Muse

My ideal man doesn't play the drums, doesn't stay late at the bar, does what he says and says what he does, does not get a fancy lawyer that the other person can't afford if things get weird. My name is Gwen. I am divorced. I have two kids, and I will not ever regret having those two kids, okay? So that's really important for me to tell anyone who's listening. I type 110 words a minute. I actually can type faster, but I keep a little bit for myself. I blew out my knee jazz recizing, so I don't want a guy that's too active. my best qualities i own a timeshare my favorite way to unwind is with a virginia slim and a big scoop of cottage cheese half a tomato why i want to find love is i just think that everybody deserves a second chance i want to go to the pta with a with somebody not just myself oh there's gwen she's divorced oh did he run away with his secretary i left a great first date with you would be two words. Benny Hanna.

TBTL! Can we listen to TBTL?

No. Yeah, yeah.

You want to listen to TBTL? Yeah.

Your favorite dish. My favorite dish. I like mugs because they're very comfortable in your hand and they hold the hot things that you don't have to touch so um you know coffee or hot tea i hear the words you're saying

and i believe you believe it's important they sound un-fricking

incredible together my dad i don't know why you insisted on my doing this rigid broadcasting

oh well it'll soon be over i hope so they taste like burning

well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a tuesday edition of tbt all the show

that just might be too beautiful to live it's a relief in a way it's not fun my name is luke burbank i'm your host it's a tough but rewarding job one that takes years to move into coming to

you from burbank california that's right burbank live from burbank california got sunshine was uh not feeling well yesterday and was actually wondering if i was even going to make the trip down here uh but um but i improved over the course of the day enough to uh board the airplane i did wear a mask by the way and uh made it down here and there's just something about this southern california sunshine that has me feeling much much improved here on this tuesday as we've arrived at episode 4645 in a collector series let the fun begin uh i flew down here because there had already been a whole thing scheduled involving me um uh coming to and visiting the set of this new uh hbo a tv show that was filming down here it was a heck of a production you want showmanship you got it the show is called um stewart fails to save the universe and it's basically like an expansion of the uh the big bang theory universe i'm apparently the the leading reporter for uh big bang related content that's not actually the big bang theory i did a story about young sheldon once um i couldn't figure out how to work in i need an old sheldon and a young sheldon joke on that story which was um regrettable but now they're making this new show and it's people from the the big bang theory show but now it's a totally different kind of show they live in a multiverse and they're they're they're heroes and they're revenge of the nerds anyways actually pretty interesting it might have been the biggest sort of hollywood production that i've i've uh i've seen uh so we will probably talk about that oh and we will definitely talk to this guy he is the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships he asks himself and i think this is why he's so outstanding at his job as the cobro of the program he asks himself this question each day right before he cracks the microphone do i know that the person to whom i'm speaking will not be offended he's andrew walsh and he is joining me right now good morning my friend it is not morning luke it is I know, I'm saying that so reflexively. I didn't either. I am sorry. Nope, nope, nope. I did that twice already. You know, there was a time I was very committed to never saying good morning if we were not in the morning times. And then at some point I just decided, eh, who cares? For consistency, I will say that. But I mean, honestly, 2.47 p.m., that's stretching it. That is pushing it. Even for me, and you know me, I am the one who will stretch the definition of morning if it means that I can lay in bed until noon on any given day. I don't come here today, though, to budge.

pester chops on such minutiae. I didn't even notice that you had done it earlier. I just, when you said good morning, I was caught off guard. But I will say this.

I mean, the sun is upsetting here in Los Angeles. I think we've missed that window.

You have missed some of the most beautiful days in Seattle, by the way. I was recording a Hey Dummies video on Friday, I think, because I remember I was in my car and it was the most beautiful day, but you were not in town on Friday, right? Were you traveling or were you were you at your home on friday it doesn't matter either way you're traveling again and i'm telling you you're missing some of the they've been sunny beautiful days and the sun is just going down

right here right now yeah it's been i was i was in the northwest yesterday and sunday i was down at my place so i was i was like well i was sort of enjoying that weather and then i woke up on monday morning and i just felt like absolute crud and i really thought like well this is the worst case scenario because um well a we had our show that we needed to record on monday we were in fact going to try to do some extra recording and then i had this tv thing down here and i thought like i'm i you know i have these certain weeks like this is a pretty crazy week for me with a bunch of different things including we've got live wire um on friday night at the reaser and beaverton and you and i are doing some special recordings as well there's just like a lot happening this week for me and i i always think like what will happen what would happen if i just was really sick and couldn't do it and the answer is everything would be fine the world would continue to rotate on its axis but i would feel very bad about like telling the crew down here uh you know skip it and the producer who worked hard to put this whole thing together uh you know i felt very bad asking you to cover for me yesterday but i do appreciate you doing it but then no problem again i was very surprised here's what happened i emailed you at like six in the morning and said, I don't think I can do the show. I then went back to bed for like four to five hours, got up, felt better enough to consider the idea of going and getting on an airplane, went into the office, found some of my old N95 masks, went to the airport, masked up, and then got down here. And then immediately I got to the hotel at like eight and I got in bed and then I went to sleep for like another nine hours. And I'll tell you what, it worked because I woke up this morning feeling remarkably better. Good.

Well, I was telling you before the show, I'm a little bit worried because I've been lucky. It's been a while since I've had like a bad cold or flu. I think, honestly, not going in to work at an office or a studio helps. I think that stuff usually gets passed around a lot, especially working in radio where you have microphones and, like, we were just pre-coated.

Well, I remember you used to host that radio show from a nursery school, and, I mean, that's just, forget it. I know, there's this, they were so lobber.

It's a recipe for getting just going around. But great guests. I'd get great guests. But, so you're kind of near the end of your work day now. I was thinking you're in the East Coast time zone. I didn't realize you're in Burbank, so that's good. It's not super late in the day, but I'm worried about you starting to flag and being fresh for tomorrow, but I have some advice for you. Do you have a car,

or are you like ride sharing it around town i'm ride sharing it around town because i'm i'm not um i flew into burbank which by the way we should all have an airport with our last name in it because there it does not matter how many times i travel to that airport it is just a massive confidence boost it just really feels like i did something with my life um they have just so many amazing signs that just say burbank and welcome to burbank and You're going to love Burbank. And so, but the hotel that I'm at is very close to that airport, and it's also very close to where we were filming, so I didn't need to rent a car.

Well, I'm looking something up here. I do think that this is going to be maybe a little bit pricey if you don't have a rental car. Oh, okay. I was going to recommend that you go to the Golden Deli in, I want to say, Alhambra.

The Golden Deli in Alhambra.

