our listeners and you andrew will also acknowledge this king of the hill is one of those shows that's actually got a lot more going for it intellectually than uh it would appear on the surface it kind of seems like a funny cartoon but it actually gets into a lot of more interesting stuff but that being said there's just kind of like highbrow lowbrow thing of like of like uh you know this very probably like well critically acclaimed film of uh marty supreme with this critically acclaimed performance by odessa azayan and it's like her mom is bobby hill i just love that that's

interesting yeah i had no idea i had no idea who i didn't know a woman voiced bobby hill to be honest

with you yeah actually you know what her um her her mom the the actress uh pamela uh pamela adlon is her name and she was also in a show that i really really loved called better things where she is a, um, she's like a single mom with, Oh, and you know who played, this is none of this will be interesting to you, but, um, uh, not, not interesting, but this isn't the kind of stuff you track. But so there's the show called better things where Pamela Adlon plays like a single mom in Hollywood. Who's kind of a working actor. Um, and her kids are great in it. The writing is really spot on. It's a very good show. I highly would recommend it. One of her kids, those played by mikey madison who just won the oscar for um anora that film oh yeah which i never saw that did you i did and i liked it i like to see that i feel like anora is sort of it's a maximalist film if that makes any sense like it's like it's not it's not subtle but i liked it i think it's really well done it's you know she plays basically like a stripper who gets into a relationship with this sort of like russian oligarch's son and like everything that's happening in the movie is the maximum of of what would be happening in a movie like that whether it's the drug use the sex that's happening the the the threatened violence you know it's it's not it's not quite as propulsive as uncut gems but it's it's not far off it's another one of those movies that like you're not you're not just like sitting there kind of enjoying it from a relaxed perspective you're kind of like leaning forward like god what's going to happen oh i bet you then that i'll

probably never click on it because that's the thing I I'm more likely to see a movie like that it's no mixed nuts if it's in the theater you know what I mean when I'm at home I kind of don't look for the things that are going to have me on the edge of the couch whereas I love seeing stuff like that in the theater because I think maybe because I do get distracted at home like I need I need to have no distractions be in a theater the only distraction is this is this is just a reality and I think we've talked about this a little bit I don't remember where you are on this it both has to do with my age and also my consumption habits but i don't i think it's been years since i've gone to see a movie without having to take a restroom break at some point during it oh i think you know what i nope yep i almost made it through marty supreme and then i realized wait we haven't seen a final grand ping pong battle yet so i know that i better go and i did go because i remember thinking i can tough this out but i always drink a large soda like the doctor orders, and at some point in the last third of the movie, I have to go use the restroom, which is a real...

you know that's a real life change for me i think i didn't go in marty supreme but it almost killed me it almost killed me because we that it was a small theater in the movie theater in los felis and it was really packed so addy and i were like in the third row uh-huh um and it was kind of one of those ones where it was like there was four seats on one side of the theater then maybe eight seats on the other in an aisle and i didn't want to have to walk basically the entire like length of the movie theater in front of everyone um and and so i think i just i just tried to hold it but then of course i'm now the guy because same thing we saw jay kelly becca and i saw jay kelly in the theater which is weird because it was released like three days later on netflix yeah but there was another one where and i think i mentioned this at the time we both said well it was kind of cool to go see it in the first of all i think it was in like you think i would know the difference because one is much larger than the other i don't know if it was 35 millimeter or 75 maybe 75 there's some kind of a way, a format they can do at the Hollywood Theater in Portland that's somewhat unique, and it was being shown in that millimeter of film. So we were both like, you know, again, back to the distraction thing, like, it's kind of nice to just lock yourself in with a movie and your popcorn and your snacks, at least with my attention span, because yeah, if I was watching, and I liked the movie J. Kelly, if I was watching it at my house, I would have probably been tempted to at some point kind of glance down at my ice cream cone, if you know what I mean.

You know, I do know what you mean, but out of context, that sounded... It did sound a little dirty.

That's a reference to a commercial we were talking about yesterday about where they're trying to basically make it look like iPhone users are vanilla, and so they show everyone who has an iPhone, instead they're holding like a soft-serve vanilla ice cream cone. And there is, in that commercial, a scene where they're in like an opera performance or something, some kind of a thing where everyone's paying attention in this darkened theater and this one guy is trying to subtly stare down at his ice cream.

You know, I was thinking more about our conversation about that yesterday and later on I thought of another point that I thought would be kind of in your column of arguing about the effectiveness of that commercial. But unfortunately I can't remember what it was, but at least know that I was thinking about it. Thank you. I appreciate it.

All right, it's time to thank some of our donors. These are the folks who are keeping TBTL happening five days a week. We do this five days a week, 52 weeks a year, and it's 100% listener supported. No advertising, no government grants, no other streams of income other than people who like the show and will like it to continue and are donating money each month. And we are incredibly grateful for folks like, aw, it's my pal Kelly Kilburn in Seattle, Washington. Right here in Seattle. Yes, sweetheart. I've known Kelly for years and years and years, and Kelly is just an absolutely awesome person, and it's always fun to see Kelly's name on the list. Thanks, Kelly. I went bowling with Kelly one time. I don't think I realized that Kelly was a listener. You've got to one-up me.

I would be surprised if you weren't there. Did you go bowling? Me and Kelly and a gang of people about 15 years ago on Capitol Hill.

That sounds like a thing I would have probably been at. One time I was in Seattle and I rented an Airbnb because I didn't live there and I was hanging out with Addy and Kelly and I think one of her friends came over and we sat on the roof of this Airbnb and had a drink. Nice. I was invited. I'll see your bowling. No, I wasn't invited to that one. She actually requested that you were not invited for that.

Wow, Kelly. Well, thank you. You know what? You can disinvite me anytime as long as you support TV sale. That's actually really sweet. Thank you.

A huge Andrew Walsh stan is Bobby Smolenski in Seattle, Washington.

Oh, Bobby. i can't keep bobby away from me and i wouldn't have it any other way thank you bobby thank you

bobby that's very nice i didn't want to ruin it like two letters off um or one letter off if you decide to spell baby incorrectly hey you're right or bobby or rachel right yeah i could get to go either way rachel chriswell is in mount vernon excuse me maine is me i always that one that

always surprises me yeah because ma was massachusetts yeah this is where i'll go into the

gary goleman riff about the state abbreviations that's my yearly thing i like to do uh thanks rachel thanks to micah shapiro who's an elk grove of california very nice thank you micah thanks to bridget shobs of chicago illinois shared a stage yeah rigid ones during the quiz right wasn't she up on the quiz for the chicago i believe so bridgie uh i'll be in chicago next week uh doing wait wait don't tell me on the 15th of january um maybe i'll see some of y'all out there um thanks bridget appreciate you as well and then chad wilson is in seattle washington indeed we know chad thank you chad i wonder what it's done for people of the with the last name wilson fairly common last name in america but because of the movie castaway and all the times where Tom Hanks is yelling Wilson to his best friend, the Wilson Volleyball. I wonder if, as a Wilson, people just, when they see Chad, they yell, Wilson! Maybe. I know that you wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I don't know. I've said this before about, like, my name, although this is really dropped off. Like, you know, there was a time where, you know, my name being Luke was very kind of notable to people because of Star Wars, and they would say, Luke, I am your father. It has been probably five years since anyone has said that to me. I did tell you that the woman cutting my hair a while ago tried to make, like, a... Yes, that's right. But, like, an updated Star Wars joke where neither she nor I knew the name of the person. She was, like, the character she was talking about.