How do you know it's going to be a girl? Thank you. Sure, of course. A terrible Bamford I offered there. My apologies. But it was a listener, and I'm sorry that I cannot remember the listener's name, but if you give me this credit— It's called the Golden what again? The Golden Deli. They recommended this place when I was living in Los Angeles. So we're talking about about 11, 12 years ago, a listener wrote in to say, you love pho. I think I had trouble finding high quality pho in like where I was living in Los Angeles at the time. And somebody said, go out to Alhambra, go to the Golden Deli. It remains one of my favorite restaurants. It's not like fancy in any way. I'm looking at it right now I mean it's the only restaurant that I'll wait in line for You show up and there is a line Literally kind of along the wall Of the little strip mall that it's in there's always a line but they handle it really quickly it's kind of a digital you know you get in line digitally so you can kind of wander around a little bit if you want I can't remember but anyway if I'm ever in that area I try to go there they have I think literally maybe the best five ever had maybe there's some in Seattle that would rival it and when I'm feeling the way you sound right now which is generally okay but a little bit raw I feel like it has

medicinal powers well if i if we end the show right now and i leave i can be there by 359 because it's about an hour and 27 minutes away from me it's oh really oh i was mapping it it looked like

it was only 36 but i was just from the heart of burbank so i don't know you know i guess i'm

technically i'm i think i may have strayed barely over into sherman oaks but i'm i'm effectively i'm culturally burbank but um you know what it is it's more here's the the real deal i don't know if you've heard this la traffic not great not ideal and to the degree that it's made me the thing i was going to say about uh about how long we will go today on the show i mean we've got a couple things going on one the show needs to get on the internet asap because we we started so late because of me doing that tv stuff this morning and again thank you for your patience really i should be saying thank you to genevieve for jumping on the show yesterday um but it's that also i'm talking right now when i see that in the show to script i get worried because it's like i feel like the listeners when they hear genevieve on the show they hear how good the show could be um yeah she

saved me she just she could hear me struggling during the introduction and so she just jumped in and took over it was quite a moment of podcasting true heroism but um no the the traffic

is rough here to the degree that i have become an like i don't know if it's a true weirdo but i have really become this person that when i'm here in la and if i like i'm staying up in the valley right now we flew into burbank we were filming in van nuys i'm not going back to lax i'm not going back to lax you can't make me so this is what i'm doing i'm staying overnight tonight so that i can fly out of burbank which is like 20 minutes from where i am right now um i'm going like i don't know my flight's at like six in the morning or something i'm so that all of that is so i don't have to get in a car and go all the way down to lax right now which would take i assume a really long time and really really uh just kind of kill my soul but what that also means is i have to change rooms in this hotel today and i have to change rooms at four o'clock i decided to because of this whole flight thing i extended my stay by one night and i called down and because not to brag but being bonvoy uh platinum i'm usually uh treated with great deference in these types of hotels um like these courtyards by marriotts and the guy was nice but he said i do we do have availability but you can't be in the room that you're in uh that room is oversold by three rooms and so you're gonna have to move rooms and i was like what is more inconvenient repacking my stuff taking it to a different room and unpacking it or canceling my morning flight and just trying to figure out should do i just call an uber and go to lax tonight and fly home and i guess what i decided was i'm gonna do the room change thing yeah you need to sleep a little

bit i think that makes the most sense i need a day of not getting on an airplane you can take a couple of trips you know this is like the difference of moving across town versus moving across the country right you don't have to pack everything up perfectly you could and i don't know that if you would do this and maybe i'm opening a bag of worms here but you could conceivably grab some shirts that are on hangers and carry them down to your new room and hang them up and then maybe take the elevator to your old room and grab another bag or you know what i mean it's a little You don't have to pack up like you're getting ready for a flight, which is a little bit different.

Well, the good news also is once we are done recording our show today, I can break down my audio gear and pack that in the suitcase for good because tomorrow I will be joining you from the Madrona Hill studio. So that's one thing. If I had to break this all down, move it, and then reconstitute it tomorrow morning, that would be kind of a great annoyance, but I don't have to do that. And I honestly didn't bring that much clothing. i have a suitcase that i i don't have to check it i can just throw it in the overhead so it's it's not it could be worse but i guess my main point is that uh if i if my body doesn't give out by at 4 p.m we're gonna hear a not so gentle knock on that door of them telling me it's time to move what i really feel bad about is the three other people who are getting relocated this is what me and the guy got into i was like i go well could i just stay in this room and then if somebody doesn't show up, then I get to keep it. And he said, no, because we're oversold by three rooms, three people.

going to get moved out of their rooms today because we're oversold and i remember thinking i didn't say it to him because it's not his fault but i thought that doesn't seem like the best system no computer how did the computer let them sell or rent or whatever we call it three rooms more than the number of rooms i understand if i can't be in one of these rooms because i'm asking for like i was supposed to be done today this was supposed to be my last day at this hotel so i'm asking for something special and i understand i can't be stay in this room but there's there's at least two other people who are just going to get evicted from their rooms who were just they didn't do anything wrong they're they're in their rooms that they're

allowed to be in why are they going to find out that they're oversold why wouldn't they get precedence over the newcomers why would they get evicted well maybe how about this maybe those

people won't be evicted but there's going to be two people that show up and they are going to be like okay um please take me to my room now or show me my room card that gets me into my king bedroom with a pullout couch um and they will be told sorry we sold too many of those you need to go to a smaller room that does not have the pullout couch which i guess i mean i don't know how many times i'm actually staying in a hotel room where technically the couch is another sleeping surface like the couch is a pullout i'm almost always traveling by myself for these work things it's never even occurred to me that these couches are also Haida beds. I'm sitting on the couch right now actually as we talk. Of course, I don't even like

to open up Haida beds in my own home based on what you might find between the cushions. You think you live a clean lifestyle. You're even, for me, a medium clean lifestyle. You're a very clean lifestyle. I try to be clean. I don't know if the house would back that up, the state of it right now. But you pull the cushions off your couch and you realize you're a disgusting animal and you should hate yourself it is yes there are not i can't and you know me also in your case the cats are a little bit to blame well i think it's mostly crumbs and detritus and yeah they're messy eaters yeah exactly so anyway uh i would say don't try to use that hide a bed tonight just sleep on the regular

their bed well the thing is i'm going to be moved i'm downgrading to a room that does not have the hide of bed so i don't even have even i don't even have the temptation of it but i'm almost curious i'm not curious enough to do this because also by the way my sciatica is killing me was i telling you on saturday night about my my newfound lifestyle of having back pain no would not recommend it my lower back has become a whole situation it is and it is activated by primarily by driving in a car sitting in a car seat and driving it's mostly it's fine when i'm standing it's fine when i'm jogging uh it's not the worst when i'm sleeping but something about the typical particularly the seat in my car my actual car which is really a bad situation um it like when i drove from on sunday when i drove from seattle back down to my place after we watched the football game on saturday night i um i when i got out of my car so that's like a two-hour drive or something when i got out of my car literally the first like seven steps i took i was completely bent over i know that feeling like like i cannot unless i like really engage my core and like try to like very intentionally like straighten out my back like i am now the guy that if i'm in my car if i'm driving for more than 10 15 minutes and you see me getting out of the car you are seeing a guy who looks like um one of it looks like the custodian in the archie comics was it him or was it was it was it was it the custodian or was it the um lunch lady one of them seemed tremendously

stooped over in my memory yeah me uh maybe both yeah let me look it up let me let me do what about

airplane seats though um not great if i'm in coach um but but doable for some reason i can kind of Like, I mean, I'm, let me put it this way. I'm more uncomfortable getting out of a car that I was driving, whether it's my car or a rental car, than I am getting off of the airplane. There's something about the fact that I have to, if I'm driving, I have to hold the steering wheel. It's a certain, I have to hold, maintain a certain posture. And by the way, my car has one of those like lower lumbar inflation things. Have you ever been in a car with that kind of move going? Does zero good. Does absolutely no good. I don't know what your lumbar pain would have to be or what your sciatica pain would have to be. for that to work but is not effective on my and where i'm going with all this is i don't know the last time i slept on a height of bed andrew but i can tell you that after the age of say 16 i've never had a good night's sleep on a height of bed because of that bar and and for all of the you know we can we can send people not so much onto the moon anymore but around the moon We're doing a moon mission that we're gonna gonna go up and circle the moon and come back and take pictures of it which seems like a thing we could do with a telescope but okay we can do that but we're are we still putting that bar in the middle of a height of bed like how is that still the the way that it works because that thing is

that's that's that's the enemy of good sleep i don't i gotta be careful here i don't think my parents listened to the show and were you know what are we in 20 minutes in and i've done a pretty good job of making the top half pretty boring so even if they were listening they're probably gone Well, together, I mean, our powers together are just extraordinary. Teamwork makes the dream work. That's the second time somebody has said that to me today, the other one being John Sklaroff. No joke. But I will say, so they're always very accommodating when I'm in town, and they very much like me to stay with them. It's the only exception I kind of make to the not sleeping over people's houses rule.