Because it was from, like, the prequel or whatever.

It was a paladin? It was a paladin? No, it was, like, Padua. Padua, yeah, yeah. I think she was referring to, like, maybe a Natalie Portman character who is maybe the mom of Luke Skywalker. but but like what what i don't get anymore is a luke i am your father but what i was going to say is i always enjoyed that because i just felt like it's got it's given us something to start off with in the conversation it's making somebody feel like they're being clever which is a fun feeling i've had it once or twice about maybe three times maybe four times or five or six but um no i i i don't i don't mind i'm not i'm not someone who's personally ever been put off by somebody using a sort of easily repeated, repetitive way of, I don't know, saying hi to me or talking. So hopefully Chad is taking all the people screaming Wilson at him in stride, is what I'm trying to say here.

I have a theory about the Luke thing, by the way, the Luke-Star Wars thing. I think that what happened was, well, obviously we know why it was so popular at the time. Star Wars was a phenomenon. But eventually that sort of lost ground while former Seahawks, I want to say tight end Luke Wilson, rose to prominence. And so now people are always like, hey, are you Luke Wilson of the Seahawks with two L's? Is that how he spelled his name? Two L's.

I think it was W-I-L-L-S-O-N.

Yeah, exactly. So it's more like Wilson? That's right. That's a combination of both you and Chad.

I would be shocked to hear that Luke Wilson is the— Yeah, he's probably not young anymore. Let's see here.

And also, I would assume that tight ends probably have maybe less of a lengthy career than even a wide receiver, given the fact that they're kind of a former professional.

No, you're right. He's a former professional football player.

Whoa, are you on Wikipedia? Look at that mustache and hair that he's got going on. He's got a mullet. I couldn't think of the word mullet.

2025. Yeah, he looks. It's always so interesting when these players, and he's not the most extreme example. The real extreme example is usually with linemen, but like you see some of these guys after they leave the league and you realize how many calories they were forced to consume in order to maintain their bulk that they needed. like uh you know i'm thinking about uh who was the uh cleveland brown joe betonio no although he joel betonio was crying joel betonio was crying by the way about to be possibly retiring from the cleveland browns just the other day i almost sent it to you remember he's the one who did the

rap i know you're talking about you're talking about um he was a tackle he never missed a snap for like forever and his name is um his first name is joe and his last name is something yeah but he

this is embarrassing but it was wild because he became a broadcaster pretty shortly thereafter and it was like he did not look like the same human being

Joe Thomas right? Joe Thomas yeah yeah yeah he really was the moment he was able to get on a microphone he did but not in a thirsty way people just love him I think he's a really good guy and is a very natural sort of talent on the air

yeah definitely but like yeah I was listening to the Seahawks games this year, in the car driving somewhere, and I guess there was some sort of a ring of honor thing that had a bunch of the former Seahawks linemen that were being honored in some way from 10, 15 years ago, and Steve Rabel said something to the effect of you would not recognize any of

these men on the street. God, I love Steve Rabel. He is, man, he and Dave Wyman are really, I think, really special broadcasters as far as former players who were, wait, I have

rabel right yeah yeah yeah former players who remember that thing that uh like that that little commercial that did stew send it around in our text chain that was basically like something from

80s it was a commercial some crossover with the seahawks seahawks of the 80s and some i don't know if it was a local restaurant or business of some kind and uh and one of them is steve rabel well

when he was a seahawk i don't know i don't i know that you wouldn't have seen it because you got a muted but i know der sent around some like full like half hour 90s celebration of the seahawks that was like, it was like Holmgren's Heroes or something like that? Is that what you're talking about?

No, no, this was like just a little commercial that, again, I think, I feel weirdly like it was Stu, which is funny because he's not even based in Seattle, but it was like in the criminals, it's probably now like, you know, weeks and weeks back. But what it was, was getting to see old Steve. Do you remember? I feel like I had a nickname for Steve Rabel that wasn't his real nickname. We were talking the other day about Sportsline with Wayne Cody, and I swear to God, and maybe it was just in passing, somebody called him Rainbow Rabes, like Steve Rainbow Rabel or Rainbow Rabes, but I went around my whole life thinking that was his nickname, and then I think we had him on Ross and Burbank, and I said something like, yeah, how'd you get the nickname? Steve Rainbow Rabes, he goes, no one's ever called me that Like, I was I was carrying around this nickname for him For years and years and years, that's apparently not his nickname But no, I love the dynamic Between him and Dave Wyman, I just love everything that Dave Wyman does And I love that Dave Wyman is kind of like the He's sort of the anti-broadcaster, broadcaster Which I like to think of as our lane, Andrew Yeah, come on Dave I'm more like the anti-talented broadcaster But he like, in the way that, like Because I will sometimes, if I'm listening to other football teams' broadcasts on, usually I'm doing it on, like, Sirius satellite, because they've got every single game on there. And it's really interesting to hear the different kinds of dynamics between the different radio broadcast teams on the different teams, for the different teams. Like, the guy in Philly is very old and very kind of, like, he sounds like he's, like, maybe, like, you know, anyway, he's definitely an older guy, very, like, throwback. Then you get some kind of young guys that are really high energy on other teams. Steve Rabel is, you know, he's somewhere in the middle. But then Dave Wyman is just like so understated. Yeah. I just kind of love it. He's like, it sounds like an insult. He's not low energy in a bad way, but he's just like low energy in a I'm not being fake way. I'm just talking about this the way that I feel about it, which has authenticity in my mind.

And the love between those two, which manifests as just ball busting constantly. But it's from this place of just like love that like kind of comes out of the radio. And also in football, because I don't listen to a lot of football broadcasts, especially outside of our region. Is it usual to have two former players, isn't it? Like with baseball, you usually have like the person calling the plays is like a broadcaster. And then the color commentator is the former player. Is it unusual in football that we have both of the main voices in our broadcast booth are former players?

I would go so far, Andrew, as to say I bet you we are the only team in the NFL. This is a very fun trivia question. I've never thought of this before, but I bet you're right. I bet you we're the only team in the NFL where our play-by-play guy and our color commentator both were starting players for an NFL team and for the same NFL team. Yeah, and that they're calling the team that they both played for. But yeah, because you're right. The play-by-play guy is never a dude who also played in the NFL. The play-by-play guy is a tiny person who grew up watching football and obsessing over football and thinking about football from the sidelines. And then, you know, like, meanwhile. We're doing it.

I've gotten so many requests for a no-point conversion. This is the NFC Championship game version. From what year? He's going to throw down the middle.