I sleep over at my parents' house on Thanksgiving, and I kind of love it, even though I never sleep over at anyone's house. Like, you know, I don't stay at friends' houses when I travel.

I don't like that either. Yeah, and I know that there was a time in your life where you sort of did enjoy that idea of, like, waking up and having coffee with friends and maybe you're in robes or whatever. Well, I like having people at my house. Oh, okay, yeah. No, I just don't like any of that.

I like that morning time hang if it's on my turf, if I slept in my bed.

Miss Beasley, the lunch lady, is not especially stooped over. Honestly, the custodian is in better shape than I am. So I don't know what we're thinking of with Archie, or maybe you're thinking of a specific thing. Maybe something from The Simpsons. But I was going to say this. So my folks are very gracious.

Mr. Svensson is the name of the custodian. That's right. And I think that— No, he looks fine. No, he looks good. He looks good. I mean, yeah, he's definitely, you know, he's in good shape. I think he's arguably in better shape than either of us.

That's what I'm saying. Like, I'm low—look at him. Like, he's hardy. He's pushing things around.

but the lunch lady okay keep going okay anyway

I think you know where I'm going with this so I do like you know if I had my druthers I'd still probably get a hotel or something in Cleveland but my time there is usually relatively short my dad likes to maximize it as much as possible I totally understand especially if I'm doing shows from there or something and so it's just a tradition and so I stay there and what they have is a little room in the basement that is my dad's office and then this sort of couch thing that does pull out into a bed it's almost more like an ease It's almost like a chair, I think, that sort of pulls out into a bed. And it is very tidy, and I think the first time I slept on it, I don't know if I've slept on it two or three times. The first time, definitely fine, maybe the second time, but the last time I was there, I was like, I can't say anything because it would seriously, it would really bum them out. They would get a new thing. If not a new chair, they would start to problem-solve, and I really don't want to put anybody out. I can sleep, trust me. It's one of the few things I can do. well and for any duration of time and so it's fine but this last time I'm like I guess I'm at an age where I can't just sleep anywhere anymore when I was younger I literally slept in a bathtub one time like in college or something like and I will say that I was like oh I don't know if it was a bar I think it was a bar or something going on underneath the mattress and also my weight

sometimes you sleep on the bar sometimes the bar sleeps on you and I was like wow and I was only

there for maybe four or five nights or something tops, and so it was fine. But yeah, I guess I'm at that age where the pullout couch is not exactly ideal for me. I bet you that the technology has

gotten better. I think one of the things they've done, because I actually have a pullout couch in the Madrona Hill studio, but what the deal is, is it's what you're sitting on. So when it's all folded up, when it's a couch, you're sitting on this, you know, actually pretty comfortable kind of regular couch padding i guess but then if you were good to go to sleep on it you unfold that and then you are on a mattress that's now on the ground so they've completely eliminated that whole complicated spring metal kind of machinery that brings the hide-a-bed out and the downside is you're at floor level but the upside is it's a lot more comfortable than those old hide-a-beds yeah no i believe that um i've got here's here's what i think about the mrs beasley situation i think she's not letting on how much back pain she's in really you think that she's just powering through i think she's like so many women have for so many generations i think she's being strong for the rest of us i'm looking at some like old like some like more vintage archie she also has gone through a lot of different like iterations in the different kind of versions of archie as it's progressed over the years definitely i was having trouble nailing that down i'm looking at what seemed to be like some like much older ones and she just she's not doing what i said she was doing which is like she's bent over and her back hurts but there's just an energy radiating off of her that says this is a person who's dealing with chronic pain and is just being strong about it. I believe that. I know that I was technically wrong in that how I described her, but I think spiritually she and I, I feel connected to her every time I get out of my car. Because you know what the move I do is I put my right hand, because my right side, so it's weird. The left side of my lower back, zero pain, zero problem. It's strictly my right side. I get out of the car and I do the ultimate old man move, Andrew, which is hand, right hand on, right hand on the lower part of my back, like, oh, these old bones, and I'm not doing it for effect, no one's even with me, it's my instinctive reaction to the pain that I'm feeling, and it's just like, it's like, it's a confirmation that I too am subject to the degradation of age and time.

can i say one more thing on this topic please miss grundy has wonderful posture she is like i see a picture of her walker she's a teacher she's got white hair as well she's tall and very skinny she's almost olive oil-esque i'm just looking at the cover of like a 1970s era pep magazine i can remember what pep was i think it all took place in the high school maybe instead of around okay around and I'm looking at

Grundy is kind of a snack

right yeah I mean

depending on the depending on the like this is the thing depending on who was drawing the comic at the time right like there's just such a wide range like I'm looking at a really foxy Miss Grundy from World of Archie Jumbo comic strip and then I'm looking at Archie and me where she's definitely like kind of drawn a little bit differently and is not bad looking the one i was looking at by the way the arch in me she's a little bit yeah um uh i was a uh i think i was well i'm i was which one was veronica have the black hair or the dark hair yeah betty had blonde hair yeah i think i was i i think i was a betty guy i think i was i mean listen i would have i would have been so excited for any of these cartoon women to show me any affection as a young man like uh josie any of the pussycats absolutely midge midge midge sleeper moose

absolute sleeper midge not to objectify these fake women but midge was a sleeper don't you think

that actually i would say at least maybe people of our age who grew up here in the states and presumably in other places too it's very likely that your your first feelings of like not even like maybe the sexual attraction because it kind of young you probably don't even have those kinds of thoughts but like attraction was probably to a cartoon or a comic i mean that would actually just make sense right like i'm watching little house on the prairie none of the you know young girls on the show the girls that were my age were being set up to be particularly like they're not there to be objectified ogled yeah ogled right exactly like and so the first good ogling i could do would be like uh you know maybe lady from lady and the tramp oh this is interesting i thought

you were one of the girl chipmunks see i i think i looking back i don't think i realized this at the time but maybe it was because i you know had trouble finding any kind of um love in real life i i think i literally maybe just crushed on every single girl my age on television i remember not even my age but i remember i think i mean i think i definitely had a thing for laura at times it was hard not to but then i mean mary wasn't mary her older sister like she i remember crushing on mary for a while after she lost her eyesight i want to say i said that hero complex again andrew saves the day you can look at that another way it's like my chances are better when she lost her

i mean um but like no i for whatever reason i didn't um i didn't find you know had okay i did have a bit of a crush on hayley mills from the parent trap i thought she was she's playing both twins and i thought she was absolutely adorable i was a big sucker for the accent she had a like a british accent i believe in that which i don't even know if i'd heard that very much in my life but if i think more about like there's something about the way that they were able to animate you know like if i'm thinking about like riffraff's girlfriend or maybe it was more garfield's girlfriend was that sonya or he's girlfriend like some of the cartoon girlfriend did garfield have a girlfriend no he didn't he didn't he had normal yeah normal curious normal had those big

eyes my favorite show title of all time this is not normal um i uh i you know You Heathcliff and Riff Raff, they had girlfriends. Okay, and John had

a crush on the vet, or the vet tech that he would take Garfield and Odie to, and she was not having it. She was, like, so eye-roll-y, like, and as well she should be. She was putting up with a lot of shit from a client.

Yeah, definitely not part of the job description to have to, like, tolerate John's, you know, affections if you're not into that. But, like, yeah, just, like, I think that probably most of my early feel i was very attracted to i can't remember which one of the like the um the sort of female chipmunks in alvin and the chipmunk you know how they had their they did counterparts yeah and then also i wouldn't say it was a romantic crush but i think i've there was something about the voice of the mom on muppet babies it was played by by the way by Barbara Billingsley, I think, from Leave it to Beaver. I think the real life mom. I think I just, I needed some real mothering in my life so badly at that time. There was something about the mom and her stripy socks on Muppet Babies.

You know what? You hear her, but never see her. I was confusing her with the adults on Peanuts. It was like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. And I do remember, in fact, our friend Hauser, you have a nickname for him. Yeah, it's J-Dog. It's good. His first name starts with a J. do you know that he was those legs for Halloween several years ago I was not here I think it was at a party at my house maybe but I believe I split town because I'm not a big Halloween guy but yeah I know that he was working on that costume

for a while that is a really really clever costume idea but anyway well maybe we do this maybe we thank some donors and then I can tell you a little bit about my big day and almost getting a job, a writing job in Hollywood. Yeah. So let's just, I'd say everybody watch your step around here because I've got, I wouldn't call it a firm offer on the table, but I feel like my, I think the doors to Hollywood are finally opening for me.

Thank you, baby.

Speaking of our donors, we want to thank some of these wonderful, generous folks. They are voluntarily sending in donations. We don't have that big HBO money like the producers of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe do. We've got to rely on these folks. A note on this. I'm not sure if you addressed this yesterday, Andrew, but did we mention the dazzling donor note going out?

Oh, no, I forgot to mention that yesterday. Message going out. It was a whirlwind.

so our um you were covering for me and dealing with a lot i appreciate that uh we are john sklarov has sent out the little form if you are someone who has been a dazzling donor this year uh that may be in your inbox even as we speak you may also have gotten something from apm asking you to put them in your estate plans delete that immediately yes and focus on the um well i'm not trying to tell you how to live your life but i would say uh start off if you can by filling out out the dazzling donor form which is just a chance for you to get us to read anything on the air that you want within reason um shout people out talk about your business just talk about anything you got on your mind um i also want to say if that feels like your reward for donating money to us is that we've given you a homework assignment you're also absolutely entitled to not fill it out that's right um but uh but if you are someone who likes getting to hear your your name in lights Everything you're seeing today is my real voice If you would like to hear your name and lights Then look for that form and please fill it out And get it back to us and we will soon be thanking Dazzling donors

That's right, if you gave it the dazzling level of donation During the last TBTL-a-thon Which I can't remember exactly what it is But I know it's incredibly, incredibly generous Look for that, and if you haven't received it Maybe check your spam folder I don't know how much you've been following this, Luke But I've been running into a lot of issues getting the newsletters into the hands of people who've signed up for it, especially if you're a Gmail user. Now, this email to the Dazzling Donors went out from John, so I'm hoping that it didn't get scooped up into your spam. But, Luke, I don't know if you know this. I'm straight up persona non grata on the Internet now. Shadow banned. I cannot. This last newsletter I sent out, I purposely kind of talked obliquely about how I'm trying to keep this newsletter very safe. There's no links in it. I didn't use the spam word. I got it, but I'm not on a Gmail. You're not on a Gmail. So if people are trying to look up Luke's personal email address, just try everything other than Gmail and try every combination of letters before the at symbol possible. And so I think...

think it is a gmail thing i think it's i'm hoping it's just me and that it's not john's emails as well but i honestly don't know what i'm going to do about the the newsletter this week because i don't know we need to rectify this if i'm going to be writing newsletters they got to get in the hands of people to read them otherwise it's kind of a time suck you know what i'm saying

would you say that right now your leading suspicion is that it's nothing but a gmail thing baby is that a reference something no just kidding that's funny and i'm making it the show title oh good wow that went from he hates jokes to it's such

a good joke it's gonna be the show title but a gmail should i write it thing or thing i think

it's fang right that's it is thang i believe in the original song is rendering of it is is uh is thang uh we want to thank chelsea burke betts who's over there in iowa city iowa lovely iowa city iowa the the eyes of the nation well that's not true i was going to say we'll we'll soon turn back to your state as we get into primary season but i think we're still a couple of we're still probably a year and a half away from where we start talking about folks showing up in new

hampshire and iowa also didn't they change or at least didn't the democratic party change the the the schedule last time around i it's funny that i can't the fact that i don't know that is a real shame and it really speaks to how far along it's how long it's been you're a low information voter well the main issue luke i'm a low information everything um and voting just happens to be one of those that's right don't you dare insult me like that but uh i know that i mean even when i live there every four years they would say that there was always some saber rattling we're going to change the the the primary schedule and then people in new hampshire would be very obviously protective of it which i completely understand but now that i don't live there and it's not just like a very fun thing to happen i realize oh yeah these this very small narrow non-diverse mostly white group of people should not be having an out i'm not saying that their vote shouldn't count but they shouldn't have a special weighted you know import from the process exactly well

Well, regardless, you know what? I would let Chelsea vote first. Sure, Chelsea. Chelsea, I trust. First in the nation, Chelsea is what I say. That's exactly who we're talking about. We're also talking about Wendy Mathia. Wendy is in Baltimore, Maryland. Our sound guy today on the shoot was from Baltimore, Maryland. And boy, could you hear it. Just a beautiful, intense Balmer accent.

Love that, love that. I've been dipping into the wire a little bit, just season one, here and there,

late at night. Yeah, I tried to get my dad I got my dad to watch a couple episodes when we were doing work on the house and he really enjoyed it and I was like, oh yeah, I need to I need to re-engage with this content I need to re-engage with thanking David Brumley, who's in Bellevue, Washington. David also has an extreme Bellevue accent. Yeah, I know. If you talk to him, you hear it right away. I hear it

yeah, but I love him anyway

No, it's beautiful, honestly Deborah Allen, supporting the show from Bryson City North Carolina. Nice a place that i i have not i mean maybe we've read deborah's name before but bryson city north carolina does not ring any bells but uh i bet you it's uh i bet you it's lovely as well we know it's lovely because deborah's there uh fiona bestwick keeping the home fires burning in the city of subdued excitement i only lived there for a few years and yet i continue to forget what the nickname of bellingham washington is because i of course just call it the bay city i think you got it right though subdued excitement i think i think i sometimes would call it subdued expectations or something i think i was even when i was trying to i spent a lot of time pushing back on the nickname and trying to rename the city the bay city and um and then sometimes i would actually forget the real slogan uh even when i was trying to use it properly and why were you why did you why did you

lean so heavily into trying to call the bay city because that's how it started right it was officially subdued excitement but you kept calling it the bay city and listeners were getting cranky about it if i recall which of course made you double down even more was it about a mural