He's got a man. Come on. Game over, baby. Touchdown. The game is over. The Seahawks are going back to the Super Bowl.

This is more than 10 years old.

You know you rock when you roll with the Seahawks. Marshawn Lynch, Beast Moe with his dreadlocks. Rolls and passes the ball to the end zone. Touchdown. You know we're going to get the crown in the Super Bowl. 2014. We get the ring to bling. Listen to the crowd sing. Seahawks, Seahawks, Seahawks We block that offense To say we'll lose in such an offense And nonsense, we got the best defense Being the other quarterback Comes with the expense of the act of being sacked I hope the Broncos have enough time to react To the level of game the Hawks are bringing That evening, a Super Bowl Sunday Cause they're gonna go all the way for the win Starting when the game begins All the way to the end of the game And to go down in fame

As the Super Bowl champions of this year, this team should be feared. You better saddle up when you roll with Seattle. Broncos seem like some old cattle. Now, Andrew.

Who's the AFC number one seed? AFC Denver Broncos.

Oh, I see what you're going for there. I did not know that.

We could very well be playing the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl this year, which would make this K-Dude and Lil Hoagie song, once again, extremely relevant.

We've got to bring them back together. I don't know why they split up.

We've been unsuccessful in locating them.

Well, I think we wanted to give them privacy. Yeah, it was one of those things where they were kids. I mean, somehow they're older than us now, but they were kids, obviously, when they recorded that. And we just, you know, somebody that was going around, they made that, put it on SoundCloud or something, then took it down.

And I think Durs, by the way, speaking of people who have blocked, Durs was the one who hipped us to that.

Again, whatever it would have been, 12 years ago or whatever. And so we never wanted our listeners to try to find these people and try to amplify the fact that we're using that on the show. Not because we feel like we're stealing something, but just because this isn't what they asked for.

I also have something on here called Seahawks Fixed Bass Rap. Was there a version of that song where the bass was unfixed and I needed to fix it? You might have. I mean, let's see. I don't know, let's see.

All right, it's the same song. It's the same song, yeah.

So this is the one I should start using because it doesn't have the extra Steve Rabel in it. But anyway, let's just do this because I do think that, first of all, we're in the Badlands now. And second of all, I do think a lot of our listeners are pretty hyped up about what's been going on with the football team. And we haven't, you and I haven't been talking day to day for a while since some pretty big stuff has gone down. But like, yeah, heady times for the Seattle Seahawks as the as the number one seed in the NFC and and, you know, a bye this week and a it's not going to be a clear path, but at least a plausible path to the Super Bowl. One of the stats that you've probably heard them throwing around on sports radio is like they're the Seahawks have been the number one seed in the NFC three other times and all three times they've gone to the Super Bowl. So that seems to portend good things potentially.

And somebody's been sending around a meme where it's also the years where there's been a new pope selected, I believe. I don't know if you've seen that as well. No, I'll take it. Everything's looking up. The octopus is pointing in our direction, it sounds like.

That's right. Yes. So, yeah, I mean, like, now the other—this is a total sidelight issue, but it's—TikTok has figured out that in the aftermath of the Seahawks beating the 49ers in that kind of big, you know, clinching game that was, like, for the number one seed in the NFC. And the difference, of course, was like so drastic between you win that game and you think particularly if you're San Francisco, you win that game. You literally never have to leave the Bay Area, including the Super Bowl. But after that, all that TikTok was delivering to me for days was Niners fans being mad watching the game. And like we've talked about this before, like I understand how it would identify me as a football fan and maybe even as a Seahawks fan because of videos that I'm letting watch. Well, no, I guess if a Seahawks fan is a Seahawks fan, then it can identify that I want to see sad Niners fans. But it's just such a weird thing that it's figured out that I'm interested in football, but also that I'm interested in seeing the team that the Seahawks just beat, seeing their fans upset.

Like, it can deliver me that content. This is more of a question about TikTok than sports, but, like, how confident are you in this day and age that those are real?

You mean as opposed to AI?

Yeah, just like some Seattle Seahawks. I mean, don't get me wrong. There's plenty of people who are filming themselves being sad during a game. But also because it is just such a rich vein for people who love one team and kind of hate the other to like feast on the tears. I could see a lot of people making A.I. creations of the fans of the opposing team looking miserable.

I think I can at this point can still tell what if it's A.I. or a human. but here's what i would say so i don't think it's ai but i do think it's humans just farming for clicks yeah so in other words i think that this human who might be a niners fan or might not be a niners fan has figured out that he can videotape himself and a lot of it's real kayfabe too like it's them being kind of like oh the seahawks have no chance and they're like you know they're sitting in a they're sitting in a gaming chair like they're sitting in a gaming chair in like a room in their house with like four screens going and and they're almost being like the heel who thinks the seahawks have no chance and then they're and then at the bottom third of the screen is actually the game it's actually plays happening you know and it's them it's like they're playing the they're playing the role of a person who i am looking to see be disappointed yeah

And so I think you're right. I think that it's total. I think it's probably an act. And yet I still watch it. Well, that's what I mean, this is obvious. And this is really a conversation we could have been having in literally 2005, let alone 2026. But I think I forgot that it's 2026 for a second. I should have said 2006 to 2026. But, you know, it's always the question of, yeah, but why were you filming that? you know like as somebody sent a meme around the other day i did yeah this is we're supposed to be we're actually carved out time to talk about the seahawks and i feel like i'm leading us away from it but i tell you that somebody added me there's like a quite i don't know serious is the right word but a group of people who play darts at the eagles that i have really nothing to do with who are getting more and more serious about like playing darts like there's a dart league and dart teams that play at the eagles and you're not interested in participating no i'm just a little nervous about it like i i like you know whatever i've played now i've played with some of those people a couple of times when i happen to be there but like darren the kind of one of the ring leaders of it and he's darren's whole thing is just like i was talking to veves about him the other day in complimentary terms like i think darren's whole energy and i think you've met him before is just like i want i want i want people to be happy i want you to be involved in whatever you want like he's just always like and well you know like he just has that energy about him and so it's really important to him that i am part of this dart thing which i'm not really part of but he added me to a dart text chain okay and so i'm constant so i am now part of a text chain with tons of random phone numbers i don't know maybe i'm gonna say there's 15 people on this chain And we're just like, we tossing tonight? Oh, I don't know. I think they're playing disc golf or whatever in the main room or whatever. Dude, tossing, I love it. And people are like tossing and stuff all the time. I don't remember exactly how did I get on this topic of darts. I literally have forgotten what I was talking about. Well, it could have, I don't know. We were, could have had to do it. Oh, I know. Oh, this is such a small aside. Somebody on that text chain. Oh, my God. I can't believe how far away I am from my point. Somebody on that text chain was like, are we tossing tonight? And they posted a meme of somebody throwing a dart and hitting the dartboard, and the whole dartboard falls down and then falls to the ground. And I was just like, yeah, but why were you taping that throw? Like that particular throw, it was clearly a handheld, like they had it rigged that way. And again, this is a meme that was so potato quality and so grainy. It probably was older than Addy. But, and so it's just, I don't have to, like, I don't have to apply the Zapruder filter to everything I see online, but I always do have the, yeah, but I don't know, I've just never been down with people who are like, oh, we're near the end of this game, let's just, like, let's make sure we're recording the room here or whatever. It always just says, just like, can you just be in the moment and not record your emotions in case you can capitalize on it later?

yeah i agree with that but i do think that because of the advent of twitch i think there's this whole world which i don't watch but there's this particularly like for different for younger generation it's super common like there are people that are making wild amounts of money by just watching other people play video games and then just like freaking out about it because they become personalities you know themselves as the watcher either the player of the video game or the watcher of the video game. So there is sort of a format for this, which is generally speaking not for me, but you're absolutely right. Like, I hadn't thought about it this way, but it's like these people are definitely trying to get clicks. They're definitely, they've realized that like, and I'm sure that if I was a Dallas Cowboys fan, I would probably see the same person being like, you know, like Pittsburgh Steelers fan crashes out when Cowboys win. And then he's all Steelers out. And then he's just like, Cowboys have no chance. And then a good thing happens for the Cowboys. And he's like, what? Screaming, he's spinning around in his gaming chair. And I'm just like, you got yours, bro. But it's like, I also know that this is basically totally faked. And like, I wouldn't watch wrestling because I know it's fake. But this is a kind of kayfabe that I can kind of hang with. Quick digression into darts, because we were talking about darts. Have you been following any of the Luke Littler thing? No. This guy who's the greatest dart player in the world?

People send me, because they know I like to play darts in my basement, I've seen this name because people will throughout the year have been kind of sending me this or that, but I'll be honest with you. I haven't, I haven't really clicked into it too much. And then I saw this on the show sheets and I was like, Ooh, what is this? But I haven't gone deep on it, but I know that he's a young guy who's like real good at darts, right?

Yeah. Basically he just won, he's 18 years old and he's just won his like second world championship, which is like a huge deal in Europe. I guess darts. i mean that this this uh the place that they play is uh is called alley pally

And it's like the something palace. It's the whatever I can look it up to. But like this place is frigging packed with people. Like this is a huge sport over there. And I don't want to get into is bowling a sport, but like it's kind of interesting because they were like the New York Times or the athletic article that I was reading about him was saying that like they were quoting like people on the Pat McAfee show saying like this guy, what he's doing as far as his dominance in the world of darts might make him the greatest athlete in the world right now. and i was like is it but i mean you are doing something you're throwing you're moving your body your stare i mean there's a lot of hand i had a ton of hand-eye coordination a ton of muscle control like it's got to be as much a sport as many other sports like i don't know if i wouldn't consider chess a sport because i don't think you have to be able to physically move the pieces that you could probably if you needed some adaptive help you could um it's mostly a mental game but I think darts is, I think we can call darts a sport, right? Definitely.

I mean, I mean, does it matter, I guess, is the big question, which is, and you just said that. I'm not trying to just totally destroy the conversation or undermine your premise. I'm just trying to wrap my head around it because it's like the McAfee thing, because the quote was something like, well, based on the stats in his sport. So let's just say that we're calling darts a sport. I think I would. I definitely would call, I would definitely call bowling a sport. Use that as kind of our throwaway line, like is bowling a sport? Because it's always like a good topic. Bowling, I have no question about. Darts, it sort of seems like, well, yeah, it just seems like a little bit of a stretch for me. It doesn't really matter to me too much because I don't have, like, kind of ego invested in it one way or the other. But when you try to make the argument, well, if darts is a sport and this guy, if you look at his stats and how it compares to every other person who's ever played the sport before him, that would make him the best athlete. like now you're just messing around with the numbers to kind of make a viral point or whatever or make a hot take or whatever it is that we all do but like obviously an athlete who plays let's just go back to football though i'm not even maybe there's another sport you can make a basketball probably even more so right like the actual physical prowess of somebody who wakes up at a certain time and goes into this this exercise regimen of just like that is just beyond my understanding and died so that they can be you know whether you're talking about tom brady or you know whoever it is like there's just no way you can say this 18 year old kid is a better athlete than tom brady in his prime or whatever i think that that is a little bit of just sort of

trying to make a point what really jumped out at me about this whole thing though was not that this guy is you know obviously like sort of the tiger woods of his sport and that he's winning this world championships very early and could maybe end up with the most of all time, which I think is like 14 or something. But it was way down in the article. They say, the only time Littler lost composure was when a wasp repeatedly flew at his head in the fifth set when he was up three to one. He was down a leg when the wasp, which made headlines at the beginning of the tournament, buzzed near him, perhaps attracted to the bright yellow and purple shirt worn by Littler, whose nickname is The Nuke. And then I was like, what, this wasp that made headlines? So then I go find this other article about these wasps that keep stinging the players during the freaking darts world championships at the Alexandra Palace, known as the Alley Pally. Which is like you were saying, the preeminent. It is the, like, you know, what would you call it? The Vatican of this stuff. It's the cradle of, it's the highest level of dart competition in the world the alexandra palace home of the pdc world championship since 2008 and they've apparently got a wasp problem i'm reading from the athletic here this is um eduardo tansley writing a wasp affectionately known as the alley pally wasp has got closer to the players and the action than the thousands of fans in attendance each day the alley pally wasp may sound like another creative nickname in the sport known for peter snake bite right and johnny the ferret clayton among others but its myth has been creating a buzz since the 2012 championships this uh this year the world number 114 uh urine vandervelde used wasp spray on stage to contend with it only to be left flapping when it flew nearby ross smith was stung three times on his left hand following a third round victory in 2023 and must have had flashbacks when he was stung live on air after his victory in this year's first round so follow along with me andrew people are bringing wasp spray to their little podium area where they have their stuff before they play these darts this one dude was uh stung uh on his left hand three times while competing We'll be right back.

And then during a post-match press conference, was again stung by one of these wasps in the alley-pally. What the hell is going on?

This seems so solvable.

I mean, I don't have that many wasps in the Madrona Hill studio. And this place is far less in the spotlight. I feel like you could make sure there were no... By the way, it's a yellow jacket. I also looked this up because I actually saw... So I'm going to play you a little bit of this press conference where this guy is getting stung by what they're calling a wasp. I did learn all yellow jackets are wasps, but not all wasps are yellow jackets, right? Because when I saw the actual—I think of a wasp really as being like a mud dauber, like one of those ones that has a very kind of like noted and kind of like long, would you call it a thorax?

The heavy bottom, the fat bottom bees.

A fat bottom bee, right? And this looked more like a yellow jacket, right? So then I was like, oh, are they calling a yellow jacket a wasp? And I looked it up, and actually yellow jackets are a wasp. So they were right. But here is this guy getting stung. It's a little hard to follow. This is a guy named Ross Smith. Again, think about sports where you need your hand to not be paralyzed. I'd put darts at the very top of the list. If you think about a wasp sting being a mini paralysis event, like, it's insane to me this is going on.