um well you yes andrew there is a mural involved what happened was i moved to bellingham and i just happened to notice like two different things that used the term bay city one of them was like bay city janitor everything goes back to janitorial work today andrew one of them i think was like bay city janitorial supplies which was kind of near our house and then there was something else i forget what it was but it said bay city and so i was like oh that's what we call this place it's on a bay and uh it's the bay city so i started using that and then people were like dude have you even seen the huge mural that says belling welcome to bellingham the city of subdued expectations or something and so i had already tried to christen it the bay city thinking that It was... really the nickname before i learned that it has this whole other thing and then as i often did i just dug in and decided to um uh continue to call it the bay city uh much to the consternation of some people but also much to the adoption of that by some people there were a lot of people who now started calling it the bay city just when they would email me and stuff so it kind of worked i mean it really became a thing for a long time people were including it in songs for us the boys in the Bay City. Fiona's sticking with Bellingham. That's fair. I get it. Jonna Beving is also sticking with Camarillo, California. I can almost see Camarillo from this balcony in the valley, Jonna. Thank you so much for supporting the show. We've been seeing Jonna's name on this list for years and years. Yeah. It's very much appreciated. So thank you, Jonna. Thank you to all of our donors today for making TBTL possible. This would not be happening without you guys. hello and welcome to top story about 30 minutes left for me to describe this big hollywood shoot that i was at today but really what i want to talk about andrew is the giant movie billboard outside of my hotel room here near the 405 for some kind of animated movie called goat and uh it looks like i don't know what it's about but it has goat on it and then a bunch bunch of cartoon characters and then it says uh you're never too small to dream big exclusively in theaters february 13th but what i noted was over on the side uh of where like for where it says goat and then you got these kind of like cartoon monster people it says uh i think it says produced by stephen curry oh and i just thought i thought is that gonna move the needle Well, would I see a movie because it was produced?

He stars in it, too. Oh, he stars in it. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me say, that was me reading directly from the AI overview, which I always promised you and the listeners I would never do. Let me double-check this. But I see it's both a goat, literally, and a goat, as in greatest of all time, basketball movie.

Hold on, here's what I'm trying to do. I'm now getting up, and I'm walking over to the window, because this is when the podcast really does get affected by my physical deterioration.

A ailment, yeah.

I swear to God, it says either in promotion.

He does produce it as well. He stars and produces. Is that what you're trying to figure out?

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out if it's saying, it says Stephen Curry in big writing, and then the other thing, I think it says from producer Stephen Curry, yeah which is like again just the stuff that stephan curry can do on the basketball court is i mean so phenomenal and fun to watch and something that i i would i would watch him you know i'd watch him play horse or pig or whatever animal he chose to spell i'd watch him play goat but the idea that he produced it is a is a very that feels first of all very la to me like i don't know if you drove by this billboard in cleveland if they would take the time to tell you it was produced by steph curry but like that's just such a that's such an odd because presumably the point of that is to further entice people to see the movie and by the way it does not say on this movie i'm getting now getting better eyes on it doesn't say starring steph curry it

says produced by steph curry yeah i guess he so i'm looking at the people in it do you know who um i was not a big stranger things person i watched the first season but that was a long time ago and And like we said before, I'm a low-information TV watcher, so I don't remember the details of it. But Caleb McLaughlin is in this, and I believe that he is— He's a Stranger Things guy? He's a Stranger Things guy, and then it says also includes—

If it's not Finn Wolfhard, miss me with that. Who's Finn Wolfhard? I think he's in Stranger Things. Okay. I think that's the only person I can name—well, other than—let's see. Well, oh my goodness, Andrew. Although my sciatica's bothering me. I need to go lie down for a minute. Winona Ryder. Winona Ryder's in Stranger Things as well.

Of course. Oh, right. As is Millie Bobby Brown.

Right, right. And the gang.

Who else? We have Steph Curry doing voice in this Gabrielle Union. You got some Nick Kroll in there. I cannot believe the thing. I like Nick Kroll. I cannot believe that during the age of really looking back at things people said, But that Nick Kroll never, he doesn't seem to ever have to answer the fact that, like, he would do characters where he straight up said the N-word on, like, Comedy Bang Bang and stuff. I remember going through the Comedy Bang Bang archives when I became, like, kind of a paying member to that. I was like, ooh, I have all the archives. And like a lot of TBTL listeners, I wanted to start from the beginning. And I did. And it was really cool because that show kind of started around the same time as TBTL. There was some interesting accidental, I think, sort of, a little bit of overlap as far as the.

cultural eye of both the things that they got obsessed with that we got obsessed just a little

bit yeah just stuff like that although the show was very different in format especially back in that day i think it was even a live stream on a on a radio on an internet radio show anyway none of that really matters but i would listen to him and he and scott will often even on the scott ackerman the host of the show will sometimes say like he he makes these jokes about like yeah go back listen the archives but not all the archives so i know that he is chagrined about some of the stuff that's in there not that he said i don't think but certainly what other people said and if you go back to the early days it really is a lot it's usually all men on the show so many penis jokes it's like back then you just men joking around in a room could not stop like everything led back to the phallus that's what it seemed like in a very immature way

I find that surprising because all of those people are so funny on that show, and it just feels like the lowest hanging fruit comedically. It is, as it were, yeah. So you're even doing it.

I just said as it were, as you're saying. I'm just supporting you. I'm being the best supporting co-bro, which is an award that I'm really hoping to win at the Webby's this year. But anyway, yeah. Do I know that the person to whom I'm speaking will not be offended? See?

I'm raw today. You are. Speaking of the comedy Bang Bangverse, I was talking to Lauren Lapkus today. Oh, nice. She's one of the stars of this show.

So, yeah, okay, so are we transitioning? Can you just tell me about this now? I don't know if we need a special introduction, but I'm a little confused. You were on an HBO shoot, but this is literally the – is this related to the original property of Young Sheldon and How I Met Your Nerd? Sorry, I can never remember. Big Bang Theory is what it's called.

The Big Bang Theory. Revenge of the nerds. It is, but it's not a CBS show. It's an HBO show, which is the first thing that's kind of interesting about it. So it's the, and you know, I did do like a TV story about young Sheldon. And so I guess that the people that do some PR for Chuck Lorre's production company, he's the guy kind of, he's one of the guys in charge of this show. You know, they reached out again. i don't know i got an email from my bosses asking if i would go to la and and and do a story about this show and since every story i do for sunday morning feels like it might be the last one i just figured okay but it's actually kind of a i think it's a kind of a funny well i was talking to one of the creators a guy named bill prady and he said straight up he was like we're finally making a show one of these shows that we make that i would watch which i thought was kind of an interesting way to frame it like it's taking like four of the characters who were kind of side characters in the big bang theory one guy um uh named stewart who ran the the comic book shop and then the lauren lapkus character who played who worked at the comic book shop and became his girlfriend the um brian possein uh it played a geologist on the show and then this last guy was named kripke and he was i think kind of like the nemesis of sheldon so these are like four side characters from the big Big Bang Theory. And the idea is that they, the difference is that this show on HBO, first of all, it's single camera, which means it doesn't have that kind of sitcom-y look. It's not, there's no laugh track. There's no audience. There's not three cameras. There's not that kind of traditional sitcom. It's a single camera. So that's a different look. And the idea is that, uh, after the Big Bang Theory TV show ends at some point, uh, Sheldon and his buddy have created some kind of at caltech they've created some kind of a machine that goes haywire and is now kind of like fracturing the universe into these multiverses and every episode of this show stewart fails to save the universe they're in a different the four main characters are in a different multiverse they're in a different universe where things are things different things are happening um you know and the the style of the show is different one of them they're in a place they're in a version of planet earth where humans never really fully evolved we never really got out of the kind of like very early sort of caveman days um this one that they were filming today at the van nuys airport is one where the universe that they're in for that episode is like um comic book related so they're they're um at the they're trying to find the flash but the problem is like um you know uh it's not easy to find him and when he runs by no one can see him because he's super fast and it's like confusing and one of the producers I was talking to said the idea of this show is like imagine a comic book but imagine the story being about the people that are