Here we go. I think, you know, leading up to this, the last couple of days, I've been a bit nervy and stuff. I think we all are, if we're honest with you. Everyone wants to just get through that first round and get on after Christmas. I'm happy now. I will relax. Hopefully you'll see a better Ross.

We hope so, because we know how well you can do. You've made some mega strides in your career over the last couple of years. Do you think you can be a dark horse in this tournament?

Yeah, without a doubt. Honestly, I believe... Oh, there's the Wasp.

The Ali Pali Wasp is here?

He's just done me. He's just stung me a lot of good.

Cool. We apologize for the language.

Sorry about that. So let me just understand this. How many times have you been stung by a bee in your life, Andrew? I'd put it at, what, under five? Maybe not counting your childhood in Ohio.

Oh, not counting child. Because I was going to say, as a kid, we would step on bees all the time. We were constantly getting. But as an adult, I remember one time I was absolutely shocked. It was in New Hampshire. I grabbed something that it was near a beehive in there, or I don't even remember if it was a wasp or a bee, but it stung me right in the hand. I grabbed something. I didn't know that a wasp was on it. And the reason I remember that was because it was shocking. It was a shock to the system.

Because if you, in adult life, unless you work in agriculture or some particular field that brings you, or you have a hobby that brings you out into a particular part of nature, I would say the average adult who has a mostly indoor life and job will be stung, I would say, a maximum of three times in their adult life. And it'll be things just like you described. We are to believe that Ross Smith was stung four times during like a two-day period at the World Darts Championship. That's not where the story ends, by the way. Similar luck followed the Wasp this year for the World Championship's first Kenyan player, a guy named David Munyua. It landed on Munyua's face before he won two sets to upset the world number 18, Mike Dedecker. I got it. This is the guy from Kenya. I got it. I tried to put it in my pocket to stay with me because I love going through tough things, Munyana said.

Is that the problem? People think it's good luck? I had scanned this article you sent, so I saw that some people say it's good luck. Like, because I'm not saying that any sport wouldn't be more difficult if wasps were in your face. I would say almost any sport would be more difficult with wasps in your face. But I'd put this at the top of the list. I'd put it damn near the top of the list. I mean, listen, if you're facing a major league pitcher and you're at the plate and there is a wasp flying around, that's also. But, you know, we're talking about these moments of real concentration. But it's an indoor sport where it's pure concentration. You just got to get this little tiny pointy thing into a very tiny little part of a of a formerly cork board, you know, and we can't do something about the wasps. Like, I feel like it's the equivalent of being like, well, SoFi Stadium is really beautiful. We have a wild boar problem. I mean, there are some wild boar problems. You know, there's some wild boars. There are javelinas roaming the field. But aside from that, like, it's a really great playing experience. It's just kind of like, can we do something about the wasps at the Shangri-La of darts?

I know. I mean, I could not believe how sort of extensive the wasp problem appeared to be at this thing. Like, again, it wasn't one. They go, by the way, they go into basically, they bring some like science into it later.

and say, it's probably not the same wasp because the average lifespan of a wasp is one to five years. So these would probably be different wasps over the different years there. But here was my theory, by the way.

Wait, so they really think there's only one flying around at any given time? Well, I mean, this is what they say. Let me get to the, let's see. I'm sorry to put you on the spot because I had scanned the article and it did seem like they were talking about it like the wasp, but I thought that maybe is weird.

I mean, they're being a little cheeky to keep it sort of British. But here's what they, let's see, if I can get back to.

Because clearly they have a wasp problem that they should just take care of one way or another. Like you find a way.

Right. It says somewhere, if I keep, oh, I can't find it now. They basically said that, I think they're kind of joking around about it being the alley-pally wasp. But then they were clarifying that it would be unlikely it was actually the same wasp. Because this is over the course of multiple years. So there is a wasp problem there. My theory is that I bet you that wasps like spilled beer. And I bet you there's almost nowhere, other than maybe Oktoberfest, there's probably nowhere in the world where there's more beer being spilled than the Alley Pally World Darts Championship in the stands.

I think, I mean, having just been educated about high-stakes gaming from watching Burt Wonderstone. I feel like, I mean, when you get to this level, I don't think it's guys. No, no, not the players, not the players, the fans. Oh, you just mean the people who are watching? Oh, maybe.

I'm saying there's a stadium full of drunk Brits, and I would guess that there's like a lot of, that just seems like a sticky floor to me. Yeah, I can see that, sure. Not the competitors, but the fans.

Yeah, people in Green Bay right now are like, I don't know, hold my beer. No, don't hold my beer. I'm holding my beer.

Except they're outside. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, that's true, yeah. So I think you can spill beer. This is my theory that I'm concocting on the fly, so to speak. I think you can spill beer outside and be relatively okay. I think a bunch of spilled beer indoors and stickiness, it seems like that's my theory. That's attracting these yellow jackets slash wasps. But it is still crazy to me that with all of this pressure and all of this, you know, there's a lot of money on the line. And by the way, this Luke Littler guy won 1.3 million, I don't know if it was pounds or dollars for like winning his second championship. And it's also kind of funny because they say in the athletic article that like there's nothing that proves that you're becoming a dominant athlete like people are booing you. And apparently a significant portion of it.

Oh, you know what? His name is Luke. I just.

His name is Luke. I'm going to write a letter to the editor. Yep. i am realizing that the person who wrote this article misunderstood what was going very likely miss um somebody named this looks like a very irish name that i can't pronounce kaomi o'neil kaomi o'neil i think kaomi o'neil writing for the athletic misunderstood that they were saying luke and this is something that of course i know very well because i did think that was kind of an interesting here we go perhaps nothing signifies a team or player supremacy more than a booing crowd he was jeered by some of the 3 000 strong crowd during his 4-2 win over rob cross i promise you they were saying luke i yeah i totally am on board because

that's so common now like i i was i feel like i was watch it was watching some nfl match up over the weekend and i didn't have any context for the teams or the players but when one i want to say maybe was it a kicker was it actually the ill-fated ravens kicker was he a luke too i don't know but you hear all of a crowd booing like that and often you're like yeah his name is loop his last name yeah yeah yeah and we're so used to that when you hear booing you're like oh oh this person's name

this is this is his cooper cup makes a catch right yeah at lumen field we're gonna say coop yeah exactly like yeah um that's funny it's i'm almost petty enough to like email that writer and say i think as someone named luke who occasionally enters public spaces like on a stage not to the degree of the darts world championship but i could say that to me the likely scenario is uh is that

they were saying uh luke well but this one the second the graph after it i want i want to give the writer a little antagonizing the audience yeah he said that um he said that littler made his feelings known in in an onstage interview afterwards thanking the crowd for paying for his prize money after uh his victory in the final and it was a bunch of money and i lost it up there he would later admit so maybe they really were booing him or at least he interpreted it that way because it sort of seems like um he he was saying like oh yeah you're gonna treat me like that well and I'll clap back.

Yeah, I guess I would have to be there, but my lived experience as a Luke makes me wonder if there was some misunderstanding of what was going on.

on there but anyway back to the Seahawks uh what do you think's gonna happen they're gonna go to the Super Bowl Andrew oh man oh man oh man we don't and this is a real this is coming from a place of ignorance let me tell you what I said to you on the show this is not gonna answer your question I'll try to come back around to it but I'll say this as a very casual football fan these days um you know I started the season saying about how I was like very very casually watching the games if watching them at all and not really caring that much but that there really is like This team has been so good, I have no problem admitting to being a little bit bandwaggy about it and making more time and trying to watch the games when possible. And the fact that it ended up being so close in our division, which is so infuriating in some ways that we have such a tough division we have to make our way through, but exciting. The fact that the last two regular season games have been such high stakes and the second-to-last one against the Rams on national television and like kind of a, you know, like a solo slot in the broadcast schedule was so unbelievably dramatic. That Ram Seahawks game, and I think that maybe you and I, yeah, I can't remember where we were in our broadcast schedule, so I don't know if we ever talked about it, but that was so dramatic and so amazing. And then to know that the next week we're going to face another division rival for the actual title of, you know, winning the division as well as an important seeding place, you know, in the playoffs. Like, I feel like we've already gotten two weeks of playoff football, and it's amazing. As of right now, though, because I find the playoffs so unbelievably complicated, I don't even know what our—we don't know the next stone we're jumping to yet, do we? We don't know who we'll be facing in two weeks.

No, we don't know exactly who it will be, but we know we will be at home. Yep. So that seems to help. Although, oddly enough, yeah, exactly. We're one of those teams that's, well, during our entire time, you know, with Mike McDonald, we've been really good on the road. Like, it's crazy how good we've been on the road. But that being said, I still, I think, would rather be at home. So it looks like we are going to play the winner of the Rams Carolina. Okay, yeah. Which kind of sucks, actually. Yeah. Because, like, go Carolina is what I would say. Yeah, definitely. It's going to be Ked Woodley week here on TVCL next week. Yes. Rawr. Rawr. Rawr. Because, like, you know, the Rams are a really, really good football team, and it would be a major bummer if we just had to turn right around and play them again. Again, we are at home, which is, I think, kind of helpful. And, you know, I do think our defense is is really, really, really legit. And I think that we I mean, we've we basically, you know, we made Brock Purdy look pretty bad. We we have made Stafford look less good than he normally is. Like, I do think there is something to our defense. And I also think the emergence of our run game, it helped that we were running in San Francisco, who was really banged up and has a pretty bad defense right now, mostly because of injuries. but like you know the fact that in the last like three four games our run game has been solid like if if our run game is working i think we're very very very hard to stop somebody else was pointing out that the seahawks are like one of the very rare teams that is like top five both offense and defense that's like a pretty um you know you you often get a team that's got a great offense but a lousy defense or vice versa and we somehow are um you know pretty competent in both departments also we've been winning games even when sam darnold isn't playing well

I was going to ask you about the last game we watched because you and I did not watch it together. I should make that clear. But I was watching with a bunch of folks at the Eagles and I enjoyed the game and I was relatively locked in on it. But I couldn't hear the announcers and it wasn't like watching at home and really like being glued to the commentary and everything. And so how did Darnold do in – it sounds like I'm – It's a lot of D's, dude. I heard it. How did he end up doing – how did his stats look after the San Francisco? game because i remember somebody holding a sign during that game that said in um darnold we trust and i was like really and we're already winning by that point but i was like in darnold we trust because i saw a lot of astounding running plays both between charbonnet and walker but like it sort of seemed like that's how we won that game and i still get nervous when i see him holding that ball like he was doing a good job of not turning it over and i think he's being very very careful with the ball now but did he have a an essential an especially good game

he did not have a bad game and he did not have an exceptional game but he did exactly what they wanted him to do which he did not turn the ball over yeah yeah and that's the main thing like we were kind of like it feels to me like the beginning of the season when our defense was still kind of trying to get locked in he was putting up these huge numbers because we sort I needed to outscore teams. And. Yep. And and he was turning the ball over a lot. I think he might have the most fumbles in the league this or at least the most turnovers at quarterback position of anybody in the NFL this year. But as the defense has gotten better and better, they've basically I think that that Clint Kubiak has changed the play calling to really, really, really minimize risk. And so it's not quite as fun as seeing him, you know, throw over the top to JSN, you know, and JSN getting 200 yards in a game or whatever. but it's working in the words of coolio and so the the number one thing we needed darnold to not do was not turn the ball over he didn't turn the ball over and he did convert you know a pass or two when we needed it it was again uh the run game was working that we you know we had like almost 200 yards rushing so that was you know it's again it's not flashy but it is a way i think that we might get to the super bowl is just our defense is uh you know phenomenal and then we just don't mess up on offense and we just and basically you wear the other team down i mean that's exactly what happened to the niners was like they on their one decent drive they end up throwing that interception um you know because you just like what what we basically do is we try to make the other team go like 90 yards for every score so there i mean that's why the other thing is the seahawks go for it on fourth down less than any other team in the nfl which makes me mad because I want to say this, too. Along with uncovering that Bobby Hill is the mom of Odessa Zion from Marty Supreme Wonderstone, I also feel like I was saying to you six, seven years ago, all teams should be going for it on fourth down almost all the time. And you said Genevieve kind of was of the same opinion back in the day.

Certainly if you're anywhere around midfield or on the opposing side of the field.

Right. But I would even say if you're on your own 40 and it's fourth and less than two, I was always saying the downside of turning the ball over on downs is extreme. But the chances of continuing the drive, the upside of that is so huge. And if you do it five times and it's successful four out of the five times, it was such a no-brainer to me. And, and I was always like, what are they doing? And now that is totally the, that is the conventional wisdom of the NFL is like, you always go for it on fourth down. If you're on the 50 or closer to the end zone, you're trying to score. And if it's like less than let's say three yards, like it's just a given now. And I'm like, yeah, I've been saying that. How am I the greatest mind in football?

That's your only question. And it is interesting that the Seahawks sort of buck that trend, given that they have the, and I think it's now official during the regular season, a defense that gave up the least points in the NFL. I think I'm right about that. Right. So, yeah, you would think that like you'd even double down on that. But, you know, I'm not too, there was a time in the last game where I was like really disappointed they didn't go for it. I think it was the last game. Maybe I'm thinking of a different play, but it's working out for him so far.