standing in the other panel when like the main superhero person is doing something very cool and amazing there's someone who's like going to get a hot dog on the street there's literally a guy eating an ice cream

cone when Superman And. is doing the thing I think it's the scene to turn and this is of course from the movie not a comic book but I think it's from the first movie oh and he's turning back time I think he's turning back time I might be getting like my movies confused so forgive me on that by the way quick aside on this while I'm out over my skis on DC lore that is interesting they can use the flash I think as DC has some sort of agreement with HBO because I noticed like all of the DC stuff is on HBO they're using Mr. Freeze and the flash in this episode that they were filming I do think you know people make fun of it I actually do think that some some of those creative um you know IP crossovers are kind of fun I think it's kind of hey we have access to this let's use it I do kind of I do kind of like that but anyway Vives and I we were watching Superman years ago 15 20 years ago and uh I had maybe I hadn't seen this as a kid and there's like literally a guy going to take a lick of an ice cream cone while Superman is doing something extraordinary and then he kind of looks bummed when the ice cream cone or the ice cream falls off the cone or something and i remember saying to vives i just said i'm an emotional eater and so now we're always saying that we see somebody like just like something extraordinary can be happening in these superhero movies and there's just like people who are just going about their day it's probably gotten a little bit more realistic nowadays but it's kind of like wait why were you still trying to shred that document while the world was exploding outside your window.

Well, yeah, I think that the premise of this is kind of like... And actually, you know, the more I talk to the people who made it, like, it's not out yet, so I haven't actually watched it because they're filming it right now. But the more that I was talking to the people that created it and the actors that are in it, I was like, this is actually kind of a very sweet idea, which is, like, the idea of the Big Bang Theory, which, again, wasn't a show that I watched, you know, with any regularity, wasn't probably for me. But, like, that was also a show where they were sort of like... All the main characters in the Big Bang Theory would have been the, quote-unquote, weird person in IT or the weird person, you know, who owns the pet shop or something. They would have gotten three minutes of a normal sitcom, right? And it would have just been, like, the, quote-unquote, normal people in the sitcom. And then they have got that weird lady who runs the cat store, you know? And, like, this, the idea was, well, okay, what if the whole show was those people? We centered them in the story. and now this is like okay what if people who were to the side of that were in this one and of course i made the joke i guess that the fourth sequel to this will be the guy from craft services we just have to keep getting further and further to the side of the main thing but like i guess the idea of this show is that the guy stewart he's played by a guy named kevin sussman an actor is not in any way the person that you would sort of imagine uh is going to be the hero of this story and in fact, none of the people in this, none of the actors in this, seem particularly well suited to the task, which is, you know, kind of a cute idea, like instead of it just being Jack Reacher or whomever, instead of just putting, you know, the very typical sort of biggest, strongest, buffest, whatever-est people, you know, to the task of trying to fix things, this is sort of like for people who kind of did not ask for it. They have no desire to be having this job, but they have it and they're filming it. and what i was really struck by was the sheer number of people on this film shoot there must have been 250 people there working on this thing and the scene that was being shot was at the most two minutes of the full of the half hour that's like a half hour per episode it was at best andrew two minutes and this was all day long for like at least 250 that didn't even count craft services which by the way was amazing i would my body type would change dramatically if i worked on one of these shoots the craft services was so phenomenal they had so first of all just the where you go for snacks was off the absolute chain i ate something called a a honey stinger energy waffle with my coffee which i'm not eating that on a normal day but it was there and then it's lunch time and then you go over to where they've got the whole like buffet going and they got like every kind of food under the sun then there's full-on pie and ice cream

there's like fresh vanilla ice cream there to be scooped upon the pie i mean unbelievable stuff but like i was it was amazing the scale of this production and the whole scene they were shooting was the four main characters get into a cab um they they tell the cab driver that they're trying to find the flash the cab driver basically thinks they're crazy the flash runs by their car but we don't see him because he's too fast normal human eyes wouldn't catch the flash being the flash and then when they say can you follow the flash he says like get out of my cab that was the scene that that all of these people were there to make happen

that day and by the way it looked great looked really good but it is like absolutely shocking to me to see how many people i've never i guess i've never really been on a i've been on film sets but it's been like indie films and little things hang on andrew yep the knock it's a knock

dreaded knock 20 minutes early 22 minutes early i know i have to tell them i have a 4 p.m checkout

let me try to practice my nicest voice go take care of it hi there i have a 4 p.m checkout no problem thank you so much i understand why they have to do it but i heard somebody references oh you know what i think it might have been on like oh i think it was like on tiktok and it was some kind of a an incident where law enforcement was like was like summoned out to a hotel or motel because the person who was staying in the room was was really annoyed and what they were really annoyed at was the manner in which housekeeping was knocking on the door with that very shrill i think they knock with like a key or a piece of metal or plastic somebody called the cops well there was a base i think what happened was the person was getting maybe removed from the room or something which could probably for non-payment or who knows but what they kept bringing up and where i really related with them was they were like they were obsessed they didn't want to talk about the bill they don't have what they give them so they kept saying why did she have to knock so rude and i was like from your lips to god's ears brother now i also understand if i worked in housekeeping i wouldn't want to like go home every night with swollen knuckles swollen knuckles and

you really want to make sure that you're announced in case the person doesn't hear your knock and then you then they haven't changed the door or whatever you call that modern chain bar barred to the door and then they walk in and that's what i'm always saying in pre in pre-show audio checks. Was that pre-show? Was yours? Wait, I can't remember now. I can't remember what we said on the show. Good morning.

Good morning. Good morning, Luke. I could not agree with you more. I am so pro the housekeeping staffs of the hotels of the world. I think it is a really hard job that people don't get paid enough money for. So I don't, I'm not proposing anything differently for what they're doing with the knocking strategy it totally makes sense for what you said you want to make sure that the people in the room know you're trying to enter the room you can't you don't want to be wrapping your knuckles against a hard door all day that's that's not a fair request and yet if you want to talk about a noise that fills me with a physical anger that's right up there with it's below but not that far below like loud motorcycle sounds like there's something that's so i don't know if shrill is the right word there's something that is just so unpleasant to my ear about the knocking that housekeeping does using some kind of a hard metal thing on the door and again i don't i'm not proposing a different like way of doing it they should just keep doing it and i'll just it just won't sound great to my ears i wonder if a little bit of it too is that there's really only two things that will be happening in this room when someone knocks on that door and one is i'll just be still in bed which is kind of unlikely because i usually come around at nine or ten i'm pretty much up by then but the other thing is i'm doing this show with you so i'm almost always whether i'm asleep or talking to you i'm in a state of mind where that noise coming out of the blue is extra it's kind of extra upsetting to me yeah yeah i i i dread it

as well but i'm somebody who does like to sleep late and that's what got me into trouble when i was in like um in our last trip to mexico and but all you got to do is put that do not disturb out i guess well that's what you're saying yeah i think i but i mean don't you have that out now and didn't they knock anyway i might i'm also again we're in this like we're in this liminal

hour now we're like i technically have until 4 p.m but you know i'm sure that there's somebody putting pressure on the housekeeping staff to get this room turned around because remember andrew they're oversold by three of these rubes right um i was here was the other thing that i was i guess impressed is the word i mean i just i've just never seen i've never seen a production on this scale i've never seen this many people with this many different jobs to just like there was 25 people that were just in charge of doing things to cameras so that whenever it was time to use that camera it would be ready to go you know what i mean and there was like every kind of boom imaginable they had like multiple giant trucks to just hold out like giant like scrims like giant like a screen that would just change because it was shooting outdoors it was in front of the the actually you know it was part of the parking jet near the van nuys airport so it was all like outside so they got to constantly control the weather and the light patterns you know but at this like massive scale they're not talking about what we call a flag at cbs we're not putting up couple flags they're like fully bringing over something the size of lumen field and then just like plopping it over where these characters are getting out of this like 1950s cab because that's also part of the plot is they're in some kind of it's a vaguely 1950s version of of this town that they're in looking for the flash or whatever but the other thing was i i saw this guy early in the day and i thought oh that's really funny because you know who brian posain is right yeah he maybe been to his comedy shows i have yeah up in the u district very very funny guy and and like long time uh collaborator uh with patten oswald he's been in a million shows he's on the sarah silverman show i'm sure he may have even been on this show i don't know i'm sure that our listeners are fairly well familiar with this guy brian possein so i keep seeing this guy and i'm like dang that looks like brian possein's brother what are the chances you get another guy on this set who is also about 6'7 and has a thunderous beard yeah he's very distinctive looking yeah and i was like i was like does that guy like know that he's sort of ripping off brian possein's look like does like and what is his job here and then i realized at some point oh that's brian possein's stand-in because this is a big hollywood shoot this somebody told me it has the budget of like an episode of game of thrones like i don't know what they're spending per budget on or per episode on this but it's wild like oh well of course there's like a stand-in and then i realized oh my gosh there was there was well four specifically but i think they even had a stand-in for one of the guest stars there was four to five people they kept see walking around and there was something about them that seemed familiar but i couldn't quite figure out what their job was or what they were doing here but they weren't getting yelled at by anyone they didn't seem to have a job of like you know running snacks for people or like being a pa there's another funny thing that happens which

which I had never been on a shoot that was this large where when, I guess it's probably the assistant director or the AD or somebody says rolling, everyone with a walkie-talkie is supposed to yell rolling. So imagine now you have like 40 people with walkies, so it's like rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling.

Everyone's yelling rolling all the time. And so just to be clear, not that this is super important, but just so that I can understand it, they're not using the walkie-talkies to say rolling, but that's just if you're wearing a walkie-talkie you have a job that means you have to echo this

into the air the dga or something you're somehow in like the director track i guess although andrew to further can i just further complicate this there was a period of time where the ad was trying to talk to everyone and it was spread out through this whole area and i noticed i was like what are those people doing they're all holding up cell phones no they were all holding their walkies their walkie-talkies up on speaker mode so that anyone who was near them was hearing what the AD or whatever the assistant director was saying into his walkie-talkie. From across the lot or something. From across. So what it was was a way, and they all knew to do it, there was a way that they could all personally turn into Bluetooth speakers.

Yeah, no kidding. Each person.

But by the way, it was very blown out. It didn't sound good. I thought, this is not a good system. It feels like Pluribus. It was totally Pluribus. That's exactly what it was, actually. But so then I finally realized, oh, yeah, there's a Brian Pussain lookalike Like whose job it is to like go and sit in this chair, you know, in this taxi cab when Brian Posehn is like too tired to do it or has been doing it for too many hours or whatever. And, you know, all of the principals, the main people had them. And I just like at some point I like came around the corners actually as I was leaving and I just like accidented my way into the stand in where they were all sitting. And it was like Bizarro Jerry. It was totally like that Seinfeld episode where you've got a version of everybody, but just a little bit different. that's creepy it was a little creepy and you know i mean hey it's honest work and like i'm sure there's i bet you a lot of people tried out for that honestly so i don't say this to in any way um like try to denigrate or make light of having that as a job but i just thought man that must be particularly in hollywood where it's like there's just so much um it's so hard to make it and it's so hard to be the person that they are deciding to point the camera at you know as the primary person as the brian possein of it all and like if you're just like i look exactly

like that dude i could say that line so wait a second though for standards in a situation like this it's not an understudy it's a stand-in and it means like you're just in there like you're you look like brian possein so you sit in the back of this cab while they do all the lighting and because you look like him so much you can get everything adjusted and then the other person kind of swaps in so if you're doing any kind of a line it's just for a sound check it's not like he's not a stunt double in other words

no but I heard I was talking to one of the creators of the show at lunch and I said oh I just realized where there's a guy who looks like Brian Posehn here he goes oh yeah well the other week we had our principal cast we had their standings and then we had their stunt doubles so there was three of everybody

oh wow that's interesting i think that the standards are technically called the second unit and yeah i don't even know if they ever even do lines they definitely are there for the purposes of getting the lighting rigs and everything set up but then also maybe there are some certain shots that they can do with the second unit where you wouldn't be able to tell the difference of the of the person so maybe they sit in for that i mean the amount of you've heard this forever from a lot of people if they're in movies or whatever but it's just like the amount of sitting around and waiting is just like insane it is truly insane on one of these productions like the amount of just like waiting for something to get reset so that like they could film they they did this whole reset to show the taxi driver whacking down that like red flag you know because it's like a 1950s cab and i was talking to the the one of the creators of the show at lunch and i was like i didn't get the payala mode by the way i did demonstrate some restraint but um i was like yeah i was curious how many times you guys were going to shoot that like knocking down that flag thing he goes oh yeah that'll never be on tv i go what do you mean he goes oh yeah um because and this is where it's like you could talk about a show like the big bang theory or any of these shows that maybe are not created with our sensibility and you could just kind of think that there's not you could be guilty of thinking there's not that much thought behind it and then you start talking to somebody it's like talking to a musician about like recording an album like it could be a music that you're not even into and they start telling you about gates and about you know like like technical stuff having to do with how albums are recording you're like oh my god there's so much to this so he was like he was like no the only reason that we shot a tight shot on that is because in the wide shot you see him move his hand to knock it down so we and we have time today because we have a light shooting schedule today so our our ad said we'll pick it up we'll get a close-up shot of it i go well why wouldn't you why wouldn't you put it in the scene he goes because everyone knows what that means when the cab driver moves his hand down on the like thing and if we do a close-up of it now that's part of the story and we just can't have everything be part of the story that people can't follow he can't keep introducing visual concepts that aren't advancing the plot they're not important they're not really part of it so there's so much stuff like that where like they just are they're leaving so much out because it's like it's not relevant to the story it's not a joke it's not a laugh line and it just if you if you left all of that stuff in you'd have a very different looking movie and one of the things that he was marveling about was that vince gilligan left in in pluribus We were talking about Pluribus Kept leaving in the entirety of Ray Seahorn's outgoing message Oh, yeah, yeah And they keep calling And he said he counted it, it was seven times It's amazing, yeah And he was just like, yeah, we would not be doing that on this show Well, hold on one second, though But they're recording it, though