Exactly. Well, that's the math. The math from Mike McDonald is instead of going for it on fourth down at the 50, we're going to punt it and we're going to make you, the other team, go further. We're just going to try to make it so that you always have to go 80 yards or 90 yards on every drive. And we just think that we're going to stop you at some point in that process. And, by the way, they've been right. They're just like, we're not giving you any free yards. We're just going to be a defense-first team that runs the ball and basically just makes your offense score on our defense, which teams have not been very successful at doing. So, you know, I mean, let me lay out, by the way, this might be almost exactly what happened the last time we went to the Super Bowl, Andrew. Drew, I have a feeling that we, this, like, this could line up very similarly to years past. I have this feeling that we beat, one of the years we went to the Super Bowl, we beat Carolina at, I think it was called CenturyLink then. Like, I think Jake DeLome and the Carolina Panthers came to Seattle, and they were a, you know, they were a playoff team, but not a particularly threatening playoff team. And I think we beat them pretty soundly and like, golly, if the, if somehow the Rams can just lay an egg in Carolina and then we can just sit back and wait for, uh, the Bryce young led Carolina Panthers to come to Seattle famous last words, by the way, now watch them come and beat us. But like, I would feel so much less stressed about that than I would about the Rams coming. That being said, as you and I were talking about off air, I think yesterday, Andrew to beat the rams at home to continue our march towards the super bowl would also be pretty

freaking satisfying yeah that's the thing because uh correct me if i'm wrong about this but we did beat them twice this year right no we beat them we split it okay first game of the season

and then we beat them the last of the second

the last game of the okay gotcha and and we also split with the 49ers of course too which would have given them the leg up this this last game if they had one okay that's that seems right yeah i mean it would be absolutely more delicious to beat the rams again uh but it would i mean it was a little bit i feel like we kind of got into a similar conversation about who we wanted to face like i think maybe regarding the astros or something um when it was the mariners getting into the postseason and like how delicious that would be even though do we really want to face a team that sort of has traditionally sort of had our number or whatever because the highs are going to be higher and the lows are going to be lower if we lose to that team i feel like but exactly let me ask you this this is a weird uh weird place to take this but it's just sort of like i did not listen to a lot i haven't had the radio on that much this week for some reason but i did hear that the past two days have been a bit of a bloodbath when it comes to head coaches jobs and i know that's the time of year where always teams are making decisions especially losing teams are making decisions about whether or not to continue with their coaches it seems to me anecdotally like this year has been more than ever we're seeing I think that's we're up to maybe seven coaches who've lost their jobs now which means there's going to be a lot of openings which means we're probably looking at maybe losing a Clint Kubiak or something like that going into

next year huh and is that something that's on your mind well it'll be a bummer but I think that um yeah i think we're gonna definitely lose him it's funny to see all the folks in baltimore that are just like pulling their hair out now because the the new narrative in baltimore is they should have fired uh john harbaugh last year and promoted mike mcdonald you know like or like like you know at the beginning of last season like basically everyone in baltimore or a lot of people in baltimore are very bummed that mike mcdonald is the seahawks head coach and we're the number one seed yeah and that although i mean honestly like i think that i don't i don't know john harbaugh i think has been a pretty good coach and it didn't help that his star quarterback was hurt for significant portions of the season like I don't I would be not that this is the John Harbaugh experiment but I have a feeling that John Harbaugh is going to get hired immediately somewhere else and is going to continue to be a pretty good coach like I don't know I wouldn't have gotten

rid of him if I were the Ravens but well the Ravens I you know we have a we have a friend slash listener who's a rabid Ravens fan it's how we became friends in fact when I was more of a browns fan and i was getting texts from our friend tiara yesterday that's i guess the news was out for an hour and i had missed it and she had texted me she's like finally about time i guess she's a hardcore ravens fan she's like yeah we we should have done this a long time ago we wasted the best years of lamar jackson under him you know just sort of like always knocking on the door getting close but never really delivering anything so i'm not i'm not taking a stance on this i'm just saying that from the biggest baltimore or uh yeah i'll take ravens fan that i know they're they're glad to see him go on. Here's my hot take on it. Yeah. Andrew Stefanski to the Baltimore Ravens.

Yeah, that's what I've seen. Really? Kevin Stefanski.

Or Kevin Stefanski, rather, to say Andrew. Yeah, because he's in the division. He's faced that team a lot. He will be facing his former team. I didn't know that that was the buzz, but that's what I was trying to start.

No, it is the buzz. So you, my friend, you've got your finger on the pulse. Very handsome man. Isn't he also You're talking about him, now you're talking about Kevin Stefanski or me. I'm talking about both of you. I'm talking about Andrew Stefanski. Okay, appreciate it. But not only, I mean, he was the Cleveland Browns head coach, but was he also, he's not like a St. Ignatius or Walsh High guy. He doesn't go that far back. Not that I know of.

I can't remember where he came from before he became the Browns head coach, but I feel like he came from another Midwest team. Did he actually do some time, did he spend some time with the Vikings maybe? I sort of feel that maybe somebody in our text chain had more background on him when he came. I actually feel bad for him. I think he's a great coach who would have – I think he had the Browns do things – the Browns broke their playoff drought under him. I think that he's had to deal with an impossible organization.

He led to some of the greatest and only good Browns memories of the last five years.

I've been getting a little bit more Browns curious lately again. I don't even know why. I'm still obviously mad at them for all their past sins, and I'm mad at them for moving. They're now in the process of moving the stadium out of Cleveland. It's like I don't know why, but maybe I'm just softening up a little bit, or I'm just like very AFC. I've been finding my eyes like during a non-Seahawks times, but when I'm still like in the kitchen puttering before my volunteer gig, I'm like, well, I've got to put A game on, and if the Browns are playing, i might as well just see what those losers are doing well that's the thing i think you're

naturally attracted to underdog stories now first of all you're from the greater cleveland area so you've got a connection to that team but i think i feel my theory is if cleveland right now was like if they were 13 and 3 and they were killing it but their quarterback was just sean watson you would actively oh no it's the fact that deshaun is pretty much out of the picture now but but it's not the people who put him there not the people who made the decisions i mean look i can i can whip myself up into anger again very very quickly i'm not saying that i'm i'm breaking out any browns jerseys anytime soon but i have been finding myself a little bit more curious about it it's not like i'm some um uh um geez louise uh what is the name of their quarterback now the uh coach prime's kid i couldn't i couldn't tell you no you do he was um he was supposed to be he was supposed to go first in the draft and he did the coach prime's kid oh oh shador sanders

is he their quarterback right now that's yeah i'm pretty sure that i'm pretty sure little i know

about them i haven't watched the last couple of games i'm pretty sure that they put him in they didn't have a lot of choices after a while but i'm pretty sure he closed out the season for him

yeah um yeah that's uh i could see you buying low again with the cleveland browns like just getting back in at the basement because i do feel like there's something like about them being kind of like brought low again through their bad decision making that now is going to over time make them an appealing team for you to kind of like start re-engaging with as far as the seahawks go you know the nfl is so weird one thing you and i were talking about off air yesterday was how many years ago i was watching the game at you and genevieve's place on capitol hill i was holding momo i was many many jamesons in when the beast quake mode uh or beast quake run rather uh happened that was when marshawn lynch and the seahawks who were really bad that year but they somehow won the nfc west because it was like a terrible division we got to host the new orleans saints who were a like way better team. And we just somehow beat them. Um, so the, uh, you know, these playoff games are, are weird. I think I would say if, if the Rams get knocked off, my prediction is if the Rams get knocked off before they come to Seattle, if Carolina beats the Rams, I think the Seahawks have a pretty good chance of going to the super bowl. The only team in the NFC that really, really, really concerns me is the Rams. I think we are pretty, pretty demonstrably better than every other team in the nfc so if we don't have to deal with the rams and we have home field advantage until the super bowl i like our chances of getting to the super bowl