They're filming it anyway, just in case, though, right? They're filming it, he said the only Yes, he said they're filming it just in case And the only reason, he said And actually, you want to know what it comes down to? Let me just try to land this plane in the most boring way possible. And by that, I mean this show. Actually, it's not boring. What I really ended up talking about today with a bunch of people on this set was like, what's going on with filming in Hollywood, right? And in Los Angeles, you hear all these stories about how everything is moving out of town and everything's going to Atlanta and it's been going to Vancouver for a long time. And it's terrible for the industry here. You know, people are out of work. It's a really sad scene. and um he said yeah uh we got a and and i guess that they put i think it was newsome actually put out like i forget what it was 500 or 700 million dollars in basically like tax breaks for these productions and this guy told me it added a million dollars per episode to their budget whoa and that allowed them he said they had they wrote two versions of this show and one was if they got the tax break and one was if they didn't because if you don't have the tax break you do not have as much time to shoot and you have to be realistic about what you can get because like i said today i watched this all 250 people not including the actors and the producers and stuff were out there all day to get two minutes of this show and if they were supposed to get four minutes of this show they wouldn't have gotten there so they got this tax break but the craziest thing was i was like what's the application process he goes it's like applying for college their line producer printed out an application that said how much is your budget for your production how many people from your production will be going to local restaurants like it's like the most basic questions about this thing you're doing and then you put it in the mail and you send it to the like you know film and television department or whatever at the like the state of california and then you just wait to hear if you got this money back Wow, wow Which is a very kind of, you know, what would you call it, like

not an overly Hollywood way to find out if you're going to get a million dollars more per episode. I wanted to share another thing with you that I read. You might have seen this bouncing around. I want to say yesterday or maybe over the weekend, and I'm looking at it now. I'd only seen the headline a couple of times, but apparently Matt Damon, and unfortunately it was an interview with Joe Rogan. Oh, I read that. The Netflix telling directors to repeat the plot more often because people are using their phones while watching these movies and sort of encouraging directors to front-load their Netflix movies with action instead of doing it the more traditional way?

Oh, I didn't hear that part. I read an article about how that movie that they did, The Rip, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, is actually very, very worker-friendly. Everyone is invested, and Netflix doesn't do this for most films. They only agreed to do it for this one because I guess the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-ness of it, But that they were able to get some kind of a payment plan so that if the movie does well, everyone on the film down to the catering people gets paid a lot more than they would normally so that it's kind of this, you know, everyone's sort of vested in a way, which seems like a cool thing. But I've heard something equally depressing about what they're saying over at Netflix, not from those guys, but from somebody else who was saying that, yeah, they'd been in a meeting at Netflix, and they were told also by someone in, like, programming there, you've got to make these shows or these movies or whatever it is they were making less compelling. Because if they're too compelling, then they can't be used as a two-screen experience. And so your job is not to make a movie that someone can't take their eyes away from. Your job is to make a movie they can totally take their eyes away from while it just drones on in the background and they scroll TikTok. And I mean, you want to just talk about depressing.

Yes and no. I mean, not that we need to turn this into a, you know, a debate program. I mean, so I was looking for more details on this with Matt Damon. It says Matt Damon has claimed that Netflix pushes directors to reiterate the plot for viewers because they're watching with their phones. I think that's interesting. I mean, it's not depressing totally. But I guess I just want to be honest when I say I am sometimes choosing things specifically that I can watch while I'm playing cards. And so I wouldn't say there isn't a need for that. But for me, usually that means it's an old movie from the 90s that we're stumbling on. By the way, I'll tell you later when I can remember some of the stars' names who are super famous. Veeves and I stumbled on a gem of a movie over the holidays that I need to – maybe I'll tell you about it tomorrow when I can Google it and get it in front of me because it's been a couple of weeks. But I love older movies like that for that reason. I know people are drawn to certain – like, oh, I'll put on reality TV. It's a bummer to know that those are directives coming for something that is supposed to be an artistic endeavor or a more serious endeavor certainly.

Well, exactly, because what I would say is that programming exists. That programming will always be created. It exists right now, whether it's older stuff we've watched a bunch, whether it's reality stuff, whether it's whatever. There's plenty of mindless stuff, but the idea that there would be also now less of the riveting stuff because everything needs to be. The mindless stuff was going to occur on its own.

i agree yeah you know yeah no i mean don't don't purposely dumb things down i mean that that is

enough dumb stuff happening out there i've also i've seen some reviews of that movie that show the rip is pretty bad which is kind of a bummer because like i really am on kind of a like i've been seeing a lot of interviews pop up of matt damon and ben affleck you know because they're promoting this movie heavily and like i really do find them to be pretty charming i wish they weren't like the most diehard boston sports fans of all time but i do appreciate that they really are sports fans and they can really throw down and they they i don't know they don't they don't seem like they sort of had such a meteoric rise from kind of obscurity to being kind of everywhere that it's kind of fun to just roast them or particularly ben affleck's back tattoo but like i don't know they're they're i don't know if i'm probably not going to see the movie they made but they certainly have been kind of coming off as likable dudes that you know i'd have a beer with

or whatever not so much affleck i think he's sober yeah right yeah no i agree they both do seem likable on their own i love their friendship on screen i know that that dunkin donuts campaign they did two years in a row for the for the super bowl not everybody loved it i actually really liked the first one i thought the second year when they tried to reboot it or run it back that was just terrible and it had it had jordan uh what's her name in it alongside it was just bad news all around but i do like they those two will always have a good rapport and good chemistry with each other and it comes off the screen and i like that and i think

Yeah, hopefully they're okay, fellas. I'm sure, you know, I'm not a Hollywood watcher, Luke, so I'm sure there's bad beats on both of them that we'll get emails about, but I am not aware of those right now.

Matt Damon, at the height of his powers, was on CNN wearing an NPR T-shirt because he had just done. This was before you could buy those on Instagram, and they were kind of like a look. And he had literally, the story was he had been at NPR West, I think doing Fresh Air or something, and somebody had offered him a t-shirt and like his next media hit was CNN and he just fully donned the NPR t-shirt. Nice, see, I love that.

Yeah, solid dude. Actually, wait, speaking of NPR, I do have a very, very quick thing I want to share with you here and it occurred to me, it does come from a listener. So would you mind if we do it very, very quickly hitting that email sound and then I can transition this?

If you hear, okay, but if you hear someone rapping on that door rapidly.

Oh, I forgot, I forgot about that. No, no, no. It's okay. Are you sure? No, I forgot about it. I thought it was just sort of like, we need to get out of here, get the show posted. I have already forgotten that you literally could then have to deal with somebody knocking on the door, and then you dragging a bunch of underwear, sticking out of your suitcase as you flee from your hotel room into another one. Do I know that the person to whom I'm speaking will not be offended? So what I will do here is I will get us out of here, but I'm going to share this with you tomorrow. But we're going to try to transition and remind people that we were talking about public radio at the end of this episode. That's so easy for me to get back to.

We could even start tomorrow with it if you want, although I'm sure I'll have some sort of a report from my flight home. Yeah, no.

And so tomorrow, just to let listeners know, we'll be posting. Oh, no, not significantly later, right? No, I might even be able to say good morning to you and mean it. Okay, and I might say good morning back. And one last thing I want to let people know that you mentioned some special recordings this week. We are efforting, as I like to say, that's a verb that I like to say, to do another super show with our friends with Text Me Back that hopefully will be airing this Friday. I didn't want to hide our light on that one. I'm looking forward to it.

No, man, it's going to be fun. This Friday, you, me, Lindy, Megan, fun times. So I hope everybody will tune in for that as well. All right. Well, listen, Andrew, for real, thanks for covering for me yesterday and being so flexible today. Thanks to you, the listeners, for dealing with the delay in posting today. And we'll be back on track tomorrow. In the meantime, everybody out there, have a great Tuesday. Please take care of yourself. Please be safe. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

God damn it, that was one of the nicest episodes of TVTL I have heard in a long time. Thank you.

Power out.