eagles kind of scare me but not because i follow them closely just because they're the eagles

that would be the the team that i would be uh the second that's the team i'm the second most concerned about would be the eagles um but i could also see the eagles getting knocked off by like green bay or even the bears or something like i don't know i feel like um uh yeah i wouldn't love playing the eagles but i i for some reason feel slightly more optimistic about playing them than the rams the rams just loom large they just see even though we just beat them they're my new houston astros is what i would say like yeah i feel like we just can't you know sean mcveigh is a really good coach stafford's having the season of a lifetime like that guy verse jared verse it's like they get they get rid of aaron aaron donald retires who was like my bet noir and then they've got this new freaking guy jared verse who's like a superhuman on the defensive line just does crazy shit like in fact that was that game against us right where he blocked was that against the seahawks where he blocked a field goal and then ran it 80 yards for the touchdown and this is a guy who's like enormous he's just like a and he's a shit talker too it's I just feel like I get nervous when I think about the Rams because they do seem to kind of have our number right now. But then again, this whole season is a gift because there was literally no one who was predicting that the Seahawks would win the NFC before the season. I mean, the predictions for the Seahawks ranged between best-case scenario, maybe they win 10 games and they sneak in, to a lot of people were like, oh, they're going to be like the third team in the division. They're going to be actually lousy because Sam Darnold is going to be a downgrade over Geno and they're not going to be able to protect him. And, you know, Sam Darnold's success in Minnesota was a total illusion. And, like, there was a lot of naysayers. That's the other thing that TikTok keeps delivering to me are, like, sports knowers before the season. In fact, I think it was, it might have been our friend P. Fletch who sent me, like, a clip of, you know, the guy Nick Wright that you and I really like?

Yeah, of course.

It was a clip of Nick Wright just, I think, talking about how horrible the Seahawks were going to be this year. How's his team doing? Oh, yeah. What's his team? Who does he root for? The Chiefs. He's a huge Chiefs guy. Yeah, right. That's going to be an interesting realignment. I mean, who knows? Maybe they'll get it back together, but it's weird to live in a world where the Kansas City Chiefs are not relevant in football.

I mean, you could have even just said not dominant, but then to even say not relevant is a possibility as well.

Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, we'll see what they do next season. But it's just so, so hard to be really good for a long time in this league. because of the salary implications and because if you have like a really good Patrick Mahomes at quarterback, you can't afford to pay anybody else. So you've got to try to do with all this smoke and mirrors. And it's just, you know, it's a very hard league to stay on top of for years and years and years. And typically what happens is when your time in the sun stops, you go away pretty fast. Meanwhile, somehow the Patriots have bounced back pretty quickly post-Belichick, although peace and love to our listeners in New England. And I don't, I'll believe it when I see it. I kind of tend to think that the Patriots are a little overrated. I think that they've had a pretty light schedule. But anyway, they've come back quicker than I expected, I guess. Under Vrabel. And Vrabel is a St. Ignatius or a Walsh High guy, right? Vrabel? Isn't Vrabel? Isn't Mike Vrabel?

Oh, sorry. I was getting him confused with our Seahawks announcer. Vrabel is. Oh, Steve Vrabel. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, not Steve Rabel, but Mike Rabel. Walsh, he's a Walsh Jesuit guy. And also, we would have overlapped, right? You're looking this up now. He would have been at Walsh in what? Like maybe his last year was maybe my first year. He graduated in 93. Okay, and I graduated in 95. Yeah, so we overlapped a little bit. And I did play football. I mean, there is a chance that he and I – I mean, I didn't play in any games. The whole thing was just a mess of a joke of a joke of a mess and me and trying to play football my freshman year. And I believe I quit and then came back at one point. It was just embarrassing. Can you imagine how I would be dining out on the story of having been potentially on the same field as Mike Vrabel? But you, even at the time, you would have known, like, I literally can't name one person in real life that I was on. I just don't remember and I don't care. And I just block out that part of my life. Whereas you would remember the names of the people that were on the team, especially star players. And I would be exaggerating about my contribution. And you say, I almost bought Mike Vrabel.

I almost bought Mike Vrabel. I taught him everything he knows about football when he and I were on the same Walsh High team.

That's right. He used to say hut, hut, hike. I told him do hut, hut, hut. I told him do Omaha, Omaha, Omaha. All right. Yeah.

Last thing I'll say, Andrew, is today is the 7th of January, which by my math means it is in 43 days. the san diego padres and your seattle mariners square off in peoria arizona the first spring training game is february 20th it's in 43 days you know i thought you're gonna say today is

january 7th uh the tbtl anniversary oh yeah i'm just realizing that and i'm also realizing that officially um i i must have said this last year too now that we're dialing in on this so my anniversary of Genevieve falls on the same day as the anniversary of TBTL. Today is our 25th anniversary.

That's almost as important as

43 days away from the Padres game. Thank you. All I care about is when is the Vetter Cup? That's what I want to know. We are only 162 days out from the Vetter Cup, Andrew. That's the only thing I care about. I'm pre-annoyed. I'm pre-annoyed at that weekend.

You're skipping right past all of the spring, springing, and the fun of early baseball and all of that. And you're going right to, and the fact that the Mariners are likely going to be pretty decent this year. And you're going right on over to annoyed at the Vetter Cup.

No, I'm excited. I'm excited.

Well, congratulations on your anniversary with Pheebs. Thanks, I appreciate it. It's 25 years.

Yeah, I don't think we're doing anything this evening. You're not going to IHOP? We're probably not going to IHOP, but that is why we're going to – that's what the Vegas vacation is about, just sort of a little getaway.

Are you going to watch Swingers to get ready for the trip?

Oh, my gosh. I don't know how else to – I'm going to know. I'm going to watch Leaving Las Vegas. That is kind of the difference between us, right? Actually, be careful. You were obsessing with Swingers while I was obsessing over Leaving Las Vegas, And that might be the difference between you and I.

That might be a big, if you want a snapshot of, I mean, listen, not that I haven't also lived that life myself, but yeah, you're right. I was going more towards the like picking up the beautiful babies in Vegas, by the way, something I never did successfully, but like trying to be Vince Vaughn. And you were like, well, if it doesn't go right, I could be Nick Cage.

I could just literally drink myself to death or at least have that.

Well, I'm glad. I'm glad that that isn't the course that your life took. No, no. All right, well, listen, thanks for hanging out with us today, everybody. We are going to be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you, so please come on by for that. In the meantime, happy anniversary. Happy TBTL-iversary, and have a great Wednesday. We'll see you tomorrow. Please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all. what do you say we go out and get some Carvel I got the time if you got the diapers power out